This day in history: President Martin Van Buren died on this day in 1862. According to the book "Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity and Liberty" Martin Van Buren ranks as the third best president (the top 5 presidents according to this book are John Tyler, Grover Cleveland, Martin Van Buren, Rutherford B. Hayes and Chester A. Arthur). The reason these presidents you never heard of were better is that they mainly left people alone.
Using a threefold model of evaluating leaders based on promoting peace, advancing the U.S. economy, and proliferating liberty, the author of Recarving Rushmore ultimately concludes that John Tyler was the greatest American president. Grover Cleveland and Martin Van Buren take the second and third ranks on the list, respectively. Woodrow Wilson, in the author's opinion, was the worst president in U.S. history.
The author, Ivan Eland, states that "Martin Van Buren, a Democrat whose four years in office preceded the William Henry Harrison/John Tyler term, was an advocate of restraining federal authority, maintaining states’ authority, and limiting the president’s power." Van Buren might have have been the greatest president had it not been for his "sustained costly and, in retrospect, unconscionable wars against Native Americans, as did my number four–ranked president, Rutherford B. Hayes."
In the book, Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel actually ranks Van Buren the #1 president of all time: "The case for Van Buren’s greatness goes beyond his being the least bad US president. While avoiding foreign wars, he did more than maintain the domestic status quo. He reduced the power and reach of central authority in the face of stiff resistance and thereby helped the American economy weather one of its most severe deflations. He also brought an ideological clarity to American politics that has seldom been equaled. Although the Democracy would stray in significant and reprehensible ways from the principled course he had charted, his imprint still left an enduring legacy. The Democratic Party remained the political alliance with the strongest affinity for laissez-faire, personal liberty, and free trade until almost the turn of the century. All will acknowledge, I believe, that Americans once enjoyed greater freedom from government intervention than any other people on the face of the earth. For that accomplishment, Martin Van Buren deserves as much credit as any other single individual — and certainly more credit than any other president of the United States."
Van Buren became the first President who was born after the American Revolution, making him, in a newer sense, the first "American" born president.
https://thebookshelf2015.blogspot.com/2021/07/help-mark-jones-stage-4-cancer-journey.html
No comments:
Post a Comment