The 37 Most Important Americans Who Were Never President

Presidents get the buildings and the holidays. These people did the work without the office.

1. 1
   Benjamin Franklin

   Signed four founding documents and ran Pennsylvania, but never the country.
   1000pts
2. 2
   John Jay

   Co-wrote The Federalist Papers, negotiated the peace with Britain and served as the first Chief Justice of the United States.
   907pts
3. 3
   Martin Luther King Jr.

   Led the civil rights movement from the Montgomery boycott to the Voting Rights Act.
   814pts
4. 4
   J. Edgar Hoover

   Ran the FBI for 48 years under eight presidents, building modern federal policing and abusing it in equal measure.
   775pts
5. 5
   Alexander Graham Bell

   Patented the telephone in 1876 and founded the company that wired America.
   660pts
6. 6
   George C. Marshall

   Army Chief of Staff who organised victory in the Second World War, then rebuilt Western Europe with the Marshall Plan and won the Nobel Peace Prize.
   660pts
7. 7
   Frederick Douglass

   The abolitionist movement's most powerful voice, and adviser to Lincoln.
   610pts
8. 8
   Booker T. Washington

   Built Tuskegee Institute and became the most influential Black leader of his era.
   610pts
9. 9
   Henry Clay

   The Great Compromiser, Speaker of the House and three-time presidential loser whose deals held the Union together for decades.
   610pts
10. 10
    Thurgood Marshall

    Argued and won Brown v. Board of Education, then became the first Black justice of the Supreme Court.
    553pts
11. 11
    Susan B. Anthony

    Organised the suffrage campaign that eventually produced the Nineteenth Amendment.
    553pts
12. 12
    Elizabeth Cady Stanton

    Wrote the Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls in 1848 and led the women's suffrage movement for half a century.
    553pts
13. 13
    Walt Disney

    Made the first feature-length animated film and Disneyland, and built the template for American popular entertainment.
    553pts
14. 14
    Alexander Hamilton

    Built the Treasury, the national bank and the case for the Constitution.
    488pts
15. 15
    Daniel Webster

    The Senate's greatest orator, whose 'Liberty and Union, now and forever' defined the case for one nation before the Civil War.
    488pts
16. 16
    Malcolm X

    The Nation of Islam's most electric voice and later an advocate of human rights, whose autobiography shaped generations of activists.
    488pts
17. 17
    Andrew Carnegie

    Built US Steel's forerunner, then gave away most of his fortune to fund some 2,500 public libraries.
    488pts
18. 18
    Harriet Tubman

    Led enslaved people to freedom on the Underground Railroad and scouted for the Union Army.
    488pts
19. 19
    Jonas Salk

    His polio vaccine ended an annual American terror, and he refused to patent it.
    413pts
20. 20
    Rosa Parks

    One refusal in Montgomery in 1955 triggered the boycott that broke bus segregation.
    413pts
21. 21
    William Jennings Bryan

    Three-time Democratic nominee whose populist Cross of Gold campaign reshaped his party for the next century.
    413pts
22. 22
    Eleanor Roosevelt

    Turned the role of First Lady into a political office and chaired the human rights commission at the UN.
    413pts
23. 23
    Mark Twain

    Wrote the American novel other American novels are measured against.
    413pts
24. 24
    W. E. B. Du Bois

    Harvard's first Black PhD, author of The Souls of Black Folk and co-founder of the NAACP.
    325pts
25. 25
    Thomas Edison

    Industrialised invention itself and electrified American cities.
    325pts
26. 26
    Thomas Paine

    Common Sense turned the colonies toward independence in 1776, and The American Crisis kept Washington's army going that winter.
    325pts
27. 27
    Jackie Robinson

    Broke Major League Baseball's colour line with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, years before the civil rights laws followed.
    325pts
28. 28
    John Marshall

    Chief Justice for thirty-four years, and the man who made the Supreme Court a real branch of government.
    325pts
29. 29
    Jane Addams

    Founded Chicago's Hull House, invented American social work and became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
    222pts
30. 30
    Earl Warren

    Chief Justice whose court ended school segregation, set one person, one vote and gave suspects their Miranda rights.
    222pts
31. 31
    John D. Rockefeller

    Built Standard Oil into the model of the modern corporation and then pioneered large-scale philanthropy.
    222pts
32. 32
    Rachel Carson

    Silent Spring (1962) exposed the damage done by pesticides and launched the modern environmental movement.
    0pts
33. 33
    Henry Ford

    The moving assembly line put cars, and mass production, within ordinary reach.
    0pts
34. 34
    Neil Armstrong

    Walked on the Moon in 1969 and then declined almost every spotlight after it.
    0pts
35. 35
    Robert F. Kennedy

    Attorney General during the Cuban Missile Crisis and civil rights fight, assassinated in 1968 on the night he won the California primary.
    0pts
36. 36
    Cesar Chavez

    Co-founded the United Farm Workers and won farm labourers union contracts through the Delano grape strike and national boycott.
    0pts
37. 37
    Steve Jobs

    Co-founded Apple and brought the Macintosh, the iPod and the iPhone to market, changing how the world uses computers.
    0pts

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