http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200612/influentials
1 Abraham Lincoln
He saved the Union, freed the slaves, and presided over America’s second founding.
2 George Washington
He made the United States possible—not only by defeating a king, but by declining to become one himself.
3 Thomas Jefferson
The author of the five most important words in American history: “All men are created equal.”
4 Franklin Delano Roosevelt
He said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” and then he proved it.
5 Alexander Hamilton
Soldier, banker, and political scientist, he set in motion an agrarian nation’s transformation into an industrial power.
6 Benjamin Franklin
The Founder-of-all-trades— scientist, printer, writer, diplomat, inventor, and more; like his country, he contained multitudes.
7 John Marshall
The defining chief justice, he established the Supreme Court as the equal of the other two federal branches.
8 Martin Luther King Jr.
His dream of racial equality is still elusive, but no one did more to make it real.
9 Thomas Edison
It wasn’t just the lightbulb; the Wizard of Menlo Park was the most prolific inventor in American history.
10 Woodrow Wilson
He made the world safe for U.S. interventionism, if not for democracy.
11 John D. Rockefeller
The man behind Standard Oil set the mold for our tycoons—first by making money, then by giving it away.
12 Ulysses S. Grant
He was a poor president, but he was the general Lincoln needed; he also wrote the greatest political memoir in American history.
13 James Madison
He fathered the Constitution and wrote the Bill of Rights.
14 Henry Ford
He gave us the assembly line and the Model T, and sparked America’s love affair with the automobile.
15 Theodore Roosevelt
Whether busting trusts or building canals, he embodied the “strenuous life” and blazed a trail for twentieth-century America.
16 Mark Twain
Author of our national epic, he was the most unsentimental observer of our national life.
17 Ronald Reagan
The amiable architect of both the conservative realignment and the Cold War’s end.
18 Andrew Jackson
The first great populist: he found America a republic and left it a democracy.
19 Thomas Paine
The voice of the American Revolution, and our first great radical.
20 Andrew Carnegie
The original self-made man forged America’s industrial might and became one of the nation’s greatest philanthropists.
21 Harry Truman
An accidental president, this machine politician ushered in the Atomic Age and then the Cold War.
22 Walt Whitman
He sang of America and shaped the country’s conception of itself.
23 Wright Brothers
They got us all off the ground.
24 Alexander Graham Bell
By inventing the telephone, he opened the age of telecommunications and shrank the world.
25 John Adams
His leadership made the American Revolution possible; his devotion to republicanism made it succeed.
26 Walt Disney
The quintessential entertainer-entrepreneur, he wielded unmatched influence over our childhood.
27 Eli Whitney
His gin made cotton king and sustained an empire for slavery.
28 Dwight Eisenhower
He won a war and two elections, and made everybody like Ike.
29 Earl Warren
His Supreme Court transformed American society and bequeathed to us the culture wars.
30 Elizabeth Cady Stanton
One of the first great American feminists, she fought for social reform and women’s right to vote.
31 Henry Clay
One of America’s greatest legislators and orators, he forged compromises that held off civil war for decades.
32 Albert Einstein
His greatest scientific work was done in Europe, but his humanity earned him undying fame in America.
33 Ralph Waldo Emerson
The bard of individualism, he relied on himself—and told us all to do the same.
34 Jonas Salk
His vaccine for polio eradicated one of the world’s worst plagues.
35 Jackie Robinson
He broke baseball’s color barrier and embodied integration’s promise.
36 William Jennings Bryan
“The Great Commoner” lost three presidential elections, but his populism transformed the country.
37 J. P. Morgan
The great financier and banker was the prototype for all the Wall Street barons who followed.
38 Susan B. Anthony
She was the country’s most eloquent voice for women’s equality under the law.
39 Rachel Carson
The author of Silent Spring was godmother to the environmental movement.
40 John Dewey
He sought to make the public school a training ground for democratic life.
41 Harriet Beecher Stowe
Her Uncle Tom’s Cabin inspired a generation of abolitionists and set the stage for civil war.
42 Eleanor Roosevelt
She used the first lady’s office and the mass media to become “first lady of the world.”
43 W. E. B. DuBois
One of America’s great intellectuals, he made the “problem of the color line” his life’s work.
44 Lyndon Baines Johnson
His brilliance gave us civil-rights laws; his stubbornness gave us Vietnam.
45 Samuel F. B. Morse
Before the Internet, there was Morse code.
46 William Lloyd Garrison
Through his newspaper, The Liberator, he became the voice of abolition.
47 Frederick Douglass
After escaping from slavery, he pricked the nation’s conscience with an eloquent accounting of its crimes.
48 Robert Oppenheimer
The father of the atomic bomb and the regretful midwife of the nuclear era.
49 Frederick Law Olmsted
The genius behind New York’s Central Park, he inspired the greening of America’s cities.
50 James K. Polk
This one-term president’s Mexican War landgrab gave us California, Texas, and the Southwest.
51 Margaret Sanger
The ardent champion of birth control—and of the sexual freedom that came with it.
52 Joseph Smith
The founder of Mormonism, America’s most famous homegrown faith.
53 Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Known as “The Great Dissenter,” he wrote Supreme Court opinions that continue to shape American jurisprudence.
54 Bill Gates
The Rockefeller of the Information Age, in business and philanthropy alike.
55 John Quincy Adams
The Monroe Doctrine’s real author, he set nineteenth-century America’s diplomatic course.
56 Horace Mann
His tireless advocacy of universal public schooling earned him the title “The Father of American Education.”
57 Robert E. Lee
He was a good general but a better symbol, embodying conciliation in defeat.
58 John C. Calhoun
The voice of the antebellum South, he was slavery’s most ardent defender.
59 Louis Sullivan
The father of architectural modernism, he shaped the defining American building: the skyscraper.
60 William Faulkner
The most gifted chronicler of America’s tormented and fascinating South.
61 Samuel Gompers
The country’s greatest labor organizer, he made the golden age of unions possible.
62 William James
The mind behind Pragmatism, America’s most important philosophical school.
63 George Marshall
As a general, he organized the American effort in World War II; as a statesman, he rebuilt Western Europe.
64 Jane Addams
The founder of Hull House, she became the secular saint of social work.
65 Henry David Thoreau
The original American dropout, he has inspired seekers of authenticity for 150 years.
66 Elvis Presley
The king of rock and roll. Enough said.
67 P. T. Barnum
The circus impresario’s taste for spectacle paved the way for blockbuster movies and reality TV.
68 James D. Watson
He codiscovered DNA’s double helix, revealing the code of life to scientists and entrepreneurs alike.
69 James Gordon Bennett
As the founding publisher of The New York Herald, he invented the modern American newspaper.
70 Lewis and Clark
They went west to explore, and millions followed in their wake.
71 Noah Webster
He didn’t create American English, but his dictionary defined it.
72 Sam Walton
He promised us “Every Day Low Prices,” and we took him up on the offer.
73 Cyrus McCormick
His mechanical reaper spelled the end of traditional farming, and the beginning of industrial agriculture.
74 Brigham Young
What Joseph Smith founded, Young preserved, leading the Mormons to their promised land.
75 George Herman “Babe” Ruth
He saved the national pastime in the wake of the Black Sox scandal—and permanently linked sports and celebrity.
76 Frank Lloyd Wright
America’s most significant architect, he was the archetype of the visionary artist at odds with capitalism.
77 Betty Friedan
She spoke to the discontent of housewives everywhere—and inspired a revolution in gender roles.
78 John Brown
Whether a hero, a fanatic, or both, he provided the spark for the Civil War.
79 Louis Armstrong
His talent and charisma took jazz from the cathouses of Storyville to Broadway, television, and beyond.
80 William Randolph Hearst
The press baron who perfected yellow journalism and helped start the Spanish-American War.
81 Margaret Mead
With Coming of Age in Samoa, she made anthropology relevant—and controversial.
82 George Gallup
He asked Americans what they thought, and the politicians listened.
83 James Fenimore Cooper
The novels are unreadable, but he was the first great mythologizer of the frontier.
84 Thurgood Marshall
As a lawyer and a Supreme Court justice, he was the legal architect of the civil-rights revolution.
85 Ernest Hemingway
His spare style defined American modernism, and his life made machismo a cliché.
86 Mary Baker Eddy
She got off her sickbed and founded Christian Science, which promised spiritual healing to all.
87 Benjamin Spock
With a single book—and a singular approach—he changed American parenting.
88 Enrico Fermi
A giant of physics, he helped develop quantum theory and was instrumental in building the atomic bomb.
89 Walter Lippmann
The last man who could swing an election with a newspaper column.
90 Jonathan Edwards
Forget the fire and brimstone: his subtle eloquence made him the country’s most influential theologian.
91 Lyman Beecher
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s clergyman father earned fame as an abolitionist and an evangelist.
92 John Steinbeck
As the creator of Tom Joad, he chronicled Depression-era misery.
93 Nat Turner
He was the most successful rebel slave; his specter would stalk the white South for a century.
94 George Eastman
The founder of Kodak democratized photography with his handy rolls of film.
95 Sam Goldwyn
A producer for forty years, he was the first great Hollywood mogul.
96 Ralph Nader
He made the cars we drive safer; thirty years later, he made George W. Bush the president.
97 Stephen Foster
America’s first great songwriter, he brought us “O! Susanna” and “My Old Kentucky Home.”
98 Booker T. Washington
As an educator and a champion of self-help, he tried to lead black America up from slavery.
99 Richard Nixon
He broke the New Deal majority, and then broke his presidency on a scandal that still haunts America.
100 Herman Melville
Moby Dick was a flop at the time, but Melville is remembered as the American Shakespeare.
James Burke might have a word or two to say about that list...
actually, i take that back. the entire list is simplistic to the point of inaccuracy, based on a fucked premise. It has about as much relevance or is as well-thought-out as your usual ILM list, only its “Great Men of History” assumptions are more readily disproven.
4 Franklin Delano Roosevelt
He said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” and then he proved it.
35. Jackie Robinson is pretty questionable—second highest ranking black person after MLK = WTF?
Bell was Canadian!
> 35. Jackie Robinson is pretty questionable—second highest ranking black person after MLK = WTF?
Seriously. That spot belongs to RZA!
If it was the top 100 most influential figures in my snacking, George Washington Carver would be #1.
This list is fucked from #2 on down.
the main problem with the list is that it doesn’t make enough room for NEGATIVE influence. to read this you’d think that all 100 of these people did nothing but good things (tho the woodrow wilson comment is amusingly ambiguous).
#1 is inarguable.
I like the way Teddy Roosevelt is lauded for trust-busting, halfway between Rockefeller and Carnegie.
And yeah, #1 is my constant answer to those “Historical Person You’d Like To Have Dinner With” kind of questions. His writings and speeches are still inspiring without being cloying. What a fuckin’ guy.
Bell wasn’t Canadian. He was Scottish, he emigrated to Canada, but he took US citizenship.
Also, no space dudes/astronauts?
Bell was Canadian!
yeah, the list ain’t really clear; is it american history or just americans? ‘coz i figure James Watt, Louis XVI, Broseph Stalin, Hitler, George III, Cromwell, Louis Pasteur, and even Tim Berners-Lee had a bigger effect than fuckin’ bill gates, joseph smith, or BYU did.
This list is as thoughtless and wanked off as the one about weird haircuts & jobs. Why does Watson get the nod, but Crick not? Had Thomas Edison not had Nikola Tesla & George Westinghouse as contemporaries, those little bulb things wouldn’t get too damn far. Without Sears & Roebuck’s catalog service and the railroads they shipped on, american retail, domestic life, and distribution woulda bit a whole bit different.
and on and on and on
Also, no space dudes/astronauts?
Spam in a can.
This list is as thoughtless and wanked off as the one about weird haircuts & jobs.
I don’t know about that... seems like a pazz and jop of a few historians, and take it with a grain, etc.
and on and on and on
Yeah, Henry Ford did not invent the assembly line.
Really, nobody did, but it found its first really smooth-working form as a disassembly line for pigs. Ford himself said he took his inspiration from Chicago meat packing plants.
Ok, this one baffles me totally:
72 Sam Walton
He promised us “Every Day Low Prices,” and we took him up on the offer.
I can see how some robber barons belong on the list, but not nearly so high up, and Sam Walton can just go get fucked. He has contributed nothing to America whatsoever.
Nothing good, anyway.
In which case, yeah, Hitler belongs on the list, too.
no Carrot Top, no credibility
b-b-but he wasn’t American (xpost about Hitler, obviously). I agree another list of people whose influence shaped America regardless of whether they were American or not would be interesting, but that’s not what this is.
(See also the answer to “Why does Watson get the nod, but Crick not?”—that’ll be because Watson’s American and Crick’s British.)
I don’t object to Sam Walton being on the list, I do object to his presence when Marshall Field is absent. Marshall Field invented shopping.
72 Sam Walton
He promised us “Every Day Low Prices,” and we took him up on the offer.
I picture the little guy from the Onion editorial cartoons saying this.
104. The Burger King
He made it possible to “have it your way,” and that’s true democracy.
GW should probably be on here if it’s not necessarily ‘good’ influence. I think it’s safe to say he’ll be remembered...
I guess I wasn’t paying attention when the Atlantic turned into Us Weekly.
I blame Sandra Tsing Loh.
yeah, there’s a disappointing lack of both Roy Kroc or Ronald McDonald on this list.
they’re forgetting one thing: JESUS
He wasn’t Merkin. He was clearly an Englishman.
there was a genuine push to make TIME name Jesus “man of the century/ millenium” in 1999. I think they went with Einstien.
96 Ralph Nader
He made the cars we drive safer; thirty years later, he made George W. Bush the president.
I thought only professional Republocrats and ILX dillydos were the only ones still wheezing this.
Yeah I was a bit put off by that too.
FWIW, in the print version of the magazine, the list is accompanied by a lengthy article explaining a lot of the reasons the list is the way it is. it also has smaller lists for authors, architects, people still living, etc.
Even accepting it for what it is, Madison should be closer to the top, and John Muir amd Robert Moses would seem to be more influential than say Rachel Carson and Frederick Law Olmsted.
“America’s tormented and fascinating South.”
also, come on, the Reagan thing is just ridiculous
Walt Disney is more influential in US history than all women. Whadaya know.
read this in the train station for 5 minutes the other day thinking this piece of shit is gonna be on ilx real soon.
96 Ralph Nader
He made the cars we drive safer; thirty years later, he made George W. Bush the president.
I thought only professional Republocrats and ILX dillydos were the only ones still wheezing this.
— Bill Weber (wjwe...), November 28th, 2006.
Yeah, it made me wonder if we aren’t witnessing the process of a myth making it into the history books.
Dems like it more than “we let them steal an election that our spineless wimp won.”
Walt Disney is more influential in US history than all women.
This may sadly be true, tho.
Edward R. Murrow should be up there.
michael jackson should be up there
The saddest thing about this is the way they steal Walt Whitman’s “I contain multitudes” line for Benjamin Franklin’s blurb!
Madison should be closer to the top, and John Muir amd Robert Moses would seem to be more influential than say Rachel Carson and Frederick Law Olmsted.
It seems like this list is skewed in the same way that VH-1 countdown specials are. It’s a snapshot of what would a) placate the greatest number of history snobs that care about such things, b) reflect current status of who is/isn’t in favor c) get people to buy the magazine.
People who really need to be on the list:
-Bob Dylan
-William Mullholland
-Ken Kesey
-Carl Sagan
-Jimmy Hoffa
-JFK
It seems like this list is skewed in the same way that VH-1 countdown specials are. It’s a snapshot of what would a) placate the greatest number of history snobs that care about such things, b) reflect current status of who is/isn’t in favor c) get people to buy the magazine.
definitely, for at least some of the choiecs, but looking at it again, it is pretty on the money in other areas. where it seems to break down is in the last 60 years or so, ie in the lifetimes of those who put it together. it’s like a serious list with an overlay of boomer navelgazing. a mashup of stars and stripes forever, appalachian spring (ahem) and we didn’t start the fire.
they should have some balls and try to understand who’s influential now.
also, bill gates as a stand in for all tech dudes is pretty lame.
In one of the sidebars in the print edition Dylan tops (or is at least on) the list of 8–10 influential musicians.
paul revere
I have nothing wrong with the list, but the blurbs make me want to puke.
not including jfk is nutty: i think the dude who presided over the cuban missile crisis deserves a place above dr spock.
frederick douglass ought to be at least ten spaces higher.
Also, i don’t like how this list disrespects the many years of service that Colonel Sanders gave to our country.
John F. Kennedy: Not as good at baseball as Jackie Robinson.
I blame Sandra Tsing Loh.
OTM.
I guess Dubya’s “influence” can’t yet be judged, but as the nation may never recover from his reign he should be in the top ten by 2020.
Crick ain’t on the list ’cause he’s a Brit.
xpost on George III, if he hadn’t pissed off so many people (via his government obv.) there would even be an America...
Walt Disney is more influential in US history than all women.
This may sadly be true, tho.
Well, it depends on who’s defining influential, no?
I guess Dubya’s “influence” can’t yet be judged, but as the nation may never recover from his reign he should be in the top ten by 2020.
The accompanying article more or less ends on this point. but i think they put the date at 2050.....
paul revere
Paul Revere should be #1 on this list, and Paul Revere and the Raiders should be #1 on the music list, and then RL Stevenson who wrote “Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” should top the authors list. Let’s revere him!