Category: History

Brief narratives about people and events in the American past.

The Sinking of the Andrea Doria

[O]n July 25, 1956, two large passenger liners off Massachusetts were steaming toward each other through the night at a combined speed of 40 knots. In spite of ample room to maneuver, in spite of the radar that let them spot each other from a distance, and in spite of clear rules intended to avoid collisions, the Stockholm crashed into the Andrea Doria and ripped the luxurious ship open amidships. It was to be the last great drama of the age of transatlantic passenger liners.

Read more from American Heritage.

A 14-year-old girl aboard the Andrea Doria survived in the wreckage on the Stockholm.

July 23rd ought to be national holiday

On July 23, 1904, according to some accounts, Charles E. Menches conceived the idea of filling a pastry cone with two scoops of ice-cream and thereby invented the ice-cream cone. He is one of several claimants to that honor: Ernest Hamwi, Abe Doumar, Albert and Nick Kabbaz, Arnold Fornachou, and David Avayou all have been touted as the inventor(s) of the first edible cone. Interestingly, these individuals have in common the fact that they all made or sold confections at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, known as the St. Louis World’s Fair. It is from the time of the Fair that the edible “cornucopia,” a cone made from a rolled waffle, vaulted into popularity in the United States.

Library of Congress

Court, unpacked

“On this day in 1937 the Senate shelved President Franklin Roosevelt’s court-packing plan, which would have allowed him to appoint new judges and justices to the federal bench for each who did not retire within six months of his (it would have been ‘his’, then) seventieth birthday.”

Read more at The Edge of the American West.

Rollin’ into Cleveland to the Lake

On July 22, 1796, a party of surveyors led commissioned by General Moses Cleaveland arrived at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, believing that an ideal location for a new town—Cleaveland, Ohio. The Connecticut Land Company had sent General Cleaveland to the Western Reserve—the northeastern region of Ohio—to speed the sale of the 3.5 million acres that the land company had reserved when Ohio was opened for settlement ten years earlier. In 1831, the Cleveland Advertiser dropped the first “a” in the city’s name to reduce the length of the newspaper’s masthead. From then on, the community was known as Cleveland.

Located on the southern shore of Lake Erie, the town did not grow substantially until the Erie Canal was completed in 1825. The canal opened a passage to the Atlantic Ocean, making the city a major St. Lawrence Seaway port. Soon, the city became a center for commercial and industrial activity. This activity increased further in the 1840s when the railroad arrived.

Today, Cleveland continues to have a highly diversified manufacturing base although the economy has shifted towards health care and financial services. With the opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and other attractions—including various museums, boating on Lake Erie, and a wide variety of entertainment options, Cleveland also has become a tourist destination.

Library of Congress

Sort of Albuquerque’s sister city. They took a letter out of our name too.

39 years ago

It was 39 years ago this evening (U.S. time) that man first walked on the moon, an event that NewMexiKen believes centuries from now will rank as the most historic happening in our lifetimes.

I can remember watching the TV that evening thinking how cool it would be if some creature came crawling over the horizon into the field of view of the live camera.

The New York Times has its next day coverage on-line, including the historic front page.

 Man on Moon

Hitler assassination attempt

Sixty-four years ago today, German military officers failed in an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler with a bomb in a briefcase. Four were killed but Hitler, though wounded, was saved by the heavy wooden table on which he was reviewing maps. This from the BBC —

Adolf Hitler has escaped death after a bomb exploded at 1242 local time at his headquarters in Rastenberg, East Prussia.

The German News Agency broke the news from Hitler’s headquarters, known as the “wolf’s lair”, his command post for the Eastern Front.

A senior officer, Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, has been blamed for planting the bomb at a meeting at which Hitler and other senior members of the General Staff were present.

Hitler has sustained minor burns and concussion but, according to the news agency, managed to keep his appointment with Italian leader Benito Mussolini.

*****

Von Stauffenberg was arrested the same day and shot. The rest of the conspirators were tried and hanged or offered the chance to commit suicide.

Eight of those executed were hanged with piano wire from meat-hooks and their executions filmed and shown to senior members of the Nazi Party and the armed forces.

Paper Clips

Below is a link to the award-winning 2004 documentary Paper Clips, the story of a middle school in a small town in Tennessee that began a project to teach its homogenous student body about diversity and the Holocaust. It’s really quite interesting, in the documentary way.

I recommend you take the time to view it, though it is 82 minutes.

The video is made possible through a new web service called SnagFilms that features documentaries in full for free, though with some annoying but quite brief advertisements. It looks promising.

Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War began on July 17, 1936 as a series of right-wing insurrections within the military, staged against the constitutional government of the five-year-old Second Spanish Republic. Because it was the first major military contest between left-wing forces and fascists, and attracted international involvement on both sides, the Spanish Civil War has sometimes been called the first chapter of World War II.

The rebels, or Nationalists as they came to be known, were backed by a spectrum of political and social conservatives including the Catholic Church, the fascist Falange Party, and those who wished to restore the Spanish monarchy. They received aid in the form of troops, tanks, and planes from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, and Germany field-tested some of its most important artillery in Spain. With the rise of General Francisco Franco as leader of the Nationalist coalition, the threat of fascism’s spread across Europe visibly deepened.

The Republicans were backed by Spanish labor unions and a range of anti-fascist political groups, from communists and anarchists to Catalonian separatists to centrist supporters of liberal democracy. The Republicans received aid from the Soviet Union and from Mexico, but their most likely European allies signed a joint agreement of nonintervention. The most visible international aid came in the form of volunteers. Estimates vary, but as many as 60,000 individuals from over fifty countries joined the International Brigades to fight for the cause of the Spanish Republic. Between two and three thousand of these volunteers were men and women from the United States—most served with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
. . .

The Spanish Civil War, especially the anti-fascist side, became a cause célèbre in the United States. Writers and artists including novelist Ernest Hemingway, poets Muriel Rukeyser and Langston Hughes, and painter Robert Motherwell paid homage to the struggling Republic in their work. Baritone Paul Robeson sang for the international brigades. The anarchist Emma Goldman led an English-language publicity campaign. Fictional character Rick Blaine, protagonist of the 1942 film classic Casablanca, struggled against fascism in Spain, as did Robert Jordan, the hero of Hemingway’s 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Library of Congress

Franco’s forces won in 1939 and he remained in power until 1975. As the Philadelphia Daily News editorialized at the time (this is the complete editorial): “They say only the good die young. Generalissimo Francisco Franco was 82. Seems about right.”

NewMexiKen was in Madrid in 1992. A crowd had gathered to watch and listen to some Peruvian pan-flutists (they were still a novelty then). The crowd was just enjoying itself when the police told us to disperse — and to my eternal amazement everyone did without a murmur of protest. In the U.S., the police would have been verbally abused at a minimum; in Madrid, nothing.

Repression comes on fast but leaves only slowly.

(Actually I did murmur a little, but I was traveling on a diplomatic passport and decided discretion was more important than valor, even if I was immune from prosecution.)

‘No one who saw it could forget it, a foul and awesome display’

It was on this day in 1945 that the first atomic bomb was exploded at 5:30 a.m., one hundred and twenty miles south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was the end result of the Manhattan Project, which had started in 1939. The bomb contained a ball of plutonium about the size of a baseball, surrounded by a ring of uranium and a series of detonators. Its main pieces were placed on the backseat of an army jeep and driven to the test site, where the bomb was assembled and positioned at the top of a hundred-foot steel tower for the test explosion.

At 2:00 a.m. on this day in 1945, a thunderstorm blew in from the Gulf of Mexico. The men assembling the bomb had to do so in the midst of a lightning storm, wondering what would happen if lightning struck the tower. But the weather cleared up just before dawn. They started the countdown fifteen seconds before 5:30 a.m. The physicists and military men watched from about 10,000 yards away. They all wore Welder’s glasses and suntan lotion.

One of the physicists who was there that day said, “We were lying there, very tense, in the early dawn, and there were just a few streaks of gold in the east; you could see your neighbor very dimly. … Suddenly, there was an enormous flash of light, the brightest light I have ever seen … it bored its way right through you. It was a vision which was seen with more than the eye. It was seen to last forever. … There was an enormous ball of fire which grew and grew and it rolled as it grew; it went up into the air, in yellow flashes and into scarlet and green. It looked menacing. It seemed to come toward one.”

The ball of fire rose rapidly, releasing four times the heat of the interior of the sun, followed by a mushroom cloud that extended forty thousand feet into the sky. Tests showed that it had released energy equal to 21,000 tons of TNT. The burst of light was so bright that it lit up the moon. An army captain in Albuquerque who knew about the test could see the explosion from his hotel room, more than a hundred miles away.

Later, when the scientists went to examine the site of the explosion, they found a crater in the ground 1200 feet in diameter. The ground was covered with a green, glassy substance, which was actually sand that had been fused into glass by the heat.

At the time, the military announced that an ammunitions dump had exploded, and a few weeks later the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Source: The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media (2006).

July 16th

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger was published on this date in 1951. It’s sold about 60 million copies since. The following is excerpted from a longer piece today at The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor.

Salinger’s division hit the beach in the fifth hour of the invasion, and for the next several months Salinger saw some of the bloodiest fighting of the war, including the Battle of the Bulge. Between 50 and 200 soldiers in his division were killed or wounded every day. At the end of the war, Salinger checked into an Army general hospital in Nuremberg, suffering from a nervous breakdown. He spent several months recuperating.

It was after Salinger’s release from the hospital that he sent out for publication the first Holden Caulfield story narrated by Holden Caulfield himself, a story called “I’m Crazy.” It was published in Collier‘s in December of 1945. One year later, in 1946, The New Yorker finally published “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” which they had been holding onto since before the war began. J.D. Salinger had finally become a New Yorker writer, something he’d been dreaming of for more than a decade.

Major John Glenn, USMC, set a transcontinental (Los Angeles to New York) speed record of 3 hours, 23 minutes and 8 seconds on this date in 1957. Average speed: 723 mph.

Will Ferrell is 41 today; Barry Sanders is 40.

Two Hollywood greats, Ruby Catherine Stevens and Virginia Katherine McMath were born on July 16th.

We know Stevens better as Barbara Stanwyck, born in 1907, she was a four time best actress Oscar nominee. Anthony Lane wrote an excellent review of Stanwyck’s work last year for The New Yorker.

And we know McMath better as Ginger Rogers, born in 1911, and an Oscar winner for best actress for Kitty Foyle. This from the abstract of a 1995 New Yorker item by Arlene Croce about Rogers.

Ginger Rogers was a star because she was unique and representative at the same time; she was complicatedly iconographic. Her very name tells us all we need to know. First of all, it’s euphonious (those three soft “g”s), and then what the first name specifies–something delicious–the last name, a half rhyme, pluralizes.

Apollo 11 left Florida for the moon on this date in 1969.

Works Progress Administration

Curious to know a bit more about the Works Progress Administration — the folks that built all those bridges you still see when you drive two lane highways? Or that wrote those wonderful state guides?

The New York Times has a concise description of the program accompanying a series of articles about WPA-related projects.

Recommended.

And here’s another related and interesting article — Going Down the Road – Places Captured in Time, but Not Frozen There.

“The American Guide Series of books, … was produced during the Depression by the Federal Writers’ Project and has become part of the canon of American travel writing.”

And I found this in a U.S. Senate document:

The American Guide Series is a highly collectible set of books; many people search the shelves of antiquarian book shops in an attempt to bring together the entire series. The Guide Series’ value continues to increase, with some titles now worth several hundred dollars. Two of the more desirable titles include the first edition Idaho volume, most of which were destroyed in a warehouse fire, and the Dakota volumes, which had very limited printings. The recent popularity of the series has also prompted publishing houses to reissue selected titles in attractive and affordable paperback editions.

Billy the Kid

… was killed 127 years ago tonight.

Henry McCarty was born in New York City (or Brooklyn) in the fall of 1859. With his mother and brother he moved west — Indiana, Kansas, New Mexico. Mrs. McCarty married a man named William Antrim in Santa Fe. After she died in Silver City in 1874, the boy got into minor trouble, escaped jail to Arizona Territory, and used the name William Antrim. His size and age led to “Kid” or “Kid” Antrim.

Billy the KidArrested for shooting and killing a blacksmith who was beating him in 1877, the Kid escaped back to New Mexico and assumed the name William H. Bonney. He enlisted in the range war in Lincoln County on the side of John Tunstall against Lawrence Murphy. After Tunstall was killed, the Kid rode with a group called the Regulators, a quasi-legal vigilante gang. The Regulators captured two of Tunstall’s killers and someone, most likely the Kid, killed both before they reached Lincoln and the jail. Later the Kid was among the group that killed Sheriff William Brady. The Kid was wounded in the fight at Blazer’s Mill with “Buckshot” Roberts. There were other gunfights between the warring parties. In July, the Kid was in the “five-day battle” in Lincoln where the leader of his group, Tunstall’s lawyer Alexander McSween, was killed. After that the war was considered over and the Kid lost any legitimacy. In August 1878, he was present when the clerk at the Mescalero Indian agency was killed.

Incoming New Mexico Territorial Governor Lew Wallace (the author of Ben Hur) issued a general pardon for the Lincoln County war, but it did not apply to Billy Bonney because he had been involved in the killing of Sheriff Brady. After another outburst of violence led to the killing of a lawyer named Chapman, Governor Wallace offered the Kid a full pardon if he’d testify against Chapman’s killers. Bonney agreed and was arrested in early 1879. Meanwhile Chapman’s killers escaped.

After waiting several months for the pardon, the Kid, who had some liberties, walked away from his guards, mounted a horse and escaped. He became a cattle thief, claiming it was owed him for back wages. He killed a saloon braggart whose gun misfired. Another man was killed in an attempt to capture Bonney.

The new Lincoln County sheriff, Pat Garrett, finally caught the Kid at Stinking Springs, 25 miles from Fort Sumner. After a gunfight the Kid was arrested. He was first charged in the murder of “Buckshot” Roberts, but eventually brought to trial and convicted for the murder of Sheriff Brady. Before Bonney could be hanged, he killed two deputies and escaped. Garrett located the Kid at Pete Maxwell’s ranch, waited in the dark bedroom, and shot him twice when he saw him outlined in the opened bedroom doorway. The Kid died without knowing who had killed him. He was 21 years old.

Billy the Kid Tombstone

NewMexiKen photo, 2006. Souvenir hunters have chipped away.

Among the best of the many books on Billy the Kid is Michael Wallis’s Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride.

Bastille Day

July 14th is Bastille Day in France, a national holiday. Even Google gets in on the act (google.fr, that is).

Google Bastille Day

The Bastille was a Paris prison, by 1789 more symbolic than significant. It had a sinister reputation as the place where people were held on the sole and arbitrary power of the king. More importantly in 1789, it was a storehouse of gunpowder and arms.

On July 14, Parisian crowds overwhelmed the prison and it was surrendered. The event is seen as a significant early step in the French Revolution.

Fête Nationale became a holiday in 1880.

Close call

English and American troops under British Major General Edward Braddock were routed by French and Indian forces near Fort Duquesne (Pittsburgh) on this date in 1755. The leading colonial officer, George Washington, had two horses shot out from under him, his coat torn by bullets and his hat shot off, but — as you may have heard — he survived.

The day music changed forever

On this day in 1954, Elvis Presley recorded his first rock and roll song and his first hit, “That’s All Right, Mama.” Elvis had wanted to be a crooner, and in his first recording sessions he only sang slow ballads. But then, in between takes, Elvis and the other musicians started fooling around and singing a blues tune called “That’s All Right.” Sam Phillips asked them to start over from the beginning and recorded the song. He then rushed the record to the biggest DJ in Memphis, and it became Elvis’s breakout hit.

The Writer’s Almanac

Sun Studio

The “other musicians” were, of course, Scotty Moore on guitar and Bill Black on bass.

Sam recognized it right away. He was amazed that the boy even knew Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup — nothing in any of the songs he had tried so far gave any indication that he was drawn to this kind of music at all. But this was the sort of music that Sam had long ago wholeheartedly embraced, this was the sort of music of which he said, “This is where the soul of man never dies.” And the way the boy performed it, it came across with a freshness and an exuberance, it came across with the kind of clear-eyed, unabashed originality that Sam sought in all the music that he recorded — it was “different,” it was itself.

They worked on it. They worked hard on it, but without any of the laboriousness that had gone into the efforts to cut “I Love You Because.” Sam tried to get Scotty to cut down on the instrumental flourishes — “Simplify, simplify'” was the watchword. “If we wanted Chet Atkins,” said Sam good-humoredly, “we would have brought him up from Nashville and gotten him in the damn studio!” He was delighted with the rhythmic propulsion Bill Black brought to the sound. It was a slap beat and a tonal beat at the same time. He may not have been as good a bass player as his brother Johnny; in fact, Sam said, “Bill was one of the worst bass players in the world, technically, but, man, could he slap that thing!” And yet that wasn’t it either — it was the chemistry. There was Scotty, and there was Bill, and there was Elvis scared to death in the middle, “but sounding so fresh, because it was fresh to him.”

Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley

NewMexiKen photo, 2006

History’s Greatest Coincidence

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on this date in 1826, 50 years to the day after the Declaration of Independence was adopted. Jefferson was the primary author of the Declaration; Adams, with Benjamin Franklin, was also key to its evolution.

Image of first page of Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence with edits.

Adams and Jefferson were colleagues during the Revolution, but fell apart over political differences during their terms as president (Adams 1797-1801, Jefferson 1801-1809). After Jefferson left office they resumed a remarkable correspondence that lasted until their deaths.

Also, on that same day in 1826, Stephen Foster, the first great American songwriter, was born. “His melodies are so much a part of American history and culture that most people think they’re folk tunes. All in all he composed some 200 songs, including ‘Oh! Susanna’ ‘Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,’ and ‘Camptown Races.'” [American Experience]

And “Old Folks at Home (Swanee River),” “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Beautiful Dreamer.”

A Declaration of Mutual Dependence

An excellent piece written in 2004 for The New York Times by Walter Isaacson. Here is an excerpt but take the time to go read it all — it is our nation’s birthday after all.

Where did these axioms come from? At first, the founders foundered a bit in figuring that out. “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,” Jefferson wrote in his initial rough draft. Franklin crossed this out with his heavy printer’s pen and changed it to “we hold these truths to be self-evident.” Drawing on the concepts of his friend David Hume, Franklin believed that the truths were grounded in rationality and reason, not in the dictates or dogma of any particular religion.

Similarly, Jefferson originally noted that “from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable.” John Adams, a product of Puritan Massachusetts, appears to be the one who suggested that this be amended to, “they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” But whatever the provenance of these basic premises, it was clear what this meant for the role and the legitimacy of governments: “To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” A nice concept.

The Declaration of Independence

It was the Declaration of Independence that was approved by the Second Continental Congress on this date in 1776.

Independence itself was voted two days earlier. We celebrate the anniversary of the birth certificate, not the birth.

Although the section of the Lee Resolution dealing with independence was not adopted until July 2, Congress appointed on June 10 a committee of five to draft a statement of independence for the colonies. The committee included Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman, with the actual writing delegated to Jefferson.

Jefferson drafted the statement between June 11 and 28, submitted drafts to Adams and Franklin who made some changes, and then presented the draft to the Congress following the July 2nd adoption of the independence section of the Lee Resolution. The congressional revision process took all of July 3rd and most of July 4th. Finally, in the afternoon of July 4th, the Declaration was adopted.

The signing of the embossed copy we recognize as THE Declaration of Independence began on August 2nd.

Information and quote from The National Archives.

The Treaty of Vesailles

… at the end of World War I was signed on this date in 1919, five years to the day after the assassination that sparked the war.

The United States Senate never ratified the Treaty, as much for political as diplomatic reasons.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand

… was assassinated in Sarajevo on this date in 1914, igniting what we know as World War I.

Franz Ferdinand was the nephew of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary. After the Emperor’s son had committed suicide and Ferdinand’s own father had died, Ferdinand was first in succession to the Emperor. He was considered likely to be a reformer, which upset Balkan nationalists.

In all, there were seven assassins along the route of the Archduke’s car, all Bosnian Serbs. The third of the seven, Nedelko Cabrinovic,

threw a bomb, but failed to see the car in time to aim well: he missed the heir’s car and hit the next one, injuring several people. Cabrinovic swallowed poison and jumped into a canal, but he was saved from suicide and arrested. He died of tuberculosis in prison in 1916.

The seventh was Gavrilo Princip.

Princip heard Cabrinovic’s bomb go off and assumed that the Archduke was dead. By the time he heard what had really happened, the cars had driven by. By bad luck, a little later the returning procession missed a turn and stopped to back up at a corner just as Princip happened to walk by. Princip fired two shots: one killed the archduke, the other his wife. Princip was arrested before he could swallow his poison capsule or shoot himself. Princip too was a minor under Austrian law, so he could not be executed. Instead he was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and died of tuberculosis in 1916.

It was the Archduke and Sophie’s fourteenth wedding anniversary. The Archduke’s last words were, “Sophie dear, Sophie dear, don’t die! Stay alive for our children.”

In the aftermath of the assassination, diplomatic efforts failed, perhaps because both Austria and Serbia feared loss of national prestige. Austria declared war on Serbia. Germany sided with Austria; Russia supported Serbia as required by treaty. France was obligated to support Russia in any war with Germany or Austria-Hungary. Britain was obligated to support France in an any war with Germany.

Source for quotes and some background: The Balkan Causes of World War One.

James Smithson

… died on this date in 1829.

Smithson’s will left the bulk of his estate to his nephew, Henry James Hungerford. But should his nephew die without children—legitimate or illegitimate—a contingency clause stated that the estate would go to “the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge…”

Source: The Smithsonian Institution

The nephew did indeed die without children and in 1838 approximately $500,000 in gold was brought to the United States. After a decade of indecision and debate about how best to carry out the bequest, the Smithsonian Institution was created by Act of Congress (1846).

Here’s what that gift has led to:

An aside: According to the Smithsonian:

Senator John C. Calhoun opposed acceptance of the Smithson bequest, largely on the grounds that to do so on behalf of the entire nation would abridge states’ rights. He maintained that Congress had no authority to accept the gift. He also asserted that it would be “beneath [U.S.] dignity to accept presents from anyone.”

President Kennedy

… uttered his famous words “Ich bin ein Berliner” (I am a Berliner) on this date in 1963. As The New York Times put it at the time:

President Kennedy, inspired by a tumultuous welcome from more than a million of the inhabitants of this isolated and divided city, declared today he was proud to be “a Berliner.”

He said his claim to being a Berliner was based on the fact that “all free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin.”

Nous Sommes Tous Sauvages

The best book about Custer is Evan S. Connell’s Son of the Morning Star: Custer and The Little Bighorn.

“Son of the Morning Star makes good reading—its prose is elegant, its tone the voice of dry wit, its meandering narrative skillfully crafted. Mr. Connell is above all a storyteller, and the story he tells is vastly more complicated than who did what to whom on June 25, 1876.” Page Stegner

This book is generally considered one of the half-dozen best written about the American west. (And I intend to go read it again when I finish this.)

The best book attempting to tell the vastly more important Indian side of the story is James Welch’s Killing Custer: The Battle of Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians.