Who’s the greatest American writer? Maybe Mark Twain, maybe Scott Fitzgerald, maybe Ernest Hemingway, maybe Robert Frost. Who’s the greatest American musical figure? Maybe Duke Ellington, maybe George Gershwin, maybe Bruce Springsteen, maybe Barbra Streisand. Who’s the greatest American athlete? Maybe Henry Aaron, maybe Johnny Unitas, maybe Jackie Joyner-Kersee, maybe Billie Jean King. Who’s the greatest American? Well, now that’s a much harder question.

It turns out that the Discovery Channel is asking that very question this very month, and I’ve been haunted by it. It raises many intriguing secondary questions, like how greatness is defined, and how greatness in one era is compared with greatness in another, and whether greatness and fame might be confused, and whether one kind of greatness (the kind you might attribute to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, for example) can reasonably be compared to another (the kind you might attribute to Henry Clay). I’m not sure who was the greater man, Longfellow or Clay. I’m not sure who was the greater man, Bill Russell or Wilt Chamberlain.

And the nominees are:

The Discovery Channel has sought to make our way through this thicket easier by selecting 100 nominees. In truth, the hints only make the question harder. I don’t know whether Frank Sinatra was greater than Audie Murphy, but I know that neither of them was the greatest American. Neither was even the greatest resident of his state. (I’d choose Woodrow Wilson or Albert Einstein over Sinatra in New Jersey, and Stephen F. Austin or Sam Houston over Murphy in Texas.)

Many of the other figures in the Discovery nominee list are ludicrous.

Johnny Carson? Maybe for most entertaining Nebraskan, but not for greatest American. Madonna? She’s not even the best pop singer from Michigan (give me Diana Ross any day). Martha Stewart? Not even the greatest American to be jailed (easy winner there: Martin Luther King Jr.). George Patton? (Winfield Scott was a better general, and so was U.S. Grant, and of course so were Robert E. Lee and Dwight Eisenhower, and there’s a good case to be made that George C. Marshall had the best combined military and civilian career of them all.)

Get real

Brett Favre? Terrific quarterback, and that was a funny cameo role in “There’s Something about Mary,” but old-timers like me hang to the notion that Bart Starr might have been the better Packers quarterback and that Robert M. La Follette was, among Wisconsans, a far more enduring figure. So, in fact, was Sen. Joseph McCarthy, but no one is putting him on a list of greats, except scourges or demagogues, though Charles Lindbergh (who is listed) comes close in both those categories. Dr. Phil McGraw? Let me answer his candidacy with the quote that made him famous: Get real.

And the presence of the names Hugh Hefner and Donald Trump on the list of nominees is useful only in that it underlines how low our national self-esteem must have dropped.

Because in truth, there were a great many great Americans. Daniel Webster (not on the list) was the greatest orator of our history, though perhaps Ronald Reagan (on it) comes close. James Madison (not listed) was the greatest theorist, though perhaps John C. Calhoun (also not listed) comes close. Thomas Jefferson (listed) was the greatest idealist, though perhaps Woodrow Wilson (not) comes close.

Harry Truman spoke (plain) truth in power in America, John Kennedy spoke eloquently about the power of America in the service of great truths. Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass were great American awakeners, though neither lived to see the full dawn of their work. Aaron Copland and Stephen Foster captured the soundtracks of American life, but then again so did Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles and Leroy Anderson. Thomas Cole and Benjamin West and Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt, to say nothing of Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe and Alexander Calder, were great American artists, doing far more for the American image than any Madison Avenue executive.

But while all were great Americans, and many of them were examples of what makes America great, and some of them are great symbols of Americanism, none of those things is the same as being the greatest American.

Which is why the Discovery nominations are no help at all. Marilyn Monroe is there and James Monroe is not. Michael Moore, Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan are listed as contenders. Michael Dukakis, who was elected governor of Massachusetts three times and nearly was elected president, and Mike Mansfield, the stoic Senate majority leader of the 1960s, aren’t listed and probably aren’t the greatest Americans either, but they’re more nearly so than Moore, Jackson and Jordan.

The big four

In a way, it doesn’t really matter who appears on the nomination list. It could be full of figures like Al Capone and the Boston Strangler, or even with John Adams or John D. Rockefeller (none of those appear), and there only still would be only four legitimate contenders as the greatest American.

They are Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr. You can argue about the order, but you can hardly argue about their presence at the top of the American pantheon.

Lincoln saved the American union, Washington saved the American idea, Roosevelt saved the American economy and King saved the American soul.

Lincoln and King were the greatest humanists of our history. Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt summoned the best of America to get the nation through its gravest tests. Washington and Roosevelt were great improvisers, and their improvisations made permanent our notions of leadership. All four of them saved, and extended, freedom.

Lucky the country that had any one of them. Luckier still the country that had them all, along with Lucille Ball and George Washington Carver and Tom Hanks.