History as therapy

USA Today reports on a poll taken of American high school students, asking them to name the "most famous Americans in history," starting with Columbus to the present day. (Columbus was American?) Here's the result:

Asked to name the most famous Americans in history, high school students put 20th-century black Americans in the top three slots. Here are the top 10, with the percentage who chose each:

1. Martin Luther King Jr.: 67%

2. Rosa Parks: 60%

3. Harriet Tubman: 44%

4. Susan B. Anthony: 34%

5.Benjamin Franklin: 29%

6. Amelia Earhart: 25%

7. Oprah Winfrey: 22%

8. Marilyn Monroe: 19%

9. Thomas Edison: 18%

10. Albert Einstein: 16%

Furthermore:

For what it's worth, when the researchers polled 2,000 adults in a different survey, their lists were nearly identical. To Wineburg, that shows that what's studied in school affects not just children but the adults who help them with their schoolwork.

Steve Sailer dryly observes:

About 20 years ago, E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy survey revealed that more high school students could identify Harriet Tubman than Stalin or Churchill. I recall William F. Buckley wondering who in the world Harriet Tubman could be. If she was more important than Stalin, how could he have gone his whole life without ever hearing of her? And if she wasn't important, why was she famous?

How naive we all were back then!

What a depressing list. The only people here who would be on my Ten Most list would be MLK and Edison (Einstein was technically an American, but I find it hard to think of him as one for the purposes of a list like this). No Washington, no Jefferson, no Lincoln, no FDR. Not even Eisenhower, the dull Republican president who actually, you know, beat the Nazi war machine. [UPDATE: I didn't realize when I posted this list this morning that the poll had deliberately excluded presidents and first ladies. -- RD] No artists (including writers and filmmakers, though I guess you might say that Marilyn Monroe was an artist, of a sort). No industrialists. Little connection with the kind of consequential achievements that built this country.

This is history as therapy. Don't get me wrong: what Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony and Rosa Parks did was heroic and consequential. But moreso than any of the Founders save Franklin? Did Harriet Tubman really do more to free the slaves than Abraham Lincoln or Gen. Grant? Hell, I think you could make a stronger case for the historical consequentiality of Bill Gates than most of the people on this list. Amelia Earhart is more important than Alexander Hamilton, the man who created the modern US banking system? Whatever history teachers are telling their students, it's wack.

I know, I know, some of you will say, "You just want to honor white males." Spare me. Assuming that "famous" in this case has something to do with the scale of the historical figure's accomplishment, then I believe we have an obligation to do our best to assess what we wish were the truth according to multiculturalist and egalitarian dogma. Of course the list will be heavily populated with white males; because of legal and social realities, non-whites and women didn't have the opportunity to do as much. The next 500 years of American history will tell a very different story in that regard from the last 500 post-Columbus years. But in exercising historical judgment, you shouldn't edit the past to make it conform to preferences in the present. This list indicates the corruption of history education.

My list of Ten Most Famous Americans is like this, in no particular order:

1. George Washington
2. Abraham Lincoln
3. The Massachusetts Bay Colonists
4. Franklin Delano Roosevelt
5. Thomas Edison
6. Martin Luther King, Jr.
7. Bill Gates
8. Henry Ford
9. Elvis Presley
10. Robert E. Lee

It's a slightly idiosyncratic list, admittedly, and reflects not those Americans I wish were most influential, but those who actually were. To explain my more puzzling choices: Gates and Ford I picked because both, in their own eras, created models that radically changed the way America, and indeed the world beyond, worked and organized their lives. I chose Elvis not because I particularly like his work (I think there were far more talented artists in US history; Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday, for example) but because of his enormous historical importance in uniting black and white working class popular art, and what he symbolized with the modern cult of celebrity in an age of mass media.

I think the hardest choice to justify is Robert E. Lee, and not for the reason you think. To me, Lee represents the tragedy and nobility of the American character. He chose to fight for the wrong side out of noble motive. As a historical figure, it's difficult to argue for Lee's enduring legacy, but I can't think of a figure in US history who more perfectly stands for the tragic aspect of our national character, which you see running throughout US history (even up to the current president, in a debased form).

To be honest, I think Carl Djerassi, inventor of the birth control pill, is probably the more significant figure (alas!). But he isn't "famous" by any stretch, so I'm ambivalent about putting him on my list.

Anyway, it may be unfashionable to say so, but as great as Susan B. Anthony and the suffragettes were, I think broader cultural forces, especially economic ones (e.g., industrialization, World War II and the need for women to enter the wartime workforce) contributed to the changed status of women in this culture, rather than a single historical figure.

So, questions to you readers:

1. Do you approve of the change in history education that caused US students to produce the list cited by USA Today? Why or why not?

2. What's your list?