... according to this poll of conservative bloggers that included me.
I think this group list of greatests came out much better than the group list of worsts. I was especially glad to see Norman Borlaug receive enough votes to appear.
This is the list I sent to RWN:
Norman Borlaug
Washington
Jefferson
Lincoln
Franklin
Madison
John Quincy Adams
Reagan
Edison
MLK
Frederick Douglas
Noah Webster
Henry Knox
Lewis & Clark (That's two, so I suppose I cheated there.)
George Mason
John Adams
Eisenhower
Phyllis Schlafly
Davy Crockett
Neil Armstrong (Representing all those who helped to build the space program during its infancy.)
I had a very hard time narrowing down to twenty. (At least one of the ones I didn't cut is purposely controversial. Have to have at least one like that in any list.) I had to cut a lot who I would have just as easily left on the list. Others I'd like to have included are Patrick Henry, Daniel Boone, Calvin Coolidge, George Patton, Henry Ford, Thomas Paine, the Wright Brothers, Ethan Allen, Andrew Carnegie, Sam Walton, and Bob Hope.
Who would be on your list?
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9 comments:
Jack Webb
Okay, forget Jack Webb. I had only just seen a Dragnet marathon and got inspired.
How about adding Archbishop Fulton Sheen? He would represent the only man of the cloth on your list.
George Mason
Norman Borlaug
George Washington
Calvin Coolidge
Robert Fulton
John Deere
Thomas Edison
Ronald Reagan
James Hill (Great Northern Railway)
Andrew Carnegie
Orville and Wilbur Wright
Got chores to do, that's enough.
I'll say that I'm much more interested in a best list than a worst list. Too depressing . . .
I would add the following...
-Louis Armstrong, because jazz is an American invention, and cool matters...
-Bill Gates, because after everyone's had their jabs, right or wrong, Windows was the operating system that got the world connected.
Those are the only ones I can think of that contribute something that the current list doesn't. On the one hand, a musical explosion that has morphed a thousand times over and affected everyone. On the other, easy home computing for more than just geeks.
No list of Most Influential Americans is complete without mention of the Wright Brothers, the inventors of the airplane. They represent the eternal genius of the common American experimenting in his garage or basement.
Working evenings and weekends in back of their bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio the Wrights not only invented the airplane but the science of aeronautic engineering. They took an "impossible" big problem and broke it into many bite-sized little problems and solved them one at a time. That is genius.
Agreed. Most people think they were just bicycle tinkerers, when in fact they were brilliant scientists and engineers in a very modern sense of those titles.
Milton Friedman
Winfield Scott
Fred Astaire (I gotta say that one, right?)
Raymond Loewy
Buckminster Fuller
Not a bad list. Bob Hope was born in England, but he became American. Norman Borlaug is an especially inspired choice.
I might replace Phyllis with Milton and Rose Friedman.
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