On November 3…
“Considerable mystery surrounds the disappearance of Alfred M. Landon of Topeka, Kansas. The Missing Persons Bureau has sent out an alarm bulletin bearing Mr. Landon’s photograph and other particulars, and anyone having information of his whereabouts is asked to communicate directly with the Republican National Committee.”
~Westbrook Pegler
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1868 – Ulysses Grant became the 18th President of the United States.
The Democratic Party dumped incumbent President Andrew Johnson – who had survived impeachment by just one vote earlier in the year – in favor of a new candidate, former New York Gov. Horatio Seymour.
He was an extremely reluctant nominee, saying he did not want be a candidate, earning him the nickname “the Great Decliner,” although he broke with tradition and campaigned actively in the North.
Opposing him on the Republican side was Ulysses S. Grant, the victorious general who had brought the Civil War to a close. Grant did not campaign and made no promises.
The popular vote was relatively close. Grant won just more than 3 million votes across the country, and Seymour received 2.7 million.
Grant, however, dominated in the Electoral College
1868 – John Willis Menard was the first African American elected to the United States Congress. Because of an electoral challenge, he was never seated and was unable to represent Louisiana’s 2nd congressional district.
When Congress debated the issue, Congressman and future president James Garfield said that “it was too early” for an African American to be admitted to Congress.
1883 – In an action that epitomized the ultimate in legal absurdity, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Native American (or in their terms, an Indian) was by birth “an alien and a dependent” of the United States.
1896 – William McKinley became the 25th U.S. president.
Incumbent Democratic President Grover Cleveland did not seek election to a second consecutive term, leaving the Democratic nomination open.
William Jennings Bryan, the former Congressman from Nebraska, galvanized Democrats support by calling for a reform of the monetary system and attacked business leaders as the cause of ongoing economic depression.
William McKinley, the popular governor of Ohio, won the Republican nomination and was backed by bankers and factory workers.
Money played an important role for the first time in a political campaign. McKinley raised $3 million (mostly from business interests), compared to $600,000 raised by Bryan.
Bryan was able to win almost all of the states of the West. However, he had virtually no success in the growing industrial cities of the East.
McKinley would defeat Bryan again in 1900.
1908 – William Howard Taft was elected as the 27th president of the United States.
With President Theodore Roosevelt declining to seek reelection, Republicans chose Secretary of War William Howard Taft as their candidate.
And for the third time, Democrats turned to William Jennings Bryan.
The primary focus of the campaign was choosing the candidate who could best carry out the vastly popular policies of Roosevelt. Although Taft was Roosevelt’s hand-picked successor, Bryan claimed he was more likely to continue Roosevelt’s policies.
However, Bryan made a major mistake when he called for the socialization of the railroads.
Taft won 51.6% of the popular vote and cruised to an easy Electoral College victory.
1934 – Lou Gehrig of the New York Yankees had finished the 1934 baseball season with a .363 batting average, 49 home runs, and a staggering 166 runs batted in.
Those numbers earned him the Triple Crown but incredibly, he lost the American League’s Most Valuable Player award to Detroit’s Mickey Cochrane (.320, 2 home runs, and 75 runs batted in).
1936 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt won his reelection bid in a landslide.
Republican Governor Alf Landon of Kansas was assigned the task of challenging FDR. Some of the proposals the President had introduced in his first term had an effect, putting many people back to work. The newly implemented Social Security program proved to be a huge hit.
It didn’t help Landon’s cause that in the two months after his nomination he made no campaign appearances.
As shown at the top of this column, columnist Westbrook Pegler had some fun at Landon’s expense.
Roosevelt took 60.8% of the popular vote and carried every state except Maine and Vermont
1941 – The Combine Japanese Fleet received Top-Secret Order No. 1: In 34 days, Pearl Harbor was to be bombed, along with the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines.
In September 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt had issued a statement, drafted by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, threatening war between the United States and Japan should the Japanese encroach on territory in Southeast Asia or the South Pacific.
Hideki Tojo, the minister of war who would soon be prime minister, construed the American “threat” of war as an ultimatum and delivered the order to all pertinent Fleet commanders that not only the United States – and its protectorate the Philippines – but British and Dutch colonies in the Pacific were to be attacked.
1944 – The first balloon bombs, intended to be the silent assassins of World War II, were launched by Japan.
The balloons, with incendiaries attached, were buoyed across the Pacific Ocean by a jet stream. It took between 30 and 60 hours for a balloon bomb to reach North America’s West Coast.
Records discovered after the war indicated more than 9,000 hydrogen balloons were launched until April 1945. Fewer than 300 of the balloons reached the U.S. mainland.
The U.S. military did not make American citizens aware of the danger (the American press cooperated with the federal government and did not report the balloons) and as a result, a single balloon did achieve its goal.
On May 5, 1945, five children and local pastor Archie Mitchell’s pregnant wife Elsie were killed as they played with the large paper balloon they’d spotted during a Sunday outing in the woods near Bly, Oregon – the only enemy-inflicted casualties on the U.S. mainland in the whole of World War II.
Shrapnel Tree, the pine behind the monument – where Mrs. Mitchell and the five children died – still bears the scars of the shrapnel from the deadly weapon and stands as a silent witness to the tragedy.
Tragic Postscript: In May 1962, Rev. Mitchell was seized by the Viet Cong near Buon Ea Na, Vietnam – where he was serving as a missionary working at a facility for treating lepers – and was never seen again.
1948 – The Chicago Daily Tribune jumped the gun and mistakenly declared Governor Thomas Dewey the winner of his presidential race with incumbent Harry S. Truman in a front-page headline: “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
In a now famous photograph snapped in the early morning hours after the Nov. 2 election, a beaming Truman is shown holding aloft the Tribune issue that had wrongly predicted his political downfall.
Even though not all the votes had been tallied at the time of the Tribune’s deadline, editors were confident in the multiple polls widely favoring Dewey to win. So they reported that he had done just that.
Truman defeated Dewey by 114 electoral votes.
1956 – The last telecast of Ford Star Jubilee – an American anthology series that aired once a month on Saturday nights on CBS – was really something special.
It was the first airing of what later became a television tradition — Judy Garland’s classic 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, with Judy’s 10-year-old daughter Liza Minnelli and Bert Lahr (the Cowardly Lion from the film) on hand to introduce it.
1957 – The Soviet Union launched the first animal into space – a dog name Laika – aboard the Sputnik 2 spacecraft.
Laika, part Siberian husky, survived for several days as a passenger in the USSR’s second artificial Earth satellite. Electrodes attached to her body provided scientists on the ground with important information about the biological effects of space travel.
She died after the batteries of her life-support system ran down.
1964 – President Lyndon Johnson was re-elected in one of the most crushing victories in U.S. history.
During the campaign, Johnson did all he could to portray Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona as a saber-rattling warmonger, who would bring the world to nuclear annihilation if elected.
Goldwater did indeed not rule out the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam, if necessary. He also called for deep cuts in social programs, and opposed much of the civil rights legislation.
Johnson campaigned on a platform of continued social programs, and portrayed himself as a model of statesman-like restraint, a man who would not send “American boys nine or ten thousand miles from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”
Johnson won 61.1 percent of the popular vote, winning by 16 million votes.
After his victory, Johnson did send “American boys nine or ten thousand miles from home” when he committed U.S. combat troops to Vietnam. Between 1964 and 1968, U.S. troop strength there rose from 23,000 to over 549,000.
1976 – Carrie, a horror film starring Sissy Spacek and based on Stephen King’s 1974 best-selling first novel, opened in theaters around the United States.
The film became a critical and commercial success, grossing over $33.8 million against its $1.8 million budget.
It received two nominations at the 49th Academy Awards: Best Actress (for Spacek) and Best Supporting Actress (for Piper Laurie)
1979 – Five members of the Communist Workers Party, participating in a “Death To The Klan” rally in Greensboro, NC, were shot to death by a group of Klansmen and neo-Nazis. Seven others were wounded.
Two criminal trials of several Klan and American Nazi Party members were conducted: six men were prosecuted in a state criminal trial in 1980; five were charged with murder. All were acquitted by an all-white jury.
A second, federal criminal civil rights trial in 1984 concluded with the acquittal of the nine defendants.
In the first trial, the jury concluded that the defendants acted in self-defense. In the second trial, the jury concluded that the defendant’s actions were based on political, rather than racial, motivations.
1986 – The Lebanese magazine Ash Shiraa reported that the United States had been secretly selling arms to Iran in an effort to secure the release of seven American hostages held by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon.
The revelation came as a shock to officials outside President Ronald Reagan’s inner circle and went against the stated policy of the administration.
In addition to violating the U.S. arms embargo against Iran, the arms sales contradicted President Reagan’s vow never to negotiate with terrorists.
1998 – Former professional wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota with 37 percent of the vote.
His opponents, seasoned politicians Hubert Humphrey III (son of Lyndon Johnson’s vice-president and the attorney general of Minnesota) and St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman, spent a total of $4.3 million on their campaigns.
Ventura, the Reform-Party candidate, spent $250,000 – money he raised by selling $22 t-shirts and accepting $50 donations from his supporters.
2002 – Actor Jonathan Harris died of a blood clot in his heart. He was 87.
He played the roles of Bradley Webster on The Third Man and Dr. Zachary Smith on Lost In Space.
2002 – Singer/songwriter Lonnie Donegan died of a heart attack at the age of 71.
The “King of Skiffle” influenced many 1960s British pop and rock musicians, including John Lennon, George Harrison, Roger Daltrey, Brian May and others.
He had 31 UK Top 30 single hits, with three of them reaching the top of the charts.
His greatest success in America came with Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On the Bedpost Overnight?), a # 5 hit in 1961.
2014 – One World Trade Center, also known as Freedom Tower, officially opened.
The 104-story structure stands (including its 408-foot spire) at a height of 1,776 feet.
Compiled by Ray Lemire ©2019 RayLemire.com / Streamingoldies.com. All Rights Reserved.