Presidential Rankings

With Lincoln’s recent birthday hoopla (reminder: Lincoln was a son of Kentucky and always identified himself as such) there has been a lot of talk about recent CSPAN rankings of former presidents by historians. I looked at the numbers today and found them very interesting. I found this quote even more interesting.

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C-SPAN’s academic advisors devised a survey in which participants used a one (“not
effective”) to ten (“very effective”) scale to rate each president on ten qualities of
presidential leadership: “Public Persuasion,” “Crisis Leadership,” “Economic
Management,” “Moral Authority,” “International Relations,” “Administrative Skills,”
“Relations with Congress,” “Vision/Setting An Agenda,” “Pursued Equal Justice for All,”
and “Performance Within the Context of His Times.”

Surveys were distributed to 147 historians and other professional observers…

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I don’t really put on my historian hat very often here at The Big Stick, but today I am going to claim authority on this issue.  A Bachelors of Arts in History probably doesn’t put me in the same tier of respect as the historians quoted for this survey, but I still have a solid opinion. These kinds of polls violate many rules that I find to be sacred in the study of history. They take the historians out of the realm of observers and into the realm of opinion-givers. While these men and women should certainly be entitled to their opinions, this is an area where we must be very careful.

There’s nothing wrong per se with historians and history professionals giving their opinions on historical people, events, etc. I’ve been asked for my opinion as I’ve given tours and when we’ve had the public out to dig sites and I always offer it (within the context of the site’s master plan). Still, when i give an opinion i am also careful to explain how our opinions change throughout time. Whenever discussing a site, it’s always best to explain old interpretations as well as new ones. To relate one such case, a site I worked at had for years been telling visitors that it had something called a ‘traveling room’ in the upstairs of the house. This was a quaint interpretation but a bad one. When the site was taken over by a well-educated Yankee from Massachusetts she correctly changed the interpretation. When I gave tours I always told the old story and the new. It’s important that the public understand that history is a field that evolves as we learn more and also as our sensibilities change.

I have worked at more than one site that was staffed by nice Southern ladies from the DAR and we would cringe as they would tell people about slavery in Kentucky being a ‘kinder, gentler, form of slavery’. As someone with a bit more training i can tell you that slavery in Kentucky was no better than anywhere else and in some places worse. So a lot of what we do is about perspective. Ranking president’s that have been out of office for less than a month, or less than a decade, or even less than a few decades strikes me as a work of folly. We learn so much as time passes that any attempt at ‘ranking’ presidents is more arbitrary than realistic.

I take one question from above: ‘Pursued Equal Justice for All’

If that isn’t a loaded statement, i don’t know what is. Did George Washington, a slave holder, score higher than George W. Bush? And where did Lincoln land despite his many remarks that ending slavery was not the main goal of the Civil War? It’s so hard to put the decisions made by Presidents on the same page and judge them with the same weight. Surveys like this will always be published, because the public gives them importance…but they shouldn’t. And i would urge readers to ignore them or at least take them with a large grain of salt.