Our Never-Ending American Argument

A quarter of a millennium has passed since the Founders declared our independence and established a nation based on radical ideas—which they deemed “self-evident”—regarding individual equality, consent of the governed, and rule of law tempered by “inalienable rights.”

We have spent those years defining and redefining what America is and who Americans are. It has never been a clean or simple dialogue: Consensus is often fleeting, with answers’ clarity often varying according to the eyes of their beholders. At worst, it’s an argument that spurred a Civil War and underlies today’s bitterest disagreements. At best, it has generated a creative tension that has produced magnificent advances in art, science, and human liberty.

The American story is not uniform, neither all good nor all bad. “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary,” as Reinhold Niebuhr, one of our great theologians, once said. The American genius has been to create a blend toward progress. E pluribus unum: Out of many we are one. Our brief 250 years illustrate Niebuhr’s wisdom: Our achievements stretch from a declaration at a Statehouse in Pennsylvania to Stars and Stripes planted on the moon; our failures are tallied in tragedies starting with human enslavement and running through a bloody series of catastrophes and injustices, some self-inflicted, others perpetrated upon us.

To capture the scope and sweep of the American story, we decided to survey leading scholars and thinkers in a number of fields, such as history, political science, and law. We invited them to contribute lists of their nominees in the categories you will find in this series. Many answered all of the questions, some a few, and a handful answered different questions entirely. All were thoughtful and thought-provoking, and we are deeply grateful for their contributions.

We built these lists from their responses. Some results were predictable—yep, Abraham Lincoln was great—but many surprised. Taken together, they are our attempt to define our nation on its semiquincentennial. And we even gave a handful of conservative thinkers their say.

Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., my father, was fond of describing history as “an argument without end.” Bruce Springsteen, the nation’s music laureate, riffs along the same lines. “America was born out of disagreement,” he said at a May concert in Washington, D.C. “It’s an argument, an ongoing, blessed, sacred argument—an argument about what course the country should take to form a more perfect union.” We offer these lists in that spirit, as a fresh avenue for the great and ongoing discussion of where we have been, who we are, and what we may yet become.

—Robert Schlesinger, guest editor

Methodology

We reached out to scores of leading scholars and public intellectuals in fields such as history, the law, economics, political science, and media and asked them to offer their top-fives in over a dozen categories designed to capture our history in its fullness. We also asked the same of a smaller group of our friends on the right.

We received nearly 100 responses. Some respondents completed all 13 lists, some fewer. We made the lists in these pages by simply tallying up the votes. In some instances, we felt logic dictated that we group them thematically—for example, putting the Reconstruction Amendments together, rather than counting them individually. The final lists here are admittedly somewhat subjective, in that in each category we decided on a number that constituted a critical mass of votes; that number was different for each category, since the n of each category was different based on the number of responses (for example, many more participants made best/worst presidents lists than court cases lists). For each category, we chose a cutoff point that seemed to us to represent substantial sentiment favoring inclusion of that person or event.

Contributors

Jonathan Alter, author and columnist

Eric Alterman, Brooklyn College

William J. Antholis, University of Virginia’s Miller Center

Cristina Beltrán, New York University

David Harry Bennett, Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs (emeritus)

Mary Sarah Bilder, Boston College Law School

David Blight, Yale University

Heather Boushey, University of Pennsylvania Kleinman Center for Energy Policy

Nadia Brown, Georgetown University

Andrew Burstein, Louisiana State University

Brandon R. Byrd, Vanderbilt University

David Canton, University of Florida

Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard University

John Milton Cooper Jr., University of Wisconsin-Madison (emeritus)

Robert Dallek, historian

Matt Dallek, George Washington University

William A. Darity Jr., Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy (emeritus)

Matthew Dickinson, Middlebury College

Robert E. DiClerico, West Virginia University (emeritus)

E.J. Dionne, Brookings Institution

Daniel Drezner, The Fletcher School at Tufts University

Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Calvin University

James Fallows, writer

John A. Farrell, writer and historian

Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard University (president emerita)

Amy Fried, University of Maine (emerita)

Beverly Gage, Yale University

David Garrow, writer and historian

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University Hutchins Center for African and African American Research

Roxane Gay, writer and cultural critic

David Greenberg, Rutgers University

Darrick Hamilton, The New School for Social Research

Michael Harriot, journalist

Nicole Hemmer, Vanderbilt University

Elizabeth Hinton, Yale University

David Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley (emeritus)

Nancy Isenberg, Louisiana State University

Michael Kazin, Georgetown University

David Kennedy, Stanford University (emeritus)

Randall L. Kennedy, Harvard Law School

Amna Khalid, Carleton College

Larry Kramer, London School of Economics and Political Science

Kevin M. Kruse, Princeton University

Jennifer L. Lawless, University of Virginia Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy

Nicholas Lemann, Columbia University Journalism School

Margaret Levi, Stanford University (emerita)

Sanford V. Levinson, University of Texas at Austin School of Law

David Levering Lewis, New York University (emeritus)

Jen Manion, Amherst College

Jane Mayer, The New Yorker

Liza Mundy, journalist and author

Melissa Murray, New York University School of Law

George Derek Musgrove, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Aryeh Neier, Open Society Foundations (president emeritus)

Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University (emerita)

Richard Parker, Harvard University Kennedy School of Government

Claire Potter, The New School for Social Research (emerita)

Andrew Preston, University of Virginia

Lara Putnam, University of Pittsburgh

Eric Rauchway, University of California, Davis

Sam Rosenfeld, Colgate University

Miguel Schor, Drake University Law School

Kate Shaw, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

John Sides, Vanderbilt University

Theda Skocpol, Harvard University

Candis Watts Smith, Duke University

Paul Starr, Princeton University

Thomas J. Sugrue, New York University

Julie Suk, Fordham University School of Law

Jeremi Suri, University of Texas at Austin Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs

James Tejani, California Polytechnic State University

Michael Tomasky, The New Republic

Robert L. Tsai, Boston University School of Law

Siva Vaidhyanathan, University of Virginia

Lynn Vavreck, University of California, Los Angeles

Michael Waldman, Brennan Center for Justice at NYU

Sean Wilentz, Princeton University

Maya Wiley, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

Isabel Wilkerson, journalist and author

Brenda Wineapple, Columbia University

John Fabian Witt, Yale Law School

Julian E. Zelizer, Princeton University