Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century

• 1. Introduction

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  Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century began not in a New York editorial meeting but at a symposium in Hanoi, Vietnam, on the 1st of February 1998. Around the table sat a journalist, two politicians, a historian, an academic, and a magazine editor. Their debate about who had shaped the previous hundred years would eventually grow into one of the most talked-about, argued-over, and occasionally ridiculed lists in magazine history. The project ran across five issues of Time in 1998 and 1999, ultimately naming one hundred people across five categories. But the list's real power lay not in who made it. It lay in who didn't, who was almost included for the wrong reasons, and what the editors believed the twentieth century would ultimately be remembered for.

• 2. The Hanoi Debate

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  Former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather sat alongside historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and former New York governor Mario Cuomo at the February 1998 Hanoi symposium. Also at the table were then-Stanford Provost Condoleezza Rice, publisher Irving Kristol, and Time managing editor Walter Isaacson. That gathering was the seed of the entire project. The five categories Time settled on reflect the range of that original debate: Leaders and Revolutionaries, Artists and Entertainers, Builders and Titans, Scientists and Thinkers, and Heroes and Icons. Each category received exactly twenty selections, producing the round number of one hundred.

• 3. Einstein Above All

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  Albert Einstein's photograph on the cover of the 31st of December 1999 issue was taken in 1947 by American portrait photographer Philippe Halsman. It is one of the most recognized images of any scientist, and Time chose it deliberately. The editors declared that Einstein was the Person of the Century on the grounds that he was the preeminent scientist in a century they believed would be "remembered foremost for its science and technology." In their framing, Einstein served as a symbol for an entire generation of physicists whose work built on his own, naming Fermi, Heisenberg, Bohr, and Richard Feynman among those implied. The runners-up were Mahatma Gandhi, described as an Indian independence activist, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the United States. That Einstein outranked both of them speaks to how heavily the editors weighted scientific achievement against political transformation.

• 4. The Difficult Question of Evil

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  Time's own stated criterion created a thorny problem. The list was explicitly open to people who had the greatest impact "for better or worse." Under that standard, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were credible candidates. In the 31st of December 1999 issue, essayist Nancy Gibbs addressed this directly in an article titled "The Necessary Evil?" Her argument was that Hitler and Mussolini were not uniquely powerful forces of evil but rather "the latest in a long line of murderous figures, stretching back to before Genghis Khan." The distinguishing factor, Gibbs wrote, was technology: both men "went about their cynical carnage with all the efficiency that modern industry had perfected." She posed the question head-on, asking whether evil is more powerful than genius, creativity, courage, or generosity. The editors ultimately chose Einstein over Hitler, a decision that was itself a statement about what the century meant.

• 5. Elvis, Bart, and the Critics

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  The Artists and Entertainers category drew the sharpest public criticism. Time representative Bruce Handy defended the exclusion of Elvis Presley by pointing to the magazine's emphasis on songwriters who performed their own material. He contrasted Elvis with the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Robert Johnson, saying Elvis's "most original recordings were his first" while the Beatles "continued to grow throughout their years together." The inclusion of Bart Simpson, a fictional cartoon character from The Simpsons television series, provoked a different kind of response. Handy argued that cartoons were "one of our great contributions" to the century, alongside jazz and film. He described The Simpsons as having merged "social satire with popular animation in a way that hasn't really been done before." In the online Man of the Century poll that ran alongside the project, professional wrestler Ric Flair gathered more than 300,000 votes, and nearly 900,000 votes were cast for Jesus. Both were removed by Time.com officials on the grounds that the votes violated the "spirit" of the title.

• 6. Lucky Luciano's Defenders

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  No single selection generated as much official protest as that of Lucky Luciano. Time's reasoning was that he had "modernized the Mafia, shaping it into a smoothly run national crime syndicate focused on the bottom line." New York mayor Rudy Giuliani called the framing "absurd," arguing that Luciano had murdered to obtain his position and then authorized hundreds more killings. Philip Cannistraro, a Queens College professor of Italian-American studies, called the selection an "outrage." Thomas Vitale, the New York State vice president of Fieri, an Italian-American charitable organization, accused Time of perpetuating myths about Italian-Americans. Time business editor Bill Saporito pushed back. He described Luciano as "kind of an evil genius" and pointed to the concrete economic ripple of organized crime, noting that "every piece of merchandise that came out of the Garment District had a little extra cost in it because of organized crime." His defense returned to the same logic the editors applied to the entire list: the criterion was impact, not admiration.