Ford Motor Company entered the business world on June 16, 1903, when Henry Ford and 11 business associates signed the company’s articles of incorporation. With $28,000 in cash, the pioneering industrialists gave birth to what was to become one of the world’s largest corporations. …
The earliest record of a shipment is July 20, 1903, approximately one month after incorporation, to a Detroit physician. With the company’s first sale came hope—a young Ford Motor Company had taken its first steps.
Category: History
Brief narratives about people and events in the American past.
Geronimo
Several sources give June 16, 1829, as Geronimo’s date of birth. It’s not clear to NewMexiKen that the Apaches were using the Gregorian calendar at that time. And, indeed, one of those sources, The New York Times, stated in its obituary of Geronimo in February 1909 that he was nearly 90 — not 79 as this birth date would indicate. But, he had to be born some time. So why not June 16?
In her excellent 1976 biography of Geronimo, Angie Debo concludes:
Geronimo was born in the early 1820’s near the upper Gila in the mountains crossed by the present state boundary [Arizona-New Mexico], probably on the Arizona side near the present Clifton. …
He was given the name Goyahkla, with the generally accepted meaning “One Who Yawns,’ why or under what circumstances is not known.
As an adult in battle he was called Geronimo by Mexican soldiers, perhaps because they could not pronounce Goyahkla, or perhaps to invoke Saint Jerome (Geronimo is Spanish for Jerome). The name was adopted for him by his own people.
In its obituary of Geronimo, The Times provided this quote:
Gen. Miles, in his memoirs, describes his first impression of Geronimo when he was brought into camp by Lawton, thus: “He was one of the brightest, most resolute, determined-looking men that I have ever encountered. He had the clearest, sharpest dark eye I think I have ever seen, unless it was that of Gen. Sherman.”
Some have wondered what motivated Geronimo to fight so fiercely. Perhaps this from his autobiography (written with S.M. Barrett in 1905) explains a little:
In the summer of 1858, being at peace with the Mexican towns as well as with all the neighboring Indian tribes, we went south into Old Mexico to trade. Our whole tribe (Bedonkohe Apaches) went through Sonora toward Casa Grande, our destination, but just before reaching that place we stopped at another Mexican town called by the Indians Kas-ki-yeh. Here we stayed for several days, camping outside the city. Every day we would go into town to trade, leaving our camp under the protection of a small guard so that our arms, supplies, and women and children would not be disturbed during our absence.
Late one afternoon when returning from town we were met by a few women and children who told us that Mexican troops from some other town had attacked our camp, killed all the warriors of the guard, captured all our ponies, secured our arms, destroyed our supplies, and killed many of our women and children. Quickly we separated, concealing ourselves as best we could until nightfall, when we assembled at our appointed place of rendezvous–a thicket by the river. Silently we stole in one by one: sentinels were placed, and, when all were counted, I found that my aged mother, my young wife, and my three small children were among the slain. There were no lights in camp, so without being noticed I silently turned away and stood by the river. How long I stood there I do not know, but when I saw the warriors arranging for a council I took my place.
You have the right to remain silent
The Supreme Court handed down the Miranda decision on this date 40 years ago. AmericanHeritage.com has an excellent summary of the case worth reading in full. It includes these essentials:
In the 1963 case Gideon v. Wainwright, the court strengthened the right to counsel by ruling that a man convicted of robbery who could not afford a lawyer had to have one appointed for him by the state. A year later, when Danny Escobedo confessed to a Chicago murder after being denied a chance to see his lawyer, the court overturned his conviction, holding that in such an instance “no statement elicited by the police during the interrogation may be used against him.”
The Miranda case was the culmination of this trend toward, as Time magazine put it, “moving the constitution into the police station.” It evolved out of a growing realization that false confessions were not uncommon and that the police could coerce without resorting to the rubber hose. In the decision handed down on June 13, 1966, Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for the 5-4 majority, recognized that the “third degree” was a venerable tradition in American law enforcement (the term itself comes from the rigorous questioning of candidates for a high level of the Masonic order). “The very fact of custodial interrogation,” Warren found, “exacts a heavy toll on individual liberty and trades on the weakness of individuals.”
In order for a statement to be assumed voluntary, the suspect had to be informed of four things before being questioned: (1) his right to remain silent, (2) the fact that his statements could be used against him, (3) his right to the presence of an attorney, and (4) the obligation of the state to provide counsel if he couldn’t afford it.
The decision did Ernesto Miranda little good. He was retried without the confession and again convicted. He served almost 10 years before being paroled. He briefly traded on his celebrity by selling autographed “Miranda warning” cards in Phoenix for $1.50 each.
Twelve years ago today
… someone killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
Timothy McVeigh
… was executed on this date five years ago for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people.
Dig him up and do it again.
Lincoln slept here
Abraham Lincoln’s home (1844-1861) in Springfield, Illinois. Now a National Historic Site.
Tenzing Norgay
… of Nepal and Edmund Hillary of New Zealand become the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest (29,035 feet/8,850 meters) on this date in 1953. The mountain is called Chomolungma (“goddess mother of the world”) in Tibet and Sagarmatha (“goddess of the sky”) in Nepal. It’s growing/moving about 6 cm a year.
George Everest (1790-1866) was the British Surveyor General of India (1830-1843). (He pronounced his name E-ver-est, not Ev-er-est as we know it.) Everest’s successor named the mountain for the surveyor.
Long distance information, give me Memphis, Tennessee
Photos of two historic buildings — shrines really — in Memphis, Tennessee, one happy and one tragic.
Sun, the recording studio where Elvis Presley made his first recordings — and so did Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins. Arguably, where rock and roll began.
Martin Luther King Jr. was on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in April 1968 when he was assassinated.
Photos taken by NewMexiKen May 25, 2006.
Shiloh National Military Park
Shiloh was the beginning of total war.
According to James M. McPherson in Battle Cry of Freedom:
The 20,000 killed and wounded at Shiloh (about equally distributed between the two sides) were nearly double the 12,000 battle casualties at [First] Manassas, Wilson’s Creek, Fort Donelson, and Pea Ridge combined.
This morning Shiloh (Tennessee) was green and lush and quiet, the opposite of April 6-7, 1862, when it was smoke and chaos and violence. After a brief film (which had to have been produced 50 years ago — its colors faded, its actors stilted and poorly made-up), NewMexiKen and Dad took much of the auto tour, from the Tennessee River at what was once Pittsburg Landing, past the Union’s last line of defense to Shiloh Church (where the 1862 log building sits next to an active church).
Often at battlefields I am able to imagine the scene. How realistically is another question, but at least I can picture what I think it might have been like, or at least feel the sense of the place. Sometimes, however, the imagination just isn’t sufficient, or the place doesn’t move me. For some reason Shiloh National Military Park was like that today.
Background: The Union Army, under Grant, was encamped in a poorly chosen position at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee. They were attacked by Confederates under Johnston and Beauregard early Sunday, April 6, 1862. By the end of the day, Confederates had catured the key position of Shiloh church and driven Union lines nearly to the Tennessee River. Grant, reinforced by Buell, counter attacked Monday morning, regained the lost ground, and forced the Confederates to retreat to Corinth, Mississippi. It was ostensibly a Union victory, though Grant was faulted for a lack of precaution that led to the first day’s disaster.
Little Rock 49 years later
Two photos from Little Rock, Arkansas, taken today.
The magnificent Little Rock Central High School, scene of one of the first great segregation confrontations when, nearly 50 years ago, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus resisted the enrollment of African-American students in the previously all-white school. Ultimately President Dwight Eisenhower sent 1,000 members of the 101st Airborne to help maintain order.
Nine students enrolled that September (1957).
The original nine are portrayed by this artwork on the north side of the Arkansas State Capitol. With each is a plaque with a current quotation or remark, many of them moving.
Driving around Little Rock (or anywhere) most of us realize how far America still needs to go on matters of race. Even so, for one like NewMexiKen who can remember that original confrontation 49 years ago, the commemoration of the students at the Capitol is remarkable.
On May 24
… the first passenger railroad in the U.S. began service between Baltimore and Ellicott’s Mills, Maryland, in 1830. That’s 13 miles.
… the first telegraph message was transmitted by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1844. Sent from Washington to Baltimore it said, “What hath God wrought!”
… the Brooklyn Bridge opened on this date in 1883. Click here for every fact you ever needed to know about this landmark.
… the first Major League Baseball night game was played in Cincinnati in 1935. The Reds beat the Phillies 2-1. The Reds played seven night games that year (one against each National League opponent).
Tommy Chong, he’s Chong of Cheech and Chong, is 68.
“Radar,” that is Gary Burghoff, is 63.
Smackdown in the Senate
American Heritage has an essay on the assault on Senator Charles Sumner by Representative Preston Brooks 150 years ago today. The essay details the events leading up to the attack — an inflammatory speech by Sumner — and the aftermath. Here’s what they say about the acutal assault:
Brooks avoided the potential difficulty of a fair fight by entering the Senate chamber after that body had adjourned. He waited chivalrously for all the ladies to leave, then approached Sumner’s desk, where the senator was franking copies of his speech to be sent to supporters. Brooks spoke a few words explaining his presence, then began whacking Sumner over the head with his cane. When the senator raised his hands, Brooks became excited and, he recalled, felt “compelled to strike him harder” than he had intended.
Sumner managed to get up and stagger down the aisle, pursued by Brooks, as a pair of congressmen tried to separate the two men and several others argued over whether to get involved. Sen. Stephen Douglas, who had been another target of Sumner’s abuse, was called to the scene but chose not to interfere, worrying that, in view of the state of relations between him and Sumner, “my motives would be misconstrued.”
Brooks recalled that by the time his cane finally shattered, less than a minute after he first confronted the senator, he had dealt Sumner “about 30 first rate stripes. Towards the last he bellowed like a calf. I wore my cane out completely but saved the Head which is gold.”
Lindbergh lands
The Writer’s Almanac has a nice essay on Lindbergh’s flight on this, the 79th anniversary of his landing.
Or you can listen to Garrison Keillor relate the story [RealPlayer].
The New York Times story from 1927 is fun to read: Lindbergh Does It! To Paris in 33 1/2 Hours; Flies 1,000 Miles Through Snow and Sleet; Cheering French Carry Him Off Field
Christopher Columbus, Failure
A history of Christopher Columbus from AmericanHeritage.com. It begins:
No matter how widely he had been hailed as a hero 14 years before, by 1506, when he died (500 years ago today), Christopher Columbus was all washed up.
Crowds from across Spain lined the streets of Seville in 1493 to welcome him home from his first voyage to the Americas, but he already hadn’t found what he was looking for, a seaway to India’s spice-trade ports. He never would, though the search consumed the rest of his life. A little genocide here, some slavery there, several mutinies, and multiple executions of crew members later, and Columbus fell out of favor with the Spanish crown and the public. When he died he was surrounded by family and by the trappings of his substantial income. But he went to his grave with the gouging sense of injustice he couldn’t forgive and of failure he couldn’t explain.
The Homestead Act
… was signed by President Abraham Lincoln on this date in 1862.
The act provided settlers with 160 acres of surveyed public land after payment of a filing fee and five years of continuous residence. Designed to spur Western migration, the Homestead Act culminated a twenty-year battle to distribute public lands to citizens willing to farm. Concerned free land would lower property values and reduce the cheap labor supply, Northern businessmen opposed the movement. Unlikely allies, Southerners feared homesteaders would add their voices to the call for abolition of slavery. With Southerners out of the picture in 1862, the legislation finally passed.
An Act to limit the immigration of aliens into the United States
The Emergency Quota Act was approved on this date in 1921. The Act limited the number of European immigrants into the U.S. for the first time. It set the annual limit at 3% of the number of foreign-born persons in the U.S. from that country in the 1910 Census. About 357,000 immigrants could be admitted annually, the majority from northern Europe.
The Quota Act did not apply to “aliens from the so-called Asiatic barred zone, … [or] aliens who have resided continuously for at least one year immediately preceding the time of their admission to the United States in the Dominion of Canada, Newfoundland, the Republic of Cuba, the Republic of Mexico, countries of Central or South America, or adjacent islands….”
In other words, no East Asians would be admitted whatsoever (having been barred by previous laws), but there were no restrictions on immigrants from the Western Hemisphere.
Immigration limitations have always been about cultural wars, not economic ones.
Greatest American
A year ago NewMexiKen was busy dissecting the AOL/Discovery Channel list of 100 Greatest Americans.
Unimpeachable
On May 16, 1868, the U.S. Senate failed by just one vote to convict President Andrew Johnson of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” as he was charged under the articles of impeachment. A second vote, taken on May 26, also fell short, by just one vote, of the two-thirds majority required to convict the president.
From the Library of Congress, which has details, though the contemporary report from The New York Times is more fun to read.
The Real Annie Oakley
It’s one of those names we all know, maybe a little vaguely: Annie Oakley. But who was she? Most people today know very little about her; in fact, you may think she’s a myth, a character from Western lore like Paul Bunyan, Pecos Pete, or the Lone Ranger.
Even the musical Annie Get Your Gun, which is supposedly about the real person, twists her life significantly. In it she loses a shooting match on purpose to a male marksman, then marries him; in real life, the 16-year-old Annie both won that match and married her man. And he became her press agent.
The real Annie Oakley was among the best-known and best-loved Americans of her day, perhaps the first female superstar in this country.
Read more about Annie Oakley from AmericanHeritage.com.
Inhuman Bondage
A solid review of David Brion Davis’ Inhuman Bondage by Ira Berlin in today’s New York Times. The review includes this:
The genius of “Inhuman Bondage” is in Davis’s ability to identify the big questions: Why slavery? Why did slavery become identified with Africans and their descendants? Why was slavery so easily accepted before 1776 and so readily challenged thereafter? Why did racism outlast slavery? On each of these matters, and dozens more, Davis expertly summarizes the debates, bringing clarity to the contending arguments. “Inhuman Bondage” is a tour de force of synthetic scholarship.
But Davis is not merely a referee among historical gladiators. He gets in with the lions, forcing a rethinking of many of the most fundamental issues. He examines the twists and turns of slavery’s development and the contingencies that set human history off in unexpected directions: the patent evil that redounds to the good and the earnest benevolence that creates untold pain.
And the Continent was spanned with iron
The last spike was driven to complete the American transcontinental railroad on this date in 1869.
Two years ago on May 10, NewMexiKen posted two entries on the subject:
And the Continent was spanned with iron and Promontory Summit.
Last summer I posted photos from the historic site.
Join, or Die
On May 9, 1754, Join, or Die, considered the first American political cartoon, was printed in The Pennsylvania Gazette. The impetus for the cartoon, which is believed to have been devised by Benjamin Franklin, was concern about increasing French pressure along the western frontier of the colonies.
Harry S Truman
… was born on this date in 1884. NewMexiKen presents this excerpt from the Truman diary:
January 6, 1947 — Arose at 5:45 A.M.[,] read the papers and at 7:10 walked to the station to meet the family. Took 35 minutes. It was a good walk. Sure is fine to have them back. This great white jail is a hell of a place in which to be alone. While I work from early morning until late at night, it is a ghostly place. The floors pop and crack all night long. Anyone with imagination can see old Jim Buchanan walking up and down worrying about conditions not of his making. Then there’s Van Buren who inherited a terrible mess from his predecessor as did poor old James Madison. Of course Andrew Johnson was the worst mistreated of any of them. But they all walk up and down the halls of this place and moan about what they should have done and didn’t. So-you see. I’ve only named a few. The ones who had Boswells and New England historians are too busy trying to control heaven and hell to come back here. So the tortured souls who were and are misrepresented in history are the ones who come back. It’s a hell of a place.
Still is.
The first significant law restricting immigration into the United States
… was approved on on this date in 1882. It was The Chinese Exclusion Act.
Whereas in the opinion of the Government of the United States the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof: Therefore,
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That … the coming of Chinese laborers to the United States be, and the same is hereby, suspended; and during such suspension it shall not be lawful for any Chinese laborer to come, or having so come after the expiration of said ninety days to remain within the United States.
The National Archives, which has a full transcript and images of the Act, notes that: “The 1882 exclusion act also placed new requirements on Chinese who had already entered the country. If they left the United States, they had to obtain certifications to re-enter. Congress, moreover, refused State and Federal courts the right to grant citizenship to Chinese resident aliens, although these courts could still deport them.”
The exclusion of Chinese remained in effect in one form or another until 1943.
Oh, the humanity
It was on this date in 1937 that the zeppelin Hindenburg exploded and crashed at the Naval Air Station Lakehurst, New Jersey. Thirteen of the 36 passengers and 22 of the 61 crew were killed, as well as one ground crew member.
Listen to a brief version of Herbert Morrison’s famous broadcast [RealPlayer].
Here’s The New York Times report on the disaster.
The Writer’s Almanac has some details about the Hindenburg and the crash, including this:
The Hindenburg was about as big as the Titanic. It traveled at eighty miles per hour, so the trip between Frankfurt, Germany, and Lakehurst, New Jersey, took two and a half days, half the time needed by the fastest ocean liner of the era. Passengers on the Hindenburg paid $400 for a one-way trip. They had sleeping compartments, sitting and dining areas, as well as a 200-foot promenade deck with a spectacular view of the ocean passing below. Passengers were free to roam about, to eat meals at a table on the best china, and to sample the best wines from France and Germany. The passengers could even dance to the music of a lightweight, aluminum grand piano, probably the only grand piano ever to provide entertainment for people in a flying machine.