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December 4, 2006
TT: They've got a great big list
Speaking of lists, the cover story in the December issue of the Atlantic is a feature called "They Made America" for which ten "eminent historians" were invited to draw up lists of "the most influential figures in American history," which were then combined into a giant-sized über-list of America's Top One Hundred Influentials. Such lists are scarcely more than an intellectual (or pseudo-intellectual) party game, but it's always fun to play, and if you go here you can see who made the cut.Here are the artists:
16. Mark Twain
22. Walt Whitman
26. Walt Disney
33. Ralph Waldo Emerson
41. Harriet Beecher Stowe
49. Frederick Law Olmsted (he designed Central Park)
59. Louis Sullivan (he invented the skyscraper)
60. William Faulkner
65. Henry David Thoreau
66. Elvis Presley
76. Frank Lloyd Wright
79. Louis Armstrong
83. James Fenimore Cooper
85. Ernest Hemingway
92. John Steinbeck
95. Sam Goldwyn (I suppose you could call him an artist)
97. Stephen Foster
100. Herman Melville
Eighteen people, ten of them writers, including three bad novelists. No playwrights. No film or stage directors. No painters (unless you count Samuel F.B. Morse, No. 45 on the list). No sculptors. No choreographers. Only one songwriter, and no other composers of any kind. Do I detect the least little whiff of philistinism on the part of those eminent historians? At least Satchmo made the cut!
In addition to the main list, the magazine published five secondary rosters of influential architects, filmmakers, musicians, poets, and critics. David Thomson chose the filmmakers, and his picks, as always, were illuminating: D.W. Griffith, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and (here's the ringer) Andy Warhol.
I chose the musicians, and after a good deal of preliminary thought, I opted to play it down the ringerless center: Armstrong, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Elvis Presley, and Bob Dylan.This, incidentally, is the second such collective venture in which I have participated. Back in 1998 and 1999, Time ran a series of tributes to what it claimed were the one hundred most important people of the twentieth century, including twenty "artists and entertainers": Armstrong, Dylan, Lucille Ball, the Beatles, Marlon Brando, Coco Chanel, Charlie Chaplin, Le Corbusier, T.S. Eliot, Aretha Franklin, Martha Graham, Jim Henson, James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Bart Simpson, Frank Sinatra, Steven Spielberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Oprah Winfrey. I wrote the article on Graham, but not before begging the editors to choose George Balanchine instead. Alas, I couldn't change their minds, so I bit my tongue and did my duty.
Fortunately, I was allowed to make the final calls on three of the items included in the "Best of the Century" list that Time published on the last day of 1999. For what it's worth, I chose Balanchine's The Four Temperaments as best dance of the century (with Paul Taylor's Esplanade and Antony Tudor's Jardin aux lilas as runners-up), Britten's Peter Grimes as best opera (with Berg's Wozzeck and Puccini's Madama Butterfly as runners-up), and Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms as best classical composition (with the Ravel String Quartet and Copland's Appalachian Spring as runners-up). I'd stand by those choices today, though I can easily imagine other, equally satisfactory rosters.
Like I said, it's only a game--but a good one.
Posted December 4, 2006 12:00 PM
