How many Presidents?

Press, 23 September 1988, Page 12

How many Presidents?

From the ‘Economist,’ London

FOR the second time in 11 years the “Economist” has been taken to task by the same reader over how to count American Presidents. "There have been 39,” writes P. B. D. Bunyan, meaning that whoever wins in November will be the fortieth President, not the forty-first. The problem, as Mr Bunyan points out, begins with Grover Cleveland. First elected in 1884, Cleveland was defeated four years later in a close contest with Benjamin Harrison. In 1892 he got his revenge, ousting Harrison and earning his place in the history books as the only person to be elected President to nonconsecutive terms. There is the rub. Cleveland’s terms in office are generally counted twice. By tradition he is known as both the twenty-second and twenty-fourth President. But there seems little basis for this, given the way other Presidencies are counted (Franklin Roosevelt’s unmatched four consecutive terms, for example, count as one). Not for the first time, tradition is wrong.

This does not, of course, mean that we are about to throw tradition to the wind. Most Americans think of Ronald Reagan as the fortieth President. Nonetheless, there are numerous ways to count Presidents. First take the man. Only 39 men have become President of the United States. Whichever way you count Cleveland, you cannot count him as two men (girth notwithstanding). This way Mr Bush or Mr Dukakis, and not Mr Reagan, will be the fortieth President. This is not the same as counting men elected to the office. There have been only 34 of them: John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur and Gerald Ford did not win a Presidential election (Mr Ford did not even win a VicePresidential one). The next President will be the thirty-fifth man to be elected as President (no women yet, of course, although a case could be made that some first ladies acted as one). Count oaths of office instead.

No-one can become President (not even for a second term) without being sworn in. In January Mr Bush or Mr Dukakis will take the sixtieth oath of office, becoming, in that sense at least, the sixtieth President. If oaths seem a little tenuous, it is because counting “terms” leads to all kinds of problems. Count partial terms as well as full, four-year ones, and you end up with the same number as “oaths.” But can you count someone like Fillmore as serving a term when he was in office for fewer than three years after his President, Zachary Taylor, died? Count full, four-year terms only (Taylor/Fillmore counting as one) and the next President will be the fifty-first. The tenures of Tyler, Fillmore, Johnson, Arthur and Ford would not count on their own, nor would the first terms of Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, or Lyndon Johnson. It is, of course, quality, not quantity, that really counts. But that is another matter entirely. Copyright — The Economist