Blog 4 History

Looks like a winner to me!

I love President’s Day as three day weekends this time of year are always welcomed! And to send it off right, I want to share the results of a new Gallup poll that asked Americans who the nation’s great president was. The results were interesting. Now remember, these are just average folks, not scholars, historians and other intellectuals who know better. However, according to the poll “Americans are most likely to say Ronald Reagan was the nation’s greatest president — slightly ahead of Abraham Lincoln and Bill Clinton. Reagan, Lincoln, or John F. Kennedy has been at the top of this “greatest president” list each time this question has been asked in eight surveys over the last 12 years.”

Don’t agree with President Obama on pretty much all of his political views, but tonight’s speech in Arizona was, in my humble opinion, his best. Very proud of the President and First Lady. Very proud, they had an opportunity to rise above the political rhetoric, unlike the media, and they did indeed and did so brilliantly. For though some out there strangely mention this shooting while also mentioning political discourse when the horrific event of last Saturday had noting to do with politics, our President was able to rise above those on the Left that could not. Those senseless shootings were the work of a madman bent on mayhem and nothing else, and as someone who knew him stated, he was not political and was not of the Left or the Right, yet so many in the media wished to identify and call out others they disagree with. Rise above, they could not, but President Obama did…

Presidents have regularly addressed students annually for as long as I can remember. However, I don’t actually remember watching one or being forced to. But nonetheless, as a teacher I was told by my administration that today I had to show President Obama’s address to schoolkids. No problem was my response, sounds good. And according to most news stories I have found, High School students across the country said they found President Barack Obama’s annual back-to-school talk Tuesday both “inspiring and relevant.”

As stated, I had no problem showing an address by the President of the United States. My students and I had a nice talk afterword and I thought Obama’s speech was great.

Just that I suspect that had this been a different President the requirement to show the education speech today might not have happened? But whatever, it was only 15 minutes and it was a good speech. Obama is very good at speeches.

Since 2002 Franklin Delano Roosevelt has ranked number one in New York’s Siena College Research Institute Survey of U.S. Presidents, which ranks the best Commander-in-Chiefs of all time in a number of different categories, and has done so five times.

I’ll let the list speak for itself:

1. Franklin D. Roosevelt
2. Theodore Roosevelt
3. Abraham Lincoln
4. George Washington
5. Thomas Jefferson
6. James Madison
7. James Monroe
8. Woodrow Wilson
9. Harry Truman
10. Dwight D. Eisenhower
11. John F. Kennedy
12. James K. Polk
13. William Clinton
14. Andrew Jackson
15. Barack Obama
16. Lyndon B. Johnson
17. John Adams
18. Ronald Reagan
19. John Quincy Adams
20. Grover Cleveland
21. William McKinley
22. George H. W. Bush
23. Martin Van Buren
24. William Howard Taft
25. Chester Arthur
26. Ulysses S. Grant
27. James Garfield
28. Gerald Ford
29. Calvin Coolidge
30. Richard Nixon
31. Rutherford B. Hayes
32. James Carter
33. Zachary Taylor
34. Benjamin Harrison
35. William Henry Harrison
36. Herbert Hoover
37. John Tyler
38. Millard Fillmore
39. George W. Bush
40. Franklin Pierce
41. Warren G. Harding
42. James Buchanan
43. Andrew Johnson

[Source]

I live in Whittier, Ca., which is a suburb of Los Angeles. But next week, joined by my lovely wife, we will be driving to San Diego to see a play based on the Lincoln Douglas Debates at the Lamb’s Player Theater. The play, The Rivlary, is a three actor stage play that include the characters of Abraham Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas, and Adele Douglas.  

Having studied under a Lincoln scholar at CSUF, I’m always eager to attend anything that has to do with Lincoln and the Civil War; indeed, that is one reason I chose the era as my area of specialty. Furthermore, out here in the West trying to find anything Civil War or Lincoln to see is like trying to find water in the Mojave Desert.

The tickets are cheap, and it looks to be a good time. As a historian, and even more, as a Lincoln historian, I no doubt will find mistakes, and hopefully like a film based on historical events, I will not judge it so harshly. I’m also not a big fan of “theater,” but I think the subject is better suited for people like myself.

Anyhow, if you’re in California and perhaps would like to see it with us, e-mail me aayepiz@yahoo.com.

Best Wishes,

Alex

The 28th President of the United States Woodrow Wilson is sometimes remembered for his, frankly, visionary Fourteen Points at the end of WWI, and for his support and promotion of the League of Nations. What has come to light by some recent analysis are his progressive policies and his deep racist actions and assumptions.

Interestingly enough, the WhiteHouse.gov site even describes Wilson at one point in his career as, ” a conservative young professor of political science and became president of Princeton in 1902.” While I have read several books that have taken exception to that identification, I don’t necessarily disagree that in some regards Wilson, like Teddy Roosevelt, could be called conservative in some policies, especially those involving foreign policy.

We throw around the labels of “Progressive,” “Liberal,” “Conservative,” ect when the meaning of those ideologies has literally changed from generation to generation. But I digress… back to Wilson.

I am not a huge Wilson fan and for numerous reasons: Progressive (big government), racist (rabid), and in 1918 the Sedition Act allowed him to imprison political opponents, something FDR would learn from and do as well. Wilson arrived at the White House after winning the election of 1912 and removed all of the colored (black) staff in the White House. He would embraced D.W. Griffith’s “A Birth of a Nation,” which of course is known for it promotion of the Ku Klux Klan as the savior of the post-South, threatened after the war by carpetbagging Republicans and freedmen. Not to mention his support of segregation in the military. The list against Wilson could go on frankly.

So thus, I have a professor who is progressive and considers Wilson in a far more favorable light than I. What to do? I suspect I will keep my bloody mouth shut…

I arrived at school this morning early. I did not sleep well, I felt, well frankly, on the down low and tossed and turned all night. I stayed up last night and watched the mockery that is the United States House of Representatives. This is not change and “ethics” at work, it was more of the same. No one would deny that we need health care reform. I was hoping that it would not come in the form of a Trojan horse that has one ultimate goal.

Back to my story, waiting there in my classroom was Gustaf, a foreign exchange student from Sweden. A nice young man and whom I have gotten to know and think very highly of. He is socialist, comes from a socialist country where they have government run universal health care. Gustaf greeted me as he usually does with a question or two about what today’s lesson might entail. I was not myself and he sensed it, so in his broken but yet very good English he asked, “So you watched the Congress last night?”

Apparently Gustaf’s host family had. We had a 10 minute or so discussion on the Sunday evening events and he then said something remarkable to me: “Mr. Wehner, the health care bill does not seem very American. I don’t understand how America would want to do this.” He spoke of our ideals and values which he learned in his U.S. Government class — which I DID NOT teach.

Sweden is a country of about 9 million and according to Gustaf they pay very high taxes and the health care is not bad. But he wondered out loud, “how will it work for 300+ million?” Good question, I replied.

Though our conversation did not end with an enlightened discovery of what the future will hold, it did nonetheless brighten my mood and lift my spirits. We are exceptional and even to a socialist — a good kid who recognizes the greatness of our country while those spoiled by her freedoms cannot.

Also, I found this national address from President Ronald Reagan and thought I would share. I have a new website in the works for history teachers and well, will speak more about that later.

This is for all Americans and for all who teach American history.

One of my AP US History students showed this to me and I thought it was cute so I will share here with you! (Video below)

Not a political post, but a factual one. Ten days ago President Obama signed legislation to increase the federal government’s borrowing authority by nearly $2 trillion.

After President Obama signed a law last week authorizing the United States Treasury to borrow an additional $1.9 trillion….

They reveal startling facts, says Jeffrey:

• When calculated by the average annual percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP) that he will spend during his presidency, Obama is on track to become the biggest-spending president since 1930, the earliest year reported on the OMB’s historical chart of spending as a percentage of GDP.
• When calculated by the average annual percentage of GDP he will borrow during his presidency, Obama is on track to become the greatest debtor president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
• Obama will outspend and out-borrow the admittedly profligate George W. Bush, a man Obama and his lieutenants routinely malign for fiscal recklessness and who, when in office, was often hailed even by his allies as a Big Government Republican.
• Obama will even outspend — but not quite out-borrow-his fellow welfare-state liberal FDR, who had to contend with both the Depression and World War II.

To read more…