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

welcome back everybody to another reaction video well i am wearing the fitch falcons gear today because my uh eldest son who just turned 14 has his very first game playing soccer for his high school team today i can't even believe it he's in eighth grade but we do an indoor season for the incoming high school players the eighth through 11th graders uh that goes from december until february so he's playing with the high school team today so i can't even believe it but we're excited so we're going to be leaving shortly to go see him play today we're going to dive into something ugly about every president in u.s history i thought this might be interesting this was actually recommended to me by one of you viewers yesterday on one of our other videos there's also i think one about something good about every president us history now in keeping with my own personal standard for this channel i won't be covering any of the recent presidents i just think that people's emotions get too much involved and i don't think it's really fair to try and judge recent presidents on their impact anyway so we will stop at the appropriate time let's go ahead and dive in [Music] george washington was perhaps one of the least qualified presidents in american history he grew up in a family of wealthy tobacco farmers who owned slaves which he inherited and profited from while a fine military leader he had little in the way of political experience i disagree with just about all of that number one he was not a fine military leader you've heard me say this before if you're been around for a while he was a great leader not a good military leader he was an incredible leader of men he knew how to hold a team together i'm not sure anybody else could have done what he did in terms of keeping the revolution going but as far as a strategist and a tactician on the battlefield not very good at all got outsmarted repeatedly on the battlefield and asked for political experience number one he had us most of the uh the members of the continental congress most of the founding fathers uh were of that planter class were of that kind of um class that didn't have a lot of leadership experience george washington was in the virginia house of burgesses for nearly 20 years he probably had as much political experience as anybody in the colonies at the time so i don't know where they're getting any of that from and the role of the presidency was largely shaped around his own skill set which was mainly military hence the title commander-in-chief as a war hero and founder he was shielded from criticism during his own time and ever since he failed to that's true but like every one of the founding fathers who owns slaves that criticism is coming back big time now the port republican forces in revolutionary france responded to a handful of frontier rioters with an army of fifteen thousand men and his economic policies consistently favor the wealthy elites people like himself which is true for anybody who was in power at that time john adams had an obvious contempt for freedom of speech regularly fining or imprisoning americans for speaking out against their government he even arrested and imprisoned a congressman for criticizing the president in a private letter yeah so it's something called the alien and sedition acts which i believe some parts of even up till recently were on the books um and yeah really black mark on an otherwise incredible uh career as one of our founding fathers by john adams thomas jefferson was one of the most successful presidents in u.s history he was also a major slave owner he criticized slavery in his writing but owned about 600 of them and when a slave rebellion through a french colonial rule in haiti jefferson's response was to embargo that country while haiti's capital of port-au-prince was once known as the paris of the new world and his his embargo i i don't know enough about jefferson's mindset to say this for sure but this is my own view of things uh his embargo of haiti was less about the fact that it was a slave revolt more about that he absolutely loved france and uh that was more about a support for france i think than anything else now as for slave owner i mean if we're gonna go there about something bad about every president you can say that for something like 80 percent of the early presidents that were slave owners i'm not saying we shouldn't criticize that fact and there was a clear hypocrisy here but i think everybody pretty well understands that i wish they would have gone a little deeper and looking for something bad like i don't know the fact that when thomas jefferson was secretary of state to george washington he hired a guy named james calendar on the government payroll and then used him to undermine the government that he was a part of and then when jefferson became president and james calendar was about to testify that jefferson had done this in court a week before he testifies he ends up drowned in like two feet of water you know mysteriously country fell into deep poverty as a result of jefferson's embargo and today remains one of the poorest countries in the world james madison did not adequately prepare the military for the war of 1812 even though he was the guy who pushed for it which is why the war is also known as madison's war so uh james madison the last president to actually be in the field during a battle might be the only president who was in the field during a battle i mean george washington led troops during the whiskey rebellion but there wasn't really a battle there but madison was at the battle of bladensburg which was the battle outside of washington that kind of you know was a part of that when washington got burned and he was he was not out there commanding the troops but he was on the field and did have a leadership role in the battle the war accomplished little for the united states but provided british forces the opportunity to occupy washington and set both the capitol building and the white house on fire james monroe got very little done considering the fact that his only opposition the federalist party was already fading away by the time of his presidency his solution for the slavery issue was the missouri compromise which drew a line between free and slave states every president from george washington to james buchanan kicked the can down the road on the slavery issue that is not unique to james monroe he claimed that the compromise had saved the union but in reality he was just setting the stage for the civil war as secretary of state john quincy adams authored the monroe doctrine claiming all of north and south america to be part of the sphere of influence of the united states and we should mention too that in the early part of the u.s history secretary of state was the main jumping off point for future presidents many of the early presidents thomas jefferson james monroe i think madison john quincy adams these were people who had served as secretary of state while you may have seen it as a measure against colonialism at the time it was soon to be used as a rationale for near a constant intervention in latin american politics including the overthrow of even democratically elected governments andrew jackson forcibly removed tens of thousands of native americans trail of tears homes those who resisted were met with hostility resulting in slaughter and the second seminole war and at one point seminole seminole um at one point uh he had a um a case against the cherokee uh native american tribe who uh were quite civilized by uh white people's standards and uh had had their own system of government and everything and uh they took a case to the supreme court they won the cherokee won the case in the supreme court and then andrew jackson probably completely ignored it and said he said they issued their ruling now let's see them enforce it and then just completely ignore the supreme court's ruling and yeah the trail of tears all on him martin van buren's incompetence is widely credited for the economic depression following the panic of 1837. william henry harrison we didn't really talk much about martin van buren there but um let's just mention one thing kind of on the side here epic sideburns okay i mean they weren't called that yet but dang dude has his hair going right into the sideburns completely superficial thing to observe but anyway following the panic of 1837 william henry harrison delivered the longest inaugural address in american history on a cold rainy day wearing no coat or hat and rode in on horseback rather than a closed carriage the oldest president ever elected at the time he promptly caught pneumonia and died yeah i spent a month as president i mean barely even really anything you can judge on the guy as president had been a great general before the war or before the the presidency uh his campaign slogan was tippecanoe and tyler too because john tyler was his vice presidential candidate and tippecanoe is what he was known as he had famously won the battle of tippecanoe john tyler was never elected president and seemed to have a great deal of disdain for democracy he was nearly impeached after vetoing absurd numbers of bills in defiance of the custom that presidents should only veto what they deem unconstitutional he then focused on annexing the republic of texas which a decade prior was officially part of mexican territory and we should mention about john tyler as well elected to the confederate congress he died in 1862 so he never took office as a confederate congressman but did get elected to the confederate congress polk completed the annexation of texas thereby completing the theft of mexican land which triggered the mexican-american war of 1848. he was an aggressive expansionist not just of us territory but also of presidential powers absolutely all true but i think by and large viewed as one of our best presidents in that time period when there were a lot of pretty weak presidents um only serves one term by his own choice uh and that was something he campaigned on that he was only gonna run for one term but this was basically he this is one of those guys who did exactly what he said he was gonna do when he was getting elected now people didn't campaign the way that they do today in fact it was kind of viewed as beneath the dignity of the office of president to openly campaign for the office but in the campaign in the election time leading up to the vote uh that was stuff he he ran on was basically uh that we're going to annex texas we're gonna you know focus on the southwest remember the two overriding issues of the first half uh well maybe even the first two thirds of the 19th century in the united states are slavery and manifest destiny this idea that the united states is destined to be one nation from the atlantic all the way to the pacific ocean and polk was one of those people who had more to do with both of those issues than pretty much any president like george washington zachary taylor had military experience but no political experience before becoming president as such he accomplished little aside from being the last president to own slaves um yeah i mean slave owner with no experience it depends on how you look at the idea of the last president to own slaves in terms of when he was president yes the last person to serve as president who ever owned a slave was ulysses s grant now i'm not saying that as a criticism of grant he was gifted a slave by his father-in-law who he promptly turned around and freed um so i'm not gonna go there and say grant was a slave owner but i guess it depends on how you look at that issue millard fillmore signed the fugitive slave act into law which required citizens of free states to return escaped slaves to their masters which is interesting because fillmore was from new york he was a northerner you have a couple of these northern presidents who are very pro-south franklin pierce is another one james buchanan as well these presidents in the 1850s were pretty much horrible all of them he also joined the deeply anti-catholic anti-immigrant know-nothing party i'm going to say who knew nothing broke with monroe's missouri compromise to support the even more controversial kansas nebraska act which allowed for the expansion of slavery into the west he also tried but failed to annex cuba uh and there was a lot of that going around with um pr u.s presidents focused on trying to gobble up territory in the caribbean grant tried to get the um what became uh the dominican republic and he had an agreement in place to do it but couldn't get it ratified by the senate james buchanan that was a dope a northerner with southern sympathies toward the end of his presidency many of the states that would become the confederacy seceded from the union while credited with freeing the slaves that oversimplification ignores the role of abolitionist groups such as the quakers and the very real role blacks had in emancipating themselves here's what i don't understand about making that statement any president who did anything significant you could say that you could say well yeah he did that but there were all these other groups that were fighting for this and so he can't take all the credit no that's always true there's no president who did anything that there weren't some groups that were also lobbying for it that there weren't other people involved in that decision i think there's a lot of things you could criticize lincoln for without that being your one how about the fact that he suspends habeas corpus again i'm not saying right or wrong i'm just saying if you're gonna criticize abraham lincoln bent the constitution about as far as you can bend it without just outright defying it lincoln repeatedly said he believed in white supremacy and early on in the war didn't allow his generals to free slaves in captured territories and that was a political issue pretty much every president at that time was probably you could label them as a white supremacist again not justifying it just the reality of the mindset of most white people at the time and point of fact he didn't believe that freed slaves could or should one day become full american citizens andrew johnson opposed federally guaranteed rights for african americans ulysses arguably one of the one or two worst presidents we've ever had and you literally spend five seconds on something bad about him i could do entire episodes of videos about the crap that andrew johnson did that screwed this country up especially for the newly freed slaves i mean if you are gonna pin the 100 years plus of jim crow and segregation and just downright viciousness that was done to freed slaves in the south after the civil war on one person it's on this guy he also looks just like tommy lee jones fights for african americans ulysses s grant was a great general but not a great president he ushered in the gilded age and his close associates were constantly steeped in scandal that's true and a lot of that has more to do with grant being very too too very too much trusting of people who took advantage of him but he also did some really good things he basically eradicated the clan uh during reconstruction he created the justice department specifically to go after the clan and groups like them he did a lot of good things but he also fell victim to people in his administration taking advantage of him hayes pushed for the assimilation of native americans into white culture crushed a railroad strike with federal troops and despite serving as president no one today knows who the hell this guy is i don't know about that and again of all the things you could criticize hayes for the stuff he chose as stuff other presidents did too again you can still criticize him for it but how about the fact that the only reason he became president is because he made a corrupt deal to pull all the federal troops out of the south now granted public perception public opinion in the north had turned decidedly against reconstruction so it was going to happen anyway but he basically made a deal it was a contested election if you remember the 2000 election with bush and gore got nothing on this one 1876 election there were two states whose electoral votes were in doubt and if either one of them had gone to samuel tilden the democratic nominee then he wins the white house but both of them going to hayes gives hayes a one electoral vote win in in the white house uh for the white house and he basically they put a commission together to decide who because both votes were contested who was going to win those two states and in return for him promising to end reconstruction both states went to haste so they call him ruth a fraud like william henry harrison garfield died before getting much of anything done chester that's what you say bad about garfield he died before getting anything done but i guess you know what honestly there's not much negative to say about garfield i think he would have been one of our greatest presidents of all time if he had lived and it's one of the big what-ifs for me how different the world could have been if garfield had been elected certainly one of our most brilliant people who's ever been president arthur was widely admired by contemporaries like mark twain but has been largely forgotten over time possibly because he never achieved anything of note again i don't know if that's a criticism it's just really more of a meh than something ugly about him grover cleveland oversaw a suffering economy and crack down on unions benjamin harrison was notorious there's a lot you could say about cleveland but i'll kind of let that one go and benjamin harrison taxed the rich to murder the poor i'll be interested to hear what he means about that suffering economy and crackdown on unions benjamin harrison was notorious for wasting government funds his policies toward native americans were hostile to say the least he oversaw the bloody battle of wounded knee against the sioux and trying to annex hawaii tried to annex hawaii which was done by mcl mckinley but i don't know if i put wounded knee on benjamin harrison i put that on the uh officers on the ground i wounded me with the seventh cavalry who did that i just don't know if i blame the president for that he had the same policies that most of the presidents before him did when it came to native americans william mckinley actually annexed hawaii he supported imperialism even in his presidential campaign and seized puerto rico guam and the philippines after the spanish-american war rather than freeing them yeah and that's all fair criticism of william mckinley but i think it was kind of the mindset of most of the people who wanted to be world powers at the time it was a time when england france the dutch the germans they were all trying to gobble up colonies around the world the u.s was getting in on it again not a justification or a defense of it it's just the reality of the world at the time teddy roosevelt was obsessed with his own image and masculinity he joined the rough riders to invade cuba to show just how tough he was then spent his presidency pushing around congress and latin american republics alike i don't know if i agree with any of that um was he a masculine dude yeah i mean probably the toughest dude we've ever had as president a lot of you could say positive about theodore roosevelt um but did he do it to show how tough he was no i think he was a patriotic guy who had to be in the middle of that stuff and so he uh steps down from his government position to you know lead the rough riders down into cuba and um that's just who he was i don't think it was like i gotta show everybody how tough i am that's just how he was he also dishonorably discharged 170 black gis after they were shot by white racist townies fat not enough he was also expected to follow in the footsteps of his mentor teddy roosevelt but deviated from roosevelt's policy so extremely that the rough rider left the republican party to form a new one again i don't know if that's something ugly about taft that taft wanted to chart his own path and didn't just do what he was told by theodore roosevelt if anything that i would think whether you agree with him or not would be um a compliment to taft that he wasn't going to just do what um what roosevelt expected of it during taft's presidency the progressive wing of the republican party split off to join the democrats mainly because of the ballinger controversy supported eugenics perhaps that's all we're gonna say that's all we're gonna say about woodrow wilson the guy who screened a clan movie in the white house the guy who i mean don't even get me started on the the racist policies of woodrow wilson he was born in the south he was actually the first southern president since before the civil war even though he was in new jersey i think he was governor of new jersey at the time he was elected president had been president of princeton university but he was from the south he's born in virginia grew up in georgia i think one of his earliest memories was seeing jefferson davis ride through town as he was fleeing from federal troops at the end of the civil war um but man there's so much you could say about wilson that i'm not going to get into today same with harding there's a reason ohio and i'm in ohio and we haven't had a president since harding because he was that bad the most corrupt president in history the most prominent of his scandals with the teapot dome scandal in which members of harding's administration were caught taking bribes from private corporations to lease oil reserves in wyoming failed to act during the great mississippi flood of 1927 then helped to build the economic policies that created the great depression and the 1929 stock market crash don't know if i'd blame coolidge for the stock market crash there's a lot of blame to go around on that but i'm not sure i feel like coolidge is responsible for that but all right herbert hoover failed to recover the economy during the great depression and supported prohibition one of the greatest president supported prohibition a lot of people supported prohibition but all right i get it residents in american history fdr is not without his faults either he married a distant blood relative and proceeded to have several extramarital affairs you can't call him marrying eleanor roosevelt incest she was like a fifth cousin i mean it wasn't even close she was theodore roosevelt's niece he actually walked her down the aisle in her marriage uh to franklin roosevelt but um nah you can't call that incest come on uh fifth cousins i mean their their common ancestor was like 150 years before they got married uh yeah come on also there were the japanese internment camps give him that truman was the first and only human being in history to order the dropping of nuclear weapons on civilians not gonna not gonna criticize that but i guess if you're gonna look for something to criticize truman i guess that's probably it he also contributed more than any other president to the building of an american empire and started the korean war eisenhower started the vietnam war threatened to use nuclear weapons to end the korean war and develop plans to blow up the moon he also authorized the cia to take out the democratically elected leader of iran and install the shah creating a lasting rift between that was a problem in the united states failed to get out of vietnam tried and failed to overthrow fidel castro recklessly threatened to use nuclear weapons to deal with the cuban missile crisis i don't know if that was reckless i feel like that was the right thing to do in that situation you had to keep nuclear weapons out of cuba you had to as president i'm not going to fault him for that and humiliated the first lady with near constant philandering yeah which you could say about harding and franklin roosevelt and bill clinton and grover cleveland and probably a number of other presidents too a total failure when it came to the war in vietnam this one's obvious right barely elected to end the war in vietnam but before doing that proceeded to expand the fighting into two other countries i'm gonna wrap it up right there i'm not gonna go any further than nixon because i think we're getting dangerously close to the part where people are going to start arguing in the comment section we're bri we're going to have that anyway anytime we deal with presidents but i'll take it it's it's not a problem so let me know your thoughts do you agree with me disagree with me do you agree with them disagree with them what would you have added what would you have said instead about each of those presidents and then we'll probably come back in a day or two and do their something good about every president u.s history check out the link in the description below to the original content creator we'll see you again soon thanks for watching you

Channel: Vlogging Through History

Views: 193,933

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: C-XCCCV6izc

Length: 26min 14sec (1574 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 04 2021