Top 100 Most Influential Americans List

[greg334]

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY'S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL LIST

(I don't agree with number one, I think TR made more of a difference than Lincoln)

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

 

[terryandrene]

54 Bill Gates and 72 Sam Walton should be in the top ten; their influences will last long after we're all dead and buried. Additionally, their influence is worldwide, not just in America, as most others on that list

 

[RichM]

Alexander Graham Bell should be #1,where would we be without modern communications. Bill Gates and many of the others would not have accomplished much if they still had to use telegrams. I wouldn't be posting this on this topic if the telephone and all that came after it was never invented.

 

[Tennesseahawk]

I agree about Walton and Gates. They should be higher.

I was thinking the other day about inventors. In essence, they happened to be the first to discover something. It's only a matter of time before someone else would've come up with the same idea, or something similar. Bell was in competition with another telephone inventor, only Bell's idea was more practical. I was told Marconi stole the idea of wireless radio, and beat the original inventor to the patent office. Talk about cutthroat!

Personally, I think Woodrow Wilson should've been higher. Being the man who signed the income tax into law, and declared our country's true power, money (the Federal Reserve), to be turned over to a private entity, he's done more to screw up this country than anyone else. Not to mention he pushed us into a war he promised to stay neutral in.

Yes... TR should've been #1. But most influential also means in PR. Just the name Lincoln has a meaning TR could never reach.

"If I claim to be a wise man, it surely means that I don't know." - Kansas

 

[Tennesseahawk]

A couple are missing. Where's Mohammed Ali?

Jack Johnson, the first black heavy weight champ, caused the country to search for a "Great White Hope" for the better part of a decade. I still think he could've laid out Ali or Tyson in their prime.

"If I claim to be a wise man, it surely means that I don't know." - Kansas

 

[ACE]

I think Henry Ford should be closer to the top.

 

[highway star]

Ali would be a much better choice for the list than the Babe. Ali's stance on the war gave him a high profile position in the most controversial issue of that era. The Babe played pretty good ball for a guy that was terminally hung-over, but a significant influence on our society? I think sports guys need their own list.

 

[Tennesseahawk]

Baseball was huge around Babe's time, which made him larger than life. He wasn't vocal outside of the sport, except when it came to kids he visited in the hospital. Ali, besides his war opposition, was just as big in boxing as Babe was in baseball. But because baseball was a way of life... go to work, go home, beat the wife, take the kids to the ballgame... Babe was everything. At that time, you could say he WAS entertainment for a good majority of Americans, because he WAS baseball. Ali fought a couple times a year, so he wasn't everything Babe was. But I would say he belongs in the top 100.

"If I claim to be a wise man, it surely means that I don't know." - Kansas