By Lee H. Hamilton
Maybe it’s the perspective a long life brings, but I eye with some skepticism the glut of “personal brands” that assault us every day. Celebrities, politicians, journalists—all are “important” in terms of the attention they garner. But who’s really important, and why?
My own list would start with some obvious choices. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison—these men (and others) created the United States, not just as a political entity but as a set of ideals and political values that reshaped the history of the world.
I’d put some other former presidents on the list, too: Abraham Lincoln, for obvious reasons; Teddy Roosevelt, for the legacy he left behind in our national park system; Franklin Roosevelt for turning the US into an international force for democratic values. Members of Congress like Henry Clay and Justin S. Morrill, and such justices as John Marshall and Oliver Wendell Holmes belong there, too.
Still, politicians are hardly the only people who’ve been important to this country’s course as a nation. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, John Lewis, and other civil rights activists and leaders confronted head on the inequities that were present at our founding and produced lasting legal and social change. The same could be said for the countless Americans—women, Latinos, gays and lesbians, and others—who over the last half-century have reminded us that this needs to be a land of opportunity for all.
We’ve also produced more than our share of inventors who transformed the world, including Thomas Edison and George Washington Carver, as well as a wide variety of tech pioneers, from Grace Hopper and Shirley Jackson to Steve Jobs. And that’s not even taking into account the medical pioneers whose work improved the well-being of humanity.
You can play this game for hours if you wish. If “importance” is purely a matter of impact—for good or ill—then the list will be quite long.
But I take a narrower view. Our democracy and the welfare of its citizens need constant tending; the long arc of our history may point toward justice, the rule of law, freedom of conscience, opportunity for all, and advancement of the greater good, but it requires never-ending work. To my mind, it’s the people who pursue those ideals and strive to ensure that we live up to our promise who belong on a list of important Americans.
Lee Hamilton is a Senior Advisor for the Indiana University Center on Representative Government; a Distinguished Scholar at the IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies; and a Professor of Practice at the IU O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years.
