Gallup's List of Most Widely Admired People of The 20th Century

Gallup's List of People that Americans Most Widely Admired in the 20th Century is a poll published in December 1999 by The Gallup Organization to determine which people around the world Americans most admired for what they did in the 20th century.

While Gallup has constructed a yearly Gallup's most admired man and woman poll list since 1948, it did not cover the entire century. Therefore they combined the results from those lists with a new preliminary poll to determine the 18 most admired people. They then ran a final poll to produce an ordered list of those 18. This produced the following ranking:

  1. Mother Teresa
  2. Martin Luther King, Jr.
  3. John F. Kennedy
  4. Albert Einstein
  5. Helen Keller
  6. Franklin D. Roosevelt
  7. Billy Graham
  8. Pope John Paul II
  9. Eleanor Roosevelt
  10. Winston Churchill
  11. Dwight D. Eisenhower
  12. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
  13. Mohandas Gandhi
  14. Nelson Mandela
  15. Ronald Reagan
  16. Henry Ford
  17. Bill Clinton
  18. Margaret Thatcher

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    “I did not enter the Labour Party forty-seven years ago to have our manifesto written by Dr. Mori, Dr. Gallup and Mr. Harris.”
    —Tony Benn (b. 1925)

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