Enough with Knee-Jerk Evaluations of History

If you ask someone for his favorite president, odds are he’ll tell you Lincoln or FDR. These are reasonable answers of course. But American history is interesting and complicated, and we should make an effort to look beyond the obvious.

Donald Trump named Rosa Parks. Chris Christie answered Abigail Adams, and Rand Paul said Susan B. Anthony. Scott Walker provided perhaps the most interesting and memorable choice: Red Cross founder Clara Barton. No one mentioned Judith Resnik, one of the astronauts who died aboard the Challenger or Pearl S. Buck, the first woman from the United States to become a Nobel laureate in literature.

It is not that these other women are any more deserving of the distinction. Rather, what is interesting is the tendency to always return to those people typically celebrated and to recite the often-heard reasons why such a person is idealized.

The crisis is not so much that creativity is lacking when evaluating history. The issue, we think, is rather the tendency to defer automatically to the same knee-jerk evaluations of history. We have been conditioned to label some historical actors as infallible and others as entirely blunder-ridden without sufficiently questioning or engaging with the complexities of these historical actors.

Historians tend to play a parlor game in which they rank the American presidents from best to worst. Washington and Lincoln tend to rank highest, while Harding and Buchanan fall at the bottom of most lists. Most of the rankings feature Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower within the top ten, and their relatively high rankings by historians are generally in line with public sentiment. Listening today to politicians and coffee clutch observers of politics alike, one would not be surprised to hear the names Roosevelt and Eisenhower spoken of it in the highest regard, held-up as measure markers for those currently involved in the political world. The deference to the generalized exaltation of these presidents is just one example of a phenomenon that surfaces in many evaluations of history.