Hard to believe only one person so far has mentioned Harding. He takes the cake for outright worst (most corrupt) president.
Most ineffective would likely be either Carter or a president from the post-Johnson, pre-TR era. Because of that impeachment, Congress basically had the White House in a strangehold, and besides that the entire Gilded Age was just a political deadlock (though the Republicans won the presidency outside of Grover, they did it often by the "Bush 2000" method and otherwise by slim margins). Grant's a good pick; Grant himself wasn't corrupt, but his only real plan that I can recall was to annex the now-Dominican Republic as a state to which former slaves could migrate.
And you guys are going way too hard on Jackson. The only thing that's keeping him out of the top 5 presidents, for me, is Trail of Tears, and his reasoning for that was actually to protect the tribes from Americans by granting them sovereignty in territory Jackson thought would remain untouched--a somewhat noble plan, to me. |