The Atlantic Unveils 100 Most Influential Americans List

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

Did Werner Von Braun never take American citizenship? I would put him at least as high as Babe Ruth and Louis Armstrong.

And I suppose it's a technicality that keeps Alexis DeTocqueville, the Marquis de Lafayette, and Nicola Tesla off the list.... although I'm not sure Tesla wasn't a citizen.

No mention of Jim Bridger, Zebulon Pike, William Barrett Travis, or Sam Houston. Before you had "free silver", you had to find the silver: but I guess that wasn't good enough to get Henry Comstock on the list. James Knox Polk made the United States an ocean-to-ocean empire: I'm glad to see that that little trope at least got noticed!

Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse weren't Americans? Geronimo? Tecumseh? Where are they?

William Seward got us Alaska: where's he?

John Jay helped author The Federalist and became the nation's first Chief Justice; he also helped negotiate, with Franklin, the Treaty of Paris that obtained British recognition of the sovereignty of the United States. I'd say that his was arguably a life as "influential" as Elizabeth Cady Stanton's or William Faulkner's or dead-bird diva Rachel Carson's.

Moreover, Bryan's world of prairie populism agrarian radicalism doesn't seem to have survived. It was a different story when the Democrats still drew strength from the Plains States and the rural South.

Although the "Finkelstein box" and the "red America" concept perpetuate that value system -- "red America" being the MSM's self-protective redefinition of "true-blue" Republicanism in view of the embarrassing emergence of really Red tendencies in their Democratic Party.

Main Street Ohio Republicans who once agitated in vain for Bob Taft against the conspiracies of New York money and lawyers (and who returned Mr. Bush to office anyway) now vote with Plains States agrarians for conservative Republicans, when they can, while the old Midwestern populists still vote Democratic, but now for socialists and, to put it bluntly, for Stalinists.

Is everyone who believes in religious dogmas and sacred texts then a bigot?

James Watson seems to think so, and he's on the list.

Did you notice, by the way, that Newsweek has declared that theism is incompatible with good citizenship? I don't think this view has been elevated to the level of public policy since the time of Galerius and Licinius, but it would seem that the chattering classes are about to follow Watson to war against Christianity.

We don't know just how permanent present splits are going to be. If American politics remains stuck on religious vs. secular for a generation things will look a lot different than if economic issues take precedence.

James Watson seems to think so, and he's on the list.

That is another suspect thing about this list and lists like this: Watson was one of three or four people responsibile for the discovery of DNA's structure. The magazine wants to pay respect to the importance of genetics, and because Watson's an American he makes the list, even though his contribution was only part of the story.

Maybe you would like to weigh in on the "Bryan was a bigot" question. I'm not aware that he was any more bigoted on race than others in his era. He accepted the segregationists as part of his party, as others accepted them as part of the nation, but doesn't seem to have had any strong feelings against non-Whites.

I think we'd need to repair to a "temper of the times" sourcebook or study on racism and racial sentiment in America to attempt to determine whether Bryan was typically racist, or only moderately racist -- which would, following modern prejudices, make him an exemplar by comparison, right? -- and whether modern opinions are any less racist than 19th-century ones. For example, is it any less racist than Theodore Bilbo was, to say with Susan Sontag that "the white race is the cancer of the planet", or is one only reporting an unpleasant truth with equable detachment? (A similar argument is made over on the Perlstein thread, which discusses his latest New Republic screed against Southern conservatives -- and yes, he uses the "r"-word while searching restlessly for new ways to compass their political isolation and destruction -- shades of 1860.)

And then, if one agrees that Susan Sontag's sentiment was racist (I personally think it was, instead, operational and cynical -- Stalinist propaganda, frankly), one has then to say whether one is speaking in absolute, Hemingwayesque terms and "writing truly", or in answer to an implicit question, "compared to what?"

I know that my own grandfather, who in family tradition had personally heard the "Cross of Gold" speech as a young man, was relatively progressive on racial questions, at least as far as his administration of the law as an assistant attorney for Marion County, Indiana, was concerned (in the days before unified city-county government, that merged Marion County and Indianapolis). He prosecuted blacks for murder who had killed other blacks, not manslaughter. And yet he gave the bum's rush -- a literal bum's rush -- to a black deputy who, testing the bounds of toleration, had voiced the sentiment openly in the office, with my grandfather present, that he, the deputy, could have any white girl he liked because his essence was so strong (etc., etc.). What the deputy overlooked was that, standing and working at a file cabinet about ten feet away as he spoke, was one of my grandfather's teenaged daughters. Oops. And yes, my grandfather addressed the man as "you black son-of-a-bitch" as he rushed him out of the office, and offered to kill him if he ever showed his face around the place again. (This was part of his normal discourse when hugely annoyed: if honored scrupulously, it would have required him to have killed my grandmother several times over before the old man finally retired from the practice of law. People spoke differently then.)

So, who was the racist? The black man who believed in the ineluctability of his manly essences (reminiscent of the boast/canard, "once you've had black, you'll never go back"), or who thought he could boast of it with impunity? My old man's old man? Or was my grandfather instead a vanguard feminist, acting promptly and fairly to guarantee his daughter a non-hostile working environment? And it isn't beyond the last stretches of imagination to envision a protective father acting to remove a scandalous influence from his daughter's environment, either -- neanderthal as that may seem.

This is a very indirect way of approaching an assay of William Jennings Bryan, relying on my grandfather's politics, Irish morality, and general sense of propriety as a guide. I doubt very much whether the belief, common in Lincoln's time and shared by him (at least until he met Frederick Douglass, and then possibly modified to some degree I can't determine), that blacks didn't have the same capacities as whites, had much abated in Bryan's time. If he shared them, then he was objectively a racist, which is not to say a racialist i.e. an advocate of race-discriminatory policies, if one accepts as golden truth the Boazian (?) diktat that the varieties of humanity are identical in their moral and intellectual gifts, hamstrings and Binet scores be damned. This would be true even if Bryan personally opposed the Ku Klux Klan (and I don't know what his posture was on Kluxerism).

Which raises a whole series of questions about what we mean by racism, and even about our metrics and epistemology. And the answers to those questions are usually politically loaded with the agenda of people offering the answers.

Racial politics and thought about it are so full of partisan propaganda that one would have to be a Martian, to be free of all of it.

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