1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [33]
Dodge, Grenville Mellon (1831–1916) Dodge served as an engineer during the Civil War, building bridges and railroads for the Union war effort, then, from 1866 to 1870 was chief engineer for construction of the Union Pacific Railroad, which provided an overland rail link from coast to coast. From 1873 on, Dodge engineered nearly 9,000 miles of railway in the American Southwest.
Dole, Sanford (1844–1926) Dole grew up in Hawaii, the son of American Protestant missionaries. After a mainland education, he practiced law in Honolulu (1869–1887) and served in the Hawaiian legislature. He led a reform movement to adopt a constitution in 1887 and in 1893, acting on behalf of American sugar interests in Hawaii, helped engineer the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani and obtain annexation by the United States. When U.S. president Grover Cleveland blocked annexation and demanded the restoration of Liliuokalani, Dole and others created the Republic of Hawaii (1894). As president of the republic, Dole continued to seek annexation, which came in 1900. President William McKinley named Dole territorial governor.
Donnelly, Ignatius (1831–1901) Born in Philadelphia, Donnelly settled in Minnesota, where he won election as lieutenant governor and congressman (1863–1869). He left the Republicans in the 1870s to form a succession of liberal third-party movements representing farmers and working men and opposing bankers and financiers, whom he attacked as public enemies. Donnelly wrote a series of highly popular visionary novels, including Atlantis (which portrayed the origin of civilization in the lost continent of Atlantis), Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (which related certain gravel deposits to an ancient near-collision of the earth and a comet), and, most important, Caesar’s Column (1891), a futurist work that predicted radio, television, and poison gas and that pictured the United States in 1988 ruled by a financial oligarchy that tyrannizes over a downtrodden working class.
Donovan, William “Wild Bill” (1883–1959) Trained as a lawyer, Donovan served with distinction in World War I and earned the Medal of Honor. Between the wars, he returned to law, serving as a district attorney and as assistant U.S. attorney general as well as practicing privately. On the eve of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called on Donovan to create a central intelligence service for the United States. This became the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), of which Donovan was named chief on June 13, 1942. Throughout World War II, the OSS collected foreign intelligence, carried out counterpropaganda operations, and, most daringly, covert actions in enemy and occupied countries. After the war, the OSS served as a model for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Doolittle, James H. (1896–1993) Doolittle was an aviation pioneer, who combined seat-of-the-pants daring with advanced academic study of aeronautics (earning an MIT doctorate). He served as an army pilot in World War I, established a number of aviation speed records between the wars, then resumed active military service in World War II. Shortly after the U.S. entered the war, as Japan moved from triumph to triumph in the Pacific, Doolittle led an extraordinary raid on Tokyo and other Japanese cities using 16 twin-engine B-25 bombers launched from the deck of the aircraft carrier Hornet—on the face of it an impossible feat. The April 18, 1942, raid was successful, and although it had all the earmarks of a suicide mission, most of the aircrews, including Doolittle, returned.
Dorr, Thomas (1805–1854) A lawyer by profession, Dorr served in the Rhode Island legislature (from 1834) but failed to reform