William Henry Harrison should not be rated as a bad president, he should be the bar we rate the rest on.
William Henry Harrison should not be rated as a bad president, he should be the bar we rate the rest on.
Slightly late for President's Day in America, apologies.
Saw this article about the presidents being rated. William Henry Harrison came in 41st.
The thing to know about him is he was president for a month and then he died. That was his impact. He died. He didn't noticeably improve or worsen things (Based on his inaugural speech he might've been bad but he never got to act on it) because he had no time to because he died. Which consequently means he should be the null point we can base every other president on.
If the country was left even slightly better then you got it? Then you did a better job then Harrison. Was it left worse? Then you did worse. Did 40 presidents all make the country better and only 4 leave it worse? Tough to believe.
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From the actual paper:
To do this, we asked respondents to rate each president on a scale of 0-100 for their overall greatness, with 0=failure, 50=average, and 100=great. We then averaged the ratings for each president and ranked them from highest average to lowest.
I would categorize "dead within a month" generally as a failure, which is where I think a lot of the scholars polled went with it.
Dead within a month isn't a failure though. It isn't anything. That's my point. He didn't do anything, so there's nothing to judge him on.
That’s your subjective opinion on what constitutes failure. Maybe more people actually expect progress, and the status quo is not a good baseline?
Failure to me implies doing something and failing. If I call a plumber and he gets hit by a car on the way over I don't give him a bad review because he didn't change the status quo of my toilet. I don't give him a review at all.
While I agree with your points in this particular comment, doesn't that kind of negate the premise of your title? He shouldn't really be judged at all because he didn't really have time to be bad or good. If judgment can't be passed on his merits, why would he be the metric we compare others to? It's just a roundabout way of saying presidents should be judged whether they made things better or worse, which is kind of self evident.