The Last Good Presidents

With perhaps a couple debatable exceptions, the United States have not had a decent president for almost a century. Here are the last three good ones.

Atlanta, GA

February 25, 2024

[NB: Catch up on our catalogue of the worst presidents here, here, here and here; the first installments of the better ones are here, here, and here]

Our presidential survey started last weekend, to observe Washington’s birthday. The journey was winding, and long. We trod familiar terrain, but tried to view it from different perspectives. 

The final trio of our best presidents includes a couple whose status has slowly risen in recent years, and one who is considered a “do-nothing” lout beyond respectable redemption. That, of course, makes him our kind of guy.

Goethe said that a man’s vices are common to him with his era, but his virtues are his own. These presidents came on stage at either end of the “Progressive Age”, so they fought considerable cultural headwinds to reach these heights. 

None of them, as with any of us, completely avoided contamination by the toxins of their time. But they were the last worthy presidents of a once proud republic. They managed to avoid the Progressive bug, or were at least asymptomatic throughout most of their terms.

The War Between the States did to constitutional principles roughly what Sherman’s army did to Atlanta. But, digging thru the back half of the 19th century, a lone jewel glitters amid the rubble. We bend down, sift carefully and…like an honored heirloom from an earlier age…retrieve from the debris the commendable accomplishments of…

Grover Cleveland. His task was daunting. The former Mayor of Buffalo and Governor of New York was the first Democrat elected to the presidency since before the war. But all around him, like gnats at a summer picnic, the rival party continued to swarm. Grover Cleveland was a healthy herb in a Republican stew.

In 1884, Cleveland became the 22d president of the United States. He was nominated again in 1888, but vote fraud cost him the election. He ran a third time in 1892, and that was a charm.

But he was still the 22d of our 45 (not 46) US presidents. Just because Benjamin Harrison intervened between terms does not mean Grover Cleveland became a different guy.

Then again, compared to most of his peers, he was a different guy. He respected presidential power, but understood its limits, and its subservience to legislative prerogative and the authority of the states. Cleveland had his ideas, and made his recommendations. But if Congress rejected them, he wouldn’t make a federal case of it. He’d move on.

And he did this during an age when people believed in “progress” and wanted to “get things done.” Cleveland did too. He just didn’t always think it was the president’s job to do them.

His primary responsibility wasn’t to steer Congress down his preferred road, it was to confine them to their constitutional lane. The veto was his guardrail, which he raised more often than all previous presidents combined.

Cleveland was diligent, and precise. To find out what was in a bill, he actually read it. Every word. And if the wrong one popped up, the bill went down. 

He vetoed a bill establishing post offices, because the constitutional provision to establish “post roads” does not provide authority to build “post offices.” He also shot down a series of bills that would’ve shifted more land to the US government to create such buildings. Beautiful.

During his term, the Tenure of Office Act…the ostensible basis for Andrew Johnson’s impeachment…was repealed. Also thwarted was the Texas Seed Bill in 1887, another unconstitutional attempt to lay a social welfare conduit from DC to the states. 

After a severe drought in Texas, the US government proposed to step in and buy seed. Regardless the motive, as Cleveland put it, there is no warrant in the Constitution for Federal government relief of individual suffering. He was duty-bound to veto the legislation, and he did.

Cleveland vetoed more than 200 pension bills, which in those days circled Congress like flies on manure. Congress set aside entire days just to deal with the subject. Wrapped in good intentions and noble gratitude for those who’d served in the war, these packages were rife with Republican fraud and congressional graft.

They were written so that almost anyone could call himself a pensioner, and get paid. Some had never even been in the army. Others claimed such afflictions as lingering diarrhea from the war, but simply had passing gas from a recent meal. 

It is refreshing that a president would actually read these proposals, detect the minutiae, decipher the fraud, and kill the bill. The Grand Army of the Republic…the Union counterpart to the United Confederate Veterans…used these vetoes against Cleveland, and helped prevent his re-election in 1888.

Overseas, an unauthorized American coup toppled the Hawaiian monarchy, and claimed the islands. Cleveland refused to support the overthrow or to send in troops. He neither recognized nor annexed Hawaii. But he didn’t put the queen back on her throne, for fear of reprisals against Americans on Oahu. 

Throughout the incident, Cleveland took the appropriate non-interventionist stance. He did likewise in Cuba, where he wisely resisted calls for invasion. This was argued for on the basis of  “defense” and the Monroe Doctrine, but would really be armed support for US sugar interests. Cleveland was correct in his actions, even if he only delayed the inevitable. Within a few years, his successor would concoct new rationale to seize the island, and capture the cane.

Between his terms, the Sherman Silver Tariff and McKinley Tariff both passed. From them came distorted trade, crony capitalism, and a depression that was just as bad as in 1929. 

When Cleveland returned to office, he ensured the Silver tariff was repealed and the McKinley tariff mitigated. The president tried to restore gold in the Treasury, which he was legally obligated to do because reserves were running low. Otherwise…unlike his successors thirty years later…Cleveland didn’t get involved, and the market soon corrected itself.

In his economic wisdom and benign neglect, Grover Cleveland  provided a working template for…

Warren G Harding. Woody Allen said that 80% of success is just showing up. That’s not always true. After all, Allen himself might’ve benefited by showing up a little less. The same could be said for most presidents. But few pulled off absence as well as Warren Gamaliel Harding.

In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell claimed that Warren Harding was “Not especially intelligent. [He] Liked to play poker and to drink… and most of all, chase women; his sexual appetites were the stuff of legend.”

So what he lacked in intelligence, he made up for in intangibles.

Harding was in office only two and a half years when he convulsed and died at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. His short tenure, and his penchant for indifference and neglect, kept him from causing too much mischief. 

For that, and his good nature and jovial disposition, he was extremely popular. From coast to coast crowds lined the tracks as the train carried his corpse from California to the Capitol. After lying there in state, he was wheeled back to Ohio…and laid safely in his ornate tomb.

Harding suffered something of a reverse-martyr effect, as news of his life soon shrouded his death. As the hole was filled and the hearse rolled away, the scandals came to light, and his reputation took a hit. Financial shenanigans, bureaucratic corruption, and marital infidelities popped into the press. 

News of his affair with Nan Britton caused a sensation. Her account was published a few years later, and alleged she had borne Harding’s daughter. It sold door-to-door, wrapped illicitly in brown paper bags, like a Jazz Age girly magazine.

But Harding’s scandals pale beside those of most American magistrates. Unlike other presidential philanderers, he was incapable of multi-tasking. As he rolled in the hay, the printing presses stayed quiet and the tanks stood still. Under his rule, the government neither counterfeited a dollar nor killed a soul. From any administration, that’s all we can ask.

His high capacity for distraction and low tolerance for thought probably served Harding well when “managing“ the Depression of 1920. And this is why he made our list. He did exactly what any good executive should do when facing a downturn caused by monetary inflation, excessive debt, and too much spending:

Nothing.

By choosing to mind his own business, chase his clique of chicks, and deal another round, Harding allowed the markets to clear and the panic to pass. Within a year, it was gone…and the Roaring 20s were on. 

Within a decade, Hoover and Roosevelt took the wheel of a similar collapse. Rather than sit idle to recalibrate the engine, they hit the gas…and drove the economy off a cliff. For whatever reason, their “remedy” of extended overdose has been the prescribed “cure” for every recession since, while Harding’s rapid detox is steadfastly ignored.

Perhaps it was in the messaging. Bill Bonner quoted H.L. Mencken to capture Harding’s unique oratorical skills:

“Mencken preserved a bit of what he called ‘Gamalielese’, just to hold it up to ridicule: ‘I would like government to do all it can to mitigate, then, in understanding in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, our tasks will be solved.’

“The sentence is so idiotic and meaningless”, said Bonner, that “it could have come from the mouth of our current president [Donald Trump]. But the crowds seemed to like the way [Harding] delivered it. He said it with such solid conviction, it ‘was like a blacksmith bringing down a hammer on an egg,’ says Mencken.”

I don’t mind a president breaking an occasional egg. Just so long as he doesn’t try to make any omelets. 

If Harding spoke gibberish, his successor said almost nothing. It was among the many wonderful attributes of…

Calvin Coolidge. A story has it that a woman sat next to Calvin Coolidge, and told the president she bet someone that she could get him to say more than two words. Coolidge quickly quipped: “You lose.”

The story is apocryphal, but the point is true. Calvin Coolidge came to office on the death of Warren Harding, and was in many ways the polar opposite of his predecessor. Where Harding was a loquacious backslapper who had a way with women, “Silent Cal” was a laconic New England congregationalist, with a stoic respect for American tradition.

Like Cleveland and Harding, Coolidge was a brief oasis in the (still ongoing) wasteland of the presidency. Harding had arrested and reversed the hyperactivity of executives since Grover Cleveland. Coolidge would continue that admirable effort, but with a philosophic foundation that fortified the limited government federalism of this New England Jeffersonian.

Despite being Governor of Massachusetts, Coolidge had not been considered a strong politician. His handling of the Boston Police strike helped change that perception, and put him on the Republican ticket. But he always seemed somewhat out of his element. He was a Middle Class agrarian in an age of rapid industrialization, massive immigration, and an inexorable transition from rural influence to urban power.

Coolidge was the last bulwark against the imperial state of the 20th century. He did his best to stem the tide, but the dam gave way after he left.

He understood the value of human scale and the benefits of local government, on which no Congress or president should infringe:

“Local habit is so strong, variety of race and creed so great, the federal authority is so tenuous, that the area within which it can function successfully is very limited. Wiser policy is to leave the localities, so far as we can, possessed of their own sources of revenue, and charged with their own obligations”

Like many of the best presidents, Coolidge wielded his veto to defend his oath. Against opposition from his own party, he vetoed the McNary-Haugen Farm Bill. Twice.

This bill would’ve created a Federal Farm Bureau and authorized agricultural subsidies. Coolidge’s veto was very unpopular. But he did it because the bill unconstitutionally expanded the commerce clause to supply agricultural subsidies, and to create bureaucratic agencies with legislative functions. 

Like Cleveland, Coolidge vetoed a series of corrupt pension bills, including the Bursum Bill of 1924. In the early 20th century, young women and teenage girls had begun to marry elderly veterans of the War Between the States. By doing so, they’d be eligible for pensions, and to be supported for life after the death of their husbands. 

The Bursum bill perpetuated what Coolidge called abuse and fraud. On that basis, and its exorbitant expense, he vetoed the legislation. The last woman who would’ve benefited by it, a Confederate widow, died in 2004.

He also killed the Muscles Shoals bill to facilitate “internal improvements”, ostensibly to extract nitrates for defense purposes. Coolidge said it was too expensive, and questioned the “defense” rationale. To him, it was merely a means to direct federal pork to local districts. In any event, he considered it unconstitutional, and gave it his veto.

Calvin Coolidge left office almost a century ago. With the possible exception of Eisenhower, we’ve not had a good president since. Even in his own time, Coolidge was an anomaly, and he knew it. Soon after he left office, he sadly confided that “We are in a new era to which I do not belong, and it would be hard for me to adjust to it.” He never did. Calvin Coolidge died shortly thereafter. 

As I noted when we started this journey, I have no particular love for the US Constitution. It has either permitted or been unable prevent what has become of the US government. But presidents take an oath to defend it. It doesn’t seem to much to ask that they do so. After all, if we’re gonna have a Constitution, we may as well use it.

But, having reached the end of the road, I can’t help but ask myself why we went so far. Why did I have to choose ten creeps and as many worthies? Wouldn’t five of each had made the point and saved us all a lot of time? Probably.

In that spirit, I’ll whittle the choices, and shave off the least representative of each list. That will leave us with the absolute peaks and dregs of presidential performance, with convenient vantage to assess the rest. They are, in descending order from each end of the spectrum…

The Five Worst: Wilson, Lincoln, Roosevelt (both of them), Truman.

The Best: Tyler, Jefferson, Van Buren, Coolidge, Cleveland.

There. That was easy.

Next week, we do the Popes.

JD