The 15 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century
A hundred years of American life in one field: the lab, the pulpit, the factory floor, the cockpit and the bandstand.
1Martin Luther King Jr.
The minister whose campaign of nonviolent protest broke segregation and won him the Nobel Peace Prize at 35.
2Franklin D. Roosevelt
The four-term president who rebuilt the economy with the New Deal and led the country through the Second World War.
3Theodore Roosevelt
The president who opened the century by busting trusts, mediating a war and inventing the modern conservation movement.
4Neil Armstrong
The Apollo 11 commander and first person to walk on the Moon.
5Henry Ford
The industrialist whose moving assembly line put cars — and mass production itself — within reach of ordinary wages.
6Rosa Parks
The Montgomery seamstress whose refusal to move started the bus boycott that launched the civil rights movement.
7Albert Einstein
The physicist who reshaped our picture of space and time and spent his last decades as an American citizen.
8Jonas Salk
The virologist who developed the first effective polio vaccine and refused to patent it.
9Muhammad Ali
The three-time heavyweight champion whose refusal of the draft made him a political figure as much as an athlete.
10Thomas Edison
The inventor whose Menlo Park laboratory turned invention itself into an industrial process.
11Eleanor Roosevelt
The First Lady who redefined the role and then drove the Universal Declaration of Human Rights through the UN.
12Louis Armstrong
The trumpeter and singer who turned jazz improvisation into a soloist's art and exported it worldwide.
13Jackie Robinson
The Dodgers infielder who broke baseball's colour line in 1947 under national scrutiny.
14Dwight D. Eisenhower
Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and then a two-term president of unusual public trust.
15The Wright Brothers
The Ohio bicycle makers who solved controlled powered flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903.
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