The Atlantic Monthly has compiled a list of the 100 most influential Americans. I don’t know if it’s more of a commentary on the list or America that there’s so little diversity on it. Full list behind the cut, for the curious.
1 Abraham Lincoln
2 George Washington
3 Thomas Jefferson
4 Franklin D. Roosevelt
5 Alexander Hamilton
6 Benjamin Franklin
7 John Marshall
8 Martin Luther King Jr.
9 Thomas Edison
10 Woodrow Wilson
11 John D. Rockefeller
12 Ulysses Grant
13 James Madison
14 Henry Ford
15 Theodore Roosevelt
16 Mark Twain
17 Ronald Reagan
18 Andrew Jackson
19 Thomas Paine
20 Andrew Carnegie
21 Harry Truman
22 Walt Whitman
23 Wright Brothers
24 Alexander Graham Bell
25 John Adams
26 Walt Disney
27 Eli Whitney
28 Dwight D. Eisenhower
29 Earl Warren
30 Elizabeth Cady Stanton
31 Henry Clay
32 Albert Einstein
33 Ralph Waldo Emerson
34 Jonas Salk
35 Jackie Robinson
36 William Jennings Bryan
37 J.P. Morgan
38 Susan B. Anthony
39 Rachel Carson
40 John Dewey
41 Harriet Beecher Stowe
42 Eleanor Roosevelt
43 W.E.B. DuBois
44 Lyndon Baines Johnson
45 Samuel F.B. Morse
46 William Lloyd Garrison
47 Frederick Douglass
48 Robert Oppenheimer
49 Frederick Law Olmsted
50 James K. Polk
51 Margaret Sanger
52 Joseph Smith
53 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
54 Bill Gates
55 John Quincy Adams
56 Horace Mann
57 Robert E. Lee
58 John C. Calhoun
59 Louis Sullivan
60 William Faulkner
61 Samuel Gompers
62 William James
63 George Marshall
64 Jane Addams
65 Henry David Thoreau
66 Elvis Presley
67 P.T. Barnum
68 James D. Watson
69 James Gordon Bennett
70 Lewis and Clark
71 Noah Webster
72 Sam Walton
73 Cyrus McCormick
74 Brigham Young
75 George Herman "Babe" Ruth
76 Frank Lloyd Wright
77 Betty Friedan
78 John Brown
79 Louis Armstrong
80 William Randolph Hearst
81 Margaret Mead
82 George Gallup
83 James Fenimore Cooper
84 Thurgood Marshall
85 Ernest Hemingway
86 Mary Baker Eddy
87 Benjamin Spock
88 Enrico Fermi
89 Walter Lippmann
90 Jonathan Edwards
91 Lyman Beecher
92 John Steinbeck
93 Nat Turner
94 George Eastman
95 Sam Goldwyn
96 Ralph Nader
97 Stephen Foster
98 Booker T. Washington
99 Richard Nixon
100 Herman Melville
It actually exhausts me to think about the sheer number of different (sometimes competing) ways that this list is fucking twaddle.
You know some of them are no-brainers (really taking a chance with George Washington, Lincoln and MLK arent’ they?) but I’m stumped by why you would include Nixon, Herman Melville or Walt Disney and not Malcom X. And it’s influence on who exactly?
The whole thing just seems bizarre.
That would be Malcolm X. I can spell, really. (And is it just me is there not a single member of the space program there? And what about the architects of Los Alamos? Or Joseph McCarthy whose anti-communism hearings destroyed thousands of lives? or Robert McNamera whose policies and designs dragged us further into Vietnam or…or….or. You get the idea.)
Yep. I expect more from the Atlantic, though now I’m not sure why…
To get an idea how the list is skewed, I noticed that Douglass is #47 and Grant is # 12. They got Melville, who’s my old boy, but yet no Poe, who had a hell of a lot of firsts. Forget about Margaret Fuller and Dickinson, they’re not even in the ball park here. I think my fifth grade social studies teacher, Mr. Edwards, made this list up. He made history dry as dust and would reach around the back of his head with his left arm in order to pick with his pinky his right nostril.