Endorsements
There are many more organizations whose work we admire and would be proud to endorse publicly. However, federal election law creates a clear firewall between political campaigns and 501(c)(3) charities: a public endorsement from a campaign could jeopardize an organization’s tax-exempt status. Out of respect for the organizations we care about, we list here only those that hold a different kind of tax status, such as 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations, 501(c)(5) labor organizations, or federal agencies, where no such restriction applies.
AAUW
The American Association of University Women: advancing equity for women and girls through education, research, and advocacy.
Read more at Wikipedia.
Labor Unions
The workers who built this country deserve a seat at every table.
Read more at Wikipedia.
NASA
America’s space agency: exploring the unknown for the benefit of all.
Read more at Wikipedia.
National Endowment for the Arts
American art runs the gamut from Norman Rockwell’s inspiring depictions of American life, to work as provocative as those of Robert Mapplethorpe; yes, that Mapplethorpe, whose 1989 exhibition became a national fight over what the NEA should fund. We don’t have to like anyone’s art, any more than we have to like anyone’s speech, but the country benefits from protecting all forms of speech.
Read more at Wikipedia.
National Science Foundation
The federal agency responsible for funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering.
Read more at Wikipedia.
We’re just getting started.
This campaign launched with the belief that you earn endorsements by standing for something worth endorsing. We’re working on that. If you or your organization would like to be among the first, we’d be honored to hear from you.
Just as We Endorse reflects the living allies whose work shapes this campaign, this tab is a place to pay tribute to the people, organizations, and moments no longer with us whose example still does. A person, an institution, an event from the past, each honored here for the same reason: because remembering them honestly is part of how we decide who to be now.
Bella Abzug
A fierce voice in Congress for women’s rights, civil rights, and government accountability, known for holding her ground as firmly as she held her opinions.
Read more at Wikipedia.
Eddie “Rochester” Anderson
Born in Oakland in 1905 to descendants of the Underground Railroad, Anderson strained his voice selling newspapers as a boy, and that permanent rasp made him one of the most recognizable sounds in American entertainment. As Rochester on The Jack Benny Program, he became the first African American to hold a recurring starring role on national network radio, with writing that made Rochester consistently smarter than his boss. By 1942 he was the highest-paid Black actor in Hollywood. During the war he bankrolled a defense plant with a predominantly African American workforce, championed the Tuskegee Airmen, and ran the first Black-owned horse in the Kentucky Derby. In Los Angeles he served as honorary “Mayor of Central Avenue,” lobbying for better housing and public services. His will directed that his home be converted into a facility for addiction recovery.
Read more at Wikipedia.
Ambrose Bierce
Civil War veteran turned journalist and satirist, best remembered for The Devil’s Dictionary, a book that made fun of everyone equally, which is precisely why it has lasted.
Read more at Wikipedia.
Omar Bradley
The “soldier’s general,” who led American forces from North Africa to Germany and never lost the trust of the men under his command.
Read more at Wikipedia.
William F. Buckley Jr.
Founded National Review and gave modern conservatism its sharpest, most serious voice in the great debate over the proper size and reach of government. On race, though, he was dead wrong, stupidly wrong, publicly defending Southern segregation and Black disenfranchisement well into the 1960s, a position he only ever partly walked back.
Read more at Wikipedia.
Shirley Chisholm
The first Black woman elected to Congress, and the first to seek a major party’s presidential nomination. “Unbought and unbossed,” she called herself, and she meant it.
Read more at Wikipedia.
Rev. William Sloane Coffin
Yale’s chaplain for nearly two decades, who left the safety of that pulpit to ride a Freedom Rider bus into Alabama in 1961, into mob violence, firebombed buses, and arrests that put riders’ lives at real risk, because he believed a faith without public consequence wasn’t much of a faith at all.
Read more at Wikipedia.
W. Edwards Deming
Taught that most failures are failures of the system, not the person caught inside it, and that the fix is honest measurement and a willingness to keep improving, not blame. The idea that government should be held to its own data, and correct itself accordingly, owes something to him too.
Read more at Wikipedia.
Diogenes the Cynic
Also known as Diogenes of Sinope, the ancient Greek philosopher said to have wandered Athens by daylight carrying a lit lamp, searching for “an honest man.” When Alexander the Great found him and offered to grant him anything he wished, Diogenes reportedly asked him to step aside; he was blocking the sunlight. Alexander is said to have remarked that if he were not Alexander, he would wish to be Diogenes.
Read more at Wikipedia.
Everett Dirksen
Senate Republican leader who delivered the votes that broke the Southern filibuster and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, working hand in hand with a Democratic president to do it. He closed the debate by quoting Victor Hugo: “stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come.”
Read more at Wikipedia.
Peter Drucker
Called himself a “social ecologist,” and spent a career arguing that any organization, whether a business, a hospital, or a government, only works when its goals are clear, its results are measured, and the people running it are held accountable for both. Every proposal on this site that lists a goal, a metric, and a review date owes something to that idea.
Read more at Wikipedia.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, then, as president, built the Interstate Highway System, ordered a nuclear submarine to complete the first submerged circumnavigation of the world, created NASA, kept the peace through the height of the Cold War, and sent the 101st Airborne to enforce school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, over the objections of his own party’s Southern wing.
Read more at Wikipedia.
James Garfield
President for only two hundred days, and shot after barely half of them, but he spent what time he had refusing patronage demands from his own party’s political bosses, a stand that cost him politically and may have cost him his life. His assassination did what his presidency couldn’t finish: it shamed Congress into passing the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, ending the spoils system he’d refused to serve.
Read more at Wikipedia.
Lou Gehrig
Played 2,130 consecutive games before ALS forced him from the field, a streak that earned him the name “The Iron Horse” long before anyone knew what was ending it. When he finally had to stand before a packed Yankee Stadium and say goodbye, he called himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth,” not the unluckiest. Perseverance and gratitude, even in the worst moment, are American values worth remembering.
Read more at Wikipedia.
Herbert Hoover
Led famine relief efforts that saved millions of lives across two world wars, first in Belgium, then across a starving postwar Europe, then again after 1945. His humanitarian work that arguably outshines nearly every other American public figure of his century. As president, though, his response to the onset of the Great Depression was slow, rigid, and inadequate to the scale of the suffering it caused, and the country paid the price for it.
Read more at Wikipedia.
Barbara Jordan
The first Black woman elected to Congress from the Deep South. During the Watergate hearings she declared, “My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total”, one of the clearest statements of constitutional conscience ever spoken on the record.
Read more at Wikipedia.
John F. Kennedy
He said: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” and, at the height of the Cold War, stood before a crowd at American University and asked the country to see the Soviet Union not as a permanent enemy, but as a nation of people who, like us, “breathe the same air,” “cherish our children’s future,” and who, along with us, should seek peace for all mankind because “we are all mortal.” It was a genuinely courageous thing to say in 1963, less than a year after the country had come to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it helped produce the first nuclear test ban treaty within two months.
Read more at Wikipedia.
Robert F. Kennedy
Carried forward his brother’s unfinished work on civil rights, and on the night of Dr. King’s assassination, asked a grieving crowd in Indianapolis to answer violence with compassion instead of vengeance, and, that night, they did.
Read more at Wikipedia.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Called this country to live up to its own founding words, not abandon them, insisting to the end that the Declaration and the Constitution were promises still owed, not lies to be discarded. He dreamed of a future in which all Americans would be judged “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’”
Read more at Wikipedia.
Chris Kraft
NASA’s first Flight Director, who built the discipline and culture of Mission Control from nothing, and whose standards still govern how the agency operates today.
Read more at Wikipedia.
Gene Kranz
Famed NASA Flight Director. On Apollo 13, his “failure is not an option” wasn’t a line written for a movie; it was how Mission Control actually operated, and it brought three astronauts home.
Read more at Wikipedia.
Rev. James Lawson
Trained a generation of young activists in the discipline of nonviolent resistance, giving the Civil Rights Movement not just its moral clarity but its method.
Read more at Wikipedia.
Abraham Lincoln
Held a divided union together through its worst hour, arguing that the Constitution itself was ordained not by the states but by “We the People,” as its own Preamble says, which meant no single state could unmake by itself what all the people had made together. He left behind the clearest sentence ever written about what self-government is for: government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
Read more at Wikipedia.
George Low
After the Apollo 1 fire killed three astronauts in 1967, Low took over the redesign of the spacecraft and, arguably his greatest achievement, built the rigorous configuration-control and quality-assurance discipline that turned a program on the edge of collapse into the most successful human spaceflight effort in history. He also pushed for and won approval to send Apollo 8 all the way to lunar orbit a full mission ahead of schedule, a decision historians still call one of the boldest in the history of American spaceflight.
Read more at Wikipedia.
The March on Washington (1963)
More than 250,000 Americans gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to demand jobs and freedom, where Dr. King delivered “I Have a Dream.” It remains living proof that disciplined, peaceful protest can move a nation’s conscience.
Read more at Wikipedia.
George C. Marshall
Army Chief of Staff during the Second World War, but his greatest achievement came after it: the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt a shattered Europe instead of leaving it to rot. It stood on groundwork laid in part by former President Herbert Hoover, whose 1947 survey of conditions in Germany and Austria helped convince Washington to abandon a punitive peace in favor of reconstruction.
Read more at Wikipedia.
Sandra Day O’Connor
The first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, and for decades its most pragmatic vote, more interested in getting the specific case right than in serving any ideology, which made her both parties’ least predictable justice and most respected one.
Read more at Wikipedia.
Tip O’Neill
Speaker of the House for a decade, who governed by the conviction that a Democrat and a Republican could argue fiercely by day and remain friends by evening, without ever mistaking the other for an enemy.
Read more at Wikipedia.
George S. Patton
As a child, Patton struggled so badly with reading and writing that historians now believe he had undiagnosed dyslexia; he didn’t learn to read until he was eleven, and he later repeated his first year at West Point after failing mathematics. He went on to become one of the most important generals of the Second World War, driving his Third Army across Europe, relieving Allied forces besieged at Bastogne, and helping defeat the Nazis at the Battle of the Bulge.
Read more at Wikipedia.
Colin Powell
Soldier, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State, who served presidents of both parties and held himself to the same standard of candor regardless of who was asking.
Read more at Wikipedia.
Will Rogers
The “cowboy philosopher” whose newspaper columns and radio broadcasts made him the most trusted plain-spoken voice in American public life during the Depression, famous for the line, “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”
Read more at Wikipedia.
Eleanor Roosevelt
First Lady, delegate to the United Nations, and principal author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She insisted that rights meant nothing unless they reached everyone, and spent a lifetime making sure more people were included in “everyone.” In 1939, when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let the singer Marian Anderson perform at Constitution Hall because she was Black, Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her own DAR membership in protest and helped arrange for Anderson to sing instead from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. More than 75,000 people came to hear her.
Read more at Wikipedia.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Led the nation through the Great Depression and the Second World War, and built the modern framework of American economic security without ever losing sight of who government is supposed to serve.
Read more at Wikipedia.
Deke Slayton
One of the original Mercury Seven astronauts, grounded for over a decade by a heart condition, who never stopped working toward space until he finally flew, on the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975.
Read more at Wikipedia.
Adam Smith
The father of modern economics, whose Wealth of Nations built the intellectual case for free markets that both parties still argue over today, though fewer people remember his earlier book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which argued that a functioning economy depends on a functioning conscience. Claimed by every political stripe, which is probably the point.
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Margaret Chase Smith
A sitting Republican senator who stood up in 1950 and delivered the “Declaration of Conscience,” the first major public rebuke of Joseph McCarthy’s tactics, from inside his own party, at real political risk, before most of official Washington dared to say a word.
Read more at Wikipedia.
George Washington
Could have stayed president for life and chose not to, setting the precedent of a peaceful, voluntary transfer of power that has held for two and a half centuries. Built the office of the presidency with such scrupulous restraint that his own example did more to shape it than the Constitution’s text did.
Read more at Wikipedia.