History – Page 47 – NewMexiKen

Today’s birthdays

Seven-time Oscar nominee for best actor, Peter O’Toole is 74 today.

Director-writer-producer Wes Craven is 67.

Eddie Munster, aka actor Butch Patrick, is 53.

Emmy-winner, for Angels in America, Mary Louise Parker is 42.

Actress Myrna Loy was born on this date in 1905. IMDB has her listed for an incredible 138 roles, beginning with silent films when she was the femme fatale, but more famously as the witty, urbane Nora Charles in The Thin Man movies. NewMexiKen liked her in The Best Years of Our Lives, a film everyone should see. It won seven Academy Awards in 1946.

Author James Baldwin was born on this date in 1924.

After writing a number of pieces that were published in various magazines, Baldwin went to Switzerland to finish his first novel. GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, published in 1953, was an autobiographical work about growing up in Harlem. The passion and depth with which he described the struggles of black Americans was unlike anything that had been written. Though not instantly recognized as such, GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN has long been considered an American classic. Throughout the rest of the decade, Baldwin moved from Paris to New York to Istanbul, writing NOTES OF A NATIVE SON (1955) and GIOVANNI’S ROOM (1956). Dealing with taboo themes in both books (homosexuality and interracial relationships, respectively), Baldwin was creating socially relevant and psychologically penetrating literature. (American Masters | PBS)

James Butler Hickok was killed while playing poker in Deadwood 130 years ago today.

FUBAR

Writing in Vanity Fair, Michael Bronner has produced 9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes, an article discussing what really happened in the air that morning, complete with transcripts and recordings.

The story of what happened in that room, and when, has never been fully told, but is arguably more important in terms of understanding America’s military capabilities that day than anything happening simultaneously on Air Force One or in the Pentagon, the White House, or NORAD’s impregnable headquarters, deep within Cheyenne Mountain, in Colorado. It’s a story that was intentionally obscured, some members of the 9/11 commission believe, by military higher-ups and members of the Bush administration who spoke to the press, and later the commission itself, in order to downplay the extent of the confusion and miscommunication flying through the ranks of the government.

The truth, however, is all on tape.

Simply fascinating.

Coincidences

Two of the four coincidences posted by John Steele Gordon at AmericanHeritage.com:

1) Probably the most famous coincidence in American history is that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the same day. And it was not just any day but July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. The cherry on top is that Adams and Jefferson were the only two signers of the Declaration to later become President. We will never know, of course, but I’ve always suspected that both Jefferson and Adams, old and rapidly failing though they were (Adams was 90, Jefferson 83) were aware of what day it was and perhaps at some level decided that it was a good day to die. President James Monroe also died on July 4, in 1831. So more than 8 percent of deceased American Presidents have died on the nation’s birthday, and three of the first five did.

3) In the 1940s two of the mightiest and most iconic of American industrial corporations were General Motors and General Electric. The president of GM from 1941 until 1953 was a man named Charles E. Wilson. The president of General Electric from 1940 to 1950 (except from 1942 until 1945, when he worked for the government) was a man named . . . Charles E. Wilson. They were unrelated and were known as Engine Charlie and Electric Charlie to keep them separate. (Runner up in this category, perhaps, is the fact that Chief Justice Earl Warren was succeeded in office by Chief Justice Warren Earl Burger.)

Henry Ford

One of the most remarkable Americans, Henry Ford, was born on this date in 1863. The following is and excerpt from Mr. Ford’s New York Times obituary in 1947:

Renting a one-story brick shed in Detroit, Mr. Ford spent the year 1902 experimenting with two- cylinder and four-cylinder motors. By that time the public had become interested in the speed possibilities of the automobile, which was no longer regarded as a freak. To capitalize on this interest, he built two racing cards, the “999” and the “Arrow,” each with a four-cylinder engine developing eighty horsepower. The “999,” with the celebrated Barney Oldfield at its wheel, won every race in which it was entered.

The resulting publicity helped Mr. Ford to organize the Ford Motor Company, which was capitalized at $100,000, although actually only $28,000 in stock was subscribed. From the beginning Mr. Ford held majority control of this company. In 1919 he and his son, Edsel, became its sole owners, when they bought out the minority stockholders for $70,000,000.

In 1903 the Ford Motor Company sold 1,708 two-cylinder, eight horsepower automobiles. Its operations were soon threatened, however, by a suit for patent infringement brought against it by the Licensed Association of Automobile Manufacturers, who held the rights to a patent obtained by George B. Selden of Rochester, N.Y., in 1895, covering the combination of a gasoline engine and a road locomotive. After protracted litigation, Mr. Ford won the suit when the Supreme Court held that the Selden patent was invalid.

From the beginning of his industrial career, Mr. Ford had in mind the mass production of a car which he could produce and sell at large quantity and low cost, but he was balked for several years by the lack of a steel sufficiently light and strong for his purpose. By chance one day, picking up the pieces of a French racing car that had been wrecked at Palm Beach, he discovered vanadium steel, which had not been manufactured in the United States up to that time.

With this material he began the new era of mass production. He concentrated on a single type of chassis, the celebrated Model T, and specified that “any customer can have a car painted any color he wants, so long as it is black.” On Oct. 1, 1908, he began the production of Model T, which sold for $850. The next year he sold 10,600 cars of this model. Cheap and reliable, the car had a tremendous success. In seven years he built and sold 1,000,000 Fords; by 1925 he was producing them at the rate of almost 2,000,000 a year.

He established two cardinal economic policies during this tremendous expansion: the continued cutting of the cost of the product as improved methods of production made it possible, and the payment of higher wages to his employes. By 1926 the cost of the Model T had been cut to $310, although it was vastly superior to the 1908 model. In January, 1914, he established a minimum pay rate of $5 a day for an eight-hour day, thereby creating a national sensation. Up to that time the average wage throughout his works had been $2.40 a nine-hour day.

The entire obituary is really rather fascinating reading.

Douglas Brinkley’s Wheels for the World (2003) is considered a good biography of Ford and the Ford Motor Company.

Failure to Zigzag

If you saw Jaws or read it, you will remember the harrowing story Quint (Robert Shaw) tells of surviving the sinking of the cruiser Indianapolis. It was on this date in 1945 that the ship, which had carried the Hiroshima atomic bomb, was torpedoed by the Japanese. According to the USS Indianapolis CA-35 web site:

At 12:14 a.m. on July 30, 1945, the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in the Philippine Sea and sank in 12 minutes. Of 1,196 men on board, approximately 300 went down with the ship. The remainder, about 900 men, were left floating in shark-infested waters with no lifeboats and most with no food or water. The ship was never missed, and by the time the survivors were spotted by accident four days later only 316 men were still alive.

The ship’s captain, the late Charles Butler McVay III, survived and was court-martialed and convicted of “hazarding his ship by failing to zigzag” despite overwhelming evidence that the Navy itself had placed the ship in harm’s way, despite testimony from the Japanese submarine commander that zigzagging would have made no difference, and despite that fact that, although over 350 navy ships were lost in combat in WWII, McVay was the only captain to be court-martialed. Materials declassified years later adds to the evidence that McVay was a scapegoat for the mistakes of others.

Shark attacks began with sunrise of the first day (July 30) and continued until the survivors were removed from the water almost five days later.

The Navy web site includes oral histories with Indianapolis Captain McVay and Japanese submarine Captain Hashimoto. The Discovery Channel has a wealth of material.

The site dedicated to the Indianapolis is perhaps the best source.

In Harm’s Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors (2001) by Doug Stanton is a book on the voyage, the sinking, the survivors and McVay’s court martial.

July 28

Catherine Howard married Henry VIII on this date in 1540. She was Mrs. VIII number five.

Maximilien Robespierre got the ax on this date in 1794. Witnesses said Robespierre died within seconds of the guillotine blade severing his head from his neck but, after viewing A Tale of Two Cities, Dr. Senator Bill Frist was certain guillotine victims “respond to visual stimuli.”

Beatrix Potter was born on this date in 1866.

Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was born on this date in 1929.

“Dollar Bill,” Bill Bradley is 63 today.

Hugo Chávez, the President of Venezuela is 52. Venezuela supplies about 6% of U.S. daily oil consumption.

An earthquake in China killed an estimated 242,000 people 30 years ago today.

The 14th amendment

… to the United States Constitution was ratified on this date in 1868. The first section of the Amendment reads:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

It’s the birthday

… of television producer Norman Lear. He’s 84. Lear brought a revolution to TV when he introduced All in the Family in 1971. Sanford and Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons, Maude, One Day At a Time and other shows were also his.

Left at Albuquerque … of Bugs Bunny, who made his first featured appearance in a cartoon released on this date in 1940, A Wild Hare. Bugs was modeled on Groucho Marx with a carrot instead of a cigar — and with a Brooklyn accent.

… of Bobbie Gentry; she is 62. No word yet on what it was she and Billy Joe threw off the Tallahatchee bridge.

… of Peggy Fleming, 58 today. Miss Fleming won her gold medal for figure skating at the 1968 Winter Olympics.

Baseball manager Leo Durocher was born 100 years ago today — “The Lip.” His Hall-of-Fame plaque reads in part:

COLORFUL, CONTROVERSIAL MANAGER FOR 24 SEASONS,
WINNING 2,008 GAMES, 7TH ON ALL-TIME LIST.
COMBATIVE, SWASHBUCKLING STYLE A CARRY-OVER
FROM 17 YEARS AS STRONG FIELDING SHORTSTOP FOR
MURDERERS ROW YANKS, GASHOUSE GANG CARDS, REDS
AND DODGERS. MANAGED CLUBS TO PENNANTS IN 1941
AND 1951 AND TO WORLD SERIES WIN IN 1954. 3-TIME
SPORTING NEWS MANAGER OF THE YEAR.

Durocher, who’s language was so salty he must have been from Deadwood, once recalled a remarkable home run by Willie Mays: “I never saw a f…ing ball go out of a f…ing park so f…ing fast in my f…ing life!”

The truce ending the Korean War was signed on this date in 1953. Read the report from The New York Times.

The first U.S. government agency, the Department of Foreign Affairs (which became the Department of State), was established on this date in 1789.

Long Tall Abe

NewMexiKen ran across this photo of Lincoln at Antietam taken just days after the battle in 1862. Look at those arms. If Lincoln lived in the late 20th century, he wouldn’t have been president, but he would have been a great rebounder.

That’s Allan Pinkerton and General John McClernand with Lincoln, October 3, 1862.

Click photo to view a larger version.

The Sinking of the Andrea Doria

Fifty years ago today, on 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.

Frances Perkins

In NewMexiKen’s copy of the Sunday New York Times an article about Senator Elizabeth Dole states she was the “first female cabinet secretary.” I wonder how many times the authors of the article, Adam Nagourney and Kate Zernike, have driven or walked by the Frances Perkins Building in Washington. That’s the headquarters for the Department of Labor, which Ms. Perkins headed from 1933-1945. She was the first woman cabinet member (and thereby the first woman ever in the presidential line of succession).

The online version of the story about Mrs. Dole has been corrected to read “the secretary of both transportation and labor.” It points out that the Senator is not doing well as head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. That may be due to the temper of the public, but the word on Mrs. Dole in Washington always was “all style, no substance.”

Frances Perkins, by the way, went to court to maintain the right to keep her surname when she married in 1913.

37 years ago

Man on Moon

Centuries from now it’ll be the most famous event of our times.

Hitler assassination attempt

Sixty-two 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.

Sitting Bull Surrenders

The Lakota Tatanka-Iyotanka (Sitting Bull) surrendered to the U.S. Army on this date 125 years ago.

This from a fine, brief biographical essay at AmericanHeritage.com:

On the morning of the July 20, in front of American and Canadian soldiers and a Minnesota newspaperman, Sitting Bull had his eight-year-old son, Crow Foot, hand Brotherton his Winchester rifle. “I surrender this rifle to you through my young son,” said the chief, “whom I [thereby] desire to teach . . . that he has become a friend of the Americans. . . . I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle. This boy has given it to you, and he now wants to know how he is going to make a living.”

1776

NewMexiKen has completed David McCullough’s 1776, a military history of that fateful year newly out in paperback.

After an opening chapter detailing the politics in Britain, McCullough traces the action, from the successful American siege of Boston (forcing the British ultimately to abandon the city), through a series of dreadful and disastrous American defeats in New York, the demoralizing retreat across New Jersey and, at the end of December and beginning of January, the miraculous American victories at Trenton and Princeton. McCullough includes much from the contemporary correspondence and reminisces of the participants; the reader learns more about the war fighters than the fighting, but that is good.

The American army was hardly more than tattered remnants when it reached the Delaware River and crossed into Pennsylvania. As Thomas Paine so famously wrote that December of 1776:

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

Considering the circumstances — the depleted American ranks, the British naval and military superiority — it really is rather remarkable that Americans today are taking coffee breaks rather than stopping for tea and biscuits. The reason — in two words — George Washington, who learned from his (and other’s) mistakes, and, while often losing hope, never lost faith.

Who killed Meriwether Lewis?

Jill, official oldest daughter of NewMexiKen, dropped by the grave of Meriwether Lewis on her recent road trip. She took this photo [click it to enlarge]. It got me to investigating the controversy around Lewis’s death and I found this article at Salon Ivory Tower. Here’s the beginning to draw you into the Meriwether Lewis murder mystery:

In the afternoon of Oct. 10, 1809, Meriwether Lewis rode up to an inn called Grinder’s Stand, a small log cabin in the Tennessee mountains on the Natchez Trace, the old pioneer road between Natchez, Miss., and Nashville, Tenn. He was traveling to Washington, where he hoped to clear up debts to the War Department he had incurred while serving as the first American governor of the Louisiana Territory. Then he planned to deliver the priceless journals of his great expedition, which had come to a triumphant conclusion just three years earlier, to his Philadelphia publishers.

The 35-year-old explorer appears to have been in a desperate state. One month earlier, on Sept. 11, he had written his will. At about the same time, according to a letter written by the commander of a fort where Lewis had stayed on his trip, Lewis had twice tried to kill himself, either by jumping overboard or by shooting himself, while traveling down the Mississippi River by boat. The commander, Capt. Gilbert Russell, wrote that he had been forced to hold Lewis, who had been drinking heavily, on 24-hour suicide watch at the fort for a week. Lewis’ companion on the trip, James Neelly, later told Thomas Jefferson that Lewis “appeared at times deranged in mind.” Historians have speculated that Lewis may have been tormented by manic depression, or even suffering from syphilis.

Lewis asked Mrs. Grinder, whose husband was absent, whether there was room in her inn. Neelly had stayed behind to round up two stray horses and was planning on meeting Lewis at the next residence inhabited by white people. Except for two servants, who were trailing behind, burdened by heavy trunks, Lewis was alone.

According to the conventional scholarly view, later that night, Lewis, after tormentedly pacing in his room for several hours and talking out loud, shot himself once in the head, grazing his skull, and then again in the chest. Still alive, he may or may not have tried to finish the job by cutting himself from head to toe with his razor blades. He died shortly after sunrise on Oct. 11.

On the face of it, there would not seem to be much reason to question this account. But there has long been a dissenting body of thought that holds that Lewis was not the victim of a suicide, but of a murder.

Read on.

On this date

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger was published on this date in 1951. It’s sold about 60 million copies since.

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 was born on this date in 1967.

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

‘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. You can listen to Garrison Keillor tell the above and more by clicking here [RealPlayer].

Billy the Kid

… was killed 125 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 Kid Arrested 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.

Bastille Day

But above all, Bastille Day, or the Fourteenth of July, is the symbol of the end of the monarchy and the beginning of the Republic. The national holiday is a time when all citizens celebrate their membership to a republican nation. It is because this national holiday is rooted in the history of the birth of the Republic that it has such great significance.

… The people of Paris rose up and decided to march on the Bastille, a state prison that symbolized the absolutism and arbitrariness of the Ancien Regime.

The storming of the Bastille, on July 14, 1789, immediately became a symbol of historical dimensions; it was proof that power no longer resided in the King or in God, but in the people, in accordance with the theories developed by the Philosophes of the 18th century.

On July 16, the King recognized the tricolor cockade: the Revolution had succeeded.

For all citizens of France, the storming of the Bastille symbolizes, liberty, democracy and the struggle against all forms of oppression.

— Embassy of France

The eagle has landed

Former President Gerald R. Ford is 93 today. He was born as Leslie L. King, Jr., on this date in 1913. He took the name Gerald Rudolf Ford, Jr., when adopted by his stepfather.

Ford is the second oldest former president ever, after Ronald Reagan, who died at age 93 years, four months. John Adams and Herbert Hoover both lived to be 90.

NewMexiKen had several meetings with President Ford in the years after he left office in 1977. In fact it can be said that on one two-day occasion in 1979 I helped him clean his garage. The most astonishing incident, however, was in 1981.

The Gerald R. Ford Museum was about to be dedicated in Grand Rapids. As the representative of the National Archives nearest Ford’s retirement office in Rancho Mirage, California, I was called with an urgent request. It seemed flags had not been ordered for the replica Oval Office in the Museum. President Ford would lend them his. I was asked to go to his office, pick them up and ship them to Michigan.

The next morning I was ushered into the former President’s office. He was standing at his desk browsing through some papers. After the routine “Hello, Ken” and “Hello, Mr. President” exchange, I went about my business with the flags. He continued his business with the papers.

The U.S. flag was on a brass stand with two wooden staff pieces screwed together at the middle and a brass eagle, wings outstretched, at the top, about seven feet from the floor. I unscrewed the two pieces of the staff, a task made difficult by the weight of the flag and the eagle above.

As I began to lower the top half at an angle, the eagle took flight. It was just set on the top of the staff, not screwed on as it should have been.

Stop and picture this. The former President of the United States is a few feet away. His gorgeous White House presidential desk is even closer. And we have a brass eagle weighing several pounds in free fall. I’m holding the flag and can’t do anything but watch.

Poor President Ford I thought, he is about to be in the news for being clunked (or worse!) by a flagpole eagle in his own office — and this after years of being portrayed by Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live as a clumsy, stumble-prone klutz. (In reality Gerald Ford was an All-American football player at Michigan in the 1930s and still looked exceptionally fit at 68.)

It wasn’t my fault the eagle hadn’t been attached but I was about to be a footnote to history.

Amazingly, the eagle missed Mr. Ford. Even more miraculously, it missed the historic desk and fell harmlessly to the carpet with a thud.

The former President had to have noticed. He never said a word. For that alone he has my enduring admiration.

Happy Birthday, Mr. President.

The Prize

NewMexiKen has finished Daniel Yergin’s Pulitzer prize-winning history of the oil industry, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power.

I recommend it.

The Prize (1992) is a lengthy (788 pages), detailed account of oil from the discovery in Pennsylvania in 1859 through the first Gulf War in 1991. It is a history of corporate, national and international politics and machinations — the Standard Oil Trust, and its dissolution, international concessions and agreements, the discovery of “elephants” (big oil fields), the role of oil in the cause and fighting of World War II, the rise of the oil-producing nations and OPEC.

Duel

Alexander Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow wrote the following two years ago. (The duel was July 11, 1804.) Chernow provides informative background, but here are the essentials.

Two hundred years ago today, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton squared off in a sunrise duel on a wooded ledge in Weehawken, N.J., above the Hudson River. Burr was vice president when he leveled his fatal shot at Hamilton, the former Treasury secretary, who died the next day in what is now the West Village of Manhattan. New Yorkers turned out en masse for Hamilton’s funeral, while Burr (rightly or wrongly) was branded an assassin and fled south in anticipation of indictments in New York and New Jersey. To the horror of Hamilton’s admirers, the vice president, now a fugitive from justice, officiated at an impeachment trial in the Senate of a Supreme Court justice.
…

So Hamilton, at 49, decided to expose himself to Burr’s fire to prove his courage, but to throw away his own shot to express his aversion to dueling. He gambled that Burr would prove a gentleman and merely clip him in the arm or leg — a wager he lost. With Hamilton’s death, America also lost its most creative policymaker. (The murder indictments against Burr petered out, and he died a reclusive old man in 1836.)

Immigration — and the Curse of the Black Legend

A must read essay from Tony Horwitz includes this:

This national amnesia isn’t new, but it’s glaring and supremely paradoxical at a moment when politicians warn of the threat posed to our culture and identity by an invasion of immigrants from across the Mexican border. If Americans hit the books, they’d find what Al Gore would call an inconvenient truth. The early history of what is now the United States was Spanish, not English, and our denial of this heritage is rooted in age-old stereotypes that still entangle today’s immigration debate.

Amen.

Read it all.

Tycoon

John D. Rockefeller was born on this date in 1839. The world’s first billionaire, Rockefeller essentially retired from Standard Oil in 1911. Even so, his taxable income in 1918 was $33,000,000 and his personal worth was estimated at more than $800,000,000. By then, he had already donated about $500 million to charitable causes.

When Rockefeller died at age 97 in 1937 The New York Times obituary had extensive details, including this:

He believed in conserving his strength. After he was 34 he made it a practice to take a nap of an hour or two after luncheon every day and frequently took three or four afternoons away from his office for golf or puttering around his country estate, laying out roads and paths and planting trees. He never bustled and never was excited. He used to say that after he had established himself he could hardly be called “diligent in business” in the copybook sense and that he was only a fifth wheel in the Standard Oil organization.

Mr. Rockefeller took up golf in 1899 and played it constantly thereafter. It was his sole exercise in his later years. When well past 80 he played a good nine holes in 41 to 45, and was delighted when he defeated an opponent or when his side won in a foursome.

On his eighty-second birthday he played a round of golf with his physician and lifelong friend, Dr. H. F. Biggar of Cleveland, also 82, and planned a game of golf for his 100th birthday.

He played the game all the year round on his private links at Pocantico Hills and at Ormond Beach, Fla. In his eighties he sometimes played on hot Summer days with an attendant following him around to hold an umbrella over his head to protect him from the sun.

Early in 1928 he cut his daily course from eight holes to six at Ormond Beach, remarking that eight holes was too much for a man of 88 and that it was better to play a good game for six holes than to be a dub for eight.

Ron Chernow has written a recent highly-regarded biography, Titan.