SOVIET PRESS SEES U.S. VOTERS MISLED
New York Times November 1, 1948

Berlin, Oct. 1 (AP) — The Soviet Army newspapers here today predicted a victory for “reaction” in the United States Presidential elections Tuesday because Henry Wallace would not be elected.

The newspaper Taegliche Rundschau said Mr. Wallace would win if there were enough “progressive and discriminating” persons in America.

“Unfortunately,” the Soviet mouthpiece said, “there are many Americans who are so hoodwinked by election propaganda they don’t realize that votes for Truman or Dewey are votes supporting the policy of war and strengthening of reaction.

“Whatever the results, one thing is for sure — the Wallace Progressive party will become stabilized as a new force in the United States which will have a great future.”
………………………

It’s curious. Throughtout the Cold War, short articles on Pravda and the set of Soviet government paper’s take on American affairs would be published. I wonder if instead newspapers should have just published various Pravda and the assorted Soviet government news organs. Whatever happened to Wallace’s Progressive Party anyway?*

I thought I had on this blog a piece from the old American Mercury Magazine on how Soviet Propaganda supposedly works, and how it supposedly weaves its way into American discourse. I was going to link to it here. I can’t find it, thus I’ll just have to say that this piece about Pravda contradict’s the American Mercury’s claim that the Soviet Union press always wryly endorsed the Democratic candidate by slamming the Republican candidate. For whatever that’s worth.

If I knew of a manner of thinning out the number of Joseph McCarthy related New York Times articles (particularly any letters to the editor or editorials in support of McCarthy), I would place them here. So, I guess… watch for a Joe McCarthy post coming… sooner or later.
…………………………

* Harvey Pekar: In 1948, my mother was for Henry Wallace. You know who he was? Yeah. So she gave me all these posters, to go around the neighborhood, stuffing in mailboxes. I thought I was gonna get red-baited. And it was weird: All these kids did start to razz me about it — ‘Harvey’s a communist,’ you know, stuff like that. And then this one guy, Chucky Welch — only he didn’t look like a Chucky Welch, and his grandmother had an Italian accent so I figured it was a changed name — anyway, this Chucky Welch guy was considered to be like a hoodlum-in-the-making, or something like that. And when he heard these guys riding me about Henry Wallace, he leaped to my defense. He said, ‘No, no, no. Wallace is for the working man.’ It was amazing. I’d never expected any help from Chucky Welch.”

New York Times; February 5, 1955
WHIP, KIFE SHOWN AS “COMICS” LURES
Books No Better Under Code, Psychiatrist Tells State Investigating Committee
INDUSTRY “CZAR” REPLIES
“Can’t Build Rome in a Day,” Says Murphy, and Promises Improvement Shortly
by Emma Harrison

A well-known psychiatrist brandished a bull whip before a comic books hearing yesterday. He said he had obtained it through an advertisement published in a magazine bearing the seal of approval of the new industry Code Authority.

The testimony was given by Dr. Fredric Wertham before the Joint State Legislative Committee, which is studying comic books. His assertion was challenged by Charles Murphy, code administrator. Mr. Murphy, a former city magistrate, had previously told the committee that advertisements for whips and knives had been banned from the books he approved.

Dr. Wertham repeated his statement under oath administrated by Assemblyman James A. FitzPatrick, chairman of the one-day hearing held at the Bar Association Building. This follwed Mr. Murphy’s challenge of the psychiatrist’s statement that he had clipped an advertising coupon from an approved book dated March 1955. Dr. Wertham did not produce the book but said he would send it to the committee.

Dr. Wertham cited the whip to bolster his contention that the comic books had not improved under the code. He used it also to support his belief that Brooklyn’s recently convicted teenage killers had been directly influenced by comic books.

The psychiatrist, who examined Jack Koslow, one of the killers, said there was not one crime they committed that was not described in detail in comic books. He cited the whipping, burning, drowning, and beating tortures used by the boys. He also produced a knife that he said he had obtained through a coupon in a comic book.

Mr. Murphy said he would like to know where the advertisement appeared. He assured the committee that he “didn’t recall of any such ad going through” and that had it been submitted to him he would not have approved it. Mr. Murphy then prodcued a pocket book that he said whould be “included in the ‘how to do it’ books” describing violence in detail.

He produced a reprint of Dr. Wertham’s book “The Show of Violence,” and asked that it be put on the record.

“It’s outrageous,” he shouted before Mr. FitzPatrick cut off the argument.

Police Commissioner Francis W. H. Adams testified that his department saw a “direct relationship between [published] obscenity and lewdness and juvenile crime.”

He asked the committee to consider more laws to enable the police to fight effectively against obscene books and pictures.

In the morning session, Mr. FitzPatrick presented a display of approved books. He pointed out where the committee considered “excessive Violence” still existed.

Closely questioned by Mr. FitzPatrick, Mr. Murphy said he “couldn’t destroy a business overnight.” He said it was a “process of education” of the comic book industry.

“We won’t have this by April or May,” Mr. Murphy promised. “You can’t build Rome in a day. Give me a little understanding and realize we are in the growing-up process.”
……………………..

February 13, 1955 New York Times
ADS FOR WEAPONS IN COMICS VERIFIED
Murphy Says He Has Ordered Them Barred in 47 Books His Office Had Approved
Stricter Curbs Sought
Head of Joint Legislative Unit Charges Material Has Bearing On Delinquency

A psychiatrist’s contention that bull whips and throwing knives were obtainable through comic books approved by the industry’s new code authority was substantiated on two fronts yesterday.

Charles F. Murphy, code administrator, revealed that his office had found advertisements for catalouges containing such weapons in forty-seven books bearing his seal of approval, and that he had ordered the ads discontinued.

From his office in Plattsburgh, NY, State Assemblyman James A. FitzPatrick, chairman of the Joint Legislative Committee studying the publication of comic books, said that the psychiatrist, Dr. Fredric Wertham, had verified his testimony made before the committee last week here. […]

“We find that these articles are advertised along with other novelties,” he reported. “We further find that the catalouge obtainable through the advertisment has on its cover a large bull whip.”

The Assemblyman, whose committee will present legislation within two weeks based on its year’s findings in the study of pocket books, comic books, obscene pictures, picture books, radio and television, said that his committee was dissatisfied with other findings on the comics.

“We have also found in our independent examination of books bearing the seal that violence and brutality continue to be portrayed to an intolerable degree.” He added that the committee was in the midst of its final report to be presented to the Legislature and expects to introduce “new and stricter legislation.”

He said the committee had found the newsstands of the state flooded with books and publications, including comic books, full of “horror, terror, brutality, and perversion.”

“It is our considered opinion that this material has a direct bearing upon the increase in juvenile delinquency,” he asserted. “We see no reason why those who persist in exploiting obscenity, vulgarity, brutality, and sex should be permitted to do so at the price of the welfare of the children of this state.”

Following the sending of telegrams forbidding publication of the catalogue advertisements to the twenty-nine publishers who comprise the Comic Magazine Association of America, Inc., Mr. Murphy said its publication had been an oversight by his office.

He said that in the advertisments of the Johnson Smith Company of Detroit the whips and knives were listed in small print among numerous other “novelties.”

“You need a magnifying glass to read it,” he said, adding that he felt the inclusion of the advertisments by two of the twenty-nine publishers had been an oversight rather than an attempt by them to circumvent code regulations against such advertising.

The former city magistrate who took over his job as “czar” of the comic books last October said this was another example of the “growing up” process of his office.

“Seventy per cent of the material is out,” he declared. “It’s just a question now of refining it.”
…………………..

New York Times, February 1, 1956
WERTHAM SCORES CITY YOUTH BOARD
Psychiatrist Also Denounces Crime Comics in Talk at Urban Episcopal Meeting
[…]
The psychiatrist said that most of the reasons assigned to the rise in delinquency — emotional disorders, broken homes, hostility — were “all cliches, alibis, and rationalizations.”

He singled out crime comic books as the worst offender. Fifteen years ago, he said, these books began their meteroric circulation rise. Since then, Dr. Wertham observed, there has been a parallel rise in murder by children and the youthful use of extortion.

He said children extort quarters from their playmates with knives. Such episodes are repeated “over and over again in millions and millions of comic books,” he told the conference.
……………………….

I wish I could post the image found in the New York Times on December 29, 1954 of Charles Murphy standing before a blown-up giant “Before” and “After” panel of how the Comics Code cleaned up an image. The “Before” features who I suspose to be the detective declaring to a ghoulish looking woman (think Graham Ingels) “There Must Be Someone More Mean and Heartless Even than you, and someday you’ll get yours, Sarah Harper!” The After Panel: the ghoulish woman (Sarah Harper) is completely cleaned up, and looks like… an ordinary woman. I suspect that changes the story a tad.

There was a fairytale quality about the inaugural and there was a fairytale quality about the funeral rites. One half expected that when the lovely princess knelt to kiss the casket for the last time, some winged godmother would wave her wand and restore the hero whole again in a final triumph over the dark forces which had slain him. There never was such a shining pageant of a presidency before. We watched it as children do, raptly determined to believe but knowing all the time that it wasn’t really true.

Of all the Presidents, this was the first to be a Prince Charming. To watch the President at press conference or at a private press briefing was to be delighted by his wit, his intelligence, his capacity and his youth. These made the terrible flash from Dallas incredible and painful. But perhaps the truth is that in some ways John Fitzgerald Kennedy died just in time. He died in time to be remembered as he would like to be remembered, as ever-young, still victorious, struck down undefeated, with almost all the potentates and rulers of mankind, friend and foe, come to mourn at his bier.

For somehow one has the feeling that in the tangled dramaturgy of events, this sudden assassination was for the author the only satisfactory way out. The Kennedy Administration was approaching an impasse, certainly at home, quite possibly abroad, from which there seemed no escape. In Congress the President was faced with something- worse than a filibuster. He was confronted with a shrewdly conceived and quietly staged sitdown strike by Southern committee chairmen determined to block civil rights even if it meant stopping the wheels of government altogether.

The measure of their success is that we entered this final month of 1963 with nine of the thirteen basic appropriation bills as yet unpassed, though the fiscal year for which they were written began last 1 July and most of the government has been forced to live hand-to-mouth since. Never before in our history has the Senate so dragged its heels as this year; never before has the Southern oligarchy dared go so far in demonstrating its power in Washington. The President was caught between these old men, their faces set stubbornly towards their white supremacist past, and the advancing Negro masses, explosively demanding `freedom now’. Mr Kennedy’s death, like those of the Birmingham children and of Medgar Evers, may some day seem the first drops portending a new storm which it was beyond his power to stay.

In foreign policy, the outlook was as unpromising. It was proving difficult to move towards coexistence a country so long conditioned to Cold War. Even when Moscow offered gold for surplus wheat, it was hard to make a deal. The revolt in Congress against foreign aid illustrated how hard it was to carry on policy once tense fears of Communism slackened even slightly. The President recognized the dangers of an unlimited arms race and the need for a modus vivendi if humanity was to survive but was afraid, even when the Sino-Soviet break offered the opportunity, to move at more than snail’s pace towards agreement with Moscow. The word was that there could be no follow-up to a nuclear test ban pact at least until after the next election; even so minor a step as a commercial airline agreement with the Soviets was in abeyance. The quarrel with Argentina over oil concessions lit up the dilemma of the Alliance for Progress; however much the President might speak of encouraging diversity, when it came to a showdown, Congress and the moneyed powers of our society insisted on `free enterprise’.

The anti-Castro movement our C.I.A. covertly supports was still a spluttering fuse, and in Vietnam the stepping up of the war by the rebels was deflating all the romantic Kennedy notions about counter-guerrillas, while in Europe the Germans still blocked every constructive move towards a settlement in Berlin.

Abroad, as at home, the problems were becoming too great for conventional leadership, and Kennedy, when the tinsel was stripped away, was a conventional leader, no more than an enlightened conservative, cautious as an old man for all his youth, with a basic distrust of the people and an astringent view of the evangelical as a tool of leadership. It is as well not to lose sight of these realities in the excitement of the funeral; funerals are always occasions for pious lying. A deep vein of superstition and a sudden touch of kindness always lead people to give the departed credit for more virtues than he possessed. This is particularly true when the dead man was the head of the richest and most powerful country in the world, its friendship courted, its enmity feared. Everybody is ‘anxious to celebrate the dead leader and to court his successor. In the clouds of incense thus generated, it is easy to lose one’s way, just when it becomes more important than ever to see where we really are.

The first problem that has to be faced is the murder itself. Whether it was done by a crackpot leftist on his own, or as the tool of some rightist plot, Van Der Lubbe style, the fact is that there are hundreds of thousands in the South who had murder in their hearts for the Kennedys, the President and his brother the Attorney General, because they sought in some degree to help the Negro. This potential for murder, which the Negro community has felt for a long time, has become a national problem. But there are deeper realities to be faced.

Let us ask ourselves honest questions. How many Americans have not assumed – with approval – that the C.I.A. was probably trying to find a way to assassinate Castro? How many would not applaud if the C.I.A. succeeded? How many applauded when Lumumba was killed in the Congo, because they assumed that he was dangerously neutralist or perhaps proCommunist? Have we not become conditioned to the notion that we should have a secret agency of government – the C.I.A. – with secret funds, to wield the dagger beneath the cloak against leaders we dislike? Even some of our best young liberal intellectuals can see nothing wrong in this picture except that the ‘operational’ functions of the C.I.A. should be kept separate from its intelligence evaluations! How many of us – on the left now – did not welcome the assassination of Diem and his brother Nhu in South Vietnam? We all reach for the dagger, or the gun, in our thinking when it suits our political view to do so. We all believe the end justifies the means. We all favour murder, when it reaches our own hated opponents. In this sense we share the guilt with Oswald and Ruby and the rightist crackpots. Where the right to kill is so universally accepted, we should not be surprised if our young President was slain. It is not just the ease in obtaining guns, it is the ease in obtaining excuses, that fosters assassination. This is more urgently in need of examination than who pulled the trigger. In this sense, as in that multi-lateral nuclear monstrosity we are trying to sell Europe, we all had a finger on the trigger.

But if we are to dig out the evil, we must dig deeper yet, into the way we have grown to accept the idea of murder on the widest scale as the arbiter of controversy between nations. In this connection, it would be wise to take a clear-sighted view of the Kennedy Administration because it was the first U.S. government in the nuclear age which acted on the belief that it was possible to see war, or the threat of war, as an instrument of politics despite the possibility of annihilation. It was in some ways a warlike Administration. It seems to have been ready, soon after taking office, to send troops into Vietnam to crush the rebellion against Diem; fortunately both Diem and our nearest Asian allies,notably the Filipinos, were against our sending combat troops into the area. The Kennedy Administration, in violation of our own laws and international law, permitted that invasion from our shores which ended so ingloriously in the Bay of Pigs. It was the Kennedy Administration which met Khrushchev’s demands for negotiations on Berlin by a partial mobilization and an alarming invitation to the country to dig backyard shelters against cataclysm.

Finally we come to the October crisis of a year ago. This set a bad precedent for his successors, who may not be as skilful as he was in finding a way out. What if the Russians had refused to back down and remove their missiles from Cuba? What if they had called our bluff and war had begun, and escalated? How would the historians of mankind, if a fragment survived, have regarded the events of October? Would they have thought us justified in blowing most of mankind to smithereens, rather than negotiate, or appeal to the U.N., or even to leave in Cuba the medium-range missiles which were no different after all from those we had long aimed at the Russians from Turkey and England? When a whole people is in a state of mind where it is ready to risk extinction – its own and everybody else’s – as a means of having its own way in an international dispute, the readiness for murder has become a way of life and a world menace. Since this is the kind of bluff that can easily be played once too often, and that his successors may feel urged to imitate, it would be well to think it over carefully before canonizing Kennedy as an apostle of peace.

A thought came to me as I was reading a book on Ronald Reagan’s 1976 primary challenge to Gerald Ford. (I’ll stop with these campaign treatsies for a while, I promise.)

The famed “Fairness Doctrine”, which disappeared during the Reagan administration, in effect in 1976 had television stations pulling old Ronald Reagan movies from their late-night line-up. Otherwise, they would have to give “equal time” to Gerald Ford.

Why didn’t some station dredge up old footage of Gerald Ford’s days playing football at the University of Michigan? (It’d have to be footage and not repeats of games, that being the freaking 1930s). I’m guessing the political ramnifications of Ronald Reagan’s old movies are about equal to the political ramnifications of Gerald Ford’s football days.

Who was kicked out of the whig party in 1844 because he voted numbers 17 18 19?

Thus asked someone who typed it into a search engine and wound up at Struat.com somewhere.

The obvious answer appears to be John Tyler, but that was 1842 (though, to be sure, this affects the 1844 election). The man who replaced William Henry “30 Days” Harrison for president, but wasn’t “Whig” enough for the party, for compromising with the Democrats against the will of the Whigs on tariff measures. But that doesn’t explain who the heck voted numbers 17, 18, and 19 (that would have to be a House member or Senate member, because presidents don’t vote for stuff) or what the heck 17, 18, or 19 are.

I don’t know.

Looking around the Internet for old articles on the 1988 Senate race between Lowell Weiker and Joseph Lieberman.

A race between a liberal-oid Republican (hated by The National Review) and a conservat-oid Democrat (hated by The Nation).

All I really found were a few National Review articles. The National Review evidentally included in it the “Weiker-Watch” — today, they’d go along with a “Specter-Watch” (Why not Chaffee? I don’t know.)

Thus, Viva La Lieberman!

He is a Democrat who: Applauded the use of military force in Grenada. Applauded the anti-terrorist strike in Libya. Applauded the deployment of naval forces to keep open the sea channel in the Persian Gulf All these positions, Republican Senator Weicker opposed.

On abortion (Lowell Weicker will be satisfied only when the Federal Government provides a bonus to any woman who aborts her child), Lieberman looks and sounds genuinely distressed by the subject. It is, he says, a profound moral question. He opposes abortion. But he would not outlaw it. And then he points out that Roe v. Wade, which turned the country’s laws around on the subject of abortion, recognized the right of the state at some point during pregnancy to extend protection to human life. He was saying, in effect, that although it developed under Roe v. Wade that anyone can get an abortion at any time, in fact, the Supreme Court only meant to license it for early in the pregnancy.

And

God… William Buckley’s “wit” is grating.

Q. So that it is primarily the retirement of Weicker rather than the election of Lieberman that you wish? A. You can’t have the one without the other. As for Joe Lieberman, he is a moderate Democrat, and it is always possible that he will progress in the right direction. There is no such hope for Lowell Weicker. Q. Why do you call your organization Buckleys for Lieberman? A. Within my own family there are a good many Buckleys, grounded in Connecticut. An informal estimate suggests that there are in the neighborhood of 11,000 Buckleys in the state. Buckleys for Lieberman intends to devote its primary attention to mobilizing their support for the attorney general. Q. What do you purpose to do about Buckleys who advise you they are for Weicker, not for Lieberman? A. That matter will be referred to the Committee on Genealogy. It is entirely possible that there are in Connecticut, person who call themselves “Buckley” whose birth certificates would not bear out any such presumption. Q. You mean to say you would challenge the legitimacy of a Buckley who announced his intention of voting for Weicker? A. This is a very serious business. The future of self-government depends on retiring such as Weicker from the Senate. Correction, there is no such thing as “such as Weicker.” He is unique. Q. How do you propose to establish that? A. That is the responsibility of the Horse’s Ass Committee. Q. The what? A. The Horse’s Ass Committee. Q. What are its purposes? A. To document that Lowell Weicker is the Number One Horse’s Ass in the Senate. The committee, which is engaged in research, is absolutely confident that it will win any challenge, from anywhere, nominating any other member of Congress: Lowell Weicker will emerge as the winner.

AND

AND

In a public debate with Democratic opponent Attorney General Joe Lieberman last week, Weicker attacked the Pledge of Allegiance. “Ronald Reagan tried to take us down a lot of wrong paths . . . and only one man stood up.” (He meant Lowell Weicker.) Asked about Buckpac (Buckleys for Lieberman), Lieberman said, “Buckley and tens of thousands of others can’t stand you for your political grandstanding.”

Yes. Proudly wearing the endorsement of William Buckley, Jr. Which brings us to the “gloating” celebration, and what The National Review would most like regarding the newly elected Lieberman.:

And this is a bit ironic.

Hmm. Suppose that, on swearing-in day in January at the Senate, Mr. Lieberman were to announce that, on mature reflection, he had decided to become a Republican?

(Posted to an occasionally visited partisan site — the Bizarro Free Republic… 41 posts in 2 1/2 years!)

The Rest of the “More of the Same”:

MMe. La Passionaria Perkins will introduce collective bargaining for panhandlers. Henry Morgenthau, the male Alice-in-WOnderland, no doubt is already busy on schemes whereby the United States will guarantee the integrity of the Japanese Yen, the Austrian schilling, and the Siamese tical. And Jim Farley — why, Jim is going to get rid of the last of those annoying Civil Service people; then perhaps Albany; and then — well, why not? — The White House. If Jim can elect Dr. Roosevelt twice, surely he can elect himself once.

So we will have to grin and bear it. The grinning is easy enough — except when we come to pay the bill. And bear it we must — until that day, not so far distant, when the incense smoke clears away from Dr. Roosevelt’s thaumaturgies and we find ourselves face to face with a reality which is going to be as unpleasant as it is stark.

Just at this time The Mercury would like to make one obvious prediction: that the Republic will shortly be deluged by a torrent of franked literature from Washington, calling upon free-born citizens to forget bygones, to bury the hatchet, to put a shoulder to the Wheel and Work for the Future of a Unified America. When translated into English, this high-sounding call will merely ask the population to forget the most obnoxious, inefficient , and despotic Administration in our history — an Administration which, manned by a political machine of almost unbelievable corruption, now enters upon its next term with a national debt of thirty-five billion dollars.

Well, if certain free-born Americans want to forget their first draught of the New Deal, there is nothing to be done about them. But just to keep the record straight, The Mercury will continue to expose the absurdities and stupidities of the new New Deal just as strenuously as it exposes the absurdities and stupidities of the First Crackpot Riech, 1933-1936.

(December 1936)…

From American Mercury, 1936

On the side of Roosevelt stands the massive fact that is hard to overestimate the imbecility of the great masses of the plain people; but in favour of Landon is the law of diminishing returns, which runs in politics quite as clearly as in love or war. (JL Mencken)

AND

So it is to be four more long years. Well, if there is any country in the world able to withstand eight years of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it is America. We are gluttons for punishment. Dr. Roosevelt’s return to office is an extradordinary tribute to the Republic’s powers or resistance.

So the greatest show on earth continues. The nine executioners on Capitol Hill tremble in their august robes, the skeleton of the NRA begins to put on flesh, the new hordes of hungry jobholders sharpen up their store teeth as they approach the public trough. The saturnalia of corruption which has drenched Washington since 1932 can continue unabeted. The process of chaning American workingmen into unemployable paupers on the dole will reach a new high before the next election. The National Labor Relations Board will soon swing into action in earnest, paving the way for the dictatorship of labor agitators. The SEC, no l.onger restrained by fear of embarrassing the Fuehrer, can really crack down on the wolves of Wall Street. Doctor Tugwll, the Sweetheart of the Regimenters, can now make America Over in earnest; by next Election Day he will probably have resettled half a million George Dems in recalcitrant Maine and Vermont. The sublime Ickes, little Lord Fauntleroy of the Uplifters, will shortly have all the poor American Indians converted to Communism. Harry Hopkins, Prince of Spendthrifts, will erect a line of WPA workers leaning on their shovels all the way from North Dakot to Alabam for a windbreak in the erosion belt.

(Continue on later for more of the same…)

Looking for a biography of a specific person whose last name begins with “H” in the public library, I noticed a slender and somewhat pathetic biography about President Warren Harding written by preeminent Presidential Tumor Expert John Dean. Considered by the arbitrary Historians who decide these things as the nation’s Worst or Second Worst or Third Worst president, here we have a flattering picture.

I leafed through it. It’s short, but I don’t want to read a biography about Warren G. Harding. What do I find? Mr. Dean believes that Harding’s Scandals weren’t his fault, and he since he was dead he couldn’t defend himself. The Teapot Dome Scandal fades away from my memory — favours for money or something like that? (There’s a teapot domed shape gas station somewhere around Toppenish, Washington that memorializes the Teapot Dome Scandal, but I never knew quite what to make of that.)

Anyway… leafing through the book, it looks like Harding’s biggest presidential accomplishment was pardoning the pacifist Socialist Eugene Debs, which helped heal the bad feelings left over by The Great War. World War I syndrome, I guess it’s called…

And he was greeted by well-wishers as his casket travelled the nation by train. But I think any president would have that same mark. Except Woodrow Wilson, who was deeply hated at that time…

That’s Warren G. Harding… I guess.

The Five Greatest Presidents According to Me at this time:

#1: George Washington
Brilliant minimalist.
#2: Thomas Jefferson
Saved the country from the Fascist Tyranny of John Adams. It’s worth noting that he jettisoned his prior philosophy of “A Revolution Every Twenty Years” when he took office…
#3: Franklin D Roosevelt
#4: Grover Cleveland
Because “Grand Vision” is overrated.
#5: William Henry Harrison
Just name me one bad thing he did while in office.

For Republicans, the stunning victory in both the presidential race and the Senate and Congressional races seemed almost incomprehensible Tuesday night. […]

“I am still in shock,” said Ralph Johnson. “A new president can make some changes, but with a new Senate and a revitalized House…” his voice trailed off in seeming awe of the prospect. […]

“There goes the national debt right there,” one observer commented when Magnuson, McCormack and Church were named losers by the television networks.

(November 5, 1980)