Top 10 worst Americans of all time
December 30, 2005
This little meme is making the rounds, and the last week of December is the time for stupid top-ten lists. My list of the top ten greatest Americans is up, too.
10. Joe McCarthy. Wisconsin’s all-time bad guy just makes the all-American team.
9. Curtis LeMay. Every movie caricature about cigar-chomping, trigger-happy, bomb-crazed generals is based on Curtis LeMay. He developed the doctrine of strategic bombing against civilian populations, argued for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union, and favored carpet-bombing Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he opposed the naval blockade and supported an attack on the Soviet installations there instead. After the Russians withdrew, he wanted to invade Cuba out of spite. He also served as the running mate of George Wallace, who just missed making the list himself.
8. Benedict Arnold.
7. Theodore Bilbo, who was the governor of Mississippi and later a U.S. Senator. He makes the list as a representative of all the Dixiecrat segregationists in the South, and the defenders of Jim Crow. He argued on the Senate floor in favor of segregation and white supremacy, and he repeatedly introduced bills in the Senate to deport black Americans to Liberia. When he was re-elected in 1946, the Senate refused to seat him, and he returned to Mississippi.
6. James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson can share this spot, as they share the title of America’s worst president. They fiddled while the Republic burned, through the secession crisis and then through the failure of Reconstruction.
5. Jeffrey Amherst, who fought in the French and Indian War and later served as the military governor of Canada. He makes the list for deliberately infecting Indian tribes with smallpox, and he stands for all the other Indian fighters who are too numerous to mention.
4. Nathan Bedford Forrest was a Confederate general and the founder of the Ku Klux Klan.
3. J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI for over fifty years, created a secret police-status apparatus and then turned it on all sorts of political opponents and people against whom he bore petty grudges.
2. John Wilkes Booth murdered President Lincoln and fatally crippled Reconstruction. In the words of Johnny Cash:
And I know that your name can be on that list
There’s no eye for an eye, there’s no tooth for a tooth
I saw Judas Iscariot carrying John Wilkes Booth
1. Jefferson Davis, the first and last president of the Confederacy, is my nominee for worst American of all time.
December 30th, 2005 at 12:10 pm
It was strange reading the other lists. Jimmy Carter? FDR? Earl Warren? Tom Daschle!?
Tom Daschle?
A mildly effective senate majority leader, and then later a mildly ineffective senate minority leader is one of the ten worst Americans of all time? I can’t fathom the mind of someone who thinks that.
December 30th, 2005 at 1:36 pm
Jefferson Davis absolutely deserves the number one spot, possibly to be shared with the unfortunately romanticized Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. Jackson. The rest of the list is excellent as well. It’s particularly noteworth that more thanl half of this list is dominated by the crisis of the republic and its aftermath, deservedly so. How will the last forty years look by 2150? Will people like James Dobson and George Bush compare to their 19th Century ancestors?
Potential additions: A. Mitchell Palmer, Anthony Comstock, Brigham Young, Charles Coughlin, Alan Pinkerton, and for some presidential curveballs, James K. Polk and Woodrow Wilson.
December 30th, 2005 at 1:58 pm
I like the list, and agree with Jefferson Davis as #1, but I’d replace Benedict Arnold with Robert E. Lee or someone from the 60s-era Dixiecrats — Strom Thurmond or Bull Connor etc.
I like K’s list, too, especially Palmer and Pinkerton.
December 30th, 2005 at 2:27 pm
I’m guessing that Dobson et al. will go down in history as the Father Coughlins of the age. Loud, obnoxious, exercising some degree of reactionary political power, but ultimately impotent against the changing tides of history. No matter how loudly they complain, women’s rights aren’t going away, marriage equality for gays and lesbians is inevitable, and the quasi-Protestant religion of the public schools in the 1950s is not coming back.
I’m less sure about George Bush’s place in history. To a large degree it depends on how it all turns out. If we get a progressive president who restores fiscal sanity, enacts universal health care, etc, Bush’s domestic impact will be next to nothing.
If we continue down the path we’re on, interest rates will skyrocket as our debt increases and we have to bribe the Chinese to keep buying T-bills. Our hostile foreign policy combined with our financial instability will cause more and more international trade to be denominated in euros, weakening our economic standing further. The income gap will continue to grow, and the Bush economy will become the dominate facet of domestic life for a generation.
And then of course Iraq is a wild card, too. If it breaks apart, will it do so peacefully? Will democracy bring Iranian-style theocracy or Turkish-style brutal secularism? What happens in the rest of the Middle East? All those things are impossible to predict right now, too.
I think the historical judgment on Bush will either be “mediocre and unimportant” or “really really bad”. He’s either going to be Warren Harding, or he’s going to be Herbert Hoover.
December 30th, 2005 at 2:33 pm
I like both of the additional suggestions. Palmer is less known but possibly worse than Joe McCarthy, but the name Palmer doesn’t immediately associate itself with hysterical paranoia the way McCarthy does. Pinkerton would be a good representative of the brutalist exercise of corporate power in the Gilded Age: machine gunning striking workers, arson, beatings, company stores and all the rest. (Correspondingly, I probably should have put a labor leader in the top-ten to represent the other side of that struggle).
I actually rated Polk among my top ten presidents a while back, and Wilson just missed the cut. The standard historian’s consensus on them is #12 and #5, respectively. I rank Wilson in that 10-15 category, along with Jackson and Clinton — good presidents with a few downsides that disqualify them from greatness.
December 30th, 2005 at 3:59 pm
A Challenge To The Blogosphere: ‘The Ten Worst Americans’ List (CONST. UPDATED)
As a post Christmas/Hannukah Challenge, I invited the Blogosphere to name ‘The Ten Worst Americans’ in the last, well it will have to be 230 odd years…..Badger Blues, calls it a stupid list, and then proceeds to make one anyway.
December 30th, 2005 at 4:15 pm
Wilson and Polk seem to be honored for their roles in expanding the union and ushering in modernity, respectively, but there is a significant downside to the actions of each.
For all of the material gain the Mexican-American War brought the U.S., it was a fairly dubious enterprise politically and legally speaking, and was fairly controversial at its outset in the same way Iraq was three years ago. In more cynical terms, the war taught all the wrong lessons (militarily-speaking) to a generation of U.S. Army officers, encouraging many of the tactics bringing about slaughter in the Civil War. Like many things receded into history, motives and opinions belong to their times, and opinions like these should be colored appropriately. In these terms, Polk is debateable, and useful for criticizing as a purely historical tool.
Wilson, on the other hand, is wholly undeserving of his good reputation, and is fairer game for criticism of this type (like Polk) due to his relative closeness to us; there are still living persons who called him president.
It’s important to note that Palmer was Wilson’s AG, and the entire attack upon civil liberties — easily one of the worst five instances in American history — was ultimately due to his policies with regards to World War One and all that it wrought.
This may be in part due to my own perspective on modern history; the entire cohort of national leaders regardless of axis during and following World War One deserve nothing but utter scorn for throwing humanity into a sinkhole from which it has yet to emerge. World War Two didn’t settle all or most the problems that were created in at the end of that decade; the Sykes-Picot Accord, the Russian revolutions, and the emergence of the modern police state and propaganda in the U.S. were all tremendously damaging.
The Cold War and subsequent interational instability, everything in the Middle East, and the continuing loss of our freedoms have roots in Wilsonian policies. Wilson isn’t personally or primarily responsible for all of these disgraces, but he is as clear of an example as any of how leaders who act largely in the service of ideology can go very wrong; not necessarily in the near term, but definitely in a longer scope. While Bush is regularly compared to Nixon, Harding, or McKinley, I think in the long term his role with regards to international politics and the Constitution will be similar to Wilson’s, though without the gloss of military victory.
December 30th, 2005 at 4:44 pm
And here I was just dinging Wilson for his inveterate racism, and his unwillingness to compromise over the Treaty of Versailles. I do think that World War One is by far the more important of the two world wars, in terms of geo-political change and for the long-term consequences.
I’m hesitant to blame Wilson for many or most of those things, since the war was not of his doing, and by waiting until the end to enter, he basically insured that America was the war’s only winner. It’s tough to divine a better result if England and France slowly starve Germany into submission in 1919 and impose a peace themselves, or if Germany’s 1918 advance combined with the increasingly mutinous French Army results in a German victory or at least a truce in which the Germans can keep Alsace-Lorraine and consolidate their eastern winnings. A German victory would have been catastrophic to the democratic West.
The real danger of Wilsonian politics is the elevation of ideology over facts. I generally support a Wilsonian foreign policy — that is, one that is idealistic and couples American power to human rights and self-determination. I despise the militarism that has been fused with it by the neo-cons, but I can’t blame Wilson for that, either.
March 28th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
How about Al Sharpton or Louis Farrahkan or Jessie Jackson for fomenting hatred of whites by blacks? How about ANY american who abuses the system?
July 5th, 2007 at 9:43 am
One has to consider the damage Jerry Falwell has done to the American psyche by spewing hateful and utterly outragous rhetoric under the guise of Christianity. He at least deserves honorable mention.