Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
21 Feb 2025
Who is the most successful president in American history? George Washington secured American independence. Abraham Lincoln preserved the union and ended slavery. Franklin D. Roosevelt ended the Depression, remade government, and won World War II. But if we define "success" as the ability to articulate your goals and achieve every single one of them, perhaps only one president in American history was ever perfectly successful. In 1845, James K. Polk, newly elected by a whisker-thin margin, confided to his friend George Bancroft the four goals of his four years in the White House. Acquire Oregon from Great Britain. Acquire California from Mexico. Reduce the tariff. Establish an independent treasury. Four years later, he'd done all this and more. As the historian Daniel Patrick Howe wrote, "Judged by these objectives, Polk is probably the most successful president the United States has ever had.” And that’s why Polk is the subject of today’s show. I don’t think another president in American history has so large a gap between his modern reputation and his actual achievement. There are two great biographies about Polk that I’ve read that have been published in the last 20 years. I’m very pleased that today, we have both authors on the show. Walter Borneman is the author of 'Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America.' And Robert Merry is the author of 'A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent_._' If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Walter Borneman and Robert Merry Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Today, our second episode of Plain History kicks off with a fun, if impossible, question. Who was the most successful president in American history? I'd say we start with the obvious nominees here. George Washington defeated the British Army and then led the country born through his military accomplishment. Abraham Lincoln saved the Union and its slavery.
Franklin D. Roosevelt came into office when the U.S. was facing one of its worst economic crises ever. And more than a decade later, he'd remade the federal government and the U.S. economy with the U.S. bestriding the planet on the verge of total victory in World War II at the pinnacle of our geopolitical power. Those are three excellent, excellent choices.
But according to the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel Walker Howe, the answer to the question, who is America's most successful president, might be none of the above. If success means articulating your goals and achieving all of them, none of those three are perfect fits. George Washington's negotiations with Britain failed to secure the recognition of US maritime rights.
FDR's court packing plan famously and infamously backfired. And while it seems kind of mean, absurd to blame Abraham Lincoln for his own assassination, I don't think it's debatable that his second term was a failure by his own standards, since his vice president, Andrew Johnson, who became president, had policies that were totally at odds with Lincoln's vision of reconstruction.
No, if success means achieving every single major thing you set out to do, then identifying the most successful president forces us to look a little bit further. In 1845, James K. Polk, newly elected president by a whisker-thin margin, confided to a friend, George Bancroft, the four goals of his four years in the White House.
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