Ludicrous Finalists for "Greatest American". Cable television's Discovery Channel is running a program called "Greatest American", which claims to have received nominations from 500,000 people, reduced to 100 top choices, which have been whittled down to, now, 5 top contenders: Benjamin Franklin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, and George Washington.
+
For MLK and Ronald Reagan to be mentioned anywhere near the words "Greatest American" is absurd.
+
The description at the website where visitors can vote for MLK says, "A man willing to stand up to injustice and inequality, Martin Luther King, Jr. redefined courage and honor while demanding change." What a bunch of bullshit.
+
The long, long struggle for civil rights and respect for blacks was not a one-man show but a train of courageous acts of defiance and character by literally millions of people, both black and white, over centuries. To focus on MLK as tho he did it all is an outrageous distortion of history that insults everyone before, contemporaneous with, and since King.
+
We know dozens of their names, from Crispus Attucks in the Revolution to Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, to Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and George Washington Carver, to Roy Wilkins and Roy Innis, to Julian Bond, James Meredith, Thurgood Marshall and Rosa Parks, who lived to do great things for their people and our civilization.
+
We know as well the names of some others, who weren't so lucky: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and the three civil-rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner whose murder in Mississippi was the subject of a trial that ended just this week with the conviction of one man for manslaughter exactly 41 years to the day after the murders.
+
To list even this many names, or any number of names, does injustice to all those whose names we know but do not mention, and gross injustice to the myriad people whose names we don't know but whose efforts, as individuals and in groups, have, bit by bit, transformed, and continue to transform society for the better.
+
Thus, to subsume all the efforts of all these people into a tribute to one man, Martin Luther King, Jr., is an obscenity. Especially obscene is it when one considers that specific man.
+
Martin Luther King was no saint. He cheated on his wife and plagiarized many authors throughout his academic and religious career.
+
Consider the first flaw: MLK was an ordained minister who swore a solemn oath of faithfulness to his wife, before God, then cheated on her with other women!
+
A book reviewer addresses these issues, and King's unorthodox theology, online:

In Martin Luther King’s famous "I-have-a-dream," speech (1963), he poignantly expressed the hope that someday his four children would be able to "live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Character indeed.

However, if the famous civil rights leader had been judged more by the content of his character than by his civil rights activities, he would have carved a far different niche in history. At least that is the conclusion one might draw after reading Michael Eric Dyson’s new book, I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. (Free Press, 2000).

Might the uncritical, exaggerated praise heaped upon MLK have something to do, oddly, with his name? He was called "King". And not just "King", but also "Martin Luther". Words have connotations. Would "King" have been as highly praised, elevated in esteem, and placed beyond criticism, if his name had been "Billy Ray Little"? ("Little" was Malcolm X's original surname.) Would his sexual sins have been so easily overlooked if his last name had been "Johnson"?
+
In any case, there has been entirely too much attention paid to MLK. He was not the only civil-rights leader in our history, nor, arguably, even the most important. He was elevated into the ranks of saints, even demigods, only because he was shot. That doesn't justify calling him anything like the "Greatest American".
+
The nomination of Ronald Reagan is even more ridiculous. Reagan wasn't even really President, but just an actor playing President. He said what he was told to say, he danced to whatever tune his pipers played, in whatever pattern might result when his puppeteers jerked his strings.
+
The text at the place one can vote for him online says, "Reagan is credited with engineering the downfall of communism and the restoration of a nation's spirit". Preposterous.
+
Reagan had no more to do with the downfall of Communism than any other President since World War II.
+
Truman established the Marshall Plan, Truman Doctrine, and NATO to stop Communist expansion in Europe, and every President thereafter, without exception, staunchly opposed Communism.
+
Eisenhower headed NATO before becoming President, then faced down North Korea and its Soviet and Communist Chinese backers to hold the line against Communist takeover of South Korea.
+
Kennedy stopped the installation of ballistic missiles in Cuba by blockading that island against Soviet ships, and began U.S. defense of South Vietnam.
+
Johnson fought the Vietnam War, and committed huge resources to try to protect South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from Communist takeover.
+
Nixon ran from Vietnam, but even before his presidency tried a different tack, engagement of Communist China and working to lessen the feeling of encirclement of the Soviet people. In his 1959 "kitchen debate" with Nikita Khrushchev, he said

[W]e do not and will not try to impose our system on anybody else. We believe that you and all other peoples on this earth should have the right to choose the kind of economic or political system which best fits your particular problems without any foreign intervention.

He followed that up with a treaty to limit strategic arsenals, all designed to reduce tensions as would permit Soviet citizens to turn more attention to internal problems and domestic discontents.
+
Ford concluded more arms-reduction arrangements with Brezhnev, also to lessen the feeling of Soviet citizens that their problems were our fault.
+
Carter negotiated further arms limitations, but once the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, sent aid to the Afghan resistance. He also boycotted the Moscow Olympics and, more tangibly, announced plans to deploy cruise missiles in Europe.
+
Tho it is true that Reagan's Administration embarked upon a very expensive arms race, and announced a "Star Wars" plan (that has never been implemented), it is absurd to say that he "engineer[ed] the downfall of communism". If anything, U.S. support for the Afghani mujahedeen, begun by Carter and only continued by Reagan, was more important:

Most observers agree that the last war of the Soviet Union created or aggravated the internal dynamics that eventually culminated in the dissolution of the country itself.

Nothing Reagan did was different in any significant way from the consistent policy of anti-Communism pursued by every American President since World War II, and it is preposterous to give Reagan's Administration special credit just because all the strands of Soviet dissolution came together, by historical coincidence, during that period. It is especially preposterous to credit Reagan the man.
+
Reagan was the world's best actor, who actually had billions of people believing that he was the President of the United States. But he was never President save in name and lawful authority. He was a front for a collective Republican leadership, many of whose members are part of the second Republican imitation-presidency, that of George Dubya Bush.
+
So, is any of the three remaining candidates for "Greatest American" worthy of that honor?
+
Benjamin Franklin was undoubtedly a great man, but he never held the highest office of the Nation so was only one of many people who contributed to the policies that created this most wondrous of nations. His astonishing creativity set a standard for every American after him who aspired to make a difference in writing, science, diplomacy, or practical inventiveness.
+
Abraham Lincoln did three things of great importance. (1) He preserved the Union against attempted secession, but only after many missteps and poor choices of generals and strategies. (2) He issued the Emancipation Proclamation — but (a) it had no practical effect at the time, since it applied only to areas he did not control, not to slaves within Union territory; (b) he delayed it almost two years after the start of the war, (c) he countermanded orders by at least two commanders in the field who had attempted to free slaves within their jurisdiction, and (d) he made plain that restoring the unity of the Nation, not abolishing slavery, was his prime concern:

If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.

Nor did Lincoln believe in the equality of the races, nor in social integration. He even entertained aloud the idea of helping free blacks to leave the United States, for Liberia or Central America. A speech he is said to have given before would-be black colonists contains remarks on racial inequality that would be regarded today as incendiary. I cannot vouch for that text, but an article at Answers.com seems to confirm its gist.
+
(3) Lincoln also contributed noble phrases to the canon of ideals to which Americans like to believe themselves devoted. He wrote one of the most famous short works of prose in all of English, the Gettysburg Address, which eloquently dedicated not just a cemetery but also a Nation:

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. * * * [And so] we here highly resolve ... that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

And he gave voice to the feeling of his countrymen that it is specially important to the course of history and human progress that the Union survive, for we were "the last, best hope of Earth". Even many non-Americans concede aloud that, with all the reservations they may have as to some uses of U.S. power, the survival of American unity really was important to world civilization.
+
But Lincoln didn't create the Union that he preserved. That task fell to the last of the nominees for "Greatest American", George Washington.
+
Without Washington, there would be no United States. There would have been no Union to preserve. There would be no nationality called "American". His picture is on both the dollar bill and the quarter, his name is on the national capital, for good reason.
+
In more ways than we know, Washington set the standard for all of us. At times we have exaggerated his virtues and glossed over his failings. He was, after all, a slaveholder, tho he did provide that after his wife's death his slaves should be freed.
+
But he kept the Continental Army together when it seemed, over and over, to be at the verge of collapse and dispersion. He harried the British, avoiding catastrophic engagements, but making them eventually realize that they faced an unwinnable war. He gave the thirteen separate colonies/states a sense of unity they had never felt before. He was the one man every "American" could claim for himself. Be he Virginian or New Jerseyan, every man saw Washington as "ours".
+
More, he refused a crown, refused to become King George I of America, which he could probably have become, as at least constitutional monarch. He astonished Europe when he refused to run for a third term but left office precisely on time, handing over power peacefully to his successor. Thru all of our remaining history, his self-imposed two-term limit was heeded as binding precedent by every President but one, FDR, who used as excuse that we were in the middle of a world war so could not risk changing horses in midstream. After FDR's demise, the Nation entrenched in the Constitution the two-term limit that Washington imposed upon himself.
+
There's no question in my mind who was the "Greatest American", and I urge everyone who reads this to vote for George Washington at AOL or by dialing, toll-free ("from landlines"), 1-866-669-3105.
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,728.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:39 PM