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<\/div>\nThe Atlantic Monthly came up with this list<\/i>: <\/p>\n
1 Abraham Lincoln<\/p>\n
He saved the Union, freed the slaves, and presided over America’s second founding. <\/p>\n
2 George Washington<\/p>\n
He made the United States possible—not only by defeating a king, but by declining to become one himself.<\/p>\n
3 Thomas Jefferson<\/p>\n
The author of the five most important words in American history: “All men are created equal.”<\/p>\n
4 Franklin Delano Roosevelt<\/p>\n
He said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” and then he proved it.<\/p>\n
5 Alexander Hamilton<\/p>\n
Soldier, banker, and political scientist, he set in motion an agrarian nation’s transformation into an industrial power.<\/p>\n
6 Benjamin Franklin<\/p>\n
The Founder-of-all-trades\u2014 scientist, printer, writer, diplomat, inventor, and more; like his country, he contained multitudes.<\/p>\n
7 John Marshall<\/p>\n
The defining chief justice, he established the Supreme Court as the equal of the other two federal branches.<\/p>\n
8 Martin Luther King Jr.<\/p>\n
His dream of racial equality is still elusive, but no one did more to make it real.<\/p>\n
9 Thomas Edison<\/p>\n
It wasn’t just the lightbulb; the Wizard of Menlo Park was the most prolific inventor in American history.<\/p>\n
10 Woodrow Wilson <\/p>\n
He made the world safe for U.S. interventionism, if not for democracy.<\/p>\n
11 John D. Rockefeller<\/p>\n
The man behind Standard Oil set the mold for our tycoons\u2014first by making money, then by giving it away.<\/p>\n
12 Ulysses S. Grant<\/p>\n
He was a poor president, but he was the general Lincoln needed; he also wrote the greatest political memoir in American history.<\/p>\n
13 James Madison<\/p>\n
He fathered the Constitution and wrote the Bill of Rights.<\/p>\n
14 Henry Ford<\/p>\n
He gave us the assembly line and the Model T, and sparked America’s love affair with the automobile.<\/p>\n
15 Theodore Roosevelt<\/p>\n
Whether busting trusts or building canals, he embodied the “strenuous life” and blazed a trail for twentieth-century America.<\/p>\n
16 Mark Twain<\/p>\n
Author of our national epic, he was the most unsentimental observer of our national life.<\/p>\n
17 Ronald Reagan<\/p>\n
The amiable architect of both the conservative realignment and the Cold War’s end.<\/p>\n
18 Andrew Jackson <\/p>\n
The first great populist: he found America a republic and left it a democracy.<\/p>\n
19 Thomas Paine<\/p>\n
The voice of the American Revolution, and our first great radical.<\/p>\n
20 Andrew Carnegie<\/p>\n
The original self-made man forged America’s industrial might and became one of the nation’s greatest philanthropists.<\/p>\n
21 Harry Truman<\/p>\n
An accidental president, this machine politician ushered in the Atomic Age and then the Cold War.<\/p>\n
22 Walt Whitman<\/p>\n
He sang of America and shaped the country’s conception of itself.<\/p>\n
23 Wright Brothers<\/p>\n
They got us all off the ground.<\/p>\n
24 Alexander Graham Bell <\/p>\n
By inventing the telephone, he opened the age of telecommunications and shrank the world.<\/p>\n
25 John Adams<\/p>\n
His leadership made the American Revolution possible; his devotion to republicanism made it succeed.<\/p>\n
26 Walt Disney<\/p>\n
The quintessential entertainer-entrepreneur, he wielded unmatched influence over our childhood.<\/p>\n
27 Eli Whitney<\/p>\n
His gin made cotton king and sustained an empire for slavery.<\/p>\n
28 Dwight Eisenhower<\/p>\n
He won a war and two elections, and made everybody like Ike.<\/p>\n
29 Earl Warren<\/p>\n
His Supreme Court transformed American society and bequeathed to us the culture wars.<\/p>\n
30 Elizabeth Cady Stanton<\/p>\n
One of the first great American feminists, she fought for social reform and women’s right to vote.<\/p>\n
31 Henry Clay<\/p>\n
One of America’s greatest legislators and orators, he forged compromises that held off civil war for decades.<\/p>\n
32 Albert Einstein<\/p>\n
His greatest scientific work was done in Europe, but his humanity earned him undying fame in America.<\/p>\n
33 Ralph Waldo Emerson<\/p>\n
The bard of individualism, he relied on himself—and told us all to do the same.<\/p>\n
34 Jonas Salk<\/p>\n
His vaccine for polio eradicated one of the world’s worst plagues.<\/p>\n
35 Jackie Robinson <\/p>\n
He broke baseball’s color barrier and embodied integration’s promise.<\/p>\n
36 William Jennings Bryan <\/p>\n
“The Great Commoner” lost three presidential elections, but his populism transformed the country.<\/p>\n
37 J. P. Morgan<\/p>\n
The great financier and banker was the prototype for all the Wall Street barons who followed.<\/p>\n
38 Susan B. Anthony<\/p>\n
She was the country’s most eloquent voice for women’s equality under the law.<\/p>\n
39 Rachel Carson<\/p>\n
The author of Silent Spring was godmother to the environmental movement.<\/p>\n
40 John Dewey<\/p>\n
He sought to make the public school a training ground for democratic life.<\/p>\n
41 Harriet Beecher Stowe <\/p>\n
Her Uncle Tom’s Cabin inspired a generation of abolitionists and set the stage for civil war.<\/p>\n
42 Eleanor Roosevelt <\/p>\n
She used the first lady’s office and the mass media to become “first lady of the world.”<\/p>\n
43 W. E. B. DuBois<\/p>\n
One of America’s great intellectuals, he made the “problem of the color line” his life’s work.<\/p>\n
44 Lyndon Baines Johnson<\/p>\n
His brilliance gave us civil-rights laws; his stubbornness gave us Vietnam.<\/p>\n
45 Samuel F. B. Morse<\/p>\n
Before the Internet, there was Morse code.<\/p>\n
46 William Lloyd Garrison<\/p>\n
Through his newspaper, The Liberator, he became the voice of abolition.<\/p>\n
47 Frederick Douglass<\/p>\n
After escaping from slavery, he pricked the nation’s conscience with an eloquent accounting of its crimes.<\/p>\n
48 Robert Oppenheimer<\/p>\n
The father of the atomic bomb and the regretful midwife of the nuclear era.<\/p>\n
49 Frederick Law Olmsted<\/p>\n
The genius behind New York’s Central Park, he inspired the greening of America’s cities.<\/p>\n
50 James K. Polk<\/p>\n
This one-term president’s Mexican War landgrab gave us California, Texas, and the Southwest.<\/p>\n
51 Margaret Sanger<\/p>\n
The ardent champion of birth control\u2014and of the sexual freedom that came with it.<\/p>\n
52 Joseph Smith<\/p>\n
The founder of Mormonism, America’s most famous homegrown faith.<\/p>\n
53 Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.<\/p>\n
Known as “The Great Dissenter,” he wrote Supreme Court opinions that continue to shape American jurisprudence.<\/p>\n
54 Bill Gates<\/p>\n
The Rockefeller of the Information Age, in business and philanthropy alike.<\/p>\n
55 John Quincy Adams<\/p>\n
The Monroe Doctrine’s real author, he set nineteenth-century America’s diplomatic course.<\/p>\n
56 Horace Mann<\/p>\n
His tireless advocacy of universal public schooling earned him the title “The Father of American Education.”<\/p>\n
57 Robert E. Lee<\/p>\n
He was a good general but a better symbol, embodying conciliation in defeat.<\/p>\n
58 John C. Calhoun<\/p>\n
The voice of the antebellum South, he was slavery’s most ardent defender.<\/p>\n
59 Louis Sullivan<\/p>\n
The father of architectural modernism, he shaped the defining American building: the skyscraper.<\/p>\n
60 William Faulkner<\/p>\n
The most gifted chronicler of America’s tormented and fascinating South.<\/p>\n
61 Samuel Gompers<\/p>\n
The country’s greatest labor organizer, he made the golden age of unions possible.<\/p>\n
62 William James<\/p>\n
The mind behind Pragmatism, America’s most important philosophical school.<\/p>\n
63 George Marshall <\/p>\n
As a general, he organized the American effort in World War II; as a statesman, he rebuilt Western Europe.<\/p>\n
64 Jane Addams<\/p>\n
The founder of Hull House, she became the secular saint of social work.<\/p>\n
65 Henry David Thoreau<\/p>\n
The original American dropout, he has inspired seekers of authenticity for 150 years.<\/p>\n
66 Elvis Presley<\/p>\n
The king of rock and roll. Enough said.<\/p>\n
67 P. T. Barnum<\/p>\n
The circus impresario’s taste for spectacle paved the way for blockbuster movies and reality TV.<\/p>\n
68 James D. Watson<\/p>\n
He codiscovered DNA’s double helix, revealing the code of life to scientists and entrepreneurs alike.<\/p>\n
69 James Gordon Bennett <\/p>\n
As the founding publisher of The New York Herald, he invented the modern American newspaper.<\/p>\n
70 Lewis and Clark<\/p>\n
They went west to explore, and millions followed in their wake.<\/p>\n
71 Noah Webster<\/p>\n
He didn’t create American English, but his dictionary defined it.<\/p>\n
72 Sam Walton<\/p>\n
He promised us “Every Day Low Prices,” and we took him up on the offer.<\/p>\n
73 Cyrus McCormick<\/p>\n
His mechanical reaper spelled the end of traditional farming, and the beginning of industrial agriculture.<\/p>\n
74 Brigham Young<\/p>\n
What Joseph Smith founded, Young preserved, leading the Mormons to their promised land.<\/p>\n
75 George Herman “Babe” Ruth <\/p>\n
He saved the national pastime in the wake of the Black Sox scandal—and permanently linked sports and celebrity.<\/p>\n
76 Frank Lloyd Wright<\/p>\n
America’s most significant architect, he was the archetype of the visionary artist at odds with capitalism.<\/p>\n
77 Betty Friedan<\/p>\n
She spoke to the discontent of housewives everywhere—and inspired a revolution in gender roles.<\/p>\n
78 John Brown<\/p>\n
Whether a hero, a fanatic, or both, he provided the spark for the Civil War.<\/p>\n
79 Louis Armstrong<\/p>\n
His talent and charisma took jazz from the cathouses of Storyville to Broadway, television, and beyond.<\/p>\n
80 William Randolph Hearst <\/p>\n
The press baron who perfected yellow journalism and helped start the Spanish-American War.<\/p>\n
81 Margaret Mead<\/p>\n
With Coming of Age in Samoa, she made anthropology relevant—and controversial.<\/p>\n
82 George Gallup<\/p>\n
He asked Americans what they thought, and the politicians listened.<\/p>\n
83 James Fenimore Cooper<\/p>\n
The novels are unreadable, but he was the first great mythologizer of the frontier.<\/p>\n
84 Thurgood Marshall<\/p>\n
As a lawyer and a Supreme Court justice, he was the legal architect of the civil-rights revolution.<\/p>\n
85 Ernest Hemingway<\/p>\n
His spare style defined American modernism, and his life made machismo a clich\u00e9.<\/p>\n
86 Mary Baker Eddy<\/p>\n
She got off her sickbed and founded Christian Science, which promised spiritual healing to all.<\/p>\n
87 Benjamin Spock<\/p>\n
With a single book—and a singular approac—he changed American parenting.<\/p>\n
88 Enrico Fermi<\/p>\n
A giant of physics, he helped develop quantum theory and was instrumental in building the atomic bomb.<\/p>\n
89 Walter Lippmann<\/p>\n
The last man who could swing an election with a newspaper column.<\/p>\n
90 Jonathan Edwards<\/p>\n
Forget the fire and brimstone: his subtle eloquence made him the country’s most influential theologian.<\/p>\n
91 Lyman Beecher<\/p>\n
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s clergyman father earned fame as an abolitionist and an evangelist.<\/p>\n
92 John Steinbeck<\/p>\n
As the creator of Tom Joad, he chronicled Depression-era misery.<\/p>\n
93 Nat Turner<\/p>\n
He was the most successful rebel slave; his specter would stalk the white South for a century.<\/p>\n
94 George Eastman<\/p>\n
The founder of Kodak democratized photography with his handy rolls of film.<\/p>\n
95 Sam Goldwyn<\/p>\n
A producer for forty years, he was the first great Hollywood mogul.<\/p>\n
96 Ralph Nader<\/p>\n
He made the cars we drive safer; thirty years later, he made George W. Bush the president.<\/p>\n
97 Stephen Foster<\/p>\n
America’s first great songwriter, he brought us “O! Susanna” and “My Old Kentucky Home.”<\/p>\n
98 Booker T. Washington<\/p>\n
As an educator and a champion of self-help, he tried to lead black America up from slavery.<\/p>\n
99 Richard Nixon<\/p>\n
He broke the New Deal majority, and then broke his presidency on a scandal that still haunts America.<\/p>\n
100 Herman Melville<\/p>\n
Moby Dick was a flop at the time, but Melville is remembered as the American Shakespeare.<\/p>\n
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