Historian Reacts - Something Great About Every U.S. President

welcome back everybody to another reaction video well i just couldn't help myself after the response to yesterday's video on question times uh video about something bad about every president and just how much i disagreed with a lot of his takes i really just had to come back to his video something great about every u.s president in history i've put a link in the description below there's a lot of the video i'm not going to watch you can see i'm starting it at 2 18. there's a lot of the beginning and i'm sure a lot of the end have to do with modern stuff that i avoid on this channel and just a heads up too if you go posting stuff about modern politics i will probably delete it i've deleted some really long posts in the last couple of days i'm trying to save you the time and energy of going on your rant about ronald reagan or barack obama or joe biden because i'm just gonna remove it i don't really want that kind of stuff on the channel so uh my channel do what i want sorry i mean that's kind of the way it is but um trying to keep this uh this community civil trying to keep it about history don't want to get into that stuff so i'm not saying there isn't a place for it i'm not saying it's not important it's just not for here okay with that said i will put the link in the description if you want to see the video in its entirety from question time and i'll also put a link in the description to my video from yesterday if you didn't see that one let's go ahead and dive in [Music] george washington defined what it means to be the president of the united states he successfully led the american revolution to victory as commander-in-chief of the continental army i just gotta stop for a second because in light of what he said yesterday about george washington being like not really a person with any kind of experience and and like he's it sounds to me like he's kind of going against what he said yesterday he kind of made washington sound like a guy who had no business being president now he's like he defined the presidency oh boy i agree but it's just weird and was dedicated to enlightenment principles of reason and rationality he was a champion of republican values and despite owning slaves during his lifetime he was the only prominent founding father to free all of them upon his death the only prominent founding father to free all of them on his death but also uh many of the founding fathers didn't own slaves and it's interesting to say this because i know a lot of people very often comment to me that thomas jefferson opposed slavery but virginia law prevented him from freeing his slaves upon his death george washington was also a virginian so i don't know john adams never owned slaves and considered the practice abhorrent historians have noted him as a clear free thinker often disagreeing with his own political party so john adams was from massachusetts of course he didn't own slaves i mean technically you could have but um i just i said this yesterday we get it i'm not downplaying the fact that slavery was evil and should not have existed and should be loudly condemned but if that's going to be our default for all of the pre-civil war presidents is good person if he didn't own slaves bad person if he did and we can't go any deeper than that i feel like we're missing an opportunity we get that slavery existed and that a lot of people owned them and it was bad but let's talk about more than just that and he certainly was a fine father as his son john quincy grew up to be one of the best presidents of all time all right i'm pausing a lot here but i gotta break all this down okay um yes he was definitely a free thinker and did often oppose his own party and i give him credit for that but also sometimes he did things like what we said yesterday with the alien and sedition acts where he opposed other people being free thinkers or at least free expressors of their thoughts uh would have people jailed for disagreeing with him and uh could have been very much viewed as a dictator because of that uh as far as fathers go yeah john quincy turned out pretty good probably one of our most qualified presidents ever john quincy held pretty much every office you can imagine um he was his whole life like his father's was dedicated to the country was he one of our greatest presidents of all time i don't know he got defeated for reelection he only served one term so america obviously didn't think so at the time and also if you look at his other son charles not so great i mean if we're gonna judge someone as a parent solely based on how their kids turn out charles basically drank himself to death and was disowned by his father so it goes both ways with the louisiana purchase thomas jefferson doubled the territory of his country overnight he drafted the declaration of independence and was a leading proponent of one of america's most important values secularism so um obviously i'm a christian so i'm speaking from a particular bias on this topic i don't know if number one america has as it's one of its most important values secularism um and he says his wall is better than trump he's talking about jefferson is the one who coined or at least popularized the term separation of church and state he wrote about a wall of separation between church and state um it doesn't mean what most people think it means but i'm not going to get into religious debate with that but interesting that thomas jefferson a champion of small central government uses the power of the federal government to double the size of the country with the louisiana purchase uh thomas jefferson who opposed the idea of a standing army uh is the one responsible for the founding of west point where we trained officers for our standing army uh so he was kind of a contradiction in that way and and that that's not a unique criticism of thomas jefferson a lot of people when they become president some things that they were very strongly opposed to their opinion and their views on those things change once they sit in that chair once they're in the white house once they face what they face a lot of times that changes so that's why i always get really uncomfortable when people run for political office and make certain promises i'm like you really don't know until you get in there what you're gonna do that's why so often people promise one thing and then they get in there and do the opposite his wall of separation between church and state protects religious minorities from discrimination government from being corrupted by dogmatic values and religion from being corrupted by politics james madison drafted the united states constitution and bill of rights enough said and here's the thing i'll say about what he said about jefferson with the declaration of independence and then madison with the constitution and the bill of rights what does that have to do with them as president yeah it says a lot about them as people and i guess you know if you're just saying something great about every president doesn't necessarily have to be something great about their presidency um because these are things that have nothing to do with their time in office so you know i'll give him a pass on that i guess entrenched your right to think he's awesome okay unlike many founding fathers james monroe was a strong supporter of the french revolution and thus the spread of republican values as ambassador to france he secured the release of thomas paine another international friend of liberty who had been arrested for his opposition to the brutal execution of the deposed king of france john quincy adams negotiated the end of the foolish war of 1812 paid off much of the national debt and promoted economic modernization and education i'll say this um and i get that this is a channel that that isn't really necessarily claiming to be a channel about history but man this guy's just throwing his bias all over this stuff calling things like the war of 1812 foolish okay well you think it was foolish maybe somebody else doesn't i i just i would prefer not to throw those kinds of words into a description about something historical but i understand that that's not what this channel is about he was a leading opponent of slavery and suggested that if a civil war were to break out the president could end slavery by decree by using his war powers kind of what lincoln did but it would have been overturned after the war was over which lincoln understood and that's why lincoln pushed for the 13th amendment because he knew that the emancipation proclamation would have been declared on unconstitutional once the war was over um but yeah john quincy adams also the uh the lawyer in the amistad trial if you've ever seen the movie amistad you see that anthony hopkins plays john quincy adams a really good story and really good movie i highly recommend you check it out so yeah i'm a big fan of john quincy adams i just don't know that i'd go so far as to say he was one of our greatest presidents of all time that just might be where lincoln got the idea for the emancipation proclamation andrew jackson was perhaps the only president in history brave enough to take on the banks his enemies accused him of class warfare which basically means fighting for the poor and weak against the rich and powerful unless you were poor and weak and native american different story then um and andrew jackson i believe it was during his presidency was the last time the united states was out of debt so give him credit for that a very forceful guy probably next to theodore roosevelt probably the kind of the most manly kind of toughest sob to ever be president i guess you could say um but i'm just not a fan there's just too many things about the guy's character i don't like a lot um that's all i'll say believe it or not martin van buren's presidency marked real victory for diversity he was the first president whose ancestry was not english in fact he remains to this day the only president in history who spoke english as a second language and his supporters were quite diverse for the time uh dutch i believe was his first language and he also was the first president born in the united states and what i mean by that is he was the first person born after the united states actually became a country and wasn't born in british america all the previous presidents were born before independence van buren rejected the admission of texas into the union on the grounds that it would cause war with mexico he turned out to be right prior to being elected president and promptly dying william henry harrison found a way of spreading american values through latin america that didn't involve the overthrow of democratically elected leaders he earned the legendary latin american revolutionary simone boulevard to adopt democratic policies it didn't exactly take but it was worth a shot gotta be honest uh and william henry harrison his father signed the declaration of independence his son was a congressman john scott harrison fascinating story there about how his body was stolen by body snatchers john scott harrison and found by his son benjamin harrison who became president so only grandfather grandson combination to ever be presidents john tyler is a tough one but when he retired from the house of representatives he endorsed his former opponent for the seat that's a pretty classy move and to this day john tyler born in the 1700s has a living grandson uh he had two but i think one of them has since passed away um but yeah he john tyler had just a bazillion children he was married twice his second wife's wife was julia gardner tyler who's a distant cousin of my wife through the gardner family uh and she was much younger than him and so he had basically a whole second generation of children um and and one of those children he had when he was in his 60s then turned around and had children in his 60s and it's one of those grandsons who is now still alive or at least was last i heard he's buried in richmond real close to james monroe they're all very they're buried and right in the same section of hollywood cemetery it's generally agreed that pope came through on his campaign promises one of them was that he would not seek re-election after one successful term sure enough that's exactly what he did and that's you know that's commendable uh it's difficult to get into power to know you could hang on to power and to willingly let it go george washington did that and set a great standard that held until franklin roosevelt and i give poke a lot of credit and i think genuine generally polk is rated very highly by historians um as president i i think he's usually around the top 10 if not just outside of it despite being a slave owner himself zachary taylor did not push for the expansion of slavery millard film sorry that's the best i've got uh zachary taylor's son uh richard taylor was a three-star general in the confederate army uh his daughter was jefferson davis's first wife he was a kentuckian himself um listen zachary taylor obviously this guy's not gonna go there because that would mean to speak favorably again in the war of mexico against mexico and he's not going to do that but zachary taylor was a great military leader um won some incredible victories in the war with mexico you don't have to like it you know ulysses s grant was strongly opposed to the war in mexico but still fought in the war in mexico and still spoke very highly of zachary taylor as a general retailer did not push for the expansion of slavery millard filmer more or less lived the american dream he had and looked like um alec baldwin didn't he i mean if he died alec baldwin's hair white he could totally pull off millard fillmore no formal schooling as a child and was born in a log cabin despite this he rose to become president of the united states and that's worth some admiration franklin pierce like most of the pre-civil war presidents is largely remembered as a total failure but in that incredibly polarizing climate few if any could really have gotten much of anything good done pierce was known to be a warm person and a skilled politician he tried to be a unifier his failures were quite likely unavoidable consequences of his time unavoidable consequences of his time and horrible tragedy in his life i talk about this all the time but his uh his only son uh was killed in a train accident where his presence his parents were present the son was basically he was a child and he was basically decapitated right in front of his parents it was pretty horrifying and um franklin pierce never recovered and i can't imagine any of us would have from something like that buchanan is rightly remembered for his great devotion to the law lincoln is that that's all we get for buchanan i don't know what else you could really say positively about him is quite often did i say overcame crippling ugliness i don't know i'm i'm not attracted to men so i can't speak to it and i know a lot of people say that but gosh i mean we're going to be that superficial and ranked as the greatest president in american history and for good reason he saw the country through its most turbulent time winning the civil war although he did not do it alone he oversaw the end of slavery he cleverly pitted his enemies against each other and his gettysburg address as one of the most beautiful political speeches in history um first of all i don't know if i'd call i i know what he's saying by political speech because it was made by a politician but it wasn't a political speech but um in his second inaugural is phenomenal too if you go to the lincoln memorial the gettysburg address is on one side his second inaugural is on the other that's the one he gave about a month before he died it was when everybody knew the civil war was about to be over he's trying to think ahead to reuniting the country and so he starts you know he talks about things like he says with malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as god gives us to see the right uh you know let us he starts talking about striving forward to finish the work that they're in to bind up the nation's wounds to care for him who has borne the battle for his widow and for his orphan and to achieve uh for ourselves and our future generations a lasting peace with ourselves and all generations and other nations and you know it's just really just a sweeping kind of speech about coming back together about reconciling with the south about taking care of the families of the soldiers who fought the war about stepping out on the world stage and achieving peace with other nations it's just phenomenal stuff and i i mourn for our country that we didn't get to see what a post-war lincoln could have done to help with the healing process um and certainly in light of what johnson did afterwards andrew johnson was a strict concert not jackson because many as many of you pointed out in yesterday's video he put andrew jackson under the picture of andrew johnson institutionalist you listen what i didn't even catch what he said about him speeches in history andrew johnson was a strict constitutionalist which i know is something that this guy seems to like but um it's interesting well i don't know if he does like it because he the guy doing this video seems to be pretty much in favor of very progressive presidents which don't typically go hand in hand with a strict constructionist view of the constitution that's typically a conservative point of view ulysses s grant did much to stop the kkk's reign of terror promote the 15th amendment seat black state legislators in southern states and make peace with native american tribes one of the most undervalued presidents when it comes to civil rights probably about the greatest champion of freed slaves that there was in the aftermath of the war um and while he mentions you know grant if there's to be a criticism of grant it's that he permitted the native american policy to go in the direction it did toward the end of his second term with the the the sioux war where they find gold in the black hills right after we signed a treaty with the sioux over the black hills and then turned right around and took it from them um and and while i don't think he was necessarily in favor of the policy he did kind of permit it in the end and i think he rightfully should be criticized for not stan standing up for for that situation fives hayes contributed greatly to the modernization of the american bureaucracy installing a merit-based appointment process weeding out corruption in the postal service and issuing an executive order that made it illegal for federal office holders to be forced to participate in party politics and that's really underrated stuff right there uh they had this thing called the spoils system which is you know the spoils of war we win we get to take uh and and the idea was all your political cronies got appointments that's still true to a point it still happens but not nearly the way that it did then a lot of very unqualified people got jobs just because of who they knew and because of who they supported and it's under hayes garfield and arthur that that really starts to change if he was never assassinated garfield likely would have continued the civil service reforms initiated by hayes he recognized that blacks were being denied their civil rights wanted to extend public education to blacks and appointed several black leaders like frederick douglass to powerful positions in government love for minorities and lasagna the play on the garfield thing i think the one yesterday said hates mondays same thing garfield the cat um yeah also i believe our only ordained minister who was ever president like few politicians of his time chester a arthur avoided scandal and corruption and was known to be true to his word grover cleveland also opposed political corruption as well as imperialism benjamin here wait let's go back friend of honesty sovereignty and elmo because grover you know grover yeah that kind of thing who opposed political corruption as well as imperialism benjamin harrison attempted to secure federal education funding and voting rights enforcement for black americans mckinley's presidency marked rapid economic growth and a decisive victory in the spanish-american war which is interesting because yesterday his criticism had to do with the spanish-american war and then he turns around and says that a great thing about him is that he helped win that he won the spanish-american war i don't get how both can be true at the same time he did the same thing with washington he kind of chose both sides of the same coin for bad and good that's weird teddy roosevelt was a great defender of conservationism establishing numerous national parks and almost always regarded as a top five president by people of both political parties he broke up corporate monopolies supported labor unions and pressed congress to pass the pure food and drug act which banned impure or falsely labeled consumables yeah there's a lot of things that happened during roosevelt's administration that we still reap the benefits for today the the what became the fda certainly one of them the national parks conservation uh things like that uh also just an all-around just hardcore dude um yeah i've shared stories about him in other videos and i won't get into too many of them my favorite is probably when he had somebody steal his boat and go down river with it so he built another boat from himself got in it tracked the guys down stayed up for like two days to bring them to justice uh set up a boxing ring in the east room of the white house where he was punched in the wrong place at one point and blinded in one eye because of it um but also probably responsible for giving the world woodrow wilson which i will never forgive him for taft actually broke up more monopolies than roosevelt and the widely believed story that he was so fat he got stuck in a white house bathtub well unfortunately that's not true woodrow wilson is best known for promoting global democracy and establishing the league of nations the predecessor of the un he innovated a regulatory approach to breaking up monopolies he avoided fighting in world war one until germans sunk american ships although the us had played a relatively small role in the war wilson played a pivotal role in the paris peace conference um yeah okay harding supported equal political rights for blacks spoke out nearly as racist as he looks how does a person look racist i don't know but against lynching and released political prisoners like socialist leader eugene depps who was imprisoned by wilson for speaking out against the war coolidge called for the federal criminalization of lynching and granted u.s citizenship to all native americans living on reservations herbert hoover wanted to focus on eliminating waste in government institutions but was instead forced to spend his presidency dealing with the great depression which is interesting too because if you were to go back 10 years and hand pick somebody who would probably be perfect to deal with the depression it would be a guy like herbert hoover brilliant guy really smart midwesterner came from the place that was one of the places that was hit hardest by the depression was secretary of commerce before the war or before um the depression uh you would think set up perfectly to deal with it but really didn't help he attempted to combat it with large-scale public works projects like the hoover dam fdr actually used similar tactics quite successfully fdr saw the united states through a period of economic disaster and global war but the most crucial aspect of his legacy was the new deal he created social security and reformed the financial system to prevent future collapse indeed the us did not experience another serious financial crisis until the critical aspects of his financial reforms like the glass-steagall act were dismantled truman prioritized civil rights he integrated the military and federal agencies yeah i integrated the military i think in 1948 first time uh going all the way back to i guess the revolutionary war where white and black enlisted men would serve in the same unit so that was a big big deal um and uh probably an underrated thing that truman did and he proposed the creation of federal offices to protect voting rights and fair employment practices eisenhower created nasa and warned the country of the dangers of the military industrial complex yeah that was his farewell address before he left after his two terms in office um again a pretty highly rated president uh usually in the top ten in most lists that i've seen um he he was really i mean of all the the people who have been elected president who were generals people like zachary taylor ulysses s grant eisenhower um he's probably the one that was best equipped to be president because his role in the military was never really about his military leadership it was his leadership ability in terms of being a good politician that was why he made such a good supreme commander in europe he knew how to pull people together and get everybody behind a common goal when you have people from different countries and he knew how to deal with de gaulle and how to deal with um you know churchill and how to uh say what needed to be said for the americans and how to lead the people under him and and bring all these different folks from different militaries together we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence whether sought or unsought by the military industrial complex the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist can it not bad for a guy who comes from a military background to be willing to say that he took responsibility for the bay of pigs even though it was actually the previous administration that planned it he negotiated a test ban treaty champion medicare and inspired america to go to the moon so um the the thing there at the bottom did things not because they are easy but because they are he was hard okay so that's kind of a play on a couple of things one a speech the speech that he gave i think at rice university which i think was phenomenal i i think we missed that as a country people setting out bold goals like that and getting the country to rally behind it that was where he laid out the vision of we we set a goal to go to the moon to return man put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth by the end of this decade we do this and the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard and then we went out and did it a couple months before the end of the decade um i love that optimism i love that setting of a goal like that um but it's also a play on his philandering we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard lbj worked against great opposition to get the civil rights bill passed into law he had to convince republicans to vote for the bill and successfully convince their leader everett dirksen to make it happen this is probably a little bit of my conservative bias showing here so challenge me on it if you disagree more republicans voted for that bill than democrats percentage-wise it was actually southern democrats who were the hardest to convince to support that bill and i don't think johnson initially supported it himself as a southern democrat i think he had to be convinced i'm not going to take the time to look up the stats on that because that's not really what this video is about but not entirely sure i'm convinced of that argument that johnson brought the republicans around i don't know nixon enforced the integration of southern schools ended the war in vietnam and created the epa ford didn't get much done in his short time in office you're welcome chevy uh all right so uh ford chevy but also chevy chase played him uh in on saturday night live we're gonna stop right there that's where i like to stop just because we're starting to get dangerously close into stuff people will argue a lot about uh so let me know your thoughts about all of that use the comment section below thank you guys so much for your continued support i did a post asking for your input about your favorite reaction videos that i've done uh this wednesday will be one year since my very first reaction video so i want to do a top 10 list of my my 10 favorite ones that i've done so if you have any input into that see that post and respond to it thanks a lot we'll see you again soon you

Channel: Vlogging Through History

Views: 110,220

Keywords: us president, president of the united states, american presidents, american history, united states, historian reacts, every president, president facts, us history, tier ranking, question time, founding fathers, us presidents ranked, us presidents documentary

Id: LlstEAUgWyY

Length: 30min 12sec (1812 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 05 2021