Presidents - the best of the worst (2)

John Quincy Adams (Elected 1824, defeated for reelection 1828, served 1825-1829)

Why so bad? The second man on the list of "bad presidents with a good side" was the oldest son of the first. Like his father, he served a single term as president, managed to be hated by his opponents while getting only half-hearted support from his own political allies, and was probably secretly relieved when he was defeated in the next election and thus got an excuse to walk away from an office that had pretty much become a living nightmare for him. Unlike his father, he became the first man to win a presidential election even though he came in 2nd to Andrew Jackson in both the popular vote and the electoral college. He managed this because the election of 1824 was a complicated 4-way race in which no candidate got more than 50% of either the popular or electoral vote. As per the United States Constitution, the election then decided by a vote in the House of Representatives. In the House of Representatives, the 4th-place candidate, Henry Clay, encouraged his supporters to vote for Adams rather than Jackson, which guaranteed a victory for Adams. Soon after, Adams appointed Clay as his Secretary of State. This looked like a painfully obvious case of Clay selling the votes of his supporters in return for becoming the senior member of the new president's cabinet. Jackson's supporters immediately accused Adams and Clay of reaching a "corrupt bargain" to thwart the will of the voters, and this accusation tainted John Quincy Adams badly even before he was sworn in as president. Jackson and his supporters used it again and again for the next 4 years, and amazingly Adams never even publicly disputed or denied it. Unlike his father, John Quincy Adams didn't end up having any significant accomplishments of his own as president, positive or negative. He did, however, mimic his father's inability to work well with others, including even Henry Clay, who might have been expected to be a close ally since they were both under attack for the same reason.

In his defence (sort of) ... John Quincy Adams really was a bad president, in the sense of being ineffective and accomplishing little, but this was not because he was corrupt. On the contrary, he was too rigid in his principles to be effective. Remember the old saying that "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree"? John Quincy Adams was very different from his father in some ways, but he matched and even exceeded Dad in his determination to do what he thought was right, regardless of political realities or consequences. There is no evidence that there was any "corrupt bargain" between Adams and Clay in 1824. Clay and Adams agreed with each other on more issues than either of them agreed with Jackson, so it was no surprise that Clay ended up supporting Adams when the election came to the House of Representatives. Adams had worked with Clay in a diplomatic role before when both of them were on the team of American diplomats who negotiated the treaty with Great Britain that ended the War of 1812, and he considered him a capable negotiator who could make a good Secretary of State.

Why didn't Adams even defend himself against the charges that made much of the country question the legitimacy of his presidency? He apparently considered it beneath his dignity to answer the charges. This might sound bizarre and unbelievable to many people today, but it actually fit well with Adams' personality. John Adams Sr. had been stubborn, but also had a down-to-earth streak and did not hesitate to let people know exactly what he thought. John Quincy Adams, on the other hand, had the hypersensitive sense of "personal dignity" of both an elite gentleman and an opinionated intellectual, and often responded to criticism by silence that was meant to show that the accusations of his opponents were not even worth responding to. Unfortunately, that approach is almost never successful in politics. American politics had become more populist, more aimed at the "common man", since his father's time, but John Quincy Adams had moved in the opposite direction. He was successful in almost every other office that he held - as an assistant to US ambassadors in Europe and then an ambassador himself, as Secretary of State (the "Monroe Doctrine" was actually mainly his creation"), and after his presidency as a long-serving Congressman from Massachusetts, where for several years he was virtually the only elected official in the national government to openly criticize slavery while also advocating government funding of scientific research, which most politicians of the time considered to be outside the government's responsibility.

When it came to presidency, however, he was almost comically mismatched. He was probably painfully aware of this for most of his presidency, but he followed his own rigid sense of personal behavior and never said anything about this.

Presidents - the best of the worst

Today is Presidents' Day, one of the more obscure national holidays in this country, but one which got me thinking, in true history geek fashion, about various Presidents of the United States.

Some Presidents are generally considered good, or if people can't agree on whether they were good or bad, at least historically important for good or ill. In this category one can find Washington, Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, possibly Ronald Reagan - as we get closer to the present day, people can't even agree on whether a President was historically significant or not, let alone whether they were a positive or negative influence.

At the other end of the spectrum are the Presidents who are usually considered bad. In this category one can find John Adams, his son John Quincy Adams, James Buchanan, Ulysses S. Grant, Warren G. Harding, Herbert Hoover. When it comes to Presidents within living memory (basically everybody after World War II), opinion about the really bad ones is even more divided than about the good ones based on a person's political views, so I don't even want to make tentative suggestions!

Finally, there are the Presidents that are considered not spectacularly bad, but are generally considered mediocre or just plain dull. In this category one could place Presidents such as James Monroe, James K. Polk, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, Grover Cleveland, William Taft, Calvin Coolidge, Gerald Ford, and possibly George Bush Sr.

Needless to say, the presidents who are generally considered good, or at least significant and controversial, tend to get most of the attention. What about the bad ones, though? Do they deserve their lousy reputations? Even bad Presidents sometimes have good moments. Consider the first man usually considered a bad President ...

John Adams (Elected 1796, defeated for reelection in 1800, served 1797-1801)

Why so bad? As the 2nd President of the United States, following George Washington, it was almost inevitable that John Adams would be seen as lacking compared with his predecessor. Even with this huge handicap, though, he managed to do worse than almost anybody expected. During his one term as President, the United States almost got into a war with France and political hostilities reached one of the highest peaks in the history of this country, with some fearing that civil war would break out. The worst single action for which President John Adams is remembered, though, was his approval of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which targeted the political opponents of Adams' Federalist Party and in the case of the Sedition Act, was almost certainly unconstitutional. On a more personal level, Adams managed to get along poorly with virtually every single other government official with whom he worked, including his entire cabinet.

In his defense ... John Adams certainly made many mistakes as President, and was indeed a very difficult man to work with, but his greatest accomplishment is little remembered because it is something that did not happen. Adams successfully maneuvered to avoid a war with France, a war which was strongly supported by his own Federalist party, and apparently did it for the simple reason that it was unnecessary, and in his own words, "great is the guilt of an unnecessary war".

Adams never fit in well with his own party. Most of the senior Federalists owed their loyalty to Alexander Hamilton, who was considered the effective leader of the Federalist Party even though he held no public office at the time Adams became President. Adams kept all of the members of Washington's old cabinet, which turned out to be a serious mistake because they were all much more loyal to Hamilton than to him. Meanwhile, the leaders of the opposition Republican party (who are actually the ancestors of today's Democratic party, just to add a little confusion) did not realize how serious a split was developing between Adams and the rest of his party, and focused their attacks on Adams. For much of his presidency, Adams was essentially a man without a party, and he actually liked it that way, because he was the last president who tried to continue Washington's tradition of standing completely above party politics. His negotiation of a diplomatic agreement with the French infuriated his fellow Federalists, especially Hamilton, who had become second-in-command under Washington of a new army that the US was raising in case of war with France. It also baffled Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and other Republican leaders, who had been assuming that Adams was working closely with Hamilton to push the USA into war with France. To make a very rough modern analogy, it would be kind if like if, 1 day before George W. Bush's ultimatum to Saddam Hussein in 2003 had expired and the Operation Iraqi freedom started, Bush had suddenly announced that, in cooperation with the United Nations, he had reached a diplomatic solution to the crisis after weeks of behind-the-scenes negotiating, and that now, thank God, war would be unnecessary. Try to picture the reaction from both pro-war and anti-war sides. Then multiply it at least a dozen times, and you probably have some idea of how the political world reacted to Adams' announcement that he had gotten an agreement with the French.

In 1800, Hamilton urged Federalists to oppose Adams and line up behind another candidate, and many did. This helped Jefferson win the election, although the odds would probably have been against Adams even if the Federalists had been united. How often do Presidents knowingly go directly against the policy of their own party and knowingly shoot their chances for reelection in the foot simply because they have concluded that a war is unnecessary and they must try to avoid it? Adams did, and IMHO that has to county for something.

Next ... the good side of another bad president, the son of the first one!