Top 21 Candidates for the Fifth Face on Mount Rushmore

There is room on that mountain for one more face, and everybody has a candidate.

1. 1
   Franklin D. Roosevelt

   Four terms, the New Deal and the Second World War.
   1000pts
2. 2
   Dwight D. Eisenhower

   Commanded the Normandy landings, then built the interstate highway system.
   702pts
3. 3
   Frederick Douglass

   The abolitionist writer and orator who forced the country to hear itself.
   574pts
4. 4
   Sacagawea

   Interpreted and guided across the continent the expedition that mapped it.
   574pts
5. 5
   Ronald Reagan

   Led a 2014 American Legion survey on a fifth face with 42 percent, far ahead of every other name.
   574pts
6. 6
   Barack Obama

   The first Black president, tied with Reagan at 30 percent in the 2020 Research Co. poll for a new Mount Rushmore.
   574pts
7. 7
   Benjamin Franklin

   The Founder with the widest reach and no presidency, which is exactly why he is not up there.
   515pts
8. 8
   Mark Twain

   Gave the country its literary voice and its sharpest self-criticism.
   446pts
9. 9
   Neil Armstrong

   The first human footprint on another world was an American one.
   446pts
10. 10
    Albert Einstein

    German-born physicist who became an American citizen in 1940 and is named in several lists of proposed additions to the mountain.
    446pts
11. 11
    John F. Kennedy

    The president most often picked for a new Rushmore, chosen by 56 percent in a 2020 Research Co. survey.
    365pts
12. 12
    Susan B. Anthony

    Spent fifty years campaigning for a vote she never got to cast legally.
    365pts
13. 13
    Donald Trump

    A January 2025 House bill from Representative Anna Paulina Luna proposed carving the 45th and 47th President into the mountain.
    268pts
14. 14
    Amelia Earhart

    Flew the Atlantic solo and disappeared into the century's most enduring mystery.
    268pts
15. 15
    John Adams

    Pushed Congress into declaring independence and served as the second President.
    268pts
16. 16
    James Madison

    Drafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that Rushmore's four swore to.
    0pts
17. 17
    Elvis Presley

    Topped a 2016 Expedia survey on who should join the four presidents on the mountain, with 29 percent of the vote.
    0pts
18. 18
    Martin Luther King Jr.

    The most frequently named candidate, and the only one with a monument of his own on the Mall.
    0pts
19. 19
    Alexander Hamilton

    Designed the financial machinery the country still runs on.
    0pts
20. 20
    Rosa Parks

    Her 1955 arrest in Montgomery launched the bus boycott and made her the mother of the civil rights movement.
    0pts
21. 21
    Harriet Tubman

    The Underground Railroad's most effective conductor.
    0pts

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