The 100, one last time

NewMexiKen opened up 57 slots on the 100 Greatest Americans list yesterday. Their replacements:

First, I suggested three as I deleted the others:

  1. Bing Crosby
  2. Brigham Young
  3. Omar Bradley

Then, I liked Functional Ambivalent’s nominees, so they’re in as a block, counting Lewis and Clark as one:

  1. Lewis and Clark
  2. Ernest Hemingway
  3. Frank Lloyd Wright
  4. Margaret Sanger
  5. David Sarnoff
  6. Douglas MacArthur
  7. W.C. Handy
  8. Ray Kroc
  9. Rachel Carson

A few incredibly important political-military-judicial figures need to be added:

  1. James Madison
  2. John Adams
  3. Ulysses Grant
  4. George Marshall
  5. John Marshall
  6. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
  7. Earl Warren
  8. Thurgood Marshall
  9. Jane Addams

Inventors were among America’s greatest contribution to the world:

  1. Eli Whitney — the cotton gin yes, but much more importantly, interchangable parts
  2. Samuel Colt — automatic firearms
  3. Cyrus McCormick — agricultural implements
  4. Samuel F. B. Morse — communication
  5. Philo Farnsworth — television
  6. James Watson — DNA

And how about the robber barons:

  1. John Jacob Astor — established America’s first settlement on the Pacific Coast
  2. John D. Rockefeller — oil
  3. J.P. Morgan — capital
  4. William C. Durant — General Motors

And the writers:

  1. John Muir — for his conservation ideology
  2. Louisa Mae Alcott — every young woman read her novels; immeasurable influence
  3. Edgar Alan Poe — Evermore
  4. Toni Morrison — Nobel Prize; seems more relevant than Pearl Buck, another American woman Nobel Prize winner
  5. Sinclair Lewis — Nobel Prize; The Jungle
  6. William Faulkner — Nobel Prize

American music:

  1. Stephen Foster — the 19th century
  2. Irving Berlin — the 20th century
  3. Louis Armstrong — the greatest American musician; changed music forever
  4. Duke Ellington; — America’s greatest composer
  5. Hank Williams — did for Country what Elvis did for pop and Ray Charles did for Rhythm & Blues — revolutionized it

Which gets us to 99 and too many names left:

Frank Capra, John Ford, Orson Welles
Jedediah Smith, John Wesley Powell
Sequoyah, Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph
Sam Adams, “Black Jack” Pershing, Hyman Rickover

3 thoughts on “The 100, one last time”

  1. Samuel Morse was a horrible bigotted charlatan who stole the telepgraph idea from Joseph Henry, who refused to patent it. Henry had been using his telegraph for years when Morse came and learned how it worked and then proceeded to get rich off the idea.

    In 1836 and 1841, he ran for mayor of New York on the Nativist ticket. (He won 1,550 votes the first time, and less than 100 votes on his second attempt.) Nativists were jingoistic, racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic. And Morse seemed a fairly rabid spokesman for the Know Nothings on all counts. Till the end of his life, he hated and feared American Catholics, he would have denied citizenship to the foreign born (especially the Irish) and he wrote pamphlets abusing those who would abolish slavery.

  2. NewMexiKen has to admit I was ignorant of Morse’s jingoism. I did not, however, say that he invented the telegraph. He popularized it. He moved communications a huge leap forward.

    They don’t call it the Henry Code.

    Morse was a painter/sculptor of some repute as well.

  3. You say you opened up 57 slots, but begin your additions with 58? Shouldn’t it be 44? You’ve cheated us 14 names.

    If you have it in you to name 14 more Americans greater than Dr. Phil, I might seriously call into question the validity of this AOL/Discovery Channel list. Seriously.

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