The Liberal Mount Rushmore

Sports fans do it obsessively. Who’s on the Yankees Mount Rushmore? The Lakers? Kobe, Jerry West, Magic, and Kareem? What—you’re leaving off Wilt Chamberlain?! The exercise leads to some intense, and fun, arguments.

This was the question we posed to our contributors: Which four progressive titans—elected officials, activists, thinkers, what have you—would you put on the famed mountainside? The illustration above tells you how it came out. King got the most votes, then FDR, then Douglass, and then Lincoln, a somewhat surprisingly distant fourth. We were disappointed no woman made the mountain. The closest competitors, just a couple of votes behind Lincoln, were Jane Addams, Frances Perkins, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Barack Obama, John Dewey, and Robert La Follette also came close.

We should note that a few of our respondents wrote to say they reject the whole idea of a Mount Rushmore. “On America’s 250th anniversary, it’s time to move from exceptionalism and hero worship to a politics of memory that embraces complexity, ambivalence, tragedy, greatness, and love,” argued NYU political scientist Cristina Beltrán. Fordham Law’s Julie Suk described a similar sentiment: “A democracy should not give immortal godlike status to four progressive ‘titans,’ but rather it should represent the masses of people who have invisibly built this country and sacrificed their lives to move it closer to its stated ideals of democracy, equality, liberty, and justice for all.”

We think hey, it’s fun to argue over.