My Top 10 American Presidents

by Zoltanous

Ranking American presidents according to the usual liberal, egalitarian, cosmopolitan, and free-market standards is an exercise in ideology, not historical judgment. The proper measure is service to the organic nation: expansion of the continental and imperial domain, protection of the historic White productive classes against both predatory finance capital and cheap alien labor, the channeling of organized labor into national rather than class-war ends, the erection of protective barriers around domestic industry, and any serious experiment in subordinating capital to a coordinated national purpose. Most of the men on this list operated within the Nordic Anglo-Saxon racial sensibilities of their time — a hierarchical view of peoples that treated Northern European stock as the core of the American ethnos and justified expansion, labor protection, and state power accordingly. What follows is a ranking constructed on those grounds alone.

The Top 10 From an American Fascist View

1. Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson ranks first because he alone articulated and partially realized the American republic as an expanding empire of White independent producers. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 more than doubled the national domain, securing the Mississippi River system and opening hundreds of millions of acres for settlement by European-descended yeomen. Jefferson understood that Jacobin adjacent republican virtue required land ownership by free White cultivators rather than dependence on wage labor or urban finance. He wrote that the “cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens” and that a nation of small farmers would remain independent of both domestic monopolists and foreign creditors. The acquisition was pragmatic imperialism: constitutional scruples were set aside when the opportunity to preempt French or British power on the continent presented itself. Jefferson’s agrarianism was never pacifist; it required continuous pressure on Native tribes through treaties that steadily extinguished their title and opened land to White settlement. He viewed the indigenous population as destined either for assimilation into agricultural life under White tutelage or extermination. Commercial agriculture, he recognized, would inevitably push the frontier westward. The Embargo Act of 1807, though economically painful, was an early exercise in economic nationalism, an attempt to use American agricultural surplus as leverage against European powers while shielding domestic producers. Jefferson’s vision was racial and hierarchical by the standards of his age: an “empire of liberty” for the White race, secured by territorial expansion and the subordination of competing barbaric peoples, grounded in the Anglo-Saxon stock that defined the Founding generation. This amounted to a Herrenvolk democracy, republican self-government and political equality reserved for the White productive citizenry, while non-White populations remained outside the political community or under hierarchical tutelage. Later industrialists would inherit the continental base he created; without it, no subsequent order would have been possible.

2. Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt ranks second as the purest embodiment of energetic nationalist statecraft. His Square Deal intervened decisively in the 1902 anthracite coal strike, forcing capital to the table and recognizing organized labor as a legitimate national interest rather than a private conspiracy. For the first time a president treated the industrial working class, overwhelmingly of European stock, as a constituency whose wages and conditions affected the strength of the nation itself. Trust-busting was selective: “good” trusts that served national efficiency were regulated; predatory ones that undermined productive power were broken. This was proto-corporatism, state arbitration between capital and labor in the service of national power rather than free-market atomism or Marxist class war. Roosevelt’s nationalism was organic and hierarchical, he viewed the United States as a living nation whose strength rested on the vigor of its historic European stock, the disciplined use of its natural resources for national ends, and the projection of power abroad. Conservation, naval expansion, and the arbitration of labor disputes were all subordinated to the same goal: the long-term power and cohesion of the American nation rather than the claims of pure individualism or internationalist sentiment. Overseas, Roosevelt practiced unapologetic imperialism: the seizure of the Canal Zone, the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, and the projection of the Great White Fleet established the United States as the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere and a rising Pacific force. He spoke of civilized nations exercising international police power over the less capable. Conservation of forests, minerals, and waterways was framed as intergenerational national stewardship for the American people, not abstract environmentalism. Roosevelt’s explicit racialism, rooted in his belief of Nordic preservation and the necessity of their expansion, aligned with the demographic reality of the early 20th century United States.

3. Andrew Jackson

Jackson’s presidency forged mass White Herrenvolk democracy against concentrated finance and external tribal claims. The Bank War was the central drama: by vetoing the recharter of the Second Bank of the United States and removing federal deposits to state “pet banks,” Jackson broke the political power of Eastern financiers who issued paper money that eroded the real wages of farmers, mechanics, and laborers. His veto message explicitly defended working and farming peoples of the USA against the rich and powerful. The Specie Circular further insisted on hard money, protecting the productive classes from inflationary speculation. Indian Removal completed the demographic conquest of the Southeast. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the subsequent treaties and forced migrations, culminating in the Trail of Tears, cleared fertile lands for White settlement and plantation agriculture through the direct expulsion of the southeastern tribes. Jackson understood that the presence of independent Native polities within state boundaries threatened both security and the expansion of White freehold; the removals were carried out with deliberate hostility to those claims. The result was a stronger White majority in the South and the opening of vast territories for the common White man. Jackson’s Scotch-Irish roots and White majoritarianism operated within the broader Anglo-Saxon settler consciousness of the age: the United States as the political expression of its historic European-descended population, defended by a vigorous executive against both monied elites and non-whites.

4. James K. Polk

Polk ranks high because he completed the continental empire with ruthless efficiency. Elected on an explicit Manifest Destiny platform, he secured the Oregon boundary at the 49th parallel, annexed Texas, and prosecuted the Mexican War to acquire California and the Southwest. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo added more than half a million square miles, territory that would become the resource base of American industrial and demographic power. Polk ordered troops into the disputed Nueces Strip knowing it would provoke conflict; once “American blood” was shed, he obtained a declaration of war and prosecuted it to a decisive territorial settlement. This was classic expansionist imperialism in the service of the White settler nation, justified by the conviction that the continent belonged to the Anglo-Saxon and related European stocks capable of republican self-government. The new lands were intended for American freeholders and, in the South, for the plantation system that employed White overseers and planters. Polk’s single-term focus on territorial aggrandizement rather than domestic redistribution or international moralism makes him a model of concentrated national will. The Pacific coast and the mineral wealth of the West became available for the industrial takeoff that followed. Without Polk’s conquests, the later protectionist and imperial presidents would have lacked the continental scale on which to build.

5. Martin Van Buren

Van Buren institutionalized the separation of federal finance from private banking through the Independent Treasury system. After the Panic of 1837, itself the delayed consequence of Jackson’s Bank War, Van Buren rejected both a revived national bank and continued reliance on state banks. The Independent Treasury required the government to hold its own specie and conduct business in hard money, limiting the leverage of speculative capital over the productive economy. He understood it as a “second declaration of independence” from the money power. As Jackson’s political heir and architect of the Democratic party, Van Buren kept the coalition oriented toward the White common man, farmers, artisans, and early industrial workers of European descent. His administration’s response to labor unrest and the emerging workingmen’s parties maintained a focus on economic independence rather than cosmopolitan reform. The Independent Treasury prefigured later attempts to subordinate finance to national purpose and operated within the same White majority politics that defined the Jacksonian era. Though the economic crisis damaged his popularity, the principle he established, federal monetary autonomy from private banks, remains a necessary condition for any serious corporatist or protectionist order.

6. Andrew Johnson

Johnson’s Reconstruction was an attempt to restore the White South under Federal authority rather than subject it to radical egalitarian engineering. A Jacksonian Democrat and Unionist, he offered rapid readmission to the former Confederate states upon ratification of the 13th Amendment, repudiation of secession, and loyalty oaths, without imposing Black suffrage or prolonged federal military rule. He vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Freedmen’s Bureau extension, arguing that citizenship and political rights were matters for the states and that the federal government lacked authority to force social equality. Johnson understood that Radical Reconstruction threatened the political and economic dominance of the White majority in the South and, by extension, the historic character of the United States. The Black Codes enacted under his plan, were attempts by Southern states to regulate labor relations and maintain order after emancipation. Johnson’s stubborn defense of states’ rights and White political control preserved a demographic and cultural continuity that later federal interventions would erode. His impeachment by the Radicals was the price of resisting the transformation of the republic into a multiracial experiment under Jewish capitalist domination.

7. William McKinley

McKinley, as the architect of the McKinley Tariff of 1890 and the even higher Dingley Tariff of 1897, he erected the steepest protective barriers in American history to shield domestic industry and the wages of American (overwhelmingly White) industrial workers from foreign competition. Tariffs were explicitly justified as preserving the American standard of living against low-wage producers abroad. The Spanish-American War completed the transition to formal empire. Acquisition of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, together with a protectorate over Cuba, gave the United States strategic bases and new markets under American control. McKinley’s Open Door notes in China sought equal commercial access without formal partition, extending American economic power into Asia. This was nationalist imperialism in the service of industrial expansion: new territories and trade routes secured for the benefit of American producers and workers rather than free-trade. McKinley’s assassination cut short a presidency that had already aligned protectionism, industrial growth, and imperial reach within the Anglo-Saxon confidence of the era.

8. Woodrow Wilson

Wilson expanded federal capacity to regulate capital, support organized labor, and coordinate industry while advancing a progressive form of nationalism grounded in White supremacy. He is arguably the only American president who can reasonably be described as borderline national socialist, with FDR the nearest parallel in his borderline fascist corporatism. Early writings, including the 1887 essay Socialism and Democracy, argued that socialism and democracy shared the premise of unlimited state authority over the individual, limited only by practical wisdom rather than natural rights. He accepted the ends of socialism while distinguishing its methods. The Underwood Tariff, Federal Reserve Act, and Clayton Antitrust Act (which exempted labor unions from anti-trust prosecution) expanded state power and treated organized labor as a legitimate collective actor. During the First World War, the War Industries Board, War Labor Board, and related agencies practiced temporary corporatism and socialist controls, state-directed allocation of production, prices, and labor relations for national ends. Wilson’s wartime mobilization demonstrated that the American state could conscript and organize the entire society. His racial views were explicitly White supremacist. He described Reconstruction as the “intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes” and portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as a defensive response of White Southerners. He screened The Birth of a Nation, which quoted his own history and glorified the Klan, at the White House, giving the film presidential imprimatur and contributing to the KKK’s revival. These positions reflected the racial consciousness common to the progressives of his time: the American nation as the political vehicle of Northern European stock. Wilson’s internationalism, embodied in the League of Nations, carried the same racial premise. It was conceived less as a universalist project than as a mechanism to prevent catastrophic wars among the advanced White nations of the West and their oversea territories, stabilizing the existing brotherhood of free civilized White peoples rather than dissolving it.

9. Dwight D. Eisenhower

Eisenhower’s greatest achievement was the Interstate Highway System, the largest public-works project in American history and the physical circulatory system of a continental industrial nation. Justified partly on defense grounds and inspired by the German Autobahn, the interstates bound regions, facilitated the movement of goods and military power, and underwrote the high-wage, high-productivity economy of the 1950s. That economy delivered rising real wages and homeownership primarily to the White working and middle classes before the demographic and cultural disruptions of later decades. His farewell warning against the “military-industrial complex” reflected a desire to keep corporate and martial power subordinate to elected national authority rather than an autonomous elite. Operation Wetback in 1954 was a large-scale, military-style campaign to remove illegal Mexican immigrants. Estimates range from roughly 300,000 formal deportations to over a million when including voluntary departures under pressure. Agents conducted sweeps across the Southwest and beyond, using roadblocks, raids on farms and workplaces, and transportation of deportees deep into Mexico by bus, train, and ship to discourage return. The operation protected American (predominantly White) agricultural and industrial labor from undercutting by illegal low-wage competition and responded to public anger over uncontrolled border crossings and employer exploitation of the Bracero system. It stands as a rare post-war exercise in demographic and pro-labor defense of the nation. At the same time, Eisenhower’s decision to send federal troops to Little Rock in 1957 to enforce school desegregation against determined White Southern resistance revealed the limits of post-war racial continuity. He argued the intervention almost entirely as the defense of federal court authority against mob rule and state nullification rather than as a moral crusade for egalitarian integration. Privately he expressed clear sympathy for the concerns of White Southern parents who resisted rapid mixing. Eisenhower thus remains a transitional figure: still capable of Wetback and continental infrastructure, but already operating in the period when the racial and national priorities of earlier presidents were beginning to fracture.

10. Franklin D. Roosevelt

FDR ranks last among the 10 only because the failure of his domestic program drove catastrophic foreign-policy choices that entangled the nation in global war with long-term demographic and civilizational costs for Western civilization. The early New Deal remains the most ambitious American experiment in the corporate state. The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and the National Recovery Administration authorized industry-wide codes of “fair competition” that set prices, wages, production quotas, and labor standards. Anti-trust laws were suspended so that capital could coordinate under state supervision. Section 7(a) guaranteed workers the right to organize and bargain collectively, embedding labor representation inside the codes. This was explicit corporatism: the state, capital and organized labor, still overwhelmingly of European descent, collaborating by sector to replace cutthroat competition with planned national recovery. The Public Works Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps put the unemployed to work on national infrastructure. The Agricultural Adjustment Act sought to coordinate farm production. The later Wagner Act of 1935 vastly expanded union power through the National Labor Relations Board, giving industrial workers institutional leverage against capital while channeling that power into the Democratic coalition. The corporatist experiment was also racially selective in practice. Key programs, AAA acreage reductions, the original Social Security exclusions of agricultural and domestic labor, discriminatory NRA wage codes, segregated CCC camps, and FHA redlining, systematically limited benefits to Black workers or actively displaced them. The industrial and agricultural coordination that elevated organized (predominantly White) labor left the bulk of the Black workforce outside the new sectoral arrangements or in subordinate positions within them.

The experiment mostly failed: administrative chaos, business resistance, and the Supreme Court’s invalidation of the NRA in 1935 ended the formal corporatist phase. The Second New Deal drifted toward pure redistribution and interest-group liberalism (the post-war FDR consensus). Unemployment remained stubbornly high through the late 1930s; the New Deal did not end the Depression. Faced with this failure, the administration turned to war mobilization as the mechanism of recovery. Massive deficit spending, conscription, and conversion of industry to war production finally absorbed the unemployed. To reach that mobilization, the United States adopted increasingly hostile policies toward Japan: moral embargoes on aircraft and materials, termination of the 1911 commercial treaty, restrictions on strategic exports, and the July 1941 freeze of Japanese assets and de facto oil embargo after Japanese occupation of Indochina. These measures were perceived in Tokyo as an existential economic stranglehold and contributed directly to the decision for war at Pearl Harbor. The Axis conflict thus served as the escape from domestic economic failure, and the long-term result was entanglement in a universalist war whose aftermath accelerated demographic and cultural transformations hostile to the historic White American nation.

Conclusions

These 10 presidencies, whatever their individual failures, consistently treated the United States as a concrete historical nation rather than an abstract proposition. Territorial expansion, protection of the productive White majority against both finance capital and alien labor, and episodic efforts to coordinate industry and labor under state authority appear again and again. Jefferson and Polk secured the continental base; Jackson, Johnson, Van Buren, and McKinley defended the economic position of the White working and farming population; Roosevelt, Wilson, and FDR demonstrated that the American state could, when it chose, discipline capital and organize production for national ends. Eisenhower, the latest figure on the list, still operated within residual elements of that older logic: the Interstate system bound the continental industrial nation together, and Operation Wetback was a rare post-war exercise in demographic and labor defense. Yet even under Eisenhower the racial and national priorities were already eroding, and by the 1960s they had largely been abandoned.

The fracture of racial continuity opened the way to an egalitarian, colorblind, and internationalist order that treated the nation as a proposition of ideas; rather than a people related by blood, language and culture. That order produced demographic transformation, perpetual wars fought in the name of vague democracy, detachment from the foundational racial concerns of the earlier republic, and a sustained hostility toward the historic White working population, tendencies that now define the modern globalist Democratic-Republican duopoly. Universalist war aims, the dismantling of immigration restriction, the elevation of finance over production, and the gradual transformation of the demographic core of the country replaced the earlier views of national power and race preservation. The ranking above is therefore not an exercise in nostalgia, it is a reminder that an American state capable of acting as the instrument of its historic people once existed and that the criteria by which such a state should be judged remain the same.