- Industry: Printing & publishing
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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
(1895 – 1972) Director of the FBI from its creation as the Bureau of Investigation in 1924 until his death in 1972. Hoover was responsible for placing the FBI at the heart of American government by undertaking a rigorous process of professionalization, bureaucratization and highly publicized investigations of communists, gangsters and alleged spies.
Following the war, Hoover extended his range and power beyond these areas into more controversial definitions of anti-Americanism, orchestrating a smear campaign against Martin Luther King, Jr. and using undercover agents to infiltrate the Black Panthers. It is also widely believed that he had gathered damaging information on most of the postwar presidents, which inclined them to keep him on at the Bureau. After his death, more questions arose about the power he had amassed at the FBI and his personal life, including his crossdressing proclivities (in stark contrast to the image of the straight-laced G-man).
Industry:Culture
(1895 – 1972) Poet, novelist, journalist and cultural and political essayist, Wilson was one of the most prodigious writers of the twentieth century After attending Princeton University and serving in the First World War, he became a theater critic, a book editor for The New Republic and cultural critic for The New Yorker. During the Depression, he made his name publishing essays such as those found in The American Jitters, which, influenced by post-Second World War anti-communism, he edited and republished as The American Earthquake. His widely acclaimed history of European revolutions, To the Finland Station (1940), highlighted a shift among many American leftists away from socialism to a more pragmatic liberalism, and shaped much of the discussion of Marxism among American intellectuals for about thirty years.
Industry:Culture
(1895 – 1990) Born and educated in New York City, Lewis Mumford became a prominent American intellectual and authority on urban planning after the Second World War, writing multiple volumes and articles in journals like the New Yorker on cities and landscape. His most notable work, The City in History (1961), provided a bleak image of dehumanizing and dysfunctional modern cities. Appearing at the height of the migration of many Americans from cities to suburbs, the work rationalized increased suburbanization, even while it recognized the continued decimation of the cities caused by the migration of Americans to the suburbs.
Industry:Culture
(1896 – 1977) Director, producer, script writer and storyteller. Beginning with silent films, Hawks developed a lengthy varied and successful career marked by strong vision and relationships that complicate our expectations of many genres. An understated auteur, Hawk’s movies are often milestones in retrospect, as recognized in a 1974 cumulative achievement Oscar. His works often develop American values of camaraderie, patriotism and male heroism as well as complicated male/female relationships (and their sexual overtones), showcasing Hollywood stars like Katharine Hepburn (Bringing up Baby, 1938), Humphrey Bogart (To Have and To Have Not, 1944), Marilyn Monroe (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1953) and John Wayne (Rio Bravo, 1959). Hawks showed facility across genres—gangster films, comedy melodrama, westerns and even science fiction (The Thing, 1951)—creating an enduring and beloved cinematic legacy.
Industry:Culture
(1896 – 1996) Part of a husband and wife (Gracie Allen, 1902–64) vaudeville team, originating in the 1920s, who made a successful transition to radio and then 1950s sitcom (CBS, 1950–8).
Allen’s effervescent naivete created wonderful language games as well as continual confusion; Burns, as a cigar-smoking straight man, constantly violated the fourth wall to address the audience (or watch sitcom events on television). After Allen’s death, Burns tried other less successful series before returning to Hollywood, where he won an Oscar for The Sunshine Boys (1975). He played God in another series of the 1970s and 1980s.
Indeed, he announced that he would play Las Vegas at 100; he did not quite keep that date.
Industry:Culture
(1897 – 1971) Richard Russell, a long-serving US senator from Georgia and a conservative Democrat, was Chairperson of the Senate Armed Services Committee from 1951 to 1952 and from 1955 to 1968, where he oversaw government defense and intelligence operations. A mentor to Senator, then President, Lyndon Johnson, Russell was a confirmed segregationist and resisted Johnson’s efforts to pass the comprehensive Civil Rights Act of 1964. Johnson forcefully persuaded Russell to serve on the Warren Commission, but Russell refused to sign the Commission’s report until a clause was added that a conspiracy to assassinate President John Kennedy was still a possibility.
Industry:Culture
(1897 – 1980) Day a Roman Catholic social activist, sought to reconcile her early socialism with her 1927 conversion to Catholicism. She did this through the Catholic Worker’s Movement, which offered hospitality to the homeless and hungry from the Depression onwards, and the newspaper Catholic Worker (founded 1933). Throughout her life, Day brought her deep faith and conscience to bear on issues of labor, race and pacifism. Since her death, some have sought to propose her as a fitting saint for the American century. Her autobiography The Long Loneliness, appeared in 1952.
Industry:Culture
(1897 – 1991) Sicilian-born director whose movies embody the comedy and pathos of the American dream. For a decade after the mid-1930s, Capra brought together character, comedy and sometimes dark shadings to stories of the triumph of small-town good and honesty over elites. Epitomized by It’s a Wonderful Life (1947), which became a holiday staple, Capra’s gaze also took in gender relations (It Happened One Nïght, Oscar 1924), politics (Mr Smith Goes to Washington, 1939) and a bitter view of mass media (Meet John Doe, 1941). During the Second World War, Capra devoted his energies to the Why We Fight documentaries. His vision, however, generally failed to capture audiences in the postwar world beyond nostalgic viewings.
Industry:Culture
(1898 – 1976) Landmark African American athlete, singer, actor and activist, Robeson also epitomized the complexity of black elites in the late twentieth century. A preacher’s son, he emerged as a scholarathlete at Rutgers, and combined acting with his work at Columbia Law School. Becoming famous on stage and screen, he also became involved with leftist and Africanist causes from the 1930s onwards. This led to red-baiting in the 1940s and 1950s, including suspension of his passport (Robeson sued and won). In the 1960s, he became honored as an international leftist and paterfamilias of the Civil Rights movement.
Industry:Culture
(1898 – 1979) Philosopher and radical social critic, German-born Marcuse was one of the younger members of the neo-Marxist “Frankfurt” or “critical-theory” school. Forced out of Germany by the Nazis, he emigrated to the US in 1934, and remained in the US as a professor at the University of California, San Diego, when other members of the school returned to Germany after the Second World War. Marcuse’s writings, especially Eros and Civilization (1955) and One Dimensional Man (1964), were among the most important foundations for New Left and counterculture radicalism in the 1960s.
Industry:Culture
