# 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.

*By YPB Team · Published August 12, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-15-greatest-americans-of-the-20th-century*

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## Current results (0 votes)

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

Tags: historical-figures, usa, legends, all-time