• Born: Jun 12, 1872
• Died: Jun 20, 1921
• Occupation: Director, Writer, Actor
• Active: teens
• Major Genres: Drama, Adventure
• Career Highlights: The Miracle Man, The Prisoner of Zenda, Traffic in Souls
• First Major Screen Credit: The Aggressor (1911)

Biography

George Loane Tucker became a director in 1910 and went on to make many one-reel films for studios such as IMP and Reliance-Majestic. In 1913, he gained considerable notoriety for making the sensationalistic Traffic in Souls, a racy exposé of white slavery. A tremendous box-office success, the film is credited with starting a trend of increasingly sexy films. Just before the film was released, Tucker had moved to England where he made a few more highly regarded films. In 1917, he returned to the U.S. and continued directing. One of his most acclaimed works was The Miracle Man (1919), the film that featured Lon Chaney in his first starring role. Tucker was highly regarded in Hollywood and when he died of a lingering illness in 1921 at the age of 49, he was hailed as "the First of the Immortals." ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

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The American historian George Tucker (1775-1861) was the most significant historian from the South in the era preceding the Civil War.

George Tucker was born on Aug. 20, 1775, in St. Georges, Bermuda. He received his early education from tutors and entered the College of William and Mary in 1795, graduating 2 years later. He studied law in his uncle's office at Williamsburg and, after admission to the bar, moved to Richmond to practice. He married Maria Carter, grandniece of George Washington, in 1802. Four years later the Tuckers moved to a country estate in Pittsylvania County, Va.

Tucker's Letters from Virginia: Translated from the French (1816), a satire on local customs, was published anonymously. Two years later he moved to Lynchburg and was elected to the U.S. Congress as a Jeffersonian Republican. During his three terms he was politically consistent, voting against protective tariffs and Federal subsidies for internal improvements.

In 1825 Tucker became professor of moral philosophy and chairman of the faculty at the University of Virginia. He expanded the curriculum, enrollment, and support of the university. He also taught political economy. He retired from the university in 1845. During this time he wrote The Law of Wages, Profits, and Rent Investigated (1837), The Life of Thomas Jefferson (2 vols., 1837), Theory of Money and Banks Investigated (1839), and Progress of the United States in Population and Wealth (1843). In his economic works Tucker assumed a modified classical position, denying the absolute determinism of population pressure and advocating governmental regulation of paper money. He favored a silver-based currency, and although he was not opposed to the idea of a national bank he believed that banks located strategically in three commercial centers would diminish the fear of monopoly.

At the age of 75 Tucker began his best-known work, The History of the United States to the End of the 26th Congress in 1841 (4 vols., 1856-1857). He had planned to include social history but failed to do so in the completed work, which consists mainly of the annual messages of the presidents and the acts of Congress. The history spends little time on the colonial period, concentrating more on contemporary times. His own position by this time was that of a Southern unionist who believed that slavery could be defended on the basis of social control. He denounced abolitionists and argued that slavery was dying because of unfavorable economic conditions and that African Americans should be colonized. Because of these views his history did not win much acceptance North or South: his Southern position on slavery alienated the North, and his unionism proved too much for the South. He died on April 10, 1861, at a plantation near Charlottesville, Va.

Further Reading

A balanced treatment of Tucker's history is in Michael Kraus, The Writing of American History (1953). Alexander Bruce, History of the University of Virginia (3 vols., 1920), evaluates Tucker as chairman of the faculty.

(1775-1861)

1816	Letters from Virginia. A satire of the customs and conduct of Virginia, condemning slavery and deriding planters, purportedly written by a traveling Frenchman. The authorship is disputed; it has also been attributed to William Maxwell and James Kirke Paulding.
1824	The Valley of Shenandoah. Tucker's first and best novel details plantation life in the valley and cautions young men against mismanaging their finances and young women against possible seducers. The book's financial failure would influence Tucker's decision to become professor of moral philosophy at the University of Virginia, a post offered to him by Thomas Jefferson.
1827	A Voyage to the Moon. A science fiction satire published under the pseudonym "Joseph Atterly," mocking typical objects of satire, including quack physicians, inept attorneys, and fashion-crazed women.
1837	The Life of Thomas Jefferson. The first authorized biography of Jefferson. Though complimentary, it is the fairest nineteenth-century treatment of the former president, based on Tucker's personal acquaintance with the man and his contemporaries, extensive research, and conversations with Jefferson's family.
1843	Progress of the United States in Population and Wealth in Fifty Years, as Exhibited by the Decennial Census. A groundbreaking statistical work compiling facts and figures from the decennial censuses. The United States Democratic Review says it is "one of the few books that may be set down as indispensable to every American library."
1856	The History of the United States from Their Colonization to the End of the Twenty-Sixth Congress, in 1841. A highly detailed four-volume history by an author who had personally known every president of the United States up to that time. Although criticized for its Southern bias and largely forgotten today, this pioneering work looks at American history through a lens of economics and morality and fills the gap between Richard Hildreth's factual American history (1849) and the later published volumes of George Bancroft's monumental work (1834-1875).

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