William Henry Harrison! James K. Polk! Millard Fillmore! Chester Arthur! Grover Cleveland! Warren Harding! Calvin Coolidge!

It must be Presidents’ Day on NRO.

Below, our contributors select their favorite presidents. Don’t worry: Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan also receive their due.


LEE BOCKHORN
Naming George Washington as your favorite president is akin to saying that ice cream is your favorite dessert — not only is he (along with Lincoln) an obvious choice, he is also, on first glance, a boring one. Washington lacked the qualities that endear other presidents to us moderns: Jefferson’s dazzling intellect, Lincoln’s literary power and hardscrabble origins, TR’s superhuman energy, FDR’s patrician élan in the face of polio, Reagan’s warmth and wit.

Washington possessed virtues that are undervalued in our time: an extraordinary sense of duty, prudence, humility, and discretion. As the first president, he established the democratic dignity of the office, avoiding the trappings of monarchy while still imbuing the presidency with grandeur. He successfully managed the enormous egos (e.g., Hamilton, Jefferson) in the first cabinet. And if there ever was an “indispensable man” in American history, it was Washington — yet by voluntarily relinquishing power after two terms, he taught us that no man is indispensable in a democracy.

Other presidents might have been better writers, better dinner companions, or better politicians, but no president inspired more awe and devotion in his countrymen than George Washington — and none was a better man.

— Lee Bockhorn is a former speechwriter for Pres. George W. Bush and NEH Chairman Bruce Cole.


RYAN L. COLE
The obvious choices are the men we built monuments to: Washington and Lincoln.

Yet, in this age of president-as-savior, how about a chief executive whose presidency speaks not of the greatness of a man but the power of the office?

When Charles Guiteau’s bullet brought down James Garfield in 1881, the presidency fell to Chester Alan Arthur, whose calling card was a stint as collector for the Port of New York, a notorious den of corruption and political patronage.

“Chet Arthur? President of the United States? Good God!” one horrified observer exclaimed.

Yet, surprise of surprises, Arthur, sobered by the responsibilities of an office he never sought or wanted, presided over one of the most ethical administrations of an unethical era. He also fought to end the spoils system he had so prospered from. At his urging, Congress passed the Pendleton Act in 1883, ending the country’s spoils system and establishing the civil service.

To be sure, Arthur will never join our presidential greats on Mount Rushmore, but his presidency offers a glimmer of hope by reminding us of the White House’s ability to transform its occupant, no matter his limits.

— Ryan L. Cole writes from Washington, D.C., and Indianapolis.


H. W. CROCKER III
As a cowboy-boot-wearing California conservative who remembers when the Golden State was “Reagan Country,” my favorite is Reagan. But I’ve always had a fondness for another cowboy: Teddy Roosevelt. I know he’s regarded with suspicion by some conservatives, but I became enamored of him as a boy, and I’ve never seen fit to amend my boyhood enthusiasm for the Rough Rider President.

Libertarian sectaries are keen to disown TR (just as liberals these days try to claim him as one of their own, because he remains popular). But the libertarian critics have probably forgotten — or never cared — that Russell Kirk chose TR as one of his “ten exemplary conservatives.” TR captured Kirk’s imagination in boyhood and never let go.

I wish I could say, for controversy’s sake, that my favorite president was Jefferson Davis, but I’m afraid I can’t: He was an admirable man in many ways, and undoubtedly the most underrated politician in American history. But if TR had been born a generation earlier, defected to the South (with his Southern mother), and been sworn in at Richmond, the South would have had it made.

— H. W. Crocker III is the author most recently of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War.


ALVIN S. FELZENBERG
Abraham Lincoln was by far the greatest and most influential of the nation’s presidents.

Preserving the Union and ending slavery, while his most enduring achievements, were hardly his only important ones. Lincoln pressed for homesteading legislation, land-grant colleges, and the transcontinental railroad. All these policies enabled the creation of wealth. All rested on incentives. None established entitlements nor redistributed income. Their purpose? To “lift artificial weights . . . to afford all . . . a fair chance in the race of life.” Lincoln, like Hamilton, saw a strong currency and banking system as preconditions for national security. (Hello?)

But for all these, the United States would never have emerged as a super power. But for that, it would never have become the force for good in the world.

To Lincoln, saving the Union was but a means to something more important: the preservation of self-government and the sanctity of majority rule. “I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House. I am living witness that any of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has,” he told the 164th Ohio Regiment. Because Lincoln kept that dream alive, the nation he saved remains the “last best hope” on earth.

— Alvin S. Felzenberg is the author of The Leaders We Deserved and a Few We Didn’t: Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game.


JOHN HOOD
I continue to marvel at the longevity of certain intellectual debates that should have been settled long ago. Admittedly, the top tier of America’s greatest presidents includes many obvious contenders — Grover Cleveland, Calvin Coolidge, Chet Arthur, some guy named Reagan — but the even more obvious winner is James Knox Polk, our 11th president.

Born in Mecklenburg County, N.C., and a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, Polk joined many of his contemporaries by moving to the western provinces (Tennessee) to make his career. A Jackson protégé, he was the only speaker of the U.S. House to become president and also served as Tennessee’s governor. Polk was the prototypical “dark horse” nominee for the Democrats in 1844, and then performed his first great service to the republic by (barely) keeping Henry Clay out of the White House in the general election.

Polk made a few key promises to the voters and kept them. He restrained federal spending and taxes. He negotiated with Great Britain to settle the Oregon question and fought a war with a corrupt and tyrannical Mexican regime to protect the Texas annexation (all the way to the Rio Grande, as the border should have been) that ended up securing American sovereignty over Mexico’s other northern territories. During Polk’s four-year term, then, all or parts of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, Oregon, Washington, and California became integrated into the United States. The Left Coast’s subsequent self-inflicted wounds notwithstanding, this was a tremendous achievement.

Fulfilling his promise to serve only one term, the relatively young Polk proceeded to die shortly after leaving office, thus saving taxpayers the expense of a lengthy retirement. A fiscal conservative to the end, and our greatest president.

— John Hood, president of North Carolina’s John Locke Foundation, is a Mecklenburg County native and UNC-Chapel Hill graduate, just coincidentally.


BILL KAUFFMAN
The three best presidents have been, not surprisingly, Upstate New Yorkers: Grover Cleveland, Martin Van Buren, and Millard Fillmore. We’ll take our mulligan with the cousin-marrying man from Hyde Park.

Millard Fillmore, usually a punch line, is the sore thumb in that trio. He erred badly in signing the Fugitive Slave Act and he ought not to have dallied with the Know Nothings, but, to his credit, Fillmore ranks with the Quaker Herbert Hoover as the most pacific president in our history. Before going oval, Fillmore had opposed the disgraceful Mexican War. As president he resisted, with grit and principle, the Democrat expansionists and proto-imperialists who wished the U.S. to annex Cuba. And in retirement, he was a Peace Whig, opposed to both Lincolnian warmaking and the tantrums of Southern fire-eaters. Alas, standing against war is the best way to sink to “below average” or “failure” in those Schlesingerian polls that measure “greatness” by how effectively a president consolidates power in the executive branch and the imperial city.

Fillmore was a superb ex-president. He founded the Buffalo Historical Society and read Shakespeare to toiling shop hands. Queen Victoria is said to have remarked that Millard Fillmore was the handsomest man she had ever met. But then we men of the Niagara Frontier do incline to a certain comeliness.

— Bill Kauffman is the author of Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle American Anti-Imperialism and Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin.


W. WESLEY McDONALD
Heard of the Great Depression of 1921? No? Not surprising, since it never happened. You can thank for that the most underappreciated man ever elected to the presidency: Warren G. Harding. Harding inherited an even worse recession than did Franklin D. Roosevelt twelve years later. Harding’s “do nothing” policies produced “the Roaring Twenties,” an era of nearly unprecedented economic growth and prosperity, while FDR’s questionable interventionism prolonged double-digit unemployment and negative economic growth. Yet while Roosevelt is celebrated as one America’s greatest presidents, Harding is regularly derided as one of our worst presidents.

Harding recognized that when government messes with the economy, it typically does more harm than good. Relying on classic laissez-faire principles, he allowed wages to fall back to their natural level and market forces to restore prosperity. He reduced government expenditures, slashed taxes, eliminated Wilson’s wartime economic controls, brought the federal budget under greater supervision, restored the high protective tariff, and imposed reasonable limits on immigration. Then he went back to imbibing whisky and playing cards with his White House cronies.

Will we ever see a president with such courage and wisdom again? Somehow, I doubt it.

— W. Wesley McDonald is professor of political science at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania and author of Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology.


MARK NEWGENT
The obvious choice for a conservative is Ronald Reagan — if only I had understood his true greatness during his presidency. A liberal-by-default in my youth, I instinctively scorned all things Reagan. As I matured and found myself on the right, however, I returned to Reagan and discovered why so many loved the man and why I’m proud to call myself a conservative now.

Reagan was an autodidact. He did his own research and wrote most of his own speeches. Detractors called him an “amiable dunce” and “unlettered bumpkin.” They underestimated the depth of his intellect. After all, what “dunce” could embarrass Robert F. Kennedy in a debate and hold his own against William F. Buckley Jr.?

More important, Reagan believed in the power of ideas, especially the idea that “this breed called Americans” had the capacity to govern themselves better than distant bureaucrats. In this age of encroaching government, those currently in power may think that idea quaint. I believe it is more powerful than ever.

— Mark Newgent blogs for Red Maryland and is the Baltimore history examiner.


LAWRENCE W. REED
Politics, someone once said, may not be the world’s oldest profession, but the results are the same. That may be why H. L. Mencken reserved one of his rare compliments of a politician for America’s 22nd and 24th president, Grover Cleveland. Mencken called him “a good man in a bad trade.”

Left-leaning historians give high grades to presidents who grew government or tortured the Constitution until it confessed to powers the Founders never conceived. Keeping government small and honest is a ticket to the historian’s footnote.

Honesty was arguably Grover Cleveland’s only policy. It was the prism through which he saw the world and conducted his public life. He saw attempts to secure special favors, privileges, or subsidies from government as fundamentally immoral. In his view, taking from some and giving to others was not something an honest man in or out of government would ever do. He rejected the notion that the Treasury should be up for grabs by the mob, so he vetoed more bills than all previous presidents combined.

Not only would Cleveland never recognize the Washington of today, he would surely expect God to either raze it or extend His deepest apologies to Sodom and Gomorrah.

— Lawrence W. Reed is president of the Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington, N.Y.


GREGORY L. SCHNEIDER
Since Presidents' Day is a silly holiday created by a president who resigned from office (Richard Nixon), it merits a type of reply deserving of that honor. To the question of who is my favorite president and why I would have to answer William Henry Harrison.

Why Harrison? Given the tremendous damage some 20th-century presidents have done to the country, Harrison’s administration was brief and to the point. He left no long-term legacy for the nation and did not crush the Constitution in pursuit of political advantage or power. Of course, by embracing Henry Clay’s expansive American system, he wanted to do this — fulfilling the goals of Hamiltonian centralizers everywhere. By having a vice president like John Tyler, he assured it would not happen.

Harrison was also old and stubborn, two admirable qualities in a leader. His campaign dispensed drink and witty slogans in equal measure. To prove his toughness, Harrison refused to wear a coat in his inaugural parade, thereby inviting the pneumonia that would claim him one month later.

He gave of himself so the country might live and the Whigs might die. There is something honorable and admirable about such a man. Raise a toast for Tippecanoe today. He spared the country through his sacrifice.

— Gregory L. Schneider is the author of The Conservative Century. His comedy stylings can be seen in class at Emporia State University.


MATTHEW SPALDING
This year, everyone’s favorite president ought to be Abraham Lincoln, and the bicentennial of his birth is the perfect occasion to reassess his legacy. This is especially the case for those who have been duped into believing the old liberal claim that Lincoln was one of them, indeed, was the father of today’s unlimited government. But the modern administrative state we detest comes out of the progressive transformation that rose up after the Civil War, when progressive intellectuals looked to European thinkers for guidance, rejected America’s grounding in “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” and set our nation on the course of endless change and constant centralization.

Lincoln took his guidance from the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. His great achievement, in probably the most trying epoch of our history, was to preserve our constitutional republic while restoring its dedication to the core principles of equality and liberty. At a time when the conservative movement is looking for its principles, Lincoln points us toward those timeless truths, “applicable to all men and all times,” that form the central idea of America. It would do us well to reread his words, and take to heart his defense of freedom.

— Matthew Spalding is the director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation.


JACOB SULLUM
First choice: Zaphod Beeblebrox, because (as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy notes) he had “no real power whatsoever.” Also, he was the sort of guy you could imagine having a drink with, and he had two heads, which are better than one.

Second choice: William Henry Harrison, because he left office before he could do much damage.

— Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason and a nationally syndicated columnist.


JAY WINIK
I have long puzzled over both who the most important president is, as well as who my favorite president is. I’m one of those rare creatures, a historian who has a foot in the Civil War camp as well as in the post-revolutionary camp. For my dear friends and colleagues, the legion of dedicated Lincoln scholars who have spent a lifetime understanding this most magnificent of presidents, Lincoln is nothing less than a deity who walks on water.

By the same token, my equally cherished friends and colleagues who have toiled away understanding the Founders and the eminent George Washington point out no less compellingly that without our first president, the American experiment may well have been strangled in the crib. So who’s right? And who’s my favorite president?


At the risk of waffling, I would have to say both. Lincoln has always tugged at my heartstrings: With great courage, he saved the Union where other presidents would almost surely have compromised; he freed the slaves where others almost certainly would have hesitated; and he helped stitch up a divided country with such humanity that historians are still trying to fathom how he did it.

But if my heart is with Lincoln, my head is with Washington. Cast in marble as well as in history, austere, unapproachable, dignified, and visionary in his own right, he resisted all the temptations to make himself a king, created our first government, and gave us the time-honored principle of the peaceful transfer of power from one head of state to another. England’s King George once said that if Washington stepped down from the presidency, he would be “the greatest man in the world.” There’s something to that, too.

— Jay Winik is the author of April 1865 and The Great Upheaval.


TODD J. ZYWICKI
Calvin Coolidge exemplifies the leadership that is lacking in Washington today.

He was a constitutionalist: As governor as Massachusetts he supported many progressive measures, such as wage and child-labor legislation. But as president he believed these to be beyond the reach of federal power.

He was a tax-cutter: He rapidly wound down the expansion of taxation and spending left over from the First World War, even paying down the debt.

He was a scourge of government waste: He repeatedly vetoed wasteful farm-subsidy bills.

He was immune to the seductions of Washington: He disliked Washington dinner parties but defended his continued attendance on the impeccable logic: “Got to eat somewhere.”

He was a fighter for real justice: He spoke out against lynching and the KKK.

He served the public rather than having the public serve him: At the end of his one full term in office, he walked away and returned home to Massachusetts, explaining that ten years in office would have been too long.

He had good judgment in people: He recognized that Hoover was a dolt, noting that “for six years that man has given me unsolicited advice — all of it bad.”

A man for any age — but especially our own.

— Todd J. Zywicki is professor of law at George Mason University and senior fellow of the Goldwater Institute.