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
John F. Kennedy is not on the list. These folks are quite perspicacious. I agree with someone that the ranking of Madison is too low.
A very intelligent bunch of choices, IMO.
Olmsted designed Central Park, among others, and was a giant of his time, in his field, and revolutionized it. He deserves his place.
I don't consider Einstein an American (he did all his stuff while living in Europe), and the bomb would have been invented with or without him.
That was an amazing book. As a side note, Adams' enthusiam about the stoic thinker Epictetus inspired me to check him out, and he actually had a profound impact on my thinking in a very positive and measurable way. And so I marvel at the fact that John Adams, from the grave, basically influenced my life in a very direct way. The Alien/Sedition acts are a blot on his amazing career and life, as is the political strife that pushed him out of office after one term, but in the revolutionary period and through to the founding, he was an absolute titan.
As for Gompers, you just skipped that particular day of your juior high school history class. His name was in it, when discussing the US labor movement.
Yup, that crossed my mind too, and even more so with regard to Enrico Fermi.
...and the bomb would have been invented with or without him.
OMG! Yes, you're right of course, except that its invention would be in our future rather than in our past. :)
Torie, I would have had same questions about those 4 people.
I am going to comment more about this later for the sure fun of it - I love lists like this - but I believe William Henry Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and James Monroe should be on the list.
Other random observations: Ronald Reagn is really high on this list, which I appreciate, but find somewhat surprising. William Jennings Bryan was not more important than JQ Adams. Madison is a little too low, agree with Torie on that. Woodrow Wilson may be slightly too high. I am delighted with how high John Marshall is on the list. Earl Warren seems way too high to me. James Polk should be a lot higher I think. Milton Friedman should be on the list. Ralph Nader definitely should not.
Einstein is either way too high on the list or too low, depending on whether you buy the Torie or the antiguv argument. I guess the compromise between the two positions puts him where he his. And again, Alexander Hamilton at number 5 seems smart, and I would not have expected that.
Betty Friedan? Replace her on the list with Harper Lee.
Also, George Gallup doesn't seem worthy of the list either. Put Albert Gallatin in his place.
And what we'd give to have a leader of the caliber of Abe...
Madison is too low, but Grant is not too high.
Amen. And, amen.
William McKinley, JFK, and most especially James Monroe are the Presidents I would think about adding to the list. If I could add just one person to this list it would be James Monroe.
I would have put JQ Adams higher personally.
I had to make 'em PROMISE to not put me on it, yet AGAIN! It was gettin' embarrassing!
;-p
I suspect the biggest flaw with this list is the important scientists/ inventors who are either under-rated or left off entirely.
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