Axis of Evel Knievel

August 20

2008-08-20T22:27:00.000-08:00

The Battle of Fallen Timbers.

August 1-2

2008-08-01T15:00:00.001-08:00

The end of Black Hawk's War.

July 30

2008-07-30T18:22:00.001-08:00

Henry Ford receives a gift from Hitler.

July 28

2008-07-28T13:00:00.002-08:00

The Great Depression descended into state-sponsored violence on this date in 1932, as President Herbert Hoover oversaw the eviction of the Bonus Expeditionary Force (popularly known as the "Bonus Army") from its shantytown on the swampy flats of the Anacostia River, just southeast of the federal core in Washington, DC.

The marchers, consisting of 15-20,000 Great War veterans and their families, had come to the nation's capital in June to ask for early payment of certificates worth roughly $1.00 for each day served during the war. The certificates were set to mature in 1945, but the Bonus marchers asked Congress to release the funds more than a decade early, when the veterans needed them most. Although the House of Representatives narrowly passed a bill to grant the veterans their wishes, the Senate defeated a similar measure by an overwhelming margin of 62-18. (The whole legislative drama was irrelevant, as Hoover most certainly would have vetoed any bill that made its way through Congress.) By this point, the BEF had set up a temporary camp on the Capitol grounds, and a number of demonstrators had occupied federal buildings that had been vacated for the hottest part of the summer.

On July 28, Herbert Hoover ordered his attorney general to remove all demonstrators from federal property. Although Hoover evidently did not want the Anacostia Flats encampment to be cleared, Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur, believed that communists were responsible for the demonstrations and that "the [bonus] movement was actually far deeper and more dangerous than an effort to secure funds from a nearly depleted federal treasury." Pursuing the war veterans across the river, MacArthur's infantry and cavalry units (including six tanks) trashed the Bonus encampment, scattering the marchers with fixed bayonets and tear gas, asphyxiating two infants. Hundreds of others were injured, and two veterants were shot.

Time magazine reported on one of the deaths:

When war came in 1917 William Hushka, 22-year-old Lithuanian, sold his St. Louis butcher shop, gave the proceeds to his wife, joined the Army... Last week William Hushka's Bonus for $528 suddenly became payable in full when a police bullet drilled him dead in the worst public disorder the capital has known in years.

President Hoover's tough stand against Lithuanian and other veterans did nothing to help his campaign for re-election. In November, he lost to Franklin Roosevelt by nearly 20 percentage points in one of great landslides in presidential history.

July 25

2008-07-25T00:42:00.000-08:00

On this date in 1969, President Richard Nixon spoke informally to a group of reporters in Guam and outlined a set of skeletal priorities that would soon come to be known as the “Nixon Doctrine.” Elaborating on his stated goal of “Vietnamizing” the disastrous war in Southeast Asia, Nixon insisted that while the United States could not afford to withdraw from the Pacific Rim entirely, “regional pride” and nationalism among American allies would require a more careful approach to foreign policy:

Asians will say in every country that we visit that they do not want to be dictated to from the outside, Asia for the Asians. And that is what we want, and that is the role we should play. We should assist, but we should not dictate.

. . . [As] far as our role is concerned, we must avoid that kind of policy that will make countries in Asia so dependent upon us that we are dragged into conflicts such as the one that we have in Vietnam.

The United States, Nixon explained, would assist its friends in waging war against “internal subversion” but would not “fight the war for them.” In applying the Nixon Doctrine to the American war in Vietnam, the president did so with his characteristic illegality and viciousness. Over the next four years, as the US gradually withdrew ground troops, Nixon escalated the catastrophic air war while expanding it into Cambodia and Laos; he ordered the mining of North Vietnamese harbors and considered bombing its dams; and he presided over the entombment of 20,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Asians, whose deaths forestalled -- for six years at most -- the reunification and Communist takeover of Vietnam.

Meantime, as the forces of “internal subversion” imperiled the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf region, the Nixon Doctrine supplied the rationale for extending billions of dollars in military hardware and training to the House of Saud and the Shah of Iran, whose nations -- gurgling with petrodollars -- were expected to remain obedient, iron-fisted regional proxies for decades to come.

July 23: A Brief Transitional Interruption

2008-07-23T15:45:00.003-08:00

Today is the anniversary of the 1967 Detroit riots.

On these events and their broader significance, I have a post up The Edge of the American West, a group blog founded last year by a couple of outstanding historians at UC-Davis.

To make a long story short, they recently asked me to come over and ruin their site. Having successfully accomplished the same for other clients, I decided to accept their offer.

Among other things, this means I'll be posting somewhat less frequently here. I can't say there's a shortage of repugnant historical episodes to explore, but my ability to research and write for the Axis has been increasingly constrained by the various demands of work and life. At least in its current form, this blog has been running for two years now, and I've compiled a huge volume of entires that I'll revise and re-post (which is much of what I've been doing anyway for the past six months). Entirely new entries will appear at EotAW, with links to those posts here.

July 17

2008-07-17T10:31:00.001-08:00

On 17 July 1791 -- two years to the day after he proposed the tricolor cockade that would serve as the basis for the modern French flag -- Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette, presided over one of the most notorious and consequential massacres in his nation’s history. For several days prior to the killings, tens of thousands of Parisians had gathered in the Champ de Mars to petition for the abdication of King Louis XVI. In response to these public demonstrations -- which the authorities feared might provoke radical uprisings against the monarchy and the National Assembly -- Jean-Sylvain Bailly, the mayor of Paris, declared martial law and ordered the crowds dispersed.

Carrying out his orders, Lafayette, the national hero who had been tapped as Commander in Chief of the National Guard, led three columns of soldiers toward the unarmed masses who had assembled near the “altar of the fatherland.” Many Parisians were drawn to the Champ de Mars by the declaration of martial law, which they apparently did not believe could be enforced against a crowd so large. Harassed by the angry demonstrators and pelted by stones and clumps of mud, the soldiers opened fire on Lafayette’s orders, killing scores of people. Implausibly, some partisans claimed at the time that 10,000 had perished; historians generally believe the actual number was around 50.

A sympathetic French historian, writing in the mid-19th century, described the aftermath of the massacre as a mixture of despair, melodrama and heroism.

In an instant the Champ-de-Mars was cleared, and nought remained on it save the dead bodies of women, and children, trampled under foot, or flying before the cavalry; and a few intrepid men on the steps of the altar of their country, who, amidst a murderous fire and at the cannon’s mouth, collected, in order to preserve them, the sheets of the petition, as proofs of the wishes, or bloody pledges of the future vengeance, of the people . . . .

The course of the French Revolution, which was already beginning to unravel, only grew more violent in subsequent years; when the Jacobins took full control of the revolution in 1792, Lafayette fled the country and spent several years in Austrian and Prussian prisons before returning to France during the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte. Americans, who remembered fondly Lafayette’s contributions to their own revolution, eventually rewarded him with a massive land grant and a $200,000 gift.

Two years after the bloodbath at the Champ de Mars, the assassin Charlotte Corday -- who famously slew the Jacobin journalist Jean-Paul Marat as he lay in his bathtub -- surrendered her head at the guillotine. Her executioner then lofted her head in the air and slapped it, an indignity that earned him several months in prison. Corday’s body, like so many others during the Reign of Terror, was dumped in a trench and buried. The whereabouts of her head has never been determined.

July 14

2008-07-14T21:40:00.002-08:00

By all accounts, the Bastille was a godforsaken chasm before an assembly of Parisians smashed its gates and burnt it to the ground on this date in 1789. Originally cast as a stone fortress for the protection of the city, the 15th century towers had evolved over time into a symbol of the monarchy’s immense despotism toward its own people. Throughout the 17th and 18th century, the Bastille served as the temporary home for rebellious aristocrats, religious dissenters, petty thieves, spies, as well as anyone who offended royal ministers or other representatives of an increasingly despotic state.

In the century before its destruction, the Bastille was the subject of dozens of accounts written by former inmates who detailed its horrors to audiences throughout Europe. The most famous of these, Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet’s Memoirs of the Bastille (1783), is widely though erroneously celebrated as the book responsible for the prison’s demise. The Bastille, while loathed by ordinary French citizens, would not have been worth the efforts of its vainqueurs had it not been for the 15 tons of gunpowder it contained. Still, Linguet’s narrative remains a fascinating, if frequently bathetic account of daily life in one of the most notorious detention facilities in human history.

It is in this total silence, I must again repeat it, in this general desolation, in this void of a silence more cruel than death, since it does not exclude grief, but rather engenders every kind of grief; it is in this universal abomination, it cannot be repeated too often, that what is called a Prisoner of State in the Bastille, that is, a man who has displeased a Minister, a Clerk in office or a Valet, is given up without resource, without any other diversion but his own thoughts or his alarms, to the most bitter sentiment that can agitate a heart yet undegraded by criminality,; that of oppressed innocence, which foresees its destruction without the possibility of a vindication; it is thence that he may fruitlessly implore the succor of the laws, the communication of what he is accused of, the interference of his friends; his prayers, his supplications, his groans are not only uttered in vain; but even acknowledged by his tyrants to be useless; and this is the only information they vouchsafe him. Abandoned to all the horror of listlessness, of inaction, he is daily sensible of the approaching close to his existence; and he is at the same time sensible, that they prolong it only to prolong his punishment.

Only seven prisoners remained in the Bastille by the time hundreds of laborers and merchants –- shopkeepers, cabinet-makers, cobblers, locksmiths and joiners –- captured the facility and dismembered its governor, Bernard-René de Launay. The victorious forces then attached de Launay’s head to a pike and hoisted it through the streets of Paris along with the keys to the main gate. They added six other heads to the procession, matching the number of prisoners liberated in the event. (It is uncertain where the other heads came from. Aside from de Launay, only one other garrison soldier perished in the fight for the Bastille.)

Over the next few months, Parisians dismantled the prison stone by stone, leaving a single cell behind as a reminder.

July 11

2008-07-11T12:43:00.001-08:00

Thirty years ago today, a truck carrying 23 tons of liquid propylene – nearly four tons more than the law permitted – slammed into a concrete wall and exploded just outside a seaside campsite near Tarragona, Spain. The resulting fireball, which fanned out across a 300-meter area, incinerated everything in its path and left a crater five feet deep and 65 feet wide. Secondary blasts, caused by exploding automobiles and portable butane stoves, ricocheted throughout the site, which at the time hosted roughly a thousand tourists from Germany, France, Belgium and elsewhere. Well over 100 people died instantly, flash fried at temperatures of at least 1000 degrees Fahrenheit, while more than a hundred others endured severe burns that would kill them in the days and weeks to come. Though most of the victims were torched beyond recognition, forensic workers managed to identify each of the bodies – a remarkable feat under the circumstances.

In all, the Los Alfaques disaster claimed 217 lives, including the driver of the doomed tanker. During the subsequent investigation, police learned that both the transport company and petrol refinery had routinely colluded in overloading vehicles. Cisternas Reunidas, which was responsible for shipping the propylene, had instructed its drivers to avoid the toll motorways and use the national roads instead. This choice saved the company a few thousand pesetas, the contemporary equivalent of 15 Euros; four years after the accident, the shipping company and refinery paid out nearly ten million times that amount in damages to the survivors and the families of those who died.

The Los Alfaques camp fire spurred new hazardous materials regulations throughout the world. It also led to the development of new international standards – based solely on dental, fingerprint or DNA evidence -- for identifying bodies in the wake of similar disasters.

Brief Vacation Interruption

2008-06-26T22:52:00.002-08:00

Things have been slower around here than usual... I've been entertaining family and trying to get Real Work accomplished. I'll be leaving on vacation for a few weeks tomorrow but will return in mid-July with some new entries....

June 17

2008-06-17T14:17:00.002-08:00

On this date in 1939, the German-born serial killer Eugen Weidmann lost his mind – and the head that encased it – to the guillotine outside the French prison at Versailles.

Weidmann had committed a number of petty crimes over the years and had completed a short prison term in March 1936 before meandering to France to avoid serving in Hitler’s armed forces. It appears that Weidmann viewed himself to be something of a criminal genius, and he organized a gang comprised of fellows he’d met while in a Franfurt prison to carry out a series of abductions that mainly targeted wealthy visitors from the United States and Great Britain. When their first effort went badly and their victim managed to escape, Weidman and his companions evidently decided to take no more chances. Beginning with the abduction and murder of the American dancer Jean de Koven – whom he admitted to strangling while she was drinking tea -- Weidman and his accomplices tallied a half dozen victims between July and September 1937. Most of them had been shot in the back of the head and robbed; one of their female victims was buried in a garden, the other stuffed into a cave. Detectives located and arrested the conspirators in December, and their trial – which did not take place for another 15 months – resulted in the completely predictable verdict of death for Weidman. His accomplices earned life sentences.

At 4:00 a.m. on June 17, 1939, prison officials roused Weidmann from bed, shaved the back of his neck, offered him a shot of rum and a smoke, then escorted him the Place de Greve, a public plaza just outside the prison walls. More than two hundred audience permits had been issued to view the killing, and so an eager crowd awaited the condemned man as he emerged from Versailles. Most of them had been merry-making since the previous evening in anticipation of the execution, and Weidman’s arrival rejuvenated their fatigued spirits, sending them into what the press described as a “hysterical” frenzy. When Henri Desfourneaux, France’s executioner, released the blade, Weidman’s head tumbled to the pavement while numerous women in the crowd surged forward to dip their handkerchiefs and scarves in the accumulating lake of blood.

Embarrassed by the display, prison authorities consigned future executions to the interior of the prison, where they ere carried out until 1977, when the last guillotining took place. France, joining much of the rest of the world in its evolving standards of decency, formally abolished capital punishment in September 1981.

June 12

2008-06-13T20:06:00.000-08:00

The day after Gov. George C. Wallace sought to prevent the integration of the University of Alabama, a fertilizer salesman and Klan member named Byron De La Beckwith gunned down Medgar Evers in the driveway of his Jackson, Mississippi home. Just before 2:00 a.m. on 12 June 1963, Medgar Evers -- a 37-year-old father of three -- died at a local hospital.

Evers had few illusions about his life’s work. Several years before his death, Evers recalled his childhood in Decatur, Mississippi:

When I was eleven or twelve a close friend of the family got lynched. I guess he was about forty years old, married, and we used to play with his kids. I remember the Saturday night a bunch of white men beat him to death at the Decatur fairgrounds because he sassed back a white woman. They just left him dead on the ground. Everyone in town knew it but never [said] a word in public. I went down and saw his bloody clothes. They left those clothes on a fence for about a year. Every Negro in town was supposed to get the message from those clothes and I can see those clothes now in my mind's eye . . . . But nothing was said in public. No sermons in church. No news. No protest. It was as though this man just dissolved except for the bloody clothes . . . . Just before I went into the Army I began wondering how long I could stand it. I used to watch the Saturday night sport of white men trying to run down a Negro with their car, or white gangs coming through town to beat up a Negro.

A veteran of the segregated armed forces who fought in Normandy during World War II, Evers returned to the United States with a determination -- shared by millions of black soldiers and their compatriots -- to enjoy and exercise their full citizenship. He graduated from Alcorn State and sold insurance for a living, but he grew increasingly involved in the emerging civil rights movement, which was a deadly commitment in one of the most unreconstructed racist havens of the old South. Evers became involved in the investigation of Emmett Till’s murder in 1955, and he organized economic boycotts, prayer vigils and nonviolent marches, all of which earned him the respect of national civil rights leaders and the enmity of segregation’s defenders. Evers, who was his state’s first NAACP field officer, had been targeted by white supremacists for nearly a decade before his death. His home was firebombed, he received teleophe threats on a daily basis, and he was chased by racist drivers who more than once tried to run him over.

In his final speech, delivered less than a month before his death, Medgar Evers expressed optimism that

the years of change are upon us. In the racial picture things will never be as they once were. History has reached a turning point, here and over the world. Here in Jackson we can recognize the situation and make an honest effort to bring fresh ideas and new methods to bear, or we can have what Mayor Thompson called “turbulent times.” If we choose this latter course, the turbulence will come, not because of so-called agitators or the presence or absence of the NAACP, but because the time has come for a change and certain citizens refuse to accept the inevitable.

Byron De La Beckwith, refusing to “accept the inevitable,” shot Evers in the back and escaped justice for more than 30 years. At last convicted of the murder in 1994, De La Beckwith died of heart problems on 21 January 2001, the day after George W. Bush took the oath of office.

June 11

2008-06-11T08:28:00.001-08:00

On this date in 1963, a Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc drove from the Linh-Mu Pagoda in Hue to Saigon, parked his car in a busy intersection, doused himself in gasoline and diesel fuel, and -- with a string of Buddhist mala (prayer beads) clutched in his hand-- calmly immolated himself. David Halberstam, then a reporter for the New York Times, recalled the event in 1965:

Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning flesh; human beings burn surprisingly quickly. Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think . . . . As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him.

His act -- captured most famously by Associated Press photographer Malcolm Browne -- stunned the world and hastened the demise of Ngo Dinh Diem, the corrupt South Vietnamese president who was then engaged in a nationwide crackdown against Buddhists and political dissidents. In a letter written just before his death, Thich Quang Duc explained that his sacrifice was intended as a call for Diem “to be kind and tolerant toward his people and [to] enforce a policy of religious toleration.”

Diem’s regime was somewhat less than sympathetic to these pleas. Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu -- Diem’s sister-in-law and the “First Lady of South Vietnam” -- dismissed the act as irrelevant and ineffectual. “They only thing they have done,” she observed with a wave of her hand, “they have barbecued one of their monks.” She added that Duc’s death was not even “self-sufficient” because he had to use “imported gasoline.” Madame Nhu was also quoted as urging the monks to continue their protests. “Let them burn,” she said, “and we shall clap our hands.” Less than four months later, Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu were killed in a coup, and Madame Nhu -- the “Dragon Lady” -- was driven into exile.

June 4

2008-06-04T10:00:00.001-08:00

Today is the 34th anniversary of one of the most staggering promotional failures in American sports history. On 4 June 1974, fans who showed up to watch the Cleveland Indians host the Texas Rangers were treated to a remarkably ill-conceived event known as “Ten Cent Beer Night.” Throughout the game, vendors dispensed tens of thousands of cups of Stroh’s beer to the 25,000 irascible fans who filled the soul-less, bug-infested cavern otherwise known as Cleveland Municipal Stadium. The result, quite predictably, was ugly.

The 1960s and 1970s were an awful time for northern Ohio, as the departure of heavy industry and the frenzied flight of white residents to the suburbs helped cut the city’s population nearly in half from its post-World War II high of 900,000. By 1974, Cleveland was five years past the infamous Cuyahoga River chemical fire and four years from declaring bankruptcy. For those who were able to struggle out of bed on June 4, the opportunity to drown in cheap alcohol must have seemed like an instance of divine intervention.

As fate would have it, a similar cheap beer promotion grew out of hand the previous week, when the Rangers and Indians met in Arlington, Texas. Midway through that game, the teams brawled, and Rangers fans responded by tossing cups of beer onto the field. Nothing that night, however, rivaled the lunacy that ensued in Cleveland when the Rangers arrived for a three-game series on June 4; averaging a mere 8000 fans per game that season, Cleveland Indians officials hoped that alcohol might create a buzz that their team's players themselves could not.

During the first few innings, tipsy fans tossed smoke bombs and firecrackers at each other. By the second inning, a topless woman had leaped onto the field and chased down one of the umpires for an unwanted kiss; another streaker joined the Rangers’ Tom Grieve as he circled the bases following his second home run of the night; a father and son team ran into the outfield and dropped their pants. Meantime, golf balls, rocks and batteries rained down on Texas’ players throughout the game. At one point, someone heaved an empty gallon of Thunderbird wine at Rangers’s first baseman Mike Hargove. As the game neared its conclusion, the evening descended into total chaos. During the ninth inning, the Indians managed to tie the score and placed the winning run on third base. At that point, a fan ran into the outfield to steal Jeff Burroughs’ glove. When Burroughs began chasing the fan, Rangers’ manager Billy Martin, along with several of Burroughs’ teammates, rushed to help out -- several of them, including Martin, carried bats.

Not caring that their team was about to win a rare victory, the most intoxicated people in Cleveland began throwing hot dogs, beer cups, broken seats and glass bottles at their guests from Texas. Thousands of fans stormed the field, some of them brandishing chains and knives and metal chairs.

Within minutes, the umpires’ crew chief Nestor Chylak had invoked Rule 3.18 and forfeited the game to Texas. Chylak later described the fans as “uncontrollable beasts,” adding that he had never seen anything quite like it, “except in a zoo.” American League president Lee MacPhail concluded that beer "played a great role" in the affair.

June 2

2008-06-02T15:07:00.003-08:00

Today is the anniversary of the 1855 Rum Riots that shook Portland, Maine, on June 2, 1855. The uprisings were inspired by rumors that the city’s prohibitionist Mayor Neal S. Dow -- the so-called “Napoleon of Temperance” – had permitted enormous stores of liquor to enter the city in apparent violation of the law. By the night’s end, one man was dead and a handful of others wounded, shot by the state militia by order of the mayor, whose political career was irreparably harmed as a result.

Dow had been an advocate of temperance since the 1830s, and he had devoted years to the project of urging his home state to criminalize the sale and consumption of wicked spirits. Where temperance reformers had traditionally relied on techniques of persuasion and conversion, Dow represented a newer wing of the movement that insisted on total prohibition as the only means sufficient to thwart civilizational collapse. And so in 1851, the Maine legislature passed a landmark bill to accomplish precisely those ends; the “Maine Law” provided that alcohol could only be used legally for “medicinal, mechanical or manufacturing” purposes.

Predictably, the traffic in rum descended underground, as smugglers devised ingenious ways of delivering the desired nectar to whomever was willing to pay for the pleasure and accept the risk. For those who could afford neither the cost nor the risk of violating it, the Maine Law was immensely unpopular – even more so among the state’s Irish immigrants, who correctly understood that public supporters of prohibition often drank as well from the nativist cup. Maine’s protestant majority despised the Irish workers whose numbers had grown in recent decades, regarding them as sotted, Gaelic brutes who would do the nation well by leaving it as quickly as they’d come. Meantime, however, the prohibition law was partly intended to arrest their bad behavior or – it was widely hoped – persuade them to leave the state for more permissive surroundings. Other laws placed new burdens on foreign-born voters, restricting them from the polls at a crucial

When Dow won the mayor’s election in 1855 – benefiting from the efforts to restrict “Irish cattle” from voting – he authorized the city to create an agency to regulate the sale of liquor to those few whe entitled to receive it. He initiated the purchase of $1600 worth of booze in his own name and arranged to pass it along to the new agency once it arrived. Unfortunately for Dow, this qualified as an illegal transfer under the state’s prohibition law, and his opponents pounced. They successfully petitioned a judge to issue a search warrant for city hall, where the contraband was supposed to be residing, and on June 2 a furious crowd descended upon City Hall.

After three hours of taunting and jeering the mayor, throwing rocks and other missiles at the police, the crowd – which had by this point swelled to well over a thousand – charged the building and were repelled by a volley of gunfire. John Robbins, a sailor from Boston, died in the attack. Mayor Dow was allegedly disappointed to learn that Robbins was not Irish.

In the aftermath of the Rum Riot, Dow himself was brought up on charges of violating the liquor law. Though he was acquitted, the incident destroyed his political career and soiled the reputation of the new Republican Party during the next election cycle. Democrats – looking for an issue to draw attention away from the nation’s mounting crisis over slavery – found the temperance controversy to be well suited to the purpose. Rallying voters against “Dowism,” they swept into power in 1856 and quickly repealed the nation’s first prohibition law.

By this point, several other states had followed Maine's lead. Among temperance advocates, the 1855 Rum Riots provided further confirmation that prohibition was a reasonable solution to the problem of alcohol.

May 29

2008-05-29T09:06:00.001-08:00

On 29 May 1985, a football riot claimed the lives of 39 spectators when a concrete retaining wall collapsed at Heysel Stadium in Brussels, Belgium, where supporters of Liverpool FC and the Italian club Juventus had gathered for the finals of the European Cup. The episode took place shortly before kick-off, when Liverpool fans rushed a section of Italians -- most of whom were guest workers living in Belgium -- and drove them backward against the wall, which gave way in the panic. Victims as young as 11 and as old as 58 were crushed or suffocated in one of the worst episodes of football violence in the history of the sport.

Hostilities between Italian football fans and supporters of Liverpool stretched back to at least the previous year, when the latter were assaulted following their team’s European Cup victory over A.S. Roma. At that time, the Roma club’s most violent enthusiasts clubbed their English rivals with tire irons and other weapons after the match concluded; some English fans had to take refuge at their nation’s embassy. When the 1985 final brought Liverpool back to face another Italian club, the drunken yobs chose to overlook the fact that the followers of Juventus -- a club from northern Italy -- had nothing to do with the 1984 attacks. Italians were Italians. So when a handful of Italian fans began lobbing chunks of the stadium at the English hooligans in the adjacent section, further violence was inevitable.

Otello Lorentini, one of the many attendees who lost a family member that evening, described the night two decades later for the British newspaper The Observer.

[An English hooligan] jumped over a small fence and came charging towards us. Then, many more followed. They had lumps of terrace concrete, Coke bottles, beer bottles, rocks and even knifes. Everyone panicked. There were seven or eight policemen standing on the pitch side of the fencing. We pleaded with them to call for reinforcements. But none came.

I thought we would die. Everyone moved away from the charging Liverpool fans and, in the crush, the wall collapsed. This was actually lucky because otherwise thousands may have been killed . . . . I escaped through a small door at the top of the terracing and eventually found myself on the field where people lay on the ground dead. There were still no police around. Many people were trapped and dying and there is one man I cannot forget -- his face was covered in blood and over these past 20 years I have dreamt about him many times. I waved [my son] Roberto’s black-and-white Juventus scarf so that he could see it and then I decided to return to look for my son among the corpses in Sector Z. It was then I met my nephew. He said: ‘Come quickly, Roberto is not so good.’ I put my ear to my son’s ears and listened. I deluded myself that I could hear his pulse. But no, he was dead. The TV cameras had been filming me and later, I watched myself find my son.

Sharing blame for the 39 deaths, organizers of the European Cup tournament had selected one of the worst stadia in Europe to host the final match. The facilities at Heysel were feeble and unsuited for the 50,000 people who were expected to attend the event. Several clubs, including Liverpool FC, raised complaints over the site -- which some critics described as more of horse barn than athletic stadium -- but event officials refused to relocate the match to a newer complex better suited to handle the security problems that were inherent in a contest like the Euro Cup final. Officials in Brussels failed as well by not assigning enough police to the event.

After a two-hour delay, the match continued, with Juventus winning, 1-0 -- the only goal of the match coming on a penalty kick, the result of an objectively incorrect call on the part of the officials.

Unaware that more than three dozens of their supporters had actually died that evening, Juventus players enjoyed a post-game victory lap, hoisting the European Cup trophy as they circled the stadium.

May 22

2008-05-22T09:30:00.000-08:00

Preston Brooks, a US Representative from South Carolina, attacked Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner with a gold-tipped cane on this date in 1856, beating him so severely that Sumner would be unable to resume his full duties until nearly four years had passed. Brooks was outraged by a speech delivered by Sumner two days earlier on the Senate floor, where he denounced the “crime against Kansas” being perpetrated by pro-slavery forces who were determined to extend the “peculiar institution” into the Midwest. Sumner singled out 89-year-old South Carolina Senator Andrew Pickens Butler -- Brooks’ uncle -- for special ridicule, accusing him of being smitten with “the harlot, Slavery,” for whom he had nothing but kind and chivalrous words.

During the course of the speech, Sumner dismissed Butler as a slobbering ignoramus, observing that

the Senator touches nothing which he does not disfigure with error, sometimes of principle, sometimes of fact. He shows an incapacity [for] accuracy, whether in stating the Constitution, or in stating the law, whether in the details of statistics or the diversions of scholarship. He cannot open his mouth, but out there flies a blunder . . .

Butler, believing “my State and my blood” had been libeled by the Senator from Massachusetts, vowed to avenge Sumner’s words. After consulting South Carolina Rep. Laurence Keitt on the proper reply to Sumner’s “libel,” Brooks carried out his plan on 22 May 1856.

Brooks chose not to challenge Sumner to a duel, in part because he knew the Senator would refuse the challenge, but also because dueling was a conventional means of settling disputes among social equals; Brooks regarded Sumner as an inferior man and chose to assault him in a manner reserved for “correcting” slaves or accosting drunkards. After approaching Sumner in the nearly vacant Senate chamber, Brooks shattered his cane -- a gift from a friend in Baltimore -- over the Senator’s head, surprising him as he was writing letters. Brooks delivered at least thirty blows before leaving the floor; he was assisted by his Keitt, who displayed a pistol and warned Sumner’s colleagues not to intervene. By the end of the assault, Sumner was nearly unconscious and was blinded by his own blood. For years, he suffered headaches and nightmares as a result of the incident.

For his part, Brooks received a $300 fine for the attack and was celebrated across his home state and throughout the South, where newspapers lined up to issue their praise. The House of Representatives voted to expel Brooks but fell short of the required two-thirds majority. Embittered, Brooks resigned his seat to seek re-election. Less than two months before he was to resume his place in Congress, Brooks died of croup in January 1857; a few days past the one-year anniversary of the beating of Charles Sumner, Andrew Butler joined his nephew in death.

May 21

2008-05-21T09:34:00.000-08:00

On this date in 1924, two exceptionally gifted college graduates smothered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in the back seat of a rental car in Chicago. The two young men, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, killed Franks in order to bear out their hypothesis that they could get away with committing the “perfect crime.” After luring Franks into their car and beating him with a chisel, Leopold and Loeb suffocated the boy with a coat and abandoned his body at Wolf Lake, which straddled the Illinois-Indiana border, fifteen miles southeast of the city.

Nathan Leopold, writing in his autobiography (Life Plus Ninety-Nine Years), explained how he and Loeb disposed of Franks’ body:

We had previously removed the shoes, trousers and stockings of the boy, leaving the shoes and the belt by the side of the road concealed in the grass. Having arrived at our destination we placed the body in the robe, carried it to the culvert where it was found. Here we completed the disrobing, then in an attempt to render identification more difficult we poured hydrochloric acid over the face and body. Then we placed the body into the drain pipe and pushed it as far as we could.

While they were attempting to conceal Franks’ remains, however, a pair of glasses slipped from Leopold’s coat pocket. The glasses were traced back to their owner, who confessed and pinned blame for the murder on his companion. Loeb, for his part, blamed Leopold for the crime.

The case of Leopold and Loeb became one of the enduring historical contributions of the 1920s. After initially entering pleas of ‘not guilty” by reason of insanity, the two young men -- following the advice of their attorney Clarence Darrow -- pled guilty and watched for an entire month as Judge John R. Caverly determined their fate. More than one hundred witnesses appeared during the sentencing hearing, which concluded with a twelve-hour summation from Darrow, who spent much of his time attacking the very use of capital punishment in a “civilized” society.

During his address to the judge, Darrow argued that the Great War had numbed the sensitivities of the entire nation, including the accused.

We read of killing one hundred thousand men in a day. We read about it and rejoiced in it -- if it was the other fellows who were killed. We were fed on flesh and drank blood. Even down to the prattling babe. I need not tell your honor this, because you know; I need not tell you how many upright, honorable young boys have come into this court charged with murder, some saved and some sent to their death, boys who fought in this war and learned to place a cheap value on human life. You know it and I know it. These boys were brought up in it. The tales of death were in their homes, their playgrounds, their schools; they were in the newspapers that they read; it was a part of the common frenzy -- what was a life? It was nothing. It was the least sacred thing in existence and these boys were trained to this cruelty.

Judge Caverly spared the lives of Leopold and Loeb, sentencing them each to life in prison for the murder of Bobby Franks and 99 years each for Franks’ kidnapping.

Richard Loeb died twelve years later in prison, his throat slashed in the shower by a fellow inmate. Nathan Leopold was paroled in 1958 and spent the rest of his life in Puerto Rico, where he died of a heart attack in 1971.

May 19

2008-05-19T10:17:00.000-08:00

A Cambodian infant by the name of Prek Sbauv was born on this date in 1925. A month short of his 50th birthday, Prek Sbauv -- now known to the world as Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge movement -- concluded nearly a decade of armed struggle by taking full control of his nation, which he renamed Democratic Kampuchea.

Espousing his own regressive version of Maoist doctrine, Pol Pot insisted that Kampuchea return to the condition of a purely agrarian society in order to purify the Cambodian people and prepare them for collective progress; cities like Phnom Pehn were therefore to be evacuated, and all modern technology was forbidden throughout the country unless approved by the central committee. The Khmer Rouge divided the Cambodian population into three classes -- “full-rights,” “candidates,” and “depositees” (or “New People”). The later category included intellectuals, journalists, Buddhists monks, anyone who had contact with the West, people with glasses, people with disabilities, and ethnic Lao, Chinese and Vietnamese people. It also included everyone living in the regions of the country not controlled by the Khmer Rouge before 1975.

The “New People,” who numbered in the millions, were deemed enemies of Pol Pot’s revolution and were rounded up into camps, separated from their families, subjected to torture and forced labor, deliberately starved and then killed by the hundreds of thousands in mass graves they had dug with their own hands. As the Khmer Rouge explained, “To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss.” Teeda Mutt Mam, one of the “New People” to survive of the killing fields, has written that

we were not allowed to cry or show any grief when they took away our loved ones. A man would be killed if he lost an ox he was assigned to tend. A woman would be killed if she was too tired to work. Human life wasn’t even worth a bullet. They clubbed us in the back of our necks and pushed us down to smother us and let us die in a deep hole with hundreds of other bodies.

They told us we were void. We were less than a grain of rice in a large pile.

After presiding over well over a million deaths, Pol Pot was dislocated from power when the Vietnamese army invaded in 1979, scattering the Khmer Rouge government. Pol Pot fled to Thailand and then to China, where he lived until the Vietnamese army withdrew from Cambodia in 1989. After returning to his native land, Pol Pot and the remnants of the Khmer Rouge managed to keep government forces at bay until 1997, when he was at last captured and sentenced to lifetime house arrest. On 15 April 1998, after learning that he was to be delivered to an international tribunal and tried for crimes against humanity, Pol Pot died. His body was cremated, however, and not cast into a ditch -- which would certainly have been no less than what he deserved.

May 15

2008-05-15T20:50:00.000-08:00

On the morning of 15 May 1974 -- the 26th anniversary of Israel's founding -- three guerillas from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP) crossed into Israel from Lebanon, then shot and killed five people in Ma’alot before taking over Netiv Meir elementary school, where about a hundred teens from a nearby village had spent the night after a hiking trip.

During the negotiations that followed over the course of the afternoon, the PDFLP insisted that the Israeli government release more than two dozen political prisoners, in exchange for which the captive youths would not be killed. The militants set a deadline for 6:00 p.m. Although the government of Golda Meir indicated that it would be willing to meet the demands, it also asked for more time to continue negotiations; the request was refused. Shortly before the deadline, soldiers from the Sayeret Matkal special forces unit stormed the school and killed the three hostage-takers -- though not before 21 children died and scores were injured by gunfire and grenade shrapnel.

The next day, Israeli Defense Force planes pounded seven Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon, killing 26 and injuring well over a hundred people.

Nineteen years after the Ma'alot massacre, a two-day crisis at a Parisian nursery school ended when French police commandos shot Eric Schmitt in the head three times while he was sleeping. Schmitt, an unemplyed engineer and failed businessman, had taken 21 girls and their teacher hostage, demanding nearly $20 million in exchange for their safe release. The teacher, a young woman named Laurence Dreyfus, kept the children calm by telling them that Schmitt was "hunting wolves."

May 14

2008-05-14T16:07:00.000-08:00

On this date in 1961 -- Mothers’ Day -- civil rights activists affiliated with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) were attacked by white mobs in Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama, when they attempted to ride through the state on Greyhound and Trailways buses. Following the US Supreme Court’s decision in Boynton v. Virginia -- which ruled segregation on interstate bus lines unconstitutional -- black and white “Freedom Riders” decided to test the willingness of white Southerners to adhere to the law. Fewer than two dozen set out from the nation’s capital on May 4. They had dutifully sent their itinerary to the Justice Department. J. Edgar Hoover promptly forwarded it to state officials in Alabama, many of whom were known to have Klan affiliations.

The rides began in early May. Defying custom, white riders sat in the back while black passengers occupied the front seats. When the buses stopped, the CORE riders refused to observe the segregated conditions that were still observed in southern bus terminals; whites used “colored” restrooms and waiting areas, while blacks used facilities reserved for whites.

The rides encountered minor violence in Rock Hill, South Carolina, but everyone knew the worst was yet to come. As Martin Luther king, Jr., had warned the riders, “You won’t make it through Alabama.” Indeed, when the CORE buses crossed the Georgia state line on their way to Birmingham, they encountered ferocious resistance. At a rest stop in Anniston, the Greyhound passengers were attacked by local members of the Ku Klux Klan and nearly 200 of their closest friends. One of the riders, James Peck, wrote about the incident in his book Freedom Rider (1962):

They set about the vehicle, denting the sides, breaking windows, and slashing tires. Finally, the police arrived and the bus managed to depart. But the mob pursued in cars. Within minutes, the pursuing mob was hitting the bus with iron bars. The rear window was broken and a bomb was hurled inside. All the passengers managed to escape before the bus burst into flames and was totally destroyed. Policemen, who had been standing by, belatedly came on the scene. A couple of them fired into the air. The mob dispersed and the injured were taken to a local hospital.

By this point, Walter Bergman had been kicked until his brain hemorrhaged. He remained in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. The reception in Anniston was not entirely unhelpful, though. A 12-year-old white girl named Jamie Miller brought a bucket of water to the riders, who were choking from smoke inhalation. Facing constant taunts and threats from other whites in the community, she and her family soon moved from Anniston.

When the Trailways bus arrived two hours later, Klansmen boarded as well, beat the Freedom Riders and forced them to the back of the bus for the two-hour ride to Birmingham. As they drew nearer to the city, Klansmen taunted and threatened the passengers. When the group arrived in Birmingham, the violence resumed with the complicity of the local police, who allowed the racist mob fifteen minutes of unimpeded access to the riders. Gary Thomas Rowe was among those who awaited the arrival of the civil rights activists. Years later, he described the event:

We made an astounding sight . . . men running and walking down the streets of Birmingham on Sunday afternoon carrying chains, sticks, and clubs. Everything was deserted; no police officers were to be seen except one on a street corner. He stepped off and let us go by, and we barged into the bus station and took it over like an army of occupation. There were Klansmen in the waiting room, in the rest rooms, in the parking area.

When the bus arrived in Birmingham, the seven Freedom Riders were dragged from the vehicle, chased into the streets, punched and kicked into semi-consciousness. After 20 minutes, the mob dispersed.

Photographs of the assaults in Anniston and Birmingham were published nationwide and even overseas. When activists from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee joined the Freedom Riders to help them complete the journey, they were attacked as well in Montgomery, where one man was doused in gasoline and set on fire. The Kennedy administration, embarrassed and shocked by the violence, quietly negotiated with the racist governor of Mississippi, James Eastland, to have the riders arrested for their own protection when they crossed into his jurisdiction. As more riders entered Mississippi and as the arrests mounted, some of the activists were shipped off to Parchman Farm, a former slave plantation than had become one of the most notorious facilities in American history.

The Freedom Rides -- scores of them -- continued throughout the summer and into the fall of 1961. The Kennedy administration did as little as possible, blaming the activists themselves for causing international embarrassment to the US. In September, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued a long-overdue order that put the Supreme Court's desegregation rulings into effect.

May 9

2008-05-09T15:50:00.000-08:00

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

2008-05-06T09:59:00.002-08:00

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

2008-05-05T13:48:00.003-08:00

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

2008-05-02T12:59:00.000-08:00

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

2008-04-30T13:31:00.001-08:00

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

2008-04-29T13:58:00.003-08:00

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

2008-04-28T00:15:00.000-08:00

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

2008-04-26T12:25:00.002-08:00

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

2008-04-24T12:02:00.003-08:00

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

2008-04-23T14:35:00.001-08:00

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

2008-04-22T11:18:00.000-08:00

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

2008-04-21T13:53:00.003-08:00

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

2008-04-18T08:32:00.000-08:00

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

2008-04-17T11:30:00.001-08:00

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

2008-04-16T09:55:00.001-08:00

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.

April 15

2008-04-15T10:26:00.002-08:00

On this date in 1715, four South Carolina diplomats were killed in the Yamassee town of Pocotaligo, located about a hundred miles west of the colonial capital of Charles town.

The delegation had been sent to solicit the support of the Yamasee in an effort to thwart the outbreak of a war -- rumored to be just over the horizon -- launched by the Ochese (Lower) Creek against the colony. The six ambassadors had good reason to assume their appeal would be recognized and accepted. As the most important English ally in the region, the Yamasee had waged war on behalf of the white settlers before, most recently in 1712-1713 against the Southern Tuscarora. In that conflict the Yamasee joined with an array of other regional tribes to annihilate their adversaries, pushing them out of the Carolinas and into the region, much farther north, that was dominated by the Iroquois Confederacy.

However, the cultural and economic stability of the Yamasee was under tremendous pressure during these years, and their allegiance to the English colonists was beginning to fray. The deerskin and Indian slave trades had helped secure the political and economic bonds between the white settlers and the Yamasee, but they also brought further white encroachment into Yamasee territory while depleting the deer stock. As well, the growth of massive rice plantations -- which would ultimately prove to be the source of South Carolina’s great wealth -- were also impinging on Yamasee territory. With the expansion of the Port Royal region south of Charles Town, cattle ranches quickly sprouted up along the border of the Yamasee territory; heedless of their own role in fomenting the crisis, unfenced livestock gobbled the crops on which the Yamasee depended for food.

During these early years of the 18th century, the Yamasee population showed marked decline, with the window of opportunity for resistance diminishing with each year. With fewer warriors, slave raiding was becoming more difficult. Many Yamasee resented what they regarded as abusive trade practices among the white settlers, including aggressive debt collection, intimidation and violence. They worried that unless they were able to clear their financial obligations to the colony, their own people would soon find themselves on the auction block; whether this fear was well-founded or not, the Yamasee were in the very least determined not to follow the downward trajectory of the Westoe or Cassaboe -- two other once-powerful Indian peoples who had been reduced to helpless dependency over the previous half century.

While receiving assurances from the South Carolina government of its benign intentions, the Yamasee could also not help noticing the construction of a new military fort in Beaufort.

When the delegation arrived in Pocotaligo on April 14, then, the Yamasee regarded the English ambassadors with suspicion. Several of the men in the group had already squandered the good will of the Indians, and the rest were rumored to be spies rather than earnest diplomats. Early the next morning, after hours of intrartibal debate, the Yamasee headmen decided to take the unprecedented step of killing their guests. One of them -- an Indian commissioner named Thomas Nairn -- was tortured for hours before he died.

Having dispatched the ambassadors -- and recognizing the consequences of that decision -- the Yamasee then launched a massive assault against Port Royal, killing roughly a hundred colonists and striking the first blow in a war that would consume the region for the next two years. The war would eventually bring the Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Catawba, Apalachee and more than a dozen other Indian peoples into a loose alliance against the colony. Over the course of two years, South Carolina reached treaty arrangements with a number of their adversaries, while others fled the region or remained in a state of hostility.

Nearly 10 percent of the colony's settlers died in the fighting. The Yamasee, which lost at least a quarter of its population, dispersed throughout the region after the war. Some joined in with the Lower Creek confederacy, while others relocated to Spanish Florida, where they eventually merged with the Seminole.

April 10

2008-04-10T08:43:00.002-08:00

Perhaps the most sophisticated submarine of its day was crushed 45 years ago today off the coast of Cape Cod. The USS Thresher, a 3700-ton Permit class nuclear submarine, was designed to navigate deeper and move faster than any previous submarine. Its purpose was to hunt down and destroy missile-firing subs developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

After an overhaul during the winter, the Thresher sailed to New England to conduct deep-water tests. On the morning of 10 April 1963 a design flaw -- most likely located along the steel bonded fittings in the sub’s piping system -- caused 100,000 pounds of water to spray into the sub, tilting its nose upward and shutting down the vessel’s reactor. Without power, the Thresher sank toward the ocean bottom. When it reached its “crush depth,” the submarine imploded, taking the lives of 129 sailors and civilians, whose last moments must have been unendurably frantic as they struggled to regain control of the doomed vessel. Radio operators on the USS Skylark -- a naval rescue ship assigned to shadow the Thresher on its maneuvers that day -- actually heard the submarine’s last moments, which somewhat mercifully consisted merely of the sound of metal being crushed.

The loss of the Thresher proved to be the worst peacetime naval disaster in US history. The vessel still rests in six parts along the ocean floor.

The Thresher was obliterated exactly 43 years after the Titanic left port in Southampton, England, on its way to New York.

April 9

2008-04-09T07:58:00.001-08:00

The notorious massacre of Palestinian villagers at Deir Yassin began on this date in 1948, marking a turning point in the first Arab-Israeli War. During the attack, more than 130 armed combatants from the Irgun and Lehi militias killed scores of unarmed men, women and children, likely 110-120 in all.

At the time of the attack, Jerusalem was besieged by neighboring Arab armies -- the major road into the city had been cut off, and on April 6 the main Israeli army (Haganah) launched a counteroffensive known as Operation Nachshon, aimed at lifting the siege. Although the residents of Deir Yassin had successfully resisted efforts by Syrian and Iraqi forces to occupy the village in the weeks prior to the massacre, and while the town itself was not strategically important, Lehi and Irgun assaulted Deir Yassin on their own initiative on the morning of April 9. The attack was led by 132 mostly young and inexperienced fighters, armed with automatic weapons and grenades.

When the irregular forces fought their way into the village -- after receiving assistance from Haganah mortar shells -- they moved from house to house, shooting everyone who remained. Prisoners and wounded villagers were liquidated as well. One group of 20-25 men was taken to a quarry and shot. Many participants and defenders of the massacre would later insist that the killings were justified by the resistance offered up by the residents of Deir Yassin. According to several accounts, some of the village men dressed as women during the battle for the village; Jewish fighters then began shooting women indiscriminately, unsure of whom they were actually shooting.

By 11:00 a.m., the village was quiet. Meir Pa’il, an intelligence agent who was on hand for the massacre, provided one of the few eyewitness accounts of the events:

The fighting was over, yet there was the sound of firing of all kinds from different houses. Sporadic firing, not like you would hear when they clear a house. I took my chap with me and went to see what was happening. We went into houses. They were typical Arab houses. Most of the houses there are one-story, though there are a few two story houses like the Mukhtar’s house and a few others. In the corners we saw dead bodies. Almost all the dead were old people, children or women, with a few men here and there. They stood them up in the corners and shot them. In another corner there were some more bodies, in the next house more bodies and so on. They also shot people running from houses, and prisoners. Mostly women and children. Most of the Arab males had run away. It is an odd thing, but when there is danger such as this, the agile ones run away first.

In 1997, one of the former residents of Deir Yassin, Um Mahmoud, recollected the events of April 9:

We were inside the house. We heard shooting outside. My mother woke us up. We knew the Jews had attacked us. My cousin and his sister came running and said the Jews were already in our garden. In the meantime, fighting became heavier and we heard lots of gunshots outside. A bomb was thrown at us and it exploded close to where we were in the yard. (...) My sister- in-law did not want to leave. She was frightened. The girl was two months old and the boy about three. I took the two and my mother said we should go to my uncle’s house. I saw how Hilweh Zeidan was killed, along with her husband, her son, her brother and Khumayyes. Hilweh Zeidan went out to collect the body of her husband. They shot her and she fell over his body (...). I also saw Hayat Bilbeissi, a nurse from Jerusalem serving in the village, as she was shot before the house door of Musa Hassan. The daughter of Abu El Abed was shot dead as she held her niece, a baby. The baby was shot too (...). Whoever tried to run away was shot dead.

After the capture of Deir Yassin, Palestinians throughout the region fled their homes by the hundreds of thousands, fearing similar atrocities.

April 8

2008-04-08T10:26:00.002-08:00

The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Septimius Bassianus Antoninus -- known to the Roman world as Caracalla -- ascended to power in the year 211 upon the death his father, Septimus Severus. For a few months he shared the imperial duties with his brother Geta, but in December of that year, Caracalla decided to dispose of his fraternal rival. He arranged a meeting with Geta in his mother’s apartment, where a group of centurions hacked the unfortunate brother to bits.

After Geta had been assassinated and his body burnt to a crisp, Caracalla began a killing spree that solidified his reputation as one of the more bloodthirsty Roman leaders. He ordered his counselor Laetus -- with whom he had originally discussed the assassination plot -- to commit suicide, taking care to send him the poison himself. Other plotters and advisers met similar ends. One victim threw himself from a window to avoid his assassins; when he merely suffered a broken leg and tried to crawl away, his pursuers mocked him in the streets before finishing him off. As the Historia Augusta explains,

[d]uring this same time there were slain men without number, all of whom had favoured the cause of Geta, and even the freedmen were slain who had managed Geta's affairs. Then there was a slaughtering in all manner of places. Even in the public baths there was slaughter, and some too were killed while dining, among them Sammonicus Serenus, many of whose books dealing with learned subjects are still in circulation.... After this he committed many further murders in the city, causing many persons far and wide to be seized by soldiers and killed, as though he were punishing a rebellion.

Over the next four years, Caracalla presided over massacres in Gaul, in Germany, and in Egypt, where thousands of Alexandrians were put to death for little reason other than to remind the rest of the city of its subordinate relationship to Rome.

Loathed by apparently everyone, Caracalla died on this date in the year 217; he was assassinated will taking a piss on the side of the road hear Harran, a city on the edge of the Parthian Empire, which included all of modern-day Iran and much of modern-day Iraq.

April 3

2008-04-03T23:37:00.000-08:00

Forty years ago today, Martin Luther King, Jr., arrived in Memphis, Tennessee to offer his support to the 1300 sanitation workers -- most of whom were African American -- who had struck nearly two months before to protest their low pay, awful working conditions and their union's non-recognition by the city. The civil rights leader had been to Memphis twice during the previous month and joined the men of AFSCME Local 1733 in marches to City Hall, sit-down protests, mass meetings and night-long vigils. During his final trip, King was ill. After joining in an afternoon march in downtown Memphis, King initially decided to rest and not speak that evening at the Bishop Charles Mason Temple Church of God, where workers and their supporters were planning to convene. After a 30-minute address by Ralph Abernathy, however, King rose and spoke extemporaneously for nearly 45 minutes.

Toward the end of his address, King observed that

[m]en, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence.

That is where we are today. And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn't done, and in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed. Now, I'm just happy that God has allowed me to live in this period, to see what is unfolding. And I'm happy that He's allowed me to be in Memphis . . . .

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

James Earl Ray shot King in the throat less than 24 hours later as King stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, wondering if he needed to wear a coat that evening.

April 2

2008-04-02T16:54:00.000-08:00

Two years into the Civil War, the Southern economy was in disarray. Cotton producers -- unwilling to bid farewell to the cash crop that sustained the slave society for which the Confederacy fought -- refused to convert their fields to food production. As the war in Virginia trampled the farms and pushed tens of thousands of refugees into the city of Richmond, food shortages combined with price inflation and overcrowding stretched the population to the limits of its patience. The melt from a March snowstorm destroyed the roads into the capital, adding to the misery of a city whose population had swelled from 40,000 to nearly 180,000 since the outbreak of hostilities. Diaries from the period record conditions approaching starvation. For some, rat meat was the only available source of protein.

On 2 April 1863, a crowd of women armed with clubs, rocks and guns took to the streets of the Confederate capital and demanded “bread or blood.” The disturbance in Richmond would prove to be the largest of the 1863 Southern food riots, which occurred as well in Mobile, Atlanta, and Petersburg among other cities and towns. The Richmond uprising was unique in a number of respects, not the least of which was that it was carried out almost entirely by women. They were led by a mother of four named Mary Jackson and a butcher’s apprentice with the improbable name of Minerva Meredith, both of whom organized a meeting on April 1 to plan a march the following day on a local bakery. After Virginia’s governor John Lechter refused to consider their pleas for relief on April 2, the women -- who eventually numbered between one and three thousand -- stormed through the Old Market, looting anything that wasn’t nailed down -- bacon, flour, sugar, candles hats, and brooms were among the goods pilfered by the enraged and war-weary crowd. Newspaper editorials and angry Confederate leaders denounced the women as prostitutes, communists, and paid agents of the Union government, although they were in fact nothing of the sort.

In 1878, the New York Sun published an account of the bread riot as told by an eye-witness named John W. Daniel, who portrayed the disgruntled participants as machine-like in their efficiency:

The women took the stores in line, one after the other. They proceeded systematically. The goods were piled upon wagons drawn by horses driven by female sympathizers. Not a word was spoken. The work was done with terrible earnestness. When the mob entered a grocery a certain percentage of them piled the goods upon the outstretched arms of the others, and they were borne to the streets and dumped into the wagons. The women had it all their own way. Neither soldiers nor police were in sight. Meanwhile the crowd increased. Other women heard what was going on, and flocked to Main Street for a share of the plunder. Not a man joined them, and for a long time no one made an effort to stop them. At last Colonel Baldwin, of Virginia , jumped upon a dry-goods box, and made an impassioned appeal for law and order. He might as well have talked to the wind. No one paid the least attention to him. The women went on with their sacking, and the bystanders drowned Baldwin 's voice with their whoops and cheers.

When Jefferson Davis and a detachment of the Virginia Public Guard arrived on the scene, the president of the Confederacy offered a few words to the rioters. John Daniel described it as “the most eloquent speech [he] had ever heard.” Another bystander -- less impressed with Davis’ attempts to soothe the crowd -- tossed a loaf of bread at the president but failed to strike him. Davis then ordered the militia captain to fire on the crowd if it did not disperse within five minutes. Several witnesses later recalled that a cannon was rolled up next to the St. Charles Hotel, where it was aimed down Main Street at the assembled women.

And so the bread riot concluded.

However unsuccessful it may have beenin the short term, the women’s uprising in 1863 helped alter the course of the war. Confederate armies badly needed reinforcements, but the threat of further disturbances kept thousands of troops tied down in the streets of Richmond, where they served a much less dangerous role guarding a dying society.

Two years to the day after turning the state’s guns against his own citizens, Jefferson Davis fled the city of Richmond on a late-night train as the Civil War neared its conclusion.

April 1

2008-04-01T11:14:00.002-08:00

On this date in 1873, the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company -- better known as the White Star Line -- lost a passenger ship off the coast of Nova Scotia.

The RMS Atlantic was making its 19th voyage, having departed on March 20 from Liverpool to New York with nearly a thousand souls aboard, 833 of whom were passengers. After encountering rough weather, the ship’s captain decided to make a coaling stop in Halifax before continuing on to New York. The Atlantic had been loaded with only 13 days’ worth of coal and was, in the judgment of the captain, not likely to have enough for the rest of the trip.

Unfortunately -- because the ship’s crew apparently misread their position in the dark and underestimated the speed at which they were traveling -- the ship ground to a halt early in the morning of April 1 overtop Golden Rule Rock, a obstacle that sat a mere 50 yards off Meagher’s Island near the town of Lower Prospect. Within minutes, the 3700-ton ship stood nearly perpendicular in the water, and nearly all of the passengers were trapped in their sleeping berths. When the crew attempted to lower the lifeboats, the turbulent waters created by the rapidly sinking ship washed them away; a few of the crew members managed to reach the island with rescue lines, but more than 560 passengers drowned, including all of the women on board, all of the married men, and every child on the ship with the exception of a single boy. The entire crew survived. Survivors of the Atlantic were rescued the next day.

Meantime, the recovery effort began as boats and divers combed the beach and waters for the remains of the dead. One of the divers later described the scene in one of the sleeping quarters:

Here, piled up in heaps on the port side, were numbers of bodies of men, and strewn among them bed clothing of one kind and another. From continual knocking against the stanchions and sharp, jagged woodwork which is splintered and broken front the linings of the bunks, the faces and limbs of these dead are more ghastly than any I have ever seen. Imagination cannot picture anything more terrible than what was in this compartment. The flesh is torn from the faces of many of the dead; others, again, are bruised and battered about their heads and faces, which are red and bloody, and in striking contrast to the pale, livid features of others which the action of the water has not disturbed. While I stand here, another of the divers descends and commences to send up some of the bodies. He, however, is more intent upon securing the cargo than sending up the bodies, and only does so now to gain access to some boxes and trunks which are lying beneath them. Having seen enough of the horrors beneath the water on that fatal reef - horrors of the deep which will never be erased from my vision - I decided to ascend, and motioned accordingly to the men who were above in the boat, and pumping down to me the necessary supply of air to sustain life; in a few minutes I was once more at the surface, gazing upon the light of heaven and experiencing a sensation of relief at having left the chambers of death in the cabins of the ill-fated Atlantic.

At the time, the Atlantic catastrophe was the worst civilian maritime disaster. Nearly 39 years later, the White Star line would lose a more famous ship called the Titanic.

March 27

2008-03-27T12:08:00.003-08:00

On this date in 1814, the Battle of Horseshoe Bend occurred on a peninsula of the Tallapoosa River, located in what would soon be the state of Alabama. The five-hour ordeal pitted a contingent of 1000 Upper Creek warriors -- known as “Red Sticks” -- against the West Tennessee Militia, the 39th United States Infantry, and an complement of Cherokee and Lower Creek (“White Stick”) fighters, all of whom answered to the command of General Andrew Jackson.

The origins of the battle were complicated. The Creek, unlike their Cherokee or Choctaw neighbors, were a loose confederation rather than a distinct political and cultural entity; as white settlement and influence extended further and further into the old Southwest, divisions emerged among the Creek villages over the question of how much resistance should be offered against white encroachments. The so-called Lower Creek -- known as “White Sticks” -- tended to adopt a more accommodationist stance. Meanwhile, certain factions of the Upper Creek -- also known as “Red Sticks” -- urged a more forceful response.. Influenced by a pan-Indian political and spiritual revival that had swept down from the Ohio Valley over the previous years, the Red Sticks tended to regard many of their fellow Creeks as spineless collaborators who had adopted too much of the European-American culture.

By 1813, the United States and Britain had entered into a war with each other, and the Creek had become enmeshed in a civil conflict. For a while, the Red Sticks maintained an upper hand in the fight; they conquered and sacked numerous Lower Creek towns in an effort to destroy all vestiges of white influence in the region. In August 1813, Red Sticks killed hundreds of Lower Creek who had taken refuge under American protection at Ft. Mims, located North of Mobile. Though most of the victims at Ft. Mims were Indian, the episode sent the region into a complete panic. Whites feared that the Red Sticks would not only receive military assistance from Great Britain and Spain, but that they would also stir up slave revolts throughout the deep South.

Militias from Tennessee, Mississippi and Georgia immediately entered the civil war on behalf of the Lower Sticks, and after several months of skirmishes throughout the region, the Battle of Horseshoe Bend brought the Creek civil war to a violent conclusion. Fortified by extensive log breastworks on a peninsula along the Tallapoosa River, more than a thousand warriors and hundreds of women and children faced off against a much larger force of Americans and their allies. Once the breastworks had been breached, however, the Creek were trapped. The battle turned into a slaughter, as the 2600 American soldiers and their 600 Indian allies had thoroughly demolished the Red Sticks. More than 500 died in battle, with hundreds more drowning or otherwise being killed in the river as they tried to flee. A few hundred managed to escape to Florida, where they took refuge with the Seminole.

Years later, Sam Houston -- who fought in the Tennessee militia under Andrew Jackson -- described the aftermath:

The sun was going down, and it set on the ruin of the Creek nation. Where, but a few hours before a thousand brave...[warriors] had scowled on death and their assailants, there was nothing to be seen but volumes of dense smoke, rising heavily over the corpses of painted warriors, and the burning ruins of their fortifications.

Five months later, the Treaty of Ft. Jackson ceded to the US more than 23 million acres of Creek territory in southern Georgia and throughout the area that would eventually become the state of Alabama. In a remarkable gesture of ingratitude, the US took land that had been held by Red Sticks as well as the Lower Creeks who had fought with the Americans.

Two decades later, President Andrew Jackson oversaw the complete eviction of the Creeks -- along with the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw -- from the old Southwest. Meantime, the former Creek lands had been opened up to white settlement, and cotton planters flooded the region, rejuvenating the institution of slavery.

March 26

2008-03-26T11:19:00.004-08:00

Eleven years ago, 39 bodies were discovered in one of the wealthiest communities in the US, a small outpost in San Diego County called Rancho Santa Fe. The dead had been members of a religious cult known as “Heaven’s Gate,” and as far as they were concerned, they had just abandoned their home planet for a ride on a spaceship traveling the universe in the 20-million mile long tail of the Halle-Bopp comet.

The journey was a long time coming. In the early 1970s the cult’s founders, Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, met at a Houston psychiatric hospital; Nettles was a nurse and Applewhite a patient who had admitted himself in hope of curing what he believed to be his errant sexual appetites. After severing ties from their families, “The Two” began a spiritual quest that took them from Texas to the woods of Northern California. There, Applewhite and Nettles -- who began referring to themselves as “Bo” and “Peep” -- founded a small band of followers who would call themselves many names over the next two decades before settling Heaven’s Gate a few years before their mass suicide.

Led by the teachings of Bo and Peep, members of the group came to believe that they had received “soul deposits” from the Kingdom of Heaven and that when the time was right, these souls would have the opportunity to leave their bodies and travel to a higher plane of existence. Meantime, the group foreswore earthly pleasures including alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, and sex. They pursued an ascetic lifestyle, dressed androgynously, and waited patiently for a spaceship to carry their souls away.

When the first rendezvous failed to materialize in Waldport, Oregon in September 1975, Bo and Peep shepherded their flock to the Colorado national monument. Again, the followers were disappointed, and by 1977, the group’s membership had dwindled from around a hundred to fewer than 20. By this time, Nettles and Applewhite had adopted new names -- “Ti” and “Do,” respectively -- and muddled along for next few years, migrating throughout the southwest and trying to rebuild their organization in preparation for their eventual “graduation” to the Next Level. When Ti died of cancer in 1985, Do explained to the group that she had done so in order to take over as pilot of their rescue craft, which would surely be coming for them soon.

Meantime, the arrival of the internet provided the group with a new means of publicizing their message as well as the financial means of securing a home base for their community. Several members earned their livings as web designers and computer programmers, and by the mid-1990s, their income enabled Heaven’s Gate to purchase a 9000-foot home in Rancho Santa Fe, where they relocated in 1996.

At this point, Do was already convinced that the comet Halle-Bopp -- sighted for the first time the previous year -- was the bearer of a message for which he’d been waiting a quarter century. In an October 1996 videotape, he warned viewers that

Planet Earth about to be recycled. Your only chance to survive or evacuate is to leave with us. Now, that's a pretty drastic statement -- pretty bold -- in terms of religion, in terms of anybody's intelligent thinking. To most people who would consider themselves intelligent beings, they'd say, "Well, that's absurd. What's all this doomsday stuff? What's all this prophetic, apocalyptic talk?" You know, intelligent human beings should realize that all things have their own cycle. They have their season. They have their beginning, they have their end. We're not saying that planet Earth is coming to an end. We're saying that planet Earth is about to be refurbished, spaded under, and have another chance to serve as a garden for a future human civilization.

The tape did not have a noticeable effect on the group’s membership.

On March 21, the members of Heaven’s Gate gobbled their final meal together at Marie Callendar’s, where they were served with pot pie, salad and cheesecake. The next day, with the comet at its closest point to Earth -- a mere 122 million miles away -- the members of Heaven’s Gate cleaned up their house, took out the garbage, and initiated a suicide pact they called “The Routine.” With help from each other, they spent their last conscious moments on Earth eating applesauce and pudding laced with elephantine doses of phenobarbitol. To wash down their final meals, they swigged vodka before climbing into their bunk beds and securing plastic bags over their heads for good measure. Their bodies were discovered three days later.

Several active members of the community were not present for the "Graduation." Two of them committed committed suicide during the next year, when the comet Halle-Bopp was considerably farther away.

March 25

2008-03-25T12:24:00.004-08:00

On this date in 1931, a fight took place on a Memphis-bound train between a group of whites and a group of blacks, all of whom had hopped the train while traveling the region in search of work. In the course of the skirmish, several of the white youth were tossed from the slow-moving cars. When the train arrived at its next stop in Paint Rock, Alabama, nine black teenagers were arrested by a mob of armed whites. From there, they were removed to a jail in nearby Scottsboro, where they were charged with assaulting a group of white youth on a train earlier that afternoon. Most importantly, the young men were accused of raping two white women -- charges that would have resulted in their lynching that very night if the governor of Alabama had not intervened to prevent it.

Over the next five years, the defendants would endure multiple trials and rounds of appeals that brought the case to the Supreme Court and to the attention of the entire nation. Although the accusations against the so-called “Scottsboro Boys” were completely unsupported by physical or eyewitness testimony, eight of the nine received quick convictions and capital sentences in April 1931. As Hollace Ransdall noted in an unpublished report on the case, the white community of Scottsboro was absolutely convinced of the guilt of the accused.

They all wanted the Negroes killed as quickly as possible in a way that would not bring disrepute upon the town. They therefore preferred a sentence of death by a judge, to a sentence of death by a mob, but they desired the same result, and were impatient with anything that slowed up the conviction and death sentence which they all knew was coming regardless of any testimony.

They said that all negroes were brutes and had to be held down by stern repressive measures or the number of rapes on white women would be larger than it is. Their point seemed to be that it was only by ruthless oppression of the Negro that any white woman was able to escape raping at Negro hands. Starting with this notion, it followed that they could not conceive that two white girls found riding with a crowd of Negroes could possibly have escaped raping. A Negro will always, in their opinion, rape a white woman if he gets the chance. These nine Negroes were riding alone with two white girls on a freight car. Therefore, there was no question that they raped them, or wanted to rape them, or were present while the other Negroes raped them - all of which amounts to very much the same thing in southern eyes - and calls for the immediate death of the Negroes regardless of these shades of difference. As one southerner in Scottsboro put it, "We white people just couldn't afford to let these Niggers get off because of the effect it would have on other Niggers."

On appeal, the US Supreme Court overturned the initial verdicts, ruling that the young men had been offered incompetent counsel. (The original lawyers consisted of a staggering alcoholic and an elderly lawyer who had not tried a case in years.) Alabama quickly retried one of the defendants, Haywood Patterson, and though one of his accusers -- a young woman named Daisy Bates -- had recanted her testimony, the jury again found Patterson guilty and sentenced him to die.

By now, however, the judge in the Patterson trial harbored serious doubts about the guilt of the defendants. In a decision that ultimately ruined his career, Judge James Horton chose to set aside the verdict and ordered a third trial for Patterson. A more compliant judge presided over Patterson’s third trial, which ended in precisely the same manner as his first two. For the second time, the United States Supreme Court vacated Patterson’s conviction -- as well as that of his fellow defendant Clarence Norris -- on the grounds that the court’s deliberate exclusion of blacks from the jury pool had violated the constitutional rights of the accused.

By 1936 -- five years after the initial incident -- the fourth round of trials began. Patterson and Norris were again convicted, along with Andy Wright, Ozzie Powell and Charlie Weems. All received sentences of 20 to 99 years for crimes they did not commit. On July 24, 1937, the state dropped charges against Roy Wright, Eugene Williams, Olen Montgomery and Willie Roberson, all of whom had been in prison for nearly five years after their initial guilty verdicts had been overturned. Between 1943 and 1950, Alabama paroled four of the five convicted Scottsboro defendants; Haywood Patterson escaped from prison in July 1948 and fled to Michigan, which refused to extradite him after his capture two years later.

Although the case is universally regarded as one of the worst episodes in American legal history, Alabama never offered restitution to the young men who spent so many unnecessary years fearing for their lives in state custody.

March 24

2008-03-24T13:28:00.003-08:00

Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez, the Catholic Archbishop of San Salvador, was assassinated by members of a right wing death squad on this date in 1980; he was shot in the heart at the Hospital de la Divina Providencia, where he had been leading a funeral mass for a friend’s mother.

Romero had become an unlikely champion for the impoverished peasants of El Salvador, which was in the early stages of a civil war that would eventually claim more than 75,000 lives by the early 1990s. Until the mid-1970s, Romero was a resolutely conservative figure in the Catholic church, focusing on social problems like alcoholism and pornography while many of his peers scrutinized the economic injustices that had left most of the country landless, politically disenfranchised and desperately poor. After witnessing human rights abuses -- including a 1975 massacre at Tres Calles, a village in his own diocese -- Romero began to revise his understanding of the church’s relationship to the poor. Shortly after his 1977 appointment as Archbishop, Romero began to challenge the government openly; when his friend and fellow priest Rutilio Grande was assassinated in early March 1977, Romero publicly excommunicated the murderers and commenced a three-year nonviolent struggle in concert with El Salvador’s dispossessed.

During this time, the right-wing, authoritarian government of Carlos Romero -- who was not related to the Archbishop -- intensified its pressure on those in the Catholic church who espoused “liberation theology” or who otherwise advocated on behalf of the poor. Death squads and assassins gunned down at least six priests between 1977-1979, and in some villages the possession of religious materials became grounds for arrest. As the death squads accelerated their work, Romero frequently visited the garbage pits where the bodies had been dumped, looking for campseinos whose families had reported them missing.

By 1980, more than 3000 Salvadorans were being killed each month at the hands of government forces who were in many cases armed, trained and funded by the United States, which fretted about the spread of anything resembling communism in Latin America. Romero appealed to the United States to withhold its resources, to no avail.

On March 23, 1980, Romero urged the Salvadoran soldiers to cast down their weapons.

I would like to make an appeal in a special way to the men of the army, to the police, to those in the barracks. Brothers, you are part of our own people. You kill your own campesino brothers and sisters. And before an order to kill that a man may give, the law of God must prevail that says: Thou shalt not kill! No soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God. No one has to fulfill an immoral law. It is time to recover your consciences and to obey your consciences rather than the orders of sin…. In the name of God, and in the name of this suffering people whose laments rise to heaven each day more tumultuously, I beg you, I ask you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!

Oscar Romero understood that his opposition to the government would likely cost him his life. As he explained in his final homily, however, “[O]ne must not love oneself so much, as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life that history demands of us, and those that fend off danger will lose their lives.”

The day after his appeal to the soldiers, Archbishop Romero joined the long list of Salvadoran martyrs. At his funeral, which was attended by nearly 250,000 people, government soldiers whot and killed as many as 50 mourners. Over the next 12 years, the US Congress and American Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush spent $1.5 million a day in support of the Salvadoran government. Archbishop Romero’s assassin was never captured.

Brief Convalescent Interruption

2008-03-23T21:10:00.002-08:00

Hey folks. Hazel here.

Look, I'm not sure what that bastard who runs this site told you, but I'm given to understand that a few of you people actually offered him money last week so that some other asshole could cut me open and tack a metal plate to my knee. Can that possibly be true? Are humans really so deranged?

Seriously. What gives?

Take a look at my leg. You might notice that it's been shaved. Do you know why my leg is shaved?

Oh, jeez, I don't know. Maybe it's because my people . . . wanted . . . to hobble me. Just because I'm always in their faces looking for some juicy love, or because I topple the high chair while chasing the mounds of food their illiterate jabbering goblin-child flings around the living room, or because I bark at those idiot cats in the middle of the night. Whatever. They apparently can't handle The Hazel, and so they cut me up like a Christmas goose.

And now a few of you have blood on your hands, too. Way to go. Way to get sucked into the vortex. You know they shaved my stomach, too. Maybe that owner of mine would let you have a gander at that for a couple of quarters. God, I hate him. If I weren't on so many drugs right now, I'd eat his face off.

Did he mention that he's been calling me "Tripod" for the past few days? Oh, he didn't? Yeah. Real classy. At least he's stopped calling me "Dumbo."

But what else would you expect from a guy who spends most of his life in sweatpants? It's pathetic. He looks like a total shut-in, but he actually leaves the house sometimes and -- wonder of wonders -- seems to hold down a regular job. Really, I'm embarrassed to be seen with the guy. Can I run a donation drive as well? Maybe I can raise enough to buy that bag of lard a decent set of clothes, or maybe get him a haircut more than two or three times a year. And he's got the nerve to come at me with the grooming tools? I'm like, "Take care of your damn self!"

As soon as I can walk again, I'm going to teach myself how to take a dump in his shoes. Oh, what's the point? He probably won't even notice.

Anyhow, I hope you're all happy. You're a couple of dollars poorer, and I've got this gigantic wound on my leg. It's win-win!

March 20

2008-03-20T10:03:00.003-08:00

When Martha M. Place threw sulfuric acid into her daughter’s face and smothered her with a pillow in February 1898, she probably was not angling to become the first American woman to die in the electric chair. Yet the Brooklyn dressmaker achieved precisely that status a little over thirteen months later, when on 20 March 1899 she was strapped into the novel device at Sing Sing prison and followed her 17-year-old child into the void.

Place was described in the press as "homely, old, ill-tempered, not loved by her husband." According to prison officials -- who carried out the execution after Governor Theodore Roosevelt refused to commute the sentence -- her electrocution was quick and efficient.

Thirty-four years after the life of Martha Place shuddered to a conclusion, the State of Florida executed bricklayer Giuseppe Zangara for the crime of murder. Zangara, a naturalized American citizen from Italy, had attempted to assassinate President-elect Franklin Roosevelt a month earlier in Miami. Zangara, who had suffered from acute stomach ulcers since childhood, was convinced that if he killed the leader of the capitalist world, he would be delivered from his excruciating physical pain -- and that he could alleviate the economic catastrophe that had immiserated millions over the previous four years.

In early 1933, he purchased a gun for $4 and on February 15 brought it to Bayfront Park in Miami, where Roosevelt was scheduled to appear that day. There, the five-foot-tall Zangara stood on top of a wooden chair and shot five people, none of whom was his intended target. Four of the wounded survived. Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, however, took a bullet to the chest and died on March 6. Two weeks after Cermak’s death, Zangara was executed at the state prison in Raiford. Had Cermak lived, Zangara would have spent at least 84 years in prison -- the sentence he had already received for trying to kill Roosevelt.

As he was being strapped into the chair, Guiseppe Zangara remained feisty and unrepentant. "Viva Italia!" he cried.

Goodbye to all poor peoples everywhere! Lousy capitalists! No picture! Capitalists! No one here to take my picture. All capitalists lousy bunch of crooks. Go ahead. Push the button!

Sixty-two years after Zangara’s anti-capitalist tirade, the state of Oklahoma executed Thomas Grasso by lethal injection, punishment he received for killing two elderly women (one of whom he strangled with her own Christmas tree lights on Christmas Eve 1990). Grasso had been serving a 20-year sentence in New York for one of the murders; although Grasso was sentenced to die in Oklahoma for the murder of 87-year-old Hilda Johnson, New York Governor Mario Cuomo refused to send him back -- even though Grasso, by his own account, desperately wanted to die. When George Pataki campaigned for Cuomo’s job in 1994, he promised to help Grasso fulfill his wish. Pataki won the election, and Grasso returned to Oklahoma. He refused to appeal his capital sentence, and so the state quickly scheduled his execution.

On 20 March 1995, Thomas Grasso sat down to his last meal -- a dozen steamed mussels, a Burger King double cheeseburger, a can of spaghetti with meatballs, a mango, half a pumpkin pie with whipped cream, and a strawberry milkshake. Grasso’s last meal was more notable, however, for what it lacked. In his final statement, Grasso announced that “I did not get my Spaghetti Os -- I got spaghetti. I want the press to know this!"

In a separate written statement released to the press before his death, Grasso wrote that “What we call the beginning is often the end, and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.” Almost no one recognized that Grasso’s statement came from “Little Gidding,” one of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

Brief Veterinary Interruption

2008-03-19T19:41:00.006-08:00

As befits someone who spends his free time describing the universal horror of human existence, I've had pretty miserable luck in recent years with the animals who live under my roof. About four years ago, Greta -- the older of our two Newfoundlands -- lost her mind and required several months of heavy medication, hypnotherapy and Jungian psychoanalysis before she ceased being afraid of nearly every spot in the house. She's no longer being medicated, but most days she still seems confident that the house is crawling with invisible dog murderers.

The next 18 months were more or less uneventful in the pet department, but in October 2006 our beloved cat Herbert contracted diabetes and suffered through nearly a year of fruitless insulin treatment before leaving us last May.

Two months later, Hazel -- the younger and less melancholy of our Newfs -- blew out the meniscus in her left knee, an injury that required costly surgery and an extended period of rehab, not to mention a shaved leg and an embarrassing plastic hood to keep her from gobbling her own wound. By October, though, she had fully recovered and was again ambling through the neighborhood, barking at harmless strangers and befouling yards and driveways like the town drunk she'd no doubt be if she were human.

Today, unfortunately, we submitted Hazel to the surgeon's knife for the second time in seven months, this time to repair a partially torn cruciate ligament in her right leg. The alternative to surgery would have been a lifetime of progressive arthritis, as her body crudely dumped calcium into her knee to substitute for a failing ACL. Treatment for that would have required daily anti-inflammatory medication, an expense of roughly $1000 a year that could just as well have been spent on a reconstructed knee. Euthanasia -- of either the medical or shotgun variety -- was not something we could contemplate for a five-year-old dog whom we continue love in spite of her tremendous character flaws.

The prognosis for Hazel's recovery is excellent, but the prognosis for my family's bank account is not quite so pleasant. To put it crudely, a dog that we received for exactly zero dollars in early 2005 will now be walking around on $5000 worth of new knees.

Clever readers have already figured out where this is heading. Believe me, I'm nearly too embarrassed to continue.

Now, I can think of plenty of reasons why no one with a sense of perspective should donate money to help defray my veterinary bills. There are plenty of bloggers out there who lack health care, who have lost their jobs, who have surrendered their homes to foreclosure, or who have been killed in Iraq. My wife and I are both employed, and my toddling daughter will soon be old enough to sew purses and stitch tennis shoes at home. More importantly, our entire economy appears to be gyrating in ever-tighter spirals toward the drain, and so my general advice would be to preserve your assets, stock up on canned food and bottled water, and learn how to deter or disable hungry neighborhood mobs.

All that said, if you're a regular reader of the Axis -- and you happen to have (literally) a couple of dollars that you weren't planning to spend on booze or drizzle with lighter fluid and use to roast hot dogs -- I would be unendingly grateful for a small contribution toward Hazel's shiny new knee. You can use the gaudy yellow donation button in the right sidebar, or you can use the gaudy yellow donation button below.

March 19

2008-03-19T12:02:00.001-08:00

Rene-Robert Cavelier De La Salle was killed by a single bullet to the head 321 years ago today at a spot about 70 miles northwest of what would later be the city of Houston. The French explorer was certainly not the last person to be murdered in Texas, but the circumstances of his passing were memorable nonetheless.

Credited with exploring the Louisiana territory and establishing (and botching) the first French colony on the Gulf of Mexico, La Salle was an audacious but badly organized, manic depressive and ill-tempered leader who eventually drew the murderous animosity of his men during his final adventure. While searching for the Mississippi River La Salle’s nephew, Moranget, became embroiled in a dispute over bison meat with the expedition’s surgeon, a man named Pierre Duhaut; Moranget accused them of setting aside the best meat and saving the marrow bones for themselves. On the night of March 18 Duhaut -- enraged by the accusations from a man he already loathed -- plotted with four other accomplices and killed Moranget and two others with an axe while they were asleep.

The next day, when La Salle arrived at the scene of the crime with a Recollet priest, he was dispatched as well. As one of the conspirators explained later

We followed them a few paces along the river as far as the fatal spot where two of the assassins were hiding on either side in the grass with their guns cocked. The first one missed his mark, but the other fired at the same time and with that single shot hit Monsieur La Salle in the head; he died one hour later.

The murderers stripped La Salle’s body and left it behind as the rest of the party continued on toward their destination at Fort Saint-Louis-des-Illinois. Accounts vary as to the final disposition of La Salle's corpse. Some accounts insist that the dead explorer was buried by his friend, Father Anastase Douay, who was with him when he died. Others explain that he was left unburied to be eaten by wild animals. Regardless of the truth, La Salle's body was never recovered.

March 18

2008-03-18T13:07:00.002-08:00

The most destructive tornado in US history touched ground on this date in 1925. After touching ground outside Ellington, Missouri, the F5 twister spent the next three hours carving a thousand-yard path through southern Illinois and southwestern Indiana. Along the way, its winds -- which reached 300 miles per hour -- turned everything in its way to rubble, killing nearly 700 people, injuring more than 2000, and destroying well over $16 million dollars worth of property.

In Illinois, where the greatest destruction took place, entire towns -- Parrish, West Frankfort, De Soto, and Murphysboro among others -- were almost completely obliterated. In the village of De Soto, 69 people died, half of them children attending a school that collapsed in the storm. A journalist visiting De Soto the next day noted that

Only a dozen houses remain standing and all of these are damaged with roofs and porches missing. Piles of brick and timbers fill the streets, trees are split and uprooted. The scene resembles that of a World War battlefield, except than on a battlefield the victims are men. Here they are mostly women and children. Many of the men escaped [because] they were away from home, mostly at work in the coal mines, and were out of the tornado’s path

The destruction of Murphysboro was even more thorough. There, 243 people died as the tornado whipped half the town into splinters.

The US Weather Bureau had predicted “rain and strong shifting winds” for March 18, 1925. In the years after the Tri-State Tornado, forecasters developed a better system for forecasting and tracking tornados. They also began actually using the term "tornado," which the Bureau had officially nearly 40 years earlier.

On the 12th anniversary of the Tri-State Tornado, a natural gas leak at a school in New London, Texas, when a shop instructor turned on an electric sander. The force of the blast actually lifted an entire section of the building into the air before it crashed and disintegrated. At least 300 children died, making the New London Explosion the worst school disaster in American history.

March 17

2008-03-17T13:48:00.003-08:00

Eight years ago today, more than 530 people -- mostly women and children -- were burnt to death in a chapel in the remote town of Kanungu, Uganda. The victims were members of a Christian cult known as the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, a group that had formed during the late 1980s under the leadership of a Catholic madman named Joseph Kibwetere. Kibwetere had been a prominent religious and political leader during the long years Ugandans spent under the grotesque rule of Idi Amin; when the former Ugandan president Milton Obote returned to power in 1980, Kibwetere was forced from his home district of Ntungamo.

Kibwetere eventually founded the MRTC with the assistance of several other former Catholic priests and a former prostitute and banana beer brewer named Credonia Mwerinde. After relocating several times, the group settled in Kanungu and lived communally, surviving on the revenues brought by the pineapple and banana plantations they had purchased. Together, this core group developed a sect based on what they claimed to be the true intent of the Mosaic commandments. MRTC members dressed in green, white or black robes and lived under conditions of extraordinary austerity. Kibwetere -- who claimed to have communicated directly with the Virgin Mary -- insisted that followers refrain from sex and alcohol. Fasting was a constant feature of the movement culture, and residents of the community were eventually forbidden from speaking except during prayers and song. All other communications were delivered through hand signals. By the late 1990s, anywhere from 1000-4000 people had joined the Movement for the Restoration.

No one knows whether God spoke to Kibwetere and Mwerinde through hand signals, but in 1999, the cult’s newspaper announced that a divine prophecy had been revealed to the cult’s leaders and that the world would soon be ending. Community members began disposing of their worldly possessions in preparation for the day of doom, which was verified to be December 31, 1999.

When the new year arrived with little fanfare -- and without the promised global catastrophe -- members of the cult were greatly dismayed. Two months later, as complaints mounted and dissenters roiled, a new doomsday was scheduled for sometime between March 6-18. On the 17th, hundreds of unsuspecting worshippers gathered at an old chapel, whose floors and pews had already been soaked in gasoline and sulfuric acid. After the chapel was packed to capacity, its doors and windows were locked and barred from the outside -- by whom no one has ever determined -- and the entire building set on fire. No one survived. Forensic evidence later indicated that many of the victims had been clubbed, poisoned or hacked to death before the fire began. The leaders of the MRTC are presumed to have died in the fire as well.

Over the next few weeks, hundreds of additional bodies turned up in villages and mass graves across the country. Nearly all of them had been poisoned.

March 14

2008-03-14T09:23:00.000-08:00

The liquidation of the Podgorze Ghetto in Krakow was completed on this date in 1943, marking the conclusion of a three-year project to render the Polish city the “cleanest” in the land. This racial cleansing was conceived by Hans Frank, who was appointed generalgouvenour after the German invasion of September 1939. Jews had been living in Krakow since the middle of the 13th century, when they were invited there by King Boleslav, who granted them unprecedented religious freedoms and guarantees of personal safety; during the following century, as European nations expelled their Jewish populations, many fled to Poland. By mid-March 1943, Nazi Germany had obliterated that 600-year history.

A deportation order issued in May 1940 dispersed tens of thousands of Jews into the suburbs, small towns and countryside; more were expelled later that fall, with the remaining numbers relocated from the historic Jewish quarter to a dilapidated, overcrowded ghetto in the district of Podgorze. In June and October 1942, the new ghetto was thinned as thousands were shipped to the nearby Belzec death camp, where nearly 450,000 Jews would eventually perish. During the second deportation, all the children from the orphanage were taken to the outskirts of town and shot along with their teachers and curators.

On 13 March 1943, Podgorze was sealed off and the last 6000 Jews were evacuated or shot. The “workers” from Ghetto A -- mostly men -- were transferred to Plaszow, a labor camp were workers were forced to exhume, cremate, and scatter the remains of previous victims from mass graves. The women, children and elderly of “Ghetto B” were cleared out on March 14 and embarked for Berkenau, where 1500 were immediately put to death in Krema II, the gas chamber that became operational that very day. After Podgorze was “cleansed,” Jewish prisoners were trucked in to collect the property left behind.

Among the survivors from Krakow was Roman Polanski, the film director whose wife Sharon Tate would eventually be murdered by the Manson family.

March 12

2008-03-12T14:47:00.000-08:00

After the St. Francis Dam failed eighty years ago today, William Mulholland -- the most famous water engineer in American history -- tearfully declared that “The only ones I envy about this thing are the ones who are dead.”

There were hundreds of them -- some buried beneath 20 feet of mud and detritus in Santa Clara Valley, North of Los Angeles, others pushed into the Pacific Ocean. As more than 12 million gallons of water poured from the ruptured dam, the towns of Castaic Junction, Piru, Bardsdale, Fillmore, Santa Paula and Saticoy were overrun as the water coursed in a two-mile-wide stream, crushing its way 50 miles to the sea.

The dam, whose construction had begun four years earlier, seemed destined to equal the majesty of the Los Angeles Aqueduct -- Mulholland’s greatest triumph, which helped spur the rapid development of Southern California in ways that were ultimately disastrous for the region’s ecology. Before the project was completed, however, numerous cracks had begun to appear in the massive concrete wall, which towered 195 feet and held back nearly 40,000 acre-feet of water. Mulholland dismissed evidence of the dam’s weakness. When new faults appeared earlier in the day on March 12, the engineer personally inspected the site and declared it sound. Three minutes before midnight, the St. Francis dam failed catastrophically, breaking into several pieces and killing the damkeeper and his entire family before having its way with the test of the valley.

The Fillmore American -- based in one of the destroyed towns -- reported bitterly several days later:

Just as the ominous thirteenth of March, 1928, was being born, Death, mounted on a wave of swirling waters, seventy feet high, and beginning at a crumbling dam high up in San Francisquito canyon, rode in devastating wrath to the sea. Sweeping through the most fertile valley in the Southland. And in his wake he left death, and devastation, and ruin, where a short hour before his passing people slept in peace, security and happiness.

The story of the breaking dam has greeted your eyes from scores of newspapers pages before this one reaches you. How the big $2,500,000 dam, built on the insecure foundation of a great city's greed for what did not belong to it, crumbled as the result of faulty designing and hasty construction. Engineer [Carl] Grunsky was right. That great dam built in the center of the canyon, with light-flung wings to the soft earth sides of the mountains, was an ‘old woman's apron.' And the strings broke and the result was a hell of swirling waters that took life after life, until its fury was stayed in the waters of the sea.

The final death doll from the flood was never accurately surveyed, though the best contemporary estimates suggest as many as 600 may have perished. Some bodies washed up ashore in Mexico. Others were never found. The last known victim of the St. Francis flood was discovered in 1992 in Newhall.

Following the disaster, William Mulholland retired and secluded himself from public life until his death eight years later.

March 11

2008-03-11T11:03:00.004-08:00

The just-completed Dale Dyke Dam ruptured on this date in 1864, sending 100 million gallons of water rushing through the Loxley river valley toward the English city of Sheffield. The local economy was driven by the city’s expanding steel industry, and Sheffield was in great need of new supplies of water. Constructed over five years by the Sheffield Water Company, the reservoir was being filled for the first time on the evening of March 11 when the dyke’s earthen wall collapsed. Within minutes, the towns of Bradfield, Damflask, Little Matlock, and Malin Bridge had been obliterated, with parts of Hillsborough and Owlerton suffering major damage as well before the torrent struck Sheffield itself, crushing several working class residential areas.

The Illustrated London News described the flood as a “water demon” that roared “with a voice of thunder” as it charged through the valley.

Everything gave way before the roaring torrent. The immense mass of water, filled with debris, razed the ground along its track as easily, and almost as instantaneously, as a cannon-ball makes for itself a lane deep into the ranks of living men. Whole familes — buried in sleep or, perchance, startled from it by the rushing roar — were literally hurled into eternity.

In the morning, the very foundations of their humble and hitherto peaceful abodes were undiscernible, and their bodies were lodged, some of them miles off, in the most unheard-of nooks and corners — here and there singly, elsewhere in heaps of ten, a dozen, or fourteen. Almost all were in their night-dresses — from some even these had been torn off by the violence of the flood. Several were shockingly mangled, and all, of course, covered with slime and mud. Let us draw a veil over this part of the picture; it is too heartrending to allow of our taking more than a general and hasty glance at it.

Well over 250 people lost their lives in the Sheffield Flood, which remains the greatest human-caused disaster in British history. The oldest victim, Ann Cook of Rutland Road, was 87. The two youngest -- including the first to die in the flood -- had been born March 9 and had not yet been named. At Malin Bridge, the Armitage family lost eleven members and the Spooners thirteen. At Hill Bridge, a man named William Crookes jumped from his bedroom window, fearing that his house was about the be dislodged by the cascade; his house was in fact perfectly safe, but Crookes later died from the injuries he sustained in the fall. At the farmhouse of James Trickett near Malin Bridge, ten people died, including Trickett’s entire family, one boarder and three servants. While there were no human survivors at the Trickett farm, eleven cows, six calves and a pig survived when the flood waters missed the barn where they were sleeping and crushed the house instead.

March 10

2008-03-10T12:17:00.005-08:00

On the night of March 9-10, 1945, roughly 300 American B-29 bombers lifted off from air bases in Saipan, Guam, and Tinian and flew at a low altitude toward Tokyo. This would not be the first time the city bore the weight of an air assault, but these raids would be unique and prophetic; each plane carried 1700 petroleum bombs which, unlike conventional explosives, were designed to set their targets on fire.

A densely populated city stuffed with wooden buildings -- the better for residents to survive an earthquake -- Tokyo was an immense pile of fuel, especially in the flatlands of the city where the city’s working class lived and labored in small shops. When the bombers swept over the city that night, 16 square miles of the city were reduced to cinders, as a tornado of fire took between 80-100,000 lives, nearly all of them civilians.

For the residents of Tokyo, there was almost literally no escape from the flames and heat. Bomb shelters -- safe places of refuge during previous attacks -- were useless in the midst of an incendiary attack. People asphyxiated as the fires vacuumed oxygen from underground bunkers, which quickly turned into 1800-degree ovens and rendered their inhabitants into simmering mounds of fat and bone.

At street level, fleeing civilians lit up like matchsticks as the city roiled with flame. Tornados sucked cars, enormous clots of wood and people into the air; the turbulence was so great around the city that even several bombers were flipped on their backs as they left the city’s airspace. Saotome Katsumoto, a novelist and political activist who survived the attack, recalled the horrific night.

Actually it was a cold night, as it turned out it was the coldest March night for forty years. Many people who tried to escape by jumping into the water — into the canals — either died from drowning or suffered heart attacks caused by the intense shock of the freezing water. People carried all their belongings with them, as much as they could. Many women were carrying babes in arms and most people were wearing heavy clothing against the cold, lots carried their bedding, futon, bedding on their backs, or over their heads. A lot of it caught fire and burned them to death.

American participants in the raid reacted with a mixture of pride and horror. General Curtis LeMay, who headed the 21st Bomber Command and directed the raids, bragged that the people of Tokyo had been “scorched and boiled and baked to death.” Chester Marshall, one of the Superfortress pilots, was somewhat less enthusiastic, explaining decades later to an Australian reporter that “I couldn't eat anything for two or three days. You know it was nauseating, really. We just said 'What is that I smell?' And it's a kind of a sweet smell, and somebody said, 'Well that's flesh burning, had to be.'"

The firebombings of Tokyo and more than sixty other urban targets from March through July were intended to terrorize the Japanese, destroy the nation’s social and economic fabric, and shorten the war. The United States accomplished the first two of these; the third goal would not be met until the atomic attacks of early August. By that point, 56 square miles of Toko were gone, and at least a million people had been displaced.

March 7

2008-03-07T11:36:00.005-09:00

On this date 1965, hundreds of civil rights activists walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which would have led them out of Selma, Alabama, toward the state capital in Montgomery. The marchers were determined to press their governor -- the atrocious George W. Wallace -- to reign in the state’s police and troopers, who had been brutalizing justice advocates for years.

In early 1965 Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had launched a voting rights campaign in Dallas County. Like many communities throughout the deep South, Dallas Country was dominated by the racist Sheriff Jim Clark who bragged that he had learned “never to his a nigger with your fist because his head is too hard.” In Dallas County, only 335 blacks -- out of a population of 15,000 -- were registered to vote, a percentage that was characteristic of Alabama as a whole.

The Selma protests quickly drew the official wrath of the state, which arrested thousands of civil rights activists during the first weeks of February. On February 18, a demonstration in nearby Marion had brought the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year old veteran and Baptist deacon whom a state trooper had shot at point-blank range during a police riot. Jackson -- who took a bullet to the abdomen while trying to protect his mother -- died from an infection on February 26. (His killer, James Bonard Fowler, was charged with murder a mere 42 years later.)

In response to Jackson’s death, the SCLC planned the Selma-to-Montgomery march for Sunday, March 7. After crossing the Pettus Bridge -- located on Jefferson Davis Highway (US 80) -- the marchers were greeted by a phalanx of Alabama Troopers. The subsequent assault was captured live by television crews and subsequently broadcast around the world. J.L. Chestnut, a young lawyer from Selma, recalled “Bloody Sunday” four decades later.

[W]hat I witnessed led me to believe America could not be saved and white people were not worth saving. One hundred fifty state troopers decked out in riot gear, tear gas, masks, and clubs the size of baseball bats, backed by fifty special deputy sheriffs mounted on nervous horses and armed with huge clubs, beat the young nonviolent people senseless in broad daylight . . .

People were left bloodied on the highway. [John] Lewis [of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee] was on his knees, suffering from two concussions and bleeding like a stuck hog. Women and even children were unconscious, others semiconscious, lying, sitting, trying to run, but literally being run over by horses -- and hearing their ribs and limbs cracking. It was the worst day of my life.

Over the next two weeks, continuing violence in Alabama brought further attention to Selma and the broader question of black voting rights. On March 9, a white Unitarian minister from Boston named James Reeb was beaten by segregationist thugs in Selma; he died from head injuries two days later. After a federal court ruled on behalf of the SCLC, thousands of marchers left Selma on March 21. Among the marchers was a housewife and mother of five named Viola Liuzzo. Liuzzo had watched footage of the “Bloody Sunday” confrontation from her home in Detroit. Horrified by what she saw, Liuzzo traveled to Selma less than two weeks later and participated in the final march, which successfully arrived in Montgomery on March 24.

On March 25, Viola Liuzzo was shot to death in her car by four Klansmen. A little over four months later, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act; Lyndon Johnson signed it into law.

Last year: The martyrdom of Felicitas and Perpetua

March 6

2008-03-06T11:20:00.002-09:00

Today is the anniversary of the Dred Scott decision, by which the US Supreme Court determined that Congress did not have the power to restrict slavery anywhere in those territories acquired after 1787. Issued in March 1857, the ruling denied Dred Scott the right to sue for his freedom in federal court.

Scott was an enslaved man from Missouri who had lived for several years in Illinois and the Wisconsin territory, where slavery was prohibited by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. In denying Scott the opportunity to sue for freedom, the Court also ruled the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. In the notorious majority opinion, Chief Justice Roger Taney argued that blacks had never been intended to receive any federal rights “the white man was bound to respect,” and that it was inconceivable that blacks should ever have been intended by the Founders to enjoy equal citizenship. Such a status, he pointed out, would have endowed blacks with

the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went.

Among other things, Taney explained, these rights would have produced “discontent and insubordination” among both slaves and free men, thus “endangering the peace and safety of the State.”

Eighteen months after the decision was rendered, Dred Scott died of tuberculosis. The decision that bears his name, of course, became one of the decisive strokes in the background to the American Civil War, which would kill 600,000 people within the decade.

March 5

2008-03-05T08:45:00.000-09:00

On this date in 1770, British redcoats from the 29th Regiment of Foot opened fire on a crowd of American colonists at the Old State House in Boston, killing five bystanders from a crowd that had been pelting the soldiers with snowballs, garbage, and chunks of ice. At their trial, the Redcoats were successfully defended by a lawyer named John Adams -- Adams would eventually serve one term as President of the United States.

Broadly speaking, the shootings represented perhaps the inevitable outcome of the hostility between many Bostonians and the British regulars quartered so controversially in their city since October 1768. Clashes between soldiers and local men were routine and had accelerated in the days before the encounter on March 5. In narrower terms, however, the so-called Boston Massacre originated in a dispute over a bill owed to a local wigmaker by an English officer; when the argument over the bill escalated and the wigmaker’s apprentice was beaten, a crowd of artisans and other workingmen responded by confronting a group of soldiers outside a government guilding. When a chunk of ice knocked Private Hugh Montgomery to the ground, he and his fellow soldiers opened fire on a group that Adams described as “a motley rabble of saucy boys, negros and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarrs.”

Among the “motley rabble” were Crispus Attucks, an Afro-Indian who died of two shots to the chest; Samuel Gray, who took a bullet to the brain; James Caldwell, who died of two shots to the back; and Samuel Maverick and Patrick Carr, both of whom died from their wounds several days after the attack.

In his famous “Boston Massacre Oration,” delivered on the fourth anniversary of the bloody deed, John Hancock urged his fellow colonists not to forget what happened on 5 March 1774. Speaking with typical revolutionary hyperbole, Hanckock thundered:

Let this sad tale of death never be told without a tear; let not the heaving bosom cease to burn with a manly indignation at the barbarous story, through the long tracts of future time; let every parent tell the shameful story to his listening children until tears of pity glisten in their eyes, and boiling passions shake their tender frames; and whilst the anniversary of that ill-fated night is kept a jubilee in the grim court of pandemonium, let all America join in one common prayer to heaven that the inhuman, unprovoked murders of the fifth of March, 1770, planned by Hillsborough, and a knot of treacherous knaves in Boston, and executed by the cruel hand of Preston and his sanguinary coadjutors, may ever stand in history without a parallel.

Without doubt, John Hancock would not have enjoyed the 20th century. One hundred and seventy years after the Boston Massacre, Joseph Stalin accepted a memo from Lavrenty Beria, head of Soviet intelligence, recommending the execution of 25,000 Polish prisoners of war being held at Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov. The shootings were carried out beginning in April at the Katyn Forest, at two locations in Smolensk, as well as at prisons in Kalinin, Kharkiv, Moscow, and other Soviet cities. For the next half century, the Soviet Union denied that the mass executions had ever taken place.

Thirteen years after agreeing to what would become known as the Katyn Massacre, Joesph Stalin expired from a massive stroke on 5 March 1953. Most of his final day was spent alone on the floor of his dacha, where he lay partly paralyzed and unable to call for assistance, or to tell anyone that he had soiled himself. If he was not in fact poisoned -- as has sometimes been alleged -- he probably should have been.

March 4

2008-03-04T08:06:00.002-09:00

If the various accounts are to be trusted, a Roman guard named Adrian (or Hadrian) was martyred on this date in the year 306. According to legend, Adrian -- who hailed from Nicomedia -- was inspired to a sudden conversion when he witnessed a group of Christians being led in chains to their tortuous imprisonment and predictable execution. Declaring himself a Christian as well, the guard surrendered himself and joined his new brothers and sisters. His young wife Natalia, far from being irritated with her husband’s decision, is alleged to have wept with glee at the news; she was, it turns out, herself a Christian already.

Following her husband’s trial, during which he was beaten and lashed, Natalia was allowed for some reason to be present at his dismemberment. Indeed, she helped the executioners fulfill their obligation to separate Adrian from his hands and feet. As told by Sabine Baring Gould’s 19th century chronicle of The Lives of the Saints, Natalia lifted her husband’s “dear feet” and placed them “reverently and tenderly” on the block.

Then, the executioner smote and crushed the bones and next with an axe hewed off the feet.

Natalia, who had stationed herself at the head of him she loved best in all the world, said, with her eyes on his face, “Servant of Christ! if you live put out your hand to mine!” And the dying man feebly stretched out his hand, as though groping for hers, and she caught it and held it and laid it on the anvil; then the executioner brought his axe down and hewed it off as she clasped it. And she folded it in her mantle to her heart, and watched the colour die out of the cheeks of Adrian and his eyes grow dim. She closed them with her loving hand.

In customary fashion, the body of St. Adrian was parceled out over subsequent centuries to churches and shrines across Europe -- an arm in Léon, a jawbone and half an arm in Cologne, another half-arm in Prague, an armless corpse in Raulcourt, teeth in Hainault and Flanders, a head in Bologna, and various bones in Agincourt, Douai, Bruges and at Mecheln. Belgian churches alone three rival bodies, each of which was supposed to have been that of Adrian, the patron saint of butchers, arms dealers, epilepsy and the plague.

March 3

2008-03-03T09:30:00.000-09:00

February 28

2008-02-28T09:35:00.001-09:00

The only American cabinet officials ever to be die in a steamship explosion did so on this date in 1844, when a 27,000 pound wrought iron gun named the “Peacemaker” shattered aboard the USS Princeton, killing Secretary of State Abel Upshur and five other people.

The explosion took place during a demonstration for President John Tyler, who was aboard the ship with 400 administration officials and other compatriots. Late in the afternoon, after the massive gun had been fired several times, Secretary of the Navy Thomas Gilmer requested that the guests be treated to one last demonstration of the gun's awesome power. Gilmer died in the subsequent blast, which was caused by an undetected and catastrophic manufacturing defect that caused the lower barrel of the gun to shatter. Gilmer was killed when a piece of shrapnel struck him in the head; a slave of President Tyler’s named Armistead (after Tyler’s mother) was also dispatched by a piece of flying iron. Abel Upshur lost his arms and legs and was disemboweled by the blast, while the severed arm of Virgil Maxcy, an American diplomat serving in Belgium, struck a bystander, covering her in blood. (In Nathaniel Currie’s lithograph of the unfortunate event, Maxcy’s arm can be seen flying through the air.) As the dead and wounded law scattered across the boat, President Tyler comforted a distraught young woman named Julia Gardiner whose father, Colonel David Gardiner, was de-limbed along with Upshur. Gardiner and Tyler married four months later.

When the Princeton returned to Washington, five of the six men killed in the explosion were laid in state in the East Room of the White House. Armistead’s body was delivered instead to his family. When John Tyler died eighteen years later, he did so as a member of the Confederate House of Representatives.

Thirty-three years after the “Peacemaker” exploded, the United States senate ratified the so-called “Manypenny agreement” between the United States and the Oglala Sioux, the Arapaho and Cheyenne; it was so named for George W. Manypenny, an American commissioner who had previously negotiated several treaties between the US and American Indians. Although the 1868 treaty of Ft. Laramie had set aside an enormous area of the northern Plains known at the time as the “Great Sioux Reservation.” Amendments to the 1868 treaty could only take place with the approval of three-quarters of the people.

Throughout the 1870s the United States abrogated the St. Laramie agreement, first by allowing railroad companies to cut through the reservation and then -- in 1875 -- by opening up Indian lands to miners. Following a short and brutal war that included the Battle of Little Big Horn, the US imposed its will on the Sioux by withholding rations and forcing their chiefs to the negotiating table. According to the terms of the one-sided Manypenny arrangement -- which most certainly did not have the support of three quarters of the population -- the Sioux were to surrender claims to the Black Hills region, which stretched across five states and covered 47 million acres of land stuffed with gold and other resources that would enrich American industrialists and financiers while impoverish the indigenous people who lived there.

Three years after the agreement that bore his name was ratified, George Manypenny wrote a book entitled Our Indian Wards. There he wrote that

It can not be denied, that from the period when the first infant settlements were made upon the Atlantic sea-board by European colonies, until the present time, there have been constant, persistent, and unceasing efforts on the part of the white man to drive the Indian from his hunting ground and his home.

In 1979, the Indian Court of Claims, established by the US in 1944 to review and rectify historic treaty violations, judged the Manypenny agreement to be one part of the “constant, persistent, and unceasing drive” to dispossess Indian people of their land; the court ordered financial restitution of more than $100 million for the Black Hills. In 1980, the Supreme Court of the United States agreed that the "sale" of the Black Hills had not been conducted legally. It refused, however, to return the land to the Lakota people and ordered them to accept belated financial compensation instead.

The Lakota refused, and the $100 million continues to lie in escrow, accruing interest to this day.

February 27

2008-02-27T08:53:00.000-09:00

On this date in 1864 Union prisoners of war began arriving at Camp Sumter, Georgia, otherwise known as Andersonville Prison. Over the next year, over 45,000 prisoners would be received at Andersonville. Due to unspeakably filthy conditions and inadequate supplies of food and clean water, more than 13,000 of those soldiers -- as well as numerous Confederate guards -- would perish of malnutrition and disease before the camp was liberated at the end of the war. Most would succumb between August and December 1864, a period that saw an average of 100 deaths per day.

By any account, Andersonville offered a squalid glimpse into hell. Sgt. David Kennedy, 9th Ohio Cavalry, wrote in his journal on 9 July 1964'

Wuld that I was an artist & had the material to paint this camp & all its horors or the tounge of some eloquent Statesman and had the privleage of expresing my mind to our hon. rulers at Washington, I should gloery to describe this hell on earth where it takes 7 of its ocupiants to make a shadow.

Clara Barton, visiting the grounds of Andersonville a year later after the camp had closed, wrote with horror of what she had seen there:

Think of thirty thousand men penned by close stockade upon twenty-six acres of ground, from which every tree and shrub had been uprooted for fuel to cook their scanty food, huddled like cattle, without shelter or blanket, half-clad and hungry, with the dreary night setting in, after a day of autumn rain. The hill-tops would not hold them all, the valley was filled with the swollen brook; seventeen feet from the stockade ran the fatal dead-line, beyond which no man might step and live. What did they do? I need not ask where did they go, for on the face of the whole green earth there was no place but this for them; but where did they place themselves? How did they live? Ay! How did they die? But this is only one feature of their suffering ; and perhaps the lightest. Of the long dazzling months when gaunt famine stalked at noon-day, and pestilence walked by night; and upon the seamed and parching earth the cooling rains fell not, I will not rust me to speak. I scarce dare think. If my heart were strong enough to draw the picture, there are thousands upon thousands all through our land too crushed and sore to look upon it. But after this, whenever any man who has lain a prisoner within the stockade of Andersonville, would tell you of his sufferings, how he fainted, scorched, drenched, hungered, sickened, was scoffled, scorged, hunted and persecuted, though the tale be long and twice told, as you would have your own wrongs appreciated, your own woes pitied, your own cries for mercy heard, I charge you, listen and believe him. However definitely he may have spoken, know that he has not told you all.

Henry Wirz, a Swiss doctor from Louisiana, served as prison commandant during that year. For his efforts, such as they were, Wirtz was hanged in November 1865. His last fourteen minutes of life were spent at the end of a rope that was too short, listening to Union soldiers taunt him with cries of “Andersonville! Andersonville!” as he slowly choked to death. Remarkably, he was the only Confederate official to be executed for war crimes.

February 26

2008-02-26T10:43:00.001-09:00

When the Buffalo Creek Dam burst 36 years ago today in Logan County, West Virginia, officials from Pittston Coal Company -- which owned the failed complex -- heartlessly described it as an “act of God.”

After a month of snow and two solid days of rain, the crude “gob pile” dam ruptured, pouring 132 million gallons of black waste water into Buffalo Creek Hollow, where sixteen mining communities lay in a seventeen-mile stretch of creek leading to the Guyandotta River. Beginning with the destruction of Saunders, where eighteen people died, the sludge rushed along at five miles an hour and leveled Pardee, Lorado, Stowe, Robinette, Kistler and eleven other impoverished towns. Within three hours, 125 people were dead, more than a thousand were injured, and 80 percent of the hollow’s 5000 residents were homeless, Over a third of those killed came from the town of Lundale, which was reduced to a mound of splinters. Seven of the dead -- six of whom were small children -- were never found.

Residents of the valley beneath the Buffalo Creek dam had complained for years about the structure, which many believed to be unsafe. After the disaster in 1972, investigators learned that the Pittston Coal Company had not properly licensed the dam when it was first constructed, nor did they construct an emergency drainage system ; they also learned that company officials had inspected the dam several times over the previous two days and elected not to warn anyone of their worries that it might fail. This was hardly surprising, since the company clearly did not care about its employees or their families to begin with. Cited for hundreds of safety violations and fined more than a million dollars in 1971, Pittston has paid to that point a grand total of $275. In all, $50 million worth of property damage occurred in Logan County that day -- a figure roughly equal to the $44 million in profits Pittston earned the previous year. Constructing a safer dam at Beaver Creek would have reduced those profits by perhaps $200,000.

The governor of West Virginia -- a much-despised man named Arch Moore -- put together an investigative commission made up of coal industry supporters and government officials. In protest, an independent citizens’ committee investigated the dam failure and released a report of its own.

There is a basic question raised anew by Buffalo Creek, the latest assault by the coal operators in their long slaughterhouse in death, injury and disease: Whether the people of Appalachia and West Virginia can any longer afford this senseless destruction of their lives, their land, and their democratic institutions; or whether the ownership and operation of the coal mines should be brought under democratic control to benefit all the people. All too clearly the tragedy of Buffalo Creek has torn away the mask, revealing the ugly truth that powerful coal interests dominate the government, the environment, and the West Virginia way of life to the detriment of all its citizens. Discussion and action are needed now to transform King Coal, the tyrant, into Citizen Coal, the servant of all -- before and not after another Buffalo Creek disaster.

The citizens' committee further observed that no acts of god were discernible in the disaster. After several years of legal battles on its own behalf, the Pittston Coal Company settled out of court for an amount equal to about $2400 for each of the 5000 victims of the flood, living and dead. Governor Moore eventually settled the state's suit against Pittston for a mere $1 million -- roughly ten percent of the cost of the clean-up effort, which the citizens of West Virginia paid for.

February 25

2008-02-25T09:17:00.004-09:00

On this date in 1836, hundreds of witnesses observed the dissection of Joice Heth, an African American woman whom Phineas T. Barnum had been displaying to live audiences for much of the previous year. Though Barnum claimed that Heth was 161 years old, it was more likely -- as the autopsy revealed -- that she was no older than 90.

An enslaved woman who had long been the property of a Kentucky family, Heth came to Barnum’s attention during the summer of 1835. At the time, she was being shown to audiences in Philadelphia on the pretense that she had actually been present at the birth of George Washington and had helped raise the nation’s eventual father figure during her years in Westmoreland County, Virginia. Her owners were, however, looking to sell Heth for a reasonable price, and after inspecting the woman and reviewing her paper trail, Barnum agreed to take possession of the blind, toothless and paralyzed woman. On August 6, 1835, the as-yet-unknown P.T. Barnum became a slaveholder. Heth cost him $1000, half of which he borrowed from a friend.

Following her purchase, Heth accompanied Barnum to New York, where she appeared for an extended run at a saloon called Niblio’s Garden. There, Heth earned about $1500 a week for her owner; during her appearances in New York, Providence, and Boston, she amused her white audiences by telling stories stories, singing hymns, answering questions from the curious, and smoking prolific quantities of cigarettes (a habit she claimed to have picked up 120 years previous). When audiences dwindled, Barnum boosted them again by claiming that Heth was in fact an “automaton” made of rubber and whale-bone.

After nearly seven months in the service of P.T. Barnum, Joice Heth died on February 19, 1836. Though autopsies were not commonly performed on whites, doctors used the procedure much more frequently on the bodies of slaves, paupers and criminals. A few days after Heth’s passing, the New York Evening Star applauded Barnum’s willingness to subject the elderly woman to the knife.

We can only say that an opportunity for illustrating the effects of such extreme old age upon the human system is not likely to occur again very soon, and that the investigation, conducted by a competent hand, would doubtless form an instructive and valuable record in anatomical science. The old woman's soul, we trust, is quite comfortable in heaven, where, perhaps, distinctions of color are of less consequence than they are here; and if the surgeons, by dissecting her body, can trace the causes of her having been so long getting thither, it might be useful to those who are in more haste. But, independently of this consideration, the examinations of the anatomy of very aged persons, affords one of the most curious and instructive studies in the science. The immediate cause of the old woman's death is said to be a severe cold which she caught about a week ago; but she was treated with the utmost attention and care, and died with perfect tranquility.

The next day, the autopsy of Joice Heth revealed a woman who was generally quite healthy except for the tuberculosis in her lungs.

February 22

2008-02-22T09:39:00.000-09:00

On 22 February 1943, shortly after the German defeat at Stalingrad, three members of the White Rose -- a German anti-war group comprised of students at Munich University -- were tried by a special German court and beheaded. Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans, and fellow student Christoph Probst had been captured after a janitor witnessed them scattering leaflets in one of the university buildings on February 18, the night of Joseph Goebbels “total war” speech at the Sportpalast. Probst, Hans Scholl, and several other men in the group had all served in the German military and had been horrified by what that witnessed on the French and Russian fronts. Beginning in June 1942, the group composed a series of essays, which they distributed by the thousands across the country; couriers delivered copies to Stuttgart, Cologne, Vienna, Freiburg, Chemnitz, Hamburg and Berlin.

In their first manifesto, the White Rose observed that

Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct. It is certain that today every honest German is ashamed of his government. Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes - crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure - reach the light of day? If the German people are already so corrupted and spiritually crushed that they do not raise a hand, frivolously trusting in a questionable faith in the lawful order of history; if they surrender man’s highest principle, that which raises him above all other God’s creatures, his free will; if they abandon the will to take decisive action and turn the wheel of history and thus subject it to their own rational decision; if they are so devoid of all individuality, have already gone so far along the road toward turning into a spiritless and cowardly mass - then, yes, they deserve their downfall.

The February 22 executions were followed by two more in July and a sixth in October; other friends and collaborators were sentenced to prison terms that were interrupted by the end of the war they so courageously opposed. Christoph Probst left behind a widow and three children, the youngest of whom had been born a month before his execution. In summer 1943, English planes dropped millions of copies of the group’s sixth manifesto across the German landscape.

One year to the day after the first White Rose beheadings, American bombers from the 8th Air Force, 446th bomber group accidentally bombed Nijmegen, Arnhem, Enschede and Deventer -- four Dutch towns that had the misfortune of being located a few kilometers from the German border. Bad weather had caused confusion during the high-altitude daytime raid, and several bridges and railyards were mistaken for German targets. Nearly 800 people died in Nijmegen as a consequence of the error, while several hundred more perished in the other three towns.

February 21

2008-02-21T00:13:00.000-09:00

Incas, a Carolina parakeet held captive at the Cincinnati Zoo, passed away on this date in 1918, less than a year after the death of his partner, Lady Jane. With Incas’ passing, the species Conuropsis carolinensis ceased to exist; it had been the only native species of parrot in North America, nesting in large trees from Florida to the upper Great Plains. When early 19th century deforestation reduced the birds’ access to cockleburs -- the species’ main source of food -- the birds turned upon the crops that were grown on the plantations and farms where their habitat used to be. In retaliation, farmers shot the Carolina parakeet in extraordinary quantities. To their ultimate disadvantage, carolinensis would swarm and circle over the slain bodies of their compatriots; this allowed even the least skilled shooters to destroy an entire flock in a matter of minutes. For many years in the mid-19th century, parakeet killers were able to sell the birds to hat-makers, who valued them for their attractive green and yellow feathers. By the 1880s the species had been diminished perilously; disease helped finish them off.

Forty-seven years after the extinction of the Carolina parakeet, Malcolm X was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, where he was preparing to deliver a speech before an audience of 400 people. Although he was shot over a dozen times, it was a single shotgun blast to the chest that killed him. Three men -- former colleagues of Malcolm’s when he was with the Nation of Islam -- were later charged in the shooting, but conclusive evidence has never been put forth to explain who fired the fatal shot.

Herman Ferguson, who worked on a number of youth projects with Malcolm X, was in attendance at the Audubon and recalled the assassination years later.

As I glanced over in the middle rows . . . two brothers had jumped to their feet. One brother was facing another brother, who was backing off from him, and they both had their hands in their pockets. One of them said, "Get your hands out of my pocket, nigger," very loud, and everybody could hear this, and the place got quiet. Malcolm stepped out from behind the podium and took a step toward the stage, and leaned forward and said, "cool it brothers and sisters" . . . and as he started to straighten up, there was a loud blast that filled that auditorium with the sound of a weapon going off. Malcolm straightened up, and his hand came up, and he stiffened. . . . The shotgun blast was fired at him by one of the assassins . . . Then a fusillade of shots rang out . . . the sound of heavy caliber pistols like they were 45s, smaller caliber pistols like they were 38s., and this kept up for several seconds. And I remember saying, “If they would just stop firing, maybe he could survive this.

As Malcolm X lay dying, he was held by his friend Yuri Kochiyama, a Japanese-American activist, had moved to Harlem with her husband in 1960 and befriended Malcolm during the last two years of his life. Kochiyama, who had been interned at Jerome, Arkansas during World War II, believed that Malcolm X spoke on behalf of people of color everywhere. Malcolm X and Yuri Kochiyama share the same birthday, May 19.

February 20

2008-02-20T08:08:00.001-09:00

On 20 February 1927, humanity was punished with the birth of Roy Cohn, a helpless, squealing neonate who would grow up to be a lawyer and one of the worst public figures of the second half of the 20th century.

Quite justifiably, Cohn hated himself, though not for the right reasons. He might have found fault with himself for being a ruthless, unethical jingo who went to his grave believing Richard Nixon to be a model American. Instead, he secretly loathed his homosexuality and took great (though unsuccessful) pains to disguise his gay identity from the rest of the world. As a 24-year-old lawyer, he secured the notorious convictions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, alleged Soviet spies who would later die for their crimes in the electric chair. As chief counsel in the Senate hearings led by Joesph McCarthy, Cohn hounded accused communists and took special delight in exposing the closeted lives of young gay men whose names were brought before the committee. Roy Cohn enriched himself by ruining others. He defended John Gotti and represented Donald Trump. A ferocious opponent of gay rights, he died of AIDS in 1986, insisting to the bitter end that he was suffering merely from liver cancer.

***

It’s been five years since a pyrotechnic error at a Rhode Island nightclub led to the deaths of 100 people. On 20 February 2003, the 1980s hair metal band Great White took the stage at The Station in West Warwick, Rhode Island; half a minute into their opening number, one of the gerbs -- cylinders that shoot columns of sparks -- set fire to the foam padding on the walls behind the stage.

The padding, which was not actual fireproof acoustical foam, instantly burst into flames and poured deadly fumes into the air. Remarkably, many in the crowd initially believed the fire was part of the show and did not recognize the fire for the danger it was. When the band stopped playing, singer Jack Russell observed that “this ain’t good.” Within two minutes, the entire club was in flames -- as the 400 people in attendance tried to escape, many became trapped in the hallway leading to the main entrance. Others managed to find the other three exits, while still more crawled through windows. One out of every four people at the show were killed, including the band’s lead guitarist.

A federal investigation later concluded that a simple overhead sprinkler would have doused the fire within seconds. Because the building dated back to the 1930s, however, it was not subject to more recent fire and safety codes, and the owners elected not to retrofit the club. The flammable padding that fueled the blaze had cost around $600. For twice the expense -- an additional $6 per victim -- the club could have purchased fire-retardant material.

February 19

2008-02-19T11:19:00.000-09:00

Four hundred and eight years ago today, the most violent explosion in the recorded history of South America occured when Huaynaputina blew its top in Peru. Seven cubic kilometers of debris were propelled from the volcano on 19 February 1600, with a plinian column extending perhaps 25-35 kilometers into the atmosphere. A thick blanket of ash was scattered across 360,000 square miles. No one knows how many villages -- or how many people -- were entombed by the event.

More precise figures, however, are available for the internment of Japanese Americans -- a relocation program authorized by Franklin Roosevelt on this date in 1942. Citing the need to defend the nation against saboteurs and spies who did not in fact exist, Roosevelt utilized World War I-era legislation to authorize the Secretary of War and his designated commanders

to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion.

Calls for the mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans began, quite predictably, after the Pearl Harbor attack two months previously. Political leaders, journalists and ordinary citizens acted symbiotically, whipping one another into a froth of racist anger that helped persuade Roosevelt -- whose own opinion of Asians was quite low -- to issue Executive Order 9066. Although concrete proof of disloyalty among Japanese Americans was nowhere to be found, the momentum in favor of internment was extraordinary. John DeWitt, head of Western Defense Command (WDC) offered the truly ingenious argument that the absence of sabotage in fact proved the existence of a conspiracy. According to his logic, only the Japanese government itself could exert such control over Japanese saboteurs, encouraging them to wait until the nation’s guard was down before launching their campaign of terror.

Over the next half-decade, 120,000 innocent people were removed from the West Coast and relocated to ten camps in the bleakest regions of the country. Several thousand additional Japanese who had come to the US from Latin America were held at eight camps run by the Department of Justice. Nearly two-thirds of those subject to Executive Order 9066 were American citizens by virtue of birth.

A similar order was issued by the Canadian government five days later.

Charles Kikuchi, an American of Japanese ancestry, was a graduate student at the University of California when the US entered the Second World War. He had worked for the National Youth Administration until 1941 and later served in the US Army. In a diary he kept throughout 1942, Kikuchi documented the process by which so many were deprived of their rights and dignity. In an entry dated April 30, Kikuchi wryly described the expulsion of Japanese Americans from Berkeley:

It certainly is degrading . . . . The Amry Lieutenant over there doesn't want any of the photographers to take pictures of these miserable people waiting for the Greyhound bus because he thinks that the American public might get a sympathetic attitude toward them . . . .

I understand that we are going to live in the horse stalls. I hope that the Army has the courtesy to remove the manure first.

Executive Order 9066 was not formally rescinded until Gerald Ford's presidency, over 30 years later. Compensation for the survivors of the camps would be delayed an additional decade.

February 18

2008-02-18T00:28:00.000-09:00

On this date in 1861, the newly-formed Confederate States of America inaugurated its first and only president, Jefferson Finis Davis, in Montgomery, Alabama. The inaugural ceremonies took place exactly two weeks after the representatives from the first six states to depart the Union -- South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida and Louisiana -- met to form a nation based on the inalienable right of white people to own black people.

On the morning of February 18, a slave-driven, six-horse coach lined with silk and saffron delivered Davis, his vice president Alexander Stephens, and Rev. Basil Manly -- who would deliver the ceremony’s benediction -- to the capitol building in Montgomery. There, Davis delivered one of the few speeches in his public life that did not mention the institution of slavery. Instead, he elaborated on the southern case for secession and announced that the southern states had not actually left the Union; he declared rather that the Confederacy embodied the “true meaning” of the original US constitution which the Northern states had since abandoned.

He concluded with one of the more unintentionally ironic moments of optimism in American history.

It is joyous, in the midst of perilous times, to look around upon a people united in heart, where one purpose of high resolve animates and actuates the whole-where the sacrifices to be made are not weighed in the balance against honor and right and liberty and equality. Obstacles may retard, they cannot long prevent the progress of a movement sanctified by its justice, and sustained by a virtuous people. Reverently let us invoke the God of our fathers to guide and protect us in our efforts to perpetuate the principles which, by his blessing, they were able to vindicate, establish and transmit to their posterity, and with a continuance of His favor, ever gratefully acknowledged, we may hopefully look forward to success, to peace, and to prosperity.

More than 630,000 corpses later, Davis would, we assume, have offered a slightly modified understanding of the favors dispensed by his God.

February 14

2008-02-14T12:12:00.000-09:00

On Valentine's Day 1945, the 91st and 398th Bomber Groups of the US Air Force accidentally unleashed a 3-minute barrage of bombs on Prague. After becoming disoriented, the bomber crews allegedly mistook the city for the German city Dresden, which was then being firebombed by British and American forces 100 kilometers away; the bombers, the US initially claimed, had only dropped leaflets on the city. Over 700 Czech civilians died in the raid, while an additional 1200 were wounded. In his diary, the American engineer and tail gunner George Forsyth wrote the following

It took us three days to complete this mission. We bombed the Capitol of Czechoslovakia, Prague. We were supposed to go to Dresden. We ran out of gas on the way home and landed at Brussels. We really had a lot of fun there. We went to town in our flying clothes.

Meantime, the bombing of Dresden, which concluded on February 15, claimed tens of thousands of lives.

***

As the bubonic plague began its catastrophic depopulation of Europe in 1348, Jews were scapegoated for the horrific disease that eventually killed 25 million people. On the orders of Amadaeus VI, the Count of Savoy, Jews living along the shores of Lake Geneva were tortured and predictably confessed to the erroneous charges and named others whom they claimed as co-conspirators in the fictitious plot to poison Christendom. News of the confessions spread throughout Europe, and mobs organized and carried out the predictable reprisals. In Strasbourg, the mass murder was organized by craftsmen and the nobility, whose economic resentments were at least as strong as their religious bigotry. On St. Valentine’s Day 1349, the city’s Jews were burnt in their own cemetery. As Jacob von Königshofen, a Swiss historian who would have been seven years old at the time, wrote years later,

There were about two thousand people of them. Those who wanted to baptize themselves were spared. . . . Many small children were taken out of the fire and baptized against the will of their fathers and mothers. And everything that was owed to the Jews was cancelled, and the Jews had to surrender all pledges and notes that they had taken for debts. The council, however, took the cash that the Jews possessed and divided it among the working-men proportionately. The money was indeed the thing that killed the Jews. If they had been poor and if the feudal lords had not been in debt to them, they would not have been burnt. After this wealth was divided among the artisans some gave their share to the Cathedral or to the Church on the advice of their confessors.

Thus were the Jews burnt at Strasbourg, and in the same year in all the cities of the Rhine, whether Free Cities or Imperial Cities or cities belonging to the lords. In some towns they burnt the Jews after a trial, in others, without a trial. In some cities the Jews themselves set fire to their houses and cremated themselves.

After the mass immolation, the magistrates of Strasbourg banished Jews from the city for a century. Twenty years later, that decision was rescinded.

February 13

2008-02-13T12:26:00.000-09:00

On this date in 1692, Scottish forces acting on the authority of the English King William slaughtered nearly 40 Highlanders from the MacDonald clan in Glencoe. The massacre was a consequence of the clan’s delayed pledge of allegiance to William, who had taken the throne in 1688 when the Scottish King James VII (James II of England) was ousted from power. William had offered a pardon to Highland clans who took the oath before January 1, 1692, but the Glencoe chief, Alistair Maclain, was several days late in delivering his oath. Nevertheless, he believed he had fulfilled the spirit of the ultimatum and returned to Glencoe with no apprehension of the horrors to come.

A month later, 120 men from the Earl of Argyll’s foot regiment arrived in Glencoe, ostensibly to collect a routine household tax. The troops were commanded by a man named Robert Campbell, whose property and livestock had been looted several years before by a company of men from Glencoe returning from a failed military campaign on behalf of the recently deposed Scottish King. Campbell and his men were nevertheless treated with customary hospitality, and they never disclosed the true nature of their mission. On February 12 word arrived from Campbell’s superior officer that the punishment of the MacDonald clan was to commence the next morning. The orders read:

You are hereby ordered to fall upon the Rebels, the MacDonalds of Glencoe, and put all to the sword under 70. You are to have especial care, that the Old Fox and his Sons do upon no account escape your Hands, you are to secure all the avenues that no man can escape: this you are to put in Execution at five a Clock in the Morning precisely, and by that time or very shortly after it, I’ll strive to be at you with a stronger party. If I do not come at five, you are not to tarry for me but fall on. This is by the King’s Special command, for the good and safety of the country, that these miscreants may be cut off root and branch.

Early on the morning of February 13, Campbell’s men -- true to their orders -- fell upon Glencoe with the intention of killing several hundred people. Although most of the glen’s inhabitants were able to flee to the hills, Campbell’s troops managed to kill 38 people initially, including the chief and his wife, whose rings were bitten from her hand. When bad weather delayed the arrival of the promised reinforcements, the soldiers burned Glencoe and absconded with the livestock. When a snowstorm beset the region, another 40 of the MacDonald clan -- mostly women and children -- died of exposure.

An official inquiry into the Glencoe massacre resulted in a whitewash; with higher officials, including King William himself, exonerated, the massacre was widely and erroneously interpreted as a mere instance of clan rivalry rather than a deliberate act of state policy. Hard feelings about the events of 1692 survive to this day.

Over 400 years before the slaughter at Glencoe, an even larger massacre took place thousands of miles to the southeast in a city called Baghdad. There, on 13 February 1258, hundreds of thousands of warriors under the leadership of Hulagu Khan -- Ghengis Khan’s grandson -- rampaged through the city as the Mongol armies swept westward from Persia toward Egypt. The caliph al-Musta’sim, who had surrendered the city three days before after boasting that the Mongols would not stand a chance, was forced to watch Baghdad’s ruin before he was rolled up into a carpet and trampled by horses. Estimates of the final body count range from less than 100,000 to nearly a million. Much of the city was put to the torch, including the Grand Library; so many books clotted the Tigris, it was later claimed, a horse could have crossed with little difficulty.

February 12

2008-02-12T09:25:00.000-09:00

Lady Jane Grey, the so-called “Nine Day Queen,” lost her head at the Tower of London 454 years ago today.

Grey, a devout worshipper in the Protestant Church of England, was installed on the throne following the death of Edward VI; to her supporters, her chief qualification was that she was not Mary Tudor, her own cousin. Tudor, one of the daughters of the former King Henry VIII, was a committed Catholic, and her faith brought great anxiety to those who feared the return of the English crown to influence of the popish devils. Through a complex series of machinations devised almost entirely by her father-in-law, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, Jane Grey was announced as the successor to Edward VI following his July 1553 death. Unfortunately for the new Queen, popular support for Mary -- her Catholicism notwithstanding -- led quickly to Grey's replacement barely a week after her reign began.

Imprisoned in the Tower with her husband, Guildford Dudley, Lady Jane was convicted and sentenced to die for treason in November 1553. No one, however, expected Queen Mary to allow the sentence to proceed. Indeed, Jane Grey would quite probably have enjoyed a long -- and eventually free -- life had not her father, the Duke of Suffolk, attempted a revolt against the new Queen Mary in January 1554. Somewhat reluctantly, the Queen accepted her advisers' counsel that so long as Jane Grey remained alive, she would serve as a beacon for zealous, rebellious protestants. Grey -- who had nothing to do with her father's plot -- was executed on 12 February 1554, an hour after her husband was similarly beheaded. After she was escorted to the scaffold and blindfolded, Jane Grey delivered her last address to the small audience:

Before God and the face of you, good Christian people, this day I pray you all, to bear me witness that I die a true Christian woman, and that I look to be saved by none other means, but only by the mercy of God, in the merits of the blood of his only son, Jesus Christ. And I confess, when I did know the word of God, I neglected the same, loved myself and the world, and thereto the plague or punishment is happily and worthily happened unto me for my sins. And yet, I thank God of His goodness that he hath thus given me a time and respite to repent. And now good people, while I am alive, I pray you to assist me with your prayers.'

After her prayer, Jane Grey was blindfolded and made to kneel. Unable to find the block of wood where she was to rest her head for the last time, the young girl began to panic. After a bystander helped the condemned to the right spot, her executioner finished the job. Jane Grey was 16 years old.

***

Today we remember the hapless epicure Adolf Frederick I, who reigned as King of Sweden from 1751 until his death in on this date in 1771. His two decades on the throne were significant only to the extent that he presided helplessly over the decline of the Swedish kingdom. As sovereign, Frederick I was almost completely powerless and functioned more or less as an ornament while the riksdag managed the affairs of state, which included Sweden’s commitment to the Seven Years’ War -- the first truly global war in human history, provoked by a poisonous mixture of European internal politics and colonialism.

Among his passions in life, Frederick was an avid collector of biological specimens. During his years as the Swedish crown prince, he served as an important resource for Carl Linnaeus, who studied the prince’s cabinet while sorting out the details of his famous taxonomic system. On February 12, 1771, Frederick’s two decades of idle monarchy came to an end. That night, he gathered his final collection of specimens, which included a titanic feast of lobster, caviar, sour cabbage, smoked herring and champagne. For dessert, the king gobbled fourteen servings of semla, a traditional wheat pastry usually served in warm milk. He died that night -- propped up on Queen Louisa Ulrica’s knees -- of a massive digestive event.

February 8

2008-02-08T08:13:00.000-09:00

The epic, racist melodrama Birth of a Nation premiered 93 years ago today. It was shown to a Los Angeles audience at the lavish Clune Auditorium on 8 February 1915; the Los Angeles Philharmonic accompanied the film, which spanned 12 reels and was seen by 2500 people on its opening night.

The silent film was directed by David Wark Griffith, who had been born to a family of former slaveholders in Oldham County, Kentucky. During the Civil War, Griffith's father Jacob organized the 1st Kentucky Cavalry and eventually ascended to the rank of colonel. During the war, the Griffith estate was burned to the ground. When the young filmmaker discovered a 1905 novel by Thomas Dixon entitled The Clansman, he was inspired “to tell the truth about the War between the States. It hasn't been told accurately in history books. Only the winning side in a war ever gets to tell its story”

One historian whom Griffith believed had narrated the tale properly was President Woodrow Wilson, who had befriended Thomas Dixon while they were both students at Johns Hopkins University. Wilson’s five-folume History of the American People (1902) depicted the rise of the Ku Klux Klan -- the subject of Dixon’s novel and Griffith’s film -- as a necessary stage in the pacification and redemption of the South.

As Dixon himself described his novel,

In the darkest hour of the life of the South, when her wounded people lay helpless amid rags and ashes under the beak and talon of the Vulture, suddenly from the mists of the mountains appeared a white cloud the size of a man's hand. It grew until its mantle of mystery enfolded the stricken earth and sky. An ‘Invisible Empire’ had risen from the field of Death and challenged the Visible to mortal combat.

How the young South, led by the reincarnated souls of the Clansmen of Old Scotland, went forth under this cover and against overwhelming odds, daring exile, imprisonment, and a felon's death, and saved the life of a people, forms one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of the Aryan race.

On 18 February 1915, Birth of a Nation became the first film ever to be screened at the White House. Among the attendees that night was Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, Edward White, who had never seen a motion picture before. In Thomas Dixon’s biography, Southern Horizons, the novelist uses third person voice to tell the story of how he persuaded Justice Edwards to attend the White House screening.

”You tell the true story of the Klan?',” White asked.
“Yes - for the first time.”
White removed his glasses and pushed his book aside, as he leaned towards Dixon and said in a low tone: “I was a member of the Klan, sir. Through many a dark night, I walked my sentinel's beat through the ugliest streets of New Orleans with a rifle on my shoulder. You’ve told the true story of that uprising of outraged manhood?”
“In a way I'm sure you'll approve,” the Reverend replied.
“I'll be there!” said White.

After Griffith’s last film, The Struggle, flopped in 1931, he became a recluse. He died in the Knickerbocker Hotel in Los Angeles in July 1948, seven months after President Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces of the United States.

February 7

2008-02-07T09:24:00.000-09:00

On this date in 1968, an American Army major explained that “it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.”

The town to which the officer referred was Ben Tre, in Kien Hoa province, where American and South Vietnamese forces battled NLF fighters for several days as the Tet Offensive ground onward. At battle’s end, over 1000 people were dead and more than 10,000 rendered homeless, as US artillery and jet fighters reduced half the city to rubble. At one point during the battle for Ben Tre, fighting was halted temporarily as both sides dumped the bodies of the dead into the Mekong River.

One hundred and thirty six years before the destruction of Ben Tre was concluded, American warships leveled a Sumatran town -- not to save it, but rather to avenge an attack on the merchant vessel The Friendship by pirates the previous year. Most of the American crew were killed during that initial February 1831 assault, and their entire cargo of spices was removed from the ship. During his third annual massage to Congress, delivered in December 1831, President Andrew Jackson announced that “a daring outrage” had been committed by “piratical perpetrators belonging to tribes in such a state of society that the usual course of proceedings between civilized nations could not be pursued.” Having determined that negotiations were likely impossible with the savages, Jackson dispatched a naval frigate to Kuala Batu with orders to “inflict chastisement” upon the wretches who lived there.

On 7 February 1832 the Potomac, sailing under the command of John Downes, dispatched 300 men to battle the Malaysian pirates, who proved little match for the US forces. Nearly 200 pirates were killed, while the Potomac lost two men and suffered 11 wounded. Two days later, Downes ordered the shelling of the rest of the village, killing another 300 innocent men, women and children. Although some Americans were outraged by the collective punishment of the people of Kuala Batu, Andrew Jackson giddily declared that the “chastisement” had assured “increased respect for our flag and increased security for our commerce.”

The attack on Kuala Batu was the first military intervention in Asia by the United States.

February 6

2008-02-06T09:42:00.000-09:00

Edward Geary Lansdale was born 100 years ago today.

He was the sort of fellow for whom the term "blowback" was coined. During his long career with the Office of Strategic Services and its successor, the CIA, Lansdale is best known for his role as an adviser to the South Vietnamese government from 1954 to 1957. A specialist in counterinsurgency, Lansdale had previously enjoyed success in the Philippines, where he aided the former American colony in putting down the Huk rebellion during the early 1950s. Along with the 1953 Iranian coup and the toppling of Guatemala's elected government in 1954, the Huk rebellion persuaded the Eisenhower administration that the United States could impose its will anywhere it chose, with minimal cost and at a volume that was barely audible to the American public.

Following the vicious counterinsurgency campaign in the Philippines, Lansdale and his advocates hoped their success might be duplicated in Vietnam, where the French had just finished a catastrophic effort to retain their imperial footprint in Asia. Employing “psychological warfare,” Lansdale headed the Saigon Military Mission, a classified group of about a dozen United States soldiers and intelligence agents who spread rumors, counterfeited documents, and organized a campaign of sabotage throughout the North, all of which was intended to disrupt a vote on the reunification of Vietnam, which the 1954 Geneva Accords required. (Although the United States had participated in the negotiations, Eisenhower administration had ultimately chosen not to sign the agreement.) As the northern regions of Vietnam were transitioning from French colonial rule to a communist-dominated government, Lansdale hoped to flood the South with anti-communist refugees who could bolster the government being created and supported by the US. Lansdale’s efforts bore fruit, as more than a million people fled the north. Millions more would flee the region over the next two decades.

During his years in Saigon, Lansdale also helped develop an army that would -- he expected -- be capable of defending itself without the need for direct American intervention. He boosted the political fortunes of Ngo Dinh Diem, the corrupt autocrat whom the United States regarded as the best hope for a politically independent South Vietnam. Although Lansdale had left Southeast Asia in 1957, he earned the trust and respect of the Kennedy administration, which in 1961 took his advice and accelerated its support for Diem. By the end of Kennedy's first year in office, he had dedicated more than 15,000 American soldiers and military advisers to the cause.

By this time, Lansdale had moved on to other projects. Among other things, he oversaw the efforts -- known as Operation Mongoose -- to topple Fidel Castro, with whom the Kennedy brothers were especially obsessed. Over the next year, as the US began to take full custody of the war in Vietnam, Lansdale hired Cuban gangsters and drug-runners among various other unsavories to carry out raids against the Castro government. The Soviet Union responded by offering to place medium-range ballistic missiles on Cuban soil, a decision that helped bring the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear war.

During the 1975 Church Committee hearings, which exposed intelligence abuses over the previous several decades, a colleague of Lansdale’s, Thomas Parrot, described one of the battier schemes put forward by Lansdale’s office during the Cuban project.

He had a wonderful plan for getting rid of Castro. This plan consisted of spreading the word that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent and that Christ was against Castro [who] was anti-Christ. And you would spread this word around Cuba, and then on whatever date it was, there would be a manifestation of this thing. And at that time -- this is absolutely true -- and at that time just over the horizon there would be an American submarine which would surface off of Cuba and send up some star shells. And this would be the manifestation of the Second Coming and Castro would be overthrown . . . Well, some wag called this operation -- and somebody dubbed this -- Elimination by Illumination.

Lansdale was eliminated by natural causes in February 1987. John Kennedy and Ngo Dinh Diem were eliminated by assassins in November 1963. Fidel Castro has managed, albeit barely, to hang on for quite a bit longer.

February 5

2008-02-05T09:28:00.000-09:00

It was 50 years ago today that a 7600-pound hydrogen bomb was lost in the waters near the coast of Savannah, Georgia. The bomb was being carried by a B-47 aircraft when it collided with an F-86 fighter at 37,000 feet on February 5, 1958; the bomber was damaged in the collision but was still able to fly. When the craft was unable to reduce its airspeed enough to ensure a safe landing, its crew was instructed to release the nuclear payload near Tybee Island, which was inhabited at the time by 3500 people. For several days after the incident, the Air Force refused to acknowledge that it had dropped anything into Georgia’s coastal waters. When the accident was disclosed more fully, the Air Force continued for decades to insist that it was merely a “simulated” hydrogen bomb that had been lost. In 2000, however, a retired Air Force pilot discovered a declassified document from the mid-1960s that listed the so-called “Tybee bomb” as a complete, functioning weapon.

In spite of its denials, the Air Force was quite eager to find the weapon after the incident in February 1958. Unfortunately, two months of searching the area around Tybee Island turned up no clues as to the whereabouts of the bomb. On 16 April 1958, the weapon was declared “irretrievably lost.” It remains somewhere in Wassaw Sound, quite likely interred in 20 feet or more of soft mud. The Tybee bomb is one of four nuclear weapons that have gone missing from the American arsenal since 1945.

***

On 5 February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared before the United Nations Security Council to present the United States’ case for disarming Saddam Hussein. Among the many fabulous details conveyed by the general that day, Powell warned that

our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets.

Even the low end of 100 tons of agent would enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly 5 times the size of Manhattan.

Let me remind you that, of the 122 millimeter chemical warheads that the U.N. inspectors found recently, this discovery could very well be, as has been noted, the tip of the submerged iceberg. The question before us, all my friends, is when will we see the rest of the submerged iceberg?

Powell has since described the speech as a "blot" on his record and the "lowest point in my life."

February 4

2008-02-04T06:29:00.000-09:00

On this date in 1899, a three-year long undeclared war broke out between the United States and the peoples of the Philippines. At issue was the status of the islands, which had been Spanish colonial property until the United States defeated its crumbling European rival in a brief war the previous summer. Although Filipino nationalists had been waging a campaign for independence since the early 1890s, President William McKinley insisted that sovereignty over the Philippines had transferred without interruption to the US. A month to the day before the US-Philippine War began, McKinley declared that the official American policy toward the Philippines would be “benevolent assimilation,” meaning that the islands would be offered “protection” and “civilization” in exchange for their submission to American rule.

Those who elected not to accept the new arrangement would be corrected, he added, by the “strong arm of authority.”

The initial shots came from three American sentries, who fired them in defense of a bridge in San Juan del Monte, a city on the outskirts of Manila. One of the men, a Private William W. Grayson, recounted the incident two years later:

About eight o’clock, Miller and I were cautiously pacing our district. We came to a fence and were trying to see what the Filipinos were up to.

Suddenly, near at hand, on our left, there was a low but unmistakable Filipino outpost signal whistle. It was immediately answered by a similar whistle about twenty-five yards to the right. Then a red lantern flashed a signal from blockhouse number 7. We had never seen such a sign used before. In a moment, something rose up slowly in front of us. It was a Filipino. I yelled “Halt!” and made it pretty loud, for I was accustomed to challenging the officer of the guard in approved military style. I challenged him with another loud “halt!” Then he shouted “halto!” to me. Well, I thought the best thing to do was to shoot him. He dropped. If I didn’t kill him, I guess he died of fright. Two Filipinos sprang out of the gateway about 15 feet from us. I called “halt!” and Miller fired and dropped one. I saw that another was left. Well, I think I got my second Filipino that time.

By the next morning, fighting had erupted throughout the island of Luzon; from there, a brutal and costly guerilla war took the lives of at least 4300 Americans and as many as a million Filipinos -- nearly all of whom were civilians culled by disease and famine. During the conflict, the United States destroyed villages, tortured captives, and herded civilians into concentration camps.

Inspired by the United States’ new imperial project, the English poet Rudyard Kipling wrote a famous bit of verse titled “The White Man’s Burden.”

February 1

2008-02-01T08:59:00.001-09:00

On 1 February 1968, several days into the Tet Offensive, Lt. Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of the South Vietnamese police, shot a captured member of the National Liberation Front in the head at close range. Nguyen Van Lam, also known as Captain Bay Lop, had been captured by South Vietnamese forces after a battle at a Buddhist pagoda in the Chinese section of Saigon. Hands tied behind his back and his face visibly swollen, Lam was marched down the street.

American photographer Eddie Adams and Vietnamese cameraman Vo Su -- who was working for NBC -- had been photographing and filming the battle and watched as two South Vietnamese Marines brought the staggering captive toward them. Adams described the scene years later:

When they were close -- maybe five feet away -- the soldiers stopped and backed away. I saw a man walk into my camera viewfinder from the left. He took a pistol out of his holster and raised it. I had no idea he would shoot. It was common to hold a pistol to the head of prisoners during questioning. So I prepared to make that picture -- the threat, the interrogation. But it didn't happen. The man just pulled a pistol out of his holster, raised it to the VC's head and shot him in the temple. I made a picture at the same time.

The frightful still image of the summary execution quickly became emblematic of the American War in Vietnam, at least to its critics. For the remainder of both of their lives, however, Adams -- whose photo was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 -- defended Loan, whom he believed was destroyed by the image as well.

Several months after the shooting of Nguyen Van Lem, Loan was severely injured in a battle near a Saigon bridge; one of his legs had to be amputated. He fled to the United States after the fall of Saigon and opened a pizza restaurant in Burke, Virginia, which he operated until when his identity was publicized in 1991 and his business suffered. Loan died of cancer seven years later. Adams passed away in 2004 from ALS. As for Nguyen Van Lam, his body disappeared after the shooting thirty-nine years ago today and was never found.

January 31

2008-01-31T09:07:00.000-09:00

American Private Eddie Slovik was shot for desertion on this date in 1945. He had abandoned the 109th Infantry Regimen, 28th Infantry Division in October 1944, just two months after arriving in France. Because of his record of petty criminality as a youth in Detroit, Slovik was originally declared unfit for military service in 1942. As the meat-grinder of war proceeded, however, his classification was changed and Eddie Slovik was declared fit for duty in 1944. Slovik was despondent during basic training and announced his intent to “run away” from his assignment, believing that he would spend at most a few months in prison. Instead, a nine-man jury convicted him of violating the 58th Article of War in November 1944 and sentenced him to death by firing squad.

Slovik appealed to General Dwight David Eisenhower for clemency but was denied two days before Christmas; desertion had become a problem among US soldiers, and the General was eager to set a deterrent example. Sixty-two years ago today, Eddie Slovik's sentence was carried out near the French village of Ste Marie aux Mines. Of the 49 American deserters sentenced to die during the war, Slovik’s sentence was the only one not commuted. In addition to Pvt. Slovik, 21,048 American soldiers deserted their units during World War II.

Just before he was shot, Slovik was urged by one of his executioners "take it easy, Eddie. Try to make it easy on yourself -- and on us."

"Don't worry about me," Slovik responded. "I'm okay. They're not shooting me for deserting the United Stated Army -- thousands of guys have done that. They're shooting me for bread I stole when I was 12 years old."

In the last letter he ever wrote, Slovik mused to his wife that “Everything happens to me. I've never had a streak of luck in my life. The only luck I had in my life was when I married you. I knew it wouldn't last because I was too happy. I knew they would not let me be happy.”

Antoinette Slovik had never actually been told that her husband was to be shot. The army insisted afterward that the young private should have told her himself. Riven with grief and anger, Antoinette struggled to clear her husband’s name until her own death in 1979. She asked seven American presidents -- including Dwight Eisenhower -- to issue her husband a pardon. All refused.

January 30

2008-01-30T00:37:00.000-09:00

Today is the anniversary of the "Bloody Sunday" massacre in Derry, Northern Ireland in 1972. During a routine protest against British rule, soldiers from the British Parachute
Regimen shot 26 unarmed demonstrators in the Bogside area of Derry, which had been a nationalist stronghold for two years. When British commanders received erroneous word that Irish Republican Army snipers were among the crowd, live rounds replaced rubber bullets and thirteen people died; a fourteenth died several months later from the wounds he received that day. Most of the dead and injured were shot as they fled the paratroopers, and none were armed. General Sir Robert Ford, commander of land forces in Northern Ireland, claimed after the melee that his troops had fired only three shots.

According to the Coroner’s report, issued 20 months after the attack,

[T]he Army ran amok that day and shot without thinking what they were doing. They were shooting innocent people. These people may have been taking part in a march that was banned but that does not justify the troops coming in and firing live rounds indiscriminately. I would say without hesitation that it was sheer, unadulterated murder.

The Widgery Commission Report, which whitewashed the events of 30 January 1972, found that the army's conduct had merely "bordered on the reckless."

***

Oliver Cromwell, military commander of the Protestant armies during the English Civil War and Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England from 1653-1658, was executed at Tyburn gallows on this date in 1661. A decade before, following English tradition, Cromwell himself had laid waste to northeastern Ireland. After being hanged, Cromwell was decapitated; while his head was mounted on a post and displayed outside Westminster Abbey, his body was reportedly dumped into a common pit. The head remained on display until 1685. It was not buried, however, until 1960.

Oddly enough, on the day of his beheading, Oliver Cromwell had already been dead for two years, having expired from malaria and a kidney infection in September 1658. Nearly a decade before his own death, Cromwell had successfully urged Parliament to execute Charles I for treason, an execution that was carried out in public on 30 January 1649. Cromwell famously described the beheading of Charles I -- twelve years to the day before his own -- as a “cruel necessity.” When the royalists recaptured power in 1660, Cromwell was convicted posthumously of the same crime for which Charles had been dispossessed of his own head. John Bradshaw, who had presided over Charles' trial in 1649, was drawn and quartered along with Cromwell; Parliamentary generals Henry Ireton and Thomas Pride were handled in more or less the same fashion.

All three happened to be dead as well.

January 29

2008-01-29T10:33:00.000-09:00

President Andrew Jackson, whose legend often presents him as a friend of the commoner, called upon federal troops to suppress a labor uprising on this date in 1834 -- the first and certainly not the last time such powers would be invoked by an American president.

The conflict, which broke out along the sixth section of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, involved rival groups of Irish workers near Williamsport, Maryland. After a laborer named John Irons was beaten to death on January 16, a week of clashes between “the Corkonians” and “the Longford men” resulted in dozens killed and scores wounded in clashes that at times involved hundreds of workers. Construction along the B&O was suspended, and the Maryland legislature appealed to President Jackson to intervene.

As it turns out, the president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was a close friend of Jackson’s. Indeed, John H. Eaton was a former Senator from Tennessee and had served two years as Jackson’s Secretary of War; he was quite open about his view that American troops should remain in his company’s service for months to come. After Jackson ordered two companies of troops to suppress the disturbances on January 29, Eaton wrote a letter to his friend and wondered if the soldiers might stick around to coerce the strikers into obedience. They did. In February 1835 -- more than a year later -- a section of B&O workers struck for higher wages. As Niles’ Weekly Register reported, mounted troops and riflement “happily reduced the rioters to order, and drove them away.”

***

Novelist, ecologist, and anarchist Edward Abbey was born on this day in 1927. Abbey died in 1989, a little over a week after George Herbert Walker Bush was inaugurated as 41st president of the US. Abbey once wrote that “Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes & disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines.”

On what would have been Abbey’s 75th birthday, the 43rd President of the US -- also named George Bush -- declared Iraq, Iran and North Korea to be an “axis of evil.” As The Decider explained, “I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons.”

Twenty-nine years ago today, a 16-year-old girl named Brenda Ann Spencer shot eight children and three adults — two of whom died — at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego. Asked after her arrest to explain her motive, Spencer merely told police that she didn’t like Mondays. The Boomtown Rats wrote a song about Spencer. Titled “I Don’t Like Mondays,” it was released nine months after the shooting.

January 24

2008-01-24T15:23:00.001-09:00

If the written accounts of Caligula's life are to be believed, his assassination on this date in anno domini 41 passed without significant mourning. The fourth of the so-called "twelve Caesars," Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus earned the nickname "Caligula" -- meaning "little boot" -- as a young boy, after the miniature soldier's uniform in which his father used to dress him. Shortly after assuming the title of Emperor in the year 37, Caligula was striken by a still-undetermined affliction and emerged from his convalescence an unparalleled monster. His reputation as a moral degenerate, already secured by the time he ascended to office, only magnified over the next four years. The Roman biographer Suetonius later described Caligula as a thin-skinned, deranged sadist. He lay in incest with his sisters; he fed criminals to the lions when raw beef was scarce; he closed the granaries merely to watch his people starve a bit. He drank pearls dissolved in vinegar and had gold cast in the shape of bread loaves. He is reported to have wished that "the Roman people had but a single neck," the better to throttle his subjects all at once.

In The Lives of the Caesars, the chapter devoted to Caligula is more or less a stomach-turning recitation of his crimes against nature and humanity. As Suetonius writes,

Many men of honourable rank were first disfigured with the marks of branding-irons and then condemned to the mines, to work at building roads, or to be thrown to the wild beasts; or else he shut them up in cages on all fours, like animals, or had them sawn asunder. Not all these punishments were for serious offences, but merely for criticising one of his shows, or for never having sworn by his Genius. He forced parents to attend the executions of their sons . . . . He had the manager of his gladiatorial shows and beast-baitings beaten with chains in his presence for several successive days, and would not kill him until he was disgusted at the stench of his putrefied brain. He burned a writer of Atellan farces alive in the middle of the arena of the amphitheatre, because of a humorous line of double meaning. When a Roman knight on being thrown to the wild beasts loudly protested his innocence, he took him out, cut off his tongue, and put him back again.

Eventually, Caligula declared himself to be a god. After less than four years of rule, Caligula was stabbed to death by Cassius Chaerea and a mob of fellow guardsmen; according to several accounts, the assassination -- though planned in advance -- was instigated when Caligula insulted Chaerea's wounded penis one too many times.

As the Roman historian Cassius Dio later quipped, in death Caligula "learned by actual experience that he was not a god."

January 23

2008-01-23T10:25:00.000-09:00

In the early morning light of 23 January 1870, calvalrymen from the 2nd US Regiment attacked an encampment of South Piegan Indians along the Marias River in northern Montana. The Blackfoot Confederacy -- which included two tribes of Piegan in Canada and Montana -- had been ensnared in a low-intensity confict with the United States for a number of years, although not all bands were regarded as hostile to the US. Indeed, one of the "friendly" bands was led by Running Horse, whose people were massacred 138 years ago today.

Led by Major Eugene Baker, the American troops acted that day on orders from General Philip Sheridan, who encouraged Baker to use his own discretion in punishing the Piegan for the murder of a white trader and his family several months prior to the attack. Although it was known that "hostiles" were located downstream under the leadership of Mountain Chief, Baker was also given to understand that the ambush should be considered a preemptive strike, since -- so the logic went -- anyone killed would have posed a threat to white interests anyway. With temperatures dropping to a staggering 40 degrees below zero, Baker and his officers allegedly steeled themselves with strong drink during the night before the attack, to the point that by morning Baker was too drunk to issue orders, as several witnesses later attested.

Drunk or not, the cavalrymen of F Company descended upon the Piegan encampment and tore it to shreds. With most of the Piegan men away on a hunt, the camp was occupied almost entirely by women, children and the elderly, nearly 200 of whom perished in the unprovoked attack. Half-inch Springfield rifle shells killed many as they fled the confusion; others suffocated in their own tents, which caught fire and collapsed. A Piegan named Spear Woman -- Heavy Runner's daughter -- offered her account in the Billings Gazette in 1932:

[Just at dawn] we were aroused by barking dogs. Then someone came with word for my father, Heavy Runner, that the soldiers were coming. All was excitement and fright in the camp. But Heavy Runner told everyone to be quiet, that there was nothing to fear. He said he would show the whites his name paper.'

He walked quietly toward the soldiers with his hands uplifted. In one of them was the paper which he had been told was a pledge of safety, held where it could be seen. A shot pierced his heart and he fell, clutching the paper to his breast.

The soldiers then began firing at everyone. Everywhere was confusion, everyone looked for cover. All the warriors and able-bodied men had left some days before on a hunt; only some old and sick men were there.,

I rushed into another tent where there were some sick and dying people. I hid under a back rest on one of the beds. While there, I saw a knife cut a hole in the teepee and then a soldier thrust himself through the opening. He fired at every moving body. When he figured no one was alive, he left. I was small and quiet, so he didn't notice me.

In the end, the US Army counted 173 dead and 300 Piegan horses stolen; F Company lost a single unfortunate soldier. More than a hundred other Piegan were captured and released with no food, supplies or horses -- all of which were pilfered or burnt by Baker's men. Many of the survivors died during a frigid, 90-mile walk to Ft. Benton.

Although Major Baker did not report the encounter until nearly two weeks had passed, his ruthless attack on a defenseless camp posed no more than a temporary inconvenience to his career. General Sheridan -- who himself oversaw similar atrocities in the Red River, Black Hills and Ute Wars -- blocked any investigation of the Baker Massacre, noting that he "preferred to believe" his officers' highly dubious accounts.

A ferocious alcoholic, Major Eugene Baker expired from cirrhosis of the liver in 1885.

Janaury 22

2008-01-22T08:43:00.000-09:00

Today marks the 21st anniversary of the death of Robert Budd Dwyer. A former Republican state senator, Dwyer served the Pennsylvania as Treasurer from 1980 until 22 January 1987, when he blew the top of his head off during a mid-day press conference at the capitol building in Harrisburg.

At the time, Dwyer was facing a possible 55-year prison sentence for mail fraud, perjury, conspiracy to commit bribery, and interstate transportation in aid of racketeering. The charges stemmed from a $300,000 kickback he was alleged to have arranged for the state Republican party -- money offered up by a California-based company that received a no-bid state contract from Dwyer's office. Proclaiming his innocence, he had actually refused prosecution offer for a plea bargain that would have sent him away for a comparatively short five-year sentence. After his conviction, the 47-year-old Dwyer grew understandably despondent over the possibility that he might live out the rest of his days in a cell. On January 21, 1987, Ronald Reagan turned down Dwyer's appeal for a presidential pardon. Calling a late morning press conference the next day to "update" reporters on "the situation," Dwyer read a long, rambling statement that reiterated his innocence. He vowed, moreover, not to spend the remainder of his days in "an American gulag."

Dwyer thanked his supporters, expressed gratitude to his wife and children, then pulled a .357 magnum revolver from a manila envelope. Warning everyone to "stay away" because, "this thing might hurt someone," Budd Dwyer dutifully took his place in the macabre folklore of American politics. Television stations in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia aired complete footage of the suicide during their mid-day broadcasts. As a result, thousands of young children -- home from school thanks to a major snowstorm -- watched the State Treasurer trepanate himself with a single shot.

Over the past two decades, Budd Dwyer has become something of a fixture in the world of sub-popular music. Odes to Dwyer have been recorded by such bands as Mr. Yukk and Poison Control; Ion Dissonance; Tijiuana Car Wash; and Camp Kill Yourself. More well-known artists such as Marilyn Manson, Filter, Ministry and Faith No More have also given Budd Dwyer everlasting life.

January 21

2008-01-21T12:13:00.000-09:00

Today is the Feast of St. Agnes, when Roman Catholics honor the most important of the virgin martyrs. According to legend, Agnes of Rome, a young Christian girl twelve or thirteen years of age, was executed on this date sometime in the third or fourth century anno domini. Agnes' transgression, evidently, was to refuse an offer of marriage from the son of a Roman prefect; when she refused, the prefect ordered her to be raped, tortured and burnt at the stake. In one account by the fourth-century Roman Catholic poet and hymnist Aurelius Prudentius Clemens, one of her would-be violators was stricken blind and comatose when he cast a lewd eye upon her. Thus, while her virginity was spared, Agnes' life was not. At her execution, the wood surrounding her body failed to ignite. According to the fourth-century account by St. Ambrose -- included in his three-part meditation de virginis ("Concerning Virgins") -- Agnes greeted her death without hesitation:

She stood, she prayed, she bent down her neck. You could see the executioner tremble, as though he himself had been condemned, and his right hand shake, his face grow pale, as he feared the peril of another, while the maiden feared not for her own. You have then in one victim a twofold martyrdom, of modesty and of religion. She both remained a virgin and she obtained martyrdom.

Although the conventional accounts of her execution are ghastly, little is actually known of Agnes' life aside from its brevity. Traditionally, her execution was believed to have occurred during the Diocletian persecutions, sometime around the year 304 or 305; other evidence, however, suggests that her martyrdom may have occurred some years before during the reign of Gaius Decius, a half century or more prior to Diocletian. Regardless of her date of death, Agnes came to be known as the patron saint of young girls. He body was placed in sepulchre, and during the reign of Constantine St. Agnes was honored with a basilica constructed around her final resting place. She remains there to this day.

***

A man of considerably less sanctity than Agnes, Howard Unruh, turns 87 today in the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital. He has been there since 1949, when the unemployed World War II tank soldier shot up his pleasant Camden, New Jersey neighborhood on September 6 of that year. Unruh believed his neighbors were talking about him behind his back, and he soon began to compile a hit list of local enemies. When someone stole a new gate he had installed at his mother's house -- where he still lived -- Unruh at last snapped and decided to shoot everyone on his roster. He carried out his plan the next morning after a breakfast of fried eggs, although he did not exactly stick to the list. In twelve minutes, he managed to shoot 26 people, half of whom died. And so it was that Howard Unruh became the first single-episode mass murderer in United States history.

"I'm no psycho," he told an investigator. "I have a good mind. I'd have killed a thousand if I had bullets enough."

January 20

2008-01-20T08:38:00.001-09:00

On this date in 2001, George Walker Bush formally ascended to the office of President of the United States. In that day's inaugural address, speechwriter Michael Gerson -- addressing the nation via the new president -- announced that

America remains engaged in the world by history and by choice, shaping a balance of power that favors freedom. We will defend our allies and our interests. We will show purpose without arrogance. We will meet aggression and bad faith with resolve and strength. And to all nations, we will speak for the values that gave our nation birth.

Toward the conclusion of the address, Gerson added that President Bush would "live and lead by these principles: to advance my convictions with civility, to pursue the public interest with courage, to speak for greater justice and compassion, to call for responsibility and try to live it as well."

"In all these ways," Bush continued, "I will bring the values of our history to the care of our times."

A mere 352 years earlier, Charles I of England -- an insufferable, arrogant prick whose rule was an endless national catastrophe -- was hauled before a special Parliamentary court. There, he faced charges of developing "a wicked design to erect and uphold in himself an unlimited and tyrannical power" and "to overthrow the Rights and Liberties of the People[.]" The indictment continued:

All which wicked designs, wars, and evil practices of him, the said Charles Stuart, have been, and are carried on for the advancement and upholding of a personal interest of will, power, and pretended prerogative to himself and his family, against the public interest, common right, liberty, justice, and peace of the people of this nation, by and from whom he was entrusted as aforesaid.

By all which it appeareth that the said Charles Stuart hath been, and is the occasioner, author, and continuer of the said unnatural, cruel and bloody wars; and therein guilty of all the treasons, murders, rapines, burnings, spoils, desolations, damages and mischiefs to this nation, acted and committed in the said wars, or occasioned thereby.

The week-long trial did not go well for the king.

January 18

2008-01-18T20:04:00.000-09:00

On this date 145 years ago, Mangas Colorado -- known to his fellow Beonkohes Apache as Red Sleeves -- was shot to death near Pinos Altos, New Mexico, while in the custody of a detachment of California Volunteers. Colorado, a towering warrior who had battled Mexicans and Anglo miners for decades, became an especially important target during a brutal conflict between the Apache and the United States Army that erupted during the early years of the American Civil War. In July 1862, Mangus Colorado and his son-in-law Cochise engaged the California Volunteers under Colonel James H. Carleton at the Battle of Apache Pass; only when a howitzer was unlimbered did the skirmish turn in favor of the Americans. Over the next six months, the California Volunteers conducted a ruthless campaign against the Apache, sacking villages and killing whomever they could manage.

By early 1863, the aging and wounded warrior -- who was indeed nearing 72 years old -- sought to arrange a peace. He was asked to come to Ft. McLane for consultation with US officials, who offered blankets, flour, beef and other supplies to Mangus Colorado and his people if they would resettle near the white settlement of Apache Tejo. The chief agreed to the arrangement, which turned out to be merely a pretext for taking him into custody on January 17, 1863.

In a letter written two years later, Joseph G. Knapp, a judge in New Mexico’s third district, described the events that followed just after midnight, January 18.

[Mangus Colorado was confined in the guardhouse; that night he was aroused from his sleep, some say that a soldier threw something and hit him, and others that he was punched with a pole, and because he raised himself up to see what had disturbed his sleep, he was instantly perforated with bullets and killed. Next morning at day dawn his lodge was attacked, and his wife and daughter shared the fate of husband and father. Not content with having killed a prisoner of war, without cause, your soldiers tore the scalp from his head and severed his head from his body, and after boiling the flesh, they exhibited the skull as a badge of honor, while the scalps of himself, his wife and daughter are worn as ornaments.

Cochise led reprisal attacks against the Union army and white settlers in New Mexico for years to come. The Cochise War, as it came to be known, raged for nearly a decade longer. The broader Apache resistance continued until 1886, when Geronimo surrendered with a mere 16 warriors at his side.

January 17

2008-01-17T08:01:00.000-09:00

Seventeen years ago tonight, the United States led a coalition of nations into war to liberate a tiny, undemocratic emirate from the temporary clutches of a larger undemocratic dictatorship located along its northern border. By the end of the conflict little more than a month later, more than 100,000 Iraqis had been killed -- adding incrementally to the hundreds of thousands who had perished in their ill-advised eight-year war with Iran. In addition, the nation's electrical grid, water treatment systems, sewers, bridges, railroads, dams and hospitals had been obliterated, virtually assuring the deaths of many more over the coming decade. In the wake of the conflict, untold thousands of tons of depleted uranium dust remained to contaminate the air, water and soil for the roughly the next four billion years. By 2001, rates of leukemia in Basra -- an area of Southern Iraq heavily targeted with DU weapons as Saddam Hussein's army retreated from Kuwait -- had risen nearly 400%, while birth defects had increased to more than six times their rate from 1990.

After the formal cessation of hostilities on 28 February 1991, more than 400,000 people were expelled from Kuwait, mostly Palestinians on whose labor the economy of the emirate had come to rely; millions of Kurds, fearing the predictable reprisals from the government of Saddam Hussein, fled into Turkey and Iran from northern Iraq; and thousands of Shi'as in southern Iraq were relentlessly slaughtered by their government, many of them shot from helicopters manufactured in and purchased from the United States.

On the night the Gulf War began, it happened to be the 30th anniversary of Dwight David Eisenhower's farewell address to the nation. In that televised speech, he famously warned that "we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex . . . . Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

At the end of the war, President George Herbert Walker Bush jovially remarked that "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all," adding that the United States had at last fought a war without "one hand tied behind [its] back."

January 16

2008-01-16T12:53:00.001-09:00

Ivan IV Vasilyevich -- otherwise known as Ivan Grozny or "Ivan the Terrible" -- formally assumed the title of tsar on this date in 1547. The 17-year-old had technically become Russia's ruler at the age of three when his father Ivan III died, but a series of regents conducted the nation's affairs until the young Vasilyevich asserted his authority over the boyars, the Slavic feudal aristocracy. During the period of his regency, Ivan was often beaten and molested by the two families of boyars -- the Shuiskys and Belskys -- who fought one another for the power to rule in his stead. By his teenage years, Ivan was known as a prolific drinker and a torturer of small animals. In 1543, Ivan ordered the arrest of one of the boyars, a prince named Andrew Shuisky who was then, according to legend, tossed into a pit with starving dogs. Ivan was a renowned rapist and an avid reader of books about history and religion. He beat up farmers and purged his sins while banging his head against the altar. As a result of his bizarre confessional style, he developed a callus on his forehead.

After assuming the title of Russia's first tsar, Ivan's early years were marked by impressive degrees modernization and territorial consolidation; during his nearly 40 years in power, Russia's legal code was revised and the printing press was introduced, and the country's first standing army was developed, in part to check the expansion of nomadic tribes from Asia. Less happily for the fate of millions, Tsar Ivan also restricted the movement of peasants, setting into motion a process of that would virtually enslave the propertyless classes of Russia. From 1558 to the early 1580s, the Livonian War -- which pitted Russia against Sweden, Poland, Denmark and Lithuania -- exacted a heavy toll upon the Russian people as Ivan waged a reckless and ultimately unsuccessful campaign to control Greater Livonia (modern day Estonia and Latvia). Famine and disease killed perhaps hundreds of thousands during the 1570s, while the Tsar's thuggish Oprichniki -- a black-robed regional security force that oversaw much of northeastern Russia -- massacred thousands of people in Novgorod, where the archbishop was sewn into a bearskin and hunted by a pack of hounds. The town of Pskov was offered similar treatment, though the fate of their clergy is unclear.

Near the end of his life, Ivan the Terrible beat his pregnant daughter-in-law for wearing what he regarded as provocative clothing; she subsequently miscarried. When his son (also named Ivan) confronted the Tsar over the beating, he was bludgeoned to death with a metal rod. The elder Ivan, wracked with grief and remorse, banged his head repeatedly on his son's coffin and foamed at the mouth like a horse, according to eye-witnesses.

Tsar Ivan himself eventually succumbed during a friendly chess match in 1584, quite likely the victim of poisoning by mercury, which he was ingesting to offset the effects of tertiary syphilis.

January 15

2008-01-15T08:19:00.000-09:00

The Spanish conquistador Vasco Nunez de Balboa was beheaded with an axe 489 years ago in Santa Maria la Antigua del Darien, a settlement he had founded nine years before in present-day Panama. He received the punishment for allegedly seeking to usurp the power of the Pedrarias Davila, who was Balboa's successor as Governor of Veragua. Pedrarias was also his father-in-law, although the two men shared no warm feelings toward one another. Among his other accomplishments, Balboa founded the first permanent Spanish settlement on the mainland of the Americas; more famously, Balboa is credited with being the first European to reach the Pacific Ocean -- which he named the "South Ocean" -- in 1513.

Illiterate and uneducated, Balboa was a relentless pursuer of gold and slaves. Like most of his kind, Balboa believed his governorship had been marked by a special humanitarian vision, although he was known to deal with recalcitrant tribes in all the customary, grotesque ways. When an indigenous alliance formed to challenge Balboa's authority in Darien, the Spaniard torched their villages and executed their chiefs. When members of a tribe under his authority were accused of practicing "male love" he ordered them to be torn apart by bloodhounds, which he had introduced to the region from Haiti. Balboa's favorite dog, Leoncillo, received a soldier's salary for his work.

Balboa's arrest, interestingly enough, was administered by his colleague Francisco Pizarro, another illiterate who would later subdue the Incan Empire. After a swift trial, the former governor and a quartet of his friends were decapitated in the town of Acla, which means "bones of men" in one of the region's indigenous languages. It took several swings of the axe to separate Balboas head from his body; the head was displayed on a post, while the body was left at the spot of the execution for more than half a day.

***

Exactly four centuries after Balboa's execution, a 50-foot tall vat of molasses collapsed in the North End of Boston, sending a tidal wave of syrup into the streets. More than two million gallons of dark brown sweetness rushed forth at 35 miles per hour, carrying a force of 2 tons per square foot. The Boston Post, mixing several culinary metaphors, described the horrific scene the next day:

Like eggshells it crushed the buildings of the North End yard of the city's paving division… To the north it swirled and wiped out practically all of Boston's only electric freight terminal. Big steel trolley freight cars were crushed as if eggshells, and their piled-up cargo of boxes and merchandise minced like so much sandwich meat.

In the wave of molasses and the vacuum created in its wake, a section of Boston's elevated train track was destroyed and a train car thrown into the air; several buildings were wrecked. A firefighter named George Leahy was trapped underneath the firehouse -- although he managed to keep his head above the molasses for several hourse, he eventually lost consciousness and drowned. In the end 21 people perished, crushed or asphyxiated by the most common form of sweetener in the United States at the time. Several of the bodies were too battered and glazed to be properly identified. Nearly 200 other Bostonians were injured in the catastrophe. Of the 20 horses who died in the molasses wave, several had to be shot because they could not be extracted from the goo.

United States Industrial Alcohol, the company that owned the faulty vat, tried to blame the accident on anarchist saboteurs but eventually settled lawsuits totaling more than $600,000.

January 14

2008-01-14T00:14:00.000-09:00

On this date in 1963, George Corley Wallace announced his triumphant arrival into the Alabama governor's office in Montgomery. In a loathsome ode to herrenvolk democracy, Wallace stoked the fires of white resentment against the modest gains of the civil rights movement, which had entered perhaps its most critical year to date:

Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and time again through history. Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever. . . .

Hear me, Southerners! You sons and daughters who have moved north and west throughout this nation . . . . we call on you from your native soil to join with us in national support and vote . . and we know . . . wherever you are . . away from the hearths of the Southland . . . that you will respond, for though you may live in the fartherest reaches of this vast country . . . . your heart has never left Dixieland.

And you native sons and daughters of old New England's rock-ribbed patriotism . . . and you sturdy natives of the great Mid-West . . and you descendants of the far West flaming spirit of pioneer freedom . . we invite you to come and be with us . . for you are of the Southern spirit . . and the Southern philosophy . . . you are Southerners too and brothers with us in our fight.

By the end of 1963, the March on Washington would take place; police officers in Birmingham would unleash German shepherds and fire hoses against unarmed men, women, and children; four young girls would be obliterated in a church bombing in that same city; Medgar Evers would be gunned down outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi; and John Kennedy -- who watched all of this with mounting dismay -- would have his brains scattered across the seats of a limousine in Dallas.

January 11

2008-01-11T00:13:00.000-09:00

On this date 51 years ago, the state of Colorado asphyxiated John Gilbert Graham with hydrogen cyanide gas. The execution occurred a little more than a year after the death of his mother in a horrific explosion over the sugar beet fields of northern Colorado. Daisie King and 43 others died on November 1, 1955, in the wreckage of United Air Flight 629, which was obliterated by a bomb. As it happened, Graham himself had placed the device in his mother’s suitcase.

Though investigators, the press and prosecutors assumed Graham’s motive was financial -- he stood to collect a large insurance settlement and inhereit a substantial commercial estate -- it turned out that Jack Gilbert Graham simply hated his mother. The bomb itself was gift-wrapped for the upcoming Christmas holiday.

Just before he entered the gas chamber on January 11, 1957, Gilbert offered a few words to the warden, Harry Tinsley. “As far as feeling remorse for those people,” he explained, “I don't. I can't help it. Everybody pays their way and they take their chances. That's just the way it goes.”

January 10

2008-01-10T07:55:00.001-09:00

According to their creation narrative, the Chinook people were the offspring of a thunderbird who nested her eggs on a mountain occupied by an ogress. The ogress threw the eggs from the mountain side, but the hatchlings survived and took their wives in the valley below.

By the beginning of the 19th century of the Christian calendar, the Clackamas -- one of the numerous Chinook tribes -- flourished in the area around Willamette Falls, located in what would soon be known to Americans as Oregon Territory. A salmon- and cedar-based society, the Clackamas inhabited several large settlements along the banks of the river; they were one of many smaller divisions of the Upper Chinook culture that dominated the region stretching from the mouth of the Columbia eastward to the Dalles River. The Clackamas enjoyed the wealth and regional power that flowed from their easy access to salmon and their extraordinary skill at fishing it from the Willamatte. Dominated by large cedar-plank houses, Clackamas villages became trading posts, where neighboring tribes came to trade beads, shells, coastal seafood, furs and horses. The Clamackas were a hierarchical society with a small aristocratic class and a somewhat larger stratum of middling sorts; the hereditary, ruling elites relied on Klamath and Molalla warriors to capture Northern California Indians who were absorbed into the villages as slaves.

When Lewis and Clark's expedition happened upon the Clackamas in 1805, they were esimated to number around 1500, although other estimates from the period place their numbers closer to 2500. By that point, diseases like smallpox had already begun to reduce the coastal population, including other Upper Chinook tribes. The turning point for the Clackamas came in 1829, when a New Englander named John Dominis attempted to found a fishery at the Clackamas Rapids. His efforts were rebuffed, but his deseased sailors infected the local population with the "cold sick," which eviscerated the tribe, killing 90% of its people that winter. By 1830, the Clackamas was no longer viable as an independent group.

On 10 January 1855, after two decades of struggle, the 88 remaining Clackamas Indians ceded land in the Willamette, Sandys and Clackamas Valleys to the United States in exchange for a $2500 annual annuity that was, pedictably enough, never actually paid. Relocated to the Grand Ronde Reservation with remnants of the Molalla, Kalapuya, Chasta, Rogue River and Umpqua tribes, the Clackamas had entirely disappeared by the 1920s.

January 9

2008-01-09T00:04:00.000-09:00

On January 9, 1964, a century of US arrogance in Latin America backfired, as several days of violence lit up the Panama Canal Zone.

The skirmish on January 9 was prompted by a dispute over a flagpole. Although the United States did not formally possess any part of Panama, the terms of a 1903 treaty enabled it to claim control “in perpetuity” over the strip of territory on which the canal would eventually be constructed. Panamanians had always objected to the unequal terms of the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, which was in fact negotiated by a French engineer and not by any actual Panamanians; their resentments toward the United States intensified after World War II, as US officials continued to behave as if Panama had no sovereign rights whatsoever over the canal or the zone surrounding it. Protests during the late 1940s and 1950s had chastened the US to some degree, and Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy offered a few, mostly cosmetic nods toward Panamanian sovereignty. Truman and Eisenhower dismantled several bases constructed during World War II (all of which were intended to be temporary in the first place), and the so-called "Kennedy Doctrine" toward Latin America offered further hope to Panamanian nationalists that a more balanced relationship might emerge in the news decade.

But for the “Zonians” -- Americans living within the fenced-in column of land bracketing the canal itself -- there was no question but that they were living on American soil. When President Kennedy ordered that Panama’s flag should be flown at all nonmilitary sites within the Canal Zone, Americans gargled and yelped in anger. When Kennedy’s brains were scattered across the back of his limousine, his instructions regarding flag protocol in the Canal Zone died as well.

When a group of Panamanian students attempted on January 9, 1964 to raise their nation’s flag outside Balboa High School, they were rebuffed by their American peers. The Americans had lofted a flag of their own two days earlier and were determined not to share their school’s pole with anyone else, least of all the people in whose country they were actually living. When the Panamanian flag was torn -- participants offered conflicting explanations as to how this happened -- street demonstrations were organized in protest. Thousands of Panamanians stormed across the “Fence of Shame” that separated the Canal Zone from the rest of the country; American-owned businesses were torched in Panama City; and when the police forces within the Canal Zone were overwhelmed, the US Army opened fire with rifles, shotguns, and grenades of tear gas. Many Panamanian demonstrators returned the fire, though guns were less plentiful than stones and Molotov cocktails.

Twenty-five people -- all but four of them Panamanians -- died over the next three days, while hundreds sustained injuries and more than $2 million worth of property was destroyed. Among the dead was Maritza Avila Alabarca, a six-month-old infant who suffocated when her house filled with tear gas. American political commentators blamed Fidel Castro for inciting the violence. Harry Truman, in a moment of gross condescension, grumbled that “The children you do the most for are the ones who cause you the most trouble, and Cuba and Panama are perfect examples of that.”

The 1964 uprisings led eventually to the complete withdrawal of the United States from the Canal Zone, a process that many American conservatives like Ronald Reagan regarded as a national humiliation.

Last year's entry: Anson Jones blows his brains out

January 8

2008-01-08T00:24:00.000-09:00

Seven years after the United States acquired the massive Louisiana territory from France, the population of New Orleans consisted of more than 18,000 enslaved and free people of color who lived in subjection to the 8000 whites who also lived within the city walls. Louisiana was a horrific place for enslaved people, who died nearly as fast as they could be replaced, worn down by the building of levees, the clearing of fields, and the tending of sugar cane. Moreover, New Orleans hosted the most abominable slave market in North America.

Inspired by Haiti's recent successes against the Napoleonic armies, the slaves who lived in southern Louisiana's rural parishes hoped that a sudden insurrection -- assisted by the black majority of New Orleans -- might wrest control of the city away from its white minority. Like all slave uprisings in North America, previous ventures along these lines -- most recently in 1795 in Pointe Coupe -- had been brutally crushed and the conspirators executed swiftly. However, with US forces preoccupied with the Spanish in Florida at the time, the winter of 1811 seemed a more auspicious moment than most to revive the dream of a tiny black republic at the mouth of the Mississippi River.

After concocting their plot in the swamplands near Maupe, the rough militia embarked from the Aubry plantation, nearly 40 miles from the city, late in the afternoon of January 8. They were led by a man named Charles Deslondes, who organized the army into neat formations and marched them with flags aloft. As their ranks swelled to more than 500 men armed with small arms and farm tools, the rebels arrived the next morning at the home of Jean Francois Trepagnier, six miles away. There, one of Trepagnier's slaves -- a young man named Gustav who had escaped shortly after his 21st birthday -- hacked his former master to death.

As word of the revolt spread throughout the sugar plantations, whites raised a militia of their own and were quickly assisted by US troops from Baton Rouge as well as the Free Black Militia of New Orleans, whose offers to help quell the insurgency were accepted. The enslaved rebels failed to reach the city arsenal, leaving them at the mercy of the much more capably armed free soldiers, who slaughtered them with canon fire at the Fortier Sugar Works, 18 miles from their' destination. Those who were not killed in battle were quickly tried and executed by hanging or firing squad at Saint Louis Cathedral. In the customary fashion, the heads of the slaves were cut off and placed along major roads as a warning to others. Samuel Hambleton, a naval agent stationed in New Orleans, wrote to a friend and described the trophies as looking "like crows sitting on long poles." As for Charles himself, his hands were cut off and was shot in both legs and the torso; before he died, he was rolled into a bundle of straw and "roasted" alive.

Later, the Trepagnier plantation was renamed "Diamond." Today Diamond remains a predominantly black community, where descendants of slaves reside nearly 200 years after their ancestors witnessed the largest revolt in North American history.

By the end of the 20th century, Diamond had become a toxic swamp, as pollutants from incinerators, petrochemical and cement plants left the town's poorest residents suffering from chronic health problems.

January 7

2008-01-07T05:58:00.000-09:00

Just past 2:00 a.m. on this date in 1950, a fire destroyed the St. Elizabeth’s wing of Mercy Hospital in Davenport, Iowa, where more than five dozen mental patients -- nearly all of whom were women -- resided behind wire mesh and bars. Within minutes, a tornado of fire had raced uninhibited through elevator and dumbwaiter shafts, consuming much of the three-story, 81-year-old building. By the time more than a hundred firefighters arrived at the hospital complex, there was little to be done for those trapped inside; the initial body count of 37 rose of the next few days to a final death toll of 41. One of the victims, Alice James, had been admitted to the hospital a mere six hours earlier.

Davenport’s assistant fire chief Harry Lang described the scene as “horrible,” in no small degree because the patients -- imprisoned for what would have been described as their own security -- were unreachable.

We couldn’t get into the building because of the intense heat, so we put up every ladder we could. But those windows were barred.

Even as firemen stood on ladders, hacking frantically with axes at the window gratings, the heat cracked the glass and people inside disappeared into the flames before our eyes.

One firefighter described the building -- which lacked a sprinkler system -- as having “burned like paper.”

Investigators soon discovered that a young patient named Elnora Epperly had set the fire. Believing that her husband had died and that she needed to escape, Epperly used a cigarette lighter to set fire to the curtains in her room. Initially charged with murder, Elnora Epperly never faced trial after an inquest ruled that she was insane and thus not responsible for her actions.

After spending the next several months in an Illinois hospital, Epperly was released into the custody of her husband, whom she may have been pleased to discover was still very much alive.

January 3

2008-01-03T20:43:00.001-09:00

Today is the 47th anniversary of the first nuclear reactor accident in United States history. On 3 January 1961 the three-megawatt SL-1 facility, an experimental reactor located about 40 miles west of Idaho Falls, was destroyed in roughly four milliseconds as a power surge vaporized the water surrounding the reactor core. Army specialists John Byrnes and Richard McKinley and Navy Electrician's Mate Richard Legg were killed; elements from the reactor core were blown into their bodies, which were horribly disfigured and pulsing with radiation. One of the men was impaled and pinned to the ceiling by a reactor shield plug, while the other two were blown sideways against a shielding block. Clean-up crews discovered that the bodies of the men -- one of whom survived for a brief period of time after the explosion -- were emitting at least 500 roentgens per hour even after their clothing had been cut away.

After much dispute over the final disposition of their bodies, Byrnes, McKinley and Legg were buried in lead-lined caskets, encased with concrete. The reactor itself received a similar farewell.

***

On 3 January 1924, a shower of red worms descended on the Swedish town of Halmsted. As described by Charles Fort in his 1931 chronicle of the bizarre, Lo!,

They were red worms, from one to four inches in length. Thousands of them streaking down with the snowflakes -- red ribbons in a shower of confetti -- a carnival scene that boosts my discovery that meteorology is a more picturesque science than most persons, including meteorologists, have suspected.

The "worms of heaven," he concluded, "seem to be a jolly lot."

Had Benito Mussolini been living in Halmsted, we can be assured that the jolly red worms would have been lined up against a wall and shot. One year after the Swedish deluge, Il Duce dissolved the Italian Parliament and rescinded all democratic liberties, bringing the force of the state to bear in subsequent years upon communists, socialists, trade unionists, and anarchists among others. As he explained in La Dottrina del fascismo, which he wrote with Giovanni Gentile in 1932,

Fascism wants man to be active and to engage in action with all his energies; it wants him to be manfully aware of the difficulties besetting him and ready to face them. It conceives of life as a struggle in which it behooves a man to win for himself a really worthy place, first of all by fitting himself (physically, morally, intellectually) to become the implement required for winning it. As for the individual, so for the nation, and so for mankind. . . .

This positive conception of life is obviously an ethical one. It invests the whole field of reality as well as the human activities which master it. No action is exempt from moral judgment; no activity can be despoiled of the value which a moral purpose confers on all things. Therefore life, as conceived of by the Fascist, is serious, austere, and religious; all its manifestations are poised in a world sustained by moral forces and subject to spiritual responsibilities. The Fascist disdains an "easy" life.

The Fascist would, we presume, hold January 3 in special contempt. Today, in addition to everything else, is the Festival of Sleep.