John Robinson Jeffers

John Robinson Jeffers was an American poet, known for his work about the central California coast. Most of Jeffers' poetry was written in classic narrative and epic form, but today he is also known for his short verse, and considered an icon of the environmental movement.

Jeffers was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh), the son of a Presbyterian minister and biblical scholar, Reverend Dr. William Hamilton Jeffers, and Annie Robinson Tuttle. His brother was Hamilton Jeffers, who became a well-known astronomer, working at Lick Observatory. His family was supportive of his interest in poetry. He traveled through Europe during his youth and attended school in Switzerland. He was a child prodigy, interested in classics and Greek and Latin language and literature. At sixteen he entered Occidental College. At school, he was an avid outdoorsman, and active in the school's literary society.

After he graduated from Occidental, Jeffers went to the University of Southern California to study medicine. He met Una Call Kuster in 1906; she was three years his senior, a graduate student, and the wife of a Los Angeles attorney. In 1910, he enrolled as a forestry student at the University of Washington in Seattle, a course of study that he abandoned after less than one year, at which time he returned to Los Angeles. Sometime before this, he and Una had begun an affair that became a scandal, reaching the front page of the Los Angeles Times in 1912. After Una spent some time in Europe to quiet things down, the two were married in 1913, and moved to Carmel, California, where Jeffers constructed Tor House and Hawk Tower. The couple had a daughter who died a day after birth in 1914, and then twin sons in 1916. Una died of cancer in 1950. Jeffers died in 1962.

Ken Adelman

Kenneth Lee Adelman is an American diplomat, political writer, policy analyst and William Shakespeare historian.

Adelman graduated from Grinnell College in Iowa, majoring in philosophy and religion. He received his Masters in Foreign Service studies and Doctorate in political theory from Georgetown University.

Adelman began working for the government in 1969 at the Commerce Department, and then served in the Office of Economic Opportunity. From 1975 to 1977 during the Gerald Ford administration, Adelman was an Assistant to United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and was later a member of the Defense Policy Board. He has also served as a national editor of Washingtonian magazine for more than 17 years.

He was the deputy U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations for two-and a half years, working with Jeane Kirkpatrick. He also served as the Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency for nearly five years, during the Reagan administration. He was an advisor to President Ronald Reagan during the superpower summits between Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.

He took part in the Zaire River Expedition in 1975, traveling down the Congo River on the 100th Anniversary of Henry Morton Stanley's legendary exploration.

Adelman was a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board well-known for his involvement in conservative policy efforts dating back to the 1970s, when he was a member of the Committee on the Present Danger. More recently, he strongly supported the war on Iraq and worked for the think tank Project for the New American Century, arguing for new policies to help the United States remain a global leader. Adelman, called "a lifelong neocon activist", worried in 2006 that the incompetence shown in handling the war in Iraq would damage the neoconservative movement: neoconservatism, he said, "is not going to sell" for at least a generation.

Adelman now serves as senior counsel to Edelman Public Relations and has led several campaigns linked to U.S. trade and intellectual property interests via the organization USA Innovations, an organization which he also leads. Using the USA Innovations platform and through other published articles Adelman has attacked the Government of Thailand for violating U.S. pharmaceutical industry HIV/AIDs drug intellectual property patents and other topics linked to Edelman Public Relations clients.

William Gallacher

William Gallacher was a Scottish trade unionist, activist and communist. He was one of the leading figures of the Shop Stewards' Movement in wartime Glasgow (the 'Red Clydeside' period) and a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He served two terms as a Communist Member of Parliament.

Gallacher was born in Paisley, on 25 December 1881, the son of an Irish father and a Highland mother. His father died when he was seven, and one of his earliest ambitions was to earn enough that his mother would no longer have to work as a washerwoman. With his sisters, he finally achieved this aim at the age of 19, but his mother died a short time afterwards at the age of 54.

He began work at ten years old, and left school for good at twelve. After a spell as a delivery boy for a grocer — where he had his first dispute with an employer — he found work in a sanitary engineering workshop. He later had a spell as a steward on some transatlantic crossings, before beginning work at Albion Motor Works, Glasgow, in 1912. After spending 1913 on a visit to his sisters in Chicago he erected scaffolding in Belfast. Returning to Glasgow, he again found work at Albion Motor Works in 1914, just before war broke out.

The "weakness for alcohol" shown by his father and elder brother, and the suffering this caused his mother, led him to become involved with the Temperance movement in his mid-teens. However, on discovering that colleagues had canvassed support for a director of a Public House Trust in the 1906 General Election, Gallacher ended his association with the organised Temperance movement. He remained a lifelong teetotaller.

A subsequent period as a member of the Independent Labour Party ended quickly and he joined the Social Democratic Federation, which brought him into contact with John MacLean. In common with many socialists in west-central Scotland, Gallacher was greatly influenced by MacLean, though they were later to have an acrimonious falling out. The Paisley branch of the SDF introduced him to John Ross Campbell, who would also become a prominent British Communist and the editor of the Daily Worker from 1949 until 1959.

Gallacher was opposed to Britain becoming involved in World War I. He was president of the Clyde Workers' Committee, an organisation that had been formed to organise Clydeside workers and, in particular, to campaign against the Munitions Act, which forbade engineers from leaving the works where they were employed. David Lloyd George and Arthur Henderson met Gallacher and the Clyde Workers' Committee in Glasgow but they were unwilling to back down on the issue. In 1916 the Clyde Workers' Committee journal, The Worker, was prosecuted under the Defence of the Realm Act for an article criticising the war. Gallacher and John Muir, the editor were both found guilty and sent to prison. Gallacher for six months and Muir for a year.

After the war Gallacher was involved in the struggle for improving workers conditions. It was widely expected that the end of the war would be followed by widespread unemployment due to the re-entry of large numbers of demobilised soldiers and sailors into the labour force. Glasgow was expected to be particularly badly affected because a large proportion of its workforce was employed in war-related areas such as munitions and shipbuilding, which would suddenly contract with the end of the war. Gallacher and the Clyde Workers' Committee proposed a campaign to limit working-hours to 30 per week, which was altered to 40 per week after the Glasgow Trades Council became involved. In January 1919 the CWC and Trades Council launched a mass strike in support of the demand for a 40 hour week demand. During the course of the agitation, the police broke up mass rally of striking workers at George Square, Glasgow on 31 January 1919. The Coalition government greatly over-reacted to the strike, thinking that a Bolshevik insurrection was about to begin on Clydeside, and sent British Army troops and tanks onto the streets of Glasgow to control the situation. Whilst revolution was the furthest thing from the minds of the trade union leaders of the day, Gallacher later claimed that they should have marched to the barracks in the Maryhill district of the city and encouraged the Scottish troops there to leave them and join the workers against the government. The union leaders of the strike were arrested and charged with "instigating and inciting large crowds of persons to form part of a riotous mob". Gallacher was returned to jail, being sentenced to five months.


In 1920, Gallacher became a leading figure of the Communist Labour Party. He led the grouping into the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and attempted to be elected to the House of Commons at Dundee (1922 and 1923), West Fife (1929 and 1931) and Shipley (1930). He was eventually elected to represent West Fife in 1935.

In 1925 he was one of 12 members of the Communist Party convicted at the Old Bailey under the Incitement to Mutiny Act 1797, and one of the five defendants sentenced to 12 months imprisonment.

In 1936 Gallacher joined members of the Labour Party such as Stafford Cripps and Aneurin Bevan in arguing for giving military help to the Spanish Popular Front government fighting against Franco's Fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War.

Gallacher lost his West Fife seat to Labour at the 1950 General Election coming third behind the National Liberal candidate, but remained in politics and served as President of the CPGB from 1956 to 1963.

William Gallacher died on 12 August 1965. He remains to this day one of only three Communist Members of Parliament elected in the UK without the endorsement of the Labour Party. The author of several books, The Case for Communism, published 1949, his autobiography, The Chosen Few, published 1940, and The Tyrant's Might is Passing, published 1954. He also wrote a book about his experiences during the first world war, Revolt on the Clyde.

Herbert Stanley Morrison

Herbert Stanley Morrison, Baron Morrison of Lambeth was a British Labour Party politician.

Morrison held various Cabinet posts, including Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister. Morrison was close to attaining the leadership of the party at various points in his career.

Morrison was the son of a police constable and was born in Lambeth, London. As a baby he lost the sight in his right eye due to infection. Morrison, like many early Labour leaders, had little in the way of formal education and left school at 14 to become an errand boy. Morrison's early politics were radical, and he briefly flirted with the Social Democratic Federation over the Independent Labour Party (ILP). As a conscientious objector, he worked in a market garden in Letchworth in World War I. Morrison eventually became a pioneer leader in the London Labour Party.

Morrison was elected to the Metropolitan Borough of Hackney in 1919 when the Labour Party won control of the Borough. He was Mayor in 1920-21. Morrison was also elected to the London County Council (LCC) in 1922 and the following year he became MP for South Hackney in the 1923 General Election, but lost that seat the following year when Ramsay MacDonald's first administration lost the general election.

Morrison returned to Parliament in the 1929 general election, and MacDonald appointed him Minister of Transport. Morrison, like many others in the party, was deeply disheartened by MacDonald's national government. Morrison lost his seat again in 1931.

Morrison continued to sit on the London County Council and in 1933 was elected to lead the Labour Group. Unexpectedly, Labour won the 1934 LCC election and Morrison became Leader of the Council. This gave him control of almost all local government services in London. Morrison's main achievements in London included the unification of the transport system and creating a 'green belt' around the suburbs. He confronted the Government over its refusal to finance the replacement of Waterloo Bridge, and eventually they agreed to pay 60% of the cost of the new bridge.

Morrison is often credited as saying that he would "build the Tories out of London", ie. build enough council housing to ensure Labour a solid majority of Labour voters, the opposite intent to that attributed to Westminster Council under the leadership of Shirley Porter in the 1980s. Morrison's biographers Donoughue & Jones insist that the quotation is apocryphal.

In the 1935 election Morrison was once again elected to the House of Commons and immediately challenged Clement Attlee for the leadership of the party. He lost badly, a defeat ascribed to his unfamiliarity with the MPs who had served in the previous Parliament. Both he and his supporter Hugh Dalton put some of the blame on the masonic New Welcome Lodge, who they claimed backed the third place leadership candidate Arthur Greenwood and then switched their votes to Attlee. After losing, Morrison concentrated on his LCC work.

In 1940 Morrison was appointed as first Minister of Supply by Winston Churchill, but shortly afterwards succeeded Sir John Anderson as Home Secretary. Morrison's London experience in local government was particularly useful during the Blitz, and the Morrison shelter was named after him. However, Morrison had to take many potentially unpopular and controversial decisions by the nature of wartime circumstances.

In 1943, Morrison ran for the post of Treasurer of the Labour Party, but lost a close contest to Arthur Greenwood.

After the end of the war, Morrison was instrumental in drafting the Labour Party's 1945 manifesto Let us Face the Future. He was the organiser of the general election campaign and enlisted the help of left-wing cartoonist Philip Zec with whom he had clashed during the early stages of the war when, as Minister of Supply he took exception to an illustration commenting on the costs of the supplying the country with petrol. Labour won a massive and unexpected victory. Morrison was appointed Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the House of Commons. In this capacity Morrison was the chief sponsor of the Festival of Britain. After Ernest Bevin's resignation as Foreign Secretary, Morrison took over his role, but did not feel at ease in the Foreign Office. His tenure there was cut short by Labour's defeat in the 1951 general election.

Although Morrison had effectively been Attlee's heir apparent since the 1930s, Attlee had always distrusted him. Attlee remained as Leader through the early 1950s, and fought the 1955 election, finally announcing his retirement after Labour's defeat. Morrison was 67 and was seen to be too old to embark on a new leadership. Although he stood, he finished bottom - by a wide margin - of the three candidates, with many of his supporters switching to Gaitskell. Hugh Gaitskell won the election, and Morrison resigned as Deputy Leader.

Morrison stood down at the 1959 general election and was made a life peer as Baron Morrison of Lambeth, of Lambeth in the County of London. He was appointed President of the British Board of Film Censors.

He died in 1965, symbolically in the same month as the London County Council was abolished.

Andrew Jacobs

Andrew Jacobs was a lawyer, judge, and Congressman for one term, in Indiana. His son, Andrew Jacobs, Jr. was also a Congressman.

He attended the public schools near where he was born, in Gerald, Indiana, and later at St. Benedict's College, Atchison, Kansas. He graduated from Ben Harrison Law School, in Indianapolis in 1928; where he commenced the practice of law. He served as public defender in Marion County Felony Court, 1930-1933.

In 1948 he was elected as a Democrat to the Eighty-first United States Congress (January 3, 1949-January 3, 1951). He was an unsuccessful candidate for reelection in 1950. He was a delegate to the Democratic National Conventions in 1952 and 1956. He was served as judge, criminal court of Marion County, 1975-1977, and was a resident of Indianapolis, until his death in 1992.

William Orr

William T. Orr was principally a television producer, most associated with a string of western and detective programs of the 1950s-1970s.

As the first head of Warner Brothers Television department, he forged a fruitful alliance with ABC, which resulted in ABC having a number of prime time hits, such as Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, and F Troop. At the height of this relationship in the early 1960s, Orr had nine programs in prime time simultaneously.

Of these, though, no program was more significant than one of his earliest, Cheyenne. It was a groundbreaking series that was both the first hour-long western and the first series of any kind made by a major Hollywood film studio comprised entirely of content wholly exclusive to television.

A curator at the Museum of Television and Radio once encapsulated Orr's importance to Warner Brothers by saying, "Television began as a step-child. But because of Orr, it became equal with film in creating revenue and jobs for the studio." One of the key reforms he made to effect this change was to move Warner's nascent television department from cramped quarters in New York City to Los Angeles studios separate from the film division.

His impact on the genre of western fiction was recognized with a Golden Boot Award upon the announcement of his death on 25 December 2002.

Jack MacBryan

John "Jack" Crawford William MacBryan was a cricketer who played for Cambridge University and Somerset and made one almost imperceptible appearance in a Test match for England. MacBryan was also a field hockey international and won a gold medal at the 1920 Olympic Games with the Great Britain and Ireland team.

An amateur and a right-hand batsman, MacBryan was the leading Somerset batsman in the years after the First World War and was called up for the Old Trafford Test match against the South Africans in 1924. But the match was ruined by rain and MacBryan neither batted nor bowled. His chance never came again.

He died July 14, 1983 in Cambridge.

Étienne Davignon

Viscount Étienne Davignon is a Belgian politician, businessman, and former vice-president of the European Commission.

After receiving a Doctorate of Law from the Université catholique de Louvain, Davignon joined the Belgian Foreign Ministry, in 1959, and within two years had become an attaché under Paul-Henri Spaak, then Minister of Foreign Affairs. He remained in Belgian government until 1965. In 1970, he chaired the committee of experts which produced the Davignon report on foreign policy for Europe.

Davignon later became the first head of the International Energy Agency, from 1974 to 1977, before becoming a member of the European Commission, of which he was vice-president from 1981 till 1985. From 1989 to 2001, he was chairman of the Belgian bank Société Générale de Belgique, which is now part of the French supplier Suez and was not an arm of the French bank Société Générale, but a Belgian institution. He is now Vice Chairman of Suez subsidiary, Suez-Tractebel.

As chairman of Société Générale de Belgique, he was a member of the European Round Table of Industrialists. He is the current co-chairman of the EU-Japan Business Dialogue Round Table, chairman of the Paul-Henri Spaak Foundation, president of the Royal Institute for International Relations, chairman of [CSR Europe], chairman of the European Academy of Business in Society and current chairman of the annual Bilderberg conference.

Étienne Davignon is chairman of the board of directors of Brussels Airlines, which he co-founded after the bankruptcy of Sabena. He is also member of the board of numerous Belgian companies.

On January 26, 2004, Davignon was given the honorary title of Minister of State, giving him a seat on the Crown Council.

He also is a crucial member of the Strategic Advisory Panel of The European Business Awards. He is a member of the Cercle Gaulois and a member of the Advisory Board of the Itinera Institute think-tank. He is also President of the Brussels-based think-tank Friends of Europe.

General Thomas Troy Handy

Thomas Troy Handy was a United States Army general who served as Deputy Chief of Staff, U.S. Army (DCSA) from 1944 to 1947; Commanding General, Fourth United States Army from 1947 to 1949; Commander in Chief, United States European Command (CINCEUR) from 1949 to 1952; Commander in Chief, U.S. Army Europe/Commander, Central Army Group (CINCUSAREUR/COMCENTAG), 1952; and Deputy Commander in Chief, U.S. European Command (DCINCEUR), from 1952 to 1954.

Handy was born on March 11, 1892 in Spring City, Tennessee, and attended the Virginia Military Institute, graduating in 1914. He did not receive an Army commission until two years later, in the Field Artillery. Handy deployed with the 5th Field Artillery Regiment to France in August 1917, moving to the 42nd Infantry Division in 1918, and later that year was assigned to the 151st Field Artillery Regiment. Following World War I and occupation duty in Germany he went to Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

He returned to his alma mater in 1921, serving as an instructor until 1925. After graduating from the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas he assumed duties as Executive Officer of the 3rd Field Artillery Brigade in 1928. He served in various staff assignments from 1929 to 1931 in Panama, and then returned to Fort Sill as an instructor at the United States Army Field Artillery School until 1934. His time there was followed as a student at the Army War College, and after graduating in 1935 he went to the Naval War College. His schooling was followed by assignment to the General Staff until 1940, interrupted for a year by taking command of the 78th Field Artillery Battalion at Fort Benning.


Letter from Handy to General Carl Spaatz authorizing the dropping of the first atomic bomb, July 25, 1945In December 1941 he was promoted to temporary Brigadier General, and temporary Major General in June 1942 when he became Assistant Chief-of-Staff in charge of Operations Division. In September 1944 he was promoted to temporary Lieutenant General in September 1944. In October 1944 he became Deputy Chief-of-Staff of the Army, receiving his fourth star in March 1945. In August 1945 he was acting Chief-of-Staff, due to George C. Marshall's absence, and transmitted the order for use of the atomic bomb.

Following the war, he remained Deputy Chief of Staff, and in September 1947 he assumed command of Fourth United States Army at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Two years later, in September 1949, he was Lucius D. Clay's successor as Commander-in-Chief of United States European Command. He moved down to Deputy Supreme Commander in 1952 when Matthew Ridgeway was named Supreme Allied Commander, Allied Powers. Handy retired from the Army in 1954 to Washington, D.C. and later residing in San Antonio, Texas.

He died on April 12, 1982, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Robert Bartlett

Captain Robert Abram Bartlett was a Newfoundland navigator and Arctic explorer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Born in Brigus, Newfoundland, Bartlett was the eldest of ten children born to William James Bartlett and Mary J. Leamon, and heir to a family tradition of seafaring. By the age of 17, he mastered his first ship and began a life-long love affair with the Arctic. Bartlett spent more than 50 years mapping and exploring the waters of the Far North and led over 40 expeditions to the Arctic, more than anyone before or since.

Bartlett was captain of the Roosevelt and accompanied Commander Robert Peary on his attempts to reach the North Pole. He was awarded the Hubbard Medal of the National Geographic Society for breaking the trail through the frozen Arctic Sea to within 130 miles of the pole, yet was excluded from the final exploring party (possibly due to a rivalry between the two men). Bartlett took a ship and was the first person to sail north of 88° N.

In 1914, Bartlett’s leadership in the doomed Karluk Expedition helped save the lives of most of its stranded participants after leader Vilhjalmur Stefansson abandoned the expedition. After being stranded on Wrangel Island for several months, Bartlett walked 700 miles over the ice of the Chukchi Sea and across Siberia and then mounted an expedition from Alaska to rescue his surviving companions from Wrangel Island. He received the highest award from the Royal Geographical Society for his outstanding heroism.

In 1917, Bartlett rescued the members of Donald Baxter MacMillan's ill-fated Crocker Land Expedition, who had been stuck on the ice for four years.

From 1925-1945, at the command of his own schooner, the Effie M. Morrissey, Bartlett led many important scientific expeditions to the Arctic sponsored by American museums, the Explorers Club and the National Geographic Society, and he also helped to survey the Arctic for the United States Government during World War II.

Bartlett died in a New York hospital from pneumonia and was buried in his hometown of Brigus, Newfoundland and Labrador. Hawthorne Cottage, Bartlett's place of residence in Brigus, is a National Historic Site. Author Eric Walters documented some of the aspects of his journey to find Arctic islands in the historical-fiction novel, "Trapped in Ice".

Laurence McKinley Gould

Laurence McKinley Gould was an American geologist, educator, and polar explorer.

Gould was born in Lacota, Michigan on August 22, 1896. After completing high school in South Haven, Michigan in 1914, he went to Boca Raton, Florida and taught grades 1 to 8 in a one-room school for two years, while saving money for college. He enrolled at the University of Michigan in 1916, but interrupted his education the following year to enlist in the U.S. Army following U.S. entry into World War I. He served in the Army until 1919, when he returned to the university to resume his studies.

After graduating in 1921 with a B.S. degree in geology he joined the University of Michigan faculty as a geology instructor while continuing his studies there. During his undergraduate days, he was the founder of the Beta Tau Chapter of the Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity. He also was an active member in the university Society of Les Voyageurs. He received an M.A. degree in 1923 and a D.Sc. degree in 1925, with a dissertation on the geology of Utah's La Sal Mountains, and he advanced to assistant professor in 1926, and to associate professor in 1930.

In the summer of 1926 Gould undertook his first trip to the Arctic, serving as assistant director and geologist with the University of Michigan Greenland Expedition. The following summer he was geographer and topologist for George P. Putnam's expedition to survey the coast of Baffin Island in Arctic Canada.

During 1928 to 1930 he accompanied Admiral Richard E. Byrd on Byrd's first expedition to Antarctica, serving as the expedition's chief scientist and second-in-command. On November 4, 1929 Gould and five companions began a grueling 2-1/2 month, 1500-mile dog-sledge journey into the Queen Maud Mountains, with the primary purpose of providing ground support and possible emergency assistance for Byrd's historic first airplane flight over the South Pole and a secondary purpose of conducting the first geological and glaciological survey of an area that Gould called "a veritable paradise for a geologist." After the successful flight over the Pole in November 1929, Gould and his companions climbed Mount Fridtjof Nansen to investigate its geology. The layered sandstones that Gould found in outcrops at the mountain's peak helped confirm that Antarctica was linked geologically to the Earth's other continents.

The expedition's progress had been reported regularly in the news media, and when the members of the expedition returned to the United States on July 19, 1930, they received a hero's welcome. Recognitions that Gould received upon his return included a Congressional Gold Medal, the 1930 David Livingstone Gold Medal of the American Geographical Society, and a Medal of the Mayor's Committee of the City of New York.

On August 2, 1930, two weeks after returning from Antarctica, Gould was married to Margaret ("Peg") Rice in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She had been a student in one of his classes at the University of Michigan, .

In the months and years after returning from Antarctica, Gould traveled around the country giving lectures on the experience. His 1931 book Cold: the Record of an Antarctic Sledge Journey described the dog-sledge trek, recalling blinding blizzards, snow bridges that collapsed into deep crevasses, and weather so cold that it nearly froze a person's eyelids shut. Additionally, he published several scientific articles about the findings of the Byrd expedition.

In 1932 Gould accepted a position as full professor and chairman of the geology department at Carleton College, so the Goulds moved to Minnesota. "Larry" Gould was a popular professor at Carleton and was named president of the college in 1945, holding that position until 1962. In 1963 he retired to Tucson, Arizona and taught Glaciology at the University of Arizona.

He also served as President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

General John Reed Hodge

John Reed Hodge was a military officer of the United States Army. Hodge was born in Golconda, Illinois. He entered military service as a Second Lieutenant in 1917, after completing U.S. Army Officer Candidate School. He served in World War I in France and Luxembourg.

During World War II, Hodge served in the Pacific Theater. He started his career as part of the staff of general Joseph Lawton Collins in the guadalcanal campaign. He then participated in the bouganville campaign in 1943-1944. He was promoted to General during the Philippines Campaign in 1944. In 1945 he served on Okinawa, and he was promoted to Lieutenant General in August, becoming the commander of the XXIV Corps of the US Tenth Army.

From 1945 to 1948, Hodge was the military governor of South Korea under the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK). He took his corps to Korea under orders of General MacArthur, landing at Incheon on 9 September 1945. He was the commanding officer receiving the surrender of all Japanese forces in Korea south of the 38th parallel.

Hodge then returned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina from 1948 to 1950. After the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, he was named the Commanding General of the US Third Army, based in the United States of America, and not in Korea.

General Hodge retired from military service in June 1953 and died on November 12, 1963.

John Barrymore

John Sidney Blyth Barrymore was an American actor, frequently called the greatest of his generation. He first gained fame as a stage actor, lauded for his portrayals of Hamlet and Richard III. His success continued with motion pictures in both the silent and sound eras. His distinguished features won him the nickname "The Great Profile".

Barrymore was born in the Philadelphia home of his maternal grandmother. His parents were Maurice Barrymore and his wife Georgie Drew Barrymore. His maternal grandmother was Louisa Lane Drew (aka Mrs Drew), a prominent and well-respected 19th century actress and theater manager, who instilled in him and his siblings the ways of acting and theatre life. His uncles were John Drew, Jr. and Sidney Drew.

Barrymore fondly remembered the summer of 1896 in his youth spent on his father's rambling farm on Long Island. He and Lionel lived a Robinson Crusoe-like existence, attended by a black cook named Edward. He was expelled from Georgetown Preparatory School in 1898 after being caught smoking a cigarette.

While still a teenager, he courted showgirl Evelyn Nesbit in 1901 and 1902. When Nesbit became pregnant — she aged 17 and he 19 — Barrymore proposed marriage. Her "sponsor" Stanford White intervened, however, and arranged for her to undergo an abortion, disguised as an operation for "appendicitis". White was later murdered by Nesbit's husband, Pittsburgh millionaire Harry K. Thaw.

Barrymore was staying at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco when the 1906 earthquake struck. He had starred in a production of The Dictator and was booked to tour Australia with it. Since he loathed this prospect, he hid, spending the next few days drinking at the home of a friend on Van Ness Avenue. During this drinking jag, he worked out a plan to exploit the earthquake for his own ends. He decided to present himself as an on-the-scene "reporter", making up virtually everything he claimed to have witnessed. Twenty years later, Barrymore finally confessed to his deception, but by then, he was so famous that the world merely smiled indulgently at his admission." His account was written as a "letter to my sister Ethel". He was sure the letter would be "worth at least a hundred dollars." In terms of publicity it earned Barrymore a thousand times that amount.

Barrymore was also great friends and a drinking buddy with baseball legend Mike Donlin. Donlin eventually appeared in two of Barrymore's silent movies, Raffles The Amateur Cracksman and The Sea Beast.

Barrymore delivered some of the most critically acclaimed performances in theatre and film history and was widely regarded as the screen's greatest performer during a movie career spanning 25 years as a leading man in more than 60 films.

Barrymore specialized in light comedies until convinced by his friend, playwright Edward Sheldon, to try serious drama. Thereafter Barrymore created a sensation in John Galsworthy's Justice (1916) co-starring Cathleen Nesbitt. He followed this triumph with Broadway successes in Peter Ibbetson (1917), a role his father Maurice had wanted to play, Tolstoy's Redemption(1918) and The Jest (1919), co-starring his brother Lionel, reaching what seemed to be the zenith of his stage career as Richard III in 1920. Barrymore suffered a conspicuous failure in his wife Michael Strange's play Clair de Lune (1921), but followed it with the greatest success of his theatrical career with Hamlet in 1922, which he played on Broadway for 101 performances and then took to London in 1925.

Barrymore entered films around 1913 with the feature An American Citizen. He or someone using the name Jack Barrymore is given credit for four short films made in 1912 and 1913 but this has not been proven to be John Barrymore. Barrymore was most likely convinced into giving films a try out of economic necessity and the fact that he hated touring a play all over the United States. He could make a couple of movies in the off season theater months or shoot a film in one part of the day while doing a play in another part of the same day. He also may have been goaded into films by his brother Lionel and his uncle Sidney, who had both been successfully making movies for a couple of years. Some of Barrymore's silent film roles included A.J. Raffles in Raffles the Amateur Cracksman (1917), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), Sherlock Holmes (1922), Beau Brummel (1924), Captain Ahab in The Sea Beast (1926), and Don Juan (1926). When talking pictures arrived, Barrymore's stage-trained voice added a new dimension to his screen work. He made his talkie debut with a dramatic reading from Henry VI in Warner Brothers' musical revue The Show of Shows, and reprised his Captain Ahab role in Moby Dick (1930). His other leads included The Man from Blankley's (1930), Svengali (1931), The Mad Genius (1931), Grand Hotel (1932) (in which he displays an affectionate chemistry with his brother Lionel), Dinner at Eight (1933), Topaze (1933) and Twentieth Century (1934). He worked opposite many of the screen's foremost leading ladies, including Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford, and Carole Lombard. In 1933, Barrymore appeared as a Jewish attorney in the title role of Counsellor-at-Law based on Elmer Rice's 1931 play. As critic Pauline Kael later wrote, he "seems an unlikely choice for the ghetto-born lawyer...but this is one of the few screen roles that reveal his measure as an actor. His 'presence' is apparent in every scene; so are his restraint, his humor, and his zest."

Barrymore suffered a relapse on his boat, The Mariner, in 1929 off the coast of Mexico while on honeymoon with wife Dolores. This entailed a quick trip to shore by his crew and admittance into doctor's care. Much of his newly occurring health problems most likely stemmed from his consumption of bad and sometimes nearly poisonous illegal alcohol during the period of Prohibition in the United States. In the late 1930s, alcoholism, or perhaps an early onset of Alzheimer's Disease, encroached on his ability to remember his lines, and his diminished abilities were apparent in a surviving screen test that he made for an aborted film version of Hamlet in 1934. From then on, he insisted on reading his dialogue from cue cards. He continued to give creditable performances in lesser pictures, for example as Inspector Nielson in some of Paramount Pictures' Bulldog Drummond mysteries, and offered one last bravura dramatic turn in RKO's 1939 feature The Great Man Votes. After that, his remaining screen roles were broad caricatures of himself, as in The Great Profile (with "Oh, Johnny, How You Can Love" as his theme music) and World Premiere. In the otherwise undistinguished Playmates with band leader Kay Kyser, Barrymore recited the "To Be, or Not to Be" soliloquy from Hamlet. In 1937, Barrymore visited India, the land where his father had been born. In his private life, during his last years, he was married to his fourth and last wife, Elaine Barrie, a union that turned out to be disastrous. His brother Lionel tried to help him find a small place near Lionel's house and to convince him to stay away from impetuous marriages, which usually ended in divorce and put a strain on his once large income.

He was known for calling people by nicknames of his own creation. Dolores Costello was known in his writing alternately as "Small Cat," "Catkiwee," "Winkie", and "Egg." He called Lionel "Mike", and Ethel called John "Jake". He was fond of sailing, and owned his own yacht, The Mariner.

Barrymore collapsed while appearing on Rudy Vallee's radio show and died some days later in his hospital room.

Richard Eberhart

Richard Ghormley Eberhart was an American poet who published more than a dozen books of poetry and approximately twenty works in total. He received the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Selected Poems: 1930-1965 and a National Book Award in 1977 for Collected Poems: 1930-1976.

Eberhart was born in 1904 in Austin, a small town in southeast Minnesota. He grew up on a 40 acres (16 ha) estate called Burr Oaks, since partitioned into hundreds of residential lots. He published a volume of poetry called Burr Oaks in 1947, and many of his poems reflect his youth in rural America.

Eberhart began college at the University of Minnesota, but following his mother's death from cancer in 1921 -- the event that prompted him to begin writing poetry -- he transferred to Dartmouth College. After graduation he worked as a ship's hand, among other jobs, then studied at St. John's College, Cambridge, where I.A. Richards encouraged him to continue writing poetry, and where he took a further degree. After serving as private tutor to the son of King Prajadhipok of Siam in 1931-1932, Eberhart pursued graduate study for a year at Harvard University.

His first book of poetry A Bravery of Earth was published in London in 1930. It reflected his experiences in Cambridge and his experience as a ship's hand. Reading the Spirit published in 1937 contains one of his best known poems "The Groundhog".

He taught for eight years at the St. Mark's School (1933-1941), where Robert Lowell was one of his students. In 1941 he married Helen Butcher. They had two children.

During World War II he served in the U.S. Naval Reserve; this experience led him to write, in one of his best-known poems, "The Fury of Aerial Bombardment":

Was man made stupid to see his own stupidity?
Is God by definition indifferent, beyond us all?
Is the eternal truth man's fighting soul
Wherein the Beast ravens in its own avidity?

In 1945, Eberhart published Poems: New and Selected containing "The Fury of Aerial Bombardment" and other poems written during his service including "Dam Neck, Virginia" and "World War". He also edited War and the Poet: An Anthology of Poetry Expressing Man's Reactions to the Present claiming to be the first collection of poems based on war.

After the war, Eberhart worked for six years for his wife's family's floor wax company, the Butcher Polish Company. Burr Oaks was his first work published after the war in 1947 followed by Brotherhood of Men in 1949. In 1950 he was a founder of the Poets' Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

From the early 1950s until his retirement he dedicated himself to writing poems and teaching at institutions of higher education, including the University of Washington, Brown University, Swarthmore College, Tufts University, Trinity College, University of Connecticut, Columbia University, University of Cincinnati, Wheaton College, Princeton University and Dartmouth College. He taught for 30 years at Dartmouth as professor of English and poet-in-residence, where he was known for his encouragement of young poets.

Eberhart published Undercliff: Poems 1946-1953 containing Fragment of New York in 1953. Eberhart wrote a number of dramatic works in the 1950s and early 1960s which were performed regionally. These works included The Apparition, The Visionary Farms, Triptych, The Mad Musicians and Devils and Angels. In 1962, these works were published as Collected Verse Works.

Eberhart was sent to San Francisco by The New York Times to report on the Beat poetry scene. Eberhart wrote a piece published in the September 2, 1956 New York Times Book Review entitled "West Coast Rhythms" that helped call national attention to the Beat generation, and especially to Allen Ginsberg as the author of Howl, which he called "the most remarkable poem of the young group" (Allen Ginsberg, Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Editions, Fully Annotated by Author, with Contemporaneous Correspondence, Account of First Public Reading, Legal Skirmishes, Precursor Texts & Bibliography, edited by Barry Miles, p. 155).

President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Eberhart as a member of the Advisory Committee on the Arts for the National Cultural Centre in 1959. As well, Eberhart was Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress for 1959-61, and was awarded a Bollingen Prize in 1962.

The Quarry: New Poems published in 1964 contained letters in verse to W. H. Auden and William Carlos Williams as well as elegies, lyrics, character sketches, and monologues. His Selected Poems, 1930–1965 (1965) won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Collected Poems, 1930–1976, which appeared in 1976, won the National Book Award in 1977. He was New Hampshire's Poet Laureate from 1979 to 1984, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1982. Eberhart has also won the Shelley Memorial Award, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Award, and the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. He died June 5, 2005 at the age of 101.

Gustav Temple

Gustav Temple is the editor of The Chap magazine and co-author (with Vic Darkwood) of The Chap Manifesto, The Chap Almanac, Around the World in 80 Martinis and The Best of The Chap.

General Ira Eaker

General Ira Clarence Eaker was a general of the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. Eaker, as second-in-command of the prospective Eighth Air Force, was sent to England to form and organize its bomber command. However while he struggled to build up airpower in England, the organization of the Army Air Forces kept evolving and he was named commander of the Eighth Air Force on December 1, 1942.

Although his background was in single-engine fighter aircraft, Eaker became the architect of a strategic bombing force that ultimately numbered forty groups of 60 heavy bombers each, supported by a subordinate fighter command of 1,500 aircraft, most of which was in place by the time he relinquished command at the start of 1944.

Eaker then took overall command of four Allied air forces based in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations, and by the end of World War II had been named deputy commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces. He worked in the aerospace industry following his retirement from the military, and then became a newspaper columnist.

Eaker was born in Field Creek, Texas, in 1896, the son of a tenant farmer. He attended Southeastern State Teachers College in Durant, Oklahoma, and then joined the US Army in 1917.

He was appointed a second lieutenant of Infantry, Officer's Reserve Corps, and assigned to active duty with the 64th Infantry Regiment at Camp Bliss, El Paso, Texas. The 64th Infantry was assigned to the 14th Infantry Brigade on December 20, 1917, to be part of the 7th Infantry Division when it deployed to France.

On November 15, 1917, Eaker received a commission in the Regular Army. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from the University of Southern California in 1934.

Eaker remained with the 64th Infantry until March 1918, when he was placed on detached service to receive flying instruction at Austin and Kelly Fields in Texas. Upon graduation the following October, he was rated a pilot and assigned to Rockwell Field, California.

In July 1919, he transferred to the Philippine Islands, where he served with the 2d Aero Squadron at Fort Mills until September 1919; with the 3rd Aero Squadron at Camp Stotsenburg until September 1920, and as executive officer of the Department Air Office, Department and Assistant Department Air Officer, Philippine Department, and in command of the Philippine Air Depot at Manila until September 1921.

Meanwhile, on July 1, 1920, he transferred from the Infantry to the Air Service and returned to the United States in January 1922, for duty at Mitchel Field, N.Y., where he commanded the 5th Aero Squadron and later was post adjutant.

In June 1924, Eaker was named executive assistant in the Office of Air Service at Washington, D.C., and from December 1926, to May 1927, he served as a pilot of one of the planes of the Pan American Flight which made a goodwill trip around South America and, with the others, was awarded the Mackay Trophy. He then became executive officer in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of War at Washington, D.C.

In September 1926, he was named operations and line maintenance officer at Bolling Field, Washington, D.C. While on that duty, he participated as chief pilot on the endurance flight of the Army plane, Question Mark, from 1 to 7 January 1929, establishing a new world flight endurance record. For this achievement the entire crew of five, including Eaker and mission commander Carl Spaatz, were awarded the DFC. In 1930, he made the first transcontinental flight entirely with instruments.

In October 1934, Eaker was ordered to duty at March Field, Calif., where he commanded the 34th Pursuit Squadron and later the 17th Pursuit Squadron. In the summer of 1935, he was detached for duty with the Navy and participated aboard the aircraft carrier USS Lexington, on maneuvers in Hawaii and Guam.

Eaker entered the Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field, Ala., in August 1935, and upon graduation the following June entered the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., from which he graduated in June 1937. He then became assistant chief of the Information Division in the Office of the Chief of Air Corps at Washington, D.C., during which he helped plan and publicize the interception of the Italian liner Rex at sea. In November 1940, Eaker was given command of the 20th Pursuit Group at Hamilton Field, California.

Promoted to brigadier general in January 1942, he was assigned to organize the VIII Bomber Command (which became the Eighth Air Force) in England and to understudy the British system of bomber operations; then in December 1942, he assumed command of the Eighth Air Force. A speech he gave the English, and which won him favorable publicity, was,“We won’t do much talking until we’ve done more fighting. After we’ve gone, we hope you’ll be glad we came.”

Eaker drew much of his initial staff, including Captain Frederick W. Castle, Capt. Beirne Lay, Jr., and Lt. Harris Hull, from former civilians rather than career military officers, and the group became known as "Eaker's Amateurs". Eaker's position as commander of the Eighth Air Force led to his becoming the model for General Pat Pritchard in the 1949 movie Twelve O'Clock High.

Throughout the war, Eaker was an advocate for daylight "precision" bombing of military and industrial targets in German-occupied territory and ultimately Germany — of striking at the enemy's ability to wage war while minimizing civilian casualties. The British considered daylight bombing too risky, and wanted the Americans to join them in night raids that would target wider areas, but Eaker persuaded a skeptical Winston Churchill that the American and British approaches complemented each other in a one-page memo that concluded, "If the R.A.F. continues night bombing and we bomb by day, we shall bomb them round the clock and the devil shall get no rest." He personally participated in the first US B-17 Flying Fortress bomber strike against German occupation forces in France, bombing Rouen on August 17, 1942.

Eaker was promoted to lieutenant general in September 1943. However, as American bomber losses mounted from German defensive fighter aircraft attacks on deep penetration missions beyond the range of available fighter cover, Eaker may have lost some of the confidence of USAAF Commanding General Henry Arnold. When General Dwight D. Eisenhower was named Supreme Allied Commander in December, 1943, he proposed to use his existing team of subordinate commanders in key positions, including Lt. Gen. James Doolittle. Doolittle was named Eighth Air Force Commander, and Arnold concurred with the change.

Eaker was re-assigned as Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces, having under his command the Twelfth and Fifteenth Air Forces and the British Desert and Balkan Air Forces. He did not approve of the plan to bomb Monte Cassino in February 1944, considering it a dubious military target, but ultimately "signed off" and gave in to pressure from ground commanders; historians of the era now generally believe Eaker's skepticism was correct and that the ancient abbey at Monte Cassino could have been preserved without jeopardizing the allied advance through Italy.

On April 30, 1945, General Eaker was named deputy commander of the Army Air Forces and chief of the Air Staff. He retired August 31, 1947, and was promoted to lieutenant general in the United States Air Force on the retired list June 29, 1948.

Almost 40 years after his retirement, Congress passed special legislation awarding four-star status to General Eaker, prompted by Senator Barry Goldwater and endorsed by President Ronald Reagan. On 26 April 1985, Chief of Staff General Charles A. Gabriel and Ruth Eaker, the general's wife, pinned on his fourth star.

On 10 October 1978, President Jimmy Carter, authorized by act of Congress, awarded in the name of the congress, a special Congressional Gold Medal to General Eaker, for contributing immeasurably to the development of aviation and to the security of his country.

Eaker died 6 August 1987 at Malcolm Grow Medical Center, Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Edwin D. Etherington

Edwin D. Etherington was born on December 25, 1924. He graduated from Wesleyan in 1948 after serving in the U.S. Army during World War II and then received a law degree from Yale University. In 1962, he was chosen as the chief executive of the American Stock Exchange, the youngest person ever to be so elected.

When he was named president of Wesleyan during a tumultuous time in United States history, he sought to bring changes to the university. He re-established coeducation, directed that enrollment of students of color be increased, and began a major revision of the curriculum. Etherington led the drive to create the Center for African American Studies, oversaw the building of the distinctive Center for the Arts, and established a scholarship program for Connecticut community college graduates, the Etherington Community College Scholarship Program, which offers outstanding students from Connecticut community colleges a chance to attend Wesleyan.

Etherington believed that students were your best hope for a correction of the imbalances and distortions of a complicated world and acted accordingly. He tried to balance the issues of the day, many of which concerned student unrest over the Vietnam War, with academic priorities.

Resigning in February 1970 to become a Republican candidate for the United States Senate from Connecticut, Etherington was unsuccessful in this endeavor. He later became chairman of the Center for Voluntary Action in Washington, D.C., and then of the National Advertising Review Board. A director of several companies, he died on January 8, 2001.

Benoit Frachon

Benoît Frachon was a trade unionist French related on the French Communist party and the French interior Résistance.

It was born on May 13rd, 1893 with the Chambon-Feugerolles, close to Saint-Etienne in a family of minors, metal-worker at the 13 years age, it adheres to the CGT as of its 16 years.

Engaged in a libertarian small group since 1909, Benoît Frachon takes part in some demonstrations of direct action. Its first strike, it saw it in 1910, in Chambon. It is very hard (more than one month), gives place to confrontations with the army (the cavalry charges “saber with light” the strikers), turns to the popular strike (the women of the strikers take part, but also, to a certain extent, the population of Saint-Etienne). He assiduously attends the Maison of the people of Chambon: it learns there and is impregnated there working culture.

The shortly after the First World War, it adheres to the French Communist party which has been just based with Tours in 1920. Directing great strike of the metallurgists of Saint-Etienne of 1924, Frachon is affirmed and become permanent secretary of the departmental union of CGTU. Starting from 1928, Frachon reaches higher responsibilities. In agreement with the orientations of the direction of the International Communist, it takes part in meetings with Moscow and enters to the political office of the PCF: Frachon is the prototype of this generation of Communist leaders which knows a very fast promotion (3 years in fact).

With the beginning of the year 1930, Frachon is in the middle of the line which triumphs in French Communism, made fold of the sectarian tendency and research of the unit at the base with the workmen and not with the socialist directors or trade unionists “confederated” (invited thus to differentiate them from unit from the CGTU). Whereas develop in France the first effects of the Crise of 1929, Communism and the trade unionism at will revolutionary see their audience narrowing. Frachon, like much of militants, undergoes the consequences of governmental repression, knows the prison of Health.

As of 1931, it is carrying analyzes then new on the trade union movement, drawing the attention to the need for sticking to the small claims of the workers. He becomes the spokesperson convinced of the fight for the Trade-union unit, under the banner of the CGTU, on the basis of defense of the Revendication S and the interests of the Working class. Frachon wants to gain the working masses: for that it is initially necessary to deal with working reality, to carry out the single face of exploited, to refuse to make “make the round the world tour with proletarians whose dominant concern is the increase in their wages” .

Starting from 1933, become secretary of the CGTU, Frachon is located in the middle of a unit strategy which seeks not only the bringing together with the workmen confederated and socialist, but also with their leaders.

Leader of foreground of the CGT after the trade-union reunification of 1935, Frachon takes part in meeting CGT/CGPF (employers) of the June 6th 1936 with the Matignon hotel. He is 15:00 when the negotiations begin. The power struggle is such as those do not last for ever: with 1:00 of the morning, the agreements of Matignon are signed.

The signature of the Pacte germano-Soviet the August 23rd 1939 puts definitively fine at the trade-union unit: the Communists of CGT are summoned to repudiate the pact and Frachon, although being pronounced in the working Life for a national defense antifascist, is deposed of his mandate.
In the Resistance, Benoît Frachon will be one of the principal leaders of PCF clandestine, more especially in charge of the union action.

Frachon takes an active part in the development of the claiming platform proposed in confederated in 1943 which leads the April 17th to the reunification of CGT. Until the Release, the essence of the trade-union activity, the great directives of action, are the fact of unit under the direction of Frachon: it is in clandestinity that those conquer the majority of the CGT and, Frachon, the authority to become one of the general secretaries about it.

August 22nd, 1944, it signs in Humanity a call to the weapons with the metal-workers Parisian.


September 10th, 1944, Frachon states the great tasks of CGT: to complete the war victoriously, to rebuild the economy. It launches the battle of the production and connects it to satisfaction working claims.
After the war, he will be elected general secretary of the CGT the September 5th 1945, responsibility which he shares with Leon Jouhaux. He is then the leading uncontested one of CGT, then with the ridge of his power.

He withdraws himself gradually as from 1967, when he becomes president of CGT, but he is the only survivor of 1936 to be taken part in the negotiations of Grenelle, even if he is not then any more general secretary of CGT.

He belongs to the political office of the French Communist party of 1956 with his death. He also takes part in the leading authorities of the Mouvement of peace.

He died the 1975.

Alger Hiss

Alger Hiss was a U.S. State Department official involved in the establishment of the United Nations. He was accused of being a Soviet spy in 1948 and convicted of perjury in connection with this charge in 1950.

On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist Party member, testified under subpoena before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) that Hiss had secretly been a Communist while in federal service, despite the fact that Chambers had previously testified under oath that Hiss had never been a Communist. Called before HUAC, Hiss categorically denied the charge. When Chambers repeated his claim in a radio interview, Hiss filed a defamation lawsuit against him.

During the pretrial discovery process, Chambers produced new evidence indicating that he and Hiss had been involved in espionage, which each had denied under oath to HUAC. A federal grand jury indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury; Chambers admitted to the same offense, but as a cooperating government witness he was never charged. Although Hiss's indictment stemmed from the alleged espionage, he could not be tried for that crime because the statute of limitations had expired.

After a mistrial due to a hung jury, Hiss was tried a second time. In January 1950, he was found guilty on both counts of perjury and received two concurrent five-year sentences, of which he eventually served 44 months.

Hiss was born in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, to Mary Lavinia Hughes and Charles Alger Hiss. His early life was repeatedly marred by tragedy. His father committed suicide when Alger was two years old, his elder brother Bosley died of Bright's disease when Alger was twenty-two, and he lost his sister Mary Ann to suicide when he was twenty-five. His father had been a middle class wholesale grocer, and after his death, Mary Hiss relied largely on family members for financial support in raising her five children. The Hiss family lived in a Baltimore neighborhood that was described as one of "shabby gentility."

Hiss was educated at Baltimore City College (high school) and Johns Hopkins University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and was voted "most popular student" by his classmates. In 1929, he received his law degree from Harvard Law School, where he was a protégé of Felix Frankfurter, the future U.S. Supreme Court justice. Before joining a Boston law firm, he served for a year as clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. That same year, Hiss married Priscilla Fansler Hobson (1903–1987), a Bryn Mawr graduate who would later work as a grade school English teacher. Priscilla, previously married to Thayer Hobson, had a three-month-old son, Timothy.

In 1933, Hiss entered government service, working in several areas as an attorney in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, starting with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). Hiss worked for the Nye Committee, which investigated and documented wartime profiteering by military contractors during World War I, and served briefly in the Justice Department.

Both Alger Hiss and his younger brother, Donald Hiss, began working in the United States Department of State in 1936. Alger served as assistant to Francis B. Sayre, a son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson, and later became special assistant to the Director of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs and in 1944 became a special assistant to the Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs (OSPA), a policy-making office that concentrated on postwar planning for international organization. He later became the director of OSPA, and, as such, he was executive secretary at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, which finalized plans for the organization that would become the United Nations.

In 1945, Hiss was a member of the U.S. delegation to the wartime Yalta Conference, where the 'Big Three' (Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill) met to coordinate strategy to defeat Hitler, draw the map of postwar Europe and continue with plans to set up the United Nations. Hiss's role at Yalta was limited to work on the United Nations. Hiss led the opposition to Stalin's proposal for 16 Soviet votes in the UN General Assembly. In the final compromise, the Big Three decided to give Stalin three votes in the General Assembly: Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (then known as Byelorussia, or White Russia).

Hiss served as the secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on International Organization (the United Nations Charter Conference) in San Francisco in 1945. He later became the full Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs. Hiss left government service in 1946 and became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he served until May 5, 1949.

In 1988 Hiss wrote an autobiography, Recollections of a Life. Hiss maintained his innocence and fought his perjury conviction until his death at age 92 on November 15, 1996 at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City of emphysema.

Leo Pasvolsky

Leo Pasvolsky was a journalist, economist, state department official and personal assistant to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. He was one of the United States government's main planners for the post World War II world, and most notably, he was the "probably the foremost author of the UN Charter."The title of his New York Times obituary states "Wrote Charter of World Organization." A short, rotund, mustachioed pipe smoker with a very large and round head, he joked he might find it easier to roll than to walk. An aide compared him to the third little pig in the Three Little Pigs, Hull called him "Friar Tuck." A hardworking "one-man think tank" for Hull, he preferred to stay invisible, in the background. In the words of Richard Holbrooke, he " was one of those figures peculiar to Washington -- a tenacious bureaucrat who, fixed on a single goal, left behind a huge legacy while virtually disappearing from history."

Pasvolsky was born in Pavlograd in the Russian Empire in 1893. His parents were anti-czarists and the family fled to the United States in 1905. After graduating from the City College of New York in 1916[4] he studied political science at Columbia University and also attended the University of Geneva. He then edited two periodicals, the monthly The Russian Review and Amerikansky Viestnik. Engaged in the tempestuous political climate of the emigres in New York, he debated Leon Trotsky during his visit to New York in 1916. He was at first optimistic about the Russian Revolution, but became embittered and anti-communist after Lenin's October Revolution.

In 1919 he covered the Paris Peace Conference for the New York Tribune, the Brooklyn Eagle and other newspapers, and in 1921 he covered the Washington Arms Conference for the Baltimore Sun. During this period he became a Wilsonian internationalist and softened his stance toward the Soviet Union, arguing for its recognition by the US and its admittance into the League of Nations.

In 1922 he became an economist on the staff of the Brookings Institution, from which he received a Ph. D. in 1936, and which was his institutional base until his death in 1953. In November 1926, he married Clara Christine McCormick of Pittsburgh. Early in the first Roosevelt administration, he was hired by Cordell Hull as his personal assistant but returned to Brookings after two years. Later he worked in the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce of the Department of Commerce (1934-35) and in the Division of Trade Agreements 1935-36 and later in various capacities in the State Department from 1935 to 1946. During the 30s and 40s, frequently with Harold G. Moulton,. his closest ally and collaborator since the 1920's at Brookings, he envisioned a stable, open world economy based on international political cooperation involving a successor to the League of Nations, wider than an alliance of democracies, and with international police powers. Earlier Brookings studies of the 20s and 30s focused on the importance of worldwide demand to the American economy, but by 1941 Paslovsky and Moulton underscored the ever growing dependence of the American economy on foreign raw materials binding the US more tightly to the world economy. "Even before America entered the war, Pasvolsky was thinking about the postwar world. He joined the Council on Foreign Relations in 1938. Along with Norman Davis, Pasvolsky, nicknamed "Pazzy" by some council members, became the main liaison between the Council and the State Department, and regularly attended the Council's Economic and Financial Group meetings in New York.

As Hull's assistant, he was on the same level as the six assistant secretaries of state.

In September 1939, Hull assigned Pasvolsky to planning for the postwar peace, and at Pasvolsky's suggestion, set up theAdvisory Committee on Problems of Foreign Relations. After this became moribund, Hull appointed Pasvolsky the first director of the State Department's new Division of Special Research in February, 1941. When this was split in January 1943 into a Division of Political Studies and a Division of Economic Studies, Pasvolsky continued to supervise them. He was executive officer of the secretive Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy, which superseded the Division, returning to the broadly based Advisory Committee concept, The work of this committee led to the drafting of an outline for a "preliminary UN" by Undersecretary Sumner Welles, based on the design of the League of Nations. Pasvolsky and Hull eventually opposed Welles' draft as being too hastily written. The major split was over whether the organization would have a "regional" nature, perhaps with local councils, in which each great power would have most of the responsiblity for its region, or would have more centralized structure. Welles, as well as Winston Churchill (and later, Nelson Rockefeller) favored "regionalism," while Pasvolsky and Hull favored a unitary global body. Roosevelt wavered between the two sides.

Throughout 1942, Welles took the lead on planning for the UN and in January 1943 discussed a new and full draft charter with Roosevelt. It incorporated Roosevelt's four power "global policemen" but gave them less than absolute veto powers on an Executive Council with "regional" members too. Welles continued to work on the draft, but after a period of political infighting with Hull, he was forced to resign in August 1943. Subsequently Hull took charge of UN planning, and appointed Pasvolsky to put together a draft charter, which he produced in August. It retained the Security Council, General Assembly and Secretariat, which Welles and Pasvolsky had agreed on, but downplayed regionalism. With the absence of Welles or any other figure with comparable influence, interest and expertise Pasvolsky's ideas and phrasing dominated the drafting henceforward. Before Hull departed for the Moscow Conference (1943), Pasvolsky advised him that economic reconstruction, especially in the USSR, should be a prioritized, while Bowman insisted on territorial agreements restricting Soviet expansion. By February 3, 1944, Roosevelt had approved Pasvolsky's latest draft. It incorporated two major departures. Unlike the League of Nations, it entrusted security matters exclusively to the Security Council. However, it widened the Security Council into an 11 member entity, reducing the dominance of the four big powers that Roosevelt had long envisioned.

Another important innovation at Dumbarton Oaks was the Economic and Social Council. Pasvolsky and Stettinius managed to persuade Roosevelt to drop his idea of adding Brazil as a sixth member of the Security Council. Pasvolsky managed to persuade Hull and eventually the Russians to limit the veto to substantive matters only - not allowing it on procedural ones including discussions.

Thomas Connally said in his memoirs "Certainly he had more to do with writing the framework of the charter than anyone else."

In 1943 Pasvolsky was placed in charge of International Organization and Security Affairs in the State Department with responsibility for drafting the United Nations Charter; he was present at Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks. He became chairman of the Coordination Committee at the San Francisco United Nations Conference on International Organization, where the charter was negotiated and signed. Secretary Hull depended heavily on Pasvolsky to explain the plans and proposals for the UN to President Roosevelt. It is striking how close a resemblance Pasvolsky's statement of objectives for the new international organization bears to the positions he had taken with Moulton throughout the previous decade.

He resigned from the State Department in March 1946. In 1946–53 he was director of international studies at the Brookings Institution, and a the time of his death, he was working on a study of the origin and history of the United Nations. He died of a heart attack on May 5, 1953 in Washington, DC.

J.R. Steelman

John Roy Steelman was the first Assistant to the President of the United States, serving President Harry S. Truman from 1946 to 1953. The office later became the White House Chief of Staff.

He was the most recent White House Chief of Staff to serve the full term of a president. He also holds the record for the longest term as Chief of Staff at six years.

Steelman attended Henderson Brown College in Arkadelphia, Arkansas and graduated in 1922. He later went to Vanderbilt University, (MA 1924) and University of North Carolina (Ph.D. 1928). He was Professor of Sociology and Economics in Alabama College in Montevallo, Alabama from 1928-1934.

Before joining the White House, Steelman served as:

Commissioner of Conciliation, U.S. Conciliation Service, Department of Labor 1934-36
Special Assistant to the Secretary of Labor 1936-1937
Director, U.S. Conciliation Service, Department of Labor 1937-1944
Special Assistant to the President, 1945-1946
Director, Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, 1946
Chairman, President's Scientific Research Board, 1946-1947
Assistant to the President, 1946-1953
Acting Chairman, National Security Resources Board, 1948-1950
Acting Director, Office of Defense Mobilization, 1952
After leaving the White House, Steelman became an Industrial Relations Consultant in Washington, D.C. from 1953-1968. From 1955 to 1969 he served in a variety of corporate roles:

President of the Montgomery Publishing Company
Chairman of the Board of the Record Publishing Company
Publisher of newspapers in Bethesda, Silver Spring, and Rockville, Maryland
He died in 1999 in Florida.

Roy Wilkins

Roy Wilkins was a prominent civil rights activist in the United States from the 1930s to the 1970s. Wilkins was active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and between 1931 and 1934 was assistant NAACP secretary under Walter Francis White. When W. E. B. Du Bois left the organization in 1934, Wilkins replaced him as editor of Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Roy Wilkins on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

In 1955, Roy Wilkins was chosen to be the executive secretary of the NAACP; in 1964 he became the executive director. At the age of 76, he retired. Wilkins was a staunch liberal and proponent of American values during the Cold War, and denounced suspected and actual Communists within the civil rights movement. He has been criticized by some on the left of the civil rights movement for his cautious approach, suspicion of grassroots organization, and conciliatory attitude towards white anticommunism, which was significantly detrimental to the post-war civil rights movement.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Wilkins graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in sociology in 1923. He worked as a journalist at The Minnesota Daily and became editor of St. Paul Appeal, an African-American newspaper. After he graduated he became the editor of the Kansas City Call. In 1929 he married social worker Aminda "Minnie" Badeau; the couple had no children. In 1950, Wilkins—along with A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Arnold Aronson, a leader of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council—founded the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR). LCCR has become the premier civil rights coalition, and has coordinated the national legislative campaign on behalf of every major civil rights law since 1957.

Roy Wilkins as the Executive Secretary of the NAACP in 1963In 1955, Wilkins was named executive secretary (the title was later changed to executive director in 1964) of the NAACP. He had an excellent reputation as an articulate spokesperson for the civil rights movement. One of his first actions was to provide support to civil rights activists in Mississippi who were being subject to a "credit squeeze" by members of the White Citizens Councils.

Wilkins backed a proposal suggested by Dr. T.R.M. Howard of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, who headed the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, a leading civil rights organization in the state. Under the plan, black businesses and voluntary associations shifted their accounts to the black-owned Tri-State Bank of Memphis, Tennessee. By the end of 1955, about $280,000 had been deposited in Tri-State for this purpose. The money enabled Tri-State to extend loans to credit-worthy blacks who were denied loans by white banks.

Wilkins participated in the March on Washington (1963), the Selma to Montgomery marches (1965), and the March Against Fear (1966).

He believed in achieving reform by legislative means; he testified before many Congressional hearings and conferred with Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Wilkins strongly opposed militancy in the movement for civil rights as represented by the "black power" movement.

Wilkins was also a member of Omega Psi Phi, a fraternity with a civil rights focus, and one of the intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternities established for African Americans.

In 1967, Wilkins was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Lyndon Johnson. During his tenure, the NAACP played a pivotal role in leading the nation into the Civil Rights movement and spearheaded the efforts that led to significant civil rights victories, including Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In 1977, at the age of 76, Wilkins retired from the NAACP and was succeeded by Benjamin Hooks. Wilkins died September 9, 1981.

Klement Gottwald

Klement Gottwald was a Czechoslovakian Communist politician, longtime leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, prime minister and president of Czechoslovakia.

His first career was as a cabinet maker. Subsequently, he was (1921) one of the founders of the KSČ, 1921-1926 newspaper editor and KSČ functionary in Slovakia, since 1925 member of the KSČ Central Committee, 1926 - 1929 the leader of the Central Political and Propaganda Committee of the KSČ Central Committee, 1929 - 1948 member of the parliament, 1929 - 1945 Secretary-General of the KSČ, 1935 - 1943 a secretary of the Comintern, 1939 - 1945 one of the leaders of Communist resistance (in Moscow), 1945 - 1953 chairman of the KSČ, 1945 - 1946 Vice Premier, 1946 - 1948 Prime Minister of the Czechoslovak government, 1948 - 1953 President of Czechoslovakia.

In March 1945, Edvard Beneš, who had been elected President of Czechoslovakia 1935-38 and who had been head of the Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile in London since 1941, agreed to form a National Front government with Gottwald. Elected to the first Czech post-war government following the 1946 election, Gottwald became Premier of Czechoslovakia.

In May 1946 Klement Gottwald, leader of the communist party, managed to win the elections with an astonishing success: 38% of the votes. This has been the widest electoral success of the communist party ever recorded in a free election.

On 9 May, 1948, after the February coup d'état, parliament (the National Assembly) passed a new constitution (the Ninth-of-May Constitution). President Beneš refused to sign the new legislation and he resigned on 7 June, 1948 (he died three months later). On June 14, the National Assembly elected Klement Gottwald as the new President of Czechoslovakia.

Klement Gottwald on a 100 Kčs banknote released right before the Velvet Revolution in 1989A Stalinist, he nationalized the country's industry and collectivised its farms. There was considerable resistance within the government to Russian influence on Czechoslovak politics and Gottwald instigated a series of purges, first to remove non-communists, later to remove some communists as well. Prominent Communists who became victims of these purges and were defendants in the Prague Trials included Rudolf Slánský, the party's general secretary, Vlado Clementis (the Foreign Minister) and Gustáv Husák (the leader of an administrative body responsible for Slovakia), who was dismissed from office for "bourgeois nationalism". Clementis was executed in December 1952 and hundreds of other government officials were sent to prison. Husák was rehabilitated in 1960s and became Czechoslovak president in 1975.

In the famous photograph from 21st of February 1948, described also in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera, Vladimír Clementis stands next to Klement Gottwald. When Vladimír Clementis was charged in 1950, he was erased from the photograph (along with the photographer Karel Hájek) by the state propaganda.

Gottwald died in 1953, just five days after attending Stalin's funeral in Moscow on 9th of March, due to a burst artery brought about by prolonged heart disease, heavily affected by syphilis and strong alcoholism. In 1953, a mausoleum was initially erected for Gottwald at the site of Jan Žižka monument in the district of Žižkov, Prague. However in 1962 the body was removed and cremated at the behest of his family. He was succeeded by Antonín Zápotocký, the Premier of Czechoslovakia from 1948 - 1953.

Harold Taylor

Harold Taylor, Philosopher of education, college president, and social activist, Harold Taylor was a recognized spokesperson for Progressive education at the postsecondary level. Taylor was born in Toronto and, upon completion of the B.A. and M.A. degrees at the University of Toronto, received a fellowship to study philosophy at Cambridge University. Shortly after his arrival he questioned the social significance of analytical philosophy and, ultimately, transferred to a doctoral program at University of London. Upon completion of the Ph.D. in philosophy in 1938, Taylor accepted a faculty position at the University of Wisconsin, where he served for six years. In 1945, at age thirty, Taylor assumed the presidency of Sarah Lawrence College, a highly progressive, experimental school outside of New York City. Taylor held this position for fourteen years, during which time he became a national leader for Progressive education, the liberal arts curriculum, international education, and the arts in the United States. While at Sarah Lawrence he worked closely with Eleanor Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson as a consultant on human rights. Taylor left the presidency of Sarah Lawrence in 1959 and proceeded to establish a career as public intellectual, independent writer and lecturer, and adjunct faculty at the New School for Social Research and the City University of New York. In addition, he served as president of the Agnes de Mille Dance Theatre, vice-chair of the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance, and president of the American Ballet Theatre. Taylor also maintained a lifelong friendship with Duke Ellington and was instrumental in arranging for the preservation of the John Dewey professional papers.

By assuming the presidency of Sarah Lawrence College at the young age of thirty, Taylor was immediately thrown into a national spotlight and compared to Robert M. Hutchins of the University of Chicago, another former "boy president." During Taylor's years at Sarah Lawrence College, one of the first Progressive, experimental colleges in the United States, he fostered a setting where there were no formal departments or academic ranks. Everyone on the faculty was considered a teacher and a member of a community of equals, each of whom was responsible for assisting students in creating their own course of study. No examinations or grades were given; students learned to judge the quality of their own work with the help of their teachers and fellow students. Since there were no required courses, the curriculum was built by a series of conscious choices made by the student. Theater, dance, music, painting, sculpture, design, and graphics were central to the overall-all curriculum and integrated with the humanities and sciences course of study. Within the context of this "open curriculum" Taylor sought opportunities to bring to the Sarah Lawrence campus cultural figures with provocative ideological, social activist, liberal, and radical views. This led anticommunist Senator Joseph McCarthy to identify Sarah Lawrence College as a target for attack during the hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

While Taylor became a leading spokesperson for peace education, academic freedom, and world education, a main theme throughout his academic career was the crucial role of students as active learners where they would be involved in making college policy and in running their own lives. In Students without Teachers (1969), considered by many as a blueprint for radical change, Taylor condemned colleges and universities for being out of touch with their students and with the surrounding intellectual community. He objected to the trend of colleges turning from dynamic cultural centers devoted to intellectual freedom and democracy to large bureaucracies that trained students and were managed by "corporate faculty." In essence, Taylor foresaw the impending "moral collapse" of the university (as noted in the 1990s) and sought to encourage student and university political activism at the national level. Taylor's call for postsecondary reform reoriented the learning—teaching system so that students collaborated with professors in the instruction of courses and were actively involved with the selection and organization of the curriculum. Running throughout this point of view was a strong Progressive education ideology, guided by the writings of John Dewey, as Taylor emphasized the importance of democracy and experience. Taylor questioned the traditional liberal arts curriculum with its concentration upon knowledge independent of the student's experience, and he argued for a curriculum embodying personal development, social and cultural activism (social agency), and the unity of intellect and emotions in the educational process. Taylor's position adopted a more tangible form in How to Change Colleges: Notes on Radical Reform (1971) which, in essence, constituted a manifesto-manual for postsecondary reform. Taylor advocated reconstructing the college departmental system as learning centers, abolishing the lecture system, required courses, and tests. Implicit within these and other recommendations was Taylor's belief in the importance of bringing the arts into the mainstream of American education and students' life.

While Taylor addressed many administrative and instructional issues at the postsecondary level, he was also active in the area of teacher education. The World as Teacher (1969) represents a three-year study of teacher education and combined Taylor's interests in the development in the early 1960s of the World College program and the International Baccalaureate. Taylor charged that teachers must understand the world, and their education must not be composed of mere courses in foreign cultures. Instead, he recommended ways for teachers to participate in international service learning projects and other educational experiences that would initiate broader, cultural perspectives. As the universities transformed in the 1950s and 1960s into corporate, multiversity conglomerates, Harold Taylor was one of the few university spokespeople who maintained a Progressive education perspective for postsecondary school reform and who championed the university as the most appropriate venue for discussion and debate of pressing societal and cultural problems.