Who would be your five representative American figures...?

[First Speaker]

...Yes, this is just a silly parlor game. Yes, it's impossible to choose just five. Yes, I could easily pick 1,000 lists like this, and it would change on a daily basis. But let's just relax and have a little fun. (We remember how to do that, don't we?) So--here are my five picks tonight:

--Frederick Douglass

--Walt Whitman

--H. L. Mencken

--Billie Holiday

--Babe Ruth

I wasn't going to choose both Mencken and Ruth--two Baltimoreans? But to hell with it...wanted an athlete, and the Babe leads the list, on and off the field... (Actually, *three* Baltimoreans, now that I think of it...Billie was from there, too. Huh. If I had included Poe and Francis Scott Key, it would have had a clean sweep...)

[Midnight Writer]

1. Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, P. T. Barnum, Elvis Presley, Muhammed Ali.

[RockRaven]

2. Frederick Douglass was the second name that came to my mind...

Lincoln was the first. Neil Armstrong was the third.

I'm not done thinking about it, so I'm not certain all of those will even make the list once I have.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

3. Jefferson, Edison, FDR, Steve Jobs, Beyonce (nt)

[lastlib]

4. Lincoln, Jefferson, Edison, Jim Torpe, and Mark Twain.

Kind of a tough call between Jefferson and James Madison, but, WTH?

[LearnedHand]

5. Grace Hopper, Martin Luther King, Navajo Code Talkers, Stacey Abrams, Pete Buttigieg

Ok a tiny cheat, but you get the idea.

[sarge43]

6. Abraham Lincoln, Tuskegee Airmen, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Aaron Copland, Jonas Salk n/t

[Harker]

7. Thomas Paine, Harriet Tubman, Franklin Delano Roosevelt...

Dorothy Parker, Carl Sagan.

[rurallib]

8. Thomas Jefferson, Billie Jean King, Ernie Banks, Carl Sagan, Gloria Steinem

and I can't fit Neil Degrasse Tyson in

[NNadir]

9. Benjamin Franklin...

...Abraham Lincoln

Josiah Willard Gibbs

Glenn Seaborg

...and Barack Obama.