1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [114]
Schine, G. David (1927–1996) Schine was hired by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his special counsel Roy Cohn as an investigative staff member. McCarthy and Cohn’s illegal efforts to secure Schine preferential treatment after he was drafted into the army became a focus of the Army-McCarthy Hearings (1954), which were seen by some 20 million television viewers. Schine became a household name in a scandal intensified by a rumored homosexual relationship between him and Cohn.
Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. (1917–2007) Schlesinger was a Harvard University history professor, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Jackson (1946) and The Age of Roosevelt (1957–1960) are masterpieces of American history. Schlesinger was no ivory-tower academic, but served as an adviser to Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy. Schlesinger’s history of the Kennedy administration, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965), also won a Pulitzer Prize.
Schurz, Carl (1829–1906) Schurz was born, raised, and educated in Germany. A participant in the failed German revolution of 1848, he was imprisoned, but escaped and immigrated to the United States (1852). He was an abolitionist and served as a brigadier general of volunteers during the Civil War. After the war, he was an advocate for the rights of liberated slaves. He was a journalist for a time, then served as a U.S. senator from 1869 to 1875. He was secretary of the interior (1877–1881) under Rutherford B. Hayes and pushed for civil-service reform and a more humane Indian policy. In the 1880s, Schurz returned to journalism and the crusade for honest politics.
Schwerner, Michael (1939–1964) With fellow Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) activists James Earl Chaney and Andrew Goodman, Schwerner was murdered by Ku Klux Klan members on June 21, 1964, while working to register black voters in Mississippi. Schwerner was a white New Yorker dedicated to social justice.
Scopes, John T. (1900–1970) A high school teacher, Scopes deliberately violated a Tennessee state law forbidding the teaching of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. In a sensational July 1925 trial that riveted the nation, Scopes was tried. He was defended by an attorney hired by the American Civil Liberties Union, the great Clarence Darrow. Assisting the prosecution was William Jennings Bryan, perennial populist presidential candidate and a committed religious fundamentalist. Found guilty, Scopes was fined an inconsequential sum, but, on appeal, his conviction was reversed on technical grounds.
Scorsese, Martin (1942– ) Scorsese emerged in the 1970s as a major American film maker with movies that focused on the violent aspects of American culture. His early masterpiece, Taxi Driver (1976), depicted an alienated New York cabbie who sees political assassination as the only alternative to accepting the corruption of modern life.
Scott, Dred (1795–1858) Scott was a slave whose owner had taken him from the slave state of Missouri to the free state of Illinois; Scott therefore sued for his freedom in 1846 on the grounds that his sojourn in free territory had made him free. The case worked its way up to the Supreme Court, whose chief justice, Roger B. Taney, handed down a decision on March 6, 1857, holding that neither slaves nor free blacks were citizens so therefore could not sue in federal court; further, Taney held that the Missouri Compromise (under which suit was brought) was unconstitutional because Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in territories. By affirming constitutional protection of slavery in all circumstances, the Dred Scott decision made civil war virtually inevitable, since only a constitutional amendment could end slavery—and the slaveholding South would never voluntarily ratify such an amendment.
Scott, Winfield (1876–1866) Scott became a captain of artillery in 1808 and fought heroically in the War of 1812, in the wars associated with the Indian Removal Act (during the 1830s), and in the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–1848). Named commanding general of the U.S. Army in 1841, he served as such