Today I am asking you a favor. Please name a few of your favorite Americans over our last 250 years. One or two would be wonderful.

People to celebrate.

Here are a few of mine:

Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR, George O’Keeffe, Jackie Robinson, Jonas Salk, Barbara Jordan, Dwight Eisenhower, Judy Collins, Thomas Paine, Leonard Bernstein, James Baldwin, Edward R. Morrow, Rosa Parks, Abraham Lincoln, Joni Mitchell, Jimmy Carter, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, John Lewis, MLK, Pete Seeger, Mark Rothko, Frederick Douglass, and Gutzon Borglum (the sculptor who created Mt. Rushmore).

The idea comes from my sparkling friend Joan Chandler in her July 4th blog. You can read her list and her brief post by clicking on the link.

There was a time when “naming names” referred to U.S. Congressmen who served on the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 1940s and ’50s.

The members requested that Hollywood actors, writers, producers, and others identify prominent associates, including close friends, who attended left-wing meetings or joined the Communist Party.

Those who refused to do what the panel demanded, movie stars among them, suffered blacklisting. Being on such lists prevented them from finding work, practicing their craft, displaying their talent, and making a living.

It did not matter that Communism had been popular in the United States during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the economy collapsed, and some believed democracy and capitalism failed them.

McCarthyism became a simultaneous anticommunist force, fueling fear and promoting loyalty oaths to establish patriotic citizenship. According to AI, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy and his cronies often made “baseless, sensationalized accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason, particularly concerning alleged communist infiltration.”

The 1950s were called the period of the Red Scare, referring to suspected communists as Reds.

Today is a different day, and the first iteration of the Red Scare is over, though serpents are not hard to find.

Let us praise and celebrate those Americans who have brought us honor thus far, 250 years since our founding.

Please allow me to add to my list a woman who fought against powerful men who made females second-class citizens, even before the Women’s Movement.

I forgot to mention her name earlier. She belongs on my roll call, for sure:

Joan Chandler.

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Freedom of Speech, the 1943 painting at the top of the page, was the first of four oil paintings titled Four Freedoms by Norman Rockwell.