November 21, 2006
The 100 Most Influential Americans V Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:35 PM EST When I was a graduate student at Brown University, it was my good fortune to take three courses with Gordon Wood, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian of early America, who served with John Steele Gordon on The Atlantic Monthly’s “100 Most Influential Americans” panel. My primary graduate adviser was James T. Patterson, a Bancroft Prize winner whose work on the modern American experience is second to none. While Patterson and Wood have been close friends for over 30 years, interestingly, Wood has traditionally agreed to serve on panels like this, while Patterson (who has written some book reviews for The Atlantic Monthly) generally turns down the invitations. As I remember it, his argument is that compiling lists of the “greatest Presidents” or the most “influential Americans” is folly, and that it degrades the more subtle forces at work in forging the American experience. I agree with Patterson’s rationale, but I can’t help wonder why anyone would turn down such a fun invitation. I don’t want to quibble with Mr. Gordon’s selections, but he does seem to have strained to find a few women and people of color to include in his list. In fact, he names only four women: Harriet Beecher Stowe, the great abolitionist novelist; Rachel Carson, the environmentalist who wrote Silent Spring; Julia Child, one of the first, and arguably the greatest, of the television chefs; and Oprah Winfrey, who needs no introduction. One of the dangers of compiling these lists is that they will invariably be very white and very male. If we start from the assumption that people drive history, and that elite actors make a greater impact than non-elite actors by virtue of their power and prestige, then these lists must skew away from women and people of color. But what about Margaret Sanger, the great birth-control pioneer, or Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, who brought feminism to millions of ordinary American women in the 1960s and 1970s? How, for that matter, does Martin Luther King, Jr., not rank in the top ten? His impact on American society was arguably much greater than Alexander Hamilton’s or Andrew Jackson’s (both of whom should certainly rank high on the list, as they do in Mr. Gordon’s version). Mr. Gordon includes Earl Warren, the chief justice whose court greatly broadened American civil liberties, but not Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP lawyer (and later Supreme Court justice) who developed the logic behind the Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Mr. Gordon includes Harriet Beecher Stowe, but what about Frederick Douglass, the great African-American political leader? His list includes Walter Reuther, but not Cesar Chavez. I would also argue that Mr. Gordon’s list includes too many business innovators, and too few religious figures. Surely in a country that has long been host to a fervent evangelical movement, and in which politics and Christianity have long existed in creative tension, the names Charles Grandison Finney, Lyman Beecher, Jonathan Edwards, Billy Sunday, and Billy Graham deserve mention. For that matter, how about John Hughes, the Catholic bishop who forged the modern American church in the nineteenth century, or Francis Cardinal Spellman, the “archbishop of the Cold War,” who helped bring American Catholics into the political mainstream in the 1950s? From an arts and literature standpoint, how about Hawthorne and Melville? Why Lorenz Hart but not Aaron Copland or Leonard Bernstein? Stephen Foster, yes, but Woody Guthrie, no? How about Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong? As Mr. Gordon said, “there can be, probably will be, and certainly should be endless debate over who does and does not deserve a spot on the list.” Maybe the problem is that 100 slots is 100 too few.
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