1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [136]
Wheatley, Phillis (circa 1753–1784) Wheatley was born in West Africa and taken to America as a slave in 1761. She was purchased by a Boston tailor as a servant for his wife. The couple treated her virtually as one of the family and allowed her to learn to read and write. She began to compose poetry at age 14 and was first published in 1770. A collection, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was issued in London in 1773.
Whistler, James Abbot McNeil (1834–1903) Best known for his Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: The Artist’s Mother (1871)—familiarly called “Whistler’s Mother”—Whistler was born in America but studied in Paris and then lived most of his adult life in London, where he achieved his greatest fame. His paintings are often titled quite abstractly—“Symphony in White No 1,” and so on—reflecting Whistler’s belief in creating art for art’s sake, without reference to any other intellectual or moral purpose. As influential as his paintings were—they constituted the avant-garde of his time—even more important were his eloquent critical and theoretical writings about art.
White, Theodore (1915–1986) A distinguished journalist and successful novelist, White is best known for his two insider accounts of critical presidential campaigns, The Making of the President, 1960 (1961) and The Making of the President, 1964 (1965). Intimate histories of the Kennedy and Johnson campaigns, they combine the skill of a journalist and the sensibility of a novelist with the understanding of a historian to present the politicians not as abstractions but as people caught in critical moments of history.
White, William Allen (1868–1944) Born and raised in Emporia, Kansas, White was dubbed the “Sage of Emporia” for his journalism, especially his editorials, which appeared in the Emporia Gazette, making this small-town newspaper internationally famous. White embodied the best of small-town America, a mixture of optimism and liberal Republicanism with an outlook that, while parochial, was also enlightened and tolerant. His most famous editorial, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” (August 15, 1896), was a critical attack on populism and was widely credited with helping moderate Republican William McKinley defeat populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan in the presidential election of 1896.
Whitefield, George (1714–1770) Whitefield was an Englishman who came to America in 1738 as a Methodist evangelical missionary. He traveled widely throughout the country, preaching with an emotional eloquence that made him a prime mover of the “Great Awakening,” a major revival movement in the British-American colonies.
Whitman, Marcus and Narcissa (1802–1847; 1808–1847) On September 1, 1836, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, together with another Methodist missionary, H. H. Spaulding, and their families, founded the first American settlement in the Oregon Territory. This was the prelude to a torrent of far-western settlement dubbed “Oregon fever” however, on November 29, 1847, the Whitmans and 12 others were killed by Indians (who blamed them for spreading a deadly measles epidemic). The “Whitman Massacre” drew federal attention and military forces to Oregon, which further hastened its settlement.
Whitman, Walt (1819–1892) Whitman was a mostly self-taught newspaper editor and schoolteacher, whose Leaves of Grass, published in its first version in 1855, is perhaps the most original collection of verse ever written. The poems, whose long, unrhymed lines were inspired by operatic arias, embodied the spirit of democratic America, moving Ralph Waldo Emerson to write to Whitman, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” Whitman spent his life continually reshaping, revising, and enlarging Leaves of Grass through several editions until just before his death in 1892.
Whitney, Eli (1765–1825) In 1793, Yale University graduate Eli Whitney, who was working as a tutor at Mulberry Grove, a Georgia plantation, patented the cotton gin, a device he designed