President’s Day is one of those weird American holidays where no one quite knows why it’s there or what it is, but it’s a day off so no one asks too many questions.
The holiday kind of celebrates Washington’s birthday (February 22), kind of celebrates both Washington and Lincoln’s birthdays (Feb 22 and 12), and kind of celebrates all 43 presidents all at once.
In any case, it seemed like the perfect time to research presidents for 60 hours and post a 7,000-word, 30-hour-late post diving into who each American president really was and what he really did. (My apologies to all non-American readers—you did nothing to deserve this.)
In deciding where to start, I looked at the whole line of presidents, and it turns out the story of the United States divides cleanly into three even parts, each 75 years long:
I’d like to eventually go through all 43 American presidents, but for today, it made perfect sense to start out with the first and most unstable part of US history, the one bookended by the two birthday boys, Washington and Lincoln, and the section during which the country’s borders, laws, principles, and national identity were all still forming. Let’s call it the “Shaping the Nation Era.” This era was a time when major precedents were being set with every new administration, allowing the 16 presidents discussed below to shape the nation in a deeper way than anyone today could have the opportunity to.
Here’s a chart depicting the results of every election and how the political parties have shifted over time, further exemplifying how much more chaotic the Washington-Lincoln years were than the rest of US history:
Before we get started, eight general thoughts I had during my research:
1) 17/43 presidents, or 40% of them, were named John, James, George, or William.
2) There was a Mustache Era. The 44 years between 1869 and 1913 saw 9 presidents, 8 of whom had mustaches:
And never before or after this era did any other president have a mustache.
3) There was a ridiculous run of terrible presidents between 1841 and 1877.
I call it The Bad President Circus, and we’ll cover most of it today. Below is a chart showing just how dire this period was. Each square represents one of the 44 presidencies, in order (so Washington is all the way on the left and Obama is all the way on the right). The red squares represent the bottom 10 ranked* presidents:
Starting with William Henry Harrison and ending with Ulysses S. Grant, The Bad President Circus is a run of ten presidents that include eight of the bottom ten in history. A grim time.