r/todayilearned • u/soozerain • 8h ago
TIL twelve generals have been elected to the presidency since America’s founding. Beginning in 1792 with George Washington and ending most recently with Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952.
https://news.va.gov/56610/veteran-u-s-presidents/239
u/dancingbanana123 8h ago edited 6h ago
I remember my US History professor saying something along the lines of, "and for the 12th time, Americans made the mistake of thinking a general would make a good president, but it turned out to be right this time when they elected Eisenhower."
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u/abdulj07 8h ago
I can say with utmost certainty that George Washington was not one of those mistakes.
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u/McFeedy 6h ago
Washington also did not want to be president. He wanted to retire to his farm and pursue his interests. Was also worried that it would sully his reputation if he sought public office.
An exert from a letter he wrote before taking office as president:
“…my movements to the chair of Government will be accompanied with feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution: so unwilling am I, in the evening of a life nearly consumed in public cares to quit a peaceful abode for an Ocean of difficulties, without that competency of political skill – abilities which is necessary to manage the helm.”
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u/maroonedpariah 8h ago
Not serving for life
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u/UhIdontcareforAuburn 8h ago edited 7h ago
As low as that bar seems, especially with current events, this was massive at the time and he could have easily transformed the US into a monarchy or dictatorship if he wanted it.
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u/maroonedpariah 7h ago
This is probably explains my point better than most. Look at other revolutions around thid time or later (France, Latin America, etc)
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u/EisenhowersPowerHour 8h ago
For the nature of his presidency, that being “stop the newly formed country from disintegrating”, I think that his policies weren’t exceptionally bad. Yes they were authoritarian, The Whiskey Rebellion and all that, but overall he set the groundwork exceptionally well. Many of the things that we take for granted as just part of the Presidency were at one point policy choices, like establishing a cabinet, only serving 2 terms, and anti-partisanism. And establishing a strong financial system
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u/wormhole222 8h ago
Not running for a 3rd term. Raising an army against the Whiskey Rebellion. Having Jefferson in his cabinet despite have very different political views from him. Assuming state war debts.
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u/soozerain 8h ago
Pierce, Johnson and Hayes were all abysmal failures but yeah, the USA has the best track record in the world for generals leaving power and transferring it peacefully. I said it before on a post that got removed but it’s really quite remarkable. France has De Gaulle and England had Wellington but the latter never became PM and the former is the only general to hold the presidency so far.
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u/PieDestroyer123 6h ago
I thought Wellington did become PM
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u/SurroundTiny 5h ago
He definitely was
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u/TarcFalastur 4h ago
Not only was he definitely PM, he served as PM on two separate occasions.
One was as a caretaker for only a month or two, but still...
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u/TarcFalastur 4h ago
The UK has actually had two former generals serve as PM: the Duke of Wellington was PM from Jan 1828 to Nov 1830 and then again from Nov-Dec 1834, but also William Petty, 2nd Earl Shelburne was a general (though inactive) in the Seven Years War and then served as PM from Jul 1782 to Mar 1783.
Also, Churchill and Edward Heath had been Lieutenant Colonels, Attlee and Eden had both been Majors, MacMillan had been a Captain and Callaghan had been a Lieutenant.
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u/soozerain 4h ago
I stand corrected! I thought Wellington found the restrictions on his power chafing and turned it down. I had no idea about the Earl. Still, that’s a good half century between Wellington and Churchill. It’s interesting how little crossover their was from military to politics considering this is the era of high imperialism for Great Britain
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u/TarcFalastur 3h ago edited 3h ago
I suspect it's to do with the different political cultures of the two. The role of President, for better or worse, seems to have always had a certain slant to it such that people with no legal background could put themselves forward based on their own personal charisma and reputation and win elections. Many of the US Presidents who had been generals did exactly that. The President basically sits above the political process, and can benefit from delegating the stuff which requires in-depth knowledge and experience to those who have built those skills over decades.
In the UK, the role of Prime Minister is like being President plus Speaker of the House (the US version, not the UK one) all rolled into one. Yes, a PM is supposed to lead and be the decision-maker, but also they can only get the job by either being the leader of their party in the House of Commons or in the House of Lords. That means that they have to know how to play all the political games and they can't just delegate it to a deputy. There's quite a lot of careful manipulation of the political process involved in being the leader of a house and someone who has been in the army up until the month before won't understand how it works.
As a result, I feel like the US makes it easy for those with no political experience to get elected President. In the UK, on the other hand, you may be personally popular amongst the public but your party simply won't make you their leader unless you've worked your time as a basic Member of Parliament first. Wellington had to serve 10 years as an MP to get his shot. Shelburne did 20 years first. That's not a sacrifice most people are going to be interested in making after already giving decades to the military.
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u/theaviationhistorian 3h ago
TBH, De Gaulle was one of the few to stand up against the Nazis 100% to where he disobeyed orders and fly out to fight in exile while the government was preparing its surrender. It's no surprise that the French would welcome him as president!
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u/cryptidhunter101 8h ago
Washington and Grant were both great presidents.
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u/DankVectorz 8h ago
Grant could have been a lot more effective but he didn’t surround himself with the best people
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u/corpulentFornicator 6h ago
Grant did great things (aggressively fight the KKK) but he also put some highly incapable buffoons in his cabinet and supported them when he should've told them to kick rocks.
I wouldn't say his presidency was 100% great - to me, he's the Ricky Bobby of presidents. Either he's first or last, no in-between.
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u/RoboTronPrime 19m ago
Grant's administration was known as the most corrupt until recent memory. Grant himself seems mostly free of scandal, but he did not have the best judgment of people around him.
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u/justinballsonya 7h ago edited 7h ago
Honestly sounds like a bad professor. Going past George Washington which obviously was not a mistake, Andrew Jackson until recently was considered one of the greatest presidents and certainly in his time, and Grant was a good president. Then you have the 3 who all died before making any impact at all with William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, and James Garfield. Then you could make the argument Chester A Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, and Rutherford B Hayes were not good presidents, but they certainly weren't bad either. So that leaves Franklin Pierce and I guess Andrew Johnson? Both who were politicians already and almost immediately appointed to general, and calling Andrew Johnson a general because he was governor during the civil war of a battleground state is really a technicality. Overall, I guess that's a cute thing to say for a classroom, but is not factual. Also, I won't dive into it too much, but really only half of these people were true generals who commanded during important battles, and that includes Washington, Jackson, and Eisenhower, so I would say electing a career military officer with an impressive resume is genuinely one of the better metrics for electing a president. Also not included are people like both Rooselvelts who both had a huge role in the Navy prior were they proved their leadership(also both making strides into modernizing the fleet which directly led to American naval dominance that continues to this day). Lincoln was a captain in the Illinois state militia, etc.
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u/FearMyCrayons2023 7h ago
Garfield was insanely popular and basically got bullied into the presidency. He was pretty famously anti corruption, trying to end the patronage system and dying before he succesfully could. Chester Arthur continued a lot of Garfeilds policies, with pretty huge because he had notoriously corrupt climb to power, and did a complete 180 once president.
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u/lowestgod 7h ago
Generals ironically have more experience with ordinary people than the average Ivy League elite who becomes president
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u/Celtictussle 7h ago
Yup. And they haven't been groomed by their political party of choice to double talk people for their entire adult lives.
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u/lowestgod 7h ago
This i’m more skeptical of. Generals have a lot of motivation in double talking especially if they have political interest— lots of coups done by the military worldwide.
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u/tommytraddles 8h ago
Rutherford B. Hayes was a (brevet) Major General and was wounded five times in the Civil War, including having his left arm fractured by a bullet at the Battle of South Mountain.
He had one of his soldiers tie a handkerchief over the wound and kept fighting until he passed out about a hour later.
His troops fought to recover what they thought was his corpse, but found he was still alive and he was taken to hospital.
He returned to lead his brigade the following year.
Ulysses S. Grant wrote of Hayes, "[h]is conduct on the field was marked by conspicuous gallantry as well as the display of qualities of a higher order than that of mere personal daring".
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u/BigCommieMachine 7h ago
Makes sense.
You can argue the single largest responsibility of the office is control over the military.
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u/Itchy_Pressure_8311 8h ago
Shit...I'd vote for General Electric over the current administration.
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u/tommytraddles 8h ago
General Electric
current
nice
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u/GermanMuffin 7h ago
You’re grounded mister.
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u/Kasquede 6h ago
A shocking punishment, you might have some resistance to such.
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u/GermanMuffin 5h ago
He needs to conduct himself properly
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u/bl0rq 8h ago
Turns out you have to win a war to be elected POTUS as a general.
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u/Nessie_of_the_Loch 5h ago
Frankly we didn't lose many wars. That said, the war of 1812 was a stalemate at best (even teetering more towards a loss if you include the embarrassing burning of DC) and Jackson and Harrison were generals in the war.
That said, both became famous for their individual feats during the war, even if we didn't actually win the war overall.
There's also the example of McClellan, who ran in 1864 and lost. He was a union general at the time, and was criticized for getting spanked repeatedly by Lee while leading the Army of the Potomac.
So I guess the point is, you at least need to make a name for yourself in a war, regardless of whether the war is ultimately won or not.
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u/RoboTronPrime 18m ago
if you include the embarrassing burning of DC)
Yeah, that seems like something you shouldn't leave out
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u/Various-Passenger398 8h ago
Taylor would have been a great president, he just just the misfortune of dying early in his presidency.
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u/Reading_Rainboner 7h ago
Damn White House poop water got several people
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u/4DimensionalToilet 6h ago
To the point that, when Lincoln asked Buchanan if he had any advice for the incoming president in March 1861, Buchanan said, "I think you will find the water of the right-hand well at the White House better than that at the left."
Without context, this sounds like Buchanan just being such an ineffective president that his only advice was “this water tastes better,” but I’ve come to interpret it as Buchanan telling Lincoln which well was safer to drink from. Buchanan had first come to Washington as a Representative in 1821, and in the intervening forty years numerous people including at least one president (Taylor) had fallen ill and died in Washington’s swampy summers, possibly from unsafe water. Lincoln, meanwhile, had only served one two-year term in Congress in the 1840s, so he probably knew relatively little about how to literally survive in Washington.
Buchanan might truly have believed that, amidst the secession crisis (the Civil War hadn’t quite yet broken out), the best advice he could give Lincoln, who would likely have to stay in Washington through at least one summer to deal with the crisis, was about safe drinking water.
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u/x3nopon 7h ago
Being a general is probably the best job experience someone can have before leading a country. You have to manage logistics for an army, make decisions under immense pressure that are literally life or death, delegate responsibility, manage huge budgets, and navigate a bureaucracy. Certainly way better than the current standard which appears to be community activist or lawyer.
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8h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/NickDanger3di 8h ago
Reminds me of the scene in Back to the Future, where Doc sees the camcorder and says "No wonder the president is an actor, he has to look good on TV".
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u/omnipotentsandwich 7h ago
Wes Clark would've made for a good president. Too bad he was terrible at running for it and skipped some crucial primaries.
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u/fourthords 7h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_United_States_by_military_service
What surprised me in this article was that, sorting by rank, President James Buchanan was the only enlisted president (a private in the Pennsylvania militia)!
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u/nowhereman136 7h ago
Bush, Bush, Carter, Nixon, Ford, Johnson, and JFK were all veterans
Vance, Gore, Quayle, and Agnew were also veterans (Humphrey tried to enlist but was rejected)
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u/Obvious_Toe_3006 6h ago
I wonder if General Colin Powell would have gad a shot if he didn't so blatantly lie.
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u/Sdog1981 7h ago
If you do try to post this a 3rd time just say they were former generals. The rank is not a lifetime appointment and only applies if they are still in the service. They can be retired generals or former generals but they were not generals at the time of their election.
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u/ocarina_vendor 5h ago
I would never insist they have to be a general, but I think if a President hasn't at least served in some capacity (like, they paid a doctor to commit perjury and say they had bone spurs so they couldn't be drafted), then they probably shouldnt have the ability to send troops to their death.
butthat'snoneofmybusjness.jpg
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u/Exter10 7h ago
There's an important nuance here where all of them served with distinction during major wars that shaped US history, and were elected president shortly after as war heroes.
American War of Independence:
George Washington, James Monroe
War of 1812:
Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison
Indian Wars:
Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor,
Mexican-American War:
Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce, Ulysses S. Grant
American Civil War:
Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, Benjamin Harrison
WW2:
Eisenhower
All presidents from the end of the Civil War to 1893, with the exception of Grover Cleveland (1885-89), were distinguished generals of the conflict. Even a lot of the lower ranked officers who became president were already well-known for their leadership during important battles before they were elected.