The number is not a ranking.

If any athlete should be in, how about Jackie Robinson?  But then, probably, we should include Branch Rickey.  How about Babe Dedrickson?  Roger Bannister?

A few thoughts about the top 100:

• of course there is a Western, English language bias.  Acknowledged and admitted.   The Chinese will have a different top 100 list.  I'd love to get together and argue about who, in the two lists, should be on both.
• Candidates must be three things: important, interesting, and influential.
• Of course J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy, and others were despicable.  The question is, were they influential?  Yes.
• No tokenism allowed: not many women on the list, and, unfortunately, justly so.   Individual women should have played a bigger role in the 20th Century, and it was unfair that they didn't, but it is a fact that they didn't.  And I don't buy the argument that they really were more influential than they appeared to be, but were simply unacknowledged.  If that were true, then it wouldn't matter that women finally did move into positions of influence, in what was, perhaps, the most significant "movement" of the century.
• Influence must have depth, as well as width.  No to Princess Diana, no to Warfield Wallace Simpson, no to Michael Jackson, no to Monica Lewinsky (!), and no to Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe.
• The U.S. will have the largest representation in the Time Magazine top 100.  That doesn't just reflect nationalist bias-- the 20th will be remembered as America's century.  The result of the two world wars was the ascendancy of U.S. military and economic might, and America's vast material prosperity has given it the resources for significant achievements in commerce and industry.  Culturally-- it's a different story.
• in some cases, a listing is credited partly as a representation of a certain movement or set of ideas, because no single individual stands out as singularly deserving the rank.   Charles Lindbergh was really no more courageous or audacious than, say, Amelia Earhart, but he was the first to cross the Atlantic alone, and he serves as a representative of the technology, aircraft, that had such a great impact on this century.   In the same sense, there is no single person who can be credited with the rise of feminism, so a few important representatives are listed.

In the arts, the U.S. most resembles the ancient Roman Empire, which accrued vast economic power, but depended on the Greeks for its culture.  No U.S. writer this century has achieved the world-wide importance of Sartre, Camus, or Greene.  No U.S. director has astonished the way Kurosawa astonishes, both the eye and the mind, or the way Bergman astonishes the soul.  F. Scott Fitzgerald?  Oh, please.

Who will be on Time's List but Shouldn't Be:

Bill Gates -- as an innovator, he is a complete dud.  As a marketer, he was successful, but again, he didn't invent anything new.  He just heads a company that is exceptionally ruthless, and exceptionally incompetent.  No, Windows 95 does not multi-task.  Several other OS's, including OS/2 and Unix, have been multi-tasking for years and years.  The makers of those operating systems just weren't ruthless or bright enough to shove their product down everyone's throats. 

Well, he might still grudgingly make the list, because the world wide web runs on the personal computer, and Gates owns the company that makes the software that runs most of the world's personal computers.

Lucille Ball -- popular and famous... how deep is Lucy's influence?  Well, how did she change your life?  Frankly, Tuesday Weld had more influence on me than Lucy ever did, in 1/100th the time.

Frank Sinatra -- come on... for what?!  His fashion sense? 

Michael Jordan-- Time Magazine will claim that Jordan is the greatest professional athlete of the 20th century.  Not so.  Wayne Gretzky exceeds the benchmark of outstanding performance in hockey by a far greater margin than Jordan does for basketball.   The point is that neither are really "influential" or important.

Billy Graham-- and how did he influence you?  The trouble with Graham is that he has dedicated his life to separating religion from politics, thus ensuring that our politics are amoral and our religion irrelevant.  But it worked as he planned: he's still around, still famous, and still gets invited to the White House.  Now start over.

Stephen Spielberg-- his movies -- including Schindler's List, are so utterly conventional and shallow, he can hardly be considered an intellectual influence on anyone.

What I Learned about the 100 Most Influential People

It's harder than you might think to come up with a list of 100.  The first 60 or 65 are relatively easy, but the last 40... you find you have to start including people you rejected the first time around.  But you also start poking into disciplines you might have forgotten about, like architecture and physics. 

The News Stories of the Century: Series

World War I

World War II

Russian Revolution

Chinese Revolution

The Depression

Fall of Communism

The News Stories of the Century: Incidents

Kennedy Assassination

Sinking of the Titanic

Landing on the Moon

Best Book
Beautiful Losers (Leonard Cohen)

Best Album
Highway 61 Revisited (Bob Dylan)

© Copyright 1998 Bill Van Dyk