Who should really be on US currency?

[MaxPower]

All this talk about putting Reagan on our money make me think. Politicians are not the people who have been most influential in making the US what it is. Nor are they the most admired people around.

I'd like to hear what your suggestions would be. The only restrictions are they they have to be dead and they must never have held a major political office. It is OK if they were not born in the US.

Here is my list of who we should put on our currency.

- Martin Luther King Jr.
- Mark Twain
- Thomas Edison
- Louis Armstrong
- Henry David Thoreau

All of these people have had a profound effect on our society (except Thoreau, but I just like the guy).

[TheRake]

-Charles Schulz
-Jackie Robinson
-Henry Ford

[Sloats]

no one born after 1800.

I think the framers of the country's infrastructure are the best choices. I do not support the neo-heroes or the political posturings. You want a woman, then Betsie Ross. Not Molly Picture, and not someone recent, and not a PC choice for a non American citizen.

I am happy with Jefferson, Hamilton, Jackson, Franklin, and Washington.


FDR, Ike, and Lincoln... not really.

[GWB]

[ QUOTE ]
and Lincoln... not really

[/ QUOTE ]

Really? I would have put Lincoln as the top consensus choice (although I would make Lincoln and Washington equal here)

[Ed Miller]

We had a big discussion about this a month ago.

[Phat Mack]

All of these people have had a profound effect on our society (except Thoreau, but I just like the guy).

Thoreau's impact on our society and the world's was, and is, enormous; however it doesn't receive a lot of attention in standard history texts. Many of the great events of the second half of the twentieth century, from the American civil rights movement to the liberation of India, are, in part, directly attributable to his thinking. (According to Erik Erikson's Ghandi's Truth, Thoreau and Emerson studied Indian concepts of nonviolent resistance, and in turn were studied by Ghandi when he was a law student in London.)

[Phat Mack]

I am way over my head here (as I know nothing of legal matters), but I would guess that you could be arrested in most American states for being a proffessional gambler until the vag laws were overturned by the Supreme Court in +/- 1970: directly influenced by Thoreau's child, the civil rights movement.

McGoorty talks about always walking down the street with jobs circled in the want ads to avoid being "vagged." This way he could state that he was pursuing a useful endevor.

[MaxPower]

Whoops. Now that I look at that thread I remember reading it. I remembered Clarkmeister's Peter Gammons joke.

Unconscious plagerism on my part. My apologies to Andy Fox.

[MaxPower]

[ QUOTE ]
All of these people have had a profound effect on our society (except Thoreau, but I just like the guy).

Thoreau's impact on our society and the world's was, and is, enormous; however it doesn't receive a lot of attention in standard history texts. Many of the great events of the second half of the twentieth century, from the American civil rights movement to the liberation of India, are, in part, directly attributable to his thinking. (According to Erik Erikson's Ghandi's Truth, Thoreau and Emerson studied Indian concepts of nonviolent resistance, and in turn were studied by Ghandi when he was a law student in London.)

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes, I agree with you there. But I think these were events where a small number of individuals who subscribed to his philosophy had a huge effect on society (oversimplified, I know). In society in general these are rare events and for the most part Thoreau's ideas are not reflected in everyday American life. (I am far from an expert on this)

[sfer]

George Gershwin
Henry James
Edward Hopper