Why stop at 100?

            I recently read a Facebook post from The Atlantic magazine highlighting the 100 most influential Americans. (1) These top 100 lists are specifically what is wrong with the uniquely American approach to history and its significance to contemporary experience.  When Ralph Waldo Emerson penned “All history is Biography,” in Essay 1 in 1841 (2), he did not distinguish the importance of celebrity over the common human.  Emerson goes on to say, ”The world exists for the education of each man.” (3)

            Limiting the American experience to a list of 100 influential individuals represents a misguided view of the American story.  It may not be the intent of the writers to articulate that these 100 put our country where we are today, but it leaves that conclusion as an implied interpretation.   In Essay 1, Emerson goes on to ask, “Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign?” (4) Celebrity can create a false history.  It can cause us to miss the important lessons from experience that weakens the opportunity from that experience.

I am thinking specifically thinking of the inclusion of Elvis Pressley in this list of 100.  Elvis would have never been possible, but for the scores of musicians who made his meteoric rise possible, from blues men like Robert Johnson to gospel and country, Elvis found his soul immersed in the voice of others.  It was the American obsession for celebrity that diminished Elvis and eventually killed him.  His true contribution was nourished through others while greed leeched his marrow.

Maybe this means, from the American perspective, that Elvis truly belongs in the top 100 influencers.  Emerson cites Napoleon, "What is History, but a fable agreed upon?" (5).  The same Napoleon whose fatal ego drowned in his own celebrity.  We are in an age where Americans claim an exceptional existence from the exploits of human kind.  As Emerson wrote, “We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience, and verifying them here,” where “all history becomes subjective.” (6) Perhaps Elvis then should move to #1 on The Atlantic’s list.  This search for super human celebrity, as with other Americans of great renown listed by The Atlantic, causes us to miss true meaningful influence and power.  Though written in 1841, Emerson could have meant Elvis when he wrote, “His power consists in the multitude of his affinities, in the fact that his life is intertwined with the whole chain of organic and inorganic being.”   We miss so much when we search for, and cite, the historic based on celebrity while the time of his or her other experience so formed action of such grand repute. 

The focus on Robert E. Lee should not be his stately myth, but the failure of misplaced loyalty.  The lessons of World War II should not be the combined psychopathy of Hitler, Stalin or Hirohito, but the overriding force of collective good forced into action.  All history should be debated and reviewed not for absolute right but invariable humility.  Martin Luther King was not the Civil Rights movement, but a voice that could be heard about a truth that had to be revealed.  

There is a collective insanity that comes with the repeated missteps of leadership and civilization.  The false worship of historical figures as celebrity blinds us from the truth of our humanity.  Perhaps the fear referenced in FDR’s famous speech is not of forces driven by ill-gotten fame, but a fear to acknowledge who and what we are.  Or as Emerson put it, “If we would trulier express our central and wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes,” (7) then maybe we can learn to act and pursue in the better interest of all.

(1) http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/12/the-100-most-influential-figures-in-american-history/305384/

(2) 09/03/20022:36:01
http://www.emersoncentral.com/credentials.htm

Jone Johnson Lewis
M.Div., 1981, Meadville/Lombard Theological School
Unitarian Universalist minister and Ethical Culture Leader

(3) Ibid 09/03/2002

(4) Ibid 09/03/2002

(5) Ibid 09/03/2002

(6) Ibid 09/03/2002

(7) Ibid 09/03/2002