May 9

On this date in 1980, a freighter -- blown off course in the perilous shipping lane of Tampa Bay -- struck the Sunshine Skyway Bridge just after 7:30 a.m. On impact, the Summit Venture, empty and riding high in the water, destroyed nearly 1300 feet of roadway and sent three dozen people plunging into the channel. The captain of the freighter, John Lerro, was attempting to guide his ship through one of the longest and most dangerous shipping channels in the world; his mission was complicated by a sudden and unexpected blast of horrendous weather, which left him as well as everyone on the bridge shrouded in zero-visibility conditions, with rain and fog and winds that approached 60 miles per hour. The ship’s radar failed as well.

A minute before impact, conditions cleared enough for Lerro to see that his ship was off course and heading toward the bridge. Last-second emergency maneuvers were ineffective. Most of the 35 people who died that morning were traveling on a Greyhound bus, which tumbled into the bay and -- in the words of one observer -- “split open like a ripe tomato.” Seven other cars joined the bus in the water. Only one man survived.

***

Nineteen years later, a Custom Charters bus veered off Highway 610 in Louisiana and crashed into an embankment, killing 22 people who were headed to a Biloxi, Mississippi casino to celebrate Mothers’ Day. The driver of the bus, Frank Bedell, had passed out just before the accident. According to one witness, the bus "closed up like an accordion," ejecting passengers in all directions.

By any measure, Bedell should not have been driving that morning. His employers were evidently unaware that Bedell had been hospitalized 20 times in the previous two years for kidney and heart ailments that eventually took his life three months after the Mothers’ Day catastrophe. Investigators later discovered that Bedell had received dialysis treatement the day before the crash and checked himself out of the hospital against his doctor’s advice; desperate to earn a living, he was given fluids and sent home 10 hours before taking the wheel. It likely didn’t help matters that Bedell was taking Benadryl and had apparently smoked marijuana sometime before taking the wheel.

It was also not insignificant that Custom Charters routinely broke federal law by insisting that its drivers work without the mandatory eight hours of rest between trips. In 1998, federal investigators slapped the company on the wrist after learning that its drivers -- at the insistence of their supervisors -- were submitting falsified logs to conceal their illegally long shifts. Custom was also cited for failing to do criminal background and medical checks on their employees, and for instituting a drug and alcohol screening program that was apparently non-functional. Any of these precautions would have saved nearly two dozen lives.

Frank Bedell died of a heart attack three months after the Mothers' Day catastrophe.

May 6

On this date in 1882, the Congress of the United States passed a bill insisting that “the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof.”

For decades, whites along the west coast had been agitating for greater regulation of Chinese labor. States like California passed openly discriminatory legislation against the Chinese from the early 1850s onward, while Chinese miners and railroad workers faced wage disparities and violence throughout the country. Meantime, anti-Chinese ideologues insisted in the press and from the pulpit that “Asiatics” represented an economic, political and moral hazard to the white republic. During the presidential campaign of 1880, the Democratic and Republican parties committed themselves to an exclusionary policy

To remedy this presumed affliction, this new law -- the so-called “Chinese Exclusion Act” -- effectively ended Chinese immigration for the next six decades by prohibiting the entry of all Chinese laborers into the US. Under the terms of the act, those who were not common “laborers” -- merchants, diplomats or teachers -- were permitted to come to the US provided that they received certification from the Chinese government assuring that they were not, in fact, common workers. Those Chinese workers already living in the US were allowed to stay but faced greater bureaucratic obstacles if they wished to travel abroad and return; the act also clarified that resident Chinese were ineligible for naturalized citizenship.

Opponents of the Chinese Exclusion Act were hardly silent throughout this period. In Congress, various Senators and Representatives argued that the proposed bill would violate America’s treaty obligations to the Chinese while needlessly alienating other Asian peoples; others insisted that the law would run contrary to the nation’s pluralistic values and that it would capitulate to racists and demagogues. Harper’s Weekly stated the latter case against the bill a month before its passage:

The coming of 230,000 or 240,000 Chinese in a quarter of a century, and the presence of 100,000 in the country at the end of that time, are not the precursor of an overwhelming invasion. The bill is founded on race hatred and panic. These are both familiar facts even in this country. It is not a very long time since one of the most familiar objections to the antislavery movement was that the fanatics wanted to free the "nay-gurs," who would immediately overrun the North and supplant the Irish. It was mere panic. We have always invited everybody to come and settle among us, because the chance of bettering his condition was fairer here than anywhere else in the world. If we now exercise our right to select new-comers, not upon great public considerations the truth of which is demonstrated, but because of race hatred, or of honest labor competition, or fear of local disorder, the movement will not stop there.

These predictions proved accurate. By World War I, the United States had passed an array of restrictive laws barring a variety of classes from immigration: people with certain diseases or handicaps, paupers, contract laborers, prostitutes or other “immoral” women, illiterates, anarchists, and convicted felons. No other law, however, targeted a single national group for exclusion. Meantime, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had been reauthorized several times until it became permanent in 1902. It was not repealed until 1943, when Congress graciously permitted 105 Chinese immigrants to enter the United States each year.

In 1965 -- nearly a century after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act -- racial quotas were at last removed from American immigration law.

May 5

On 5 May 1886 -- mere hours after the infamous Haymarket bombing in Chicago -- Wisconsin state militiamen fired on a group of striking mill workers in Bay View, just outside Milwaukee. Four died on the spot, with three more succumbing to their wounds over the next few days.

Earlier that week, at least 14,000 Polish and German laborers had struck against the city’s industrial base, and by May 3 had managed to shut down every factory in Milwaukee with the exception of the North Chicago Rolling Mills Steel Foundry. In doing so, they joined hundreds of thousands of workers across the nation in calling for a shorter workday without reductions in pay. At the time, the mill workers in Milwaukee endured 12-hour shifts for wages that hovered around $1.25 per day; while the city had an eight-hour law on the books, it was weak and carried no provisions for enforcement.

As the strike gathered strength, several industries conceded to the workers’ demands. Bricklayers and masons received 20 percent wage increases; one of the city’s breweries offered its workers an eight hour day along with better pay. The city’s leaders feared their world was being turned upside down.

Wisconsin’s governor, “Uncle” Jeremiah Rusk, had already put the state guard on alert in preparation for the week’s events, and on May 3 he issued a formal order mobilizing them in defense of private property. The Kosciuko Militia -- made up of Polish businessmen -- was among the units that were assigned to guard the Bay View complex. The next day, a mass of strikers was turned back by several hundred militiamen, who fired over their heads as they gathered at St. Stanislaus Church. When news of the Chicago bombing reached Milwaukee late in the evening of May 4, Gov. Rusk issued “shoot to kill” orders, which the militia put to use the next morning against a wall of unarmed protestors as they approached the gates of the foundry.

No one was ever prosecuted for the seven deaths, and Governor Rusk was deluged with congratulatory telegrams from appreciative business owners and Wisconsinites who believed the labor radicals had received their due. Polish workers in particular were assigned the role of scapegoat for the entire strike; employers fired them by the thousands in subsequent weeks. As for the Polish businessmen who comprised the Kosciuko militia, they were rewarded by the mill’s owners, who offered them cash bonuses for their role in defending the Bay View mill.

Later that year, socialists and labor advocates -- mobilized by the Bay View Massacre -- swept the municipal elections in Milwaukee.

May 2

Leopold II of Belgium formalized his rule over the "Congo Free State" -- surely one of the great misnomers in the history of imperialism -- on this date in 1885. During the previous six years, Sir Henry Morton Stanley had concluded a series of advantageous treaty negotiations with the tribal chiefs of central Africa, whose lands were given over to the king for his personal enrichment. Stanley, quite famously, observed that "the savage only respects force, power, boldness, and decision," advice that Leopold surely took to heart as he spent the next 20 years administering the destruction of millions of people whose homelands he would never visit.

The history of the Congo Free State amounts to one of the great mass murders in human history, as a familiar nexus of racism and economic exploitation was condensed into two decades of systematic atrocity carried out with only the barest pretesnse of "White Man's Burden." Leopold opened parts of the Congo to European entrepreneurs, who purchased the rights to exploit the land for rubber and ivory; in exchange for granting monopoly rights, the Belgian ruler asked only for a 50 percent share in the profits. In the regions of the "Free State" that the king ruled directly, he borrowed from 16th century Spanish conduct in the West Indies and demanded annual production and labor quotas from the locals. The quotas were more than mere recommendations. White deputies of the king, known as the Force Publique, brutalized the various Congolese tribes, enforcing the king's authority over nearly a million square miles of land; the FP also punished interference from Congolese or Arab traders who competed with European merchants. During the "rubber terror," recalcitrant or non-productive tribes were tortured, mutilated and shot. FP conscripts were allowed to submit baskets of severed hands to their commanding officers, "tributes" of a different sort than relieved them of responsibility for failing to extract the quotas from the subject peoples.

Villages were depopulated and burnt to the ground. One member of the FP later testified that in one episode,

[w]e fell upon them all and killed them without mercy ... [Our leader] ordered us to cut off the heads of the men and hang them on the village palisades, also their sexual members, and to hang the women and children on the palisades in the form of a cross.

Between five and fifteen million Congolese died during the 23 years of Leopold's rule, while the king himself absconded with 220 million francs in personal profit, an amount totalling more than a billion dollars in contemporary terms.

By the early years of the new century, word of Leopold's savagery leaked to the European public, who reacted in horror at the revelations of journalists like Edmund Morel or novelists like Joseph Conrad, whose Heart of Darkness was based on his observations as captain of a steamer on the Congo River. Writing about a decade before the king's death, Mark Twain declared that

Leopold has deliberately destroyed more lives than have suffered death on all the battlefields of this planet for the past thousand years. In this vast statement I am well within the mark, several millions of lives with the mark. It is curious that the most advanced and most enlightened century of all the centuries the sun has looked upon should have the ghastly distinction of having produced this moldy and piety-mouthing hypocrite, this bloody monster whose mate is not findable in human history anywhere, and whose personality will surely shame hell itself when he arrives there--which will be soon, let us hope and trust.

Investigations by European governments eventually persuaded the Belgian parliament to wrest control from Leopold in 1908. The damage, however, had already been done. Not only had Leopold destroyed tens of millions of lives while depleting the wealth of a continent, but his entrepreneurial imperialism accelerated the European quest for African lands -- a competitive cycle that would bring devastating consequences for hundreds of millions more, including Europeans themselves. By 1914, the bearers of "civilization" -- driven mad by nationalism and imperial competition -- paused for a moment and began slaughtering one another for a change.

Leopold II, sadly, was not around to witness the fruits of his effort to subdue the Congo. By the time the Germans occupied most of his country, Leopold had been dead for five years.

April 30

The Anglo conquest of the American Southwest took a bloody leap forward on this date in 1871, as a band of Mexican and Tohono O'odham vigilantes -- laboring in the service of a handful of whites -- obliterated an Apache encampment at Camp Grant, located fifty miles to the northeast of Tuscon. There, scores of Aravaipa and Pinal Apache were slaughtered in about half an hour; as was often the case with Indian massacres, most of the victims were women and children. The precise numbers have never been determined, though contemporary historians usually estimate the number of dead anywhere from 85 to 144 Apache, as well as several dozen infants who were taken and sold into servitude.

The Apache had relocated to Camp Grant in February and March 1871, when the pressures of white settlement and the complexities of regional land conflicts drove more than five hundred to seek federal security and rations in exchange for a promise of peace. The officer in charge of the facility, Lt. Royal Whitman, described the Indians as quite agreeable and later emerged as their strongest -- if most futile -- defender. Meantime, livestock raids and reprisal killings continued apace in the region, and community leaders elected to blame the Aravaipa, whom they alleged were continuing to harass white settlers in Tucson, San Xavier, Tubac, Sonoita, and San Pedro. In late March, prominent white Tusconans formed the Committee on Public Safety, a citizens' group that unsuccessfully petitioned the federal government for protection and redress. Finding no satisfaction, William S. Oury -- a veteran of the Mexican War and a former delegate to the Confederate Congress -- organized a hunting party and set them loose upon the Indians camped at Fort Grant.

Just after dawn on Sunday, 30 April 1871, the armed posse began firing upon the Aravaipa, who were still sleeping. C. B. Briesly, a surgeon in the US Army, described the aftermath later that year in a sworn affidavit presented to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The camp had been fired and the dead bodies of some twenty-two women and children were lying scattered over the ground; those who had been wounded in the first instance, had their brains beaten out with stones. Two of the best-looking of the squaws were lying in such a position, and from the appearance of the genital organs and of their wounds, there can be no doubt that they were first ravished and then shot dead. Nearly all the dead were mutilated. One infant of some ten months was shot twice and one leg nearly hacked off.

As with the Chivington Massacre in Colorado less than a decade before, the Eastern public was astonished to hear word of the slaughter. President Ulysses S. Grant denounced the conduct of the vigilantes, while other federal officials called for justice to be served.

In the trans-Mississippi West, the appraisal was considerably more generous to the perpetrators of the massacre. In December 1871, more than 100 defendants were found "Not Guilty" of the crime of murder of 108 people at Camp Grant. After a trial that sensationalized and distorted the record of Apache depredations against whites, the jury took a mere 19 minutes to reach its verdict. Relations between the various Apache bands and the United States degenerated quickly into an open war that would carry into 1873.

April 29

On this date in 1992 a jury in Simi Valley, California, acquitted four white police officers of all the charges that had accrued to them from the beating and arrest of Rodney King the previous year. The pummeling of King -- an African American who had just been pulled over after an extensive, high-speed chase on Highway 210 in Los Angeles -- had been caught on videotape by a bystander who was roused from bed by the commotion outside his apartment.

George Holliday’s fortuitous camera work provided what was supposed to be the central piece of evidence against the officers, who kicked and struck their victim dozens of times as he writhed on the ground. After King had been subdued, one of the officers reported that “I haven't beaten anyone this bad in a long time.” At the LAPD officers’ trial, however, defense attorneys managed to persuade the jury -- none of whom were black -- that Rodney King had, in fact, been the aggressor and that the videotape showed an arrest procedure that had gone by the book.

When the verdict was announced just after 3:00 p.m. on April 29, 1992, a shocked nation watched as south central Los Angeles descended into violence. Within an hour following the acquittals, the intersection of Florence and Normandie streets had become ground zero for the uprisings that would continue throughout the city for the next five days. Young men, infuriated by the outcome of the trial and eager for revenge, smashed windows, set buildings on fire, looted stores and threw bottles and chunks of concrete at passing cars. Rioters quickly targeted Korean-owned grocery stores, which -- along with police brutality -- served as a focal point for black grievance in Los Angeles.

When the LAPD pulled out of the neighborhood, the arson and looting spread, and random passers-by were caught up in the convulsion. In one of the more horrific episodes that first day, Reginald Denny, a truck driver hauling a load of sand, was dragged from his car and attacked by four men, one of whom threw a block of concrete on his head, shattering his skull in 91 places. Remarkably, Denny survived. Others did not. Among those who died that first day were Eduardo Vela, who was standing beside his stalled car when someone shot him in the chest; John Henry Willers, who had stopped to help victims of a collision when he, too, took a bullet in the heart; and Elias Rivera, who was beaten into a coma when he intervened to stop an assault against one of his neighbors. Rivera’s family removed him from life support eight months later -- four months after the body of Nissar Daoud Mustafa was at last discovered in the rubble of a department store that had burned on April 29.

When the disturbances ended on May 4, 53 people had died and thousands were attempting to recover from injuries; the city, meanwhile, had suffered hundreds of millions of dollars in economic losses. Like Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the 1992 Los Angeles riots were supposed to provoke a “national conversation” about race and poverty -- a conversation that has yet to actually take place.

April 28

Today is the anniversary of the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre, when 28-year-old Martin Bryant killed 35 people at a popular Tasmanian tourist site.

Socially inept and detached since childhood. Martin Bryant was regarded with caution by nearly everyone who knew him. After shacking up in his early 20s with an eccentric middle-aged heiress to the Tatersall’s Lottery fortune, Bryant inherited her estate when she died in a car accident. Suddenly rich, Bryant used his dead friend’s cash to travel the world over the next few years. Hoping a long last to make friends, he found that most people were reluctant to chat with him because of his creepy demeanor; according to some of his acquaintances and family members, his adventures abroad disappointed him greatly and increased his sense of isolation. Returning to Australia, Bryant’s developed an intense fascination with guns and eventually bought several semiautomatic weapons from an unlicensed dealer in Hobart, the Tasmanian capital.

On 28 April 1996, Bryant snapped at long last. After eating lunch at the Broad Arrow Café, Bryant retrieved his weapons from a large duffel bag and shot 20 people in a matter of minutes. Proceeding to the parking lot, he wounded and killed several other tourists before escaping in his Yellow Volvo. As he drove from the site of Australia’s most brutal 19th century prison colony, Bryant stopped along the road to shoot nearly a dozen more people before taking a hostage -- whom he later killed -- and sequestering himself inside a guesthouse called the Seascape Cottage, whose owners he had already shot prior to the mass assault at the cafe. As the hours passed, police from Victoria and New South Wales descended on Port Arthur. The siege became the largest single police action in the nation’s history.

Early the next morning, after police failed to persuade Bryant to surrender, Australia’s greatest mass murderer set fire to the cottage. Pulled from the blaze and arrested, a severely burned Martin Bryant eventually received 35 consecutive life sentences.

Bryant has never precisely explained his motives for embarking on the spree. Asked once by police interviewers to explain himself, Bryant responded that "I'd really love to help you out, but I can't." Whatever his rationale, he was most certainly not celebrating the birthday of Saddam Hussein, who turned 59 that day.

Birthday Girl

Once in a while, someone asks me how I can possibly maintain this blog and not sink into a pit of despair. I don't often have a good answer to that question, but this strikes me as being good a reason as any:

April 24

The Cold War rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union claimed another victim 41 years ago today, when cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov plummeted 150 miles to Earth aboard the Soyuz I spacecraft. The accident took place three months after the United States lost three astronauts in the Apollo 1 fire; it set the Soviet space program back by nearly two years, helping to assure that the United States would be the first superpower to reach the Moon.

Described posthumously by the Communist Party as “a loyal son of our motherland and a courageous explorer of space,” Komarov was incinerated when the ship struck the ground near Orenburg, Siberia after both its main and reserve parachutes failed, with the latter becoming hopelessly tangled in the drag chute. The tangled chute was the last of a seemingly endless sequence of failures after the previous day’s launch. Upon arrival into orbit, one of the craft’s solar panels failed to deploy, leaving the orbiter without sufficient power to maneuver. After a fate-tempting thirteen cycles around the planet, and with Komarov quickly losing his ability to stabilize the Soyuz, the decision was made to attempt re-entry, with results that were -- to understate the matter -- less than optimal.

The entire Soyuz project had been a chaotic mess to this point -- a situation that Komarov’s death only underscored. Previous unmanned Soyuz test flights had all ended badly, and it was widely known among the Soviet engineers and cosmonauts that the program was riddled with flaws. Despite the knowledge that literally hundreds of design problems jeopardized the launch, Party officials were determined to move ahead so that the first Soyuz missions would coincide with state celebrations of Lenin’s birthday. Before the launch, Komarov himself joked that if he were bumped from the mission, Yuri Gagarin -- a national hero -- would die instead.

Americans listening to Soviet radio transmissions claimed later that they could hear Komarov -- who had been able to say goodbye to his wife and children before re-entry -- cursing and berating the engineers and flight planners as his ship scorched the atmosphere at 400 miles an hour.

April 23

James Buchanan, arguably the worst chief executive in American history, was born on this date in 1791. The only president to hail from Pennsylvania, Buchanan stood for nearly everything the state’s Quaker founders detested, including the institution of slavery, which he sought to extend before watching inertly as it cleaved the nation in two.

A lawyer by training, Buchanan ascended into political life as a young man and migrated from the Pennsylvania House of Representatives to the US Congress, in both of whose chambers “Old Buck” resided during the 1820s and 1830s. When not enrolled as a legislator, Buchanan was employed as a diplomat, serving the Tennessee imperialist James K. Polk as Secretary of State during the most priapic era of Manifest Destiny, 1845-1849.. Two years before his election to high office, Buchanan gave even more ballast to his imperialist credentials by helping draft the disastrous Ostend Manifesto (1854), which essentially demanded that Spain agree to the sale of Cuba to the United States. The manifesto, composed in Belgium, advised President Franklin Pierce that if Spain proved “dead to the voice of her own interest, and actuated by stubborn pride and a false sense of honor, should refuse to sell Cuba to the United States,” the United States would be obliged to act strongly in the name of “self-preservation.” Insisting that Cuba’s domestic troubles might spill into the southern United States, Buchanan and his fellows advised that the US could rightfully dislodge the island from Spanish rule. They likened it to a desperate individual “tearing down the burning house of his neighbor if there were no other means of preventing the flames from destroying his own home.”

The Manifesto was a disaster for slavery’s advocates, who were ever more desperately arguing that the extension of the Peculiar Institution was the only means of preserving it where it already existed. The document fueled Northern suspicions that elements of the “Slave Power” were mobilizing to thwart the ambitions of free white landowners. Such concerns were further fueled by the insistence of Southern Democrats -- and even many Whigs -- that the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850 had unlawfully restrained slavery’s growth into the Western territories. On the great moral and political questions of the day, Buchanan was unmistakably supportive of the Southern cause.

When Buchanan was elected to the White House in 1856, only five of the sixteen so-called “Free States” endorsed his ticket, while the slaveholding regions of the country voiced nearly unanimous approval (losing Maryland to Millard Fillmore). As President, Buchanan returned the love. He heartily congratulated the Supreme Court on its notorious Dred Scott decision, which was issued mere days after his inauguration; he supported the admission of Kansas (where the Civil War had already commenced) as a slave state; and when the first, petulant wave of Southern secession occurred in late 1860, Buchanan blamed the “intemperate interference of the Northern people” for the troubles. While Buchanan had six years earlier recommended an imperial war against Cuba in the name of “self-preservation,” he could not bring himself to lift a finger in the cause of preserving the Union. Instead, he insisted that the President could do nothing to scold a recalcitrant state like South Carolina. Moreover, he urged Congress -- whose lower house was run by a free-soil Republican majority -- to succumb to the demands of man-stealers and lawbreakers. By forever securing white rights to human property, Buchanan believed that a Constitutional amendment would “restore peace and harmony to this distracted country.”

Buchanan then did practically nothing until he left office in March 1861.

April 22

A calamity shrouded by state secrecy occurred four years ago today in Ryongchon, North Korea, where a train explosion killed several hundred people while leveling nearly 2000 houses within a 500 meter radius. According to Red Cross observers, at least 76 children died in the blast when their school was obliterated. Although the precise cause of the disaster has never quite been ascertained, the best guess appears to be that a wagon loaded with ammonium nitrate fertilizer was accidentally detonated by an electrical charge when it was shunted to a car brimming with fuel oil.

The Ryongchon explosion took place twelve years after a horrific volley of explosions blew apart huge sections of the working class Alamo district in Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city. Here, 206 people died and more than 500 were injured when corroding PeMex gasoline pipes leaked fluid into the city’s sewer system. For days prior, residents of the city had complained of gas fumes in their homes; some even witnessed gasoline flowing from their sink faucets. City officials were investigating the problem when the city lit up like a Roman candle at 10:06 a.m. on Wednesday, 22 April 1992. Over the course of four hours, a series of blasts tore apart six miles of sewer lines, destroying hundreds of buildings and vehicles and rendering 15,000 people homeless. Nearly two dozen city blocks collapsed into massive, 60-foot ravines, where more than 230,000 tons of rubble crushed everything. The explosions registered around 7.0 on the Richter scale. Buses were tossed onto rooftops.

As in South Korea a dozen years later, the source of the ignition could never be clearly reconstructed. It is quite possible, however, that the spark from a dropped manhole precipitated the disaster.

April 21

Uncommemorated and forgotten, the charred and unidentified remains of scores of prisoners are buried in mass graves at Evergreen, Eastlawn and Harper-McKinley cemeteries in Columbus, Ohio. Monuments to the worst prison fire in American history, these anonymous grave sites hold most of the inmates who died on 21 April 1930, when a candle ignited a pile of oily rags on the roof of West Block at the Ohio State Penitentiary.

Prison officials scrambled in vain to locate a master key; abandoned as the fire spread, the prisoners suffered unimaginable deaths, as 322 were asphyxiated and barbecued in their cells. Among the dead that day was 31-year-old Wilbur "Fats" Young, a World War I veteran serving a sentence at Columbia for bigamy. Young's hometown paper, the Deshler Flag, carried his obituary on 24 April 1930:

[F]ate was not kind to Wilbur Young and he lost his life, while still a young man, within the gray walls of the institution in a most horrible manner. Trapped in his cell like a wild beast with no hope of release he could see the flames, smoke and heat creep closer and closer while all he could do was to wait and do nothing but still wait. Convict though he was, and the rest may be or rather may have been, yet withal there beat in his breast a human heart with human feelings and a heart that could love those near and dear to him and be loved in turn and it casts a pall of gloom and sorrow over those who knew him to think of the awful manner of his ending.

Mr. Young and Funeral director Rader took the ambulance to Columbus on Tuesday afternoon with the expectation of bringing the body back but were informed that no bodies would be released until 9 o'clock on Wednesday morning. They were also told that the body would be furnished with a shroud, color and tie and a coffin, and that transportation charges would be prepaid to its destination.

Prison officials blamed the fire on a botched escape plan, but the fire drew increased attention to the miserable conditions at the Columbus facility, which was operating at twice its intended capacity. Meager efforts were made to improve Ohio's prison system over the next several years; none succeeded, and the Ohio Penitentiary was the site of three major riots in the decades after World War II. The facility was ordered closed in 1979. From 1897-1963, it had been the site of 315 executions -- seven fewer than the number killed on this date in 1930.

April 18

Not long after 5:00 a.m. one hundred and two years ago, the city of San Francisco convulsed when the plates along the San Andreas Fault unexpectedly slipped several meters to the right. The resulting earthquake -- now believed to have reached a magnitude of 7.7 to 7.9 on the Richter Scale -- could be felt across an area of 375,000 square miles from Oregon to Los Angeles and eastward into Nevada. The destruction was massive throughout the region, though nowhere was the quake felt more than in the city. Buildings dropped to the ground, especially in the South-of-Market area of the city, where tenement buildings thundered down, trapping and killing thousands of working class and poor San Franciscans.

One eyewitness somehow avoided the fate that quite literally struck so many that day. He lived to describe it:

Outside I witnessed a sight I never want to see again. It was dawn and light. I looked up. The air was filled with falling stones. People around me were crushed to death on all sides. All around the huge buildings were shaking and waving. Every moment there were reports like 100 cannons going off at one time. Then streams of fire would shoot out, and other reports followed.

I asked a man standing next to me what happened. Before he could answer a thousand bricks fell on him and he was killed. A woman threw her arms around my neck. I pushed her away and fled. All around me buildings were rocking and flames shooting. As I ran people on all sides were crying, praying and calling for help. I thought the end of the world had come.

By mid-day, the fires had begun; by the end of the day, much of the city was alight. Troops from Ft. Miley began dynamiting buildings to create fire breaks. Not infrequently, the explosions created more fires. Most civilians were able to make their way to some kind of safety, although thousands of people were unable to leave their neighborhoods due to the reefs of debris. In addition to the 500 alleged looters whose bodies were left in the streets as a warning to imitators, military and police officers shot at least four people who could not be rescued from the flames -- one man who was pinned under burning rubble, and three who were trapped on the roof of the Windsor Hotel at Fifth and Market, not long before the roof collapsed. Five thousand people witnessed the mercy killings at the Windsor.

By the time the fires exhausted themselves four days later, 25,000 buildings no longer existed, and nearly 500 city blocks were reduced to ruin. Half to three-quarters of the city’s 400,000 people were rendered homeless. An accurate count of the dead was never accomplished; the best contemporary estimates suggest that 3000 people or more may have perished in the earthquake and fire.

April 17

The Cambodian civil war ended thirty-three years ago today, as the Supreme Committee of the Khmer Republic abandoned the capital of Phnom Penh. Over the previous five years, the war had consumed the entire nation, with government forces -- supported by the United States -- waged an increasingly futile campaign against the National United Front of Kampuchea (FUNK), a coalition of forces increasingly dominated by the communist Khmer Rouge. As they chipped away at the territory controlled by the government of Prime Minister Lon Nol, FUNK earned the financial and military backing of the Chinese and North Vietnamese. In the field, the Front were commanded by named Saloth Sar, a monster from the Khmer Rouge who would become known to the world in coming years as Pol Pot.

For its part, the United States unwittingly aided the cause of the Khmer Rouge by dropping a half million tons of bombs on central and eastern Cambodia, where North Vietnamese forces had set up camp in its ongoing effort to run the US out of South Vietnam. As the American bombing campaign remade Cambodia into something resembling the landscape of the Moon, the Khmer forces acquired further support among a peasantry that already had good reason to detest the government in Phnom Penh. After 1973, when the US acknowledged the futility of its war on Vietnam, it likewise ended its campaign on behalf of the government of Cambodia.

By 1974, the Khmer Republic could only assert control of Phnom Penh and Battambang, the country’s two largest cities, both of which were overcrowded with citizens displaced from the countryside. Roughly 700,000 soldiers of the Khmer Rouge soon launched a final assault on the capital, which succumbed a mere two weeks before the reunification of Vietnam under communist control. Though Lon Nol himself had fled to Hawaii along with other government officials, others in the Cambodian government remained; captured by the Khmer Rouge, they were quickly executed.

As many as 150,000 Cambodians may have perished in the civil war that formally ended on April 17, 1975. Over the next 44 months, anywhere from one to two million more would die as Pol Pot committed Democratic Kampuchea -- as his country was now called -- to a campaign of ideological and economic purification. Cities were evacuated and the people herded onto collective farms, where they labored and starved by the hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands more -- intellectuals, professionals, ethnic minorities and other “parasites” -- were taken to the so-called Killing Fields, where they were shot or (more frequently) slugged with hammers or gouged with pick axes before being dumped into mass graves.

April 16

On 16 April 1947, the French ship Grandcamp -- a salvaged American vessel formerly known as the Benjamin R. Curtis -- was loaded with twine, peanuts, drilling equipment, tobacco, cotton, and about 17 million pounds of ammonium nitrate, shipped to the port at Texas City from Nebraska and Iowa.

When a fire erupted in Hold 4 of the ship around 8:00 a.m., crew members and local firefights spent an hour trying to extinguish the blaze before the fertilizer ignited, causing a massive explosion that destroyed everything in a several-hundred yard radius. A 15-foot tidal wave surged over the port facilities, tossing boats indiscriminately; one 150-foot oil barge was tossed 200 feet. Bodies cut in half by flying steel clotted the harbor, and smoldering cotton and twine showered the city, igniting fires that ultimately burned for days. The ship’s anchor -- weighing 3000 pounds -- was discovered two miles away. Ruptured oil tanks and pipes dumped crude slicks into the harbor. Flaming debris set them alight. At 1:00 a.m., the USS High Flyer -- which had been docked next to the Grandcamp and was also bulging with explosive chemicals -- erupted into flames and was itself torn asunder by an explosion that showered the city with more steel debris. Over $32 million worth of property was destroyed.

Carrie Born Baker, a young mother at the time of the disaster, recalled the event a half century later:

I was waiting for a Houston salesman to come show me drapery material. As we looked at his fabric, the blast blew the door open in his face, and he took off for Houston. I grabbed Sheary and ran outside. Deafening sirens were blaring. Police cars and ambulances were everywhere. My nieghbor's husband and son-in-law worked at the docks, and she kept fainting.

A nieghbor came by in his flatbed truck and made us get in. I didn't want to leave but another explosion was expected, and I had to get my brothers, sisters, and baby to safety. My older brother drove to Houston to tell my husband Tommy and Dad where we were going . . .

My brother-in-law, Truman Baker, was a Monsanto foreman, last seen going to the fire. Tommy and his brother-in-law, Walter Stidham, were part of group searching for bodies. They kept looking for Truman and Walter's father. It took a long time to find them. Fingerprints and dental work indentified Truman. Tommy never liked to think of the explosion because all he could see was the bodies and pieces of bodies, and smell that awful smell. When he thought of his brother, he remembered his face caved-in.

I knew a lot of people that died that day. Many I worked with at Monsanto or lived near. I lost friends, family and many acquaintances. I will never forget that day even though many names have faded from memory.

The exact death toll of the Texas City explosion could never be accurately determined, since so many of the missing were never recovered, and because there were untold numbers of workers and seamen who may have been visiting or working at the facility without documentation. The best estimates, however, are that nearly 600 people died and several thousand more suffered injuries. The entire Texas City volunteer fire department -- twenty-eight members in all -- perished.