Can I change the three-word description on my suggestion of Jesse Owens to : “Made Hitler cry”?
Cute suggestion, but I’ll say no. Hitler was pissed, but not saddened, by Owens’s showing up his pinheaded Aryan-supremacy ideology, from all I’ve read.
Okay, how about “Made Hitler swear”?
Glad to see both Whitman and Frost on the list. There’s probably room for one or two more (Dickinson? Eliot? ee cummings? One of the Beats maybe?), though I doubt any of them will make it to the last 16.
Okay, here goes:
**Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. ** - Justice, saved Lincoln?
Sitting Bull - resisted evil policies
Tecumseh: united Native Americans
Will Rogers: humorist, social commentator
Audie Murphy: decorated soldier, actor
Cesar Chavez: civil rights activist
Meriwether Lewis - Louisiana Purchase explorer
William Clark - Lousiana Purchase Explorer
William Seward - Alaska Purchase buyer
Elendil’s Heir may need to arbitrate, but since I noticed this duplication first, perhaps I get to retract Ford first and renominate:
Marilyn Monroe: voluptuousest woman ever
Orson Welles – writer, director, actor
Langston Hughes – Harlem Renaissance poet
Upton Sinclair – author, muckraker
Earl Warren – governor, Chief Justice
That’s fine. If there are duplicate nominations, the first one posted will be the one that appears, subject to my light editing. The second poster may then nominate someone else.
I see Tecumseh and Sitting Bull mentioned. I considered them, along with Crazy Horse, for my list but I wasn’t sure if they qualified; As far as I know they weren’t citizens of the U.S. Can we get a ruling?
Yes, I will accept any Native American nominations for this thread, even if they were not U.S. citizens under the law at the time.
Hrm, interesting point.
My take on it is that “was Sitting Bull a citizen of the U.S.,” or not, was pretty much the whole struggle that defined his life. He refused to submit at first and led a principled resistance, but eventually surrendered. For what a Wikipedia citation is worth, he supposedly later advocated normalization of relations with white people.
That might count as becoming a US citizen, albeit after his defeat.
A second argument to be made is that the thread asks for Greatest American, not necessarily “U.S. citizen,” and he’s manifestly both a Native American and tied to [one of the saddest parts of] the story of America’s development.
But I will make another selection if the ruling goes against him. 
Harry Truman-American President
I cannot tell a lie. I already assumed the rule you give; the problem is that I nominated Ford before notfrommensa did. I guess the “voluptuousest woman ever” won’t appear unless someone else nominates her.
By the way, I feel like you’re being cheated a little. Your five nominations include at least 3 that would have been on almost everybody’s nomination list. That means the rest of us have been free to nominate “niche” candidates. (For example, I nominated Brown, Disney, Frost, possibly Monroe, without much hope any of those will make it to the Top 10: I’ll feel a sort of victory if 2 or 3 of them just make it to the Top 40.)
Therefore, in the interest of fairness, I hope Elendil’s Heir will add however many “niche” nominations of his own that he chooses before presenting the final list of nominations.
That’s very kind of you, septimus. Perhaps I will, but I suspect I won’t have to. Others have already nominated people who would’ve been on my personal Top Ten list, if it came to that.
I will certainly consider it.
Are you OK with colonial figures like Roger Williams? I’d think that founding Rhode Island would qualify the guy as an American, but sticklers might disagree.
I understand your point, but yes. Anyone who lived on American soil during and after the establishment of the colonies at Plymouth, Jamestown, Roanoke, St. Augustine etc., and is commonly considered a figure in “American history” regardless of citizenship status, may be nominated.
I just noticed that John F. Kennedy has not yet been nominated. I’m out of nominations myself, but certainly hope Kennedy makes it onto the list by Nightfall.
While his “Mr. Hyde” aspects led me to vote to eliminate him in the President Game, JFK certainly belongs on a list of Greatest Americans. It seems very likely Man would not yet have landed on the Moon were it not for JFK. (Such an expensive and “useless” program would certainly be inconceivable in today’s political climate.)
Chief Justice John Marshall’s absence from the list seems like a bigger gap than Kennedy, honestly. Though I’m also out of nominations.