Old Hickory vs. the Great Communicator

Revised with a musical correction courtesy of Chris Quinones.

The Atlantic has published its list of the 100 Most Influential Americans of All Time.

Possibly unnecessary apology:  I'm pretty sure the list is available to the general public.  Ross Douthat's article accompanying it is only available to subscribers.  If you can't access the list, drop me a line and I'll email it to you.  Ditto with the article.

It's not a particularly controversial list.  A list that starts off with Abe Lincoln, George Washington, Tom Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Alexander Hamilton in the top five slots has left port already steering a pretty safe course between the Scylla of revisionism and an iconoclastic Charybdis.  (Ben Franklin's number 6, Martin Luther King is 8, and Tom Edison, the first non-political figure on the list, is number 9.)  The list's interest factor is mostly in its usefulness for jogging memory and reminding us that there are more, and more profound, ways to change the world than through politics.

The list includes Cyrus McCormick, for inventing the reaper that mechanized farming and made it possible for farmers to feed the entire nation and not just themselves and their immediate neighbors; Frederick Law Olmstead, for making us love city parks; Jonas Salk, for freeing us from the fear of polio; Stephen Foster, for everybody knowing what song the Camptown ladies sing all the doo dah day; and Babe Ruth for hitting them harder, farther, higher, and with more panache than anyone had done before.

I suppose you could take issue with how few women are on the list or object that the women there are the usual suspects:  Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jane Addams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Eleanor Roosevelt...Nice to see Margaret Sanger on the list for making it possible for women to enjoy sex and save themselves from becoming baby making machines.

The only argument I have with the list comes at the Numbers 17 and 18 spots.

Ronald Reagan is ranked above Andrew Jackson.

Here's what the editors say about Reagan:  "The amiable architect of both the conservative realignment and the Cold War's end."

And this is their take on Jackson:  "The first great populist: he found America a republic and left it a democracy."

Leaving aside the question of whether or not Reagan really belongs on the list at all---and I'd argue that on any list that ranks Richard Nixon at 99 and Herman Melville at 100, he doesn't---don't you think that a President who permanently changed the soul and identity of the nation ought to rank above one who caused a temporary shift in the way the nation runs its bureaucracy?

As for Reagan being the architect of either the conservative realignment or the end of the Cold War, horseraddish!

Reagan was at best the conservative movement's great fighting general.  He was its Patton, not its George Marshall, and not even its Eisenhower.  He led the charge, but he didn't organize, mobilize, or strategize anything on his own.

He spoke for the movement and spoke well.  But the ideas weren't his own.  Rhetorically, to change wars in mid-metaphor, he was to the Movement what Tom Paine was to the American Revolution.

He was certainly not its Thomas Jefferson or even its John Adams.

And, of course, the conservative realignment has turned out to have been merely the Southernizing of the Republican Party, which Richard Nixon engineered and Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, and Karl Rove drove into the ground.

Lead times for magazines being what they are, the list was put together long before this past election, but the trends were there for the editors and judges to see and it has always been debatable as to whether or not the Reagan Revolution was a conservative revolution or just that, Reagan's Revolution.

Reagan's personal appeal and winning ways made it faddish for people to identify themselves as conservatives and vote Republican, but no polls have ever shown that the American people have agreed to forget the New Deal or accept the Religious Right's dreams of a theocratic quasi-monarchy.

In fact, until George Bush climbed atop the rubble with his bullhorn, arguing that there had been a real conservative shift in the country was mostly a matter of counting heads in Congress and the governors' mansions.  The Right had been able to advance very little of its agenda anywhere, even while the wildly popular Reagan was supposedly doing the realigning, thanks mainly to two men, Tip O'Neill and Bill Clinton, neither of whom is on the list.

If Reagan at number 17 couldn't get anything of lasting import done, it seems to me that the men who stymied him and his avatar Newt Gingrich ought to get at least an honorable mention.

And if the realignment was just a matter of controlling state houses and Congress, well, that was the result of a couple of demographic shifts that were actually causing the country to trend blue not red, one actuarial and the other geographic.

In the 1980s the generation that had come of age under Franklin Roosevelt was passing.  They were being replaced as a political force by their more conservative because more complacent but also more paranoid younger brothers and sisters who'd liked Ike and watched the sky for Soviet missles and by the older baby boomers who had begun to rake in money by the sackful in the late 1970s and didn't like how much of they had to scoop out of their sacks to give to Uncle Sam.

If Reagan succeeded at changing the nation's collective minds about anything it was about the idea that we need to pay our way as we go. Ronald Reagan sold the boomers on the idea that it was ok to hate paying taxes but love all the benefits of Big Government.  The man who came to office supposedly to teach us that there was no such thing as a free lunch wound up offering everybody second and third helpings.

Hardly a conservative idea and not one that was tenable.

Now, facing their own retirements and celebrating the births of their grandchildren, the Boomers are looking at the prospect of a bankrupted treasury and a state of permanent war run by ideologically deluded and incompetent Right Wing kooks and thinking that maybe it wouldn't hurt to be a little bit truly conservative, which is to say, Liberal.

In a nation founded on the ideas of permanent experiment and progress as a generally good thing, the view that change should be controlled and we need to pay for it as we go is the conservative position.

Reagan didn't bring that about on purpose.

And it's turning out that the Boomers' children and their children's children who are approaching voting age are in many ways more liberal than their parents were in their hippie-dippy salad days.

When the last Eisenhower Republicans and Reagan Democrats leave the scene, they will leave a generation of Al Gore Democrats in charge.

Meanwhile, beginning in the 1970s and continuing until recently, there was a great population shift from the Northeast and the Rust Belt to the South and the Sun Belt.  This had the effect of cutting down the former states' representation in Congress while increasing the latter's without actually changing the philosophical and political outlook of the nation as a whole.

What happened was that a lot of those people who moved South and Southwest found that they had accidentally but essentially disenfranchised themselves.  Their votes were negated by the votes of their many conservative new neighbors while their presence in the neighborhood added to their neighbors' influence in Congress and the State House.

But over time more formerly Blue State voters have gone to join up with those already down there and out there while the actuarial shift has also affected the Red States.

The Southwest and the Rocky Mountain States are trending blue faster, but a solidly red south is probably also on its way out over the next generation.

And it seems to me that if there really had been a realignment then Reagan's self-styled heir apparent, George W. Bush, shouldn't have needed to have stolen an election to become President or required the boost of 9/11 and Karl Rove's vicious gay bashing strategy to win re-election, and that he shouldn't have had to lie or sneak in the backdoor or bring about through executive fiat the relatively few (so far) Right Wing successes he's had.

However far right Bush has managed to move the country, he hasn't done it by persuasion or reaching a general concensus.

You'd think that if Reagan had brought about a true realignment, Bush would have had an easier and more straight-forward time of it.

I haven't even raised the subject of abortion, which, it could be aruged, had more to do with the Republican resurgence than anything else.

Reagan and Newt happened to be on the scene when the demographics were in a state of flux that temporarily gave disporportionate influence to more conservative voters, but the waters are subsiding and it is already clear that at least one of the things Reagan did to get himself listed high on the Atlantic's list he didn't really do.

The other thing he did, bring about the end of the Cold War---I guess that's true, as long as you ignore Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Dean Rusk, George Marshall, George Kennan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Lech Walesa, and Pope John Paul II.

Reagan happened to be the captain on deck to accept the surrender when the Soviet ship of state, which had been taking on water for decades, finally began to sink beneath the waves.

The good thing he did---the very good thing---was ignore the neo-cons in his own administration who were screaming that no, the Soviets' boat wasn't sinking, it wasn't even one leaky boat, it was an entire fleet of heavy cruisers steaming at us with the crews at battle stations and all guns at the ready and missles ready to launch.

Reagan saw that the old tub was hulled at the waterline and instead of torpedoing it as it was going down, as the neo-cons and Right Wingers wanted, he sailed over to come to its aid.  For that he deserves a lot of credit, but I don't think he deserves so much that he should rank above Andrew Jackson.

The editors of the Atlantic are engaging in a little hyperbole when they credit Jackson with turning the country into a democracy.  He moved it farther towards one though and set the stage for future moves in that direction.  But the Atlantic doesn't mention something else he did that was crucial to the survival of the nation.

Jackson put off the Civil War for a generation.  He held the Union together, and he not only resisted calls to expand the territory of the slave states (Texas had to wait for James Polk, who is on the list at number 50 for stealing the Southwest from Mexico.), he curtailed its expansion.

He was far from a perfect President, as the Cherokee people can testify.

But I think preserving the Union and expanding democracy ought to get him ranked above the President who decided pickles are a vegetable in order to save the taxpayers a few bucks.
_________________________________________

All I know about Andrew Jackson I know from reading The Age of Jackson by Arthur Schlesinger and Robert V. Remini's The Life of Andrew Jackson.

Here are some of my favorite histories and biographies.

Revised with a musical correction courtesy of Chris Quinones.

The Atlantic has published its list of the 100 Most Influential Americans of All Time.

Possibly unnecessary apology:  I'm pretty sure the list is available to the general public.  Ross Douthat's article accompanying it is only available to subscribers.  If you can't access the list, drop me a line and I'll email it to you.  Ditto with the article.

It's not a particularly controversial list.  A list that starts off with Abe Lincoln, George Washington, Tom Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Alexander Hamilton in the top five slots has left port already steering a pretty safe course between the Scylla of revisionism and an iconoclastic Charybdis.  (Ben Franklin's number 6, Martin Luther King is 8, and Tom Edison, the first non-political figure on the list, is number 9.)  The list's interest factor is mostly in its usefulness for jogging memory and reminding us that there are more, and more profound, ways to change the world than through politics.

The list includes Cyrus McCormick, for inventing the reaper that mechanized farming and made it possible for farmers to feed the entire nation and not just themselves and their immediate neighbors; Frederick Law Olmstead, for making us love city parks; Jonas Salk, for freeing us from the fear of polio; Stephen Foster, for everybody knowing what song the Camptown ladies sing all the doo dah day; and Babe Ruth for hitting them harder, farther, higher, and with more panache than anyone had done before.

I suppose you could take issue with how few women are on the list or object that the women there are the usual suspects:  Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jane Addams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Eleanor Roosevelt...Nice to see Margaret Sanger on the list for making it possible for women to enjoy sex and save themselves from becoming baby making machines.

The only argument I have with the list comes at the Numbers 17 and 18 spots.

Ronald Reagan is ranked above Andrew Jackson.

Here's what the editors say about Reagan:  "The amiable architect of both the conservative realignment and the Cold War's end."

And this is their take on Jackson:  "The first great populist: he found America a republic and left it a democracy."

Leaving aside the question of whether or not Reagan really belongs on the list at all---and I'd argue that on any list that ranks Richard Nixon at 99 and Herman Melville at 100, he doesn't---don't you think that a President who permanently changed the soul and identity of the nation ought to rank above one who caused a temporary shift in the way the nation runs its bureaucracy?

As for Reagan being the architect of either the conservative realignment or the end of the Cold War, horseraddish!

Reagan was at best the conservative movement's great fighting general.  He was its Patton, not its George Marshall, and not even its Eisenhower.  He led the charge, but he didn't organize, mobilize, or strategize anything on his own.

He spoke for the movement and spoke well.  But the ideas weren't his own.  Rhetorically, to change wars in mid-metaphor, he was to the Movement what Tom Paine was to the American Revolution.

He was certainly not its Thomas Jefferson or even its John Adams.

And, of course, the conservative realignment has turned out to have been merely the Southernizing of the Republican Party, which Richard Nixon engineered and Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, and Karl Rove drove into the ground.

Lead times for magazines being what they are, the list was put together long before this past election, but the trends were there for the editors and judges to see and it has always been debatable as to whether or not the Reagan Revolution was a conservative revolution or just that, Reagan's Revolution.

Reagan's personal appeal and winning ways made it faddish for people to identify themselves as conservatives and vote Republican, but no polls have ever shown that the American people have agreed to forget the New Deal or accept the Religious Right's dreams of a theocratic quasi-monarchy.

In fact, until George Bush climbed atop the rubble with his bullhorn, arguing that there had been a real conservative shift in the country was mostly a matter of counting heads in Congress and the governors' mansions.  The Right had been able to advance very little of its agenda anywhere, even while the wildly popular Reagan was supposedly doing the realigning, thanks mainly to two men, Tip O'Neill and Bill Clinton, neither of whom is on the list.

If Reagan at number 17 couldn't get anything of lasting import done, it seems to me that the men who stymied him and his avatar Newt Gingrich ought to get at least an honorable mention.

And if the realignment was just a matter of controlling state houses and Congress, well, that was the result of a couple of demographic shifts that were actually causing the country to trend blue not red, one actuarial and the other geographic.

In the 1980s the generation that had come of age under Franklin Roosevelt was passing.  They were being replaced as a political force by their more conservative because more complacent but also more paranoid younger brothers and sisters who'd liked Ike and watched the sky for Soviet missles and by the older baby boomers who had begun to rake in money by the sackful in the late 1970s and didn't like how much of they had to scoop out of their sacks to give to Uncle Sam.

If Reagan succeeded at changing the nation's collective minds about anything it was about the idea that we need to pay our way as we go. Ronald Reagan sold the boomers on the idea that it was ok to hate paying taxes but love all the benefits of Big Government.  The man who came to office supposedly to teach us that there was no such thing as a free lunch wound up offering everybody second and third helpings.

Hardly a conservative idea and not one that was tenable.

Now, facing their own retirements and celebrating the births of their grandchildren, the Boomers are looking at the prospect of a bankrupted treasury and a state of permanent war run by ideologically deluded and incompetent Right Wing kooks and thinking that maybe it wouldn't hurt to be a little bit truly conservative, which is to say, Liberal.

In a nation founded on the ideas of permanent experiment and progress as a generally good thing, the view that change should be controlled and we need to pay for it as we go is the conservative position.

Reagan didn't bring that about on purpose.

And it's turning out that the Boomers' children and their children's children who are approaching voting age are in many ways more liberal than their parents were in their hippie-dippy salad days.

When the last Eisenhower Republicans and Reagan Democrats leave the scene, they will leave a generation of Al Gore Democrats in charge.

Meanwhile, beginning in the 1970s and continuing until recently, there was a great population shift from the Northeast and the Rust Belt to the South and the Sun Belt.  This had the effect of cutting down the former states' representation in Congress while increasing the latter's without actually changing the philosophical and political outlook of the nation as a whole.

What happened was that a lot of those people who moved South and Southwest found that they had accidentally but essentially disenfranchised themselves.  Their votes were negated by the votes of their many conservative new neighbors while their presence in the neighborhood added to their neighbors' influence in Congress and the State House.

But over time more formerly Blue State voters have gone to join up with those already down there and out there while the actuarial shift has also affected the Red States.

The Southwest and the Rocky Mountain States are trending blue faster, but a solidly red south is probably also on its way out over the next generation.

And it seems to me that if there really had been a realignment then Reagan's self-styled heir apparent, George W. Bush, shouldn't have needed to have stolen an election to become President or required the boost of 9/11 and Karl Rove's vicious gay bashing strategy to win re-election, and that he shouldn't have had to lie or sneak in the backdoor or bring about through executive fiat the relatively few (so far) Right Wing successes he's had.

However far right Bush has managed to move the country, he hasn't done it by persuasion or reaching a general concensus.

You'd think that if Reagan had brought about a true realignment, Bush would have had an easier and more straight-forward time of it.

I haven't even raised the subject of abortion, which, it could be aruged, had more to do with the Republican resurgence than anything else.

Reagan and Newt happened to be on the scene when the demographics were in a state of flux that temporarily gave disporportionate influence to more conservative voters, but the waters are subsiding and it is already clear that at least one of the things Reagan did to get himself listed high on the Atlantic's list he didn't really do.

The other thing he did, bring about the end of the Cold War---I guess that's true, as long as you ignore Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Dean Rusk, George Marshall, George Kennan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Lech Walesa, and Pope John Paul II.

Reagan happened to be the captain on deck to accept the surrender when the Soviet ship of state, which had been taking on water for decades, finally began to sink beneath the waves.

The good thing he did---the very good thing---was ignore the neo-cons in his own administration who were screaming that no, the Soviets' boat wasn't sinking, it wasn't even one leaky boat, it was an entire fleet of heavy cruisers steaming at us with the crews at battle stations and all guns at the ready and missles ready to launch.

Reagan saw that the old tub was hulled at the waterline and instead of torpedoing it as it was going down, as the neo-cons and Right Wingers wanted, he sailed over to come to its aid.  For that he deserves a lot of credit, but I don't think he deserves so much that he should rank above Andrew Jackson.

The editors of the Atlantic are engaging in a little hyperbole when they credit Jackson with turning the country into a democracy.  He moved it farther towards one though and set the stage for future moves in that direction.  But the Atlantic doesn't mention something else he did that was crucial to the survival of the nation.

Jackson put off the Civil War for a generation.  He held the Union together, and he not only resisted calls to expand the territory of the slave states (Texas had to wait for James Polk, who is on the list at number 50 for stealing the Southwest from Mexico.), he curtailed its expansion.

He was far from a perfect President, as the Cherokee people can testify.

But I think preserving the Union and expanding democracy ought to get him ranked above the President who decided pickles are a vegetable in order to save the taxpayers a few bucks.
_________________________________________

All I know about Andrew Jackson I know from reading The Age of Jackson by Arthur Schlesinger and Robert V. Remini's The Life of Andrew Jackson.

Here are some of my favorite histories and biographies.

Comments

[Jennifer]

I thought it was ketchup.

[MoXmas]

Once you get past the Top 10 or so -- which are the historical version of "which is the best rock song of all time, "Stairway to Heaven", "Let It Be" or "Bohemian Rhapsody" -- the list has some truly bonkers placements.

Your takedown of the Reagan caretaker presidency is right on. Hell, I would (and have) argue that Jerry Ford was debatably the most important President post-WW2 (stabilized the country after a constitutional crisis, put Helsinki Accords in place, signed the SALT treaty, etc.). Reagan was Warren Harding by comparison.

But some of the choices loower down on the list are just incomprehensible. Sam Walton instead of Richard Sears? The Sears Catalog was a defining document for most of America for over 60 years. Wal-Mart has been a supply chain and worker abuse sucess story for about 20 years, a place that many people are vaguely embarassed to shop at.

Putting Sam Walton on instead of Sears is like putting Oral Roberts on instead of Jonathan Edwards, just because Roberts gave liturgical justification for sucking cash out of evangelical congregations.

And some of the names are just space filler, or better represented by other names on the list: Lyman Beecher, Ralph Nader, Mary Baker Eddy, Rachel Carson?

I'll give you a Walter Reuther (sit down strikes and the real golden age of labor), Curt Flood (free agency defines much of the modern workplace, not just sports), Billy Graham (made TV preachin' acceptable) and Thomas Watson (founder of IBM).

And putting Einstein and Enrico Fermi on the list is just cheating.

It's also kind of sad that the first MAN ON ANOTHER PLANET isn't on the list, but that's typical of the way exploration is treated nowadays. Lewis and Clark? Cool. Neil Armstrong? Who?

[Td Raicer]

They included RWR because they knew they would get a lot of hate mail if they didn't and it would be more proof of the Liberal Media Conspiracy. That's all.

[Campaspe]

Wait a minute - the only film figures are Goldwyn and Walt Disney? Come again? No John Ford, no LB Mayer, no Jack Warner or DW Griffith or John Wayne or any of the others who shaped our 20th century mythology? Are they cracked? All right, this is special pleading on my part, perhaps. But I do think our vision of the frontier owes a hell of a lot more to Ford than musty old James Fenimore Cooper.

[Campaspe]

and Welles?? What about Welles? OK, I will stop now ...

[Kate Marie]

Lance,

I disagree with you about Reagan. He deserves his place on the list. And I'd quibble with you about your characterization of the neo-cons who wanted to torpedo the Soviet ship of state while it was sinking. I'm not sure which neo-cons you're referring to, but in any event, there were plenty of Sovietologists who as recently as the late Seventies were declaring the Soviet Union stable for the foreseeable future. Robert Conquest is a good person to read on that point.

Lists like these are always fun, though. I was surprised, and pleased, to see William James on the list, though "angel" Harry will always be my favorite James brother.

[Exiled in New Jersey]

Gosh, Kate Marie, my favorite James brother was Frank; Jessie was a little too wifty.

The Atlantic and others publish these lists just to remind many of us that they are still breathing.

[Kate Marie]

I forgot about *those* James brothers, Exiled.

I still say *my* James brothers could kick *your* James brothers' asses every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

[Chris Quinones]

Hey, Lance. Been a while.

Nitpick: Al Jolson's "Swanee" was written by George Gershwin, with words by Irving Caesar.

Speaking of which, they got Elvis and Louis Armstrong, but left Gershwin out? and Ellington, and Bernstein, and Rodgers, and Hammerstein...

[Raenelle]

Someone who never makes these lists, but should: Bill Wilson. If you don't know who he is, fair enough; he preferred anonymity anyway. But he saved the lives of millions, including mine, and listmakers should have heard of him, anonymity or no.

[Kate Marie]

Raenelle,

Bill Wilson is a very good choice. It's interesting you should mention him, because he said he was inspired to create AA partly by his reading of James's Varieties of Religious Experience, with its accounts of religious conversion and the importance of ego collapse in the process of conversion.

[David W.]

Gad, when I saw that "Bedtime for Bonzo" Reagan was rated above Andy Jackson (who won the Battle of New Orleans before becoming President, dude), I put the copy of The Atlantic I was reading at the bookstore quietly back up on the rack. What was once a fairly informative liberal read has now become little more than a pretentious neo-con rag, IMNSHO. Then again, I knew that when they published the goofy work of David "Bobos" Brooks that they were on the downside of the intellectual slope.

[Lance]

Chris Quinones: Nitpick: Al Jolson's "Swanee" was written by George Gershwin, with words by Irving Caesar.

Chris, that's not a nitpick. That was a major goof on my part. Thanks for catching it. I revised the reference, with attribution.

KM, I'm with you on the James Bros. I'm also a fan of the Smith Bros., Marx Bros., Ritz Bros., and Smothers Bros. But William and Henry are the only brother act I'd put on the list.

The Ringling Bros. sort of sneak in there with PT Barnum.

[Claire]

But some of the choices loower down on the list are just incomprehensible. Sam Walton instead of Richard Sears? The Sears Catalog was a defining document for most of America for over 60 years.

MoXmas is completely right. Not only was the Sears Catalog a staple but Sears himself changed the way people bought things.

I also agree that there were too many musicians left out. Though I was pleased to see Olmstead, Wright and Sullivan up there.

An interesting list, but lists like this can never be definitive.

[Jennifer]

You know, I've been thinking... if they have Margaret Sanger on the list (which they should), should they not also have Gregory Pincus, who was responsible for the applicable science end of what Margaret was after?? I am guessing there are many Americans who have been influenced by the work of Gregory Pincus.

And if not Pincus, then how about Charles Goodyear and his invention of vulcanized rubber.

[FW]

More lists. I just went through the Levine blog and the 100 tv catchphrases. Please, no more lists. The list-making has no valid logic to it, or reason-for-being, other than getting the response such as you have written. These lists exist to argue about them and that substantiates them in some odd reverse logic. In that way, I suppose the fact that there will be arguing as to the former actor, President Reagan being worthy of being on the list at all, is the reason he is on the list.

[Greg]

FWIW, Raenelle, Bill Wilson was on Time's list for the most influential of the 20th Century.

I agree that it's a disgrace that there weren't more and better filmmakers on the list. But what about TV? Where are Lucille Ball, Jim Henson, Gene Roddenberry, Oprah, Matt Groening, or Ted Turner?

[KC45s]

I like the Sears suggestion a lot. Good show.

I also agree that a definitive name or two from the world of TV belong on the list. Television is one of America's most popular exports, always has been, and as such one of the ways the rest of the world sees us (for better and for worse). It's also the single invention that most changed social habits, the movie industry, sports, cuisine, and a lot of other things since 1950.

Let me add that I was at first scandalized that Superman did not make the list. Then I remembered he's from Krypton. Though that American Way schtick should count for something, shouldn't it?

[Jim]

the list is biased by a northern slant, and is also lacking native Americans. Lincoln should be noted for violently oppressing a region, and therefore, should be further down the list. Jeff Davis should have made the list.

FDR should be noted for the creation of the welfare state, and LBJ noted for expanding welfare and not completing our moral obligation to win Vietnam. Clinton should be mentioned for fortunate welfare reform with his "welfare to work" legislation.

Capitalists like Milton Friedman and Gary Becker should also be there for defending free markets and the engines of economic growth which saved countless lives all over the world.

[Ed D.]

Ok, Steve Martin did this bit on Johnny Carson where he came out as a stoned, aged like cheese, rock critic. Long silver locks and that smarmy I'm much smarter than you look. He pontificated about the three "big Ms" of rock and roll: McCartney, Morrison and... Manilow. Yep. These lists always have a 1 in 3 sour note.

As for Ronnie R. I'd always thought him a lightweight while reserving the benefit of the doubt for him. Then I saw a PBS frontline or something about him and gained new respect for him. He worked on his own speeches and wrote volumes of letters. He had a developed sense of where the country should be going, worked out over years of political involvement. BUT - just like Andy Panda, he succumbed to "Up Jumped the Devil." He convinced much of America that greed and selfishness were just great. Wrap them in an easily summarized economic theory, present them with glowing mountaintop visions of America and away we go. I think many folks like him simply because he validated their own tendencies(yes, we all have them) to selfishness and greed. I'm not saying he doesn't have valid, well thought out ideas. But in my experience most of the supporters of Reagan's legacy are those who now feel at ease with their lower values. Free market economics were based on self-interest which Adam Smith differentiated from monetary selfishness. To him it was the admiration of your neighbors that mattered most in life. Charity of the heart was part of it. Reagan promoted iconoclastic individuality and devalued our community effort at freedom called 'government.' That is his great sin - he convinced so many that "the government" is some distant "them" rather than a collective version of "us." He radically changed the vision of democratic government to being one from which we the people are detached. Nice guy, but I don't think he fully understood the longer term effects of his underlying spiritual/political message.

[Enlightenment]

It's worse than you think.

"In fact, until George Bush climbed atop the rubble with his bullhorn..."

Since the Bush regime loves to trot out the bloody banner of 9/11 to try to "justify" every new atrocity, let’s take a few moments and look at some of the details of that horrible event that precipitated the "war on terror", the event without which the Bush regime would never have been able to scare most Americans into thinking it was necessary to invade Iraq, the event around which America’s foreign policy has been inextricably wrapped ever since that awful morning.

One thing that struck me as odd in the days after 9/11 was Bush saying "We will not tolerate conspiracy theories [regarding 9/11]". Sure enough there have been some wacky conspiracy theories surrounding the events of that day. The most far-fetched and patently ridiculous one that I've ever heard goes like this: Nineteen hijackers who claimed to be devout Muslims but yet were so un-Muslim as to be getting drunk all the time, doing cocaine and frequenting strip clubs decided to hijack four airliners and fly them into buildings in the northeastern U.S., the area of the country that is the most thick with fighter bases. After leaving a Koran on a barstool at a strip bar after getting shitfaced drunk on the night before, then writing a suicide note/inspirational letter that sounded like it was written by someone with next to no knowledge of Islam, they went to bed and got up the next morning hung over and carried out their devious plan. Nevermind the fact that of the four "pilots" among them there was not a one that could handle a Cessna or a Piper Cub let alone fly a jumbo jet, and the one assigned the most difficult task of all, Hani Hanjour, was so laughably incompetent that he was the worst fake "pilot" of the bunch, with someone who was there when he was attempting to fly a small airplane saying that Hanjour was so clumsy that he was unsure if he had driven a car before. Nevermind the fact that they received very rudimentary flight training at Pensacola Naval Air Station, making them more likely to have been C.I.A. assets than Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. So on to the airports after Mohammed Atta supposedly leaves two rental cars at two impossibly far-removed locations. So they hijack all four airliners and at this time passengers on United 93 start making a bunch of cell phone calls from 35,000 feet in the air to tell people what was going on. Nevermind the fact that cell phones wouldn't work very well above 4,000 feet, and wouldn't work at ALL above 8,000 feet. But the conspiracy theorists won't let that fact get in the way of a good fantasy. That is one of the little things you "aren't supposed to think about". Nevermind that one of the callers called his mom and said his first and last name ("Hi mom, this is Mark Bingham"), more like he was reading from a list than calling his own mom. Anyway, when these airliners each deviated from their flight plan and didn't respond to ground control, NORAD would any other time have followed standard operating procedure (and did NOT have to be told by F.A.A. that there were hijackings because they were watching the same events unfold on their own radar) which means fighter jets would be scrambled from the nearest base where they were available on standby within a few minutes, just like every other time when airliners stray off course. But of course on 9/11 this didn't happen, not even close. Somehow these "hijackers" must have used magical powers to cause NORAD to stand down, as ridiculous as this sounds because total inaction from the most high-tech and professional Air Force in the world would be necessary to carry out their tasks. So on the most important day in its history the Air Force was totally worthless. Then they had to make one of the airliners look like a smaller plane, because unknown to them the Naudet brothers had a videocamera to capture the only known footage of the North Tower crash, and this footage shows something that is not at all like a jumbo jet, but didn't have to bother with the South Tower jet disguising itself because that was the one we were "supposed to see". Anyway, as for the Pentagon they had to have Hani Hanjour fly his airliner like it was a fighter plane, making a high G-force corkscrew turn that no real airliner can do, in making its descent to strike the Pentagon. But these "hijackers" wanted to make sure Rumsfeld survived so they went out of their way to hit the farthest point in the building from where Rumsfeld and the top brass are located. And this worked out rather well for the military personnel in the Pentagon, since the side that was hit was the part that was under renovation at the time with few military personnel present compared to construction workers. Still more fortuitous for the Pentagon, the side that was hit had just before 9/11 been structurally reinforced to prevent a large fire there from spreading elsewhere in the building. Awful nice of them to pick that part to hit, huh? Then the airliner vaporized itself into nothing but tiny unidentifiable pieces most no bigger than a fist, unlike the crash of a real airliner when you will be able to see at least some identifiable parts, like crumpled wings, broken tail section etc. Why, Hani Hanjour the terrible pilot flew that airliner so good that even though he hit the Pentagon on the ground floor the engines didn't even drag the ground!! Imagine that!! Though the airliner vaporized itself on impact it only made a tiny 16 foot hole in the building. Amazing. Meanwhile, though the planes hitting the Twin Towers caused fires small enough for the firefighters to be heard on their radios saying "We just need 2 hoses and we can knock this fire down" attesting to the small size of it, somehow they must have used magical powers from beyond the grave to make this morph into a raging inferno capable of making the steel on all forty-seven main support columns (not to mention the over 100 smaller support columns) soften and buckle, then all fail at once. Hmmm. Then still more magic was used to make the building totally defy physics as well as common sense in having the uppermost floors pass through the remainder of the building as quickly, meaning as effortlessly, as falling through air, a feat that without magic could only be done with explosives. Then exactly 30 minutes later the North Tower collapses in precisely the same freefall physics-defying manner. Incredible. Not to mention the fact that both collapsed at a uniform rate too, not slowing down, which also defies physics because as the uppermost floors crash into and through each successive floor beneath them they would shed more and more energy each time, thus slowing itself down. Common sense tells you this is not possible without either the hijackers' magical powers or explosives. To emphasize their telekinetic prowess, later in the day they made a third building, WTC # 7, collapse also at freefall rate though no plane or any major debris hit it. Amazing guys these magical hijackers. But we know it had to be "Muslim hijackers" the conspiracy theorist will tell you because (now don't laugh) one of their passports was "found" a couple days later near Ground Zero, miraculously "surviving" the fire that we were told incinerated planes, passengers and black boxes, and also "survived" the collapse of the building it was in. When common sense tells you if that were true then they should start making buildings and airliners out of heavy paper and plastic so as to be "indestructable" like that magic passport. The hijackers even used their magical powers to bring at least seven of their number back to life, to appear at american embassies outraged at being blamed for 9/11!! BBC reported on that and it is still online. Nevertheless, they also used magical powers to make the american government look like it was covering something up in the aftermath of this, what with the hasty removal of the steel debris and having it driven to ports in trucks with GPS locators on them, to be shipped overseas to China and India to be melted down. When common sense again tells you that this is paradoxical in that if the steel was so unimportant that they didn't bother saving some for analysis but so important as to require GPS locators on the trucks with one driver losing his job because he stopped to get lunch. Hmmmm. Further making themselves look guilty, the Bush administration steadfastly refused for over a year to allow a commission to investigate 9/11 to even be formed, only agreeing to it on the conditions that they get to dictate its scope, meaning it was based on the false pretense of the "official story" being true with no other alternatives allowed to be considered, handpicked all its members making sure the ones picked had vested interests in the truth remaining buried, and with Bush and Cheney only "testifying" together, only for an hour, behind closed doors, with their attorneys present and with their "testimonies" not being recorded by tape or even written down in notes. Yes, this whole story smacks of the utmost idiocy and fantastic far-fetched lying, but it is amazingly enough what some people believe. Even now, five years later, the provably false fairy tale of the "nineteen hijackers" is heard repeated again and again, and is accepted without question by so many Americans. Which is itself a testament to the innate psychological cowardice of the American sheeple, i mean people, and their abject willingness to believe something, ANYTHING, no matter how ridiculous in order to avoid facing a scary uncomfortable truth. Time to wake up America.

[mac macgillicuddy]

The problem with lists is they are typically made up by people who have a bias, and those people are on deadline. This one really smacks of a bunch of white guys in cubicles standing up and shouting at one another across the room, "Shouldn't we add so and so?"

Anyway, the list is people who influenced life for "all time." That doesn't mean we have to like them, and it might even exclude people we like.

It's odd that Sullivan gets billing over Elisha Graves Otis, without whom Sullivan would have built his buildings lying down. But maybe the offices of The Atlantic have poorly running elevators, and hence their bias.

[Ken C.]

"Ben Franklin's number 6, Martin Luther King is 8, and Tom Edison, the first non-political figure on the list, is number 9."

Franklin and King were public figures, and did things of political importance, but were they really politicians?

"the wildly popular Reagan"

Not so: less popular than Clinton at comparable times, for example, except at the beginning.

Kate Marie: "...there were plenty of Sovietologists who as recently as the late Seventies were declaring the Soviet Union stable for the foreseeable future."

The fact that they were wrong isn't any credit to Reagan.

[The Constructivist]

With you on Reagan, but not on Jackson. Michael Paul Rogin, Reginald Horsman, and Anders Stephanson, among others, flesh out the case against Jackson. On the other hand, since "influential" doesn't just have to include praiseworthy accomplishments, maybe I'm with you, after all. BTW, Jackson was Hawthorne's favorite president, for what that's worth.