The Smithsonian Left Football Off Its List. Maybe It Was Right.

Editor's note: It has been called the "National Fake League" as sarcasm replacing the National Football League because professional football in America has been elevated to what seems like the epitome of human cultural accomplishment. The fanboys of this clearly staged and faked professional entertainment business worth billions of dollars every year are in a category of their own. The National Fake League has become a stage for athletes who see themselves as the pinnacle of human achievement, histrionically dramatizing every routine tackle, ostentatiously choreographing end-zone celebrations, and shamelessly showboating for the cameras until the bloated spectacle of their own self-importance eclipses the game itself, while a vast pipeline of college players, nearly all of them dreaming of an NFL roster spot, chase the same prize of status, fame, and money, treating four years of college as little more than an audition for the National Fake League. The Smithsonian thinks they are "insignificant." Maybe for a good reason:

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Editor's note: Professional football players, as football players, have not met the bar for a list of significant Americans according to the Smithsonian, because significance means changing something beyond the field of play. Their achievements are measured in games, yards, and championships, and while millions of fanboys dressed in their respective teams colorful loyalty costumes may cheer for them, the sport would look nearly identical had any single player never existed.

Smithsonian's 2014 List of 100 Greatest Americans

by Miles Mathis

September 27, 2026

If you didn't already have existential vertigo, this will give it to you. People blame me for putting people off-balance with my papers, but I have never seen anything as disorienting as this article from the Smithsonian.

I got to it while searching for the subject of a new paper. I wanted to see who I have missed in my blitz on history.

I feel I must confirm that I am not making this up. You may need to take the link above to see that this is all terribly terribly real. They divide the list into ten categories, like Presidents, Artists, Religious Figures, and so on, and then list eleven people in each category. Which, according to my math, is 110 people, not 100, but whatever. I guess it is too much to expect fake historians to be able to do simple multiplication.

The strangest category may be religious figures:

Joseph Smith Jr.

William Penn

Brigham Young

Roger Williams

Anne Hutchinson

Jonathan Edwards

L. Ron Hubbard

Ellen G. White

Cotton Mather

Mary Baker Eddy

Billy Graham

We need two Mormons on this short list? And strange promotion of Seventh Day Adventists as well, with Ellen White. So this list is already very spooky. Same for L. Ron Hubbard, who was an actual spook (Naval Intelligence). Then we get four Puritans with Hutchinson, Williams, Edwards, and Mather. No one has been a Puritan for about 300 years, so how are these people "significant", much less influential? Same for Christian Science, started by Eddy in 1879: it now has less than about 40,000 members, so it isn't as significant as a Star Wars fanclub. Same again for William Penn, a Quaker. Almost no one is now a Quaker, and I have shown you the Quakers were always just agents themselves, infiltrating Christianity to blow it from the inside, like the rest of these fake denominations. This list is basically just a promotion of schismatics. But why would the Smithsonian be promoting a bunch of schismatics that most people haven't even heard of on a list of greatest Americans? If you have been reading my papers, you know why: OPERATION CHAOS.

But it gets weirder. You have to look closely at the categories to see it:

Presidents

Religious Figures

Artists Athletes

Empire Builders

Pop Icons

Outlaws

First Women

Rebels and Resisters

Trailblazers

What's missing? How about scientists? And remind yourself that this list comes from the Smithsonian, which is supposed to be about the sciences, arts, and humanities. But here we see their list is heavy with throwaway categories. Athletes are now on a par with Presidents, but scientists are left out? Women need their own category? Ten percent of this list needs to go to outlaws like Al Capone and Charles Manson? These are the greatest or most significant people in the history of our country? Here is the whole list of outlaws:

Benedict Arnold

Jesse James

John Wilkes Booth

Al Capone

Billy the Kid

William M. "Boss" Tweed

Charles Manson

Wild Bill Hickok

Lee Harvey Oswald

John Dillinger

Lucky Luciano

Not one of those people belongs on this list of greatest or most significant Americans. I have outed most of them in their own papers. That whole category is a waste, so why would the Smithsonian include it? Again, OPERATION CHAOS.

You would also expect to see a lot of writers on the list from the historians at Smithsonian, or perhaps to see an entire category given to them. Nope, we get only two writers, Edith Wharton on the Ladies list, and Mark Twain in the Pop Icons list with Madonna and Marilyn Monroe. He is turning over in his grave. Likewise, we get one scientist, Edison, but he is lost in the Empire Builders category with Walt Disney and Steve Jobs.

Then we come to Athletes:

Babe Ruth

Muhammad Ali

Jackie Robinson

James Naismith

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Ty Cobb

Michael Jordan

Hulk Hogan

Jim Thorpe

Secretariat

Billie Jean King

First of all, a bodybuilder is not an athlete, and neither is a fake wrestler, so Arnold must have bought himself on to this list along with Hulk Hogan. Hulk Hogan?! And I hate to tell the historians at Smithsonian, but Secretariat is not a person. He is a horse. Look it up. Plus, why do we have three baseball players here, but only one basketball player and no football players? Why no Olympic athletes? And again, none of these people or quadripeds belong on a greatest or most significant Americans list. Maybe a most famous list, but not a most significant list. The significance of all of these sports is just entertainment, which is relatively insignificant. Never before in history have athletes ranked equally with statesmen, artists, scientists, or writers. Only in our purposely collapsed culture could anyone even imagine such a thing. If you disagree, name one athlete from the 18th century. Name one athlete from the Renaissance. Name one athlete from ancient Rome or Greece.

Another buy-on to this list was George W. Bush. No real historian would list Bush as one of the top eleven Presidents. There are very few blacks on this list (10 out of 110), and this was 2014, so it is very surprising Obama isn't on the Presidents list. As the first black President, he is far more significant just for that alone than Bush or even Grant, and far more significant in the long run than Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson, or Louis Armstrong. I am not a fan of Obama, but that is a fact.

Ditto for Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, and Oprah Winfrey, who make it on the Ladies' list, but wouldn't make a top-million list by any real person. Without extreme promotion, no one would have ever heard of them, and in a few decades no one will.

On the Artists list we find Georgia O'Keefe, but far better choices would be Mary Cassatt or Cecilia Beaux. Hard to believe Emily Dickinson was bumped off the Ladies' list in favor of Madonna or Bette Davis. Also more deserving of being on this Ladies' list would be Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, Myra Bradwell, Elizabeth Blackwell, or Sarah Whiting. And if you had to put an actress on this list, you would choose Meryl Streep, not Bette Davis. Like everyone else in Hollywood, Streep has become intolerable, but that doesn't nullify her early performances, like in Sophie's Choice or Out of Africa. I don't think actors are great people, or significant, so I wouldn't put them on this list at all, but Streep has to rank highest in her category, just above someone like Anthony Hopkins or Daniel Day Lewis.

If the Smithsonian can include Christopher Columbus or Amerigo Vespucci as American, I can suggest Nikola Tesla as a replacement for one of their buy-ons. Tesla spent most of his life and did most of his major work here.

It is also difficult to believe they listed all these athletes, actresses, outlaws and other promoted nobodies while forgetting about Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sinclair Lewis, John Goddard, Edmund Hubble, Robert Millikan, Robert Hofstadter, Theodore Richards, Wild Bill Donovan, Allan Pinkerton, J. Edgar Hoover, William Shockley, Elisha Gray*, George Eastman, John Singer Sargent, Thomas Hart Benton, Albert Bierstadt, Winslow Homer, John Steinbeck, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Frost, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, Ben Franklin, Samuel Morse, Arthur Compton, Linus Pauling, Louis Agassiz, and Richard Byrd. To be clear, I don't think many of those, like Pinkerton, Donovan, or Hoover, are great men, but they are far more significant to the history of the US than most of those chosen by the Smithsonian. They certainly helped make it what it is, for better or for worse. Same for Ben Franklin, whom I no longer admire, but no sane person would leave him off this list to make room for Billie Jean King. That would be like replacing George Washington with Taylor Swift.

In conclusion, I think just about anyone—even those who don't agree with my specific choices—can agree this list from the Smithsonian is surpassingly strange. It is so outrageously stupid and counterintuitive and counter-historical (again, Hulk Hogan?!), that it can only be another CIA mindstir. It clearly didn't come out of the Smithsonian, it came out of Langley down the road. That is, supposing that everything in the Smithsonian, and all of DC, isn't now just an offshoot or outbuilding of CIA.

*I list Gray to replace Alexander Graham Bell, but I still find it hard to believe the historians at the Smithsonian left Bell off to make room for Sarah Palin or Lucky Luciano.