Determined to educate himself  Booker set out in 1872 for Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia (now Hampton University), a teachers’ college established to educate freedmen. He traveled hundreds of miles under great hardship to get there. When he arrived at Hampton he took his stepfather’s first name-Washington-as his surname. Washington worked as a janitor to pay his expenses. Washington became a star pupil under the tutelage of General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the head of Hampton. He graduated from Hampton in 1875. In 1876 Washington returned to Malden, where he taught children in the daytime and adults at night for two years. He also taught Sunday school at African Zion Baptist Church.

In 1878 Washington studied for six months at Wayland Seminary inWashington, D.C.and then joined the teaching staff of Hampton. General Armstrong, still the head of Hampton, approached Washington one day after chapel. He told Washington he had received a letter from some “gentlemen in Alabama”. They were asking General Armstrong to recommend a white principle for a colored school they wanted to open in the town of Tuskegee.

In 1881 Booker T. Washington founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute on the Hampton model in the Black Belt of Alabama. He started with two small run-down buildings, no equipment and very little money. He used his ability to win the trust of white Southerners and Northern philanthropists to make Tuskegee into a model school of industrial education. His cooperative nature helped to raise funds to establish and operate thousands of small community schools and institutions of higher education for the betterment of African-Americans throughout the South. Washingtonbelieved that the best interests for African-Americans in the post-Reconstruction era would be realized through education in the crafts and industrial skills. He cultivated in his students the virtues of patience, enterprise and thrift. Tuskegee was a monument to his life’s work. By the time of his death thirty-four years later,Tuskegee had more than 100 well-equipped buildings, 1,500 students, and 200 faculty members teaching 38 trades and professions.

On September 18, 1895, Booker T. Washington became a national hero. He was invited to speak to a racially mixed audience at the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia. He urged his fellow freedmen, most of whom were poor and illiterate, to set aside their efforts to win full civil rights and concentrate their energies instead on education. He said that he believed education was the path to economic success and economic success would bring social justice. With his life’s work Booker T. Washington did much to improve the working relationship between the races. He became friends with such self-made men as Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers; Sears, Roebuck and Company President Julius Rosenwald; and George Eastman, inventor and founder of Kodak. He enlisted his philanthropic network to create matching funds programs to stimulate numerous rural public schools for African-American children in the South. The Rosenwald Fund helped support the construction and operation of more than 5,000 schools and supporting resources. The local schools were a source of communal pride and were priceless to African-American families. In 1900 he founded the National Negro Business League and in 1901 he published his autobiography, Up From Slavery, which was translated into many languages. In all, he wrote fourteen books.  Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft used Washington as an advisor. He went on to receive honorary degrees from Harvard Universityand Dartmouth College.

Jody Victor

“Character, not circumstances, makes the man.” …. “Character is power.”- Booker T. Washington

Jane Addams spent her childhood playing outdoors, reading voraciously and attending Sunday school. When she was four years old she contracted tuberculosis of the spine, Potts’s disease, which caused a curvature in her back and lifelong health problems. As a child Jane thought she was “ugly” and would walk down the other side of the street when she and her father, in his Sunday best, would walk to church. She did not want to embarrass him. When Jane was six years old her father took her to visit a mill town. She was deeply moved by the squalor of the homes around the mill. It was then that she decided when she grew up she would live in a nice house. But it would not be with other nice houses; rather it would be among houses such as the ones she saw that day.

John Addams remarried in 1868, when Jane was eight years old. His second wife, Anna Hostetter Haldeman, was the widow of a miller in Freeport. She had two sons: Harry (20 at the time of her remarriage) and George (aged 7). In her teens, Jane had big dreams to do something useful in the world. Her readings of Dickens made her interested in the poor as did her step-mother’s kindness to the poor in Cedarville. She decided she would become a doctor so she could live and work among the poor. In 1875, Jane’s sister Alice married their stepbrother Harry Haldeman.

Jane Addams’ father encouraged her to pursue higher education, but not too far from home. She wanted to attend the brand-new college for women,Smith Collegein Northampton, Massachusetts. Instead, her father sent her to Rockford Female Seminary (now Rockford College) inRockford,Ill inois. After graduating valedictorian fromRockfordin 1881, with a collegiate certificate, she still hoped to attend Smith to earn a proper B.A. She was granted her bachelor’s degree one year later whenRockford became accredited asRockford College for Women.

The summer after Jane graduated fromRockfordher father died unexpectedly from appendicitis. Each of the children inherited $50,000 (equivalent to $1.3 million today). That fall Jane, Alice and Harry, and their stepmother Anna moved to Philadelphia so that the three young people could pursue medical educations. Harry was already trained in the medical field and studied further at theUniversityofPennsylvania. Jane and Alice completed their first year of medical school at the Woman’s Medical College of Philadelphia. But Jane’s health problems prevented her from completing the degree. Stepmother Anna was also ill so the entire family canceled their plans to stay 2 years and moved back to Cedarville. The following fall Harry performed surgery on Jane’s back to straighten it. He then advised that she not pursue her studies right away, but travel instead. In August 1883, Jane Addams set off for a two-year tour of Europewith her stepmother. Visiting the Catacombs inRome, where the early Christians from all walks of life lived and worshiped together in secret, Jane decided that she did not have to become a doctor to help the poor.

Upon her return home, Jane gathered clues about her future from what she read. Fascinated by the early Christians and Tolstoy’s book My Religion, she was baptized a Christian in the Cedarville Presbyterian Church. She read Mazzini’s Duties of Man and began to be inspired by the idea of democracy as a social ideal. Then in the summer of 1887, Jane read in a magazine about the new idea of a settlement house. She believed she had finally found something she could actually do. She decided to visit the world’s first settlement house, Toynbee Hall, inLondon’sEast End. Jane invited some friends, including Ellen Gates Starr, a friend from Rockford Female Seminary, to join her on her second tour ofEurope. Together they traveled in Europefrom December 1887 through the summer of 1888. At first, Jane had told none of them about her dream to start a settlement house. But as they traveled she became increasingly guilt-ridden that she was just being a tourist and not acting on her dream. Finally, believing that if she told someone of her dream, she might do something about it, she told Ellen Gates Starr. Starr loved the idea of starting a settlement house and agreed to join her.

When Jane Addams visited Toynbee Hall she was enchanted. She described it as “a community of  University men who live there, have their recreation clubs and society all among the poor people, yet in the same style in which they would live in their own circle. It is….so unaffectedly sincere and so productive of good results in its classes and libraries that it seems perfectly ideal.” Her dream of the classes mingling socially to mutual benefit, as they had in early Christian circles, seemed embodied in the new type of institution. The co-founders of Toynbee Hall, Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, shared Jane’s desire to bring Christianity back to its roots. They called it a “social Christian” movement. The Barnetts had no interest in converting anyone to Christianity but they did believe that Christians should be more engaged with the world. Jane Addams was determined to open a similar settlement house in an underprivileged area of Chicago.

In 1899 Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr leased a large home built by Charles Hull in Chicago, Illinois. The run-down mansion had been built in 1856 and needed repairs and upgrading. At first, Jane Addams paid for all of the repairs and operating expenses. Eventually gifts from individuals, even in the first year, began to support Hull House. A number of wealthy women became donors to the House. Jane Addams and Ellen G. Starr were the first to move in to Hull House with the purpose being to provide a center for a higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial sections of Chicago. Their three “ethical principles” were “to teach by example, to practice cooperation, and to practice social democracy”. Addams made speeches about the needs of the neighborhood and convinced young women of well-to-do families to help. She took care of children, nursed the sick and listened to the troubles of impoverished people. By its second year Hull House was host to two thousand people every week. There were kindergarten classes in the morning and club meetings for older children in the afternoon. In the evening more clubs were available for adults as were courses in what became virtually a night school, a forerunner of the continuing education classes offered by many universities today. The first facility added to Hull House was an art gallery. The second was a public kitchen. Then came a coffee house, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a cooperative boarding club for girls, a bathhouse, a book bindery, an art studio, a music school, a drama group, a circulating library, an employment bureau, and a labor museum. Hull House eventually became a thirteen-building settlement complex, which included a playground and a summer camp, Bowen Country Club.

As Jane Addams’ reputation grew so did her invitations to get involved in larger fields of civic responsibility. In 1905 she was appointed toChicago’s Board of Education. Addams was a formative member of both the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1908 she participated in the founding of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy. The following year she became the first woman president of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections. InChicagoshe led investigations on midwifery, narcotics consumption, milk supplies and sanitary conditions. She even went so far as to accept the post of garbage inspector of the Nineteenth Ward. In 1910, Jane Addams received the first honorary degree ever awarded to a woman byYaleUniversity. She stressed the role of children in the Americanization of new immigrants. In her book, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, she argued that play and recreation programs were needed for social collective interaction. She served as the first vice-president of the Playground Association of America. Jane Addams was a leader in women’s suffrage. She said that if women were to be responsible for cleaning up their communities and making them better places to live, they needed the vote to be effective in doing so.

In 1906 Jane Addams gave a course of lectures at the University of Wisconsinsummer session, which she published the next year as a book titled Newer Ideals of Peace. She spoke and campaigned extensively for Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 Presidential campaign on the ‘Progressive’ party. She spoke for peace in 1913 at a ceremony commemorating the building of thePeacePalaceatThe Hague. For the next two years she was sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation to do a series of lectures against America’s entry into the First World War. In 1915 she accepted the chairmanship of the Women’s Peace Party, an American organization, and months later the presidency of the International Congress of Women convened atThe Hague. When this congress later founded the organization called the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Jane Addams was chosen and served as president until 1929. Publically opposed toAmericaentering the war, Jane Addams was attacked in the press and expelled from the Daughters of the American Revolution. OnceAmericabecame involved in the war she worked as an assistant to Herbert Hoover in providing relief supplies of food to the women and children of the enemy nations. Even though it was a war effort she had found an outlet for her humanitarian impulses. She re-told her story of the relief effort in her book- Peace and Bread in Time of War.

Jane Addams worked tirelessly at Hull House and with labor unions and other organizations all her adult life to address the problems of poverty and crime. In 1926 Jane Addams suffered a heart attack and her health began to fail. Even so, she continued working. Addams was admitted to aBaltimorehospital on December 10, 1931, the very day that the Nobel Peace Prize was being awarded to her in Oslo, Norway. She was the first U.S.woman to win the prize.  Jane Addams died on May 21, 1935 in Chicago. She is remembered today as a pioneer in the field of social work and one of America’s early pacifists.

Jody Victor

“America’s future will be determined by the home and the school. The child becomes largely what he is taught; hence we must watch what we teach, and how we live.” – Jane Addams

In 1843 Louis Pasteur was admitted to the Ecole Normale Superieure, an elite teachers’ college inParis. While there he attended lectures by French chemist Dumas. Pasteur decided to become a research chemist and was Dumas’ teaching assistant. Pasteur obtained his Master of Science degree in 1845 and then earned an advanced degree in Physical Sciences. He earned his Doctorate in Sciences in 1847. Pasteur was appointed professor of physics at the Dijon Lycee, a secondary school, in 1848. Shortly after teaching at the Dijon Lycee he accepted a position as professor of chemistry at theUniversityofStrasbourg. While at Strasbourg Pasteur met and courted Marie Laurent, the daughter of the rector of the university. They were married on May 29, 1849. Together they had five children. Only two survived childhood. Of the three who died young, two died of typhoid and one from a brain tumor. These personal tragedies inspired Pasteur to study diseases and find cures.

In 1854, at the age of just 32, Pasteur became Dean of the Faculty of Science at the Universityof Lille. Lille was the center of alcohol manufacture inFrance. In 1856, Pasteur received a visit from a man who worked at a factory that made alcohol from sugar beet. Many of his vats of fermented beer were turning sour and had to be thrown away. He asked Pasteur to find out why. Pasteur began a series of studies on alcoholic fermentation. Using a microscope, Pasteur found thousands of tiny micro-organisms. He was convinced they were responsible for the beer going sour. He believed that they caused the putrefaction- not that they were the result of the putrefaction. He continued to work on this theory by studying other liquids such as milk, wine and vinegar. In 1857, he returned to the Ecole Normale Superieure inParisas Director of Scientific Studies. Between 1857 and 1859, he became convinced that the liquids he had studied were being contaminated with microbes that floated in the air.

The medical establishment ridiculed Pasteur for his germ theory. He was vilified in public. But rather than giving up he was more determined to fight for what he believed in. He devised tests to prove he was right and was eventually able to prove that air contained living organisms; that these microbes can produce putrefaction; that the microbes could be killed by the heating of the liquid they were in; and that these microbes were not uniformly distributed in the air. In April 1864, Pasteur explained his beliefs in front of a gathering of famous scientists at theUniversityofParisand proved his case beyond doubt. With his germ theory established he invented a process in which liquids such as milk were heated to kill most bacteria and molds already present in them. This process was soon afterwards known as pasteurization.

Once Pasteur proved that germs were the cause of fermentation in liquids he believed they could be the cause of contagious diseases in people and animals as well. Because of his study in germs, Pasteur encouraged doctors to sanitize their hands and equipment before surgery. Prior to this, few doctors or their assistants practiced washing procedures. He proposed preventing the entry of micro-organisms into the human body, which led Joseph Lister to develop antiseptic methods in surgery. Pasteur had ushered in the era of preventative medicine.

In the following years Louis Pasteur solved the mysteries of chicken cholera, anthrax in sheep, and silkworm diseases. He contributed to the development of the first vaccines for animal diseases. Pasteur turned next to rabies and developed a vaccine for animals afflicted with the disease. Most people who were victims of rabies died a painful death and the disease was getting more and more common in France. But he faced a problem- what worked on animals might not work on people. In 1885, a young boy, Joseph Meister, had been bitten by a rabid dog and was brought to Pasteur. The boy would have certainly died an agonizing death if nothing was done. Pasteur took a risk and gave the boy his animal-tested vaccine. The boy survived.

All of Louis Pasteur’s achievements point to his brilliance and perseverance. His work was the springboard for branches of science and medicine such as stereochemistry, microbiology, bacteriology, virology, and molecular biology. His work has protected millions of people from disease through vaccination and pasteurization.

“Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence.”- Louis Pasteur

Jody Victor

When Jonas was 13 he entered Townsend Harris High School, a public school for intellectually gifted students. The high school was named after the founder of City College of New York (CCNY) and it was a launching pad for the talented sons of immigrant parents who lacked the money and status to attend a top private school. In high school Jonas was known as a “perfectionist who read everything he could lay his hands on”, according to one of his fellow students. The students at Townsend H.S. had to cram a four-year curriculum into just three years. Most students dropped or flunked out. The students who did graduate had the grades to enroll in CCNY, a highly competitive college. Jonas was the first sibling in his family to attend CCNY.

Salk enrolled in the City College of New York at the age of fifteen. At his mother’s urging he put aside his aspirations of becoming a lawyer and instead signed up for the classes necessary for admission to medical school. What made CCNY special was the student body that fought so hard to get there. From the ranks of the 1930s and 1940s emerged a wealth of intellectual talent including more Nobel Prize winners and PhD recipients than any other public college except the University of California at Berkley. Salk earned his Bachelor of Science degree in 1934.

Jonas Salk next entered the New York School of Medicine (NYU). NYU had a modest reputation based on famous alumni, such as Walter Reed, who helped conquer yellow fever. Tuition was comparatively low and it did not discriminate against Jews. Most of the surrounding medical schools- Cornell, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania and Yale- had rigid quotas. In 1935, for example, Yale accepted 76 applicants out of 501. Of the 501, 200 were Jewish and only five got in. During his years at NYU Salk stood out from his peers. He was Alpha Omega Alpha, the Phi Beta Kappa Society of medical education. In his first year at NYU he decided that he did not want to practice medicine and instead became absorbed in research, even taking a year off to study biochemistry. Later he focused more of his studies on bacteriology. It was the laboratory work that gave new direction to his life. Salk said, “My desire is to help humankind in general rather than single patients”.

In 1941, during his postgraduate work in virology, Salk chose a two-month elective to work in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Francis at the University of Michigan. Dr. Francis had discovered the Type B influenza virus while working for the Rockefeller Foundation. After his two-month stint in Francis’s lab, Salk was hooked. After graduating from medical school Dr. Salk began his residency at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital where he worked again in Francis’s laboratory. Few hospitals in Manhattan had the status of Mount Sinai, particularly among its Jewish citizens. Dr. Salk quickly made his mark. Even though he focused mainly on research he showed great skills as a clinician and a surgeon. His leadership as president of the house staff of interns and residents at Mount Sinai defined him best to his peers.

While he was attending medical school Jonas Salk met and fell in love with Donna Lindsay, a master’s candidate at New York College of Social Work. Her father, Elmer Lindsay, was a wealthy Manhattan dentist who viewed Salk as a social inferior. He agreed to their marriage on two conditions: First Salk had to wait until he could be listed as an official M.D. on the wedding invitations, and second, he must improve his “rather pedestrian status” by giving himself a middle name. Dr. Jonas Edward Salk and Donna Lindsay were married the day after his graduation from medical school. Together they had three children: Peter, Darrell and Jonathan.

At the end of his residency Dr. Salk began applying for permanent research positions. Once again he found himself hindered due to Jewish quotas, which prevailed in much of the medical research establishment. He could not apply at Mount Sinai because their policy prevented hiring their own interns. As a last resort, he contacted Dr. Francis for help. Dr. Francis, who was now directing the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, secured extra grant money and offered Salk a job working on an army-commissioned project in Michigan to develop an influenza vaccine. Eventually the two perfected a vaccine that was used at every U.S. army base. Dr. Salk was the one responsible for discovering and isolating the flu strains that were included in the final vaccine.

In 1947, Dr. Salk decided to find an institution where he could direct his own laboratory. Three institutions turned him down before he received an offer from William McEllroy, dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. The offer included a promise that he would run his own lab. But the promise was not quite what he envisioned. Dr. Salk was relegated to cramped, unequipped quarters in the basement of the old Municipal Hospital. As time went on, however, Dr. Salk began to secure grants from the Mellon family and was able to build a working virology laboratory.

The director of research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis asked Dr. Salk if he would like to participate in the foundation’s polio project, which had been established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938. Paralytic poliomyelitis, “polio”, was a medical oddity that had baffled researchers for years. Polio was first recorded in 1835 and grew steadily over the years. During the start of the 20^th century, the 1914 and 1919 polio epidemics found U.S. physicians and nurses making house-to-house searches to identify all infected persons. Children suspected of being infected were taken to hospitals and the child’s family was quarantined. In 1921, when Franklin D. Roosevelt, former vice presidential candidate and soon to be governor of New York, came down with the paralytic illness it gained national attention. The fight against polio did not really get under way until the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis was born. Basil O’Connor, the former law partner of President Roosevelt, headed it. That same year, the first March of Dimes fundraising program was begun. Radio networks offered free 30-second slots for promotion. Listeners were asked to send in a dime and the White House received 2,680,000 letters within days. Polio had become the most serious and frightening health problem of America’s postwar era. By 1952, polio was killing more children than any other communicable disease. Of the 58,000 cases reported in 1952, 3,145 people died and 21,269 were left with mild to disabling paralysis. In some parts of the country the concern escalated to outright panic. The public reaction was to a plague. Scientists were in a frantic race to find a cure.

Salk was offered to participate in the polio project when the public’s fear was at its highest. The funds to combat it had increased from $1.8 million to $67 million. At that time everything scientists believed about polio was wrong, which led them down many blind alleys. Most researchers were experimenting with highly dangerous live vaccines. In one test six children were killed and three left crippled. Dr. Jonas Salk decided to use the safer killed virus. After successful tests on laboratory animals it next had to be tested on human beings. But who would take the risk? Dr. Salk and his family allowed themselves to be human guinea pigs. In November 1953, at a conference in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, he said, “I will be personally responsible for the vaccine.” He announced that he, his wife and their three sons had been among the first volunteers to be inoculated with his vaccine.

It was then critical that Dr. Salk develop the trust of the U.S. public for his experiments and the mass tests that would become necessary. The field trial set up to test the vaccine developed by Dr. Salk and his research team was the most elaborate program of its kind in history. It involved 20,000 physicians and public health officers, 64,000 school personnel and 220,000 volunteers, with over 1,800,000 school children participating in the trial. More Americans had participated in the funding, development and testing of the polio vaccine than had participated in the nomination and election of the president. At least one hundred million people had contributed to the March of Dimes. Another seven million had donated their time and labor as well. With the hopes of the world upon him Dr. Salk worked sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, for years. Dr. Salk later described his endeavor as “two and a half years of drudgery and hard work”.

On April 12, 1955, Dr. Thomas Francis, the monitor of the test results, declared the vaccine to be “safe and effective”. The announcement was made at the University of Michigan exactly 10 years to the day after the death of President Roosevelt. Five hundred people, including press, radio and television reporters, filled the room. Fifty-four thousand physicians, sitting in movie theatres across the country, watched the broadcast on closed-circuit television. Americans turned on their radios to hear the news. Department stores set up loud speakers. Judges suspended trials so that everyone in the courtroom could hear. Dr. Francis reported that the vaccinations had been 80 to 90 percent effective. Overall, the vaccine was administered to over 440,000 children in forty-four states, three Canadian provinces and in Helsinki, Finland. The results were clear: the vaccine worked. After the announcement, when asked whether the effectiveness of the vaccine could be improved, Salk said, “Theoretically, the new 1955 vaccines and vaccination procedures may lead to 100 percent protection from paralysis of all those vaccineated.”

By the time Dr. Francis stepped down from the podium, church bells were ringing across the country. Factories observed moments of silence. Synagogues and churches held prayer meetings. Across the nation there were spontaneous celebrations. April 12^th had become a national holiday. Bells rang, horns honked, factory whistles blew, and salutes were fired. People took the rest of the day off from work. Schools were closed and the children sent home to celebrate with their families. Politicians around the country were falling all over themselves to find ways to congratulate Dr. Salk. In the Eisenhower White House, plans were started to present Dr. Salk with a special presidential medal designating him “a benefactor of mankind” in a Rose Garden ceremony. New York City could not get Dr. Salk to accept a ticker tape parade so instead they created eight “Jonas Salk Scholarships” for future medical students. Dr. Salk did eventually receive a Presidential Citation, the nation’s first Congressional Medal for Distinguished Civilian Service, and many other citations and medals. By July the movie studios were fighting for the motion picture rights to his film biography.

In the years following his polio vaccine discovery, many supporters, including the National Foundation, helped him build his dream of a research complex for the investigation of biological phenomena “from cell to society”. It was called the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and opened in 1963 in the San Diego, California neighborhood of La Jolla. The Salk Institute was something that he was deprived of early in his years of research, but due to his successes the institute was able to provide for future scientists. In the mid 1980s, Dr. Salk engaged in research to develop a vaccine for another more recent plague, AIDS. To further his research he co-founded the Immune Response Corporation to search for a vaccine. The AIDS vaccine project was discontinued in 2007, twelve years after Dr. Jonas Salk’s death on June 23, 1995.

Dr. Jonas Salk described his “biophilosophy” as the application of a “biological, evolutionary point of view to philosophical, cultural, social and psychological problems”. His definition of a “biophilosopher” was “someone who draws upon the scriptures of nature, recognizing that we are the product of the process of evolution, and understands that we have become the process itself, through the emergence and evolution of our consciousness, our awareness, our capacity to imagine and anticipate the future, and to choose from among alternatives”.

“We are the co-authors with nature of our destiny.”- Dr. Jonas Salk

Jody Victor

In 1908, when one of Martha’s sisters developed asthma, the Graham family moved to Santa Barbara, California for better weather. Martha finished her secondary schooling and then attended a school of dramatics for three years. She became interested in studying dance after she saw Ruth St. Denis perform in Los Angeles. But her parents did not approve of her becoming a dancer, so she enrolled in the Cumnock School, a junior college.

Martha Graham’s father died in 1914, after which she felt free to pursue her dream of dancing. Following her graduation from Cumnock, Martha enrolled in the Denishawn Studio, a dance school operated by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. She had never had a dance lesson up to that point in her life. But the quiet, shy hard-working Martha impressed Ted Shawn so much that he invited her to tour with the troupe as co-star in his production of Xochitl, which was his famous duet about an Indian girl and an Aztec emperor. During the next seven years, Martha Graham evolved from a student, to a teacher, to one of the company’s best-known performers.

In 1923, Graham left Denishawn to take a job with the Greenwich Village Follies, where she gained a reputation for her ballet ballads. In the next three years she became a part of the Greenwich Village art scene. She saw the works of Eleanora Duse, the Moscow Art Theatre, and Max Reinhard.

In 1925, Graham left the Follies to start her solo career. In order to support herself during this period, she took teaching positions at the Eastman School of Music and Theater in Rochester, New York and the John Murray Anderson School in New York City. She experimented with modern dance forms that let the body do what it could naturally based on its own structure, developing what became known as “percussive movements”. “I wanted to begin,” she said, “not with characters or ideas but with movement.” She rejected the traditional steps of classical ballet by allowing the dancing body to be related to natural motion and to the music. On April 18, 1926, her company, featuring students from Eastman, debuted in New York City. The program featured Graham in exotic solos with her students in a ballet called “The Flute of Krishna”. Graham’s first dances were performed on a bare stage with only costumes and lights. Later she added more scenery and different costumes for effect.

By 1927, Martha Graham resigned from teaching at the Eastman and Anderson schools and was working full-time as a dancer and choreographer in New York City. She worked with Louis Horst, whom she had known at Denishawn, where he had been the musical director and resident accompanist. Horst was the major figure in the modern dance scene of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Horst introduced Graham to the work of the great German modern dancer, Mary Wigman. He introduced her to the school of modern painting. Most importantly, he taught her about musical form and encouraged her to work with contemporary composers rather than making dances to eighteenth and nineteenth-century music. She established the use of moving scenery and used props as symbols. She combined speech with dancing. She was also the first to integrate her group of dancers using African Americans and Asians in her regular company.

By 1930, Graham was beginning to identify a new system of movement and new principles of choreography. Based on her interpretation of the Delsartean principle of tension and relaxation, Graham identified a method of breathing and impulse control she called “contraction and release”. Her method of muscle control gave her dances and dancers a hard, angular look. It was very unfamiliar to dance audiences. At first she was accused of dancing in an “ugly” way. But her audiences and critics soon became accustomed to her innovative style and she developed a following among serious dance patrons, scholars and critics.

In 1930, Graham performed the lead role in composer Igor Stravinsky’s American premier of “Rite of Spring”. She toured the United States for four years starting with the production “Electra”. While on tour Graham took a trip to the American Southwest and became interested in making dances on the theme of American history. In “Primitive Mysteries” she combined her interest in the religious rites of American Indians with the exploration of other religious rites. “Primitive Mysteries” represented important advances for Graham. The choreographic focus was on the corps of dancers rather than on the solo figure, a fundamental shift in the architecture of dance. And the narrative of the dance was not presented in a literal way, but used a pure, abstract movement vocabulary to bring its story to life. “Primitive Mysteries” was Graham’s first critical masterpiece and garnered attention from critics around the world. Her increasing interest in the American past was seen again in her dance based on the lives of American pioneer women, “Frontier”. Next came her famous “Appalachian Spring”.

Also in 1930, Graham founded the Dance Repertory Theater in New York City. She helped establish the Bennington School of Arts at Bennington College in Vermont, where her teaching made Bennington the center of experimental dance in America. Later she established the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance in New York City, where she taught a large number of modern dancers who went on to spread her ideas and style to the rest of the world. In 1932, she became the first dancer to receive a Guggenheim fellowship. She was the first dancer ever to perform at the White House in 1937 for President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Martha Graham danced and choreographed for over seventy years. She traveled abroad as a cultural ambassador and in 1976 received the highest civilian award of the United States: the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She received honors ranging from the Key to the City of Paris to Japan’s Imperial Order of the Precious Crown. Graham danced her last role in 1969, but continued to choreograph. In 1990, one year before her death, she choreographed “Maple Leaf Rag”, a show that featured music by Scott Joplin and costumes by Calvin Klein. The Martha Graham Dance Company is still a vital force and can be seen in residence in New York City and on tour.

“I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer. It’s permitting life to use you in a very intense way. Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful. But nevertheless it is inevitable.”- Martha Graham

Jody Victor

In 1849, the Muir family emigrated to America. They settled near Portage, Wisconsin and started a farm called Fountain Lake Farm. John Muir’s father was a harsh disciplinarian who worked his family from dawn to dusk. During the rare occasions when they were allowed a short time away from the plow and hoe, Muir and his younger brother would roam the fields and woods of Wisconsin. John Muir became a loving observer of the natural world during those free moments.

John Muir also became an inventor. He carved practical mechanisms in wood. He made clocks that kept accurate time and created a device that tipped him out of bed before dawn. In 1860, Muir took his inventions to the state fair at Madison. He won both prizes and great attention. That same year he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He paid his own way for three years. It was at the university that he took his first botany lesson. Later, in his autobiography, Muir stated, “This fine lesson charmed me and sent me flying into the woods and meadows in wild enthusiasm.” As a freshman he studied chemistry with Professor Ezra Carr and his wife Jeanne. They became lifelong friends with Muir developing a lifelong interest in chemistry and the sciences. Although he never graduated, he learned enough geology and botany to inform his later wanderings.

In 1863, Muir’s brother Dan left Wisconsin for Canada. One year later John Muir left the university and also went to Canada, where he spent the spring, summer and fall wandering the woods and swamps around Lake Huron collecting plants. With his money running out, John met up with his brother Dan in Ontario, where they worked together at a saw mill.

John Muir returned to the United States in March 1866. He wound up in Indianapolis working as a sawyer in a factory that made wagon wheels. His employers came to value him because of his inventiveness in improving the machines and processes. In early March 1867, he had an accident that changed the course of his life. A tool he was using slipped and struck him in the eye. He was confined to a darkened room for six weeks and he worried if he would ever regain his sight. When he did he “saw the world- and his purpose- in a different light”. He believed the possibility of losing his sight was a lesson from God. From that point on he was determined to “be true to myself” and follow his dream of exploration and the study of plants.

In September 1867, Muir undertook a walk of about 1,000 miles from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico. He chose to go by the “wildest, leafiest and least trodden way” he could find. Once he reached Florida he planned to hop aboard a ship to South America. But he contracted malaria in Florida and abandoned those plans. Instead, he sailed to New York and booked passage to California. He sailed to Cuba, and later to Panama, where he crossed the Isthmus and sailed up the West Coast, landing in San Francisco in March 1868. From that moment on (even though he continued to travel the world) California became his home.

California’s Sierra Nevada and Yosemite truly captured John Muir’s heart. When he walked across the San Joaquin Valley and into the high country for the first time he called the Sierra the “most divinely beautiful of all the mountain chains I have ever seen”. That first summer he herded sheep and made his home in Yosemite. Then he took a job building a saw mill for James Mason Hutchings. In his free time he roamed Yosemite. In 1871, he found living glaciers in the Sierra and conceived his controversial theory of the glaciation of Yosemite Valley. He was convinced that glaciers had sculpted many of the features of the valley. His theory was in stark contrast to the accepted theory of the day which attributed the valley’s formation to a catastrophic earthquake.

In 1871, John Muir discovered an active alpine glacier below Merced Peak that supported his theory. His former professor, Ezra Carr, and his wife Jeanne encouraged him to put his ideas into print. His papers were published as far away as New York. He began to be known throughout the country. Many famous American writers and scientists made their way to the door of his pine cabin. In addition to his geological studies, Muir investigated the plant life of the Yosemite area. He made field studies along the western flank of the Sierra on the isolated groves of Giant Sequoia. In 1874, he wrote a series of articles entitled “Studies in the Sierra”, launching his successful career as a writer. During his lifetime John Muir published over 300 articles and twelve books.

John Muir left the mountains for a while and moved to Oakland, California to write articles for leading magazines like Overland Monthly, Scribner’s and Harper’s Magazine. From Oakland he continued his wanderings and took many trips, including his first to Alaska. In 1880, he met and married Louie Wanda Strentzel, daughter of a prominent physician and horticulturist with a 2,600 acre fruit orchard. Together they had two daughters. They moved to Martinez, California, where Muir went into partnership with his father-in-law and managed the family fruit ranch with great success. But he grew restless to immerse himself in nature again. His wife saw his restlessness at the ranch and would sometimes “shoo him back up” to the mountains. At times he took his daughters with him. At his wife Louie’s urging, Muir traveled to Alaska’s Glacier Bay and Washington’s Mount Rainier. He championed protection of the Petrified Forest and the Grand Canyon in Arizona. He was the public voice for setting aside the high country around Yosemite Valley as a national park in 1890, as well as for General Grant and Sequoia national parks. He petitioned the U.S. Congress for the National Park Bill that was passed in 1899.  In 1903, Muir went on a three-night camping trip with President Theodore Roosevelt. That camping trip is considered the most significant camping trip in conservation history. He persuaded President Roosevelt to return Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove to federal protection as part of Yosemite National Park. The trip had a lasting effect on the president and on the nation.

John Muir was a founder and the first president of the Sierra Club, which helped establish a number of national parks since his death. Today the Sierra Club has over 1.3 million members. Muir Woods National Monument, a grove of redwoods north of San Francisco, is named in his honor as well as Muir Beach, John Muir College, Mount Muir, Camp Muir and Muir Glacier. One of the most well-known hiking trails in the U.S., the 211-mile John Muir Trail, was named in his honor. John Muir has been called the “father of our national parks” and “one of the patron saints of twentieth-century American environmental activity”. Following Muir’s death in December 1914, Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of Century Magazine, wrote that “the world will look back to the time we live in and remember the voice of one crying in the wilderness and bless the name of John Muir.”

“God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he can not save them from fools.” – John Muir