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January/February 2007 Atlantic Monthly
Follow-Up, The Atlantic 100In our last issue, we published a special feature, “The 100 Most Influential Americans of All Time”; the list is the collective product of rankings generated by ten eminent historians. (To see the Top 100, and to read the accompanying essay, go to www.theatlantic.com/doc/200612/influentials.) Before we unveiled the list, we conducted an online contest, asking readers to predict which Americans would grace our Top Ten. We received hundreds of entries, but no one correctly guessed all ten, or even nine out of ten. Eight contestants, however, successfully named eight of the ten figures. Congratulations, therefore, go to Mark Guszak of Lampasas, Texas; Peter High of Chevy Chase, Md.; Dax McMenamin of Tucson, Ariz.; Mike Monje of Portland, Ore.; Joshua Rosenthal of Providence, R.I.; David Trilling of Los Angeles, Calif.; Terry D. Wright of Piqua, Ohio; and Gerald Zubkoff of Rydal, Pa. We awarded first prize to Zubkoff, because his two incorrect guesses were not far out of the historians’ Top Ten—he picked John D. Rockefeller (our historians’ No. 11) and Mark Twain (16), while omitting only Alexander Hamilton (5) and Woodrow Wilson (10). Tallying our contestants’ aggregate guesses yielded the following Atlantic Readers’ Top Ten List, which is strikingly similar to our historians’—the only two of the historians’ choices that didn’t make our readers’ list were John Marshall and Woodrow Wilson (Nos. 7 and 10 respectively on our historians’ list, and Nos. 17 and 22 on our readers’ list), and there were only a handful of significant disagreements, most notably about Bill Gates, whom our readers ranked forty-five slots higher than our historians did; and John F. Kennedy, who was ranked No. 12 by our readers but didn’t crack the historians’ Top 100.
1. Abraham Lincoln (No. 1, according to our historians) We also asked readers to tell us who should have made the Top 100 but didn’t. In the ten days after November 21, when we officially posted the list, more than 1,500 readers wrote in to nominate their choices for Most Egregious Omissions, and in some cases to quarrel with what they viewed as the Most Nonsensical Inclusions. Readers proposed more than 600 additional figures as worthy of inclusion in the Top 100, from Adams (Abigail, Ansel, Samuel) and Ailey (Alvin) to Zappa (Frank) and Zinn (Howard). Once again, our readers clearly believe JFK’s influence to have been stronger than our historians do; he got more than twice as many votes for inclusion as the second-place finisher, Billy Graham. The twenty-five most-cited names are enumerated below, along with selected commentary. 1. John F. Kennedy Selected Comments
Nominating Irving Berlin: “No Jew since Jesus has done more for the Christmas holiday.” Nominating Billy Graham: “Influenced every president since [Harry] Truman. The idea that Mary Baker Eddy had more influence than Billy Graham is ludicrous.” Nominating Philo T. Farnsworth: “Invented the television—if Bill Gates and Alexander Bell make the list, so does Philo.” “Albert Einstein should be above Edison. Sure, lightbulbs are great, but for America, nuclear weapons are more important—they ended World War II and produced the Cold War.” “You put both Brigham Young and Joseph Smith in the Top 100? As a former Mormon, even I can’t see that they were more important than many of the missing names.” “American Indians are Americans, as are African Americans, Latino Americans, and Asian Americans. And there are some figures in those categories who are more influential than some of your other nominees. After all, where would James Fenimore Cooper be without his epic tales of Native Americans? Think outside the white-male box.” “The idea that Elvis Presley was more influential than Joseph McCarthy or J. Edgar Hoover is preposterous. After Hoover died, Congress had to introduce legislation to make sure no one else ever became as powerful as he had been.” To read more reader commentary, see all the lamented omissions, and weigh in with your own, visit www.theatlantic.com/doc/200701u/influentials-comments.
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