By the Maui Curmudgeon (8th in a 43-part series)

How do the U.S. Presidents stack up? I thought I’d find out by reading biographies of all 43 presidents, in the order of their administrations. Here are briefly the pros and cons of my discoveries, the interesting bits, and how I’d rank him. For comparison, I give you the 1982 Murrary-Blessing ranking, a survey of hundreds of leading historians who ranked each president by number. This survey is the gold standard of presidential rankings and is most cited when this kind of thing needs bringing up in media.

MARTIN  VAN BUREN: 1837-1841 ~ 8th U.S. President

A man of prodigious accomplishments, Van Buren was the country’s first self-made man to become president. Born of poor tenant farmers, Van Buren used his tenuous links with propertied rich friends (the New York Van Nesses) to gain entrance into law school where he eventually repudiated them. He was off, and before he was finished he would become known as “the little magician.”

Contemporaries of his, those with well-known names and fat wallets, people like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, coveted the presidency, but only Van Buren won it. He had worked his way up from law school, to a lucrative practice in New York, then as a New York Senator and Governor. Under Jackson, he was Minister to Great Britian, and Jackson’s vice-president during the second term. Jackson adored Van Buren, and respected his amazing ability to work bureaucracies to accomplish tasks, which is why Jackson held onto him, and even endorsed him as his successor, when Van Buren often didn’t like Jackson’s practices.

THE BAD

• He believed in the spoils system, and many historians consider Van Buren to be the inventor of the modern political party. He saw victory as a blessing, for the winners to bring “like-minded” people along into positions of power. He did not, however, practice as nasty as Jackson did. He did redefine republican government as “party government.”
• Van Buren carried Jefferson’s and Jackson’s disdain for paper currency, and a Central Federal Bank into his office, to his, and the country’s, detriment. Just a few months into his term, hyperinflation exploded. A financial panic radiated from New York to the western farmlands, and thousands of American’s suffered. Van Buren, having already demanded coin (silver and gold) for public payments, could not help anyone, for the bullion needed to prop up currency (which common folk used) was missing from Banks because his policies had stripped the banks bare of coin. A second recession, aided by British tariffs, gave the country a terrible blow in 1840 and Van Buren could not win another term, though his loss was razor thin.

THE GOOD

• Continuously rejected Texas’s plea to become a state. It was Mexican land, as far as Van Buren was concerned, and he wasn’t about to go to war with Mexico for it. And he didn’t.
• In the second recession in 1840, cotton prices plunged, and Van Buren actively prevented any help for the industry. Many think he was using this as a back door to destroy the Southern way of life - which meant slavery. All it did was make certain he didn’t win a vote down there come election.
• Realized his grave error with the National Bank and rammed home legislation that formed the modern independent national bank - the precursor to what is today the “Fed.”

INTERESTING BITS

• His young wife died and he never remarried, but raised his four sons himself, and was spoken of as a kind and generous father.
• Spent the last 22 years of his life, outside the White House, tracking what he called, “the rise of the storm,” the Civil War, which he hoped wouldn’t happen but felt it was inevitable. Many of Abraham Lincoln’s ideas about saving the Union at all costs, and how to abolish slavery while preserving the union, first found expression in Van Buren’s writings.

Murray-Blessing rank: #20

My Score: 50%

Interesting Reading: American Presidents: Martin Van Buren by Ted Widmer.