Author’s note: This article features work by my LaGrange College undergraduate researchers: P.J. Davis, C.J. Dawson, Jaydin Glover, Cece Gonzalez, Helen Gordon, Kayla Helms, Jezell Johnson, Myui Komatsu, Rabe Lawson, Ian McLargin, Tito Moon, J.P. Moore, Tray Owens, Ethan Perkins, Zari Plummer, Noah Preuer, Azaria Thomas and Christiana Walker.
As President Donald Trump looks to expand the world’s real estate under U.S. control, my students in a political science class and I wondered about U.S. Presidents and their legacy, in a discussion of hypothesis tests.
We look at the Presidents who added territory during their tenure, and compared them to a random sample, as well as those presidents who gave some territories their freedom, independence, or a return to another country.
Trump has set his sights on Greenland, and would like to convince Denmark to sell it. He has called for Canada to be made into the 51st state. He’s talked about repossessing the Panama Canal Zone. He wants all maps to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Who knows what else he hopes to add to American control.
The United States has been in an expansionist mood since its independence. This country has added territory in a variety of ways. There’s the Louisiana Purchase; we took part of Florida, and bought the rest later. There’s Oregon territory, the Gadsden Purchase, the annexation of Texas and the U.S.-Mexican War. We purchased Alaska, annexed Hawaii, took various territories during the Spanish-American War, and created the Panama Canal Zone. From 1915 to 1934, U.S. Marines occupied Haiti. We bought the Danish Virgin Islands.
But there have also been times when the United States has helped territories it won, or acquired, get their independence, or withdrew troops from occupied countries, or gave trustees their independence. How did the public react to those?
Many of these presidents served in office before there was polling. So my students and I used the C-SPAN survey of Presidential historians and how they rate occupants of the White House. I had my students gather this information about who was president during the time the territory was taken, or liberated (some were in office for multiple annexations or purchases). Upon the suggestion of a pretty smart student, I compared the data to a random sample of U.S. Presidents who neither acquired territory nor gave territories their freedom.
Not everyone is going to like this survey methodology. Former President Richard M. Nixon once quipped “History will treat me fairly. Historians probably won’t.” But it’s a start, right? And what president doesn’t want to go down in history as one of the best?
A survey of territory-taking presidents finds an average score of 579.6 from presidential historians, with an average ranking of 18. That’s better than our random sample of U.S. Presidents, where those leaders scored only a 479.9 from C-SPAN and 23 in the rankings. There’s certainly a gap, though it is not statistically significant.
However, for the U.S. Presidents who give territory their freedom, they average a score of 662.3 and a ranking of 14. Though they do better than presidents who take territory, the results are not statistically significant.
But those who liberate lands do significantly better, statistically, than the random sample. Perhaps it’s part of showing that we’re not like all of the colonizers and other empires, but a different kind of nation worthy of respect.