Who's missing from this 'top 100' list?
AMERICAN LIFE feels overwhelmed by politics. All anybody wants to talk about is President Bush or the midterm elections, what the Democrats should do or where the Republicans went wrong. And with the elections over, the press has already begun obsessively handicapping 2008.
This makes it a good time to take a step back and remember how small a role politics has played in national life, and how much influence has been wielded by those who never stood for office or shouted from a soapbox. This year, The Atlantic asked 10 historians to compile their lists of the 100 most influential Americans -- with influence defined, loosely, as a person's impact, for good or ill, on his or her own era and on the way we live now.
The lists were then averaged to create a "top 100" list that will appear in the December issue. The results of this survey are inevitably unscientific, but they offer a snapshot of our nation's past. They offer, too, a timely suggestion that there's something faintly un-American about our obsession with electoral politics.
It's not that the historians didn't list their share of political figures: The top 100 vote-getters included 17 presidents, for instance, as well as many political figures who never occupied the Oval Office -- Alexander Hamilton, Eleanor Roosevelt, Tom Paine, and Ralph Nader. The panelists suggested 321 names all told, and more than half of America's presidents didn't receive a single vote; nor did the vast majority of the country's Supreme Court justices, Senate and House leaders, secretaries of state and attorneys general.
If you set aside the figures associated with either the American Revolution or the Civil War, our two great political earthquakes, then politicians and political activists were dramatically outnumbered by businessmen and inventors, novelists and directors, intellectuals and religious visionaries.
While politicians bicker, the historians' voting suggests, everyone else gets busy making America what it is -- a nation of pioneers, innovators, and successful freelancers.
Thus the votes for Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science; for Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, the founder and preserver of Mormonism; for Charles Grandison Finney, the great 19th-century revivalist and a forebear of today's Evangelicals; and for William Seymour, the son of freed slaves whose Azusa Street Church, in turn-of-century Los Angeles, touched off the century-long explosion of Pentecostalism.
Thus the host of scientific and technical geniuses who received votes: Thomas Edison, Eli Whitney, and Jonas Salk; Cyrus Field, who laid the first trans-Atlantic cable; Philo Farnsworth, who fathered the television; Willis Carrier, whose air conditioning keeps today's congressmen and lobbyists cool in the Washington, D.C. heat.
Thus, too, the various captains of industry -- not only the usual robber baron litany, but such figures as A.T. Stewart, the 19th-century dry goods king; or David Sarnoff, who built RCA into a radio and television empire; or Ray Kroc, the man behind McDonald's. And thus the various cultural icons, the Jackie Robinsons, Walt Disneys, Bob Dylans, and George Lucases, who affected the average American's daily life far more than many acts of Congress.
As with the past, so with the present. Historians are notoriously wary about assessing the influence of anyone who isn't safely in the grave, and as a result there were only three living Americans in the top 100 vote-getters. But 34 living Americans received votes , and few of them were political figures.
Overall, the historians' balloting suggests that we're more likely to remember today's giants of culture, commerce, and science than any contemporary politician.
There were historians who bet on the long-lasting influence of Steve Jobs and Steven Spielberg; on Norman Borlaug, the man behind the "green revolution"; on the four "fathers of the Internet," Vinton Cerf, Robert E. Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, and Lawrence Roberts; and on Billy Graham, Oprah Winfrey, and Martha Stewart.
There were none willing to place bets on the enduring impact of Newt Gingrich or Karl Rove; John Kerry or Anthony Kennedy. Nor were there any votes for the president.
It's possible, of course, that our panelists are wrong, and that Nancy Pelosi and Dennis Hastert will join Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln on a "100 Most Influential Americans" list of 2106. But the historians' balloting suggests that many of today's seemingly apocalyptic political battles will fade into irrelevance within a generation or so, and that what endures from our era will have little to do with the debates currently roiling talk shows and blogs and Capitol Hill.
Ross Douthat is an associate editor at the Atlantic Monthly and author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class." 
