Fourth of July 2026: The top 10 greatest Americans in U.S. history
Commentary by Tracy McCue, Sumner Newscow — Happy Semiquincentennial Day. 250 years. Wow, it’s been quite a ride.
Since this is our big birthday, I wanted my annual Fourth of July list to be something not only historical but encompassing. So I decided to do the mother of all Cueball lists, and name the 10 Greatest Americans in U.S. History. Next time I hope to have a narrower field of choice. Like “America’s top 10 thongs” or something like it.
My only stipulation is that everyone on this list has to have died. Why? Because their legacy has been cemented. Also, I’m not sure anyone living today qualifies to make this list.
So let’s get going. Here’s my list, counting them down Casey Kasem-style.
10. Walt Disney.
Wellington Regent Theater owner Jerry Fike will tell you, Disney is the Evil Empire, and he is most certainly not alone in that assessment.
But there was a time when Disney was magical.
Walt created a universe of talking animals, and made them into movies, TV shows, and the greatest theme parks the World has ever witnessed.
Disney loved drawing as a boy and was smart enough to turn his craft into an empire. He started in advertising, where he discovered the power of cartoons. Soon, Mickey Mouse was born, and “Steamboat Willy” became the first sound cartoon ever produced.
Then came “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Do you remember, old-timers, when the original Star Wars movie came out and how revolutionary it was? Snow White was twice that in 1939. It was the first full-length animated movie in color and with sound, with the drawings talking to that sound – all wrapped together with a plot. Nobody had seen anything like it.
The Disney universe would follow: Dumbo, Sleeping Beauty, Disneyland, Davey Crockett on TV, and finally The Jungle Book, his last picture before he died of lung cancer at the age of 65.
9. Steve Jobs.
Jobs was a strange dude. He had to have everything a certain way, including this font I’m typing in. It took him a year to find a refrigerator that suited him. He never took showers because he was a fruitarian – whatever that means. Yet, he created an empire.
Jobs, along with partner Steve Wozniak, created Apple Computer, revolutionizing the industry so dummies like me can navigate the techie world.
Later came the Macintosh – and Apple was off and running. With all that success, guess what happened next? He got fired. While the Apple corporation floundered without his presence and nearly went bankrupt, Jobs was off launching Pixar and NeXT computers. Soon Apple was begging for his return.
In his second stint, Jobs introduced the iMac, iTunes, Mac OS X, the Apple Store, iPod, iTunes Store, the iPad, and his most revolutionary machine, the iPhone.
Jobs died early in life, being diagnosed with cancer and eventually dying in 2011. Stupidly, Jobs thought he could cure the cancer himself. His introduction of the iPhone was one of his final acts at the Macworld Conference and Expo.
There’s a lot about Jobs to dislike. Besides being weird, he didn’t treat people well and denied the birth of his first daughter.
But in the process, he made Apple into a mammoth trillion-dollar industry with a distinctive brand.
8. Thomas Edison.
Without Edison, we wouldn’t have heard every mother on earth say to their son: “Turn off the lights. No wonder our electric bill is so high.”
Well, Mom, that’s 4 cents a day. I’m sure you can still pay the electric bill.
Edison didn’t invent the light bulb. He just got one to work. In the late 1800s, the earliest light bulbs petered out faster than the Washington, D.C., Reflective Pool stays blue.
What Edison and his scientists did was create the incandescent light bulb using bamboo filaments. And those could burn for more than 40 hours. Eventually, he had enough bulbs to build an electric company.
But it wasn’t just light bulbs. He created the phonograph, the motion picture camera, the carbon telephone transmitter, and the alkaline storage battery. The phonograph was his favorite, an invention so revolutionary nobody had even thought that such a thing could exist.
He also created the first industrial laboratory called “Menlo Park.” His goal was to stock almost every conceivable material.
Again, here’s a person who wasn’t particularly likable. He operated on three hours of sleep, and demanded that his employees work 18 hours a day. He spent a lifetime fussing with contemporaries. He was rich, but lost a lot of money with bad investments.
In the end, though, he would have 1,093 U.S. and 2,332 international patents. That’s a lot of things to invent.
7. Albert Einstein.
Einstein is an example of why turning away immigrants does not serve America’s interest.
Einstein, the world’s most prominent scientist of his day, was famous for developing the theory of relativity and for his contributions to quantum theory. In 1933, as a German-born citizen, he was in the U.S., undertaking a two-month professorship at the California Institute of Technology. Meanwhile in his country, Adolf Hitler had seized power. Einstein was so alarmed at the rise of Nazism and the attacks against his fellow Jews that he requested U.S. citizenship.
We, smartly, granted it to him.
Einstein was instrumental in attracting Jewish scientists out of Germany to the U.S., bringing some of the world’s most brilliant minds. Then he changed history.
Franklin Roosevelt
President Franklin Roosevelt had a lot on his plate in 1939. The fact that Germany may be building up nuclear weapons wasn’t on his radar. Several scientists had warned him, but he didn’t seem to care.
Then Einstein sent Roosevelt a letter. Because of Einstein’s stature, Roosevelt took notice. Soon we had a nuclear program.
We can argue all day about whether the Manhattan Project resulting in the dropping of the atomic bomb in Japan and nuclear buildup thereafter was good for the U.S. and world. Einstein expressed regret thereafter.
But one thing is for certain: It’s good that Hitler didn’t have the Atom Bomb. Had Einstein assisted Germany in nuclear technology, it would be unfathomable.
6. The Wright Brothers.
For centuries, the world wanted to know how to fly. Orville and Wilber Wright were the first to do it.
By the late 1800s, the desire to fly was so great that governments around the world were sinking millions into research. But some of the most brilliant aerodynamic engineers couldn’t figure out how to keep one aloft.
What is so cool about this story is that it took a couple of Ohio bicycle shop owners, with little education, to make it happen.
They came up with a theory: an airplane is like a bicycle – and it had everything to do with the operator and his ability to balance.
Conventional wisdom at the time thought otherwise. It had more to do with the type of power an engine produces.
But in Kitty Hawk, N.C., the Wrights spent four years of tests perfecting the first manned airplane flight. It took them another four years to convince the world that they had done it.
That’s the thing when you’re a snooty engineer. How could a couple of Ohio hillbillies perfect the art of flying?
5. Jonas Salk.
I had a classmate, whom I’ve known all my life, who never had use of her arms. She adapted and pretty much lived her life as normally as the rest of us, but only with harrowing effort.
She had polio. In the 1950s, there were roughly 58,000 cases of polio in the U.S. alone, 500,000 worldwide. What made this disease even more atrocious is it mostly attacked the central nervous system of small children, leaving them either paralyzed or dead.
Jonas Salk was the man who developed the polio vaccine. He did so, much like the Wright Brothers invented the plane, unconventionally.
Salk was an unassuming man, and an odd duck. He went to medical school, not to be a doctor, but to work in a lab. And eventually he fulfilled his wish, securing a lab dedicated exclusively to curing this disease. It took Salk and his team seven years to develop a vaccine.
The inoculation process, launched by the March of Dimes, was unlike any other in the U.S. Starting in 1955, seven million volunteers helped 100 million people get inoculated over the next couple of years. By the 1980s, the disease was nearly eradicated.
I scoff at people who proclaim that the 50s, or even the 70s, were better times than they are today. Modern science makes living life today so much easier. And we have people like Salk to thank.
4. Dr. Martin Luther King Junior.
The U.S. Civil War was supposed to end slavery in the 1860s. Fast forward 100 years, and while people weren’t in bondage, little else had changed.
By the time the 1960s rolled around, the South was still in the thralls of Jim Crow laws and rampant racism. The northern states, in many ways, were no better. Heck, even here in Wellington, there were two swimming pools – one for the white and one for the black children.
Then came Dr. King, who became the premier civil rights activist leader from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. He sparked a movement that led to desegregation and gave African Americans an equal voice.
It all started on April 13, 1944. King, a high school junior, won a speaking contest, saying, “the finest negro is at the mercy of the meanest white man.” That very night, as he was coming home on a bus from the speaking contest, the driver told him to stand and let the white passengers sit. And the rest became history. He demanded change.
He initiated the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, which led to the Atlanta sit-ins and, in 1963, delivered the 17-minute speech “I Have a Dream” during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
And then he was assassinated. King always knew he was going to die young. His prophecy proved to be true.
King embodied the spirit of overcoming and standing up not only for yourself but also for your fellow citizens. What can be more American than that?
3. George Washington.
Washington wasn’t the greatest of war generals. The Yankee troops lost some key battles because of his inability to fortify the troops.
His Presidency was also a bit unremarkable. It was more of a setting-up-shop kind of thing. On top of that, he had really bad teeth.
But Washington was the father of our country. He was an incredible leader and stamped a face on a young nation in need of a face, saying, “Hey, that is our guy.”
The Brits didn’t really want to fight the Revolutionary War. Their big enemy was France. America was an ocean away, and a logistical nightmare of farms and forests.
But the Redcoats also thought it would be a cakewalk. We never sported a military. Brits had been fighting for centuries.
This was the genius of Washington. He was able to build an army of people who would do anything for him. He never deserted the troops, even during the trying days at Valley Forge when he was losing half his troops to disease such as dysentery. Washington was one of the first generals to proceed with a vaccination program to stave off smallpox – another killer disease.
A little-known fact: more than twice as many Revolutionary War soldiers died of disease than gunshot.
Washington would eventually lead the Americans to victory with the help of the French, which made him a Godlike hero. When the Founding Fathers were busy forming the new Republic, he was the natural fit to be President. Washington refused to be king.
During his time in office, Washington was more about management and staying above the fray of politics. After two terms, he did something almost unheard of. He stepped down on his own recognizance. Nobody wanted to see him go.
2. Ben Franklin
Franklin was everything. He did it all. He was an entrepreneur, a writer, a scientist, a diplomat, a printer, and the ultimate patriot. He was rich, funny, and seemed to like the ladies – lots of them. He was the Taylor Swift of the late 1700s; people loved him so much.
Oh, and he helped draft the Declaration of Independence, that document we are celebrating 250 years ago today.
Born one of 17 children, Franklin was already making his mark as a teenager by writing rabble-rousing editorials. At 17, he ran away from home and never looked back. In Philadelphia, he bought a printing press and turned it into a newspaper chain. Then he started the Poor Richard’s Almanac – that had all kinds of common wisdom. By the age of 42, Franklin was so rich, he retired.
Franklin was just getting started. He became an American diplomat in Britain. When the Parliament wanted to tax America for the French and Indian War, Franklin basically told them to go to hell. He returned to Pennsylvania and helped fine-tune the Declaration in 1776.
For all his accomplishments, Franklin’s best work arguably came as the French ambassador. He was able to convince France that the American War was worth fighting for (and sticking it to the Brits). Without France, we wouldn’t have won the war.
Franklin signed the U.S. Constitution in 1787, in his dying days. He was 81, 20 years older than the next living person.
1. Abraham Lincoln.
Pardon my French, but Lincoln was a badass. He is the John Wick of Presidents.
Just look at how he conducted the U.S. Civil War. He expanded his own war powers, arrested Confederate sympathizers, and told journalists like me we couldn’t trash the war in any editorials. He fought with Commanding General of the U.S. Army George McClellan for two years, saying he wasn’t aggressive enough on the battlefield – before firing him. He even personally went to the Battle of Fort Stevens, becoming the only sitting U.S. President to be fired upon by enemy combat.
The Emancipation Proclamation wasn’t really about abolishing slavery altogether. That happened later with the 13th Amendment also under Lincoln’s watch. What he did was abolish slavery only in the Southern states’ rebellion. Those slave states that were on the U.S. side, Kentucky and Maryland, got to keep their slaves. Basically, he was treating the South like children. “You act bad, you’re getting no supper.”
Yet, Lincoln was the ultimate diplomat. When he was filling his cabinet, he selected political adversaries, including some who had run against him for President. Why? He wanted the “smartest people for the job.”
Where is that leadership today?
Unfortunately, John Wilkes Booth shot and killed him before he could implement his Reconstruction plan for the defeated South, which I’m sure created problems we are still dealing with to this day.
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Well, there you have it. I really wanted to get John Elway on this list for bringing the Broncos their first Super Bowl Championship. But, I guess, winning football games aren’t as important as saving humanity.
Here is the list of my other 10 Independence Day columns in case you are interested…
In 2016, I rated my 10 favorite Presidents of all time (click here).
In 2017, I ranked the American wars by importance (click here).
In 2018, I listed the 10 greatest American inventions of the past 50 years (click here).
In 2019, I listed my top five U.S. Constitutional amendments (click here).
In 2020, I listed my top five favorite American conspiracies (click here).
In 2021, I rated my top 10 favorite American movies (click here).
In 2022, I rated my top 10 American Restaurant chains. (click here).
In 2023, I rated my top 10 American songs (click here).
In 2024, I rated my top 10 most shocking moments in U.S. history (click here).
In 2025, I rated my top seven holidays (and three that were lame) (click here).
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