1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [141]
Wythe, George (1726–1806) Wythe was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1746 and became active in the independence movement. A delegate to the Continental Congress, he participated in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. As a chancery judge (appointed in 1778), Wythe was an ex officio member of the Virginia supreme court, and, in Commonwealth v. Caton (1782), he was the first U.S. judge to assert that a court could refuse to enforce unconstitutional laws. A great jurist, he was also mentor to great jurists and leaders, including Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and Henry Clay.
Young, Brigham (1801–1877) Young was a carpenter in Mendon, New York, near the church Joseph Smith had established. Young read the newly published Book of Mormon and, on April 14, 1832, was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, soon becoming a church leader. On July 24, 1847, three years after Smith was assassinated in the Mormon town of Nauvoo, Illinois, Young, now in command of the church, arrived with 148 Mormons—143 men, 3 women, and 2 children—in Salt Lake City, Utah Territory, which he had chosen as the new seat of the faith. This was the vanguard of the great Mormon Trek, a mass Mormon migration, which would ensure the survival of the Mormon religion and open a vast western territory of the United States.
Younger Brothers With Frank and Jesse James, the Younger Brothers (Cole, Jim, John, and Bob) were the most celebrated and notorious bandits of the American West. The Younger-James gang was responsible for a decade of brazen bank and train robberies from 1866 to 1876.
Zappa, Frank (1940–1993) Zappa was a prolific contemporary composer-performer more or less in the rock idiom, creating some 60 albums in his 30-year career. His original group, the Mothers of Invention, was founded in the 1960s, and personnel varied over the years. His music was innovative, often satiric, usually subversive of the complacent values of middle-class America, and, by the 1980s, frankly embodied political protest. Zappa took rock and roll traditions—the prevailing American popular music since the mid 1950s—and expanded them to challenging social and aesthetic dimensions.
Zenger, John Peter (1697–1746) Zenger, publisher of a colonial newspaper called the New York Weekly Journal, was arrested in October 1734 on charge of “seditious libel” for printing criticism of the colony’s royal governor, William Cosby. Lawyer Andrew Hamilton defended Zenger at trial in 1735, securing his acquittal on the grounds that the truth can never be deemed libelous. The decision was an American milestone in the principle of freedom of the press and figured as a precedent for the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Ziegfeld, Florenz (1869–1932) Ziegfeld started in show business in 1893 as the manager of Sandow, a strong man, and went on to produce extravagant Broadway revues that became known as the Ziegfeld Follies. Sanitized versions of the Parisian Folies-Bergère, the Ziegfeld shows began in 1907 and were repeated in various versions through 1957. Ziegfeld’s chorus lines were intended to “glorify the American Girl,” and his extravaganzas also produced a galaxy of solo stars, including Will Rogers, Bert Williams, Fanny Brice, and Eddie Cantor.
Zworykin, Vladimir (1889–1982) Born and educated in Russia, Zworykin immigrated to the United States in 1919 and became a citizen in 1924. While working for Westinghouse, he patented in 1923 the iconoscope—the television transmission tube—and the following year the kinescope, the television receiver. Together, these were the basis for an all-electronic (as opposed to electromechanical) television system and made possible modern television technology.
John M. Fahey, Jr., President