Hole in the Atlantic

The Atlantic Monthly's cover story this month lists the 100 "most influential Americans." The novelists selected are completely unsurprising -- Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, etc. -- and the side lists for poets (Plath, Whitman) and critics (Greenberg, Jarrell) allow the 10 historian-judges to expand things beyond such a tight set. The only black author of any kind, by the way, is Frederick Douglass.

As a scholar once pointed out to me, when you get a group together to assemble one of these lists, everyone can generally agree on the first 25 people or so. After that, things get interesting or quirky or complicated. It's extremely easy to find gaps, to complain about important individuals left out. It's often more interesting to try to suss out the overall reasoning that led repeatedly to this kind of person being chosen over that one. But the Atlantic's is is a pretty unsurprising list overall and the story's attempt to define "influential" doesn't overwhelm one.

Only three things leapt out at me immediately: No actors. Authors and artists and film directors and composers are here but not a single actor. One could argue that more people around the world have gotten their understanding of what it means to be an American from Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne and Katherine Hepburn (or W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers) than from dozens of the political figures included.

And no economists. Not that that's a great loss. It only surprised me because of the recent death of Milton Friedman and the dozens of obituaries that hailed him as such a titan of liberty and freedom -- obituaries that pretty much toed the conservative-libertarian line and ignored the fact that this messiah of the free market as a cure-all had supported the New Deal's relief programs. But that's only because the Depression, he wrote, was an extreme case, an exception. What that makes of the Panic of 1837 ("the land stinks of suicide," Emerson wrote at the time), the Panic of 1873 and the Panic of 1893 is a good question.

In any event, Mr. Friedman didn't make the list but neither did Paul Samuelson, Arthur Laffer (thank God) or John Kenneth Galbraith.

Neither did any playwright or Broadway musical creator. Which seems only typical after the complete lack of actors. Yes, George Gershwin is included but that's mostly for his boundary-breaking with jazz and classical music. In other words, the Broadway musical may be as distinctively an American creation as jazz or rock or the comic book or blues or gospel, but Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Frank Loesser and Stephen Sondheim didn't rate. Hell, as the saying goes, Irving Berlin is the American songbook, and he's not even here.

Neither is Eugene O'Neill or Tennessee Williams. Or Arthur Miller or David Mamet or Edward Albee.

Conclusion: Someone has a definite blindspot when it comes to theater.

A late addition: The lack of Edgar Allan Poe is also curious. Not as poet or critic or fantasist. But as the inventor of the detective story, another hugely popular art form that America created.