The New Radical Chic
Ahead of America's 250th, the beautiful people have brought anti-patriotism fully back into style
In 1986 the New York Times celebrated the 100th year of the Statue of Liberty with a series of paeans to its hometown heroine-of-steel, who’d stood at the harbor and welcomed so many of the city’s immigrant families.
“Miss Liberty… represents tolerance and acceptance, a generosity of spirit, the America that lives in the words of Walt Whitman and William Saroyan, the films of Frank Capra, the music of Aaron Copland,” the paper wrote. “And when… a nation falls short of the ideals she represents, she towers in silent reproach.”
Forty years later the same Times, ahead of a new national milestone, is running a series of features called AMERICA AT 250. One of the latest is “These 8 Americans Shaped History. We Just Don’t Agree on How.”
What eight Americans would you put on a list of history-shapers?
From Elvis to Muhammad Ali to Michael Jackson to Barack Obama, the most famous people on earth for the last seventy-plus years have almost all been Americans, but being known isn’t everything. If the question is who shaped world history, one could make cases for Edison, Ford, Whitney, Salk, Disney, Deere, Gates, Jobs, Rockefeller, Colt, or the Wright Brothers; you might think of shadow villains like Dulles or Lansdale, or activists like Samuel Gompers, Betty Friedan, Susan B. Anthony, or Martin Luther King, Jr. It would be hard to write a modern history book without sections on Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Eisenhower, and both Roosevelts.
Which eight did the Times choose? Let’s dig in:
