Thomas Edison
Orville and Wilbur Wright
Theodore Roosevelt
Frederick Douglass
John Marshall
Orville and Wilbur Wright
James Madison
John Marshall
Orville and Wilbur Wright
Current standings:
John Marshall 7
James Madison 6
Orville and Wilbur Wright 6
Frederick Douglass 5
Susan B. Anthony 3
Thomas Edison 3
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt
The Roosevelt barrier has been decisively broken; looks like we’re going to have a thoroughly boring final 2.
Maybe we should just eliminate two in the current round (although everyone will still have three votes), to give us a Top Ten…?
Susan B. Anthony
Frederick Douglass
Martin Luther King Jr.
Not a good round for activists for social change.
I like it. For the top 10, will we be voting out two at a time, or going down to single elimination?
I’m inclined to thereafter go with one vote each and single elimination, now that we’re down to the Really Big Names.
Doesn’t sound like a bad idea. I’ll note that right now we have a three-way tie for #2; do you want to institute some kind of tie-breaker? The first that comes to mind for me is to disqualify the first person to reach their current vote total (by this rule, Madison would go out ahead of the Wrights and Douglass at the moment); alternately, we could do a one-day run-off (one vote per customer); you could always exercise the OP’s prerogative and break the tie this one time by yourself.
Hmmm. Power-hungry despot that I am, I think I’ll exercise my OP prerogative if there’s a tie.
John Marshall
James Madison
Frederick Douglass
Thomas Edison
Orville and Wilbur Wright
Benjamin Franklin
Morning update:
John Marshall 8
James Madison 7
Orville and Wilbur Wright 7
Frederick Douglass 7
Thomas Edison 4
Susan B. Anthony 4
Martin Luther King, Jr. 2
Benjamin Franklin
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt
Just Washington and Lincoln with 0 votes.
I’d like to put in a quick word for Frederick Douglass:
The man started life as a slave; taught himself to read despite being legally forbidden and was teaching his fellow slaves when he was a teenager; in addition to being an abolitionist, he was also an early supporter of women’s suffrage and a delegate to the Seneca Falls conference. He rose from slavery to become a man with the ear of Presidents, or at least who Presidents felt the need to be seen consulting.
Honestly, if it comes down to Douglass versus ML King, I’ll vote to keep Douglass.
I’m a Douglass fan too. He was influential at the critical time, too; before, during, and after the Civil War. He contributed to the way freedom came to the slaves when it did come. He also gave the first sober reassessment of Lincoln’s relationship to slavery and the enslaved, eleven years after the assassination: Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln.
In a probably doomed attempt to keep him in this round, I will vote like so:
Thomas Edison – doesn’t belong in this company
Susan B. Anthony – Arg, somebody’s got to go, sorry Susie
Theodore Roosevelt – a great character, and it’s hard to say he shouldn’t be here, but if anyone is manly enough to withstand being voted out, it’s Teddy. He’ll probably form his own Bull Moose game and try to get voted back in.
This.
Douglass is also from the classic American paradigm of growing and learning, as opposed to clinging to dogma. To wit, his first autobiography (1845) is essentially propaganda–a horror story of slavery. By his second autobiography of 1855 (which is unfortunately neglected today in favor of its more sensational precursor), his views had become much more nuanced and honest. His work was a critique of the *institution *of slavery, not a demonizing tale of slaveowners. In this, he was much more credible than most white abolitionists, and served as a bridge between that camp and the more moderate anti-slavery thinkers like Lincoln. In essence, he got them to see past the fire of people like John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison, enunciating the thesis that freedom was more than an abstract moral ideal–it was a practical necessity.
Final tally:
John Marshall 8
James Madison 7
Orville and Wilbur Wright 7
Frederick Douglass 7
Thomas Edison 5
Susan B. Anthony 5
Martin Luther King, Jr. 2
Theodore Roosevelt 2
Benjamin Franklin
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Just Washington and Lincoln with 0 votes.
So we have a tie and now await the OP’s tie-breaker; he initially voted for both Madison and Douglass.
Hmm. This is actually easier than I thought.
John Marshall is out, as he got the most votes (much as I personally would like to save him). Among the three-way tie for second, Orville and Wilbur Wright gave us powered and controlled flight, an amazing innovation that had long been thought impossible, and which has since utterly changed human society. I agree with the praise of Frederick Douglass and will not repeat it here. So… it’s gotta be James Madison, whose disastrous Presidency could easily have lost us our hard-won independence. Despite his earlier importance as a Framer and in drafting the Bill of Rights, he’s gone.
Therefore, behold the SDMB Top Ten Greatest Americans, almost all of whom IMHO deserve to be in that exclusive club:
Susan B. Anthony: Suffrage activist
Frederick Douglass: Abolitionist, orator
Thomas Edison: Inventor, workaholic
Benjamin Franklin: Scientist, statesman, inventor
Martin Luther King Jr.: Preacher, orator, humanitarian
Abraham Lincoln: President, emancipator, writer
Franklin D. Roosevelt: President, reformer, statesman
Theodore Roosevelt: President, conservationist, statesman
George Washington: President, general, statesman
Orville and Wilbur Wright: Aviation pioneers, inventors
We will now to go one vote each, with one person eliminated each round. The current round will end at noon EST on Fri. March 12.
George Washington.
Great, yes, but I have always felt that his status as first president makes him seem even greater than he actually was. Also I am in the mood to make things a little more interesting.
I’m of two minds: on the one hand, I wish we had more scientists, inventors, and maybe even a writer or two in our final ten, and fewer politicians and activists. On the other hand, given the group we have, I still find one (two, actually) of the inventors to have the weakest case for carrying on.
So:
Orville and Wilbur Wright, mainly because they suffer in the comparison with Thomas Edison.