Bouncing around

Like conversations, its amazing the tangential continuity of how one enquiry can lead to another.  In the course of trying to decipher a handwritten fax (where even the typed address letterhead was smudged), who clearly went to the same school of spidery inscribing as Prince Charles, I typed into Google a phrase with which I was unfamiliar, the writing encrypting any further understanding.  Was it Lans Deo or Laws Deo or even Lams Deo - it turned out to be Laus Deo.
From here, Google informed me of how it was set into the very top of the pyramidium of the Washington Monument.  Seeing that the Monument was 555ft high, that struck me against other once-record holders, briefly checking out the Great Pyramid of Giza, Cologne Cathedral (whose Archbishop retired this year) and the Eiffel Tower, the Monument exceeding the first two but being surpassed by the third.
The Monument's construction was held up for a variety of reasons, not least the American Civil War, but also because of the co-option of the Know Nothing Party.  I had read about this party in a history book covering major events, people and movements between 1789 and 1945 and used Wikipedia to refresh my memory.  This anti-Catholic and nativist movement (represented in Gangs of New York with a leader in William'Bill the Butcher' Cutting, portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis) was often unsavoury, engaging in acts of violence.  One of its leaders was ex-US president Millard Fillmore.  I clicked on his link and his Wiki page.
From here was the striking statement that he was frequently in the bottom 10 of historical ranking of Presidents of the United States.
Historical rankings of US Presidents has always captured my imagination since the only part of a Wall Street Journal book containing pen-portraits of every US chief executive up to and including George W. Bush (besides impartial writings on Harry Truman and of Robert Dallek on Lyndon Johnson and a few broadsides fired at Dubaya by the then-WSJ editor) that I didn't have to wipe rabid right-wing slobber off my hands that dripped from the pages, were the historical surveys by scholars.  The book claimed that almost all historians were subject to the corrupting influence of liberal college campuses so it was trying to redress the balance - not by being balanced, oh no, no, but by taking an extreme conservative viewpoint.  Some were clearly not qualified, Lynne Cheney writing about a single anecdote about one of the early presidents that was so worthless that I can't remember the victim of her hagiography.  Kenneth Starr, the lawyer who tried to impeach Bill Clinton, wrote well, if controversially, about how great Nixon was because he defended the authority of the President of the United States (POTUS) office, skirting around how he brought these troubles upon himself - and that was it, just a single topic, not mentioning anything about Nixon, from foreign policy to domestic actions, let alone Watergate.  The vitriol that many of the contributors felt towards Clinton meant that they had to hand that coverage over to a British art historian!  Needless to say, it too was inadequate.  Terrible presidents like Warren G. Harding were trumpeted, great liberal presidents like Franklin Roosevelt had all of their achievements derided because it didn't agree with conservative ideology.  But it was those surveys where I found the real value, historians, law teachers and economists across the board had a list divided into 'Great', 'Near Great', 'Above Average', 'Average', 'Below Average', 'Weak' and 'Failures'.  The top three for historians and economists were George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, in that order, with law teachers rating Abe as number one, Washington as two and FDR as three.  The failures were unanimous as being Harding and the three POTUSs who preceded the American Civil War.
So this Wikipedia page held great interest for me.  A 538 analysis even predicted that overall Barack Obama would be rated 17th in the list of 44, one ahead of Bill Clinton, putting Obama between 'average' and 'above average', which I have to say is fair.  Taking out the 32-day tenure of William Henry Harrison, George W. Bush is in the bottom five.  Shocking is how veneration for Ronald Reagan has reached fever pitch over the last few years - this was a president who should have been impeached for breaking the constitution over the Iran-Contra scandal and whose support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan indirectly led to 9/11, with many more black marks of a lesser nature.  In an ABC poll in the year 2000, he garnered 9% as the greatest president as voted by the American public, in a Washington College Poll in 2005, he got 15% and placed 2nd and in a Gallup Poll in 2011, he scored 19% as the greatest POTUS and was top of the pile.  That's scandalous.  Then again, it is only a fifth of Americans - equally 13% though Bill Clinton was the greatest ever, which is just a bit silly, like people naming greatest ever footballers only by players they've seen in their lifetime.  That is why the lists by scholars are the ones to be most trusted in the long-run.