1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [43]
Franklin, Benjamin (1706–1790) Franklin earned national and international fame as a printer, publisher, author, inventor, scientist, diplomat, and charming wit. Self-educated, he had a tremendous breadth of knowledge and achievements. He was celebrated as a font of homely wisdom with his enormously popular Poor Richard’s Almanacs; he was a driving force behind the American Revolution; he was a diplomat of extraordinary skill, instrumental in negotiating the Franco-American alliance during the revolution; he was an entrepreneurial innovator (a pioneer of the insurance industry); he was a brilliant author; he was an internationally respected scientist (especially for his early work on electricity); and he was an inventor. Bifocals, the Franklin stove, and the lightning rod were among his best-known inventions, but his greatest invention was himself. In his justly celebrated Autobiography, Franklin mythologized his own life, presenting himself as an illustration of all that was possible in America for one who applied wit, sound ethics, imagination, and a willingness to work.
Frelinghuysen, Frederick Theodore (1817–1885) Frelinghuysen graduated from Rutgers College in 1836, studied law under his uncle, then began practicing in 1839. He was a founder of the Republican Party in New Jersey. Appointed to the U.S. Senate to fill a vacancy in 1866, he was defeated for the Senate in 1869 but was elected for a full six-year term beginning in 1871. President Chester A. Arthur appointed him secretary of state in 1881. Frelinghuysen forged strong commercial ties with Latin America, acquired Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, for a U.S. naval base—giving America control over much of the Pacific—and opened diplomatic relations with the “hermit kingdom” of Korea in 1882.
Frémont, John C. (1813–1890) Frémont explored and mapped much of the Far West during the 1840s in the course of surveying potential routes for a transcontinental railroad. During the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–1848), Frémont was instrumental in breaking California away from Mexico. A committed abolitionist, he ran unsuccessfully in 1856 as the first Republican presidential candidate, then served (with little success) as a Union general during the Civil War.
Freneau, Philip (1752–1832) Freneau was a schoolmaster and divinity student before the American Revolution, during which he used his considerable poetic talent to compose acid satires mocking the British and Tories. He joined the New Jersey militia in 1778 and was captured by the redcoats in 1780. He recounted his POW experience in a bitter poem titled The British Prison-Ship (1781). After the war, Freneau worked as a partisan journalist promoting the liberal orientation of such leaders as Thomas Jefferson against the more conservative Federalism exemplified in John Adams. As a poet, Freneau stood well above most of his American contemporaries.
Frick, Henry Clay (1849–1919) Frick made his fortune by building and operating coke ovens beginning in 1870 and supplying the steel and iron industry with the coke needed for the blast furnaces that refined raw ore. As chairman of Andrew Carnegie’s steel interests (1889), Frick built the company into the world’s largest manufacturer of steel and coke. In 1892, during the Homestead (Pennsylvania) steel strike, Frick was shot and stabbed by the anarchist Alexander Berkman, but recovered and went on to create the United States Steel Corporation. Frick used part of his great fortune to amass one of the great private art collections in the world. He bequeathed the collection and the Manhattan mansion housing it to the city of New York as a museum.
Friedan, Betty (1921–2006) While working as a journalist, Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique (1963), which asked why so many modern American women were