The Best American Presidents

"I like guys like Chester A. Arthur, John Tyler, Calvin Coolidge, and Grover Cleveland," says the interviewee — Doug Casey on Presidents: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Interviewer Louis James:

Grover Cleveland might have been the best of the lot. He was a sound-money advocate, generally pro-market, and had both the personal ethics and the backbone to face down Congress and the powerful interests behind the annexation of Hawaii.

The conquest of Hawaii, in my opinion, was one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history, because of the massive level of fraud and deceit involved, which was quite different from the relatively simpler xenophobic extermination of other natives. Grover Cleveland basically said that Hawaii would never be annexed while he was president, and that's exactly what happened.