Who is the most important American who was 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.
2. 2
   Martin Luther King Jr.

   Led the civil rights movement from the Montgomery boycott to the Voting Rights Act.
3. 3
   Alexander Hamilton

   Built the Treasury, the national bank and the case for the Constitution.
4. 4
   Frederick Douglass

   The abolitionist movement's most powerful voice, and adviser to Lincoln.
5. 5
   Harriet Tubman

   Led enslaved people to freedom on the Underground Railroad and scouted for the Union Army.
6. 6
   Thomas Edison

   Industrialised invention itself and electrified American cities.
7. 7
   Susan B. Anthony

   Organised the suffrage campaign that eventually produced the Nineteenth Amendment.
8. 8
   Henry Ford

   The moving assembly line put cars, and mass production, within ordinary reach.
9. 9
   Eleanor Roosevelt

   Turned the role of First Lady into a political office and chaired the human rights commission at the UN.
10. 10
    John Marshall

    Chief Justice for thirty-four years, and the man who made the Supreme Court a real branch of government.
11. 11
    Mark Twain

    Wrote the American novel other American novels are measured against.
12. 12
    Rosa Parks

    One refusal in Montgomery in 1955 triggered the boycott that broke bus segregation.
13. 13
    Jonas Salk

    His polio vaccine ended an annual American terror, and he refused to patent it.
14. 14
    Neil Armstrong

    Walked on the Moon in 1969 and then declined almost every spotlight after it.
15. 15
    Booker T. Washington

    Built Tuskegee Institute and became the most influential Black leader of his era.

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