1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [25]
Coolidge, Calvin (1872–1933) A taciturn New Englander, Coolidge was not the typical outgoing American politician. He served in Massachusetts politics, becoming governor in 1918. His hard line against striking Boston police officers (“There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.”) gained him national prominence and selection as Warren G. Harding’s running mate in the presidential elections of 1920. When Harding died in office in 1923, Coolidge stepped in and did much to clean out the corruption that had characterized that administration and rebuilt American confidence in the presidency. Despite his tight-lipped approach—“Silent Cal,” he was called—Coolidge won election in his own right in 1924.
Cooper, James Fenimore (1789–1851) The scion of a prominent upstate New York family, Cooper is reputed to have become a novelist at his wife’s urging. He had complained about a British novel he had just read, claiming that he could do better. Susan De Lancy Cooper dared him to do just that, and he wrote Precaution (1820), largely in imitation of Jane Austen. He found his life’s subject in a series of five novels—collectively called the Leatherstocking Tales—that featured a frontier guide and scout named Natty Bumppo. In The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841), Bumppo emerged as an archetypal man of the frontier, a character of mythic proportions.
Cooper, Peter (1791–1883) In 1830, Cooper built the locomotive “Tom Thumb” for the fledgling Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. An engine capable of pulling passengers and freight over the railway’s hilly route, the Tom Thumb enabled the commercial success of the B&O and launched the American railroad industry. Cooper went on to contribute to other manufacturing enterprises, including the production of the world’s first structural steel beams. Grown wealthy, he used much of his fortune to create in 1859 New York’s Cooper Union, which offered free courses in science, engineering, and art. The institution continues to thrive today.
Copland, Aaron (1900–1990) Copland grew up in Brooklyn, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. By the age of 15 he decided to become a composer and in 1921 studied with the famed teacher Nadia Boulanger in Paris. His early avant-garde, abstract style matured into a vigorously American expression, replete with elements of jazz, folk songs, and spirituals, but also uniquely modernist. For such works as the ballets Billy the Kid (1938) and Appalachian Spring (1944)—among many others—he gained enduring recognition as a representative American classical composer.
Copley, John Singleton (1738–1815) Copley was born in Boston and created his early portraits there, including Boy with Squirrel (1766), which was praised by the great British painter Sir Joshua Reynolds and thus became the first work of American art to be publicly appreciated in Europe. With opportunities limited in America, Copley settled permanently in London in 1775 and turned his attention to painting historical subjects.
Corbett, Boston (1832–1894?) Corbett immigrated to New York with his family in 1839 and became a hatter in Troy, New York. Like many in that trade (who were exposed to high levels of mercury), he suffered symptoms of mental illness, became a religious zealot, wore his hair long in imitation of Jesus, and (in 1858) castrated himself with scissors in order to avoid the temptations of prostitutes. He joined the Union Army in