1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [140]
Woodhull, Victoria Claflin (1838–1927) Born into a family of impoverished eccentrics, Victoria Claflin was part of her family’s traveling medicine and fortune-telling show, continuing in this even after she married Canning Woodhull when she was 15 years old. Moved by a vision of the ancient Greek orator Demosthenes, Victoria Woodhull met shipping and rail mogul Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was deeply interested in spiritualism. Backed by him, Woodhull began publishing a magazine and launched into a variety of reform movements, which made her a national sensation. These included women’s suffrage, free love, and, finally, what she called “mystical socialism.” In 1872, the highly visible Woodhull became the first woman to run for president when the Equal Rights Party nominated her.
Woodward, Bob (1943– ) With Carl Bernstein, Woodward made journalism history—and changed American history—with investigative reporting, in the Washington Post, of the Watergate break-in, which led directly to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974. With Bernstein, he also coauthored a book on Watergate, All the President’s Men (1974), and an inside account of the collapse of the Nixon presidency, The Final Days (1976). More recently, on his own, Woodward wrote two books on the George W. Bush presidency, Bush at War (2002), about the war in Afghanistan, and Plan of Attack (2004), about the genesis of the U.S. invasion in Iraq. Both contain remarkable “insider” information—a hallmark of Woodward’s work.
Woodward, C. Vann (1908–1999) A professor of American history at Johns Hopkins (1946–1961) and Yale (1961–1977), Woodward was regarded as the most important analyst of the post-Civil War history of the South. His landmark 1955 book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, demonstrated that legal segregation in the South was not rooted in time-honored Southern custom (as apologists claimed), but was the deliberate product of legislation that followed the defeat of Populism as recently as the 1890s. Woodward’s argument provided a cultural basis for the federal desegregation legislation of the 1950s and 1960s by demonstrating that, historically, integration, not segregation, was the norm—even in the South.
Woolman, John (1720–1772) Woolman and his father, English Quakers, immigrated to New Jersey when young Woolman was 21 in 1741. Three years later, John Woolman began the first organized antislavery campaign in America by preaching against slavery throughout the colonies.
Wright, Frank Lloyd (1867–1959) Wright served an apprenticeship with the great architects Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler and in 1892 designed his first building, the Charnley House, in Chicago. This structure contained elements Wright developed into the “Prairie style”—perhaps best exemplified in Chicago’s magnificent Robey House (1907)—featuring a broad, low roof, strong horizontal lines, and harmonious integration of design elements, inside and out. The Prairie Style became the most influential basis of advanced 20th century residential design in America, and Wright became the nation’s most celebrated architect.
Wright, Orville and Wilbur (1871–1948 and 1867–1912) On December 17, 1903, at Kill Devil Hill, Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright flew a 750-pound aircraft he and his brother, Wilbur—partners in a Dayton, Ohio, bicycle shop—designed and built. Its 12-horsepower gasoline engine, which they also designed, propelled the airplane for 12 seconds a few feet above the ground over a distance of 120 feet.
Wright, Richard (1980–1960) Born and raised in Mississippi poverty, the grandson of slaves, Wright moved north during the Depression and began