Persons of achievement in 20th-century Virginia who were nominated in the greatest and most influential categories came from many walks of life. One was President Woodrow Wilson, whose administration A. Barton Hinkle of

The Times-Dispatch summarized as including "the creation of the Federal Reserve system, increased interventionism in domestic economics and foreign policy, The League of Nations, and the Treaty of Versailles, which helped lay the groundwork for WWII."

Such a mixed legacy led UVa Center for Politics director Larry Sabato to leave Wilson off the list of great Virginians: "He was a Virginian," Sabato wrote, "but more identified with New Jersey for his public career. I also believe his presidency is overrated, given the disaster of the League of Nations, his inflexibility, the poor health that produced an invalid president for two years, and his truly appalling views on race."

Mayor L. Douglas Wilder cast a vote for Richmond's Lewis F. Powell, the only Virginian to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States since the 1850s. "He brought a voice of moderation to an increasingly polarized U.S. Supreme Court," Wilder wrote.

Richmond SPCA CEO Robin Starr wrote of Powell, "He was a patrician whose refined demeanor did not prevent him from having clarity of vision about the profound effects of poverty and discrimination on many people in our country."

A Virginian who will be fondly remembered is the late News Leader editorial cartoonist Jeff MacNelly. Friend and former editor Ross Mackenzie, explained: "MacNelly probably was the singular editorial cartoonist this nation has produced." More so even than Thomas Nast, who in the 19th century created the modern editorial cartoon genre, MacNelly "was a revolutionary in terms of style, composition, and message."

Lila Meade Valentine was a founder and one of the most influential leaders of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia. She and thousands of other Virginia women, famous ones and non-famous ones, campaigned for the right to vote early in the 20th century.

Distinguished Virginia writers, such as Mary Johnston, and social reformers such as Naomi Cohn and Ida Mae Thompson, also took part in the fight for the right to vote. Valentine died soon after ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, but Cohn, Thompson, and many others reformed the movement into the League of Women Voters and continued to press for social reforms.

Archivist Jennifer McDaid singled out Thompson for having preserved and deposited the records of the Equal Suffrage League in the Library of Virginia. The 25,000document collection is one of the best suffrage collections in the country. "Thanks to her," McDaid wrote, "the records -- and the history -- of Virginia's woman suffrage movement survive."

Edgar Finley Shannon, president of the University of Virginia from 1959-74, and Virginia Tech's T. Marshall Hahn, president from 1964-74, were the only educators nominated. UVa's Sabato wrote that Shannon "dramatically improved the quality of the faculty and students, massively expanded the physical plant, opened up the university to women and minorities, and in short, put UVa and thus Virginia on the map in terms of higher education."

During the same period, Hahn put a decidedly good university in Southwest Virginia onto the path toward becoming one of the nation's premier land-grant institutions with parallel initiatives to Shannon's. Hahn told Virginia Tech it could be great, then proceeded to make the school live up to his vision.

Sabato also nominated Wilder, the black man who "managed a feat no one else in America achieved in the 20th century -- election as governor of a state, and in the capital of the Old Confederacy at that."

The current governor, Tim Kaine, acknowledged the legacy of one of his predecessors: A. Linwood Holton, who also happens to be Kaine's father-in-law. Gov. Kaine wrote of Holton, "He adopted as his goal the creation of a truly competitive two-party democracy and worked for 25 years to build the modern Republican Party. His election as governor in 1969 ensured that goal. We have true political competition today and Linwood is a key reason for it." Holton's history of using the governor's office as a touchstone of racial reconciliation during a turbulent era left an impression on his son-in-law.

The only two-term governor of Virginia during the 20th century, Mills Godwin did not receive many votes for the most influential or greatest. Historian James Sweeney wrote, "Godwin's greatness lay in his ability to transcend his upbringing, abandon the politics of race, and bring Virginia into the New South. Godwin realized that times were changing in the early 1960s. In 1961 he was elected lieutenant governor and subsequently he emphasized economic growth and education rather than polarizing racial issues."

Ellen Glasgow was one of the most famous and distinguished writers in all of Virginia's history. Robin Starr summarized Glasgow's career this way: "She won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature for her novel, In This Our Life, in 1942. She received every major award for fiction except the Nobel Prize. She was an early feminist and dedicated proponent of animal welfare. She wrote with great courage about the inhibiting roles and demands placed on women in Southern society."

Starr also pointed out that Glasgow "left the majority of her estate and the rights to all of her literature to the Richmond SPCA in honor of her beloved dog, Jeremy. This bequest formed the nucleus of the organization's endowment."

Frank Robert Rowlett, who retired from the National Security Agency in 1966 as chief of its cryptology school, was a founder of the army's signal intelligence service and led the War Department team that in 1940 broke the Japanese diplomatic code.

Historian and archivist Robert Vejnar wrote that "many of Rowlett's inventions remain classified, vital elements of our national security to this very day. His work in solving Soviet codes, and the ingenuity of his postwar cipher inventions, apparently proved as successful as his wartime exploits against Japan's secret communications. In 1999 the NSA inducted him into its Hall of Honor."

In the influential category, Marianne Julienne also nominated Walter Reed, the physician who while working as a health officer in Panama at the beginning of the 20th century discovered that mosquitoes were responsible for spreading yellow fever. He devised measures to reduce the mosquito population, which saved thousands of lives. As a consequence of his discovery the United States was able to complete construction of the Panama Canal.

Historian Cynthia Kierner believes that Arthur Ashe was the greatest Virginian of the 20th century. "During the 20th century, entertainment and popular culture -- far more than politics or literature -- defined the intellectual universe of many Americans. While movie stars, pop music icons, supermodels, and sports figures are often innocuous, relatively few are genuine heroes or role models. Arthur Ashe was both."

Ross Mackenzie submitted a list of great and influential Virginians: Woodrow Wilson, George C. Marshall, Harry Flood Byrd Sr., publishers John Stewart Bryan and David Tennant Bryan, editor and historian Douglas Southall Freeman, editorial cartoonist Jeff MacNelly, and writer Tom Wolfe.

One Virginia woman who inadvertently played an important role in 20th-century American history was Carrie Buck. In the 1920s she was diagnosed, perhaps wrongly, as feeble-minded. After she gave birth to a baby that may have been conceived during a rape, the state government used her as plaintiff in a contrived case to settle the constitutionality of the state's policy of imposing involuntary surgical sterilization on people it classified as mentally retarded or susceptible to what were then believed to be inherited conditions, such as alcoholism.

In 1927 the Supreme Court of the United States in Buck v. Bell upheld Virginia's sterilization law. During the next 45 years, the state surgically sterilized more than 8,300 people, many of them, like Buck, without their permission or even knowledge. Amy Leigh Campbell, the president of Falls Church-based Bloom Consulting, wrote that Buck's experience "reminds all Virginians that our commonwealth has often been a leader in the nation," but in some ways its leadership must be viewed "with profound regret."

UVa law professor A.E. Dick Howard also received a nod. Howard is the author of Virginia's current Constitution, and widely is recognized as one the nation's premier constitutional lawyers and scholars. A legendary professor in Charlottesville, Howard has also spent much time advising emerging democracies around the globe about how to write their own constitutions. These countries include Brazil, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Albania, Malawi, and South Africa. The structure of democracy was invented by Orange County's James Madison, and it is fitting that neighboring Albermarle's Howard continues the tradition. -- Brent Tarter