1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [96]
Oglethorpe, James (1691–1785) A professional British soldier, Oglethorpe entered Parliament in 1722 and, in 1729, chaired a committee on prison reform. This inspired him to found a North American colony that would offer the poor a new start and an alternative to debtor’s prison. It would also serve as a haven for persecuted Protestant sects and would be founded on generally utopian principles, including relative equality of wealth (no one would be permitted to own more than 100 acres) and the prohibition of rum as well as slavery. Georgia (as he called his utopia) was chartered in 1732 and founded the following year. The utopian provisions were quickly renounced by settlers, however, and Oglethorpe, disillusioned, returned to England in 1734.
Oglivy, David (1911–1999) Dubbed in the 1970s “the Father of Advertising,” Oglivy was certainly among the most influential and creative practitioners of the art and business of commercial persuasion. He had been born in England, falling into advertising through an early career in sales. He came to the United States just before World War II and, in 1949, founded his own agency. His early campaigns—especially those for Hathaway shirts and Schweppes beverages—made a permanent impression on American popular culture and changed the advertising industry forever.
O’Keeffe, Georgia (1887–1886) During her long career, O'Keeffe combined bold abstraction with images from nature to produce powerfully expressive paintings of great beauty, suggestive of erotic and emotional depths. She is most closely associated with imagery drawn from the desert of the American Southwest, but her works are universal rather than regional in appeal, a fusion of an organic vision with a modernist aesthetic.
Oliver, Joseph “King” (1885–1938) Oliver grew up on a Louisiana plantation and began playing the cornet in New Orleans in 1907. He was a bandleader by 1915 and moved to Chicago in 1916. The music he played was the earliest style of jazz, and in 1920 he hired young Louis Armstrong, who grew to his early maturity as a cornetist with Oliver. Oliver and his band are considered the foundation on which jazz was subsequently built by Armstrong and others.
Olmsted, Frederick Law (1822–1903) Olmsted was trained as an engineer, but earned his fame as a landscape architect with his design for New York’s Central Park in 1857. Universally acclaimed for this work—which combined an unerring urban aesthetic with the preservation of a genuinely wild element—Olmsted was hired to design city parks throughout the United States. His work gave rise to the “city beautiful” movement and was a welcome antidote to the blight of industrialization and urban sprawl that threatened the nation during the second half of the 19th century.
Oñate, Don Juan de (1550?–1630) A conquistador, Oñate established the Spanish colony of New Mexico in 1598 and served as its royal governor. He was a despot, obsessed (as many early Spanish explorers and settlers were) with finding the legendary Seven Cities of Gold in the New World. His explorations failed to find gold, but did chart vast regions of the American Southwest. Oñate’s harsh treatment of Indians and Spanish settlers alike resulted in his expulsion from his own colony. His sentence was subsequently reversed, but he was never restored to the office of governor.
O’Neill, Eugene (1888–1953) O’Neill was the son of an actor and a frail, opium-addicted mother. His unstable but emotionally rich upbringing would prove a rich source of dramatic material when he started to write for the stage, beginning with an early masterpiece of 1916, Bound East for