“Earl Warren was as dumb as a post, and he changed America more than any single human being in the second half of the twentieth century.”
Helen Andrews
I would not want to be one who denies how wicked Earl Warren was but I do think there are other candidates for being “the single human being who changed America more than anyone else.”
Here is my shortlist.
1.) Alfred Kinsey — Indiana University Sexologist who straddled the mid-century mark. One could easily label Kinsey as the founder of the sexual Revolution that arose in the 1960s.
2.) Hugh Hefner — Hefner was Kinsey’s pamphleteer. He incarnated Kinsey’s vision by means of his Playboy Empire. Hefner forever changed the stability of the American family and stripped women of their familial safety net.
3.) Emmanuel Celler
4.) Phil Hart
Hart & Celler together sponsored the Immigration & Nationality Act of 1965. This legislation would eventually change the racial-ethnic face of America so that America would no longer be considered a WASP country.
5.) Herbert Marcuse — Marcuse spread the Gospel of Cultural Marxism across America through his teaching gigs, his books, and his influence on subsequent generations of University professors.
6.) Saul Alinsky — Through his “Rules for Radicals” Alinsky taught a whole generation how to successfully engage in Political Activism for the Left. His methods are still being used today.
7.) Margaret Meade
Meade is another straddler between pre-1950 and post-1950 but it is fair to say that most of her influence was post-1950. Meade was a student of the radical anthropologist Franz Boas and followed Boas’s thought that race was not a central factor in intelligence and native ability. Meade’s work in Somoa also worked to the end of loosening Christian ethics and morals in the West.
9.) Steve Jobs
Let Jobs stand for the computer explosion — many of whom were part of that seismic change. The computer, with the internet, has shrunk our world so that information is now a commodity that has become a democratic weapon for those who know how to leverage it.
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Maybe, dear reader, you can recommend some more?
