November 22, 2006
The 100 Most Influential Americans VIII Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:30 PM EST There is a tension in Mr. Gordon’s response to my post about his list of “influential Americans.” On the one hand, Mr. Gordon agrees that it “would have been nice [for he and his fellow panelists] to get together . . . and have each explain why X deserved a spot,” a statement that seems to acknowledge that no person’s list is infallible. On the other hand, with characteristic scorn Mr. Gordon accuses me of endorsing tokenism and writes, “American history up to this point has been very white and very male. I’m not about to sprinkle my list with women and nonwhites just to achieve the phony ‘diversity’ that so obsesses academia.”
About business history and high political history (and, one might add, Broadway musicals), Mr. Gordon knows a great deal. But depth is no substitute for breadth. I’d suggest that Mr. Gordon stop denigrating academic historians and start reading more of their work. Like the term “liberal,” Mr. Gordon seems to think that “academia” and “diversity” are dirty words. Why, I don’t know. But anyone who states with impunity that “American history up to this point has been very white and very male” is either living in a dream world or has a reflexive and intellectually debilitating aversion to new ideas.
To note the influence of Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Duke Ellington, Martha Graham, Betty Friedan, Ralph Ellison, or Langston Hughes is hardly to promote tokenism.
Arguably, to include the name of Sam Walton (as Mr. Gordon does) is a case of tokenism. Wal-Mart is a tremendously important company. But is the business model it employs really all that innovative? From a historical perspective, it is but the next generation of the department store or the five-and-dime store, and Mr. Gordon’s list already includes A. T. Stewart, who was one of the first Americans to discover the value of high-volume retail sales. The nineteenth-century department store and twenty-first century Wal-Mart are different, to be sure, but conceptually they are very similar. I wonder if Mr. Gordon isn’t just a little obsessed with the phony achievements of white men.
Likewise, why include Daniel Webster or Henry Clay on the list? Both were tremendously important political figures in their own time, but no more so than James G. Blaine in the 1880s, Henry Cabot Lodge in the 1910s, Edith Green in the 1960s, or Ted Kennedy in the 1990s. Webster and Clay gave considerable backing to the Whig economic program, and Clay helped broker the Missouri Compromise. But Rep. Emmanuel Cellar authored the 1965 immigration reform act, which has arguably had as large an impact on the country as Clay’s and Webster’s signature achievements. He’s not on Mr. Gordon’s list, and he shouldn’t be. Like Clay and Webster, his achievements were great but not transcendent.
That said, perhaps Mr. Gordon would consider bumping Harriet Beecher Stowe for Wilbur Mills. Mills was the powerful chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in the 1960s and 1970s. Most people don’t remember him for much more than his drunken escapades with the stripper Fanne Foxe. On the other hand, Mills was white and male, and as John Steele Gordon reminds us, so was American history.
In crafting throwaway lines like, “Mr. Zeitz is very concerned with issues regarding race and gender. I am not,” and, “I am, obviously, very interested in and knowledgeable about business history and couldn’t care less about religion,” Mr. Gordon wears his ignorance like a badge of honor. Worse, he suggests that his limited range of interests and knowledge excuses the omission of entire categories of Americans from the Most Influential list.
This is a strange proposition. Personally, I don’t have the slightest interest in business history, but I wouldn’t have excluded many of the names Mr. Gordon included, because they were important figures in their own right. I don’t presume to confuse my personal interests with historical authenticity. In writing off the contributions of minorities and women in the construction of American history, and in discounting the central role that religion has played in American life, Mr. Gordon does.
My problem isn’t with Mr. Gordon’s list; as I said, these lists are fun but not particularly serious exercises. My problem is with Mr. Gordon’s characterization of American history as “very white and very male,” and his blissful infatuation with his own ignorance.
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