notes, documents, and dates from a lifetime of reading about the United States
Carried through the current administration April 2, 2021. The table prints on four sheets; see the note at the bottom about landscape.
I used to hand this table out on the first day of the survey and say: skim, don't memorize. The point of a table of presidents is not the recall; it is seeing the whole slope of the thing at once, the parties arrive and die, the war show up in the middle like a spine, the country get louder as it goes. A student once told me she taped it inside a cabinet door, which is the highest praise this page has ever received and I have her to thank for keeping it current ever since.
One honest line apiece, and "honest" means I like none of them completely and dislike none of them completely; the ones who look flat here are the ones I had the least to say about, which is itself a verdict of a kind. My longer argument about why these lines are not rankings is in the essays.
| # | President | Term | Party | One line, anyway |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | George Washington | 1789–97 | none | The precedent-setter; two terms and out, a warning against parties and foreign entanglements in the farewell address, and then home to Mount Vernon, which is the most underrated part of the whole career. |
| 2 | John Adams | 1797–1801 | Federalist | Kept the country out of a war it did not want, then signed the Alien and Sedition Acts and never fully lived it down; his letters to Abigail are the best reading of any presidency. |
| 3 | Thomas Jefferson | 1801–09 | Dem.-Rep. | The Louisiana Purchase doubled the country in 1803; the pen behind the Declaration; an enslaver who knew better, which is the whole tragedy in five words. |
| 4 | James Madison | 1809–17 | Dem.-Rep. | The Constitution's architect; the War of 1812 went badly enough that the White House burned, though the country survived it and decided it had won. |
| 5 | James Monroe | 1817–25 | Dem.-Rep. | The Missouri Compromise and the Doctrine with his name on it; the "Era of Good Feelings," which lasted about as long as the phrase does. |
| 6 | John Quincy Adams | 1825–29 | Dem.-Rep. | Elected by the House after a four-way race; argued the Amistad captives' case after losing the office; a better ex-president than president, which in his case is saying a great deal. |
| 7 | Andrew Jackson | 1829–37 | Democrat | The people's president, the Bank war, the expansion of the franchise; and Indian Removal, the Trail of Tears among the results; both halves are the presidency and neither cancels the other. |
| 8 | Martin Van Buren | 1837–41 | Democrat | A founder of the modern party system; inherited the Panic of 1837 within weeks of taking the oath, which is the presidency's oldest trick. |
| 9 | William Henry Harrison | 1841 | Whig | Thirty-one days; the longest inauguration speech and the shortest term; died of what the doctors of 1841 treated, which was as dangerous as the illness. |
| 10 | John Tyler | 1841–45 | Whig* | The first vice president to inherit the office; annexed Texas; expelled by his own party and later elected to the Confederate Congress, dead before he could serve in it. |
| 11 | James K. Polk | 1845–49 | Democrat | One term, four stated goals, all met: California and Oregon, the tariff, the treasury; the Mexican War was the price and he knew the receipt. |
| 12 | Zachary Taylor | 1849–50 | Whig | A general who had never voted before running for president; died sixteen months in, in the summer before the country came apart. |
| 13 | Millard Fillmore | 1850–53 | Whig | Signed the Compromise of 1850 with the Fugitive Slave Act in it; ran again in 1856 as a Know-Nothing; kept the peace by papering it, which worked for exactly as long as it did. |
| 14 | Franklin Pierce | 1853–57 | Democrat | The Kansas-Nebraska Act opened the territories to slavery and broke the peace on his watch; a handsome man with the worst luck of any president, public and private. |
| 15 | James Buchanan | 1857–61 | Democrat | Presided over the collapse; thought secession unlawful and also unstoppable, a theory of the presidency that amounts to spectating. |
| 16 | Abraham Lincoln | 1861–65 | Republican | Save the Union, end slavery, win the war, die for it; the address at Gettysburg is on the documents page and is two minutes long. |
| 17 | Andrew Johnson | 1865–69 | Democrat | Impeached, acquitted by one vote; let the defeated South back in on almost any terms, and the freedpeople paid the difference for a century. |
| 18 | Ulysses S. Grant | 1869–77 | Republican | The general who won the war; the president who defended Black citizenship harder than anyone for a hundred years, with a scandal-ridden cabinet for his trouble; his Memoirs are the best book any president wrote. |
| 19 | Rutherford B. Hayes | 1877–81 | Republican | Elected by one electoral vote after a compromise that pulled the troops out of the South; honest, and the bargain was bigger than he was. |
| 20 | James A. Garfield | 1881 | Republican | Shot in July, dead in September; a genuinely brilliant man, killed by a disappointed office-seeker, and the civil service exam is his memorial. |
| 21 | Chester A. Arthur | 1881–85 | Republican | A machine politician who reformed the civil service once he got it; nobody saw it coming, including him. |
| 22 | Grover Cleveland | 1885–89 | Democrat | Honest and conservative; sent the army into the Pullman strike; the first half of the only non-consecutive pair. |
| 23 | Benjamin Harrison | 1889–93 | Republican | Grandson of a president; the Sherman Antitrust Act; presided over the first "billion-dollar Congress," a phrase used against him like an insult. |
| 24 | Grover Cleveland | 1893–97 | Democrat | The second act; the Panic of 1893 arrived with him and would not leave. |
| 25 | William McKinley | 1897–1901 | Republican | The war with Spain and the debate over the Philippines; assassinated in Buffalo in 1901; won the first modern media campaign without ever leaving his porch. |
| 26 | Theodore Roosevelt | 1901–09 | Republican | Trusts busted, parks created, the canal dug, the Square Deal declared; the first modern president, and fully aware of it. |
| 27 | William Howard Taft | 1909–13 | Republican | Busted more trusts than Roosevelt and hated every minute of the job; later Chief Justice, which is the happy ending of the list. |
| 28 | Woodrow Wilson | 1913–21 | Democrat | The Fed, the income tax, the war, Versailles, the stroke; a genius who resegregated the civil service and screened Birth of a Nation at the White House, all of it on the same résumé because that is where the facts live. |
| 29 | Warren G. Harding | 1921–23 | Republican | Died in San Francisco in 1923 with the scandals still inside the cabinet; the atmosphere of the administration was his fault and the thieving mostly was not. |
| 30 | Calvin Coolidge | 1923–29 | Republican | The boom and the quiet; "the chief business of the American people is business," approximately, and then he did not run again, which took everybody by surprise including the Republicans. |
| 31 | Herbert Hoover | 1929–33 | Republican | The crash eight months in; the great engineer who could not engineer the economy out of the hole; a better man than the shantytowns' name for him allowed. |
| 32 | Franklin D. Roosevelt | 1933–45 | Democrat | The New Deal, the war, four terms; the only president elected to a fourth, and the only one to die in the middle of one. |
| 33 | Harry S Truman | 1945–53 | Democrat | The bomb, the Marshall Plan, NATO, Korea, the desegregation of the armed forces; the buck stopped there and he said so. |
| 34 | Dwight D. Eisenhower | 1953–61 | Republican | The interstates, the armistice, the warning about the military-industrial complex on the way out; underrated for decades, currently being re-rated, correctly. |
| 35 | John F. Kennedy | 1961–63 | Democrat | The missile crisis and the speech in Berlin; Dallas; a thousand days and forty years of what-ifs. |
| 36 | Lyndon B. Johnson | 1963–69 | Democrat | The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and the Great Society; Vietnam swallowed the rest; the biggest domestic record since Roosevelt, and he knew exactly what it cost him. |
| 37 | Richard M. Nixon | 1969–74 | Republican | China, détente, the EPA, the EPA again for emphasis, and Watergate; resigned in 1974; the one-line summary of this presidency is a lifetime's work, and I have spent part of mine on it. |
| 38 | Gerald R. Ford | 1974–77 | Republican | The healing, the fall of Saigon, the pardon; never elected to the office or the vice presidency, appointed under the 25th Amendment, and the country survived the novelty. |
| 39 | Jimmy Carter | 1977–81 | Democrat | Camp David, the hostages, stagflation; the best ex-president of the century, which he had to live a long time to hear anybody say out loud. |
| 40 | Ronald Reagan | 1981–89 | Republican | The recovery, the arms buildup, the tax cuts, Iran-Contra; the wall came down on his watch's schedule, though the schedule was not only his. |
| 41 | George H. W. Bush | 1989–93 | Republican | The Berlin Wall came down and the coalition held together in the Gulf; one term, ended by a recession and a sentence about taxes. |
| 42 | William J. Clinton | 1993–2001 | Democrat | The boom and the balanced budget; impeached over perjury in a deposition, acquitted; the politics of the era in one presidency. |
| 43 | George W. Bush | 2001–09 | Republican | September 11 and two long wars; the financial crisis arrived in the last quarter of the last year, and the historians are still sorting the eight in between. |
| 44 | Barack Obama | 2009–17 | Democrat | The first Black president, a fact that deserves its own line and gets one; the ACA, the bin Laden raid, the recovery; the fights over all three continue. |
| 45 | Donald J. Trump | 2017–21 | Republican | The tax cuts, the pandemic year, two impeachments (the first president to be tried twice), and January 6 in the last fortnight; the sorting has not begun. |
| 46 | Joseph R. Biden | 2021– | Democrat | The oldest man inaugurated at 78; a $1.9 trillion COVID bill in March 2021; the line ends here because the term does. |
*Tyler was expelled from the Whig Party in September 1841, five months into the term, and governed as a man without one, which the asterisk is doing its best to convey.
Because the column needs a legend and the legend is a lecture. Federalists wanted a stronger central government and got Washington and then nobody else. The Democratic-Republicans (Jefferson's) won the argument, became the Democratic Party under Jackson, split over slavery in 1860 into Northern and Southern halves, and did not fully reassemble until the twentieth century. The Whigs opposed Jackson, won twice with war heroes who promptly died in office, and broke apart over slavery in the 1850s; what replaced them in the North was the Republican Party, founded in 1854, six years before Lincoln. After 1868 you can trace the two modern parties from those stems, through the realignment of the South in the late twentieth century, which is the single most useful thing to understand about the map's colors, and the reason the table's "party" column is not decoration.
Because a table of presidents is an abstract thing and the graves are not: Lincoln's, in Springfield, twice (the second time because Margaret had not seen it and the first time had been raining). Grant's, on the Riverside drive in New York, which is enormous and, I think, right. Garfield's, in Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland, a tower you climb, with the city spread out below. McKinley's, in Canton, the memorial's dark marble stairs on a hot day. Hayes's, at Spiegel Grove in Fremont, on the lawn of his own house, which is exactly how he would have wanted it. Five of the first twenty-five, four of them Ohioans, all of them within a day's drive of this desk. I keep meaning to make it six and I keep not getting to Pierce, which I am told says something about me, and I have stopped disputing it.
Print: the stylesheet strips the navigation and the footer; the table runs four sheets; turn on the checkbox for background colors if you want the zebra striping, or don't, it's your toner. Teachers write me every fall about the cabinet-door thing, and it has kept the table current, which the site log shows.