It is a politically correct and cowardly list. Just at a quick glance, half of the 2020 list are unimportant people like Sojourner Truth, a big-mouthed leftist black feminist.
Interestingly there are no Southern generals on the list or John Wayne. Too controversial. Too hell with this silly garden.
I fear nobody who fought for the Confederacy will be on the list. Lee. Stonewall Jackson. Jeb Stuart. James Longstreet. Even Clark Gable, for portraying a Southerner.
It's about time that Robert E Lee be re-acknowledged as one of the US's finest generals, bar none. Defending one's country from invaders, and helping to win victories for his nation, what other high honor in military battle can be given?
If Lee isn't the automatic definition of a "Hero" (a War Hero at that, and when the term "Hero" originally was used to chiefly designate that), then the term is meaningless.
Much as I admire Elvis, or Babe Ruth, Robert E. Lee is a legitimate Hero in the best sense, and the vast consensus of Americans for most of the 20th Century would've agreed.
Matty is largely forgotten, as is Grover Cleveland Alexander except of course for hardcore baseball history aficionados. For example, I'm not sure if Steve is familiar with the fact that Matthewson pitched 3 complete game shutouts in a single week, during the 1905 WS vs PHI AL.
Before Babe Ruth, perhaps NYC's greatest MLB player was Christy Matthewson. Actually there's no perhaps about it.
But if we have to include the greatest ever to have played in MLB, that would crowd out names from other fields. So Babe Ruth and perhaps Cobb and Walter Johnson are sufficient.
And to be all PC, include Mays and Aaron so no one gets all butthurt.
In the entertainment field of the 2nd half of the 20th century, there wasn't a more relevant force than Elvis. He changed everything.
"Elvis Presley is the greatest cultural force in the 20th century... He introduced the beat to everything and he changed everything--music, language, clothes, it's a whole new social revolution--the Sixties come from it."
--Leonard Bernstein, 1966 ( TIME Magazine)
Perhaps many if not most all of Steve's favorite musicians when he was growing up owe directly or indirectly some debt to Elvis, and they wouldn't have been ashamed to say so themselves.
Funny that Sacajawea is on the list. I don't much care for David Frum but when Sacajawea was put on the silver dollar twenty-five years ago he called her "Squaw-Slave" which is about what she was. If you need to make the American-Indian quota, why not Geronimo, Jim Thorpe, Chief Bender or Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell.
Jim Thorpe over Cy Young. Light on scientists. Oppenheimer would be a controversial choice. Feynman wouldn’t been bad, I might prefer the lesser known Joshua Gibbs or Joesph Henry.
Among philosophers of cultural impace you could do worse than William James
There's a lot in that sentence. Appellate judges should be elderly lawyers who have the rules of statutory construction and the grand scheme of the common law memorized and ingrained and issue terse opinions on arcane legal issues and correction of trial court errors. Then nobody cares who the judges are.
I actually attended an oral argument as a tourist at the Supreme Court when Rehnquist was chief judge, and all you had to do was wait in line and pass through a metal detector. I took a wrong turn looking for the restroom and ended up in an alcove where all the clerks sat during oral argument. I excused myself and backed out; nobody batted an eye.
Actually I'd put Judge Learned Hand in the hero's garden, who looks exactly how God would have made appellate judges. And Scalia and Thomas (not dead yet) for pointing out most constitutional law jurisprudence is made up out of whole cloth.
Learned Hand, sitting by designation because too many Supreme Court Justices were recused, wrote the most evil opinion in the history of American jurisprudence.
I thought discussing the precise procedural posture was getting into the weeds. The government brought an antitrust claim against ALCOA. The claim was dismissed and should have gone to the Supreme Court, but six Justices recused themselves because they owned ALCOA stock. Congress passed a special statute allowing the Second Circuit to make the final decision. Judge Hand wrote the opinion in favor of the government. For many years, antitrust lawyers considered it to be the de facto equivalent of a Supreme Court case, and it was often cited approvingly — before Judge Bork and the antitrust revolution.
I stand by my earlier comment: it is the most evil decision in the history of the American judiciary.
I agree. And I believe quite seriously that her childhood friend, Truman Capote, took her manuscript and contributed too much to it. It's very different than the movie. She also was a bit too fond of the mass murderers Capote sent her to interview for In Cold Blood, and her last manuscript, published some time ago, reinforces her general inability.
Buckley as well should be booted from the list for his behavior in freeing woman-rapist-killer Edgar Smith. At least Mailer apologized for his 'lil spree killer fetish. Only Buckley, Sarandon, and John Silber stood by theirs.
I believe in Harper Lee's second and last novel, Atticus Finch is a supporter of segregation in the 50s. But I never read it. The truth is that almost all white Southerners supported segregation until the 1970s.
But it is not at all true that almost all white Southeners supported segregation until the 1970's.
I know a lot of white retired Atlanta cops who wept over black kids and young black prostitutes' bodies. And the vast, vast, vast majority of killing was black-on black. I lived in mixed neighborhoods on the southside for decades. There was and is a lot more peaceful racial mixing in Atlanta than in the North, for a lot longer, from the legislature to construction jobs, both of which I worked.
You can support segregation and be sad about black children being killed. You brought up Atlanta. I bet there are very few whites in the Atlanta public schools. Most of those white children would attend no further than elementary schools. At the higher grades, the black boys would beat up the white boys and take liberties with the white girls. And virtually all whites living in Atlanta are liberals.
He was one of the big money man for Adolf. As well as gifting him his writings that made it into Mein Kampf. On the other hand, where would USA be in industrial production, including war-time industrial production without Ford?
The idea for the assembly line came from the meat industry and if Ford hadn't done it, someone else would have very shortly. It's something that would have evolved naturally as demand for cars ramped up.
This is why the great men model of science breaks down. With inventions we must consider how big a step something was with how long the necessary components had been available before someone put them together. But there is also how great was the insight.
Einstein came up with the theory first and had those other guys help him with the math. I'm not super deep on special relativity (but deeper than normal) and I am not convinced that having the math available automatically makes one stumble upon the theory.
It's fairer to say that given the known problems (like why the speed of light always measures the same) it is likely someone else would have eventually said --well let's treat that speed as constant and see what the implications are. But that could have taken 20 more years.
Actually, Einstein studied math @ Hermann Minkowski, so he took the concept of Minkowski space and ran with it to stitch up the special relativity. Lorenz transformations were already circulating, Maxwell equations were around, and Michelsen already proved the constant speed of light irrespective of the motion frame. So everything was there, it wouldn't have taken another 5 years for someone else to come up with special that gave the theoretical underpinning for unification of electric and magnetic forces.
The general was "much more work to do". Minkowski already died in 1909, so Einstein turned to Hilbert who recommended Emmy Noether, the famous lady algebraist who is also known for the symmetry and conservation laws. Funnily enough, after Einstein discussed his problems with the general, Hilbert started working on the general too on his own, but Einstein preempted him. By 1916 the general was more or less complete, so Karl Schwarzschild could furnish his solution of a stationary black hole.
All true but I still think the special relativity insight about frames of reference wasn't obvious from the math. My understanding is that Einstein came up with the nonobvious insights and later the math and geometry was applied to them. I guess there is no way to know for sure given that Einstein doesn't pass the test of a long lag between the pieces being in place and the discovery.
I asked chatGPT because that's a good way to get the average opinion of people who debate these things and it said:
If Einstein never existed, special relativity would still have emerged — likely by 1915 at the latest, just more slowly, and possibly in a more mathematically dense or philosophically tangled form.
It said 1920s at latest so a little shorter than mine. Also:
What Einstein Did Differently
Einstein’s breakthrough wasn’t in the math — it was conceptual clarity:
He postulated that the laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames.
And that the speed of light is constant for all observers, regardless of their motion.
This cleaned up the ether-based worldview and made the relativity principle central to all physics, not just electrodynamics.
I understand that you are writing this on behalf of antisemites but since I was going to write it anyway I'll drop it here...fuck Henry Ford.
I have an extremely high bar for problematicness and he's the only one I can think of who clears it. For a garden of heroes? No way. If we have him we should also have the founder of the KKK
The heroism of an inventor should be partially judged by the obviousness of the invention. I forget who came up with the standard but you consider how long all the components needed for the invention were available before someone put them together. The real inventor of the assembly line is whoever came up with the meat disassembly line. Without checking I'd guess that one evolved rather than was invented by a guy.
That's why it's so complicated picking heroes. It is vanishingly rare for one person to be the key the whole thing.
Also, as a multiply failed entrepreneur, I am extremely skeptical of vision stories in business. Almost always they are back fit to events after the success.
Having read a book on McDonald's a few years ago, Kroc was the dynamo. The McDonalds brothers were content to make an upper middle-class income and Kroc eventually bought them off for a million dollars each. Kroc and Sonneborn came to loggerheads on the McDonald's corporate model. Kroc was interested in the restaurant side while Sonneborn was interested as McDonalds as a real estate firm selling leases to McDonald's franchise owners. They were not on speaking terms by about 1963 and communicated to each other through June Martino, McDonald's vital third wheel.
You would think by the time they're worth several hundred million simoleons they'd find some room to compromise and remain on speaking terms as they enjoyed their incredible, God-blessed careers. I'm sure both men's egos were as big as the World Trade Center towers.
Funny about how shortsighted the McDonald brothers were. They felt plagued by the high taxes on the rich after World War Two and got tired of the taxes they paid on what Kroc paid them. So they opted for a flat million bucks in 1960? and one last tax payment. Both died before 1980 if memory serves so it is unlikely they would have been billionaires. But they would have been very, very rich had they held onto their shares of McDonald's.
Nathan Bedford Forrest just might qualify. Anyway, QED, a hero's garden in such a highly pluralistic society as the US is kind of a fool's errand. Different founding mythos, different religions, different history, different ancestry. Different everything. Nobody can agree on what constitutes a heroic American just like nobody can agree on anything else.
A personal litmus test I have for "getting" America is the ability to watch Birth Of a Nation, and then explain dispassionately explain what nation D.W. Griffith portrayed as having been birthed. No idea how many people would pass the test but my impression is few, and fewer every year, so I am completely indifferent to an American Hero's Garden.
It would be amusing to have public debate on such a garden. Some on the far left might try to opt out on the basis of "Trump, obviously" but for undecided voter types that would just look like they think America has no unblemished achievements. So people on the right would suggest mostly white men who did great things and the left would be a combination of the first black woman to discover a species of newt and some actual left wing heroes who would almost all be vulnerable to ticky-tac accusations of problematitude.
Kind of related, I once suggested to a conservative Brit that they ought to wind down their toothless, expensive monarchy. He said no, because then the government would have to write up a republican constitution and it would be a thousand pages long, divvy up power among a million obsolete functionaries, and contain every single "right" the liberals could dream up.
The monarchy works well in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Your British conservative friend is right. Having an elected president would add layers of bull**** to British government. The British monarchy is helpful to the various tabloids throughout the English-speaking world and it is a great tourist attraction. Who would want to visit Buckingham Palace without King Charles and Queen Camilla living there?
"Nathan Bedford Forrest just might qualify" as what, a hero for the garden? What was the nature of his heroism. A quick read on the guy suggests he was a horrible war criminal.
Brilliant self taught cavalry officer who killed Yankees and turncoats and led the resistance to Reconstruction. One man's war criminal is another man's freedom fighter.
War crimes are defined by the victors. The Truman administration killed 250,000 civilians in one day and nobody hung for it.
first- being a self taught cavalry officer hardly qualifies you for the list. If you want a confederate hero to mark the secession as heroic, there are far better people. This guy executed prisoners of war because they were black. Took a bunch from hospitals to do so. That's a war crime by anyone's standard, not just the victors.
But Henry Ford is The Guy who is associated most with mass production and putting the working class in their own cars. That's just huge in American and world history.
No Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Joe DiMaggio, Ty Cobb or Ted Williams. Hmm. Cobb's off because he was "racist" like 99 % of Americans of his time. You would have thought Williams might have made it as a Hispanic quota.
Alex Trebeck????????????????????????? A game show host. Who next? Bill Cullen? Art Fleming? Gene Rayburn? Soupy Sales?
Aaron and Mays weren't dead yet in 2020. I'd go with DiMaggio, Cobb, and Williams over Cy Young. I'd say Williams as the current folk hero of the three. He wasn't terribly popular when he was playing, but now people really like him.
He missed three years of baseball during WWII doing the usual baseball star stuff, including learning to be a fighter pilot (which was highly dangerous by itself). But then in his mid 30s he gets called back and sent into jet fighter combat over Korea as John Glenn's wingman. It would be like Steph Curry getting pulled out of the NBA and sent to bomb Iran. Ted was pretty baffled by why he was getting drafted, but he served.
Williams was so adept at piloting that he spent most of the war teaching young pilots. If memory serves, Williams missed 43,44,45 and 52 because of war. That's probably 125 homers right there.
Robert E. Lee, engineer. His engineering pretty much made Des Moines. He did a lot of work around St. Louis to make the Mississippi navigable. Robert Goddard, originator of the rocket. Eli Whitney, originator of the cotton gin but instrumental in the concept of interchangeable parts. Cyrus McCormick and the reaper. All men more important than Alex Trebeck.
I second Goddard as the father of the liquid fueled rocket. He had a lab in and conducted his early experiments near Roswell, NM, where there is a high school named after him, the Goddard Rockets. There are two military rockets in front of the school and a tile space mural on the wall next to the main entrance.
I went to Robert Goddard Junior High School in Seabrook, MD, a half-mile from NASA. As for Robert Goddard, scientist, he was funded by one of the Guggenheim's at the suggestion of Charles Lindbergh.
Henry Leland got Cadillac and Lincoln going, introduced the electric starter and mass-produced V8, and solidified precision machining and interchangeable parts for autos.
No Patsy Cline? No Loretta Lynn? No Willa Cather? Willa Cather is a two-fer. Woman. Lesbian. Just bragging, but Patsy Cline and Willa Cather grew up in Gore, VA ten miles from my house when they were toddlers.
Although I do not support Trump's silly park, if it need be built, it shouldn't be built in Washington DC which is overloaded with monuments. It should be built in Detroit. The federal government could just buy four or six blocks of rubble and make it into Trump's park.
Where’s James Knox Polk? During his presidency territory that today comprises California, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada was added and territorial disputes with Great Britain were settled that included what today are Idaho, Oregon and Washington. The border with Mexico dispute extended Texas from the Nueces River to the Rio Grande. Yes, the U.S. fought a war against Mexico that Polk provoked by placing troops in the disputed territory but that territory was recognized as the legitimate boundary by the Treaties of Velasco which ended the Texas War of Independence. Mexico later rejected those treaties because they were signed by Santa Ana under “duress” but aren’t most treaties that ended wars signed under duress by the losing nations?
Polk owned slaves but so did a number of others who are listed.
von Neumann is already on the list, but I would definitely include Oppenheimer, Teller, Fermi and Ulam. Not Feynman. After all, heroes alludes to conflict, and what conflict was Feynman involved in at the main point of his adult life?
Amongst the film types: Griffith, Chaplin, John Ford, Kubrick and Wilder.
I also think one can't not include Lindbergh. In terms of affinity/contribution to Nazi-ism, Henry Ford was much worse, and he's on the list...
You are right, barnabus, on the film giants. You are wrong about Lindbergh, who was not an anti-Semite. Lindbergh was politically naive. He was also the son of one of the few congressmen who voted against America's Declaration of War against Germany in 1917. Swedish-Americans tended to be very isolationist and anti-war a century ago.
Lindbergh went to Nazi Getmany and transmitted back vital information to Roosevelt concerning the superior strength of the Gertman Air War Machine. Roosevelt never mentioned this when he banned him from fighting for our military. So Lindbergh fought with other allies and endured the slight.
His home life was a bit more complicated, as it turns out. His wife was a great writer and observer of between-the-wars Europe, by the way.
Lindbergh also reported on the weakness of the British air force. His analysis of what the Brits needed to become competitive with the Germans was the main reason why Roosevelt authorized the export of "green gas" -- 100 octane aviation gasoline, the only source for which in the world was the Standard Oil refinery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to the British. Without the increase in horsepower that fuel allowed, the Brits would have stood no chance in the air against the Luftwaffe.
Lindbergh didn't fight with other allies. He was hired as a technical consultant by aviation companies. Working for Chance-Vought, he flew with the Marines' VF-24 in the Pacific, flying combat missions and advising pilots on how to get the most out of their F4Us. He proved to them that that airplane could lift a 4,000lb bomb load.
Working for Lockheed, he flew with the Army Air Force's 475th FG in the Pacific, and taught the pilots how to extend the P-38's range by hundreds of miles. He also taught them deflection shooting, which the Army, unlike the Navy, did not do. While flying combat missions, he shot down a Japanese plane. When word of that got out, he was yanked away from the squadron by 5th Air Force's Gen. George Kenney, and sent home. But first Kenney shook his hand, slapped him on the back and bought him dinner.
While working for Consolidated-Vultee, Lindbergh determined that the B-24 lacked sufficient lateral stability and advised that it needed an increase in vertical stabilizer area, but the Army rejected the suggestion because it would have caused several weeks delay in production to make the change. When the Navy bought their version of the B-24, the PB4Y-2, they specified it have the "Lindbergh tail," thus eliminated the problem that plagued all pilots trying to fly tight formations in the B-24 or keep it from "hunting" at high altitudes.
Lindbergh did not need to fly combat missions. As a technical advisor and a civilian, he was neither required or expected to do that. Some of his combat missions with the 475th were quite harrowing, such as joining three other pilots to fly hundreds of miles over the ocean, navigating only by compass and clock, to Truck island to dare the Japs to come up and fight and then battling the swarm of Zeros that rose up to take them on, with no chance of reinforcement and no hope of getting home or rescued if their airplane were damaged, let alone if they were shot down, then successfully breaking off the combat when fuel ran low and flying home those hundreds of miles.
Talk about heroes, talk about warriors, talk about extraordinary skill and daring.... Wow.
I'm proud to say that my great grandfather met and became friends with Lindbergh in 1929 when Lindbergh visited the USS Saratoga (CV-3) off Panama at the completion of Fleet Problem IX while he, my great grandfather, was flying the Martin T4M-1 with Torpedo Squadron VT-2B (as it was then designated), and had just successfully participated in the surprise "bombing" of the Panama Canal.
Lindbergh did report to the US government his opinion of the Nazi Air Force. He was doing his country a favor. His personal life was unusual to say the least. He had families with at least two German women. Because his sister-in-law had heart problems, he funded heart research. An interesting tidbit about Lindbergh is that he greeted all the nutcases that came to his Connecticut estate rather than having bodyguards take care of them. Many of the lunatics claimed to be Lindbergh's baby grown up. He was apparently very patient with these people.
It is a politically correct and cowardly list. Just at a quick glance, half of the 2020 list are unimportant people like Sojourner Truth, a big-mouthed leftist black feminist.
Interestingly there are no Southern generals on the list or John Wayne. Too controversial. Too hell with this silly garden.
John Wayne is on the list.
Yes. I missed it.
Robert E. Lee should've made the list.
I fear nobody who fought for the Confederacy will be on the list. Lee. Stonewall Jackson. Jeb Stuart. James Longstreet. Even Clark Gable, for portraying a Southerner.
Lee was also a Mexican War hero.
Lee was probably the most vital officer in the Mexican War.
Amen, and Praise the Lord.
It's about time that Robert E Lee be re-acknowledged as one of the US's finest generals, bar none. Defending one's country from invaders, and helping to win victories for his nation, what other high honor in military battle can be given?
If Lee isn't the automatic definition of a "Hero" (a War Hero at that, and when the term "Hero" originally was used to chiefly designate that), then the term is meaningless.
Much as I admire Elvis, or Babe Ruth, Robert E. Lee is a legitimate Hero in the best sense, and the vast consensus of Americans for most of the 20th Century would've agreed.
Dwight Eisenhower admired Robert E. Lee. Two great Americans.
By the way, everybody on the list had to be dead as of 2020, so recent pro athletes seem to be restricted to Kobe Bryant.
I could do without dead ball era pitcher Cy Young.
Agreed re: Cy Young. Walter Johnson and Ty Cobb would be better choices.
Christy Matthewson as well.
Matty is largely forgotten, as is Grover Cleveland Alexander except of course for hardcore baseball history aficionados. For example, I'm not sure if Steve is familiar with the fact that Matthewson pitched 3 complete game shutouts in a single week, during the 1905 WS vs PHI AL.
Before Babe Ruth, perhaps NYC's greatest MLB player was Christy Matthewson. Actually there's no perhaps about it.
But if we have to include the greatest ever to have played in MLB, that would crowd out names from other fields. So Babe Ruth and perhaps Cobb and Walter Johnson are sufficient.
And to be all PC, include Mays and Aaron so no one gets all butthurt.
Matthewson's performance in the 1905 World Series is one of the greatest baseball performances in the history of the sport.
Absolutely. Can't imagine Ohtani pitching three complete games in a single week, let alone all were shutouts.
Can you, Steve? That's a fair question.
And Matty's arm didn't fall off either as he pitched another 9 prime years of dominant baseball.
Hank Williams, the Hillbilly Shakespeare, and arguably the father of modern country music, should be added, as should Bob Dylan.
Yeah, with Hank Williams everybody who is a serious country music fan would agree on him.
Dylan isn't dead yet.
Williams, yes. Dylan, yes. Cash, yes. Willie Nelson, eventually. Merle Haggard should be on the list. John Fogarty, yes. Hall and Oates, hell no!
Elvis. Come on.
Did Elvis make the list? He'd better have.
I agree. Although not a songwriter, Presley revolutionized popular music in post-war America and the world.
In the entertainment field of the 2nd half of the 20th century, there wasn't a more relevant force than Elvis. He changed everything.
"Elvis Presley is the greatest cultural force in the 20th century... He introduced the beat to everything and he changed everything--music, language, clothes, it's a whole new social revolution--the Sixties come from it."
--Leonard Bernstein, 1966 ( TIME Magazine)
Perhaps many if not most all of Steve's favorite musicians when he was growing up owe directly or indirectly some debt to Elvis, and they wouldn't have been ashamed to say so themselves.
The great narcissist, John Lennon, was quick to acknowledge that there wouldn't be a Beatles without Chuck Berry.
Lennon, it is alleged, would be a conservative today. And, hopefully divorced.
There's no evidence that he would've been a conservative.
While Paul McCartney tended to give credit to Elvis and in particular Buddy Holly.
Carl Perkins was a great favorite of George Harrison.
Elvis is on the list.
Hooray
If you are going to do mild affirmative action, Charley Pride.
Funny that Sacajawea is on the list. I don't much care for David Frum but when Sacajawea was put on the silver dollar twenty-five years ago he called her "Squaw-Slave" which is about what she was. If you need to make the American-Indian quota, why not Geronimo, Jim Thorpe, Chief Bender or Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell.
Jim Thorpe over Cy Young. Light on scientists. Oppenheimer would be a controversial choice. Feynman wouldn’t been bad, I might prefer the lesser known Joshua Gibbs or Joesph Henry.
Among philosophers of cultural impace you could do worse than William James
Yes. I would add C. Walton Lillehei, the chief originator of open-heart surgery which has saved millions of lives, including my oldest child.
It's "Josiah" Gibbs, but yes: the man Einstein called "the greatest mind in American history" should obviously be on the list.
Thanks. Phone typing is brutal dor me. Gibbs work also influenced mathematics, psychology, and sociology.
As the great John Derbyshire said, “if the republic survives, there will be statues to Jared Taylor in town squares across the land”.
Europeans don’t even know who their Supreme Court justices are, never mind erecting monuments to them. America could learn from this.
On the musical Gs it seems mad to leave out Marvin Gaye and leave in Woodie Guthrie.
There's a lot in that sentence. Appellate judges should be elderly lawyers who have the rules of statutory construction and the grand scheme of the common law memorized and ingrained and issue terse opinions on arcane legal issues and correction of trial court errors. Then nobody cares who the judges are.
I actually attended an oral argument as a tourist at the Supreme Court when Rehnquist was chief judge, and all you had to do was wait in line and pass through a metal detector. I took a wrong turn looking for the restroom and ended up in an alcove where all the clerks sat during oral argument. I excused myself and backed out; nobody batted an eye.
Actually I'd put Judge Learned Hand in the hero's garden, who looks exactly how God would have made appellate judges. And Scalia and Thomas (not dead yet) for pointing out most constitutional law jurisprudence is made up out of whole cloth.
Learned Hand, sitting by designation because too many Supreme Court Justices were recused, wrote the most evil opinion in the history of American jurisprudence.
Hand wrote approximately 4,000 opinions but never sat on SCOTUS even by designation. Which opinion are you referring to?
I thought discussing the precise procedural posture was getting into the weeds. The government brought an antitrust claim against ALCOA. The claim was dismissed and should have gone to the Supreme Court, but six Justices recused themselves because they owned ALCOA stock. Congress passed a special statute allowing the Second Circuit to make the final decision. Judge Hand wrote the opinion in favor of the government. For many years, antitrust lawyers considered it to be the de facto equivalent of a Supreme Court case, and it was often cited approvingly — before Judge Bork and the antitrust revolution.
I stand by my earlier comment: it is the most evil decision in the history of the American judiciary.
Can you point out the evil parts? Because I'm not falling on my fainting couch over this one.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/148/416/1503668/
William Faulkner is not on the list. Yet Harper Lee is with a grand total of two novels. A coward or an ignorant fool came up with this list.
I agree. And I believe quite seriously that her childhood friend, Truman Capote, took her manuscript and contributed too much to it. It's very different than the movie. She also was a bit too fond of the mass murderers Capote sent her to interview for In Cold Blood, and her last manuscript, published some time ago, reinforces her general inability.
Buckley as well should be booted from the list for his behavior in freeing woman-rapist-killer Edgar Smith. At least Mailer apologized for his 'lil spree killer fetish. Only Buckley, Sarandon, and John Silber stood by theirs.
I believe in Harper Lee's second and last novel, Atticus Finch is a supporter of segregation in the 50s. But I never read it. The truth is that almost all white Southerners supported segregation until the 1970s.
I read it. You are right. Atticus Finch was a fraud. And Lee couldn't actually write.
But it is not at all true that almost all white Southeners supported segregation until the 1970's.
I know a lot of white retired Atlanta cops who wept over black kids and young black prostitutes' bodies. And the vast, vast, vast majority of killing was black-on black. I lived in mixed neighborhoods on the southside for decades. There was and is a lot more peaceful racial mixing in Atlanta than in the North, for a lot longer, from the legislature to construction jobs, both of which I worked.
You can support segregation and be sad about black children being killed. You brought up Atlanta. I bet there are very few whites in the Atlanta public schools. Most of those white children would attend no further than elementary schools. At the higher grades, the black boys would beat up the white boys and take liberties with the white girls. And virtually all whites living in Atlanta are liberals.
Henry Ford will be scrapped if this enterprise goes to fruition. He was an anti-Semite.
He was one of the big money man for Adolf. As well as gifting him his writings that made it into Mein Kampf. On the other hand, where would USA be in industrial production, including war-time industrial production without Ford?
The idea for the assembly line came from the meat industry and if Ford hadn't done it, someone else would have very shortly. It's something that would have evolved naturally as demand for cars ramped up.
Sure. Given enough time, David Hilbert and Henri Poincare' would have stumbled across Einstein's General Relativity too.
This is why the great men model of science breaks down. With inventions we must consider how big a step something was with how long the necessary components had been available before someone put them together. But there is also how great was the insight.
Einstein came up with the theory first and had those other guys help him with the math. I'm not super deep on special relativity (but deeper than normal) and I am not convinced that having the math available automatically makes one stumble upon the theory.
It's fairer to say that given the known problems (like why the speed of light always measures the same) it is likely someone else would have eventually said --well let's treat that speed as constant and see what the implications are. But that could have taken 20 more years.
Actually, Einstein studied math @ Hermann Minkowski, so he took the concept of Minkowski space and ran with it to stitch up the special relativity. Lorenz transformations were already circulating, Maxwell equations were around, and Michelsen already proved the constant speed of light irrespective of the motion frame. So everything was there, it wouldn't have taken another 5 years for someone else to come up with special that gave the theoretical underpinning for unification of electric and magnetic forces.
The general was "much more work to do". Minkowski already died in 1909, so Einstein turned to Hilbert who recommended Emmy Noether, the famous lady algebraist who is also known for the symmetry and conservation laws. Funnily enough, after Einstein discussed his problems with the general, Hilbert started working on the general too on his own, but Einstein preempted him. By 1916 the general was more or less complete, so Karl Schwarzschild could furnish his solution of a stationary black hole.
All true but I still think the special relativity insight about frames of reference wasn't obvious from the math. My understanding is that Einstein came up with the nonobvious insights and later the math and geometry was applied to them. I guess there is no way to know for sure given that Einstein doesn't pass the test of a long lag between the pieces being in place and the discovery.
I asked chatGPT because that's a good way to get the average opinion of people who debate these things and it said:
If Einstein never existed, special relativity would still have emerged — likely by 1915 at the latest, just more slowly, and possibly in a more mathematically dense or philosophically tangled form.
It said 1920s at latest so a little shorter than mine. Also:
What Einstein Did Differently
Einstein’s breakthrough wasn’t in the math — it was conceptual clarity:
He postulated that the laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames.
And that the speed of light is constant for all observers, regardless of their motion.
This cleaned up the ether-based worldview and made the relativity principle central to all physics, not just electrodynamics.
Ford's grandson, Henry II, was instrumental in turning Ford into a giant military factory during World War Two.
I understand that you are writing this on behalf of antisemites but since I was going to write it anyway I'll drop it here...fuck Henry Ford.
I have an extremely high bar for problematicness and he's the only one I can think of who clears it. For a garden of heroes? No way. If we have him we should also have the founder of the KKK
I have no use for Henry Ford personally. But he was revolutionary in his auto production. His auto company thrives today.
The problem with a list like this is that everybody has their prejudices.
"thrives today" is a bit over the top. Survives is the better verb.
The heroism of an inventor should be partially judged by the obviousness of the invention. I forget who came up with the standard but you consider how long all the components needed for the invention were available before someone put them together. The real inventor of the assembly line is whoever came up with the meat disassembly line. Without checking I'd guess that one evolved rather than was invented by a guy.
Vision is important. The McDonald brothers had the production process, but Ray Kroc had the vision. Then Harry Sonneborn supplied the business model.
You've got to let your stars be stars. If the McDonald brothers had given Kroc free rein and a bigger stake he'd have made them billionaires.
That's why it's so complicated picking heroes. It is vanishingly rare for one person to be the key the whole thing.
Also, as a multiply failed entrepreneur, I am extremely skeptical of vision stories in business. Almost always they are back fit to events after the success.
Having read a book on McDonald's a few years ago, Kroc was the dynamo. The McDonalds brothers were content to make an upper middle-class income and Kroc eventually bought them off for a million dollars each. Kroc and Sonneborn came to loggerheads on the McDonald's corporate model. Kroc was interested in the restaurant side while Sonneborn was interested as McDonalds as a real estate firm selling leases to McDonald's franchise owners. They were not on speaking terms by about 1963 and communicated to each other through June Martino, McDonald's vital third wheel.
You would think by the time they're worth several hundred million simoleons they'd find some room to compromise and remain on speaking terms as they enjoyed their incredible, God-blessed careers. I'm sure both men's egos were as big as the World Trade Center towers.
Funny about how shortsighted the McDonald brothers were. They felt plagued by the high taxes on the rich after World War Two and got tired of the taxes they paid on what Kroc paid them. So they opted for a flat million bucks in 1960? and one last tax payment. Both died before 1980 if memory serves so it is unlikely they would have been billionaires. But they would have been very, very rich had they held onto their shares of McDonald's.
Nathan Bedford Forrest just might qualify. Anyway, QED, a hero's garden in such a highly pluralistic society as the US is kind of a fool's errand. Different founding mythos, different religions, different history, different ancestry. Different everything. Nobody can agree on what constitutes a heroic American just like nobody can agree on anything else.
A personal litmus test I have for "getting" America is the ability to watch Birth Of a Nation, and then explain dispassionately explain what nation D.W. Griffith portrayed as having been birthed. No idea how many people would pass the test but my impression is few, and fewer every year, so I am completely indifferent to an American Hero's Garden.
It would be amusing to have public debate on such a garden. Some on the far left might try to opt out on the basis of "Trump, obviously" but for undecided voter types that would just look like they think America has no unblemished achievements. So people on the right would suggest mostly white men who did great things and the left would be a combination of the first black woman to discover a species of newt and some actual left wing heroes who would almost all be vulnerable to ticky-tac accusations of problematitude.
Kind of related, I once suggested to a conservative Brit that they ought to wind down their toothless, expensive monarchy. He said no, because then the government would have to write up a republican constitution and it would be a thousand pages long, divvy up power among a million obsolete functionaries, and contain every single "right" the liberals could dream up.
The monarchy works well in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Your British conservative friend is right. Having an elected president would add layers of bull**** to British government. The British monarchy is helpful to the various tabloids throughout the English-speaking world and it is a great tourist attraction. Who would want to visit Buckingham Palace without King Charles and Queen Camilla living there?
The best scenario for Britain is William deposes his father and dissolves Parliament.
"Nathan Bedford Forrest just might qualify" as what, a hero for the garden? What was the nature of his heroism. A quick read on the guy suggests he was a horrible war criminal.
Brilliant self taught cavalry officer who killed Yankees and turncoats and led the resistance to Reconstruction. One man's war criminal is another man's freedom fighter.
War crimes are defined by the victors. The Truman administration killed 250,000 civilians in one day and nobody hung for it.
first- being a self taught cavalry officer hardly qualifies you for the list. If you want a confederate hero to mark the secession as heroic, there are far better people. This guy executed prisoners of war because they were black. Took a bunch from hospitals to do so. That's a war crime by anyone's standard, not just the victors.
I agree that Forrest won't make this ridiculous garden but he is considered one of the greatest small-unit commanders of the Civil War.
But Henry Ford is The Guy who is associated most with mass production and putting the working class in their own cars. That's just huge in American and world history.
No Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Joe DiMaggio, Ty Cobb or Ted Williams. Hmm. Cobb's off because he was "racist" like 99 % of Americans of his time. You would have thought Williams might have made it as a Hispanic quota.
Alex Trebeck????????????????????????? A game show host. Who next? Bill Cullen? Art Fleming? Gene Rayburn? Soupy Sales?
Aaron and Mays weren't dead yet in 2020. I'd go with DiMaggio, Cobb, and Williams over Cy Young. I'd say Williams as the current folk hero of the three. He wasn't terribly popular when he was playing, but now people really like him.
Williams was a great fisherman as well.
He missed three years of baseball during WWII doing the usual baseball star stuff, including learning to be a fighter pilot (which was highly dangerous by itself). But then in his mid 30s he gets called back and sent into jet fighter combat over Korea as John Glenn's wingman. It would be like Steph Curry getting pulled out of the NBA and sent to bomb Iran. Ted was pretty baffled by why he was getting drafted, but he served.
Williams was so adept at piloting that he spent most of the war teaching young pilots. If memory serves, Williams missed 43,44,45 and 52 because of war. That's probably 125 homers right there.
The list has way too many entertainers and not enough scientists and engineers.
Robert E. Lee, engineer. His engineering pretty much made Des Moines. He did a lot of work around St. Louis to make the Mississippi navigable. Robert Goddard, originator of the rocket. Eli Whitney, originator of the cotton gin but instrumental in the concept of interchangeable parts. Cyrus McCormick and the reaper. All men more important than Alex Trebeck.
I second Goddard as the father of the liquid fueled rocket. He had a lab in and conducted his early experiments near Roswell, NM, where there is a high school named after him, the Goddard Rockets. There are two military rockets in front of the school and a tile space mural on the wall next to the main entrance.
I went to Robert Goddard Junior High School in Seabrook, MD, a half-mile from NASA. As for Robert Goddard, scientist, he was funded by one of the Guggenheim's at the suggestion of Charles Lindbergh.
Henry Leland got Cadillac and Lincoln going, introduced the electric starter and mass-produced V8, and solidified precision machining and interchangeable parts for autos.
You learn something every day at this site. Thanks for the information.
Daniel Boone, Nathaniel Greene, William Penn, *and* George Fox!? Good to see some Quaker representation. Sadly no Herbert Hoover or Richard Nixon.
No Patsy Cline? No Loretta Lynn? No Willa Cather? Willa Cather is a two-fer. Woman. Lesbian. Just bragging, but Patsy Cline and Willa Cather grew up in Gore, VA ten miles from my house when they were toddlers.
Although I do not support Trump's silly park, if it need be built, it shouldn't be built in Washington DC which is overloaded with monuments. It should be built in Detroit. The federal government could just buy four or six blocks of rubble and make it into Trump's park.
I prefer Patsy but think Loretta Lynn is more appropriate. Both were exemplary mothers, too. That might be considered.
Where’s James Knox Polk? During his presidency territory that today comprises California, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada was added and territorial disputes with Great Britain were settled that included what today are Idaho, Oregon and Washington. The border with Mexico dispute extended Texas from the Nueces River to the Rio Grande. Yes, the U.S. fought a war against Mexico that Polk provoked by placing troops in the disputed territory but that territory was recognized as the legitimate boundary by the Treaties of Velasco which ended the Texas War of Independence. Mexico later rejected those treaties because they were signed by Santa Ana under “duress” but aren’t most treaties that ended wars signed under duress by the losing nations?
Polk owned slaves but so did a number of others who are listed.
I would’ve liked Polk or Coolidge
I might make a No Presidents rule. Presidents are really famous in general.
I hope they are divided into career groups. Ben Franklin and his (wife?) Aretha sounds pretty silly
von Neumann is already on the list, but I would definitely include Oppenheimer, Teller, Fermi and Ulam. Not Feynman. After all, heroes alludes to conflict, and what conflict was Feynman involved in at the main point of his adult life?
Amongst the film types: Griffith, Chaplin, John Ford, Kubrick and Wilder.
I also think one can't not include Lindbergh. In terms of affinity/contribution to Nazi-ism, Henry Ford was much worse, and he's on the list...
You are right, barnabus, on the film giants. You are wrong about Lindbergh, who was not an anti-Semite. Lindbergh was politically naive. He was also the son of one of the few congressmen who voted against America's Declaration of War against Germany in 1917. Swedish-Americans tended to be very isolationist and anti-war a century ago.
Lindbergh went to Nazi Getmany and transmitted back vital information to Roosevelt concerning the superior strength of the Gertman Air War Machine. Roosevelt never mentioned this when he banned him from fighting for our military. So Lindbergh fought with other allies and endured the slight.
His home life was a bit more complicated, as it turns out. His wife was a great writer and observer of between-the-wars Europe, by the way.
Lindbergh also reported on the weakness of the British air force. His analysis of what the Brits needed to become competitive with the Germans was the main reason why Roosevelt authorized the export of "green gas" -- 100 octane aviation gasoline, the only source for which in the world was the Standard Oil refinery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to the British. Without the increase in horsepower that fuel allowed, the Brits would have stood no chance in the air against the Luftwaffe.
Lindbergh didn't fight with other allies. He was hired as a technical consultant by aviation companies. Working for Chance-Vought, he flew with the Marines' VF-24 in the Pacific, flying combat missions and advising pilots on how to get the most out of their F4Us. He proved to them that that airplane could lift a 4,000lb bomb load.
Working for Lockheed, he flew with the Army Air Force's 475th FG in the Pacific, and taught the pilots how to extend the P-38's range by hundreds of miles. He also taught them deflection shooting, which the Army, unlike the Navy, did not do. While flying combat missions, he shot down a Japanese plane. When word of that got out, he was yanked away from the squadron by 5th Air Force's Gen. George Kenney, and sent home. But first Kenney shook his hand, slapped him on the back and bought him dinner.
While working for Consolidated-Vultee, Lindbergh determined that the B-24 lacked sufficient lateral stability and advised that it needed an increase in vertical stabilizer area, but the Army rejected the suggestion because it would have caused several weeks delay in production to make the change. When the Navy bought their version of the B-24, the PB4Y-2, they specified it have the "Lindbergh tail," thus eliminated the problem that plagued all pilots trying to fly tight formations in the B-24 or keep it from "hunting" at high altitudes.
Lindbergh did not need to fly combat missions. As a technical advisor and a civilian, he was neither required or expected to do that. Some of his combat missions with the 475th were quite harrowing, such as joining three other pilots to fly hundreds of miles over the ocean, navigating only by compass and clock, to Truck island to dare the Japs to come up and fight and then battling the swarm of Zeros that rose up to take them on, with no chance of reinforcement and no hope of getting home or rescued if their airplane were damaged, let alone if they were shot down, then successfully breaking off the combat when fuel ran low and flying home those hundreds of miles.
Talk about heroes, talk about warriors, talk about extraordinary skill and daring.... Wow.
I'm proud to say that my great grandfather met and became friends with Lindbergh in 1929 when Lindbergh visited the USS Saratoga (CV-3) off Panama at the completion of Fleet Problem IX while he, my great grandfather, was flying the Martin T4M-1 with Torpedo Squadron VT-2B (as it was then designated), and had just successfully participated in the surprise "bombing" of the Panama Canal.
What you write is true. Flawed as he was, Lindbergh was a great man.
Lindbergh did report to the US government his opinion of the Nazi Air Force. He was doing his country a favor. His personal life was unusual to say the least. He had families with at least two German women. Because his sister-in-law had heart problems, he funded heart research. An interesting tidbit about Lindbergh is that he greeted all the nutcases that came to his Connecticut estate rather than having bodyguards take care of them. Many of the lunatics claimed to be Lindbergh's baby grown up. He was apparently very patient with these people.
Raise your hand if you used to think Johnny Appleseed was a tall tale like Paul Bunyan.