Martin Luther King, Jr. As I stated above, in popular perception, King is as much a metonym as he is a man. He is a symbol of a great push for decency in a time of abject depravity. Though his work was extensive, I would argue that many if not most of the advancements in civil society after World War II would have happened with or without his influence. King was not a factor in Brown v. Board of Education. King was not a factor in Executive Orders 10479 and 10590. King was not a factor in the massive consciousness raising that accompanied the integration of major sports. (Yes, I’m still grousing about Jackie Robinson, who I feel should still be in this game.) King was a great exponent of the most profound movement of his day. He was not the Greatest American.
If you’d told me 25 years ago, when I had a poster of King above my bed, that I would be typing these words today, I would not believe you. Nevertheless, critical thinking must trump dogmatism.
Thomas Edison. A brilliant inventor in his own right, he also headed a massive corporation late in life and profited from - and took credit for - the hard work of his many underlings. To many of them, he was a jerk. Out he goes.
But he was twenty feet tall and made of radiation!
I think that as we close in on the idea of the “greatest” American, we are forced to contemplate what constitutes greatness in the American narrative. Despite its hackneyed overuse, freedom is still a powerful word to Americans; as close to a holy word as our civil discourse has. Accordingly, the final list is weighted inevitably toward those who have freed others or been instrumental in extending and codifying freedom, and less toward vaccines and light bulbs.
I always thought that what was critical about King’s contribution was not so much that he drove the advances to happen, as that he guided them toward a peaceable resolution. It seemed possible that anger (justified though it was) and impatience (a hundred years of waiting for the promise of the 14th Amendment to be fulfilled!) would taint the movement with militancy and violence, creating resentments that would make America a very unhappy place for a very long time, if not leading to outright civil conflict. The reaction to his death gave us a taste of what his moderating influence may have prevented from happening on a larger scale.
After all that, I will continue to try and pick off
Thomas Edison
I just see a lot of his work as refinements/improvements/working versions of things that lots of people were working on. I know the same exact claim can be made about the Wrights, but in a time when everyone else was just trying to get into the air, their vision went beyond that; they recognized control was every bit as important, and they didn’t just get us into the air, they gave us command of it.
Also, while Edison’ business ventures represent a very American way of organizing talent and directing it productively, the Wright brothers represent a competing and no less mythic American vision of dedicated, obsessed amateur tinkerers working in private. I find their individualism charming in a way that Edison’s “system” is not.
I’ll join the Edison movement. I think he was more important than the Wright brothers but he was also a bigger ass and that should have disqualified him from making it to top 10 anyway.
I agree with the idea that the finalists shouldn’t be all political and/or military figures – indeed, when I participated in a similar poll several years ago, I included Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie in my top five. However, the Wrights suffer from the fact that their accomplishments were pretty much limited to aviation, while Edison’s stamp was impressed on home illumination, sound recording, motion pictures, fluoroscopy, and more, not to mention the distribution of the power required for these devices and processes to operate.
Also, Orville and Wilbur are inevitably linked, and the idea of the game is to find the individual most deserving of the Greatest American mantle. So off the Wrights go into the wild blue yonder…
