2006.12 美国历史上最有影响力的人物

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他们创造了美国
谁是美国历史上最有影响力的人物？大西洋报》最近询问了十位著名的历史学家。其结果是《大西洋》杂志的100强，以及对影响力的性质和历史的偶然性的一些见解。沃尔特-迪斯尼真的比伊丽莎白-卡迪-斯坦顿更有影响力吗？本杰明-斯波克比理查德-尼克松更有影响力？Elvis Presley比Lewis and Clark更有影响力？约翰-D-洛克菲勒比比尔-盖茨更有影响力？贝比-鲁斯比弗兰克-劳埃德-赖特？让辩论开始吧。

作者：罗斯-杜塔特
2006年12月号
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更多有影响力的人。

最佳生活影响者
获得小组成员投票的在世美国人

有影响力的建筑师
由迈克尔-J-刘易斯选择

有影响力的电影制片人
由大卫-汤姆森选择

有影响力的音乐家
特里-蒂格特（Terry Teachout）所选

有影响力的诗人
克里斯蒂安-维曼所选

有影响力的评论家
罗伯特-麦森格选择的

*前100名 *
[点击这里查看名单] 。

这是一个模糊的概念，影响力：当你看到它时，你就知道它，但定义却很难得到。不过，当我们在美国谈论历史时，往往是为了论证影响力，论证我们国家过去的人物如何塑造我们自己时代的美德和缺陷。

因此，取决于你相信谁，小布什要么是哈里-杜鲁门的合法继承人，要么是理查德-尼克松和林登-贝恩斯-约翰逊的私生子。他的批评者是沃尔特-杜兰蒂和简-方达的继承人，为暴君道歉--除非他们是爱德华-R-默罗和尤金-麦卡锡，大胆地对权力说实话。外交政策分析家们谈论现代的 "杰克逊主义者 "和 "威尔逊主义者"；平权行动的捍卫者和反对者都援引了小马丁-路德-金；每个人都把建国者当作自己的建国者--因为建国者的影响和榜样被认为是最重要的。

另请参见。

用他们自己的话说
在我们的历史学家小组选出的100名美国人中，有31人向《大西洋》杂志投稿。浏览他们的部分著作。

后续，《大西洋》100人
看看读者的反应。

祝贺我们的竞赛获胜者
看看谁的猜测与我们历史学家的选择最接近。
考虑到这些辩论，《大西洋月刊》最近请十位历史学家（见第76页的小组成员简历）撰写他们自己的100位最具影响力的美国人名单。为了强调共识，对投票进行了平均和加权处理--如果候选人出现在多张选票上，就会得到加分--结果就是本文所附的100人名单。在我们给小组成员的指示中，我们有意对影响力进行了宽泛的定义--一个人对他或她自己的时代和我们现在的生活方式的影响，不论是好是坏。这使得选择过程有了一定的创造性，而且它的好处是把更难的定义工作留给了历史学家自己。

其结果不可避免地是不科学的，因为将过去几个世纪中所有有影响力的美国人缩减到只有100个名字，更不用说给他们排名了，这是一项困难的任务。但最终的成果是有价值的，也是耐人寻味的，它提供了共识和争论的实例，以及我们在第三个美国世纪早期的国家记忆的快照。它并没有解决关于影响力和美国历史的争论，但它确实提供了一个讨论的起点。

任何试图得出历史排名的人都必须与某些问题作斗争。我们的小组成员沃尔特-麦克杜格尔（Walter McDougall）是宾夕法尼亚大学的教授，也是普利策奖得主，著有《天与地》。太空时代的政治历史》一书的作者，描述了他和他的同伴们在为我们的名单做出判断时面临的五个挑战。

影响力的定义。什么样的定义才能让我们对来自不同职业和生活领域的美国人进行排名--例如，将一位伟大的小说家的影响力与一位总统的影响力进行比较，或者将一位宗教领袖的影响力与一位企业家的影响力进行比较？或者说，什么样的定义可以将当今的人物与前几代人的男人和女人进行比较？像约翰-D-洛克菲勒（他最终在我们的名单上排名第11位）这样的十九世纪巨头的影响比比尔-克林顿的影响跨越更长的美国历史时期；另一方面，克林顿对我们现在生活方式的直接影响比洛克菲勒的影响更直接明显。根据什么标准在他们之间做出选择呢？

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成就的协作性。一旦你开始权衡创意与发明、总统与公司、今天的成就与过去的成就，另一个问题就出现了。谁应该得到荣誉？你是引用纳撒尼尔-霍桑写出了第一部伟大的美国小说，还是引用詹姆斯-费尼莫尔-库珀（83）使美国小说成为可能？谁应该为宪法，或电影业，或爵士乐的诞生而记功？"哈里特-比彻-斯托（Harriet Beecher Stowe）[41]是'写了导致大战的书的小女人'，"麦克杜格尔指出，"但只是因为白人和黑人的废奴主义者几十年来一直在宣扬同样的福音"。即使是技术天才也是站在巨人的肩膀上的：如果罗伯特-富尔顿没有开发出第一艘商业上成功的蒸汽船，其他人就会有；如果没有史蒂夫-乔布斯，我们可能不会有iPod，但我们仍然会有一些相当不错的个人电脑。

流行文化的力量。定义影响力的最简单方法是使用市场指标。美国人听说过谁，他们推崇谁？他们买什么产品，看什么电视节目？这样一份名单 "读起来就像盖洛普民意调查或麦迪逊大道的消费趋势指南，"麦克杜格尔说，迈克尔-克莱顿超过了赫尔曼-梅尔维尔（100），乔尔-奥斯汀击败了莱因霍尔德-尼布尔。但也许这就是它应该有的样子。"我们的祖先在这片大陆上带来的美国是一个市场--权力、商品和服务、娱乐和精神方面的自由市场，"麦克杜格尔指出。"根据定义，似乎影响力的最终衡量标准只是卖什么。"

价值判断的问题。这就是 "阿道夫-希特勒问题"。你如何评估那些使世界变坏的男人和女人的影响力？在美国，称之为 "休-海夫纳问题"。一个终生穿着浴袍闲逛，靠物化女性致富的人，真的值得在任何人的100强中占有一席之地吗？另一方面，如果你要寻找上个世纪的新闻巨头，难道海夫不值得与亨利-卢斯或H-L-门肯并列吗？如果你为这位给我们提供色情点播服务的人敞开大门，会不会有一队煽动者跟在他后面大摇大摆地走过来？乔治-华莱士、休伊-朗、约瑟夫-麦卡锡、J-埃德加-胡佛--"我们可能会发现，我们的名单中有一半是流氓的画廊，"麦克杜格尔建议。

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身份政治的问题。美国可能是一个大熔炉，但影响力往往不能超越巴里奥的边缘，或犹太教堂的大门。"麦克杜格尔想知道，"每一个种族或宗教少数群体的领导人都必须受到尊敬，"即使他们对整个国家的影响很小或没有影响？" 鉴于摩门教徒目前只占美国人口的不到2%，约瑟夫-史密斯（52岁）或杨百翰（74岁）究竟有多大的影响力？塞萨尔-查韦斯（César Chávez）在西班牙裔人中的地位如此之高，是否值得额外考虑？出于类似原因，像哈维-米尔克这样的同性恋权利先驱是否值得考虑？

每个小组成员对这些挑战都有不同的回应。对于新罕布什尔大学教授、《历史的记忆》一书的作者埃伦-菲茨帕特里克来说。写作美国的过去，18801980》的作者，核心问题是一个人的影响是否既 "长期 "又 "根本"。因此，举例来说，建国者应该得到很高的地位，因为 "如果没有他们对美国民主的愿景，就不会发生其他很多事情"。但是，像比尔-盖茨这样的人物（54岁），无论多么重要，在菲茨帕特里克的估计中都输给了计算机科学家约翰-冯-诺伊曼，因为 "是冯-诺伊曼的研究帮助计算成为可能"，所以他对计算机的贡献比盖茨的工作更 "根本"。(菲茨帕特里克在冯-诺伊曼的问题上被淘汰了，他没能进入前100名）。

沃尔特-麦克杜格尔采取的政策是重视与联邦政府有关的个人，"因为他们塑造了所有美国人赖以生存的法律和制度"；重视 "商业和技术领域的领导人，他们塑造了所有美国人的物质环境"；重视 "宗教和教育领域的领导人，他们影响了大多数美国人的信仰和认识，特别是对他们自己国家的认识。" 他 "省略了那些虽然受人尊敬......但只影响了一小部分美国人的民族领袖"，而且他 "完全排除了名人，理由是他们的影响是浅薄的、短暂的和可替代的。"

斯坦福大学教授、普利策奖得主大卫-M-肯尼迪（David M. Kennedy）在《摆脱恐惧的自由：1929-1945年大萧条和战争中的美国人民》一书中做了类似的计算。他写道："大多数'运动员、偶像和名人'都不在我的名单上，"因为娱乐是 "高度短暂的"，而且大多数艺人往往 "不会留下持久的遗产"。他所寻找的是 "原创者--即 "为持久的机构或文化实践或思维方式奠定基础的人"。

对多丽丝-科尔恩斯-古德温来说，他以《不寻常的时间》获得了普利策奖。富兰克林和埃莉诺-罗斯福。二战中的后方，重要的问题是，"哪些人物改变了人们的日常生活，无论是在当时还是在之后？" 她特别寻找 "伟大的公众人物，他们使人们有可能过上扩大的生活--物质上、心理上、文化上、精神上"。

布朗大学教授戈登-S-伍德，普利策奖得主，《美国革命的激进主义》一书的作者，试图关注像亚伯拉罕-林肯（1）和乔治-华盛顿（2）这样的 "奇特的人物"，他们 "非常适合 "他们发挥影响力的那个时刻。但他也在寻找他所说的 "替身--像艾灵顿公爵和路易斯-阿姆斯特朗（79）这样的人物，他们可以体现一个巨大的合作产业、艺术形式或文化变革，并 "代表一打或半打的人"。

H. 德克萨斯大学教授、《有钱人》一书的作者W.Brands。他采取了类似的做法，根据 "他们所代表的东西 "来选择一些人--例如，Nat Turner（93岁）代表 "奴隶叛乱的幽灵"，或者Sam Goldwyn（95岁）因为 "好莱坞必须被代表"。他还指出，对政治人物的偏爱是不可避免的。"政治人物，"他说，"之所以重要，正是因为他们影响了每个人的生活。"

另一方面，罗伯特-达勒克--尽管他是一位总统历史学家，也是最近的《未完成的人生》的作者。约翰-F-肯尼迪，1917-1963》的作者，但他试图给商业和发明以特权。"当人们回顾这个社会时，他们会把科学、技术和商业成就看得比我们的政治、艺术和文学更重要。" 他还特别重视思想的力量，它在美国生活中形成了一股 "暗流"--直到突然间，就像民权运动那样，出现了一种感觉，"这是一种时代已经到来的思想"。

圣母大学教授马克-诺尔是《美国的上帝》一书的作者。从乔纳森-爱德华兹到亚伯拉罕-林肯》一书的作者，与布兰兹一样，认为政治将在最后的名单中占主导地位，但他认为这反映了历史是如何被教授的--"作为一种政治叙述或作为对政治叙述的一种反应"。他争辩说，在这两种叙述中，"几乎没有宗教的空间"，尽管宗教组织 "在美国出现之前就一直是美国社会的主要粘合剂"。他自己的名单将这一观点推向了高潮，其中包括一些鲜为人知但影响巨大的人物，如19世纪的复兴者查尔斯-格兰迪森-芬尼（Charles Grandison Finney），或流动的卫理公会主教弗朗西斯-阿斯伯利（Francis Asbury）。

同样，小组成员约翰-斯蒂尔-戈登是《财富帝国》的作者。美国经济实力的史诗般的历史》一书的作者约翰-斯蒂尔-戈登区分了名气和影响力，他以杰罗姆-克恩和欧文-柏林之间的区别为例。他认为，"两人都非常有名，""但只有克恩永远改变了百老汇"。

与她的许多小组成员一样，加州大学洛杉矶分校的名誉教授乔伊斯-阿普尔比（Joyce Appleby）表现出对创始人的强烈偏见--那些 "相当杰出的人做出的决定产生了巨大的积极影响。" 但她拒绝提出任何更广泛的衡量影响力的系统。"我进行了反思，"她谈到她的选择时说。"但这更像是一个直观的、不可描述的过程。"

那么，小组成员的反思告诉我们美国的影响力是什么？首先，虽然名单的前三分之一，大致上体现了强烈的共识--每个小组成员都为前九个人物投票；前三十名中的每个人都得到了至少七张选票--但一致意见是很难得到的。许多入选的人物只获得了比那些落选的人物多一点的支持。

不过，某些模式还是很明显的。例如，这份名单告诉我们，尽管我们可能是一个移民国家，但土生土长的人最有可能撼动一切：最后100人中只有7人出生在美国大陆之外。它告诉我们，东海岸各州已经充分利用了他们的领先地位：100人中有63人出生在最初的13个殖民地，仅新英格兰地区就有26人。它告诉未来的有影响力的人不要害怕家庭承诺：这100人中有91人至少结过一次婚，其中两人--约瑟夫-斯密和杨百翰--在他们之间有50多个妻子。这份名单还表明，同时代人有时是判断谁的影响力会持久的好方法：《时代》杂志的 "年度人物 "中有9人出现在历史学家的名单上。

政治生涯（或法律生涯）是通向历史遗产的最可靠的门票（100人中有26人担任过法官职位或高级政治职务）。有抱负的人也可以考虑尝试发明一些东西（如灯泡、飞机或原子弹），或发现一些东西（脊髓灰质炎疫苗、双螺旋）--尽管戈登-S-伍德在名单完成后说，"我们太强调发明家了。迟早会有人想出轧棉机......利润的诱惑力太大。飞机和电话的情况也是如此"。

创立宗教的约瑟夫-斯密和杨百翰，以及基督教科学的玛丽-贝克-艾迪（86岁）都在名单上。煽动革命也会留下印象，无论你是成功了，就像建国者那样，还是失败了，但会产生长期的影响，就像纳特纳和约翰-布朗（78）那样。我们《大西洋月刊》很高兴地看到，前100名中有21位人物因其写作而特别有名，从沃尔特-惠特曼（22）到玛格丽特-米德（81）--而且有超过30位（！）上榜人物在本杂志上发表过文章。

最后的100人名单还表明，至少在许多历史学家眼中，男性仍然是统治者--哦，应该是白人男性。有10位女性上榜（排名最高的是女权主义先驱伊丽莎白-卡迪-斯坦顿，排在第30位），还有8位非裔美国人，但前100名中有大量的WASP。小马丁-路德-金（Martin Luther King Jr.）（8）是得票率最高的人之一，但在杰基-罗宾逊（Jackie Robinson）（35）之前，没有另一个非裔美国人上榜。而且没有西班牙裔美国人、亚裔美国人或美国原住民。

"这很有趣，也很有挑战性，"埃伦-菲茨帕特里克谈到这项工作时说，但她称这个排名顺序是 "荒谬的练习"。注意到沃尔特-迪斯尼（26岁）在投票中排在斯坦顿之前，她想知道。"一个漫画家值得在一个最有力地推动半数人在法律面前应该平等的人之上占有一席之地吗？" 或者再问："我们是否要得出结论，没有一个美国印第安原住民影响了我们的过去？"

如果妇女和少数民族明显缺席，那么骑士呢？冷战时期的恶棍约瑟夫-麦卡锡（Joseph McCarthy）只得了两票，像休伊-朗（Huey Long）和查尔斯-考夫林（Charles Coughlin）这样的小煽动家也没能进入前100名。(Hugh Hefner也没有，尽管Walter McDougall投了他的票。)但备受唾弃的理查德-尼克松(99)进入了前100名，支持奴隶制的立法者约翰-C-卡尔霍恩(58)也在其中。

从某种意义上说，最终名单也许证明了美国过去没有真正的恶棍，或者至少是大家都认为是恶棍的人物。每一个谴责厄尔-沃伦（29）或贝蒂-弗里丹（77）的保守派，都有一个自由派为其辩护。同样，罗纳德-里根（17岁）或沃尔玛的山姆-沃尔顿（72岁）的情况也是如此，只是欢呼声和嘘声截然相反。

然而，我们的历史学家似乎对流行文化，以及一般的大众品味做出了明确的判断。名单上有七位小说家，但只有三位音乐家，猫王（66）、路易斯-阿姆斯特朗（79）和作曲家斯蒂芬-福斯特（97），以及两位运动员，杰基-罗宾逊和乔治-赫尔曼-鲁斯（75）。有一个好莱坞大亨（山姆-戈德温），但没有导演或演员（当然，除了里根）。在众多小说家、记者和散文家中，有两位（詹姆斯-费尼莫尔-库珀和哈里特-比彻-斯托）是真正的博物馆珍品，而其他许多人--拉尔夫-瓦尔多-爱默生（33岁）和亨利-戴维-梭罗（65岁）、威廉-福克纳（60岁）和威廉-詹姆斯（62岁）--都写过严格意义上的高深文章。(另一方面，正如戈登-S-伍德所指出的，没有历史学家上榜，这让他说："我想我们不认为我们所做的事情很有影响力。" ）。

那么合作呢？除了像莱特兄弟（23人）和刘易斯和克拉克（70人）这样的联袂合作外，小组成员没有发现明显的方法来确认合作的影响。这可能有助于解释为什么没有女性最终接近排名的顶端--因为一些小组成员把苏珊-安东尼（38）放在更高的位置，而另一些人则把伊丽莎白-卡迪-斯坦顿放在更高的位置，而且没有办法对伟大的女权主义者的努力的累积效应进行评价。

不过，如果你知道在哪里找，著名的合作还是出现在最后的名单上。如上所述，在创世之初的摩门教徒约瑟夫-斯密和杨百翰都出现了；原子弹的同事阿尔伯特-爱因斯坦（32岁）、罗伯特-奥本海默（48岁）和恩里科-费米（88岁）也出现了。同样，美国建国背后的合作者--乔治-华盛顿、托马斯-杰斐逊（3）、本杰明-富兰克林（6）、约翰-马歇尔（7）、詹姆斯-麦迪逊（13）和约翰-亚当斯（25）--都出现在榜首附近。美国革命的预言家托马斯-潘恩（19）也加入了他们的行列。(H.W.Brands在这一点上有异议。他说："潘恩阐述了一些空中楼阁，"但革命 "无论如何都会发生"）。

这份名单在很大程度上倾向于不久前的过去。只有三位在世的美国人--比尔-盖茨、拉尔夫-纳德（96岁）和双螺旋的共同发现者詹姆斯-D-沃森（68岁）上榜，而在前100名中，有67人在1950年之前去世。唯一进入前20名的60年代后的重要人物是纳德和里根，总的来说，这份名单反映了大卫-肯尼迪（David M. Kennedy）所说的对 "将任何快速或最近去世的人封为圣人 "的本能谨慎。"很难判断现在，"约翰-斯蒂尔-戈登指出。"我们无法说谁会有影响力"。罗伯特-达勒克指出，即使是里根，似乎也是近代史上最有把握的一个赌注，在五十年后，一旦他的所有政府记录被历史学家打开，可能就不会这么大了。

因此，如果在半个世纪后再次进行这项工作，大概会显示出对我们这个时代什么重要、什么不重要有更强的共识。这可能意味着桑德拉-戴-奥康纳和希拉里-克林顿，甚至奥普拉-温弗里和玛莎-斯图尔特，都能获得一席之地。(多丽丝-卡恩斯-古德温（Doris Kearns Goodwin）说："人们希望从现在起的一百年里，在高层的女性会比现在更多"。鲍勃-迪伦在这次投票中没有进入前100名，他可能会溜进去；一旦互联网时代的影响超过半个世纪，史蒂夫-乔布斯也会溜进去。

小组成员确实为许多二十世纪的人物投了票，还有许多运动员和爵士乐手、视觉艺术家和宗教创新者。总的来说，这十位历史学家推荐了322位有影响力的人物；只是在近期和非政治性的选择上没有像在镀金时代的工业家和开国元勋上那样达成共识。但是，每一票投给羊角辫维多利亚时代的人，至少有一票投给斯坦-李或玛丽莲-梦露、B-F-斯金纳或老虎伍兹。这就是为什么投票中最有趣的部分可能是潜伏在选票下游的那些迷人的人物。

以美国的宗教领袖为例--名单上有约瑟夫-斯密和杨百翰、玛丽-贝克-艾迪、乔纳森-爱德华兹（90）和长老会牧师莱曼-比彻（91），以及一些因其政治改革努力而闻名的牧师，如小马丁-路德-金和废奴主义者威廉-劳埃德-加里森（46）。这些都是值得尊敬的人，但你必须在获奖者名单的更下方找到那些真正建造了今天大多数美国人所崇拜的教堂的人。有几个犹太人进入了前100名，但唯一获得选票的拉比是所罗门-谢赫特，他是保守派犹太教的设计师。前100名天主教徒只有乔治-赫尔曼-"贝比"-鲁斯、路易斯-阿姆斯特朗和詹姆斯-戈登-贝内特（69岁），他是十九世纪伟大的新闻工作者；不过，有两位小组成员推荐全国第一位天主教主教约翰-卡罗尔。还有两票投给了另一位天主教主教富尔顿-辛（Fulton Sheen），正如马克-诺尔（Mark Noll）所说，他在1950年代的媒体工作 "证明了罗马天主教在宗教、政治和文化方面的良性影响"（并使他成为今天那些口才不佳的电视布道者的开拓者）。

没有进入前100名的还有美国福音派的设计师，他们是这个以新教为主的国家中最成功的新教种类。两位小组成员列出了弗朗西斯-阿斯伯里（Francis Asbury），这位18世纪的卫理公会主教不屈不挠的传教努力创造了一个创业型宗教的模式，此后成功的福音派牧师一直遵循这一模式。救世军第一位女性 "将军 "伊万杰琳-布斯获得了一票，德怀特-L-穆迪也获得了一票，他可以说是十九世纪最有名的福音派人士；二十世纪的葛培理获得了两票，他是这个称号的继承人。

诺尔选出的另一位威廉-西摩，也许比前100名中的其他宗教人物更默默无闻，但从长远来看，可能比他们中的任何一个都更有影响力。西摩是被解放的奴隶的儿子，1906年，他因为相信当代基督徒可以用舌头说话而失去了洛杉矶教会牧师的工作；他没有气馁，在洛杉矶阿苏萨街的一栋破旧的建筑里开了店，从而引发了 "阿苏萨街复兴"，成为现代五旬节运动的开始。今天，五旬节教派是世界上增长最快的基督教形式。

有趣的商业人物也出现在名单的后面。维多利亚时代最著名的工业领袖--约翰-D-洛克菲勒、安德鲁-卡内基（20）和J-P-摩根（37）--进入了前100名，山姆-沃尔顿、比尔-盖茨和亨利-福特（14）也是如此，这三个人物对于任何20世纪末的消费者来说都是熟悉的。但是，我们为什么不记得其他得票者，如埃德温-德雷克，他是第一个建议勘探者考虑钻探石油的商人？或者赛勒斯-菲尔德，他在1858年成功铺设了第一条跨大西洋电缆？或者彼得-库珀，一位钢铁大亨，在他的众多成就中，投资了菲尔德的电缆，开发了第一个蒸汽动力机车，竞选了总统，成立了库珀联盟，并获得了果冻专利？

然后是美国的发明家。托马斯-爱迪生（9岁）赢得了每个小组成员的选票，但只有约翰-斯蒂尔-戈登把票投给了尼古拉-特斯拉，这位出生于克罗地亚的交流电方法的开发者，战胜了爱迪生的直流电。(每当我们打开电灯开关时，"戈登说，"我们都能感受到特斯拉的影响"）。赛勒斯-麦考密克（Cyrus McCormick）（73岁），他的机械收割机彻底改变了美国农业，进入了前100名。但为什么不是威利斯-开利，这位新英格兰人开发了空调，从而永远改变了从亚特兰大到阿尔布开克的美国人的生活？H.W.Brands指出，在开利之前，迪克西州对大多数企业来说是一片陌生的土地，因为在马森-迪克逊线以南，"你不能指望人们接受转让"。威廉-福克纳（William Faulkner）因为使潮湿、折磨人的旧邦联不朽而上榜；当然，开利公司因创造了明亮的、有空调的新南方而应受到赞扬。

如果开利公司的空调建造了亚特兰大，那么德维特-克林顿的运河呢？伊利运河被称为 "克林顿的沟渠"，它将一个国家的商业通过奥尔巴尼输送到纽约市。"戈登说："站在第42街的拐角处，环顾四周。"克林顿给了我们这个。"

然后是弗兰西斯-帕金斯，埃伦-菲茨帕特里克的人选之一，他的纪念碑是每个美国人工资单上的工资扣款。作为富兰克林-德拉诺-罗斯福（Franklin Delano Roosevelt）的劳工部长（4），她将社会保障制度推向世界。尽管小威廉-巴克利（William F. Buckley Jr.）（菲茨帕特里克的另一个人选）竭力想消除这一计划，但这一退休计划的寿命比她长，而且似乎也可能比他长。

但它可能不会超过另一位女性先驱的影响。乔伊斯-阿普尔比、约翰-斯蒂尔-戈登和戈登-S-伍德选择了朱莉娅-柴尔德，她的指纹，无论是油脂还是面粉，都被涂抹在我们烹饪文化的各个方面，从埃默里尔-拉加斯到整个食品。(伍德就对像Walter Lipp-mann[89]这样的人被认为比Child更有影响力表示惊讶）。

同样，只要有自助书籍和励志演讲者，美国人就会感受到戴尔-卡耐基的影响，他是罗伯特-达勒克挑选出来的，是1938年《如何赢得朋友和影响他人》的作者。只要有好莱坞大片，美国人就会把他们的夏季娱乐--在威利斯-开利公司的空调凉爽中享受--归功于史蒂文-斯皮尔伯格（他获得了三张选票，来自布兰德、古德温和戈登）和乔治-卢卡斯（两票，来自伍德和麦克杜格尔）。

最后，其中一些人物只是间接地触及了我们现在的时代，但却主宰了一个更早的时代。前100名中包括伊丽莎白-卡迪-斯坦顿（Elizabeth Cady Stanton）、苏珊-安东尼（Susan B. Anthony）和贝蒂-弗里丹（Betty Friedan），他们都坚持认为妇女的地位是在投票站和工作场所以及在家里。但是，虽然他们最终赢得了争论，但在很长一段时间里，其他影响因素使这一结果受到了怀疑。例如，Walter McDougall的名单中包括几乎被遗忘的Sarah Josepha Hale。作为一名十九世纪的记者，黑尔在1837年至1877年期间编辑了流行的女性杂志《戈德伊女士之书》，并利用其版面宣传家庭女神的理想，使女权主义对妇女地位的看法在几十年内黯然失色。

麦克杜格尔还挑选了威廉-霍尔姆斯-麦格菲，这位长老会牧师负责麦格菲读物。这些书有助于使美国人几乎普遍识字；通过强调爱国主义和辛勤工作、政治平等和新教信仰，它们教导学生成为美国人。但他们的时代已经过去了，曾经是公共教育的一个决定性文本，现在仍然存在，只是因为它被推销给那些选择退出的人--例如，基督教家庭教育者，他们更喜欢麦格菲的正义和严谨的组合，而不是取代他的更自由的文本。

影响可能是深刻的，但最终是短暂的；正如罗伯特-达勒克所说，我们的名单反映了 "历史记忆的残酷性"。但是，如果说《麦格菲读本》和《戈代夫人书》的命运说明了影响力的无常，那么名单上的大部分内容也说明了其偶然性。

以哈里-杜鲁门（21岁）为例，他投下了原子弹并创立了杜鲁门主义。当然，这个脾气暴躁的小衣匠符合戈登-S-伍德关于 "特殊个性 "的标准，非常适合于某个历史时刻。然而，他的时代只是在最后一刻选择了他，作为亨利-华莱士的替代者，这位左翼的前商务部长在第二次世界大战的大部分时间里都是FDR的副总统，由于担心他过于同情约瑟夫-斯大林的俄国而被从票上挤掉。如果罗斯福的暖泉中风来得再早一点，华莱士可能会出现在名单上--鉴于他最亲密的顾问中有两人是苏联特工，他很可能作为误解莫斯科的人而被记住。

有许多这样的 "无名之辈"--如果不是因为机会或上帝的恩典，他们可能会有影响力而不是默默无闻，他们就像阴影一样笼罩在他们记忆力较好的同行周围。LBJ（44岁）被肯尼迪的阴影所笼罩，虽然肯尼迪并不显眼，但他只赢得了两位小组成员的选票；如果没有刺客的子弹，就会是肯尼迪与民权和越南的搏斗，而约翰逊则逐渐消失在为老年副总统保留的阴影中。西奥多-罗斯福（15岁）的阴影是威廉-麦金利，他同样被刺客杀死（尽管人们怀疑罗斯福在任何情况下都会找到自己的影响力）；亚伯拉罕-林肯的阴影是杰斐逊-戴维斯，他几乎被视为不同的美国共和国之父；尤利西斯-格兰特（12岁）和罗伯特-李（57岁）的阴影是石墙-杰克逊，如果他活过钱塞洛斯维尔之战，可能会为戴维斯赢得这场比赛。

即使是乔治-华盛顿也有他的影子。本尼迪克特-阿诺德（Benedict Arnold），他是一个比来自弗农山庄的人更好的将军，但事实证明他是一个更大的傻瓜；还有霍雷肖-盖茨（Horatio Gates），这位革命战争时期的将军，在萨拉托加战役胜利后，被一些殖民地军官看好，认为可以取代华盛顿。

那些被未来的历史学家认为是有影响力的人无疑也会有他们的影子。如果历史将比尔-克林顿列为有影响力的人物，那将是以牺牲其他伟大的民主党人的希望为代价的，历史将忽略他们。比如加里-哈特，他的婚外情没有得到原谅，或者马里奥-科莫，他在1992年犹豫不决，而克林顿却抓住了时机，并获得了总统职位。如果最高法院大法官安东尼-肯尼迪的影响力持续下去，它将被罗伯特-博克的几乎影响力所掩盖；同样，塞缪尔-阿利托和哈里特-米尔斯的阴影也将被掩盖。


如果乔治-W-布什的印记在2056年仍能强烈感受到，那么阿尔-戈尔--离总统职位还差几张佛罗里达州的选票（或一张最高法院的选票）--将（勉强）因他从未有机会发挥的影响力而被人们记住。



罗斯-杜塔特（Ross Douthat）是《大西洋》杂志的前特约编辑。



They Made America
Who are the most influential figures in American history? The Atlantic recently asked ten eminent historians. The result was The Atlantic’s Top 100—and some insight into the nature of influence and the contingency of history. Was Walt Disney really more influential than Elizabeth Cady Stanton? Benjamin Spock than Richard Nixon? Elvis Presley than Lewis and Clark? John D. Rockefeller than Bill Gates? Babe Ruth than Frank Lloyd Wright? Let the debates begin.

By Ross Douthat
DECEMBER 2006 ISSUE
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More influentials:

Top Living Influentials
Living Americans who received votes from panelists

Influential Architects
Selected by Michael J. Lewis

Influential Filmmakers
Selected by David Thomson

Influential Musicians
Selected by Terry Teachout

Influential Poets
Selected by Christian Wiman

Influential Critics
Selected by Robert Messenger

* THE TOP 100 *
[Click here to see the list.]

It's a nebulous concept, influence: you know it when you see it, but definitions are hard to come by. Still, when we talk about history in America, it’s often to make arguments about influence, about the way the characters from our national past shape the virtues and flaws of our own era.

Thus, depending on whom you believe, George W. Bush is either the rightful heir to Harry Truman or the bastard child of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Baines Johnson. His critics are the successors of Walter Duranty and Jane Fonda, making apologies for tyrants—unless they’re Edward R. Murrow and Eugene McCarthy, boldly speaking truth to power. Foreign-policy analysts talk of modern-day “Jacksonians” and “Wilsonians”; defenders and opponents of affirmative action alike invoke Martin Luther King Jr.; and everyone claims the Founders for their own—because the founding generation’s influence, and example, is felt to matter most of all.

Also see:

In Their Own Words
Of the 100 Americans selected by our panel of historians, thirty-one contributed to The Atlantic. Browse a selection of their writings.

Follow-up, the Atlantic 100
A look at reader response.

Congratulations to Our Contest Winners
Find out whose guesses most closely matched our historians' picks.
With these debates in mind, The Atlantic recently asked ten historians (see panelist biographies on page 76) to compose their own lists of the 100 most influential Americans. The balloting was averaged and weighted to emphasize consensus—candidates received extra points if they appeared on multiple ballots—and the result is the list of 100 names that accompanies this article. In the instructions we gave to our panelists, we intentionally defined influence loosely—as a person’s impact, for good or ill, both on his or her own era and on the way we live now. This allowed for a certain creativity in the selection process, and it had the advantage of leaving the harder work of definition to the historians themselves.

The results are inevitably unscientific, since whittling down all the influential Americans of the last few centuries to just 100 names, let alone ranking them, is a difficult assignment. But the end product is rewarding and intriguing, offering instances of both consensus and contention, and a snapshot of our national memory early in the third American century. It doesn’t settle the debate about influence and the American past, but it does offer a starting place for discussion.

Anyone trying to arrive at a historical ranking must wrestle with certain questions. Our panelist Walter McDougall, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, described five challenges that he and his fellow historians reckoned with in making their judgments for our list.

The definition of influence. What definition would allow us to rank Americans from different careers and walks of life—to compare the influence of a great novelist with the influence of a president, for instance, or the influence of a religious leader with that of an entrepreneur? Or again, what definition would allow for comparisons between present-day figures and the men and women of earlier generations? The influence of a nineteenth-century titan like John D. Rockefeller (who ended up No. 11 on our list) extends across a longer period of American history than the influence of a Bill Clinton; on the other hand, Clinton’s direct impact on the way we live now is more immediately obvious than Rockefeller’s. By what criteria does one choose between them?

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The collaborative nature of achievement. Once you begin to weigh ideas against inventions, presidencies against companies, and present-day achievements against the past, another question arises: Who should get the credit? Do you cite Nathaniel Hawthorne for writing the first great American novel, or James Fenimore Cooper (83) for making the American novel possible? Who deserves credit for the Constitution, or the motion-picture industry, or the birth of jazz? “Harriet Beecher Stowe [41] was ‘the little lady who wrote the book that caused the Great War,’” McDougall points out, “but only because abolitionists both white and black had been preaching the same gospel for decades.” Even technical geniuses stood on the shoulders of giants: if Robert Fulton hadn’t developed the first commercially successful steamboat, someone else would have; we might not have iPods without Steve Jobs, but we’d still have some pretty nice personal computers.

The power of pop culture. The simplest way to define influence would be to use market indicators. Whom have Americans heard of, and whom do they esteem? What products do they buy, and what television shows do they watch? Such a list would “read like a Gallup Poll or Madison Avenue guide to consumer trends,” McDougall says, with Michael Crichton outstripping Herman Melville (100), and Joel Osteen beating out Reinhold Niebuhr. But perhaps this is as it should be. “The America our forefathers brought forth on this continent is a market—a free market in power, goods and services, entertainment, and spirituality,” McDougall points out. “By definition, it would seem [that] the ultimate measure of influence is simply what sells.”

The problem of value judgments. This is the “Adolf Hitler problem”: How do you assess the influence of men and women who have changed the world for the worse? In America, call it the “Hugh Hefner problem”: Does a man who has spent a lifetime lounging around in a bathrobe, getting rich off the objectification of women, really deserve a place in anyone’s Top 100? On the other hand, if you’re looking for the journalistic giants of the last century, doesn’t Hef deserve a place alongside a Henry Luce or an H. L. Mencken? And if you open the door for the man who gave us porn-on-demand, does a parade of demagogues come trooping in after him? George Wallace, Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover—“We might find that half our list is a rogues’ gallery,” McDougall suggests.

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The question of identity politics. America may be a melting pot, but influence often fails to extend beyond the barrio’s edge, or the synagogue door. “Must the leaders of every ethnic or religious minority be honored,” McDougall wonders, “even though they had little or no influence on the nation at large?” How broadly influential were Joseph Smith (52) or Brigham Young (74), really, given that Mormons currently account for less than 2 percent of the American population? Does César Chávez deserve extra consideration for looming so large among Hispanics? Does a gay-rights pioneer like Harvey Milk deserve consideration, for similar reasons?

Each panelist found a different response to these challenges. For Ellen Fitzpatrick, a professor at the University of New Hampshire and the author of History’s Memory: Writing America’s Past, 18801980, the central questions were whether a person’s influence was at once “long-term” and “fundamental.” So the Founders, for instance, deserve a high place because “without their vision of American democracy, not much else would have happened as it did.” But a figure like Bill Gates (54), however significant, loses out in Fitzpatrick’s estimation to the computer scientist John von Neumann, because “it was von Neumann’s research that helped make computing possible,” and so his contribution to the computer was more “fundamental” than Gates’s work. (Fitzpatrick was outvoted on von Neumann, who failed to make the Top 100.)

Walter McDougall adopted a policy of giving weight to individuals involved with the federal government, “because they shaped the laws and institutions under which all Americans live”; to “the leaders in business and technology who fashioned the material environment of all Americans”; and to “the leaders in religion and education who influenced what most Americans believe and know, especially about their own country.” He “omitted ethnic leaders who, while honored … influenced only a modest percentage of Americans,” and he “eliminated celebrities altogether on the grounds that their influence is shallow, ephemeral, and replaceable.”

David M. Kennedy, a Stanford professor and the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945, made a similar calculation. “Most ‘athletes, icons, and celebrities’ don’t make my list,” he wrote, because entertainment is “highly evanescent” and most entertainers tend to “leave no lasting legacy.” What he looked for instead were “originals—that is, “people who laid the foundations for enduring institutions or cultural practices or ways of thinking.”

For Doris Kearns Goodwin, who won a Pulitzer Prize for No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II, the important question was, “Which figures changed the daily lives of people, both at that time and afterward?” She looked, in particular, for “great public figures who made it possible for people to lead expanded lives—materially, psychologically, culturally, spiritually.”

Brown University professor Gordon S. Wood, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution, tried to pay attention to “peculiar personalities,” like Abraham Lincoln (1) and George Washington (2), who were “ideally suited for the moment” in which they wielded influence. But he also looked for what he termed “stand-ins—figures like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong (79), who could embody a hugely collaborative industry, art form, or cultural change, and “represent a dozen or a half-dozen people.”

H. W. Brands, a professor at the University of Texas and the author of The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy, and the Hundred Years’ War Over the American Dollar, took a similar tack, choosing some people based on “what they represent—Nat Turner (93) for the “specter of slave rebellion,” for instance, or Sam Goldwyn (95) because “Hollywood had to be represented.” He also noted that a bias toward political figures is inevitable. “Political figures,” he said, “are important precisely because they influence the lives of everybody.”

On the other hand, Robert Dallek—though he’s a presidential historian and the author, most recently, of An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963—tried to privilege commerce and invention. “When people look back on this society, they will attach greater importance to science, technology, and business achievements than to our politics, or our arts and literature.” He also gave special weight to the power of ideas, which form an “undercurrent” in American life—until suddenly, as with the civil-rights movement, a sense emerges that “this is an idea whose time has come.”

Mark Noll, a professor at the University of Notre Dame and the author of America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, shared Brands’s expectation that politics would dominate the final list, but suggested that this was a reflection of how history has been taught—“as a political narrative or as a reaction against the political narrative.” He contended there is “little room for religion” in either of these narratives—even though religious organizations “have been the main glue in American society since before there was a United States.” His own list drove that point home, by including little-remembered but hugely influential figures like the nineteenth-century revivalist Charles Grandison Finney, or the itinerant Methodist bishop Francis Asbury.

Similarly, panelist John Steele Gordon, the author of An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power, distinguished between fame and influence, citing as an example the distinction between Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin. “Both were very famous,” he argued, “but only Kern changed Broadway forever.”

Like many of her fellow panelists, Joyce Appleby, a professor emerita at UCLA, showed a strong bias toward the Founders—those “rather remarkable men making decisions whose impact has been tremendously positive.” But she declined to propose any broader system for gauging influence. “I reflected,” she said of her choices. “But it was more of an intuitive and ineffable process.”

So what do the panelists’ reflections tell us about influence in America? First that although the top third of the list, roughly speaking, embodies a strong consensus—every panelist voted for the first nine figures; everyone in the top thirty received at least seven votes—agreement is hard to come by. Many figures who made the final cut did so with only marginally more support than those who missed it.

Still, certain patterns are evident. The list tells us, for instance, that though we may be a nation of immigrants, it’s the native-born who are likely to shake things up the most: just seven of the final 100 were born outside the continental United States. It tells us that the East Coast states have made the most of their head start: sixty-three of the 100 were born in the original thirteen colonies, and twenty-six in New England alone. It tells would-be influentials not to be afraid of family commitments: ninety-one of the 100 were married at least once, and two—Joseph Smith and Brigham Young—had more than fifty wives between them. The list also suggests that contemporaries are sometimes good judges of whose influence will last: nine of Time magazine’s “People of the Year” show up on the historians’ list.

A political career (or a legal one) is the surest ticket to a historical legacy (twenty-six of the 100 held a judgeship or high political office). Aspiring influentials might also consider trying to invent something (like the lightbulb, or the airplane, or the atomic bomb), or discover something (the polio vaccine, the double helix)—though Gordon S. Wood remarked, after the list was finished, “We put too much emphasis on inventors. Someone sooner or later would have come up with the cotton gin … the lure of profits was too great. The same was true with the airplane and the telephone.”

Founding a religion landed Joseph Smith and Brigham Young on the list, as well as Christian Science’s Mary Baker Eddy (86). Fomenting a revolution also leaves an impression, whether you succeed, as the Founders did, or fail, but with long-lasting repercussions, as Nat Turner and John Brown (78) did. And we at The Atlantic were pleased to see that twenty-one of the figures in the Top 100 are especially famous for their writing, from Walt Whitman (22) to Margaret Mead (81)—and that more than thirty (!) of the figures on the list have been published in this magazine.

The final 100 also suggests that men still rule, at least in many historians’ eyes—oh, and make that white men. Ten women are on the list (the highest-ranked is the feminist pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton, at No. 30), and eight African Americans, but the Top 100 is heavily WASPish. Martin Luther King Jr. (8) was among the top vote getters, but there isn’t another African American on the list until Jackie Robinson (35). And there are no Hispanics, Asian Americans, or Native Americans.

“It’s fun and challenging,” Ellen Fitzpatrick said of the exercise, but she called the rank order “an exercise in absurdity.” Noting that Walt Disney (26) finished ahead of Stanton in the balloting, she wondered: “Does a cartoonist deserve a place above someone who most powerfully advanced the case that half the people deserved equality before the law?” Or again, “Are we to conclude that not a single Native American Indian influenced our past?”

If women and minorities are conspicuously absent, what about knaves? With only two votes, Cold War bogeyman Joseph McCarthy didn’t make the Top 100, nor did minor demagogues like Huey Long and Charles Coughlin. (Nor Hugh Hefner, though Walter McDougall voted for him.) But the much-reviled Richard Nixon (99) is in the Top 100, as is the pro-slavery legislator John C. Calhoun (58).

In a sense, perhaps, the final list is a testament to the absence of true villains from the American past—or at least figures that everyone can agree were villainous. For every conservative who damns Earl Warren (29) or Betty Friedan (77), there’s a liberal springing to the defense. The same is true, with the cheers and boos reversed, for Ronald Reagan (17) or Wal-Mart’s Sam Walton (72).

Our historians seem to have made a definite judgment, however, against pop culture, and popular taste in general. The list contains seven novelists but only three musicians, Elvis Presley (66), Louis Armstrong (79), and the songwriter Stephen Foster (97), and two athletes, Jackie Robinson and George Herman “Babe” Ruth (75). There’s one Hollywood mogul (Sam Goldwyn), but no directors or actors (save, of course, Reagan). And of the many novelists, journalists, and essayists, two of them (James Fenimore Cooper and Harriet Beecher Stowe) are true museum pieces, while many of the rest—Ralph Waldo Emerson (33) and Henry David Thoreau (65), William Faulkner (60) and William James (62)—wrote strictly highbrow fare. (On the other hand, as Gordon S. Wood points out, no historians made the list—leading him to remark, “I guess we don’t think what we do is very influential.”)

What about collaboration? Apart from joined-at-the-hip pairs like the Wright Brothers (23) and Lewis and Clark (70), the panelists found no obvious way to recognize collaborative influences. This may help explain why no woman ended up closer to the top of the ranking—because some panelists put Susan B. Anthony (38) higher and others Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and there was no way to rate the cumulative effect of the great feminists’ efforts.

Still, famous collaborations show up on the final list, if you know where to look. As noted above, present-at-the-creation Mormons Joseph Smith and Brigham Young both make an appearance; so do atomic-bomb coworkers Albert Einstein (32), Robert Oppenheimer (48), and Enrico Fermi (88). Likewise the collaborators behind America’s founding—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson (3), Benjamin Franklin (6), John Marshall (7), James Madison (13), and John Adams (25)—all appear near the top. They are joined by Thomas Paine (19), the prophet of the American Revolution. (H. W. Brands dissented on this one: “Paine articulated something that was in the air,” he allowed, but the Revolution “was going to happen anyway.”)

The list is heavily weighted toward the not-so-recent past. Only three living Americans—Bill Gates, Ralph Nader (96), and James D. Watson (68), a codiscoverer of the double helix—made the list, and of the Top 100, sixty-seven died before 1950. The only significant figures from the post-’60s era to crack the top twenty were Nader and Reagan, and in general the list reflects what David M. Kennedy calls an instinctive caution about “canonizing anyone who’s among the quick,” or recently deceased. “It’s hard to judge the present,” John Steele Gordon points out. “We aren’t able to say who will be influential.” And Robert Dallek notes that even Reagan, seemingly as sure a bet as recent history offers, may not loom so large in fifty years, once all of his administration’s records have been opened to historians.

So if this exercise were to be carried out again in half a century, presumably it would show a stronger consensus about what mattered in our own era and what didn’t. This might mean a place for Sandra Day O’Connor and Hillary Clinton, for instance, or even Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart, both of whom received votes. (“One would hope that a hundred years from now there will be more women at the top than there are now, looking back,” Doris Kearns Goodwin said.) Bob Dylan, who fell just short of the Top 100 in this balloting, might slip in; so might Steve Jobs, once the impact of the Internet age extends over half a century.

The panelists did vote for many twentieth-century figures—as well as many athletes and jazz musicians, visual artists and religious innovators. All told, the ten historians suggested 322 influentials; there just wasn’t as much consensus on the recent and nonpolitical choices as there was on Gilded Age industrialists and Founding Fathers. But for every vote cast for a muttonchopped Victorian, at least one went to Stan Lee or Marilyn Monroe, B. F. Skinner or Tiger Woods. Which is why the most interesting part of the voting may be the fascinating figures lurking in the lower reaches of the balloting.

Take America’s religious leaders—represented on the list by Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, Mary Baker Eddy, Jonathan Edwards (90), and the Presbyterian clergyman Lyman Beecher (91), as well as a number of ministers best known for their efforts at political reform, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (46). Worthies all, but you have to look farther down the winners’ list to find the people who actually built the churches where most of today’s Americans worship. Several Jews are in the Top 100, but the only rabbi to receive votes was Solomon Schechter, the architect of Conservative Judaism. The only Top 100 Catholics are George Herman “Babe” Ruth, Louis Armstrong, and James Gordon Bennett (69), the great nineteenth-century newspaperman; two panelists, however, suggested John Carroll, the nation’s first Catholic bishop. There were also two votes for Fulton Sheen, another Catholic bishop, whose 1950s media ministry, as Mark Noll put it, “certified Roman Catholicism as a benign religious, political, and cultural influence” (and made him a trailblazer for today’s rather-less- eloquent crop of televangelists).

Also falling short of the Top 100 were the architects of American evangelicalism, the most successful species of Protestantism in this largely Protestant nation. Two panelists listed Francis Asbury, the eighteenth-century Methodist bishop whose indefatigable missionary efforts created a model of entrepreneurial religion that successful evangelical pastors have followed ever since. The aptly named Evangeline Booth, the first female “general” of the Salvation Army, received one vote, as did Dwight L. Moody, arguably the nineteenth century’s most famous evangelist; two votes went to Billy Graham, the twentieth-century heir to that title.

Another Noll pick, William Seymour, is perhaps more obscure than the other religious figures in the Top 100, but in the long run may prove more influential than any of them. The son of freed slaves, Seymour in 1906 lost his job as pastor of a Los Angeles church over his belief that glossolalia—speaking in tongues—was available to contemporary Christians; undeterred, he set up shop in a ramshackle building on L.A.’s Azusa Street, and thus touched off the “Azusa Street Revival,” the beginning of the modern Pentecostal movement. Today, Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing form of Christianity in the world.

Interesting business figures also surface farther down in the list. The most famous Victorian captains of industry—John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie (20), and J. P. Morgan (37)—made the Top 100, as did Sam Walton, Bill Gates, and Henry Ford (14), three figures familiar to any late-twentieth-century consumer. But why don’t we remember other vote getters like Edwin Drake, the first businessman to suggest that prospectors consider drilling to find oil? Or Cyrus Field, who laid the first successful transatlantic cable, in 1858? Or Peter Cooper, an iron-and-steel magnate who—among his many accomplishments—invested in Field’s cable, developed the first steam-powered locomotive, ran for president, founded the Cooper Union, and patented Jell-O?

Then there are America’s inventors. Thomas Edison (9) earned votes from every panelist, but only John Steele Gordon voted for Nikola Tesla, the Croatian-born developer of the alternating-current approach to electricity, which won out over Edison’s direct current. (“Every time we turn on a light switch,” Gordon says, “we feel Tesla’s influence.”) Cyrus McCormick (73), whose mechanical reaper revolutionized American agriculture, made the Top 100. But why not Willis Carrier, the New Englander who developed air conditioning and thus changed forever the lives of Americans from Atlanta to Albuquerque? Before Carrier, H. W. Brands points out (from his air-conditioned Texas office), Dixie was terra incognita for most businesses, because “you couldn’t expect people to accept transfers” south of the Mason-Dixon Line. William Faulkner made the list for immortalizing the humid, tormented Old Confederacy; surely Carrier deserves credit for creating the brassy, air-conditioned New South.

If Carrier’s air conditioning built Atlanta, what about DeWitt Clinton’s canal? Dubbed “Clinton’s Ditch,” the Erie Canal channeled a nation’s commerce through Albany to New York City. “Stand on the corner of 42nd Street and look around,” says Gordon. “Clinton gave us this.”

Then there’s Frances Perkins, one of Ellen Fitzpatrick’s picks, whose monument is the payroll deduction found on every American paystub. As secretary of labor for Franklin Delano Roosevelt (4), she midwifed Social Security into the world. The retirement program outlived her, and seems likely to also outlive William F. Buckley Jr. (another Fitzpatrick pick), despite his best efforts to eradicate it.

But it may not outlive the influence of another female pioneer: Julia Child, who was picked by Joyce Appleby, John Steele Gordon, and Gordon S. Wood, and whose fingerprints, in grease or flour, are smeared over every aspect of our culinary culture, from Emeril Lagasse to Whole Foods. (Wood, for one, expressed surprise that someone like Walter Lipp-mann [89] would be deemed more influ- ential than Child.)

Similarly, as long as there are self-help books and motivational speakers, America will feel the influence of Dale Carnegie, a Robert Dallek pick and the author of 1938’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. And as long as there are Hollywood blockbusters, Americans will owe their summer entertainment—enjoyed in the cool of Willis Carrier’s air conditioning—to Steven Spielberg (who received three votes, from Brands, Goodwin, and Gordon) and George Lucas (two votes, from Wood and McDougall).

Finally, some of these figures touch our present era only indirectly, but dominated an earlier one. The Top 100 includes Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Betty Friedan, all of whom insisted that a woman’s place was in the voting booth and the workplace as well as in the home. But while they won the argument in the end, for a long time other influences put that outcome in doubt. Walter McDougall’s list, for instance, includes the nearly forgotten Sarah Josepha Hale. A nineteenth- century journalist, Hale edited the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book from 1837 to 1877, and used its pages to promote an ideal of domestic goddesshood that eclipsed the feminist vision of women’s place for decades.

McDougall also picked William Holmes McGuffey, the Presbyterian minister responsible for the McGuffey Readers. These books helped make Americans almost universally literate; and by emphasizing patriotism and hard work, political equality and Protestant faith, they taught their pupils to be Americans. But their day passed, and what was once a defining text of public education persists only because it’s marketed to people who opt out—to Christian homeschoolers, for instance, who prefer McGuffey’s mix of righteousness and rigor to the more latitudinarian texts that have replaced his.

Influence can be deep and yet ultimately ephemeral; our list reflects, as Robert Dallek put it, the “cruelty of historical memory.” But if the fate of the McGuffey Readers and Godey’s Lady’s Book speaks to the impermanence of influence, much of the list speaks to its contingency as well.

Take Harry Truman (21), the man who dropped the atomic bomb and created the Truman Doctrine. Surely the hot-tempered little haberdasher meets Gordon S. Wood’s criterion of a “peculiar personality” ideally suited to a historical moment. Yet his moment chose him only at the last minute, as a replacement for Henry Wallace, the left-wing former commerce secretary who was FDR’s vice president for most of World War II, and who was bumped from the ticket over concerns that he was too sympathetic to Joseph Stalin’s Russia. Had Roosevelt’s Warm Springs stroke come just a little sooner, Wallace might be on the list—remembered, most likely, as the man who misunderstood Moscow, given that two of his closest advisers were Soviet agents.

There are many of these “unfluentials—figures who, but for chance or the grace of God, might have been influential rather than obscure, and who hang like shadows around their better-remembered counterparts. LBJ (44) is shadowed by JFK, who, though hardly obscure, earned the votes of only two panelists; without an assassin’s bullet, it would have been Kennedy wrestling with civil rights and Vietnam, and Johnson fading into the obscurity reserved for elderly vice presidents. Theodore Roosevelt (15) is shadowed by William McKinley, similarly felled by an assassin (though one suspects that Roosevelt would have found his way to influence in any event); Abraham Lincoln by Jefferson Davis, almost remembered as the father of a different American republic; Ulysses S. Grant (12) and Robert E. Lee (57) by Stonewall Jackson, who might have won the war for Davis had he lived past the Battle of Chancellorsville.

Even George Washington has his shadows: Benedict Arnold, who was a better general than the man from Mount Vernon but proved a greater fool; and Horatio Gates, the Revolutionary War general who, after his victory at Saratoga, was favored by some colonial officers as a replacement for Washington.

Those that future historians deem influential will doubtless have their shadows as well. If history ranks Bill Clinton an influential for the ages, it will be at the expense of other Great Democratic Hopes whom history will slight: Gary Hart, say, whose extramarital dalliance went unforgiven, or Mario Cuomo, who dithered in 1992 while Clinton seized the moment, and the presidency. If Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s influence endures, it will be shadowed by the almost-influence of Robert Bork; likewise Samuel Alito and the shadow of Harriet Miers.


And if George W. Bush’s imprint is still strongly felt in 2056, then Al Gore—a few Florida ballots (or one Supreme Court vote) short of the presidency—will be (barely) remembered for the influence he never had the chance to wield.



Ross Douthat is a former contributing editor at The Atlantic.