1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [65]
Jeffers, Robinson (1887–1962) Jeffers received a diverse education in literature, medicine, and forestry, but when he came into an inheritance that gave him financial independence, he became a poet. His work drew on the meeting of land and sea in northern California to present a strongly imagistic vision of pantheistic nature, in comparison to which all else—including human life—is ephemeral, frenetic, and futile.
Jefferson, Thomas (1743–1826) A driving force behind the American Revolution, Jefferson was a renaissance man of the early republic: a naturalist, an inventor, an architect (who designed his magnificent Virginia home, Monticello, as well as the original buildings of the University of Virginia, of which he was also principal founder), and author. He created for his native Virginia a groundbreaking statute of religious freedom, and it was he who wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. He served as the United States’ first secretary of state (1789–1794), its second vice president (1797–1801), and its third president (1801–1809). As the founder of the Democratic-Republican Party, he championed the rights of the individual over the power of central government. His Louisiana Purchase added a vast western realm to the new nation, into which he sent Lewis and Clark to explore. He was perhaps the most radical of the founding fathers, the chief political philosopher of individual freedom as the heart and soul of the American Revolution.
Jenny, William LeBaron (1832–1907) Jenny was born in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard Scientific School and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His ten-story Home Insurance Building, built in Chicago in 1883, was the first structure that used a steel skeleton framework to support both the floors and the exterior walls and is therefore considered the world’s first skyscraper. This architectural form would become a defining American building style.
Johnson, Andrew (1808–1875) Johnson grew up in poverty in Tennessee and rose to become a U.S. representative (1843–1853), governor of Tennessee (1853–1857), and a U.S. senator (1856–1862). He opposed secession and was alone among the Southern senators in remaining in the Senate and refusing to join the Confederacy. President Lincoln named him military governor of Tennessee, and in 1864 chose him as his running mate. On Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, Johnson succeeded to office. His advocacy of lenient treatment of the South after the Civil War angered Radical Republicans in Congress and precipitated his impeachment in 1868. He was acquitted by a single vote in the Senate and served out his term virtually powerless.
Johnson, James Weldon (1871–1938) Trained as a schoolteacher and lawyer, Johnson collaborated with his composer brother, John Rosamond Johnson (1873–1954), on many popular songs, including “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which became a kind of African-American anthem. In 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Johnson U.S. consul to Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, and in 1909 he became consul in Corinto, Nicaragua, serving until 1914. His 1912 novel, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, became a classic of African-American literature and was an acute analysis of race relations in the United States. Johnson was a major figure in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), published his own poetry, and compiled major anthologies of African-American poetry and spirituals. His poetic masterpiece is God’s Trombones (1927), poems written in the form of black dialect sermons.
Johnson, Lyndon B. (1908–1973) LBJ was a U.S. Senator from Texas for a dozen years before he became President John F. Kennedy’s vice president. During his vice presidential term, he was instrumental in launching America