Study: Most presidents are forgotten

Modern leaders would do well to remember an old adage: "All glory is fleeting."

A new scientific study details the fact that most U.S. presidents are forgotten after just a few decades.

"A total of 415 undergraduates in 1974, 1991, and 2009 recalled as many presidents as possible and attempted to place them in their correct ordinal positions," reports the journal Science. "All showed roughly linear forgetting of the eight or nine presidents prior to the president holding office at the time."

Famous early presidents are remembered, particularly George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. So are presidents who confronted major crises: Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, and Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Depression and World War II.

Even then, however, most people cannot place the presidents in order.

In a story on the study, The New York Times reports:

"Almost everyone could name George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, after which memorability plunged to near zero. It spiked again around the Civil War, with Lincoln, Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant, followed by another run of obscurity until Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman.

"After that, memory about most presidents faded with distance in time; most baby boomers remembered Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter, but fewer than a quarter recalled Herbert Hoover or Calvin Coolidge. Most Generation X participants remembered the elder President Bush, but fewer than a quarter recalled Dwight D. Eisenhower. ...

"The study authors predict that presidents like Lyndon B. Johnson, Nixon and Carter will by 2040 be remembered by less than a quarter of the public. After that, it is a steep fall to Millard Fillmore land."