U.S. Presidents, Quality and Remembrance by Experts vs. Popular Opinion

Previously I measured the prominence of U.S. Presidents, using a quantitative measure (mentions in print as indexed by Google N-gram; a person publishing a book mentioning a President will have a greater level of expertise than someone chosen at random from the general public and asked about this President.) From this you can see which Presidents are being forgotten more or less quickly, based on how long they've been out of office. I also compared this how relatively forgotten or well-remembered they are against performance ratings given by historical experts. By doing this, you can see which bad Presidents we remember better than their time out of office would predict (and who maybe we should forget), and which good Presidents are unjustly slipping from memory.

Reading back through the Wiki article, I noticed they've added memorability and performance measures from the general public. Memorability and performance rankings from non-experts is bound to differ from the measures I performed already. So, for memorability I used the Roediger and De Soto Science paper,[1] and for performance I used the net favorability figure from the 2013 Rasmussen poll.

Here is the overall scatter plot for forgetting over time. The x-axis is years out of office, the y-axis is percent of general public remembering the President by surname.


As before, I guessed that forgetting happens more and more slowly over time. That is, people forgot about Polk faster in the first fifty years after he left office than the second fifty years. In the expert data this was born out and it was born out in the popular data as well, using the same two comparison groups (forgetting rate of the group J.Q. Adams through Cleveland, compared to McKinley through Reagan; not shown). In fact in both data sets there is a slight "negative" forgetting in the earlier group, i.e. the longer ago you were President, the better. (I started with J.Q. Adams because he was the first President who was not a founder, but the effect remained.)

Because of this effect (non-linear trend due to faster drop off in the more recent past) again I used a power law for goodness of fit, to determine whether Presidents were forgotten faster or slower than they otherwise would have been, on average, for that length of time out of office. I had to exclude Obama because he was in office (zero years out) during the survey and you can't include a zero value in a power law calculation. The figure on top is forgetting relative to appearance in print in 2000; on the bottom, to American's ability to remember this President's surname in 2014.




Here, there was a difference. For the experts, relative to how long they've been out of office, Gerald Ford was the most forgotten. Here, it's Chester Alan Arthur - who also holds the dubious distinction of being most forgotten in absolute terms as well (only 7% of Americans could remember him - tied with Franklin Pierce.) In fact, in popular remembrance Ford is not relatively more forgotten, but LBJ is (and in fact since this poll didn't distinguish LBJ and Andrew Johnson, presumably a least a tiny bit of this number is for the other President, so it's probably slightly worse than it appears here.) In fact there's only one other President from the last hundred years more forgotten relative to his time out of office than LBJ, and that's Harding. Charts are side-by-side for comparison. You can see the cluster of obscure late nineteenth century Presidents, more forgotten by the public than they are in print.

WHAT ABOUT PERFORMANCE VS. REMEMBRANCE?

First let's look at the net favorable ranking that the public gave for these Presidents, compared to their relative remembrance (distance above or below the remembrance curve, with a linear adjustment so the units come out the same for comparison to the previous blog post. X-axis is performance (left is better), Y-axis is memorability (up is well-remembered.) In other words, George Washington will be in the upper left.


The rankings above are not zero sum. That is, the public could conceivably rank everyone favorably, or unfavorably, and indeed you can see clustering on the left (good performing) side of the graph. But to compare apples to apples, let's line them up ordinally - so it IS zero sum - and compare to the experts rankings. By doing this, we break the Presidents into four quadrants based on whether they're in the top or bottom half of the performance rankings, and whether they are relatively forgotten or well-remembered based on where they are relative to the remembrance curve. The chart above is based on experts rankings and overall mentions in print; below, on public remembrance and net favorables.





The "unjust quadrants" are bad and relatively well-remembered, as well as good and forgotten. This chart looks somewhat different from the experts' rankings. For one thing, in popular opinion there's more clustering of the good, well-remembered Presidents (possibly those two variables are the more like the same thing, outside the experts.) Also, the worse-than-average Presidents are remembered in print a little better than than by the general public (see the group just above the memory line on the right side of the experts/print graph.) As Ford is the most forgotten in the expert/print world and Arthur to the public, I predict that over time public opinion converges to the experts; i.e. Ford will eventually be just as obscure as Arthur is now.

And finally, in the public mind, there is one clear outlier who performed poorly but is remembered well - Richard Nixon. In the latter, there isn't such separation. The three I've circled are, from left to right, Reagan, Wilson, and Garfield. Garfield!?![3] That last one may owe more to the comic strip;[4] and anyway, if only 19% of people remember you (as opposed to Reagan's 66%) how do they know if they like you or not? Consequently, an argument that the experts' rankings are at the very least more internally consistent. You should see the post, or at the very least read about the most unjustly forgotten successful President (per the experts), James Polk.


FOOTNOTES

[1] Note that the popular poll apparently went just by surname, which of course gives us five pairs of Presidents who can't be distinguished. When I assumed people were remembering one half the time and the other one half the time, or when I completely excluded them, the forgetting trend was the same.

[2] Internet surveys are not infrequently gamed, and the lowness of Reagan's numbers is suspect here, but it's the best I have available. To be clear, this isn't an endorsement of the Reagan administration - if you're liberal and you're annoyed by the thought that Reagan's memorability should be higher, compare to how much you hear Reagan being fetishized by Republicans and then go back and look at how low this number is. If it makes you feel better, assume that the number is not representative of full public opinion because Republicans don't know how to use the internet.

[3] A final insult to Arthur. You're the VP for a guy who is assassinated after just a few months in office, and you serve out almost his whole term, and people still remember him 2.5x as much as you?!?

[4] This comic generator is fun too.

Polk, Truman, Eisenhower Are Most Unjustly Forgotten, Ford is Most Relatively Obscure U.S. President

1) Who is the most obscure president, adjusting for temporal distance? That is to say; Gerald Ford and Millard Fillmore are both obscure, but Fillmore's excuse is that he was in office 170 years ago. After 170 years will people remember Ford even less?

2) Presidents can be remembered for good or bad reasons. Unfortunately it seems easier to forget those who did a decent job. So when ranking obscurity against performance, who are the undeservedly forgotten presidents?


1. The Most Obscure President, Relative to Time Since Leaving Office

Results here are for presidents through Reagan. Here I assume obscure = least remembered = least discussed in print at a certain recent point in time. (We don't care that Zachary Taylor was discussed in 1849, of course he was, he was in office!) So I looked at Google Ngram mentions of the president's names in the year 2000. This means I excluded all presidents who did not complete their administration by that point (Obama, George W. Bush, and Clinton) and also excluded George H.W. Bush because of confusion with his son in the 2000 primary season. I included common variants of their names ("Chester A. Arthur" and "Chester Alan Arthur"; "JFK" especially may be overinflated by mentions of the airport.) I did not include nicknames (Tippecanoe, Ike, etc.) I consider Cleveland to have left office in 1897 (no special treatment due to non-consecutiveness.)

Once I had the number of Google Ngram mentions per president, I compared against how long they'd been out of office. Not surprisingly, the trend is that the longer you're out of office, the more obscure you are. For all of these graphs, Y-axis is remembrance (%Ngram mentionsx10,000), and X-axis is years out of office. (X-axis might be counter-intuitive; earlier presidents are on the RIGHT.)


It's reasonable to think that most of the forgetting occurs in the first couple decades; that is, from 1 year after they leave office to 21 years after they leave office, people will forget faster than from 101 years to 121 years. And indeed that's the case.




Above you can see the curve for (more recent) 20th century presidents, which is three times steeper (we forget the more recent ones faster) than the overall curve for all presidents. Also, the older group starting with John Quincy Adams through Cleveland is essentially flat. So, after they've been gone a century, we've basically forgotten whatever we're going to forget. (I started with John Quincy Adams to avoid inflation by Founding Fathers; those presidents were already well-known for their involvement with the Revolution and Constitution, and I want to learn about remembrance relating to what they did as president.)

Now we can look for presidents that are furthest off-trend from the curve. I modified the original curve from linear to a power function, which reflects the early forgetting trend better than a linear function.

Sure enough, relative to how long he's been out of office, Gerald Ford is the most obscure. He is furthest below the curve, on the lower left. Most presidents are in a sea of average-to-obscure just below the curve, starting with Coolidge as we go back. But there are plenty of more memorable outliers.

So who are the best-known, relative to the the time since they left office? FDR, LBJ, JFK (remember, airport signal), Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington. Honorable mentions are John Adams, James Madison and Andrew Jackson. What's interesting is that being famous before you're president (usually for being a war hero, but in one case being an actor) doesn't seem to matter for how well you're remembered, even if it helps you get elected. (Today do we talk about Grant the president, or Grant the general?)


2. How Are Presidents Remembered Relative to Performance? Who is Most Under-Rated?

My source for presidential performance is the Wikipedia article on ranking of the presidents; I averaged every survey they have in the scholar survey results. I convert the average of all the scores into a decimal between 0 to 1. 0 means everyone unanimously agreed he was the best president, 1 that he was terrible. These surveys span 1948 to 2015. The curve in the previous graph predicts how well-remembered they should be based on how long they've been out of office. For each, their distance above or below the curve is the relative remembrance. This compares the relative remembrance to their historical ranking. (For grins, I compared my own ranking against the historians and got an R^2 for 0.4527; there was general agreement except relative to historians, I really don't like John Adams and LBJ.)

As it turns out, there may be justice after all. The better the president, the more likely they are to be remembered. (Although it must be said, if the winners write history, this is also what we should expect to see.)

Looking at the two "unjust" quadrants (bad but remembered, or good but forgotten), let's focus on the good-but-forgotten; they're the ones we should be thinking more about, plus the good-but-forgotten stand out above the curve much more than the bad-but-remembered.

I circled the three most unjustly forgotten presidents. As I'd expected, Polk was a good but forgotten president (come on, click on that and read about him, he deserves it!) In particular, he explicitly set a number of ambitious foreign policy and domestic goals, and achieved them, prosecuting the Mexican War and expanding to the Pacific, settling the Oregon Territory question peacefully but to American advantage even against Victorian Britain, and establishing the forerunner to our modern treasury. (He would have been a very good candidate for futarchists!) Eisenhower and Truman are also standouts underrated by the attention we pay them.