1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [122]
Stimson, Henry L. (1867–1950) Stimson was a New York attorney and Republican politician who served during 1911–1913 as President William Howard Taft’s secretary of war. During the administration of President Calvin Coolidge, he was sent to Nicaragua to resolve unrest there and was also appointed governor general of the Philippines. Stimson was President Herbert Hoover’s secretary of state from 1929 to 1933. In 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed the Republican Stimson his secretary of war. Stimson served through World War II, continuing under President Harry S. Truman until his retirement after the war in September 1945. Stimson was a major influence on U.S. foreign policy during the first half of the 20th century.
Stockman, David (1946– ) Stockman was a businessman and politician (U.S. Representative from Michigan from 1977 to 1981) who became President Ronald Reagan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget (1981–1985). Stockman was a leading figure of the era of “Reaganomics,” implementing the Reagan budget cuts aimed at dismantling the “Democratic welfare state.” Austere and uncompromising, he became infamous for justifying funding cuts for federal school lunch programs by his proposal to reclassify ketchup as a vegetable—since supplying this condiment was the cheapest way to satisfy requirements for vegetable content of federally funded school lunches.
Stone, I. F. (1907–1989) Born Isidor Feinstein, Stone worked as a journalist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, New York Post, The Nation, and other publications before starting his own weekly, I. F. Stone’s Weekly (later I.F. Stone’s Bi-Weekly) in 1951. The journal was published through 1971 and, although always small in circulation, was eagerly read by the nation’s movers and shakers, including the likes of Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt. Stone was an early advocate of civil rights and an early opponent of McCarthyism and, later, the Vietnam War.
Stone, Lucy (1818–1893) Stone was cofounder of the American Equal Rights Association in 1866 and the New Jersey Woman Suffrage Association the following year. She was a moving force behind the woman suffrage movement until her death.
Stone, Oliver (1946– ) Among the defining experiences of Stone’s life was his army service in the Vietnam War (1967–1968), which inspired three films about Vietnam—Platoon (1986), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and Heaven and Earth (1993). These are typical of Stone’s cinematic interests, which approach large historical events and social subjects from a personal perspective. His 1991 JFK advanced a conspiracy theory concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, his 1995 Nixon was a dramatic portrayal of that president’s rise and downfall, and World Trade Center (2006) was the story of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York from the point of view of two police officers trapped in the wreckage of the WTC.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher (1811–1896) New Englander Stowe saw slavery close-up when she lived for a time on the Ohio-Kentucky border with her Bible-scholar husband, Calvin Stowe. Passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 prompted her to begin a book she called Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, which was published serially during 1852 and appeared as a book in 1853. An international bestseller, its vividly sentimental scenes dramatized the cruelty of slavery, shaking the apathy out of many Northerners and enraging slave-holding Southerners. When President Abraham Lincoln met Stowe during the Civil War, he greeted her as “the little lady who wrote the book that made this big war.”
Strand, Paul (1890–1976) Strand made a radical break with the pictorial, painting-like photographic styles popular early in the 20th century and created sharply focused “objective” photographs, typically of commonplace buildings or objects shot in ways that simplify them into stark abstraction. Strand conceived photography in terms of photography rather than painting or any other