text: Historical reputation In surveys of U.S.scholars ranking presidents conducted since 1948, the top three presidents are Lincoln, Washington, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, although the order varies.Between 1999 and 2011, Lincoln, John F.Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan were the top-ranked presidents in eight public opinion surveys, according to Gallup.A 2004 study found that scholars in the fields of history and politics ranked Lincoln number one, while legal scholars placed him second after George Washington.Lincoln's assassination left him a national martyr.He was viewed by abolitionists as a champion of human liberty.Republicans linked Lincoln's name to their party.Many, though not all, in the South considered Lincoln as a man of outstanding ability.Historians have said he was "a classical liberal" in the 19th-century sense.Allen C.Guelzo states that Lincoln was a "classical liberal democrat—an enemy of artificial hierarchy, a friend to trade and business as ennobling and enabling, and an American counterpart to Mill, Cobden, and Bright", whose portrait Lincoln hung in his White House office.Sociologist Barry Schwartz argues that Lincoln's American reputation grew slowly from the late 19th century until the Progressive Era (1900–1920s), when he emerged as one of America's most venerated heroes, even among white Southerners.The high point came in 1922 with the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.Union nationalism, as envisioned by Lincoln, "helped lead America to the nationalism of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt." In the New Deal era, liberals honored Lincoln not so much as the self-made man or the great war president, but as the advocate of the common man who they claimed would have supported the welfare state.