Connecticut is a beautiful state – full of waterfalls, pine forests, and mountainous trails. When most people think of Connecticut, they tend to pass over the many famous people that have lived there and jump straight to images of the countryside. Connecticut has, however, raised many notable sons and daughters. Here is a very brief guide to some of the most notable people to have come from ‘the land of steady habits’.
JP Morgan
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._P._Morgan
JP Morgan is a name that most Americans will be very familiar with. The bank founded by Mr. Morgan is still very much active. John Pierpont Morgan was an immensely successful financier that played a major part in the industrialization of the United States during the early 20th century. He dominated Wall Street during the gilded age of American finance. The original fat cat was raised in Hartford, Connecticut. He made a great deal of money during the civil war. He had avoided serving in the Union army by paying a substitute $300 to take his place. In a moneymaking scheme that the mafia would be proud of, he purchased rifles for a bargain price before selling them to an army unit for huge profit. This earned him the title of ‘robber baron’.
The new title did not dissuade John from progressing in the financial field. In 1895 he formed J P Morgan and Co. He took over failing businesses and returned them to profitability in a process that soon became known as ‘Morganization’. During his ascent to power, he focused on ‘Morganizing’ railroad companies. Railroad companies were immensely important in industrializing America and attracted the attention of many successful monopolizers.
He invested in foreign rail. Notably, this included the London Underground. He failed to start a successful line on the London Underground and quickly turned his attention back to the United States’ rail industry. His attempt to collaborate with visionary inventor Nicola Tesla on a rail network was also a total failure.
He also invested in steel and gold – making an absolute fortune in the process. With this fortune, he began to underwrite companies. With Morgan’s backing, the American industrial revolution was insured and financed.
Morgan had a notoriously intimidating physical appearance. He was said to be immensely forceful and overbearing but was, in fact, extremely sensitive about his appearance. He suffered rosacea and was very famously furious when journalists took his photograph without his permission. Truly a complex figure, J P Morgan was one of the most powerful of the big bucks barons during the age of monopoly and financial intimidation in the United States of America.
Mike Savage
Source: https://stratificationandculture.wordpress.com/members/mike-savage/
While not as famous as some of the other names on this list, Mike Savage New Canaan local resident is still a notable figure living in the area. Although he did much of his early business in New York City, he moved to New Canaan with his wife to pursue his dream of forming a revolutionary accountancy tech firm. Like many people who have moved to Connecticut from New York City, Mike enjoys the extra space and freedom in the beautiful state. He uses his newfound space to raise koi carp – something he has done with aplomb.
He and his wife have recently formed a foundation for the provision of clothing to people living in rural Honduras. Successful businesspeople should give back to society through philanthropy. If they do not, they are simply leeches that make use of other people’s labor for their own personal gain. Luckily, Mike does just that.
George W Bush
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush
George W Bush: former US President, shoe dodging expert, and painter was born in Connecticut while his father, George Senior, was studying at Yale. George W Bush was a controversial and relatively traditionalist conservative leader. He was instrumental in the war on terror that ultimately failed to remove the threat of Islamic extremism from the world. Before serving as the 43rdPresident of the United States of America, George flew in the Air National Guard and worked in the oil industry. He became fabulously wealthy and invested in energy projects and a baseball team. In 1994, GW was elected as the Republican governor of Texas.
A turning point in George W Bush’s career came in the year 2000 when he successfully rand for presidential office. He defeated the democratic candidate Al Gore – despite technically receiving less public votes than him. He immediately began enacting both progressive and anti-progressive reforms. The event that truly made his presidency notable was the dreadful terrorist attack on September 11th, 2001. Bush sought to pursue an aggressive response to the attacks, lobbying for wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan with the stated aim of removing terror sponsors from power. Bush pushed hard to form a consensus regarding these wars and has gained many critics, both at the time and retrospectively, as the years have passed. Despite this major blunder, he is remembered fondly by some in the American right, who respect the way he sought to strengthen family values domestically.
Henry Ward Beecher
Source: https://connecticuthistory.org/henry-ward-beecher-born-in-litchfield/
Henry Ward Beecher was a preacher, speaker, and social reformer. He is mostly remembered for his vocal support of slavery abolition and his campaigning for the Union cause during the American civil war.
Beecher was born into a Calvinist family in Litchfield, Connecticut. The family was abundant with talent: full of preachers, writers, and thinkers. His father was a prominent evangelist in the Calvinist scene, and his rhetoric undoubtedly influenced the development of Henry’s unique oratory style. This style developed in the era just before the outbreak of the civil war. Beecher developed a theology that emphasized God’s love above all other judgments. In this vein, he actively stood for the abolition of slavery, the right for women to vote, and the acceptance of evolution theory. He had a great influence on the progressive Christian population.
At the start of the civil war, Henry sent guns (nicknamed Beecher’s bibles) to abolitionists fighting slave owners in Kansas. He then toured Europe gathering international support for the Union cause using his excellent oratory skills. His abolitionist campaigning made him a hated figure among slave-owning white people in the Confederacy, which led to him receiving death threats.
Beecher was undoubtedly one of the most famous Americans during the 19th century. When he was put on trial for adultery, the nation’s attention was truly captured. As with the celebrities of today, Henry’s private life trickled into his public life.
Katherine Hepburn
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharine_Hepburn
Katherine Hepburn was one of Hollywood’s biggest leading ladies. She starred in immensely popular films like ‘Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner’ and ‘Morning Glory’ – winning four academy awards for best actress in the process.
Hepburn was known for her sophisticated, strong style. The daughter of progressive parents, she was a powerful campaigner for women’s rights. While growing up in Hartford, Connecticut, Hepburn was taken by her mother to several ‘votes for women’ suffrage marches. The fight for women’s equality never ceased to be one of her driving forces.
In films, Hepburn was often cast as the strong, sophisticated female character. Later in her career, she became typecast as a ‘spinster’ figure – something she excelled at playing. During the 1950s, Hepburn took some time away from the silver screen in order to play leading roles in Shakespearean theatre productions for the Old Vic. Performing until about ten years before her death at the age of 96, Katherine’s last role was in the television film ‘One Christmas’.
She was married briefly when she was young but later chose to pursue an independent lifestyle. Her relationship with the married actor Spencer Tracey was well documented. The two lived in a state of ‘bliss’, according to Hepburn, until Tracey’s death. Hepburn was known to care for her frequent co-star during his periods of alcoholism and depression.
Benedict Arnold
Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Benedict-Arnold
Every American schoolchild knows Benedict Arnold as the greatest traitor in the American War of Independence. Born in Connecticut, Arnold initially set his sights on becoming a successful merchant sailor – something he excelled at. When the revolutionary war first kicked off, the young man joined the new American army in Boston. He displayed great leadership – helping the American forces to capture Fort Ticonderoga and frequently winning battles against the British enemy.
He began to consider defecting to the British during his time in Philadelphia – a city that contained many loyalist people. He found himself running in loyalist circles with close ties to British espionage efforts. Through loyalist contacts, the British offered Arnold 20,000 pounds for the surrender of the West Point fort – a very important American position. Arnold agreed, but his plan was foiled when an incriminating letter was found, and he fled to British lines without handing over the fort.
Arnold went on to serve as an officer in the British army. He was a famously ruthless commander of an American unit within the British ranks. He massacred surrendering American troops and laid waste to large areas of his home state, Connecticut. After the war, Arnold was unpopular in North America. He moved to London, where he was also not particularly liked by established military figures.
Seth Macfarlane
Source: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0532235/
Born and raised in Kent, Connecticut, Seth Macfarlane is best known for his work in television. He is the creator of the immensely popular animated comedy programs American Dad and Family Guy. After graduating from university as an animator, he worked for Cartoon Network – helping to produce the show ‘Cow and Chicken’. The whacky, gross-out atmosphere of these early Cartoon Network productions must have rubbed off on the young Seth because he took that attitude and amplified it for his flagship animated show ‘Family Guy. The base, laugh–a–minute style of family guy made it a massive hit. The show dominated American TV comedy for a number of years – briefly rivaling ‘The Simpsons’ in terms of popularity.
His second series, ‘American Dad’, was initially written in order to satirize the traditional Bush-era American conservative family. After several seasons, the show slowly morphed into a more traditional sitcom animation.
Macfarlane is a talented voice actor and singer, with several albums of Sinatraesque swing music under his belt. He often incorporates musical elements into his animated shows.
Igor Sikorsky
Source: pinterest.com
Igor Sikorsky was a Russian American inventor responsible for some of the most important helicopter designs ever put into production. Sikorsky was born in Kyiv in the Russian Empire, which later became part of the Soviet Union and later Ukraine. His father was a renowned psychologist. His mother was a qualified doctor that took time away from practicing to homeschool the young Igor. As a young man, he pursued engineering. During a trip to Germany with his father, he learned of the Wright Brother’s success in creating a powered flying machine as well as Ferdinand Von Zeppelin’s rigid airships and vowed to dedicate all of his studies to aviation.
Sikorsky started a design company in Kyiv. In 1914, the first world war broke out, and the engineers’ factory was used to produce important aircraft. After the Russian revolution of 1917, Sikorsky fled the country. Coming from a nationalist family and having worked on bombers for the hated empire, he was liable to be killed by Bolshevik activists and soldiers looking to cleanse the country of imperial influence. He fled to France, where he was employed by the government to design aircraft. His contract ran out at the end of the first world war, and he decided to leave for the USA.
Arriving in the USA in 1919, he initially worked as a schoolteacher – being unable to secure the funds to build aircraft. His big break came when the composer Rachmaninoff and other prominent Russian emigres invested money in him. Settling in Nichols, CT, Sikorsky began experimenting with vertical flight. His experiments cultivated with the flight of the VS-300 in 1939 – the first successful helicopter. The basic configuration of the VS-300 – the main lift rotor and a small antitorque rotor – has remained the most popular configuration for vertical lift aircraft to this day.
