American Men of Action

American Men of Action

The Project Gutenberg EBook of American Men of Action, by Burton
E. Stevenson This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost
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Title: American Men of Action
Author: Burton E. Stevenson
Release Date: August 10, 2005 [EBook #16508]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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AMERICAN MEN OF ACTION
BY
BURTON E. STEVENSON
AUTHOR OF "A GUIDE TO BIOGRAPHY--MEN OF MIND," "A
SOLDIER OF VIRGINIA," ETC.; COMPILER OF "DAYS AND
DEEDS--POETRY," "DAYS AND DEEDS--PROSE," ETC.

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK:
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1913
* * * * *
COPYRIGHT, 1909, 1910, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
* * * * *
[Illustration: WASHINGTON]
* * * * *

CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I.
--A TALK ABOUT BIOGRAPHY
II.--THE BEGINNERS
Summary to Chapter II
III.--WASHINGTON TO LINCOLN
Summary to Chapter III
IV--LINCOLN AND HIS SUCCESSORS
Summary to Chapter IV

V--STATESMEN
Summary to Chapter V
VI.--PIONEERS
Summary to Chapter VI
VII.--GREAT SOLDIERS
Summary to Chapter VII
VIII.--GREAT SAILORS
Summary to Chapter VIII
INDEX
* * * * *

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Washington Frontispiece Columbus
Jefferson
Jackson
Lincoln
Cleveland
Franklin
Webster
Boone

Grant
Lee
Dewey
* * * * *

AMERICAN MEN OF ACTION
* * * * *
CHAPTER I
A TALK ABOUT BIOGRAPHY
No doubt most of you think biography dull reading. You would much
rather sit down with a good story. But have you ever thought what a
story is? It is nothing but a bit of make-believe biography.
Let us see, in the first place, just what biography means. It is formed
from two Greek words, "bios," meaning life, and "graphein," meaning
to write: life-writing. In other words, a biography is the story of the life
of some individual. Now what the novelist does is to write the
biographies of the people of his story; not usually from the cradle to the
grave, but for that crucial period of their careers which marked some
great success or failure; and he tries to make them so life-like and
natural that we will half-believe they are real people, and that the things
he tells about really happened. Sometimes, to accomplish this, he even
takes the place of one of his own characters, and tells the story in the
first person, as Dickens does in "David Copperfield." That is called
autobiography, which is merely a third Greek word, "autos," meaning
self, added to the others. An automobile, for instance, is a self-moving
vehicle. So autobiography is the biography of oneself. The great aim of
the novelist is, by any means within his power, to make his tale seem
true, and the truer it is--the truer to human nature and the facts of
life--the greater is his triumph.

Now why is it that everyone likes to read these make-believe
biographies? Because we are all interested in what other people are
doing and thinking, and because a good story tells in an entertaining
way about life-like people, into whom the story-teller has breathed
something of his own personality. Then how does it come that so few
of us care to read the biographies of real people, which ought to be all
the more interesting because they are true instead of make-believe?
Well, in the first place, because most of us have never tried to read
biography in the right way, and so think it tiresome and uninteresting.
Haven't you, more than once, made up your mind that you wouldn't like
a thing, just from the look of it, without ever having tasted it? You
know the old proverb, "One man's food is another man's poison." It isn't
a true proverb--indeed, few proverbs are true--because we are all built
alike, and no man's food will poison any other man; although the other
man may think so, and may really show all the symptoms of poisoning,
just because he has made up his mind to.
Most of you approach biography in that way. You look through the
book, and you see it isn't divided up into dialogue, as a story is, and
there are no illustrations, only pictures of crabbed-looking people, and
so you decide that you are not going to like it, and consequently you
don't like it, no matter how likeable it is.
It isn't wholly your fault that you have acquired this feeling. Strangely
enough, most biographies give no such impression of reality as good
fiction does. John Ridd, for instance, is more alive for most of us