I could see this becoming a real time-eater
Several blogs have weighed in on the poll of high-school students fashioned by history professors from Stanford and the University of Maryland regarding the ten most famous Americans of all time. While the question “who do you think is most famous?” is rather unproductive (”No, this star sold more records!” “No, this politician was mentioned more times in newspaper articles!”), the top ten as pronounced by the poll results is a telling list. I would imagine the students actually went with what I would have gone with: who was most influential, or had the greatest impact on U.S. history. Still the answers are further justification for discouragement about the future of our society. There were some pretty dumb and off-the-wall selections. Oprah Winfrey? Marilyn Monroe?
Let’s throw it open here at BN. Let’s do use the “most influential” criterion. I don’t know how you’d measure fame or what tht would tell us that would be of any use.
So, I’ll kick things off. And, being the blogmeister, I reserve the right to post an entirely different list later based on changing my mind.
These aren’t necessarily in order.
Abraham Lincoln
Henry Ford
Dwight Eisenhower
W.C. Handy
John Dewey
Ralph Peer
Ezra Pound
Irving Berlin
David Sarnoff
Franklin Roosevelt
I can see already that I’ll be making another list. It’s a thought-provoking exercise.
In fact, let’s try it again.
Abraham Lincoln
George Washington
John Jay
Alexander Hamilton
James Madison
Thomas Jefferson
Henry Ford
Orville Wright
Wilbur Wright
Franklin Roosevelt
I’m sure I’ll be taking another crack at this.
In fact, let’s go again right now.
George Washington
Jonathan Edwards
Thomas Edison
William F. Buckley, Jr.
Ernest Hemingway
Louis Armstrong
Dwight Eisenhower
Walter Cronkite
Nathaniel Hawthorne
As you can see, my entries are not by any means all people I personally think are cool Cronkite, for example, makes it because he used the Tet Offensive in january 1968 - which was decidedly not a success for the Viet Cong - to convince the American public that U.S. involvement was a quagmire, which set off real momentum for the antiwar sentiment in this country, something that continues to mess us up to this day. John Dewey’s educational theories started us down the path of learner-centered education which paved the way for our present preoccupation with self-esteem.
February 13th, 2008 at 11:41 am
Here we are 40 years after Tet still arguing about its effects. Bottom line for me was it was a huge stretch to link saving the world for freedom and toting a gun in a foreign jungle fresh outta high school, killing or being killed. Our daddy’s “conflict” split this country, alienated us from much of the rest of the world, and did not accomplish diddly-squat. They apparently thought that dropping more firepower on that tiny country than that dropped by all the combined forces in WW II could get ‘er done. Now the blogmeister is trying to blame Walter Cronkite for defeat? Oh, truth died in there somewhere too, along with our innocence. You certainly couldn’t trust your own daddy. Mine was head of the local draft board. He had me groomed for officer material. Fie upon that!
February 13th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Once again you reinforce my point, although I doubt if that was your intention. We - meaning, ultimately, a sovereign South Vietnam, allied with the United States - were winning in January 1968. General Giap of the North Vietnamese army has said the demoralization of the U.S. public that really got mainstreamed by Walter Cronkite did more to ensure freedom’s defeat than anything the Communists did militarily.
And I see once again you raise the amount-of-firepower angle. What that has to do with whether the right side in a conflict prevailed or not is - well, nothing.
February 13th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
It’s not for lack of trying and lack of killing that the Generals didn’t get ‘er done. Something about the people of a country rising to the occassion when they are invaded. I take it you are intimating that we sheep were led by that wolf in sheep’s clothing Walter Cronkite. Gimme a break! If our side were so right why would we not have seen it? Nor, apparently did God, who it has been postulated, sees and knows all, including the death of innocents.
February 13th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
hemingway
gehry (dual citizenship: Canadian-American)
chomsky
james webb
mlk
February 13th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
So it’s a good thing that the South Vietnamese government fell and thousands of its citizens were forced into re-education camps, and the Soviet empire was emboldened to invade Afghanistan four years later and wage proxy war against the West in Cnetral America?
February 13th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
Walt Disney
Abe Lincoln
MLK
George Washington
Thomas Jefferson
February 13th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Walt Disney
Abe Lincoln
MLK
George Washington
Thomas Jefferson
Ben Franklin
Thomas Edison
February 13th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
Walt Disney
Abe Lincoln
MLK
George Washington
Thomas Jefferson
Ben Franklin
Thomas Edison
Sacajawea
Andrew Carnegie
Joseph Smith
February 13th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
If the Soviet Union was emboldened to invade Afghanistan they got just what we did, defeat and their virtual undoing. We hear little about that proxy war in Central America these days, and Ortega is the freely elected leader of Nicaragua today. We supply Taiwan with arms yet we wonder why China spies on us. What a wicked game we continue to play.
We can hope to win but statecraft still must rule the day.
February 13th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Bill Gates in there somewhere
How about Ray Kroc
Maybe Ted Turner
February 14th, 2008 at 2:09 am
Engaged, as I am, in a great war, I fear it will be difficult for the world to understand how fully I appreciate the principles of peace, inculcated in this letter, and everywhere, by the Society of Friends.
–Lincoln, March 19, 1862 Letter to Samuel B. Tobey
Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time.
–Lincoln, August 26, 1863 Letter to James Conkling
February 14th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
My opposition to war is not based upon pacifist or non-resistant principles. It may be that the present state of civilization is such that certain international questions cannot be discussed; it may be that they have to be fought out. But the fighting never settles the question. It only gets the participants around to a frame of mind where they will agree to discuss what they were fighting about.
HENRY FORD, My Life and Work
February 14th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
Why, you ask, these quotations from your choice of great men in American History? Why, because methinks you often wax way to bellicose here:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. –Dwight D. Eisenhower
I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new-one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use. That new language is the language of atomic warfare. –Dwight D. Eisenhower
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity. –Dwight D. Eisenhower
February 14th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
~Ernest Hemingway
About the quote: from “Notes on the Next War,” published in Esquire Magazine, 1935.
You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.
~Ernest Hemingway
No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.
~Ernest Hemingway
The 1st panacea of a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the 2nd is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; a permanent ruin.
~Ernest Hemingway
February 14th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.–FDR
February 14th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
Rodgers “only knew, I think, two chords, on guitar,”–Ralph Peer
February 14th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
“These Fought in Any Case”
by Ezra Pound
These fought in any case,
and some believing
pro domo, in any case …..
Died some, pro patria,*
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.
Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks, and fine bodies;
fortitude as never before
frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.
*The famous line from one of Horace’s “Odes”:
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (”Sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country.”)
February 15th, 2008 at 2:18 am
“There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.” –Thomas Edison
February 15th, 2008 at 2:24 am
The letter that launched the arms race. A warning to President Roosevelt of the possibility of constructing “extremely powerful bombs of a new type” with hints that the German government might be doing just that. Addressed and dated Peconic, Long Island, August 2nd 1939, it was most likely written by Leo Szilard, the scientist who invented the chain reaction. Nevertheless, Einstein took full responsibility for its consequences, calling it “the greatest mistake” of his life.
http://hypertextbook.com/eworld/einstein.shtml#fourth
February 15th, 2008 at 2:27 am
Work and live to serve others, to leave the world a little better than you found it and garner for yourself as much peace of mind as you can. This is happiness. –David Sarnoff
February 15th, 2008 at 8:40 pm
I hate to see de evenin’ sun go down,
Hate to see de evenin’ sun go down,
‘Cause ma baby, he done lef’ dis town. - W.C. Handy