Stephen M. Klugewicz
Traditional rankings of the American presidents ask whether our chief executives did what was necessary for the good of the country. But should we look to their fidelity to the Constitution as a better way to evaluate their behavior in office?
9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America: And Four Who Tried to Save Her, by Brion McClanahan (Regnery Books, 2016)
This book is a refreshing attempt to “turn upside down” the traditional rankings of the presidents, which, beginning with Arthur Schlesinger’s 1948 academic poll, place the United States’ most proactive executives—Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson—at the top of the list. “Many historians, and too many Americans in general,” author Brion McClanahan avers, “seem to believe that presidential authority is virtually unlimited.” Mr. McClanahan instead evaluates each president on “what he is constitutionally permitted to do in office,” turning to what the author perceives to be the original intent of the American Founders as found in the Constitution. The result, if not a comprehensive re-ranking, is a short list of indictments of the nine worst presidents and brief defenses of four of the best.
It should be noted that whereas Mr. McClanahan is surely correct that “the founding generation considered an out-of-control executive to be the greatest bane to liberty” (p. xv), it is also true that the Founders themselves disagreed about what exactly constituted an “out-of-control executive,” a question that quickly became a heated political issue between the new government’s first Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, and first Secretary of Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. The latter famously asserted in Federalist No. 70 that “energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.” Despite the author’s clear Jeffersonian sympathies, Mr. McClanahan, somewhat surprisingly, does not reject “energy” as a positive quality of the chief executive, » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2025/02/9-presidents-screwed-up-america-brion-mclanahan-stephen-klugewicz.html