1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [87]
McKissick, Floyd (1922–1991) Born in Asheville, North Carolina, McKissick was the first African American to study at the University of North Carolina Law School. He became active in the NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and participated in every major aspect of the Civil Rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s. He became CORE’s national director in 1966, and began to turn the attention of the organization from the rural South to the problems of the northern urban ghettos. Beginning in 1968, McKissick developed Soul City, North Carolina, intended as model town and industrial project.
McLuhan, Marshall (1911–1980) Although McLuhan was a Canadian, his major impact was on American popular culture, which he helped to shape in the 1960s with his analysis of the extraordinarily pervasive influence of television and computers on all modes of information and thought in virtually every cultural field. He declared that “the medium is the message” and predicted the obsolescence of the printed book, which would yield to electronic media destined to transform a diverse world into a “global village.”
McNamara, Robert (1916– ) McNamara was president of the Ford Motor Company when President John F. Kennedy appointed him secretary of defense in 1961. McNamara revolutionized the Pentagon by revamping the military bureaucracy, cutting costs, and refocusing the thrust of defense policy from its strategic (nuclear) emphasis to the doctrine of flexible response, enhancing the military’s ability to fight smaller conventional wars. During the Kennedy administration, McNamara played a major role in successfully resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis, but he was also instrumental in greatly expanding America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, especially during the administration of JFK’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson.
McPhee, John (1931– ) McPhee is a journalist who has written a series of popular books focusing on the environment and key aspects of technology and current events. Many of his works first appeared, at least in part, in The New Yorker. His first major book was a study of New Jersey’s surprisingly remote semi-wilderness, The Pine Barrens (1968). Alaska was profiled in Coming into the Country (1977), the citrus industry was the focus of Oranges (1967), aeronautics in The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed (1973), and nuclear terrorism in The Curve of Binding Energy (1974). During the 1980s he wrote a series of books on the geology of the American West.
McVeigh, Timothy (1968–2001) A decorated veteran of the Persian Gulf War (1991), McVeigh left the army after he failed to qualify for a Special Forces assignment. Disaffected with the federal government, he packed a rented Ryder truck with explosive material made from nitrate fertilizer and detonated it beside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on August 19, 1995. In the deadliest incident of domestic terrorism in American history, 167 persons were killed (including many children in the building’s daycare center), and many more were injured. Apprehended, tried, and convicted, McVeigh was sentenced to death and was executed on June 11, 2001.
Mead, Margaret (1901–1978) Mead was a student of pioneering anthropologists Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, earning her Ph.D. in 1929. She wrote 23 books during her long career, beginning in 1928 with Coming of Age in Samoa, a bestseller and a classic study of adolescence in an “undeveloped” region. Mead popularized anthropology’s relativistic approach to culture, enabling many of her readers and lecture audiences to overcome ethnocentrism and appreciate our common humanity. Although many scientists questioned Mead’s reliance on observation over statistics and her absolute belief in cultural determinism, the force of her charismatic personality could not be denied, and she surely advanced popular interest in the human sciences.
Meade, George G. (1815–1872) Meade was a Union cavalry officer not noted for his brilliance, but respected for his careful competence. He was in