November 21, 2006
The 100 Most Influential Americans II Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 11:45 AM EST I am fascinated by John Steele Gordon’s list of the hundred most influential Americans, below. It raises many interesting questions, but to start with I’ll just ask two related ones. How does Franklin Roosevelt come to be way down at No. 14, below the likes of Steve Jobs? It seems to me that Roosevelt gave the American political landscape its basic shape for a good half a century, at least until Reagan was President, not to mention transforming the role of the federal government and leading the country out of a Depression and to victory in a world war. And how does Jobs get to be so high on the list? I’d have thought Bill Gates had done much more to foster the spread of personal and networked computing, unless you maintain that Gates’s biggest contribution is Windows and he lifted that from Jobs’s company. I have no doubt John has very good answers to these questions, and I look forward to being enlightened. (I’m tempted to add that I’m a little surprised to see Milton Friedman nowhere on the list. But I said I’d ask just two questions.)
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