Come on now, you can think of worse people for 1860-1880 than Robert E. Lee, can’t you? Lee was a slaver and a sleazebag, but he was as nothing compared to Nathan Bedford Forrest (perpetrator of the Ft. Pillow massacre and founding father of the Ku Klux Klan), or William Tecumseh Sherman (inventor of modern scorched-earth warfare in the 1860s, and genocidaire of the Plains and Southwest Indians in the 1870s-1880s), Alexander Stephens (Vice President of the Confederacy and author of the infamous “cornerstone speech”), etc.

Joseph McCarthy also seems like an overhyped choice for the 1940-1960, given the presence of General Curtis LeMay and Senator James Eastland (D-MS), who was as enthusiastic a leader in the hearings as McCarthy himself, and also personally helped to found the White Citizens Councils in the Mississippi Delta.