1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [21]
Chaplin, Charlie (1889–1977) Chaplin was born to London music hall entertainers and made his stage debut at age five. While touring the United States with a stage company in 1913, Chaplin made his first comic short for Mack Sennett. This one-reeler was unremarkable, and Sennett asked Chaplin to come up with a more marketable film persona. The result, in 1914, was the figure of the “Little Tramp,” who was destined to become an icon of silent film comedy and even survived into the talking-picture era, culminating in the 1936 Modern Times. Most film historians consider Chaplin the greatest film comic of all time and one of the most important figures in the history of cinema.
Chase, Salmon Portland (1808–1873) Chase was a lawyer, politician, and abolitionist who served in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet as secretary of the Treasury from 1861 to 1864. He was skilled in the role of financing the war, but he also worked behind Lincoln’s back to steal the 1864 presidential nomination from him. On the death of Supreme Court chief justice Roger Taney, Lincoln disposed of Chase by nominating him to the court. He served as chief justice from 1864 to 1873, presiding with fairness over the Senate impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson in 1868.
Chavez, Cesar (1927–1993) Born in Mexico, Chavez grew up as a migrant laborer in Arizona and California, becoming an organizer of oppressed migrant labor in 1958. In 1962, he founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), which made great strides in organizing migrants to improve pay and working conditions. He was catapulted to national prominence when he led, beginning in 1965, a strike and nationwide boycott of California grapes. The boycott brought much support for the plight of the migrant and resulted in bargaining agreements with growers.
Cheney, Dick (1941– ) Cheney, a conservative Republican politician, served six terms as U.S. Representative from Wyoming and was secretary of defense under President George H. W. Bush (1989–1993), overseeing the military invasion of Panama (1989) and the first Persian Gulf War (1990–1991). As vice president in the administration (2001– ) of George W. Bush, Cheney was popularly perceived as a shadow president, who wielded unprecedented decision-making power. Many saw Cheney—not Bush—as the chief architect of the “war on terror” that followed the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the prime instigator of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Chennault, Claire L. (1890–1958) An innovative—even maverick—military aviator, Chennault retired from the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1937 and was hired by Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek as his aviation adviser. During the Sino-Japanese War (which began in 1937), Chennault organized the Chinese air force and in 1941 created the American Volunteer Group (AVG), better known as the Flying Tigers, a squadron of volunteer U.S. pilots. With the most modest of resources, Chennault’s aviators, trained in combat techniques he developed, achieved an extraordinary record against the much more numerous air forces of the Japanese. With U.S. entry into World War II, the Flying Tigers were incorporated into the U.S. Army Air Forces as the China Air Task Force (later, the Fourteenth Air Force), and Chennault returned to active duty as the unit’s commander. Once again, Chennault performed tactical miracles against superior forces.
Child, Julia (1912–2004) Born Julia McWilliams, Child served in World War II as a member of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Ceylon (today, Sri Lanka), then spent six years after the war in Paris, where she attended the famed Cordon Bleu cooking school. She subsequently founded a school of her own and, in 1961, published Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a runaway bestseller and enduring classic that brought French cookery into mainstream American culture. From 1962 through the mid 1990s, she was the star of several popular television cooking shows and became an international celebrity, as famous