INFOMUTT - Key Persons
Charlton Heston (born October 4,1924) is an American actor and activist. He was born in Evanston, Illinois as John Charles Carter. His father was a mill worker. Heston was the only child. The family settled in a rural area of Michigan, where Heston spent much time reading and acting for himself.
Before he was 10 his parents divorced. Some years later his mother married Chester Heston. The new family moved to a suburb of Chicago, where Heston attended high school. He enrolled in the school's drama program, where he performed with such outstanding results that he earned a scholarship to Northwestern University in Evanston for drama in 1942. There he played in Peer Gynt, a 16mm amateur production of a fellow student. Several years later the same team produced Heston's second film, Julius Caesar, in which he played Marc Antony.
In 1944, he left college and enlisted in the Army for three years. When he returned from service in WWII, Heston and his wife went to New York, where they worked as models. Seeking a way to make it in theater, they decided to manage a playhouse in Asheville, North Carolina. In 1947, they went back to New York where Heston was offered a role in the Broadway play Anthony and Cleopatra, for which he earned acclaim. He also had success in television, where he acted in several productions.
Heston then felt the time had come to move to Hollywood. In 1950, he earned recognition for his appearance in his first professional movie, Dark City. His breakthrough came in 1952 with his role of a circus director in The Greatest Show On Earth. He became however a megastar by portraying Moses in The Ten Commandments. He has played leading roles in a number of fictional and historical epics, such as Ben-Hur, El Cid, 55 Days in Peking, and '\'Khartoum, during his long career. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his 1959 performance in the title role of Ben-Hur. Heston has played also in various science fiction films, some of which, like Planet of the Apes'', have become classics. Heston continues acting, increasingly in TV films.
Heston has fought for his artistic choices. In 1958 he maneuvered Universal International into allowing Orson Welles to direct him in Touch of Evil, and in 1965 he fought the studio in support of Sam Peckinpah, when an attempt was made to interfere with his direction of Major Dundee. Heston was also president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1966 to 1971.
Although he accompagnied Martin Luther King Jr during the civil rights march performed in Washington, D.C in 1963, politically, Heston is a conservative, and has clashed at various times in his life with the same Martin Luther King Jr, John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. He is an honorary life member of the National Rifle Association (NRA) which is the largest and oldest civil rights oraganization in the United States, and was its president and spokesman from 1998 until 2003. In 2001, he sought an unprecedented fourth term as president, in which he declared, while holding an American Revolutionary War era musket over his head: "I have only five words for you - From my cold, dead hands." He serves on the National Advisory Board of Accuracy in Media.
Heston is married to Lydia Marie Clarke since 1944. They met when both were drama students at university. The couple has a son and a daughter. In 2002, Heston publicly announced that he had Alzheimer's disease. In July 2003, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Heston has written several autobiographies, including The Actor's Life, To Be A Man, and In The Arena.
Job Titles:
- First Secretary of the Treasury
Alexander Hamilton was born on the West Indies Island of Nevis on January 11, 1757. He went to New York in 1772 for his formal education, beginning with grammar school. Later he attended King's College, which is now Columbia University.
Hamilton's great qualities of mind and spirit revealed themselves early. While in his teens, he took a firm stand on the side of the patriots, and became a leader in the movement advocating independence. Before he was 20 years of age, Hamilton commanded artillery troops in several important battles, and from 1777 to 1781, served as aide-de-camp to General Washington.
He left Washington to take command of an infantry regiment that took part in the siege of Yorktown. At the age of 25, he served as a member of the Continental Congress from 1782-1783, then retired to open his own law office in New York City. His public career continued when he attended the Annapolis Convention as a delegate in 1786.
He also served in the New York State Legislature and attended the Philadelphia Convention in 1787. Throughout the convention's proceedings Hamilton, who was a federalist, argued consistently for a strong central government, including an upper house with members appointed for life rather than subject to re-election. Although the document finally produced by the convention was less centralist than Hamilton proposed, he was active in the successful campaign for its ratification as the Constitution of the United States on September 2, 1789. In this endeavour Hamilton made the largest single contribution to the authorship of the Federalist Papers.
Hamilton served another term in 1788 in what proved to be the last time the Continental Congress met under the new Articles of Confederation.
President George Washington appointed him to be the first Secretary of the Treasury when the first Congress passed an Act establishing the Treasury Department. He served as Secretary of the Treasury from September 11, 1789 until January 31, 1795.
As Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton's term was marked by bold innovation, statesmanlike planning, and masterful reports. His financial program provided public credit where there was none before, and gave the infant Nation a circulating medium and financial machinery.
After being in office for barely one month, he proposed the idea of a seagoing branch of the military to secure the revenue against contraband. The following summer, the Congress authorized a Revenue Marine force of ten cutters. The Revenue Marine is now the United States Coast Guard. He also played a crucial role in creating the United States Navy (the Naval Act of 1794). Hamilton also proposed the creation of a Naval Academy, an idea ahead of his time.
He published Report on the Public Credit on January 14, 1790, (although some reports put the date at January 9, 1790), which amounted to a watershed in American history, marking the end of an era of bankruptcy and repudiation. The plan provided for assumption of both the domestic and the foreign debts. Both James Madison and Thomas Jefferson strongly opposed Hamilton's plan, but it passed overwhelmingly. He advocated assumption by the Federal Government of the debts of the States. Madison and Jefferson also opposed this plan, but they settled the contest in a private meeting on July 21, 1790. During this meeting, Hamilton agreed to the future location of the Nation's Capital on the Potomac River, in return for Jefferson's support of assumption.
Hamilton's perceptive and creative mind coupled with his driving ambition to set his ideas in motion resulted many proposals to the Congress. His proposals included a plan including import duties and excise taxes for raising revenue, funding of the revolutionary debt, and suggestions on naval laws. He also developed plans for a Congressional charter for the First Bank of the United States, and for placing the revenues on firm ground.
Strong opposition to collection efforts of his excise tax on spirits erupted into the Whiskey Rebellion in Western Pennsylvania and Virginia in 1794. Hamilton felt that compliance with the laws was very urgent. He accompanied General "Light Horse Harry" Lee and his troops part of the way in an advisory capacity to help put down the insurrection.
Hamilton's resignation as Secretary of the Treasury in 1795 did not remove him from public life. With the resumption of his law practice, he remained close to Washington as an advisor and friend and he is believed to have influenced Washington in the latter's composition of his Farewell Address. Relations between Hamilton and Washington's successor, John Adams, were frequently strained and Hamilton's attempts to frustrate Adams' adoption as presidential candidate of the Federalist Party split the party and contributed to the victory of the Jeffersonian Republicans in the election of 1800.
Hamilton's role in ensuring the subsequent selection of Jefferson as President in preference to Aaron Burr was one of a number of factors arousing the Burr's anger prompting him to fight a duel with Hamilton on July 11, 1804. Hamilton was shot in the duel. The bullet entered Hamilton below the chest and was fatal. He died in New York City the following day.
Hamilton's portrait appears on the U.S. $10 bill. USS Alexander Hamilton was named in his honor.
John Caldwell Calhoun (March 18, 1782 - March 31, 1850), was a prominent United States politician in the first half of the 19th century. His staunch determination earned him the nickname the "cast-iron man". Calhoun served South Carolina in the United States Senate, and as Secretary of State, Secretary of War, and the seventh Vice President.
John Calhoun attended Yale in 1802. In 1810 he was elected to Congress, and allied with the war hawks, including Henry Clay, agitating for what became the War of 1812. After the war, he proposed a bonus bill for public works. In 1817 he was appointed Secretary of War under James Madison.
After the odd Election of 1824, Calhoun became Vice President under John Quincy Adams. He soon broke with Adams and the National Republicans, who seemed to favor northern interests. He developed his theory of nullification that states (or minorities) could nullify federal (or majority) actions.
He also became Andrew Jackson's running mate in the Election of 1828, and again was Vice President. Jackson opposed the idea of nullification and said in a famous toast, "Our federal Union-it must and shall be preserved." In Calhoun's toast, he replied, "Our Union; next to our liberties most dear." A rift soon developed between Calhoun and Jackson, exacerbated by the Eaton affair.
On December 28, 1832 he became the first Vice President to resign from office, having accepted election to the United States Senate from his native South Carolina. The Force Bill was proposed by Congress prohibiting states from nullifying federal laws. The Compromise of 1833 settled the matter for a number of years.
Calhoun tried to gag abolitionist press in the US South, which became federal law in 1841 as the 21st Rule. In 1844 he was reappointed Secretary of State by John Tyler. Calhoun returned to the Senate in 1848 and died in 1850 in Washington, D.C He was buried in St. Phillips Churchyard in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1957, United States Senators honored Calhoun as one of the "five greatest senators of all time".
He penned "Disquisition on Government" and the "Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States."
Places named for Calhoun
John Davison Rockefeller (July 8, 1839 - May 23, 1937), an American capitalist and philanthropist. He was born in Richford, New York to William Avery Rockefeller (November 13, 1810 - May 11, 1906) and his wife Eliza Davison(September 12, 1813 - March 28, 1889). In 1853 his family moved to Strongville, Ohio.
After 1857 he lived in Cleveland, Ohio, where he had begun to work as a bookkeeper in 1855. In 1858 he went into the produce commission business. His firm, Clark & Rockefeller, invested in an oil refinery in 1862, and in 1865 Rockefeller sold out his share to his partner Clark, paid $72,500 for a larger share in another refinery, and formed the partnership of Rockefeller & Andrews.
At about the same time Rockefeller's brother, William, started another refinery. In 1867 Rockefeller & Andrews absorbed this business, and Henry M. Flagler joined the partnership. In 1870 the two Rockefellers, Flagler, Andrews and a refiner named Stephen V. Harkness formed the Standard Oil Company, with John D. Rockefeller as president.
John Marshall (24 September 1775 - 6 July 1835), Chief Justice of the United States and principal founder of American constitutional law, was born at Germantown (now Midland) in Fauquier County, Virginia. A member of the Culpepper Minutemen early in the American Revolutionary War, he entered the Third Virginia Continental Regiment on 30 July 1776 and served ably in a number of important campaigns, rising to Captain. He became a lawyer after the war, serving his state as a leader in the Assembly and in the new Federalist Party. He attracted attention from national leaders, and was offered several diplomatic posts, but preferred to remain in Virginia. In 1797, however, he accepted an appointment on a three-man commission to negotiate with France. After French leaders demanded personal bribes in return for engaging in the negotiations, Marshall answered for his colleagues in a brilliant memorial which rejected this extortion and upheld the honor and dignity of the new country.
Elected to Congress in 1799, Marshall became Secretary of State on 6 June 1800. Here he strongly opposed violations of American rights on the high seas and adopted a policy which necessitated a strong Navy to give force to our diplomatic protests.
Appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court on 20 January 1801, Marshall continued to serve as Secretary of State until the end of Adams' administration 4 March 1801. In the United States Supreme Court, Marshall made his greatest contributions to the development of American government. In a series of historic decisions, he established the judiciary as an independent and influential branch of the government equal to Congress and the Presidency. Perhaps the most significant of these cases was that of Marbury v. Madison, in which the principle of judicial review was simply stated by Marshall: "A legislative act contrary to the Constitution is not law." Then, as the young nation was endangered by regional and local interests which often threatened to tear it to shreds, Marshall again and again interpreted the Constitution broadly so that the Federal Government had the power to become a respected and creative force guiding and encouraging the nation's growth. For practical purposes, the Constitution in its most important aspects today is the Constitution as John Marshall interpreted it. As Chief Justice he embodied the majesty of the Judicial Branch of the government as fully as the President stood for the power of the Executive Branch. He died 6 July 1835, having served as Chief Justice for nearly 35 years.
Job Titles:
- Vice President of the United States
PR industry historian Scott Cutlip describes Bernays as "perhaps public relations' most fabulous and fascinating individual, a man who was bright, articulate to excess, and most of all, an innovative thinker and philosopher of this vocation that was in its infancy when he opened his office in New York in June 1919." Much of Bernays's reputation today stems from his persistent public relations campaign to build his own reputation as "America's No. 1 Publicist." During his active years, many of his peers in the industry were offended by Bernays's constant self-promotion. According to Cutlip, "Bernays was a brilliant person who had a spectacular career, but, to use an old-fashioned word, he was a braggart."