1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [120]
Stanley, Henry Morton (1841–1904) Born John Rowlands out of wedlock in Wales, Morton later took the first and last names of the merchant who adopted him, Henry Hope Stanley. He served as a Confederate soldier during the American Civil War and in the U.S. Navy and U.S merchant marine, then worked as a journalist in the Far West. In 1867, James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the New York Herald, sent him to Africa to cover Britain’s war against King Tewodros II of Ethiopia. Bennett next sent him in search of the famed British missionary Dr. David Livingstone, who had disappeared in 1866 while looking for the source of the Nile. Stanley found Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in 1871, greeting him with “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”
Stanton, Edwin McMasters (1814–1869) Stanton succeeded President Abraham Lincoln’s first secretary of war, the notoriously corrupt Simon Cameron, on January 13, 1862. Once in charge, Stanton prosecuted the Civil War with ruthless energy. He was legendary for his ill temper and willingness to provoke disputes with other officials and with military commanders. The attempt of Andrew Johnson (who succeeded Lincoln after his assassination in April 1865) to remove Stanton from the Cabinet triggered Johnson’s impeachment.
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady (1815–1902) With Lucretia Mott, Stanton, in 1848 composed the Declaration of Sentiments, a statement on women’s rights. In the same year, she pulled together the first organized demand for woman suffrage in the United States and worked with Susan B. Anthony for a half a century toward obtaining the right of women to vote.
Starr, Kenneth (1946– ) An attorney and former judge, Starr was appointed independent counsel in 1994 to investigate allegations of possibly impeachable offenses committed by President Bill Clinton in connection with certain real estate dealings. Four years and $40 million later, the “Starr Report” cleared Clinton of wrongdoing in connection with the real estate issue, but detailed his sexual liaison with a 21-year-old former White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. Starr concluded that Clinton had violated his oath of office by perjuring himself in a sworn deposition he had given in a sexual harassment civil lawsuit brought against him by a former Arkansas state employee, Paula Jones. He also alleged that the president had lied about the affair to a grand jury. Based on the Starr Report, Congress voted, along party lines, to impeach President Clinton, who was acquitted on February 12, 1999, in a Senate vote also along party lines.
Steffens, Lincoln (1866–1936) Journalist and social critic Steffens was among the writers President Theodore Roosevelt called “muckrakers,” using a term borrowed from John Bunyan’s 17th-century allegorical classic, The Pilgrim’s Progress, among whose characters is a “Man with the Muckrake…who could look no way but downward.” The term also took on a positive connotation to describe writers who exposed social corruption and injustice. Steffens’s 1906 The Shame of the Cities exposed the widespread corruption of urban politicians and fueled many of the reforms of the Progressive era in American politics.
Steichen, Edward (1879–1973) Born in Luxembourg, Steichen was taken to the United States as an infant. He became an important photographer, who began working in a pictorial or painterly style, but evolved into straightforward realism, specializing in portraiture of the most influential artists and celebrities of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1955, he organized quite possibly the most ambitious photographic exhibition ever, the “Family of Man,” a show of 503 master photographs chosen from some two million submitted from all over the world. Enormously popular, the exhibition, which