1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [27]
Coxey, Jacob (1854–1951) A socialist politician from Ohio, Coxey is best remembered as the leader of what was popularly called Coxey’s Army. In 1894 and again in 1914, he marched at the head of bands of unemployed men from his hometown of Massillon, Ohio, to Washington, D.C., to demand that Congress vote for funds to create jobs for the unemployed. Coxey’s two “armies” were never large, and he was widely ridiculed in his own time, but the idea of creating public works jobs for the unemployed became a cornerstone of FDR’s New Deal during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Crane, Hart (1899–1932) This poet created rich, visionary lyrics that portrayed and even celebrated life in industrial America. His most ambitious work, The Bridge (1930), used the magnificent Brooklyn Bridge as a central image on which to build an epic myth of the American experience. The result was one of the greatest American poems since Walt Whitman’s 19th-century masterpiece, Song of Myself.
Crane, Stephen (1871–1900) In his short life, Crane worked as a newspaper reporter while creating a new, lean realistic style of fiction, culminating in his masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), a depiction of the Civil War so authentic that most readers thought it autobiographical. Crane inspired a generation of American realistic novelists, including Ernest Hemingway.
Crazy Horse (1842?–1877) One of the great Native American military leaders, this Oglala Sioux chief led the militant resistance to white settlement of Indian lands on the Great Plains. He is most famous for his victory over George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876, in which Custer and his entire command fell. After years of fighting, Crazy Horse surrendered to General Crook in Nebraska on May 6, 1877. He was subsequently killed in a scuffle with his soldier-jailers.
Creel, George (1876–1953) Creel was a crusading journalist who, when the United States entered World War I in 1917, created for the administration of Woodrow Wilson the Committee on Public Information and fashioned it into a powerful propaganda machine, which made use of traditional and emerging media to shape American public opinion in favor of the war. Unprecedented, Creel’s efforts were a model for government propaganda and for the emerging American public relations industry.
Creeley, Robert (1926–2005) Creeley dropped out of Harvard University in his senior year, worked in India and Burma, lived variously abroad, and began writing poetry. In 1955, Creeley received a B.A. from the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina, joined the faculty, and edited the Black Mountain Review, which became the leading venue for some of the most innovative American poetry and prose of the intellectually fertile 1950s.
Crèvecoeur, Hector St. John de (1735–1813) Born Michel-Guillaume-Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur in France, Crèvecoeur served as a military officer and mapmaker in Canada, then traveled widely in the Ohio and Great Lakes region and became an American citizen in 1765. Caught up in the American Revolution—spurned by Patriots and Loyalists alike—he returned to Europe in 1780. Two years later, in London, using his American name, J. Hector St. John, he published Letters from an American Farmer, an optimistic vision of the young American democracy, which became an international bestseller and is still considered one of the best analyses of the American character ever written.
Crittenden, John J. (1787–1863) After Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, Crittenden desperately sought a compromise that would avert civil war by proposing a set of resolutions collectively called the Crittenden Compromise, which would have protected slavery but prohibited