Posted on 11/22/2006 7:51:12 AM PST by Borges
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
NOOO...it was from a book by Robert Welch. I don't read the Enquirer.
:D
Or, my favorite, Julia Ward Howe.
Are we not in the process of becoming "two (or more) nations" _again_, right now? One needs to do no more than look around....
- John
Check the list again. They ain't all dead.
Right. I think he was the one that gave TJ the job of drafting the declaration of independence, too.
A couple observations:
1) The list could be cut by imposing the standard of whether or not America became more like that person and that person's influence. Take W.J. Bryan, for example: his influence on America, though great, ought to fall dramatically below J.P. Morgan on the list, as America today looks far more like that which Morgan made than the one Bryan tried to create. By that measure, Sanger, Wilson, Dewey and some of the other idealists would fall lower or off the list. Accordingly, and in the other direction, John Marshall's influence, for example, ought to be much higher than as listed.
2) Specific actions, events, or inventions: these would seem to operate better as a distinct category. I understand that Henry Ford and Bill Gates belong on the list, but neither man invented or should be credited fully with popularizing their respective technologies: they made fortunes off channeling those technologies their way. OTOH, Edison not only changed what and the way people do, he changed how Americans came to think of themselves.
3) The top five ought to go unenumerated.
4) The list might include some more pre-1789 figures than just Payne: Samuel Adams, Cotton Mather, etc.
Ralph Nader? Please.
Martin Luther King more influential than Ronald Reagan, I beg to differ, I put Reagan 3rd, but I'm biased.
The influence of the 1919 Transcontinental Motor Convoy has been hugely overstated. It only become meaningful after he became president. Eisenhower's accomplishment with the Interstate Highway System was in federalizing it under the excuse of the Russian H-bomb threat. He neither invented the interstate nor introduced the idea into Congress.
He did oversee the form by which it was enacted, for which he ought to be credited and for which alone he belongs on that list. Still, his action in it was part of a long, long series of events, ideas, and actions by automobilists, good roads advocates, and far-thinking States that were already building -- and independently financing -- the modern highway.
Ralph unfortunately belongs there for having built the extralegal, rule-by-trial-attorney of modern product liability law and for having done as much as any other in advancing judicial activism to the level of absurdity of today.
As far as I can figure, there are all deceased!
My guess is they Nixon on there for Negative influence, and Nader there as a Positive influence though, but you already knew that.
Nader would make our list of top 100 negative influences.
I realize that, since you've made it a point several times in this thread. However, at a glance, #54 Bill Gates and #96 Ralph Nader are most definitely still alive.
(So there's no excuse for Milton Friedman's absence...)
That is they, not there, but still wrong! Looking more carefully, Bill Gates, James D. Watson, Betty Friedan, and Ralph Nader are still around. They are even a stranger group than the entire list!!
This is a surprisingly good list, at least at the top part of the list, imo. Hamilton definitely gets his due here, which surprised me.
So whomever knew who James Gordon Bennett was, raise your hand. I didn't. And I only knew about Sullivan and Olmsted because I am at once an architecture and landscaping hound, who also spent time in Chicago. While hearing the name before, I also was not quite sure what Horace Mann did. It must be related to my disillusionment with the public school system. Other than that, I knew that all. That was what having been around for a long time, gets you in life. :)
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