Trego's Mountain Ear

It’s difficult to select the worst president.  I’ve thought that Buchannan, with 13 states seceding on his watch, rated mention – yet the idea of fairness makes me believe his failure may have been that the challenges he faced were too large.   Nobody would have taken the job anticipating the Dred Scott decision and John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry.  While Buchanan was opposed to slavery, he believed that ten cents/day was a fair wage for the working man – which says something about him – but it doesn’t cinch the title.

Warren Harding is often on the short list – but the narcissism that leads to truly awesome presidential failures wasn’t in him: here are a couple of his quotations that show his lack of narcissism:  “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.”  and “I knew that this job would be too much for me.”  Harding’s campaign slogan was “a return to normalcy.”  I think Biden claimed the same.  Come to think about it, Harding was accused of campaigning from his front porch – Biden from his basement.  Still, two shared points aren’t enough to make a correlation.

One of Kristofferson’s songs includes the line “sometimes the best that you can do is buy some time ‘til they can find somebody better.”  Harding came after Woodrow Wilson.  In grade school, I was taught that Woodrow Wilson was a great president – yet as I continued to read, I learned that this former Princeton University president did more to promote racism than any other American president.

Unlike Harding’s humility, Wilson entered the presidency with this quotation: “Remember that God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States. Neither you nor any other mortal or mortals could have prevented this.”  Now that sounds a little narcissistic to me – but it may just be that I’ve never been an attorney or a political scientist.

The Libertarian Republic offers what the author considers Woodrow Wilson’s top ten racist quotations.  They’re bad.  This link provides a fairly objective story of his presidential accomplishments – including this statement: “Wilson’s progressive agenda did not apply to all Americans, however. During his first term, he oversaw the re-segregation of many branches of the federal workforce,  including the Treasury, the Post Office, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the Navy, the Interior, the Marine Hospital, the War Department and the Government Printing Office. The action reversed hard-fought economic progress made by Black Americans since Reconstruction.”

Woodrow won the Nobel Peace Prize – an interesting award for a man whose second campaign had the slogan “He kept us out of war.” yet broke off diplomatic relations with Germany on February 3, 1917.  Academics tend to rate Wilson highly – but Wilson was an Academic, and his progressive, internationalist approach fit well in the academy.

Four US Presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize.  Only one is on Mount Rushmore.  It isn’t Woody.  It took the country about fifty years to find a philosophical successor to Jefferson Davis – and maybe Woodrow isn’t so bad if you compare his accomplishments with Confederate presidents.