1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [91]
Morgan, Daniel (1736–1802) Morgan was a frontiersman who led a unit of handpicked Virginia riflemen during the revolution. A master of guerrilla warfare, he played major roles in the U.S. invasion of Canada early in the war and in the battles at Saratoga in 1777, but his most important victory was at the Battle of Cowpens, South Carolina (January 17, 1781), which helped turn the tide of the war in the South.
Morgan, J. Pierpont (1837–1913) The son of a financier, J. P. Morgan made his fortune—and fortunes for others—by reorganizing a number of major railroads and consolidating United States Steel, International Harvester, and General Electric. For a long time, Morgan was the single most powerful figure on Wall Street.
Morgenthau, Henry, Jr. (1891–1967) A brilliant manager of money, Morgenthau served as secretary of the Treasury through President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s dozen years in office (1934–1945). During this period, which saw both the massive expenditures of the Depression-era New Deal and World War II, Morgenthau was in charge of some $370 billion in spending—three times the funds than were managed by his 50 predecessors combined. Morgenthau’s uncompromising proposal after World War II that Germany be permanently reduced to a pre-industrial agricultural economy was rejected by President Harry S. Truman and prompted Morgenthau’s resignation.
Morris, Gouverneur (1752–1816) Morris was a man of contradictions. Highly conservative (he was an extreme Federalist, who believed in the strongest possible central government, including presidential tenure for life and presidential appointment of senators), he was nevertheless a zealous champion of independence during the American Revolution and a strong advocate of unlimited religious freedom. Under the Articles of Confederation, Morris formulated the decimal coinage system that became the basis of the U.S. monetary system. A key delegate to the Constitutional Convention, he was a principal drafter of the document.
Morris, Robert (1734–1806) Born in England, Morris immigrated to Maryland in 1747 then moved to Philadelphia, where he became a prominent merchant. Active in the American Revolution as vice president of the Pennsylvania Committee of Safety (1775–1776) and a delegate to the Continental Congress (1775–1778) and the Pennsylvania legislature (1778–1779, 1780–1781, 1785–1786), Morris was the primary manager of finance for the war effort from 1776 to 1778. Later, he worked as a fund raiser, requisitioning cash from the states and borrowing from the French. In 1781, he founded the Bank of North America and was superintendent of finance under the Articles of Confederation from 1781 to 1784. Ironically, his personal finances suffered toward the end of his life, and from 1799 to 1801 he was incarcerated in debtors’ prison.
Morrison, Toni (1931– ) Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Ohio and created a career in fiction by writing of the African-American experience, often from the female point of view. Her works span from slave times to the present. She burst onto the literary scene with her 1977 Song of Solomon, and her 1987 Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.
Morse, Samuel F. B. (1791–1872) Samuel Finley Breese Morse embarked on a career as a painter and received acclaim in this field, but little monetary reward. He turned to invention, and in the 1830s designed the first truly practical telegraph. He successfully commercialized