Question

Who was more important in US History? John D. Rockefeller or Earl Warren? ---- I'm doing a debate and I need exact specifics on how and why one is more important/influential than the other.

Answer 1

Personally I would say Earl Warren....

He set precedents and lead a Supreme Court that changed the landscape of America. In cases such as Brown vs Board of Education, Gideon vs Wainwright, and Miranda vs. Arizona.

These precedents stand to this day and have become a baseline for various rights in the country. His cases are heavily studied in law school to this day. This is where I would differentiate him from Rockefeller. Rockefeller has aged with time in his accomplishments. When companies like Exxon are no longer the most valuable in the world. His accomplishments were legendary but studying his style of business is very much futile. The regulatory and business environment has changed dramatically. While we still debate and see the reoccurrence of cases in the Warren court.

Answer 2

Well, if YOU are the one debating, YOU need to decide who YOU think is more important. Then you can proceed. If you don't agree with someone on this site, but use their info because it sounds convincing, you still won't be as convincing than if you decided on your own THEN sought argument points.

Answer 3

i'd pick Rockefeller in a heartbeat. His efforts eased the lives of millions, by providing cheap and effective illumination (he got his start providing kerosene for lighting after whale oil became scarce). Poor students could study after dark, farmers could work later, mining was safer, and so on. The effects of his work were broad, and very few corners of American society were unaffected.

The most significant effects of the Warren Court were probably Brown, Loving and Miranda. The last only effects you positively if you are (1) charged with a serious crime, (2) actually innocent, and (3) stupid enough to implicate yourself anyway in what you say to the police, but (4) smart enough to benefit from a Miranda warning. Loving put the nail in anti-miscegenation laws, but these were dying anyway. (Ditto Griswold and its effect on anti-contraception laws.)

Brown is definitely significant, and accelerated integration of schools. Whether this was, in the long run, more beneficial than having those things happen organically, or at a state level, is unclear to me. I'm generally skeptical of efforts to change peoples' minds by force, and if in the present day we are skeptical of the ability of the US Marine Corps to bring Afghanistani attitudes about women into the 20th (let alone the 21st) century, it's hard to see how we can be credulous about the ability of Earn Warren to drag American attitudes about race into the 20th century by force of law.

Still, I would respect an argument made the other way, if you were to make a case why sometimes top-down force can change a society more than grassroots up from the bottom growth.