All Presidents

This master list names every U.S. president by who their power served—workers, elites, or empire—before myth has a chance to intervene.

All Presidents — Master List

The American Proletariat Index (API)

This is the canonical master list of all U.S. presidents, organized by tier under the American Proletariat Index. Placement reflects material outcomes, not rhetoric or reputation. Individual rankings within tiers will be finalized on each president’s dedicated page.

Reading note: Tiers indicate directional alignment, not moral purity. Every presidency carries harm; tiers measure who the state primarily served.

🟩 Tier I — Proletariat-Forward (Preliminary)

Presidents whose administrations materially expanded worker protections, social insurance, or democratic enforcement against elite resistance.

• Franklin D. Roosevelt
  
  

• Lyndon B. Johnson
  
  

🟨 Tier II — Mixed / Conditional (Preliminary)

Presidents who delivered real gains but paired them with exclusions, repression, or elite trade-offs.

• Abraham Lincoln
  
  

• Ulysses S. Grant
  
  

• Harry S. Truman
  
  

• Theodore Roosevelt
  
  

• John F. Kennedy
  
  

• Jimmy Carter
  
  

• Barack Obama
  
  

• Joe Biden
  
  

🟧 Tier III — Elite-Stabilizing (Preliminary)

Presidents whose primary function was preserving order, capital, expansion, or hierarchy.

• George Washington
  
  

• John Adams
  
  

• Thomas Jefferson
  
  

• James Madison
  
  

• James Monroe
  
  

• John Quincy Adams
  
  

• Rutherford B. Hayes
  
  

• Chester A. Arthur
  
  

• Benjamin Harrison
  
  

• William Howard Taft
  
  

• Woodrow Wilson
  
  

• Calvin Coolidge
  
  

• Dwight D. Eisenhower
  
  

• Gerald Ford
  
  

• George H. W. Bush
  
  

• Bill Clinton
  
  

🟥 Tier IV — Anti-Proletariat (Preliminary)

Presidents whose governance expanded exploitation, dispossession, coercion, or repression.

• Andrew Jackson
  
  

• Martin Van Buren
  
  

• William Henry Harrison
  
  

• John Tyler
  
  

• James K. Polk
  
  

• Zachary Taylor
  
  

• Millard Fillmore
  
  

• Franklin Pierce
  
  

• James Buchanan
  
  

• Andrew Johnson
  
  

• Grover Cleveland
  
  

• Herbert Hoover
  
  

• Richard Nixon
  
  

• Ronald Reagan
  
  

• George W. Bush
  
  

• Donald Trump
  
  

How to Use This List

• Click any president to view their full API profile (bio, financials, policy impacts, slavery/Indigenous/labor accounting, and final score).
  
  

• Expect movement: rankings may adjust as evidence is expanded.
  
  

• Disagreement is expected; euphemism is not.
  
  

One-line summary:
This master list names every U.S. president by who their power served—workers, elites, or empire—before myth has a chance to intervene.