Category: History

On October 28, 1919, Congress passed the Volstead Act providing for enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified nine months earlier. Known as the Prohibition Amendment, it prohibited the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” in the United States.

The movement to prohibit alcohol began in the early years of the nineteenth century when individuals concerned about the adverse effects of drink began forming local societies to promote temperance in consumption of alcohol. The first temperance societies were organized in New York (1808) and Massachusetts (1813). Members, many of whom belonged to Protestant evangelical denominations, frequently met in local churches. As time passed, most temperance societies began to call for complete abstinence from all alcoholic beverages.

Source: Library of Congress

Same philosophy still in effect for drugs.

Tombstone, Arizona, now a sleepy retirement community of 1,500 trying to milk its history, was a silver boom town of 10,000 in the early 1880s. Lawlessness was rampant — so much so that martial law was threatened by President Arthur in 1882.

Among the early residents were the Earp brothers, James, Virgil, Wyatt, Morgan, and Warren (ages 40 to 25 respectively in 1881). The Earps were, more or less, itinerant lawmen, politicians, security guards, and gamblers. By 1881, Virgil and Wyatt were established in Tombstone, seeking political office and running gaming tables. When the town marshal disappeared, Virgil Earp was appointed to the job.

The Clantons — father N.H. “Old Man,” and sons Ike, Phin, and Billy — were part of the town rowdy cowboy crowd, probably rustling cattle from Mexico and generally being unsavory, at least as far the the establishment was concerned. They were also Southern Democrats. The Earps were Union men (James had been seriously wounded in the war).

The bad blood between the two families seems to have grown out of finger pointing between them. The Earps would accuse the Clantons of some nefarious activity and the Clantons would point right back — and, of course, both were basically telling the truth. Wyatt, intent on a big splash to assure his election as sheriff, negotiated with Ike to reveal the identities of the Contention stage coach robbers and killers so he, Earp, could capture them. The negotiations fell through, but knowledge of them became public, making Ike look like the turncoat he was. He blamed Wyatt.

On October 26, 1881, Virgil Earp arrested Ike Clanton, who had been making threats since the previous evening. As Virgil hauled Clanton to the courthouse, Wyatt ran into a friend of Clanton’s, Tom McLaury. They had a heated exchange that ended when Wyatt hit McLaury over the head with a pistol. After this, Ike and Tom, joined by their brothers Billy and Frank respectively, considered their options, including leaving town. Billy Claiborne joined them. Virgil Earp, the town marshal, enlisted Wyatt, Morgan, and their friend Doc Holliday to help arrest the Clantons and McLaurys.

They met in a vacant on Fremont Street near the O.K. Corral livery stable. Thirty shots were fired in about 30 seconds. Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers were killed. Virgil and Morgan Earp were wounded. The two prime antagonists, Ike Clanton and Wyatt Earp, were unhurt, as was Claiborne. The Earps were accused of murder, but a justice of the peace found they had acted as officers of the law.

The gunfight was the end of the Earps political plans in Tombstone. Virgil lost his post as town marshal. Family and friends of the Clantons began a vendetta, seriously wounding Virgil in December and killing Morgan in March 1882. Wyatt killed a deputy sheriff and another man suspected of being involved in Morgan’s shooting.

Virgil and Wyatt took their skills and ambitions to California, Colorado, and Alaska. Warren Earp was killed in Wilcox, Arizona, in a gunfight that might have been fallout from the O.K. Corral. Virgil died of pnuemonia in 1906. Wyatt Earp died in 1929. He was 80.

I see some of the commentariat are starting to fret at the “danger” of having the presidency and both houses of congress in Democratic hands.

It is something to think about. I mean look at what happened after the 1964 election when there was a Democratic mandate in the 89th and 90th congresses.

• Medicaid
• Medicare
• Voting Rights Act
• Head Start
• Immigration and Nationality Act
• Age Discrimination in Employment Act
• Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act
• National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act
• Freedom of Information Act
• National Historic Preservation Act
• Wild and Scenic Rivers Act
• National Trails System
• Public Broadcasting Act (PBS and NPR)

I hope we don’t get that kind of progress again.

While campaigning for the presidency as the Bull Moose Party candidate, former president Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest in Milwaukee on this date in 1912. He went ahead with his scheduled speech.

Milwaukee, Wis., October 14 — A desperate attempt to kill Col. Theodore Roosevelt tonight failed when a 32 caliber bullet aimed directly at the heart of the former president and fired at short range by the crazed assailant, spent part of its force in a bundle of manuscript containing the address which Co. Roosevelt was to deliver tonight, and wounded the Progressive candidate for President.

Col. Roosevelt delivered part of his scheduled address with the bullet in his body, his blood staining his white vest as he spoke to a huge throng at the auditorium. Later, he collapsed, weakened by the wound, and was rushed to Emergency hospital.

HistoryBuff.com had the above from a contemporary newspaper account. There’s more.

Roosevelt survived the wound. He died in January 1919, age 60. The Bull Moose Party was officially the Progressive Party.

… of the White House.

The cornerstone of the White House was laid on October 13, 1792. President John Adams and his wife Abigail moved into the unfinished structure on November 1, 1800, keeping to the scheduled relocation of the capital from Philadelphia. Congress declared the city of Washington in the District of Columbia the permanent capital of the United States on July 16, 1790. …

Constructed of white-grey sandstone that contrasted sharply with the red brick used in nearby buildings, the presidential mansion was called the White House as early as 1809. President Theodore Roosevelt officially adopted the term in 1902.

Source: Library of Congress

During the Truman Administration the White House was gutted except for the outside walls and rebuilt. This photo was taken in April 1950.

Gutted to the outside stone walls, deepened with a new two story basement, reinforced with concrete and 660 tons of steel, and fireproofed, the White House was stabilized. The protection of the historic stone walls was so important that workers dismantled a bulldozer and reassembled it inside to avoid cutting a larger doorway out of the walls. Shafts out of windows carried out debris from the inside of the house, and external stairs were built because the inside was completely empty during the renovation.

Source: The White House Historical Association

The Truman Presidential Museum and Library has a photo essay on the reconstruction — The White House Revealed — though the photos are too small to view much detail.

And this, Washington Didn’t Sleep Here: A White House FAQ

On Sunday, October 8, 1871, fire leveled a broad swath of Michigan and Wisconsin, including the cities of Peshtigo, Holland, Manistee, and Port Huron. At least 1,200 people died (possibly twice as many) as a result of the fire. Approximately 800 fatalities occurred in Peshtigo, Wisconsin. That same night, the Great Chicago Fire erupted in nearby Illinois.

Conditions were ripe for major conflagrations that year. Rainfall during the preceding months totaled just one-fourth of normal precipitation; early October was unseasonably warm; and winds were strong. Vast tracts of forest burned for a week in parts of Michigan and Wisconsin and Chicago firefighters battled blazes daily. Contributing to Chicago’s Great Conflagration were the facts that the bustling midwestern city was built primarily of wood and several woodworking industries operated within the city limits.

Today in History: Library of Congress

Today marks the anniversary of the first American train robbery. An east bound Ohio & Mississippi passenger train was boarded by the Reno brothers near Seymour, Indiana, on this date in 1866.

The Today in History page at the Library of Congress provides background about train robberies and early railroads including this excerpt from “The Early Days in Silver City” —

I happened to be riding that train. I had gone overland to Safford and Solemisvelle prospecting. I decided to come home Thanksgiving to be with my family at Silver City. I boarded the train at Wilcox. There was a large shipment of gold on the train. Just out of Steins Pass we could see a large bon-fire. One of the trainmen remarked, ‘Wonder what the big fire is, I hope we don’t run into any trouble.’ The bon-fire we discovered to our sorrow was on the R. R. Then as today curiosity got the best of some of us so we had to find out why the train came to an abrupt stop, and what the bon-fire was put on the track. We found ourselves looking into the barrel of guns.

…was sworn in as Supreme Court Justice on this date in 1967. Marshall made the successful argument before the Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954. He was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals by President Kennedy, and as Solicitor General and then to the Supreme Court by President Johnson. He was the first (of just two so far) African-American justice.

Click here to see how political cartoonist Paul Conrad depicted the loss when Marshall died in 1993 (two years after retiring from the Court).

“Of all the days on all the fields where American soldiers have fought, the most terrible by almost any measure was September 17, 1862. The battle waged on that date, close by Antietam Creek at Sharpsburg in western Maryland, took a human toll never exceeded on any other single day in the nation’s history. So intense and sustained was the violence, a man recalled, that for a moment in his mind’s eye the very landscape around him turned red.”

Stephen W. Sears
Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam

The New York Times coverage from 1862 is online.

Antietam gave Lincoln the military victory he needed to issue his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22nd. It stated that slaves in states or parts of states still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, would be declared free. The objective of the war had changed.

America’s bloodiest day:

As a rule of thumb, about 20% of the wounded died of their wounds and 30% of the missing had been killed (in the days before dog-tags to identify the dead). Accordingly, an estimate of the total dead from the one-day battle: 7,640.

Source: National Park Service

The best single volume on Antietam is Stephen Sears’s Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam. Sears wrote a good article on the battle in 1989: Antietam: The Terrible Price of Freedom.

221 years ago today the delegates to the Constitutional Convention met for the last time to sign the document and send it to the 13 states for ratification. In Gouverneur Morris’s immortal preamble:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Click image for larger version of Mike Wilkins’s Preamble, 1987, painted metal on vinyl and wood, 96 x 96 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Nissan Motor Corporation in U.S.A. Wilkins ordered the plates from each of the states.

It was on this day in 1812 that Napoleon’s army invaded the city of Moscow. He began the invasion of Russia in June of that year. The Russian forces kept retreating, burning the farmland as they went so the French wouldn’t be able to draw provisions from the land.

The troops were exhausted and hungry by the time they reached Moscow on this day, in 1812. The gates of the city were left wide open. And as the French came through, they noticed that all over the city small fires had begun. The Russians had set fire to their own city. By that night, the fires were out of control.

Napoleon watched the burning of the city from inside the Kremlin, and barely escaped the city alive. The retreat began across the snow-covered plains, one of the great disasters of military history. Thousands of troops died from starvation and hypothermia.

Of the nearly half million French soldiers who had set out in June on the invasion, fewer than 20,000 staggered back across the border in December.

— The Writer’s Almanac (2005)

The confusion and horror of the French retreat through the Russian winter are well described. “The air itself,” wrote a French colonel, “was thick with tiny icicles which sparkled in the sun but cut one’s face drawing blood.” Another Frenchman recalled that “it frequently happened that the ice would seal my eyelids shut.” Prince Wilhelm of Baden, one of Napoleon’s commanders, gave the order to march on the morning of Dec. 7, only to discover that “the last drummer boy had frozen to death.” Soldiers had resorted to looting, stripping corpses and even to cannibalism by the time the march was over.

— From a Washington Post review of Moscow 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March

U.S. President George W. Bush writes a note to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during a Security Council meeting at the 2005 World Summit and 60th General Assembly of the United Nations in New York September 14.

— Reuters via Yahoo! News.

Hey, when you gotta go, you gotta go. And Bush really needs to go!

[First posted here three years ago.]

Poynter.org has a gallery of front pages from September 11 and 12, 2001.

John Smith was elected president of Jamestown 400 years ago today.

A brash and boldly self-confident figure, Smith brought years of soldiering experience to the Virginia venture. While fighting the Turks in Transylvania, he was wounded, captured, and sold, he claimed, into slavery in Turkey. Smith reported that he eventually escaped with the assistance of a Turkish woman who had fallen in love with him. All this before his adventures in America!

Whether or not Smith’s reportage was accurate, his version of his role in the survival of the Jamestown colony was accepted as fact by subsequent generations of Americans. In Virginia, Smith led the settlers’ resistance against frequent raids by the Algonquin Indians who made their homes in the Chesapeake region. He also ventured into surrounding territory to forage for food, negotiate with Native Americans, and trade trinkets with them in exchange for corn.

In December 1607, Captain Smith was captured and brought before Algonquin Chief Powhatan. In a book written much later, Smith described how Pocahontas, the chief’s young daughter, saved his life by throwing herself between him and the warriors ordered to execute him.

The tale of Smith’s rescue by the Indian princess Pocahontas first appeared in his own Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles, published in 1624. The event, now part of our national mythology, was probably romanticized by Smith. However, Pocahontas’s intervention appears to resemble a ritual familiar to many Native American groups.

Library of Congress

Smith left Virginia a year later. He explored the coasts off Maine and Massachusetts Bay in 1614 and coined the term “New England.”

On this date 151 years ago today.

In 1857 a group of pioneers were taking cattle from Arkansas to California and made the mistake of stopping to let their herd graze in Utah, where the Mormons had settled after being forced from the East. A group of Mormons and Paiute Indians surrounded the party and, after offering to ferry them to safety in exchange for their guns, killed some 140 people—everyone except for a few children under the age of seven. Shortly before the massacre President James Buchanan sent the U.S. Army, because the sect was forming an independent government, and McMurtry surmises that this left the Mormons feeling particularly vulnerable. They were also probably eager to get their hands on the Arkansans’ valuable cattle. The victims’ bodies were left in a pile, stripped of their clothes and jewelry, and the cattle were divided. But as McMurtry’s writes, “the lesson, if it is a lesson, is that blood—in time, and, often, not that much time—will out. In case after case the dead have managed to assert a surprising potency.”

A group of men passing through the meadow a few weeks later found the bodies, and news quickly spread. The Mormons concocted a story to blame the carnage on the Indians, but an investigation by the superintendent of the Utah territory found that tale to be flimsy at best. The survivors, children now in the custody of Mormon families, began telling their version of events. Eventually the church offered up a scapegoat, John Doyle Lee, to deal with the mounting public pressure. Lee was sentenced to die, and he requested to be shot, by firing squad, on the site of the massacre.

The taint of the murders has remained on the Mormon church ever since. As recently as 1999 bones were uncovered at the site of a Mountain Meadows memorial, and forensic scientists were able to disprove the Mormons’ claim that the Paiutes alone were responsible for the deaths of women and children.

AmericanHeritage.com / Remembering the Massacres of the Great West

The above from a review of Larry McMurtry’s thin volume Oh What a Slaughter. The classic account remains Juanita Brooks’s The Mountain Meadows Massacre. Mark Twain wrote about it in Roughing It in 1872.