HOW HISTORIANS RATE PRESIDENTS. Historians have for decades weighed presidents’ virtues and accomplishments in a bid to determine the best and worst of the bunch.

The faces of three of those four men – Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln – are immortalized on the towering granite walls of Mount Rushmore, with Theodore Roosevelt occupying the fourth spot on the Keystone, South Dakota national memorial.

“The top five – George Washington, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson – have been the top 5, jockeying for position, over all 37 years (of the Siena poll),” says Don Levy, director of the Siena College Research Institute. “There is certainly collective agreement on that.”

Completed in 1941, the shrine of democracy that is Mount Rushmore was designed by sculptor Gutzon Borglum to embody the birth, growth, development and preservation of the United States. For more than 200 years, presidents have endeavored to leave a similar mark on the country, hoping that their legacy, too, is etched in the bedrock of American history.