Of pantheons, ranking and reputations

ABSTRACT

Americans love lists. Found in abundance in American culture are two types of lists in particular: pantheons and rankings. The practice and value of rating presidents seems to both fit well with and be a byproduct of such cultural forces. The development and utility of these ratings are assessed in this concluding essay.

OVERVIEW

Commenting on the 2001 release of the U.S. News & World Report college rankings that have become increasingly influential in college application decisions, the New York Times noted that "... Americans do love lists." (1) Indeed, two kinds of lists in particular pop up repeatedly in various parts of American culture: pantheons and rankings. Examples of the former can be seen in such rosters as those who constitute the membership of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans or-in what is surely America's most spectacular pantheon--on Mount Rushmore, where gigantic carvings of the features of four great presidents were completed in 1941. Rankings, by contrast, involve some kind of ordered listing, typical examples of which are the end-of-year "Ten Best" lists produced most typically by film and music critics. Although sometimes presented "in no particular order" or alphabetically, critics more typically rank their selections from one to ten. (2)

When the idea of honoring a pantheon of "great Americans" led to the creation of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in 1901, inducted were those who met its criteria for "greatness," but there certainly was no thought of ranking these notable Americans against one another. Nor, when the idea of "halls of fame" eventually spread to dozens of imitators, including such particularly noteworthy ones as the Clown Hall of Fame, the Agricultural Aviation Hall of Fame, and the Shuffleboard Hall of Fame, (3) were members of those pantheons ranked against each other. Greatness was simply greatness.

While the Hall of Fame for Great Americans has fallen on hard times, and is today essentially moribund, millions of baseball fans still await eagerly each year the judgment of the Baseball Writers Association of America regarding which players are to be deemed worthy of induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Established in 1936 in Cooperstown, New York, that hall "enshrines" only those individuals who had "exceptional careers," and again, no thought is given to ranking the more than 250 players who have won admission. (4) The same is true regarding the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, whose nationally televised induction proceedings are viewed by millions of rock fans, eager to see their favorite guitar heroes granted a kind of immortality. The significance of these many halls, of course, is that they allow some formal recognition of greatness--in a nation where aristocratic titles are constitutionally forbidden. (5) If America's greats cannot be knighted, they can at least be elevated to pantheons of the outstanding, becoming part of a relatively small group of people worthy of special respect and honor, and clearly distinguishable, for example, from the rank and file of ordinary clowns, average agricultural aviators, or run-of-the-mill shuffleboard players. (6)

RANKINGS MENTALITY

Yet while the rise of pantheons in American culture satisfied some of the American craving for "lists," there seems also to have remained a hunger for greater precision--for "rankings" that would allow one to know not just who the "greats" were, but exactly who were the greatest, second-greatest, and so on. The American love of competition is well-known, and perhaps this desire emerged from the growing American sports culture of the late 19th century, particularly among men (and, indeed, it may well be the case that the love of lists remains, to this day, far more typical of the male of the species). Rankings, based on won-lost records, appear to have become available for baseball's National Association in 1871, and for two college football conferences in 1888. (7) Being able to rank-order sports teams--to be able to identify the best team, the third best, the next-to-worst--may have helped to produce a "rankings mentality" that was bound to spill over into other realms of American popular culture.

Thus, the idea of rankings would become increasingly commonplace in the 20th century. Perhaps the first appearance of non-sports rankings came in 1895 when The Bookman, a literary journal, began to run a monthly list of what it called "best sellers," an idea that was to evolve by 1942 into the crucial weekly list found in every Sunday's edition of the New York Times Book Review. (8) It seems evident that for many people, there is some deep pleasure, or at least satisfaction, to be found in knowing not just which books are selling the most copies, but in having a neat and precise ranking of those books--one that can, for example, be compared from week to week. Many people seem greatly concerned to be reading the most popular book, or at least appear to have a great interest in knowing what others are reading. This is true, even if, at some level, such people must certainly understand that the popularity of a book may say very little about its quality.

In any event, within a few years, the mania for rankings had spread to the music industry. As early as 1913, Billboard, a music industry journal, had begun printing weekly sheet music bestseller charts and surveys of the most popular songs in vaudeville. In 1934, Billboard began reporting the most-played songs on network radio, giving rise to the first radio broadcast, in 1935, of "Your Hit Parade," a show in which singers performed, in ascending order, the most popular songs of the week, ranked on the basis of sheet music sales and radio airplay. By the 1950s, radio stations routinely operated on the basis of a "Top 40" format, playing over and over again the songs deemed most popular with listeners, and identifying, usually with great fanfare, the number that these songs had reached on the charts that week. (9)

In radio, Hooper, Nielson, and Arbitron ratings produced ranked lists of the most popular shows being broadcast, with the latter two companies surviving into the age of television, when their findings spelled life and death for each season's westerns, sit-coms, and quiz shows. Of course, with music, radio, and television, as with books, the potentially large gap between what was merely popular and what was musically of high quality was certainly clear to critics, and probably to many listeners as well. Thus, a regular end-of-year feature in many newspapers and magazines involved respected critics providing their "Ten Best" lists--most often of films, but sometimes for music, radio, and television as well. Needless to say, the overlap between such critics' lists and lists of what had sold the most in any given year was often purely coincidental.

The gap between the judgment of the public and the judgment of experts was, of course. no less obvious in presidential politics than it was in literature and in popular entertainment. It was certainly evident to scholars that presidential popularity was not to be confused with presidential greatness. Warren G. Harding, after all, had won one of the greatest landslides in history in 1920, yet most scholars had little difficulty assessing his presidency as generally quite a poor one. Clearly, therefore, it was up to the scholars to sift the presidential wheat from the presidential chaff, to determine what mattered and what didn't in a presidency, and to establish the criteria by which presidential greatness was to be properly measured. It is hardly surprising, therefore, in the context of an American cultural climate characterized throughout the first half of the 20th century by a hunger for all kinds of pantheons and rankings, that there would come a moment when it would seem an interesting and useful idea to have knowledgeable people rank even the presidents. (10)

A COTTAGE INDUSTRY DEVELOPS

Thus, in the November 1, 1948 issue of Life magazine, published the week before that year's presidential election--and otherwise notable mainly for a striking photo of Thomas E. Dewey captioned "The Next President Travels by Ferry Boat Over the Broad Waters of San Francisco Bay,"--there appeared an article by Harvard University professor of history Arthur M. Schlesinger. Titled "Historians Rate U.S. Presidents," and including the results of what Schlesinger himself acknowledged was merely "an informal presidential rating poll" among colleagues in American history and government, that piece proved to be the genesis of what would become something of a cottage industry for American historians and political scientists. (11)

The appearance of that article in Life magazine rather than in a professional journal suggests the extent to which, from the outset, rating the presidents and assessing "presidential greatness" were matters of wide public interest, and not merely confined to a narrow audience of scholars. Providing both a rank-order and a pantheon (with presidents neatly divided into the Great, the Near Great, the Average, the Below Average, and the Failures), Schlesinger's poll proved of sufficient interest to result in the New York Times' again calling upon him, in 1962, to conduct a new poll to see how well the earlier results held up. (12) Down the road, would lie many more such polls, conducted by many more scholars, and, eventually, even public opinion polls on this topic. This was perhaps inevitable, given the irresistible combination of the growing American fascination with the presidency--an office occupied by a single person, the focus of intense media scrutiny, in a nation ever more "celebrity" conscious"--and the burgeoning American fascination with pantheons and rankings.

Then too, the traumatic end of the Roosevelt era, brought about by FDR's death in 1945, may have led Arthur M. Schlesinger to wonder whether that late and beloved president would rank with the greats of the 19th century and with his cousin, Theodore. And what many saw as the sharp contrast between the confidently aristocratic FDR, dancing his nimble political ballet, and the more self-effacing, somewhat bumbling Harry Truman may also have made much more salient the question of what made some presidents great, and others not.

Whatever the forces that combined to produce the 1948 Schlesinger poll, however, it is clear that in that 1948 issue of Life, there was born an enterprise that has proven endlessly fascinating to many--and not just to scholars of the presidency. (13) For with presidential rankings, unlike say, bestseller lists--a great deal is at stake. Presidential rankings undeniably have their subjective aspects, but to acknowledge that fairly obvious point is hardly to conclude that such rankings are meaningless. For such rankings, no matter how derived, do have an impact on the way we think about our society. In George Orwell's dystopian masterpiece, 1984, the Ministry of Information operates with the official credo: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." Deciding which presidents are to be considered great and which not, turns out to be, therefore, not just a battle for the American past, but also for its future. Seen from that perspective, rankings of presidential greatness are, in an important sense, a set of judgments about what has gone right and what has gone wrong in American history. And winning the battle of opinion regarding what has gone right and what has gone wrong in the past is a long step towards winning the specific political battles that take place today and that will take place tomorrow.

Moreover, it is difficult to believe that such judgments will not inevitably have some impact on the presidents in our future. Surely, presidents will try--with more or less success--to be what Washington. Lincoln, and FDR were, and to avoid being what Harding and Grant were. Thus, what past presidents did, and what they have come mean, remains a matter of great importance as the American nation moves into a future that is always and inherently uncertain, and where therefore, evidence from the past is endlessly raked over for clues about what is to come.

Of course, it should be clear that we have been speaking of to this point--pantheons and rankings--are essentially aspects of the broader issue of "reputation," the question of what people think of others, and how and why such opinions come to be formed. Interestingly, although "separate disciplines are devoted to the study of wealth and power," there is no discipline to study "honor or reputation--the third chief category of class systems and human motivation." (14) Indeed, even sociology has failed to develop the coherent body of concepts and general hypotheses that would be necessary for a serious study of "prestige processes." (15)

Nonetheless, with the recognition that rankings and determinations of prestige or "greatness" may well amount to more than an interesting parlor game, it is possible to discern the outlines of the beginnings of a systematic study of reputation. A pioneer in this field has been Richard A. Posner, formerly a professor of law at the University of Chicago and since 1981 a judge of the United States Court of Appeals. Posner's study of how and why US Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo's reputation developed and came to flourish suggests that the study of reputation has the potential to tell us much about ourselves by studying the processes by which we create and populate our pantheons. (16)

While conceding that no good general theory of reputation exists at present, Posner suggests that "work in several fields provides enough elements of such a theory" to serve his purposes. (17) Posner, of course, has the advantage of focusing on the reputation of a Supreme Court justice--shaped to a considerable degree by his or her production of a series of written legal opinions-rather than on a president, whose impact is considerably more diffuse and varied. Indeed, precisely because so much of a justice's reputation is the product of a body of judicial decisions, Posner is able to piggy-back onto analyses of the reputations of those who similarly produce bodies of work that can be analyzed as discrete entities, though also making up a greater whole. In particular, Posner builds upon studies of film director Alfred Hitchcock and writer George Orwell. (18)

Clearly, of course, there are important differences between the bases upon which the reputations of artists (or even Supreme Court justices) develop and the bases upon which presidential reputations are made, making it dangerous to carry Posner's approach too far. Still, at least two of Posner's points seem helpful for developing an understanding of the processes by which presidential reputations evolve.

Posner begins by making the fairly self-evident point that reputation is not really an actual "thing" that a "reputee" possesses, but rather a product of what "concerned persons" think of the reputee. Somewhat less evident, however, is the fact that one of those concerned persons turns out to be the reputee himself or herself, so that, in the cases Posner examined, "the posthumous durability of reputation depended, at least in part, on an artist's own lifetime efforts to protect or preserve that reputation.... (19)

It is hard not to think here of the many ways in which presidents have worked diligently more to protect, preserve, or (increasingly) to rehabilitate their reputations. (20) One thinks immediately, for example, of Herbert Hoover's post-presidential search for a strategy of public service that might help to rescue his name from the obloquy that followed the onset of the Great Depression during his term as president. Harry Truman, by contrast, appears to have been content simply to tell "My Story" in two volumes of memoirs, while Lyndon Johnson called in Doris Kearns to make sure that a talented and sympathetic biographer (but one not obviously in his thrall) would relate his version of the events of his presidency. Richard Nixon worked hard to transform himself into an elder statesman, whose grasp of geopolitics and grand strategic prescriptions might help to erase the harsher memories of his disgraced status in the wake of Watergate. Jimmy Carter's work for world peace and for the poor can be seen in a similar light, and has perhaps won for him the title of "America's greatest ex-President."

Posner's second important point involves the suggestion that part of what shapes reputation is "retrospective interest leading to the rediscovery of the artist as the symbolic representative of emerging cultural or political identities." (21) Relying on John Rodden's study of the development of George Orwell's literary reputation, Posner notes that "Posthumous reputation is facilitated by the generality, variety, and ambiguity of the reputee's work, or in short by its adaptability to social, political, and cultural change." (22) In other words, that Orwell's work allows many different kinds of people and movements to see in it what they want to see, fosters the kind of consensus that elevates that work-and with it, Orwell himself--to mythic proportions. Nor is Orwell a unique case for, as Rodden stresses, "any figure whom a culture elevates and irradiates serves as a looking glass which it raises to itself--and tilts to suit itself as it pursues its self-image." (23)

Again, there is certainly something of value here for understanding presidential reputations. It is interesting to note, as some of the scholars in this volume do, that Franklin Roosevelt's reputation is now solidifying to the point that even political conservatives seem willing to agree that he was a "great" president. It is perhaps not coincidental that FDR was (surprisingly to many) Ronald Reagan's favorite president, and that so strong a challenge to American liberalism as the 1994 "Contract With America" was carefully defended by its advocates as seeking no more than to repeal the Great Society and what liberalism had wrought in the years since--not an effort to repeal that part of the social safety net put in place by Roosevelt's New Deal. Indeed, a quotation from Roosevelt expressing revulsion at any notion of Americans on a permanent government dole was often introduced into the debate over the Contract, with the argument being explicitly made that even FDR would have been horrified by what liberalism had become since his death. (24) And, of course, as many scholars have argued, in evaluating FDR it is not very difficult (depending upon what aspects of his legacy one chooses to emphasize or de-emphasize) to view him as a conservative--in the truest sense of the word--for working unstintingly to maintain the basic institutions of American capitalism in their time of greatest danger, the 1930s.

Thus, even the exemplar of modern American liberalism, Franklin Roosevelt, turns out to be shrouded in sufficient ambiguity to allow him to become "the symbolic representative of emerging cultural or political identities." One might then hypothesize that, as America's broad political culture has persisted in ranking Franklin Roosevelt among the "great," members of the once adamantly dissenting conservative sub-culture have increasingly adapted themselves to that reality by (employing Rodden's metaphor), "tilting the mirror" to make him look more like they do. Such a result cannot help but leave us to wonder whether some currently under-emphasized liberal aspect of Ronald Reagan's presidential legacy might not someday emerge from the welter of historical interpretations now surrounding his legacy, and serve as the basis for liberals entering into a consensus hailing Reagan's greatness, which for the moment at least, remains a matter of considerable dispute. (25)

And so, the enterprise begun in 1948 continues--presidents pursuing reputation and greatness just as energetically as their very earliest predecessors did; partisans and ideologues seeking to win the battle for control of history by ushering those whom they most admire into the pantheon of presidential greats; and finally, scholars like the ones in this volume working ceaselessly and diligently to make some broader sense of, and give some semblance of order to, this passing parade.

NOTES

(1) New York Times, August 27, 2001, p. A14.

(2) Pantheons and rankings can sometimes overlap, as when, for example, some two millennia ago, St. Paul listed the great virtues as "faith, hope, and charity," and then declared that "the greatest of these is charity." He was thus willing to rank-order one of the members of his pantheon of virtues, but he apparently felt no compulsion to then assign positions to its other members--faith and hope.

(3) Richard Rubin, "The Mall of Fame," Atlantic Monthly, July 1997, pp. 14-18.

(4) Bill James, a sportswriter and founder of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABRE), has satisfied fan hunger for more precise rankings by publishing elaborate statistical analyses allowing players from different teams and different eras to be ranked against each other in dozens of categories. His most recent work is The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).

(5) In recent years, the bestowing, by the president of the United States, of lifetime achievement awards in the form of Kennedy Center Honors may have taken on something of the aura of knighting ceremonies, at least for those in the performing arts.

(6) In the world of film, the influential auterist critic, Andrew Sarris is well-known for his seminal study of American film directors, in which the greatest are designated explicitly as "Pantheon Directors." See The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968 (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968. Those falling short of the pantheon are relegated to such categories as "The Far Side of Paradise," "Expressive Esoterica," "Less Than Meets the Eye," and "Lightly Likable." And pity the director who falls into the category of "Strained Seriousness."

(7) For baseball, see http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Track/4222/1871.htm. For college football, see http://www.cae.wisc.edu/~dwilson/1888/standing1.txt

(8) Michael Korda, Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller, 1900-1999 (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2001), xviii-xvix.

(9) Information regarding the music industry comes from Joel Whitburn, Pop Memories, 1890-1954: The History of America's Popular Music (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research, Inc., 1986), pp. 13-16.

(10) Less than a decade later, in 1955, the United States Senate would establish a committee headed by a 38-year old junior senator named John F. Kennedy to choose five senators to be honored as the "most outstanding." Advised by scholars and shaped (inevitably) by the politics of the day, the committee selected Daniel Webster, John Calhoun, Henry Clay, Robert La Follette, and Robert Taft. In 1999, the Senate adopted a resolution providing for two more names, those of Arthur Vandenberg and Robert Wagner, to be added to that roster. See http://www.senate.gov/leaniing/brief_21.html

(11) Life, November 1, 1948, pp 65-66, 68, 73-74. To judge the extent to which presidential rankings have quite literally become something of an industry, one need only look at the offerings of the public opinion pollster, John Zogby. His "Complete Presidential Greatness X-tab Package (2002, 2001, 2000, 1999 & 1998)" could be purchased, in January 2002, for $99.95 at http://zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=529.

(12) "Our Presidents: A Rating by Historians." New York Times Magazine, July 29, 1962, pp. 12-13.

(13) It should be noted that this interest for rankings has inevitably spilled over onto other important U.S. government offices. See William D. Pederson and Norman W. Provizer, Great Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court: Ratings and Case Studies (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1993); Dennis R. Still, "Ranking the Speakers: Congressional Scholars Perceptions of U.S. House Speakers," presented at the 56th annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, 1998. Nor is this interest any longer confined to the United States. See J.J. Granatstein and Norman Hillmer, Prime Ministers: Ranking Canada's Leaders (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1999). Barry Jones," Ranking Our Leaders," The Age, July 29, 1998, provides one man's ranking of twenty-four Australian prime ministers, explicitly employing the criteria established by Murray and Blessing in their 1983 ranking of US presidents. For a ranking of 20th century British prime ministers by a panel of twenty scholars, politicians, and commentators see "Churchill 'Greatest PM of 20th Century" at the BBC website, http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk_politics/newsid_575000/575219.stm. The curious will want to know that Anthony Eden edges out Neville Chamberlain as the worst British prime minister of the 20th century.

(14) John Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of 'St. George' Orwell (New York & Oxford: Oxford University, 1989), p. 54

(15) William J. Goode, The Celebration of Heroes: Prestige as a Control System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 98-102

(16) Richard A. Posner, Cardozo: A Study in Reputation (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993). Interestingly, at virtually the same time, Bill James produced his study of how and why the Baseball Hall of Fame came to include and exclude some players whose situations clearly should have been reversed. See Bill James, The Politics of Glory: How Baseball's Hall of Fame Really Works (New York: Macmillan, 1994). Posner's pursued his interest in the politics of reputation with Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), wherein he ranked the top one hundred intellectuals in order of their influence upon public discourse.

(17) Posner, ibid, p.58.

(18) Posner cites Robert E. Kapsis, "Reputation Building and the Film Art World: The Case of Alfred Hitchcock," 30 Sociological Quarterly 15 (1989) and John Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation, cited above.

(19) Posner, Cardozo, p. 59

(20) Though a fascination with rankings may be characteristic of the 20th-century the broader concern with "greatness" has its clear analogue even in the earliest days of the American republic. Indeed, the historian Douglas Adair pointed out as much in his well-known work, cited below, on the founders of the Republic. Although there are those today who seem to consider it almost vulgar to be concerned with "greatness" and sneer at presidential attempts to assure their reputation in history as though it were some kind of pandering (even if to a future public opinion rather than a current one), Adair made it evident that men like Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton--divided as they might have been in other respects--were united in their quest for "fame," which for them meant, not "celebrity" in the modern sense, but rather a high reputation, in the sense of being well thought of. Even Thomas Jefferson fretted, in a 1796 letter to Edward Rutledge, that "No man will every bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it." See Douglass Adair, "Fame and the Founding Fathers," pages 3-26 in a collection of his essays edited by Trevor Colbourn. Fame and the Founding Fathers (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1974).

(21) Posner, Cardozo, pp. 59-60.

(22) Ibid, pp. 60-61.

(23) Rodden, Politics of Literary Reputation, p. 400.

(24) The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America. Work must be found for able-bodied but destitute workers." From Roosevelt's 1935 State of the Union address.

(25) It is interesting to see the extent to which, even within the conservative community, a battle has been raging to capture Ronald Reagan's legacy. Some conservatives see Reagan's legacy as one of unremitting hostility to government, which others view that legacy as a call to "national greatness," for which governmental power is a prerequisite. For the former view, see Tony Snow, "Savage Conservatives Yearn for Reagan, Ravage His Legacy," Arizona Republic, November 24, 1997. For the latter view, see William Kristol and David Brooks, "What Ails Conservatism," Wall Street Journal, September 16, 1997. The outcome of that debate may well have important implications for how liberals come to view the Reagan presidency.

MARK LANDIS is Professor of Political Science and Chair, Department of Political Science, at Hofstra University. He is the author of Joseph McCarthy: The Politics of Chaos (1987).

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