Category:American presidents

George Washington took the oath of office on a balcony at Federal Hall in New York City on April 30, 1789, and in doing so created the working template for every executive who followed. The men gathered in this category held the office of President of the United States during a span running from the founding generation through the middle of the twentieth century. They came from plantation Virginia, frontier Tennessee, Ohio law offices, Massachusetts political dynasties, and a Missouri haberdashery. Their tenures bracket the early republic, the sectional crisis, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, the two World Wars, and the opening years of the Cold War.

Background

The presidency was designed at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 as a compromise between those who feared executive tyranny and those who feared legislative chaos under the Articles of Confederation. Article II of the Constitution sketched the office in deliberately spare terms, leaving custom and precedent to fill in the details. Washington was acutely aware that he was establishing those precedents, declining a third term and setting the pattern of a cabinet drawn from department heads. John Adams, his vice president and successor, presided over the first peaceful transfer of power between political rivals when he handed the office to Thomas Jefferson in 1801.

For most of the nineteenth century the presidency was a comparatively modest institution. The Executive Mansion staff was small, federal patronage flowed through congressional allies, and the president's principal tools were the veto, the appointment power, and the moral authority of the office. The Civil War, the rise of industrial capitalism, and the United States' emergence as a world power gradually expanded the role. By the time Franklin D. Roosevelt left office in 1945, the presidency had acquired the regulatory state, a vastly enlarged White House staff, a permanent intelligence apparatus, and command over the world's largest military.

Several presidents in this category reached the office without being elected to it. John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester A. Arthur, and Theodore Roosevelt succeeded from the vice presidency after their predecessors died. Harry S. Truman and Calvin Coolidge did likewise. Four presidents in the category died in office from assassination or illness: William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, James A. Garfield, William McKinley, Warren G. Harding, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, with Garfield and McKinley shot by assassins.

Notable members

The founding and early national presidents established the office's basic shape. Washington and Adams worked out the relationship between executive and Congress during the partisan battles of the 1790s. A generation later, Andrew Jackson reoriented the presidency around popular mandate, using the veto aggressively and breaking with the Bank of the United States. His confrontations with the Supreme Court and South Carolina nullifiers redrew expectations of executive assertiveness.

The antebellum decades produced a string of one-term presidents whose names are now associated with the country's slide toward civil war. James K. Polk presided over the Mexican-American War and the acquisition of California and the Southwest. Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Fillmore was the last Whig to hold the office. The war itself is not represented in this sample by Abraham Lincoln, but its aftermath is: Andrew Johnson clashed with Radical Republicans and was impeached, while Ulysses S. Grant, the Union general, served two terms shadowed by patronage scandals and the violent collapse of Reconstruction in the South.

The Gilded Age presidents inherited a federal government grappling with railroads, industrial monopolies, currency questions, and civil service reform. Rutherford B. Hayes took office after the disputed 1876 election and the Compromise that ended Reconstruction. Garfield's murder by a disappointed office-seeker spurred the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, which Chester A. Arthur signed. Grover Cleveland remains the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms. Benjamin Harrison, grandson of William Henry Harrison, signed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890.

The Progressive Era recast the office. Theodore Roosevelt used the presidency as what he called a bully pulpit, prosecuting trusts, brokering the end of the Russo-Japanese War, and pushing through the first wave of federal conservation. Woodrow Wilson led the country into the First World War, championed the League of Nations, and oversaw the Federal Reserve Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act. The 1920s produced a sharp turn back toward limited government under Harding and Coolidge, who emphasized tax reduction and business-friendly policy.

The Depression and Second World War transformed the office again. Herbert Hoover entered office months before the 1929 crash and saw his political career consumed by the downturn. Franklin D. Roosevelt won four presidential elections, launched the New Deal, and led the country through nearly the entire Second World War. Truman ordered the use of atomic weapons against Japan, recognized Israel, and committed the United States to the Korean War and to NATO. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, presided over the prosperous and tense Cold War 1950s and signed the Interstate Highway Act of 1956. John F. Kennedy confronted the Cuban Missile Crisis and was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963. Lyndon B. Johnson, succeeding him, pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Great Society, while escalating the Vietnam War.

Paths to the presidency

The men in this category arrived at the office along a handful of well-worn paths. Military command was one. Washington, Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Taylor, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, and Eisenhower all built national reputations in uniform before entering politics. State governorships produced another stream, including Tilden's rival Hayes of Ohio, Cleveland of New York, Wilson of New Jersey, and Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York. The vice presidency, long considered a political dead end, delivered the office to nine of the men listed here through succession.

Legal training was nearly universal among the nineteenth-century presidents. Several were self-taught lawyers who read law in a senior attorney's office rather than attending a formal school. The twentieth-century figures show a wider range of preparation: Hoover trained as a mining engineer at Stanford, Truman never completed a college degree, Eisenhower graduated from West Point, and Kennedy held a Harvard degree and Pulitzer Prize.

Regional balance shaped nominations throughout the period. Virginia dominated the early decades, Ohio produced a remarkable cluster in the late nineteenth century, and New York supplied candidates from both parties across multiple generations. The category as a whole offers a compressed political and social history of the United States from the ratification of the Constitution to the Vietnam era.