1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [48]
Gingrich, Newt (1943– ) Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999, Gingrich was associated with the Republican “Contract with America,” which addressed such issues as welfare reform, term limits, tougher crime laws, and a balanced budget law, and which helped conservative Republicans gain 54 House seats and take control of the House for the first time since 1954. For a time, Gingrich, wholly identified with the new conservative agenda, was the most powerful Speaker in recent history, but his decline was as precipitous as his rise, and he lost the Speakership amid ethics questions and after the poor Republican showing of 1998.
Ginsberg, Allen (1926–1997) Ginsberg grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of noted poet Louis Ginsberg. Influenced less by his father than by the likes of William Carlos Williams—an exponent of free verse and narrative poetry in a lyric vernacular—and Walt Whitman, Ginsberg created a new form of free verse, wild, ecstatic, angry, and richly inventive, in his modern autobiographical epic Howl of 1956, which is considered one of the central poems of the so-called Beat movement in American literature.
Gist, Christopher (1706–1759) Gist was a trader, frontiersman, and explorer based in western Maryland and highly regarded by colonial authorities as a wilderness guide and an interpreter/negotiator influential with the Indians. In 1753, he joined George Washington, at the time a colonel of the Virginia militia, in an expedition against French “invaders” of the Ohio Valley, which was claimed by the English. Gist was an invaluable mentor to Washington in the ways of the frontier and in Indian diplomacy.
Giuliani, Rudolph (1944– ) Giuliani was an attorney who, as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York (appointed in 1983), earned a reputation as a tough, savvy prosecutor. He ran for mayor of New York in 1989, was defeated, but emerged victorious in 1993, the first Republican mayor of the city in twenty years. He pledged major reforms of the city’s finances and law enforcement, and he presided over a period of financial recovery and substantially reduced crime. Although some objected to what they regarded as his authoritarian manner, most New Yorkers—and most of the nation—were greatly impressed by Giuliani’s strong, efficient, and compassionate leadership during the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and afterward.
Glasgow, Ellen (1873–1945) A lifelong resident of Richmond, Virginia, Glasgow had a long career as a novelist, in which she chronicled life in the American South as it made its uneasy transition from the traditions of the 19th century to the demands of the 20th. Her The Romantic Comedians (1926), They Stooped to Folly (1929), and The Sheltered Life (1932) are extraordinary chronicles of the slow decay of Southern aristocracy in a modern industrial civilization. Her final novel, In This Our Life (1941), was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
Glenn, John (1921– ) A Marine Corps aviator, Glenn was one of the seven original Mercury astronauts and the first American to orbit the earth (February 20, 1962). Glenn was elected to the U.S. Senate from Ohio in 1974 and was reelected three times. At 77, on October 29, 1998, he returned to space as a “payload specialist” aboard the shuttle Discovery, thereby becoming the oldest person ever to travel in space.
Godkin, E. L. (1831–1902) Born in Belfast, Ireland, Godkin came to the United States in 1851, practiced law in New York City, and in 1865 founded The Nation, which became the leading political review in the United States and was highly