1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [34]
Dos Passos, John (1896–1970) After graduating from Harvard in 1916, Dos Passos volunteered as an ambulance driver in World War I and, like many young men of his age, was emotionally scarred by the experience, becoming one of the so-called “Lost Generation.” After the war, Dos Passos became deeply involved in the struggle for social justice, culminating in his efforts to save the Anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, charged with murder. After their execution in 1927, he set to work on his masterpiece, the epic trilogy U.S.A., which depicts America as “two nations,” one of the wealthy and the other of the poor.
Douglas, Stephen A. (1813–1861) An Illinois politician, noted orator, and leader of the Democratic Party in the years before the Civil War, Douglas sought compromise in the slavery issue by arguing for popular sovereignty, whereby the citizens of each territory would, when applying for statehood, vote their territory free or slave without intervention by the federal government. This (among other things)became the subject of the seminal Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, which eloquently articulated the crisis facing the nation on the brink of civil war. Douglas defeated Lincoln in his bid for the Senate.
Douglas, William O. (1898–1980) Douglas graduated from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, in 1920, and worked his way cross country in 1922 to enroll in Columbia University Law School. He graduated second in his class, practiced corporate law briefly, taught, worked for the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in 1939 was appointed to the Supreme Court by Franklin Roosevelt. Douglas was an uncompromising defender of the Bill of Rights, especially free speech and the rights of those accused of crimes. His views made him a target of conservatives.
Douglass, Frederick (1818?–1895) Raised a slave, Douglass escaped to New York in 1838 and soon earned fame for his eloquent personal perspective on the evil of slavery. He became an abolitionist lecturer and in 1845 wrote a stirring autobiography, The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, which was published in its final form as The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Douglass, a strong advocate of the enlistment of black troops, served Abraham Lincoln as an adviser during the Civil War. After the war, he became a champion of women’s rights, and he served in several high-level U.S. government posts—the first African American to do so.
Dreiser, Theodore (1871–1945) Born poor in Terre Haute, Indiana, Dreiser became a newspaper reporter, then started writing fiction, beginning with Sister Carrie (1900), the story of a small-town girl who uses men to transform herself into a successful actress. Devoid of Victorian moral judgments, the novel proposed that Carrie’s career was the product of nature: she was naturally stronger and more adaptable than the men she used. Dreiser’s “naturalism” culminated in his masterpiece, An American Tragedy (1925), which used the rise and fall of a man convicted of murder as a microcosm of success and failure in America. Condemned by conventional religious and political leaders of his day, Dreiser helped clear the way for a bold new American literature.
Dubinsky, David (1892–1982) Born in czarist Russia, Dubinsky became a labor leader there and was exiled to Siberia for his “subversive” activities. He escaped and immigrated to the Untied States, where he became president of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union ILGWU), which he transformed into a giant organization—growing it from 45,000 to 450,000 members—and a model international union, which pioneered housing,