1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [56]
Haywood, “Big Bill” (1869–1928) William D. “Big Bill” Haywood was a western miner who became active in the mine labor movement. He was a founder of the International Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905, a radical labor organization that sought to bring all workers under “one big union.” Haywood was persistently harassed by federal authorities, who, after U.S. entry into World War I, arrested him and other IWW members on charges of treason and sabotage for interfering with war-related production. While on bail pending appeal, Haywood fled to Soviet Russia, where he lived the rest of his life.
Hazelwood, Joseph (1946– ) On March 24, 1989, the supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground 25 miles south of Valdez, Alaska, spilling 240,000 barrels of crude oil into the pristine waters of Prince William Sound. It remains the worst environmental disaster in American history. The skipper, Joseph Hazelwood of Huntington, New York, was charged with (among other things) operating a vessel while intoxicated and was found guilty of negligent discharge of oil. His conviction was overturned on appeal based on a statute that granted immunity to those reporting oil spills to the authorities. The oil spill covered some 2,600 square miles of Alaska wilderness and killed untold thousands of birds and marine animals.
Hearst, William Randolph (1863–1951) The renegade son of a California senator and gold miner, Hearst took over the ailing San Francisco Examiner in 1887 and transformed it into a runaway success by combining genuinely reformist investigative journalism with outright sensationalism. He repeated this success on a grander scale when he bought the moribund New York Morning Journal in 1895, hired the best writers and reporters to work on it, then reduced its price to a penny—thereby obtaining spectacular circulation. Hearst engaged in a circulation war with rival publisher Joseph Pulitzer and, together, the two publishers created a new brand of muckraking sensationalism dubbed “yellow journalism.” Hearst went on to build a nationwide news chain and became an opinion maker of unprecedented power, typically making news as well as reporting it—as when he heightened the war fever that led to the Spanish-American War.
Hemings, Sally (circa 1773–1835) Hemings was a chambermaid to Thomas Jefferson, by whom she may have had at least one child (her youngest son, Easton Hemings). DNA studies of known Hemings and Jefferson descendants and other scientific evidence have yet to resolve the controversy definitively. Jefferson, who had condemned the slave trade in his draft of Declaration of Independence, was a slave owner lifelong and, on his death, did not free Sally or any other slave.
Hemingway, Ernest (1899–1961) Many regard Hemingway as the greatest American novelist and short story writer of the 20th century. He was celebrated as much for his lean writing style—in which there seemed not a single superfluous word—as for his compelling treatment of themes of masculine identity, morality, and courage. A member of what Gertrude Stein called the “lost generation” of post-World War I writers and artists, Hemingway created fictional heroes in search of meaning in a morally and spiritually shattered world. In the process, he carved out for himself the life of a celebrity author, whose very public thirst for high-risk adventure was unquenchable. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
Henderson, Fletcher (1898–1952) Henderson was a fine jazz pianist who created great orchestrations for large jazz ensembles and was responsible for much of the “big band” sound of the 1930s and 1940s. He was the first arranger to create fully written arrangements that did not compromise the free spirit