Presidential historian Armitage Goodwin is the visiting associate teaching assistant at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson Center for Harmonious Race Relations. Here he explains his recent voting in the prestigious Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey.
As a participant in the clunkily titled 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey, I am aware that political bias may have contributed to, for instance, Joe Biden being listed as the 14th greatest president of all time.
If by “bias,” people mean one is perceived to be unfairly prejudiced in favor of one thing against another, that would accurately describe why I inexplicably placed Biden ahead of James Knox Polk (25th), who reformed the national banking system, secured the Oregon territory, and won the Mexican-American war, essentially acquiring California and much of the Southwest. Biden is a superior president compared to Polk because the latter essentially stole that land from Mexicans, and the former now is allowing Mexicans unfettered access to it without asking for anything in return other than their votes.
Biden is a truly great president and should’ve placed higher (I had him third, ahead of the slave-owning George Washington) because in less than three years in office, he saved the republic from Donald Trump, who ranked last (45th) and fared even worse than William Henry Harrison (41st), whose accomplishments didn’t include the Abraham Accords but did include dying 31 days into his term.
The distinction between Biden and Trump couldn’t be clearer. For instance, one of Biden’s greatest accomplishments is how he withdrew troops from Afghanistan in 2021 and deftly handled its immediate and complete collapse. He gave a stern warning to the now-ruling Taliban not to resort to their old radical-Islamist chicanery, or else there’d be an even sterner warning.
Biden also continues to rally U.S. taxpayer dollars to support Ukraine in its struggle against Russia while wisely urging Israeli war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu to take it easy on the terrorist gang that slaughtered 1,200 of his citizens. Had the Afghan calamity and those two wars broken out under Trump instead of Biden, we likely now would be fighting World War III as opposed to simply failing to get ready for it.
Barack Obama came in seventh — higher than Dwight D. Eisenhower (eighth), James Madison (11th) and John Adams (13th) — when many (including Obama himself) have argued he should’ve placed first. And while that is a slight stretch, Obama is the one president who greatly mastered the persistent use of the words “I” and “me.”
Obama also won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, not exactly for bringing peace to anything, but he did peacefully stand by when Vladimir Putin initially invaded Ukraine in 2014 and annexed its Crimean Peninsula and the Donbas region. Fortunately, Putin’s provocation occurred under Obama and not Trump, ensuring that a strident Obama lecture to a smirking Putin would deter him from invading Ukraine ever again until he did it again under the 14th greatest president in U.S. history.
Republicans are in a snit over Biden faring better than Ronald Reagan (16th), who accomplished nothing in eight years beyond revitalizing a moribund economy, reducing inflation from 14 percent to 2.5 percent, seeing more than 16 million new jobs created, strengthening our military, and facilitating the collapse of the Soviet Union and its global empire.
Historians know the economy isn’t exactly roaring under Biden, inflation is persistently high, and al-Qaida’s tentacles are again spreading throughout Afghanistan when Biden vowed they wouldn’t. So, what accounts for Biden being an even greater president than Reagan? Democrat historians like myself hate Reagan and would, if we could, rank Mikhail Gorbachev the world’s greatest U.S. president ever. Some might call that bias, but if it is, it is only because it empowers those who are oppressed.
Woodrow Wilson (15th) also rightly topped Reagan. Wilson guided the nation through the Great War, established the League of Nations, a forerunner to the august United Nations, and famously told civil-rights leader William Monroe Trotter in 1914 that “segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.”
Now, Wilson’s unapologetic racism might seem detrimental to being placed relatively high on a world’s greatest list of any kind (except for world’s greatest racist), but that D next to his name counts for at least five spots on a presidential-greatness scale.
Case in point: Jimmy Carter (22nd) ranked higher than Polk and Calvin Coolidge (34th). To say that Carter’s stewardship over the economy was on par with Max Pruss’ piloting of the Hindenburg would be greatly insulting to Pruss, who did a much better job. Coolidge’s economic policies fueled the roaring ’20s (“gross domestic product (GDP) rose from $85.2 billion in 1924 to $101.4 billion in 1929”) and, shockingly because he was a Republican, liked minorities and granted citizenship to Native Americans who theretofore lacked it.
Jimmy Carter created the Department of Energy while also telling citizens to turn down their thermostats. That makes him a superior president to Coolidge. Why? Because I am an expert. And Carter empowered managerial class experts like me. When you see a headline reading or hear newsreaders saying, “Experts say,” they are referring to me. And as you might’ve guessed, I am to be taken seriously, and greatly so.
Matt Manochio can be found on X @MattManochio.
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