November 21, 2006
The 100 Most Influential Americans VI Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:45 PM EST I think lists of the most influential people are tough, especially when they are as expansive as this one, in part because influence is not the same thing as just celebrity. Hitler was surely the most influential Austrian who ever lived—he made the greatest change in the world—and while it is distressing to put him ahead of Mozart and Wittgenstein and Freud, his preeminence seems indisputable. A few random thoughts on this process: When you are an American, you do not always know how foreigners rate your countrymen, and it can be fascinating to find out. Sometime in the early or mid-1980s, an English friend, now professor of physics at Queens University in Belfast, was stupefied that I had never heard of Gibbs, in his view clearly the greatest American. Gibbs? I replied, faintly, and was told, with mounting incredulity, “Gibbs! Josiah Willard Gibbs!” My friend claimed that everyone knew about Gibbs. It turns out that between 1876 and 1878 this character had written On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances, and that this was perhaps the greatest scientific achievement of the nineteenth century. I at first assumed this was a brilliant deadpan joke, but when I eventually looked it up, I learned, to my astonishment, that this was a respectable claim. Max Planck, for example, had heard of Gibbs, “whose name not only in America but in the whole world will ever be reckoned among the most renowned theoretical physicists of all times . . .“ Go figure. Okay, who would I put on this list, who has not yet been proposed? William Tecumseh Sherman. Had Sherman not taken Atlanta before the 1864 Presidential election, it seems at least possible that McClellan would have won the Presidency, offered his promised truce, and eventually recognized the Confederate States of America. Lincoln deserves the No. 2 slot because Sherman let him finish the job. By the way, No. 43 seems ungenerous for Grant. If Lincoln is No. 2, let Grant and Sherman tie for No. 3. And how about John Walter Christie? In the late 1920s Christie invented a coil-spring suspension for tanks, which allowed considerably greater cross-country speed and a lower profile. The system was first introduced in Christie’s M1928 design, but the U.S. Army wasn’t interested. The Russians, however, got hold of the design in 1930 and later bought two of the M1931 model, which they imported without turrets, claiming that they were buying tractors. As it happens, John Walter Christie is at least the grandfather of the T34, and the T34 has as good a claim as any machine does to having won the Second World War.
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