On Presidents Day, it's worth noting that the way we remember our chief executives says more about the present than the past.
When Harry Truman left office in 1953, he moved back here to his Kansas City-area hometown with the lowest poll numbers in recorded history. People weren’t just mild about Harry, they were downright done with Harry.
The presidents’ passage — some from global giants to unremarkable place holders — exemplifies a curious aspect of history that affects presidents and the times they occupied: The past is constantly changing. Much of the impetus has come from scholarly and, often even more so, popular books. Through bestselling biographies, David McCullough has single-handedly revived the reputations of Truman and John Adams , both overshadowed by their formidable predecessors, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and George Washington.
John Adams once described Washington as “Old Muttonhead.” Lincoln considered James K. Polk a “bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man.” Woodrow Wilson deemed Chester A. Arthur “a nonentity with side whiskers.” The 1948 Schlesinger survey placed Wilson, Jefferson and Jackson in the next three positions, but all three have declined as the decades passed.
In the 2013 Gallup Poll, 3 of 5 Americans ranked Ronald Reagan either “outstanding” or “above average,” giving him the second-highest ranking of presidents since the Eisenhower years, rating just below Kennedy. Presidential rankings also fluctuate with the nature of the rankers themselves. Merry points out that Democrats outnumbered Republicans 2 to 1 in the Schlesinger surveys, and Alvin Felzenberg, a presidential historian affiliated with the Annenberg School for Communication“I can understand why that is,” Felzenberg said. “Academics tend to be liberals, and the people writing history now were educated in university during Vietnam, the civil rights movement and the environmental revolution.
“I think after the Hemings revelations, some people began to see Jefferson more as a human being rather than as a symbol,” said Gordon-Reed. “His entanglement with slavery seemed even more real for many. There’s no way to deny the importance of slavery at Monticello when we understand the nature of his relations with members of the Hemings family.”
Kennedy’s vow in his 1961 inaugural address to “meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty” can be regarded as Wilsonianism translated into a 1960s idiom.
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