Category: History

Brief narratives about people and events in the American past.

Letter from Birmingham Jail

If you’ve never had the opportunity to read Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail I encourage you to do so. It’s one of the most remarkable documents in American history.

Dr. King’s note provides some background.

Note from the author: This response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama (Bishop C. C. J. Carpenter, Bishop Joseph A. Durick, Rabbi Hilton L. Grafman, Bishop Paul Hardin, Bishop Holan B. Harmon, the Reverend George M. Murray. the Reverend Edward V. Ramage and the Reverend Earl Stallings) was composed under somewhat constricting circumstance. Begun on the margins of the newspaper in which the statement appeared while I was in jail, the letter was continued on scraps of writing paper supplied by a friendly Negro trusty, and concluded on a pad my attorneys were eventually permitted to leave me. Although the text remains in substance unaltered, I have indulged in the author’s prerogative of polishing it for publication.

The letter is lengthy; nine pages. It is an Adobe PDF file.

Washington burned

The invading British burned the public buildings of Washington on this date in 1814.

On August 24, 1814, as the War of 1812 raged on, invading British troops marched into Washington and set fire to the U.S. Capitol, the President’s Mansion, and other local landmarks. The ensuring fire reduced all but one of the capital city’s major public buildings to smoking rubble, and only a torrential rainstorm saved the Capitol from complete destruction. The blaze particularly devastated the Capitol’s Senate wing, the oldest part of the building, which was honeycombed with vulnerable wooden floors and housed the valuable but combustible collection of books and manuscripts of the Library of Congress, then located in the Capitol building. Heat from the intense fire reduced the Senate chamber’s marble columns to lime, leaving the room, in one description, “a most magnificent ruin.”

Source: U.S. Senate Art & History

After 26 hours in Washington, the British moved toward Baltimore, where they met with resistance and the Star-spangled banner still waved.

Meriwether Lewis …

was born on this date in 1774. Lewis had this to say on his 31st birthday in 1805, camped just east of Lemhi Pass near the present-day Montana-Idaho border. (From the Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Online at the University of Nebraska.)

This day I completed my thirty first year, and conceived that I had in all human probability now existed about half the period which I am to remain in this Sublunary world. I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the hapiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended. but since they are past and cannot be recalled, I dash from me the gloomy thought and resolved in future, to redouble my exertions and at least indeavour to promote those two primary objects of human existence, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestoed on me; or in future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.—

His birthday doubts are made all the more poignant, of course, with the knowledge that just more than four years later Lewis took his own life at age 35.

Macbeth …

was killed on this date in 1057. But not as Shakespeare portrayed it. Here’s the story from the BBC:

Shakespeare’s portrait of a great tragic hero, whose fate was linked to black magic and fuelled by the fire of greed and ambition, bears little resemblance to the historical figure. Duncan (1034-40) was not Shakespeare’s venerable, elderly monarch, but a young king who was killed in battle, possibly by Macbeth, although this is not certain. We do know that Duncan was not murdered in the home of a so-called host.

Macbeth, King of Moray, was elected King of Scotland in place of Duncan’s son Malcolm, who was only a child, and for 14 years Macbeth is believed to have ruled equably, imposing law and order and encouraging devout Christianity. In 1050 he is known to have travelled to Rome for a Papal Jubilee. He was also a brave leader and made successful forays over the border into Northumbria, England.

In 1054, Macbeth was challenged by Siward, Earl of Northumbria, who was attempting to return Malcolm (later Malcolm III) to the throne. It was not until 1057 that Macbeth was killed and not by MacDuff but in battle at Lumphanan. The battle of Dunsinane and the encampment in Birnam Wood referred to in Shakespeare’s tragedy are both earlier events. The final battle was probably not between armies, but between two champions – Macbeth, who was middle-aged or even elderly, and Malcolm, still a young man. The two fought in a stone circle near Lumphanan where Malcolm triumphed. It was Malcolm, not Macduff, who beheaded Macbeth.

Napoleon Bonaparte …

was born on the French owned Mediterranean island of Corsica on this date in 1769.

As an adult, Napoleon was just over 5-feet, 6-inches tall (1.686 m), about average for his countrymen at the time.

The Social Security Act …

was signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt on this date in 1935.

I’m 35 years old. If nothing is done to improve Social Security, what can I expect to receive in retirement benefits from the program?

Unless changes are made, at age 73 your scheduled benefits could be reduced by 27 percent and could continue to be reduced every year thereafter from presently scheduled levels.

I’m 25 years old. If nothing is done to change Social Security, what can I expect to receive in retirement benefits from the program?

Unless changes are made, when you reach age 63 in 2042, benefits for all retirees could be cut by 27 percent and could continue to be reduced every year thereafter. If you lived to be 100 years old in 2079 (which will be more common by then), your scheduled benefits could be reduced by 33 percent from today’s scheduled levels.

Should I count on Social Security for all my retirement income?

No. Social Security was never meant to be the sole source of income in retirement. It is often said that a comfortable retirement is based on a “three-legged stool” of Social Security, pensions and savings. American workers should be saving for their retirement on a personal basis and through employer-sponsored or other retirement plans.

Is there really a Social Security trust fund?

Yes. Presently, Social Security collects more in taxes than it pays in benefits. The excess is borrowed by the U.S. Treasury, which in turn issues special-issue Treasury bonds to Social Security. These bonds totaled $1.5 trillion at the beginning of 2004, and Social Security receives more than $80 billion annually in interest from them. However, Social Security is still basically a “pay-as-you-go” system as the $1.5 trillion is a small percent of benefit obligations.

More informative Q&A about Social Security.

The Aztecs surrendered …

to Cortés on this date in 1521.

Historian Hugh Thomas recently published Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire, from Columbus to Magellan. The book was reviewed by Paul Kennedy in The New York Times.

”Rivers of Gold” takes just about 700 pages to describe only the first 30 years of the Spanish conquests, from Columbus’s first voyage and return in 1492-93 to Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe in 1519-22. It is an old-fashioned, almost self-indulgent narrative, and thus rich in its descriptions of characters, events and landscapes (it is also admirably illustrated). …

[Rivers of Gold] stands on its own firm historical ground as a grand and sweeping account of the world’s transformation half a millennium ago. But to those who enjoy analogies, it can equally serve as a memorial about empire and about imperial ambition.

Fidel Castro …

is 78 today. Or possibly 77.

NewMexiKen actually was able to view a speech Castro gave outside the Hotel Nacional in Havana in 1993. It was interesting to see the man who has been so much a focus of America for more than 40 years.

Castro wrote a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. (He says he was 12, but should have been 13 or 14.) “If you like, give me a ten dollars bill green american in the letter [back] because never have I not seen a ten dollars bill green american and I would like to have one of them.” Castro went on to say, “I don’t know very English but I know very much Spanish and I suppose you [FDR] don’t know very Spanish but you know very English because you are American but I am not American.”

A more complete copy of the letter is here.

Biography.com has more information about Castro.

Little Sure Shot…

was born on this date in 1860. Larry McMurtry’s excellent essay “Inventing the West” from the August 2000 issue of The New York Review of Books tells us all about this famous performer.

Annie Oakley (Phoebe Ann Moses—or Mosey) grew up poor in rural Ohio, shot game to feed her family, shot game to sell, was pressed into a shooting contest with a touring sharpshooter named Frank Butler, beat him, married him, stayed with him for fifty years, and died three weeks before he did in 1926.

When Annie Oakley and Frank Butler offered themselves to Cody the Colonel was dubious. His fortunes were at a low ebb, and shooting acts abounded. But he gave Annie Oakley a chance. She walked out in Louisville before 17,000 people and was hired immediately. Nate Salsbury, Cody’s tight-fisted manager, who did not spend lavishly and who rarely highlighted performers, happened to watch Annie rehearse and promptly ordered seven thousand dollars’ worth of posters and billboard art.

Annie Oakley more than justified the expense. Sitting Bull, normally a taciturn fellow, saw her shoot in Minnesota and could not contain himself. Watanya cicilia, he called her, his Little Sure Shot. Small, reserved, Quakerish, she seemed to live on the lemonade Buffalo Bill dispensed free to all hands. In London she demolished protocol by shaking hands with Princess Alexandra. She shook hands with Alexandra’s husband, the Prince of Wales, too, though, like his mother the Queen, she strongly disapproved of his behavior with the ladies. In France the Parisians were glacially indifferent to buffalo, Indians, cowboys, and Cody—Annie Oakley melted them so thoroughly that she had to go through her act five times before she could escape. In Germany she likened Bismarck to a mastiff.

In 1901 she was almost killed in a train wreck. Annie claimed that it was the wreck that caused her long auburn hair to turn white overnight; skeptics said her hair turned white because she left it in hot water too long while at a spa. She continued to shoot into the 1920s. In her last years she looked rather like Nancy Astor. Will Rogers visited her not long before her death and pronounced her the perfect woman. Probably not until Billie Jean King and the rise of women’s tennis had a female outdoor performer held the attention of so many people. She became part of the “invention” that is the West by winning her way with a gun: a man’s thing, the very thing, in fact, that had won the West itself.

What our neighbors think

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Frances Fitzgerald has written a review of History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History.

Here are a few things students in this country will not find in their history books but that students from certain other countries may know for a fact:

a) Our revolution was inspired by the work of the French Enlightenment philosophers (not the essays of John Locke).

b) We won that war largely because the British commanders were slow and blundering (not because of the wisdom and determination of George Washington).

c) What we thought of as a revolution was for many inhabitants of British North America an extended civil war, in which many were forced into exile.

d) After Gen. Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in 1781, the Spanish and French fleets opened full-scale war with the British in the Caribbean.

Those with a particular interest in American history should find the whole review well worth reading.

The Rock

Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary accepted its first prisoners 70 years ago today.

Alcatraz is a 22-acre rock island in San Francisco Bay, 1½ miles from shore. For 29 years the federal prison system kept its highest security prisoners there, including Al Capone, Machine Gun Kelly, and the famous Birdman, Robert Stroud (played by Burt Lancaster in the film Birdman of Alcatraz). Reportedly, no one was ever known to have successfully escaped from Alcatraz.

From 1868 to 1934, Alcatraz was a military prison. In 1969, American Indian activists occupied and claimed the island. Their occupation lasted 19 months.

Alcatraz Island became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area of the National Park Service in 1972.

Alcatraz, for the original Spanish Alcatraces, is usually defined as meaning “pelican” or “strange bird.”

Click photo to enlarge.

Herbert Clark Hoover…

was born on this date in 1874. Mr. Hoover, who was the 31st President of the United States, lived until 1964. Among the presidents, only Reagan, Ford and the first Adams have lived longer.

Born in Iowa, orphaned at nine, Hoover grew up in Oregon. He was in the first class at Stanford University, graduating as a mining engineer. Hoover earned millions in mining before turning his attention to public service. He was instrumental in relief and humanitarian efforts during and after World War I. He was Secretary of Commerce under Presidents Harding and Coolidge. Hoover, the Republican, defeated Al Smith, the Democrat, handily in the 1928 election with 58% of the popular vote.

President at the time of the stock market crash and subsequent depression, Hoover believed that, while people should not suffer, assistance should be primarily a local and voluntary responsibility. Even so, he supported some measures to aid businesses and farmers; indeed, among his party he was moderate. But he was simply not bold enough to meet the crisis.

Hoover lost to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, 57.3% to 39.6% of the popular vote, 472-59 in the electoral vote.

The second nuclear bomb…

was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on this date in 1945. The BBC provides some facts (the first two are as reported at the time of the bombing):

The bomb was dropped by parachute from an American B29 Bomber at 1102 local time.

It exploded about 1,625 ft (500m) above the ground and is believed to have completely destroyed the city, which is situated on the western side of the Japanese island of Kyushu.

About 30% of Nagasaki, including almost all the industrial district was destroyed by the bomb and nearly 150,000 people were killed or injured.

The bomb, nick-named “Fat Man” in a reference to Winston Churchill, measured just under 3.5m (11ft 4in) in length, had the power of 22 kilotons of TNT and weighed 4,050kg (9,000lbs).

Residents of both cities are still suffering the physical and mental consequences of radiation to this day.

On 14 August Japan surrendered to the Allies.

The Creek War…

ended on this date in 1814, when Major General Andrew Jackson signed the Treaty of Fort Jackson. According to the Library of Congress:

The agreement provided for the surrender of twenty-three million acres of Creek land to the United States. This vast territory encompassed more than half of present-day Alabama and part of southern Georgia.

The war began on August 30, 1813, when a faction of Creeks known as the Red Sticks attacked a contingent of 553 American settlers at Lake Tensaw, Alabama, north of Mobile. In response, Jackson led 5,000 militiamen in the destruction of two Creek villages, Tallasahatchee and Talladega.

On March 27, 1814, Jackson’s forces destroyed the Creek defenses at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Eight hundred Creek warriors were killed and 500 women and children captured.

Arthur J. Goldberg…

was born on this date in 1908. Goldberg was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Kennedy in 1962. He subsequently made one of the great sacrifices for his country:

Three years after Goldberg took his seat on the Supreme Court, President Lyndon Johnson asked him to step down and accept an appointment as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations. At first, Goldberg declined the offer, but after much prodding by Johnson, he finally accepted. Goldberg’s change of mind was prompted by his sense of duty to the country during the war in Vietnam. He said, “I thought I could persuade Johnson that we were fighting the wrong war in the wrong place, [and] to get out…. I would have loved to have stayed on the Court, but my sense of priorities was [that] this war would be disastrous” (Stebenne, 348). On July 26, 1965, Goldberg assumed the responsibilities of Ambassador to the UN.

The ambassadorship proved frustrating for Goldberg, involving many confrontations with Johnson concerning the war in Vietnam. Goldberg came to believe that he could affect American foreign policy better as a private citizen than through a governmental position, and on April 23, 1968, he resigned from the ambassadorship. He returned to the practice of law in New York City from 1968 to 1971 with the firm of Paul, Weiss, Goldberg, Rifkind, Wharton, & Garrison.

[Source: The Supreme Court Papers of Arthur J. Goldberg, Northwestern University School of Law]

Goldberg died in 1990. He is buried in Arlington Cemetery near his friend, Chief Justice Earl Warren.

The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

An excellent review of Gordon Wood’s The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin:

It’s Benjamin Franklin’s time. Two years ago Edmund S. Morgan gave us a fine character sketch with ”Benjamin Franklin.” Then Walter Isaacson’s ”Benjamin Franklin: An American Life” planted itself on the New York Times best-seller list for a long stay. H. W. Brands has chimed in with ”The First American,” a more commodious biography than Isaacson’s, if a less fluent one. And now we have Gordon S. Wood’s engaging book ”The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin.”

Wood has some tough acts to follow, but he is no slouch. A skilled writer with both Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes to his credit, he possesses as profound a grasp of the early days of the Republic as anyone currently working. He is the author of two books — ”The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787” and ”The Radicalism of the American Revolution” — that are essential for understanding the United States from its founding down to the present.

This study is not a biography, at least not a conventional one. Wood focuses on Franklin’s personal development and constructs his narrative around various turning points in the life, almost like a bildungsroman. We learn the choices Franklin made, the conflicts he had to resolve. This is the most dramatic of the recent Franklin books.

Continue reading the review from The New York Times.