1861 – President Abraham Lincoln made a late night visit to General George McClellan, who Lincoln had recently named general in chief of the Union army. When Lincoln, Seward, and presidential secretary John Hay stopped by to see the general, McClellan was out, so the trio waited for his return. After an hour, McClellan came in and was told by a porter that the guests were waiting. McClellan headed for his room without a word, and only after Lincoln waited another half-hour was the group informed of McClellan’s retirement to bed.
Hay felt that the president should have been greatly offended, but Lincoln replied that it was “better at this time not to be making points of etiquette and personal dignity.” Lincoln made no more visits to the general’s home. In March 1862, the president removed McClellan (the first of two times) as general in chief of the army.
1909 – The Ballinger-Pinchot scandal erupted when Colliers magazine accuses Secretary of the Interior Richard Ballinger of shady dealings in Alaskan coal lands. It was, in essence, a conflict rooted in contrasting ideas about how to best use and conserve western natural resources.
The article charged that Ballinger – an appointee of President William Taft – improperly used his office to help the Guggenheims and other powerful interests illegally gain access to Alaskan coal fields, confirming the worst fears of chief forester, Gifford Pinchot and former President Theodore Roosevelt. Despite the fact that he had stayed on as chief forester in the Taft administration, Pinchot began to criticize openly both Ballinger and Taft, claiming they were violating the fundamental principles of both conservation and democracy. Livid with anger, Taft immediately fired Pinchot, inspiring yet another round of scandalous headlines.
The controversy over the Ballinger-Pinchot affair soon became a major factor in splitting the Republican Party. After returning from an African safari, Roosevelt concluded that Taft had so badly betrayed the ethics of conservation that he had to be ousted. Roosevelt mounted an unsuccessful challenge to Taft on the independent Bull Moose ticket in 1912. In truth, subsequent scholarship has shown that Ballinger had not technically misused the power of his office and the charges of corruption were unjustified. However, the Ballinger-Pinchot scandal reflected the ongoing tension between those who emphasized the immediate use of natural resources and those who wanted them conserved for the future, a discussion that remains active today.
1927 – The Holland Tunnel, connecting the island of Manhattan with Jersey City, NJ, opened for traffic. On its first day of operation, 51,694 vehicles passed through, paying a 50 cent toll (equal to $6.79 today) per car, which was intended to defray the tunnel’s $48 million price tag. It was the first of two automobile tunnels built under the Hudson River, the other being the Lincoln Tunnel.
1941 – The United States Congress amended the Neutrality Act of 1935 to allow American merchant ships access to war zones, thereby putting U.S. vessels in the line of fire. In anticipation of another European war, and in pursuit of an isolationist foreign policy, Congress had passed the Neutrality Act in August 1935, forbidding the sale of munitions by U.S. firms to any and all belligerents in any future war. This was a not-so-subtle signal to all governments and private industries, domestic and foreign, that the United States would play no part in foreign wars.
The first amendment to the act came as early as September 1939; President Roosevelt, never happy with the extreme nature of the act, fought with Congress to revise it, allowing for the sale of munitions to those nations under siege by Nazi Germany. W hen the U.S. destroyer Reuben James was sunk by a German sub in October 1941, the Neutrality Act was destined for the dustbin of history. By November, not only would merchant ships be allowed to arm themselves for self-defense, but they would also be allowed to enter European territorial waters. America would no longer stand aloof from the hostilities.
1945 – President Harry Truman announced the establishment of a panel of inquiry to look into the settlement of Jews in Palestine. In the last weeks of World War II, the Allies liberated one death camp after another in which the German Nazi regime had held and slaughtered millions of Jews. Surviving Jews in the formerly Nazi-occupied territories were left without family, homes, jobs or savings. It became clear to Truman that something had to be done to speed up the process of finding Jewish refugees a safe place to live.
Truman contacted British Prime Minister Clement Attlee to propose that Jewish refugees be allowed to immigrate to Palestine, which at the time was occupied by Britain. In April 1946, Truman’s panel issued its report, which recommended the immigration of 100,000 Jewish refugees to Palestine. Truman wrote to Attlee for his help in moving the repatriation process forward. However, by mid-1946, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff had weighed in, bringing up the question of who would control the lucrative oil fields in a region that had the potential for unstable political and cultural relations between Jews and Arabs.
The settlement plans were put on hold.
1953 – In an example of the absurd lengths to which the “Red Scare” in America was going, Mrs. Thomas J. White of the Indiana Textbook Commission, called for the removal of references to the book Robin Hood from textbooks used by the state’s schools. Mrs. Young claimed that there was “a Communist directive in education now to stress the story of Robin Hood because he robbed the rich and gave it to the poor. That’s the Communist line. It’s just a smearing of law and order and anything that disrupts law and order is their meat.” She went on to attack Quakers because they “don’t believe in fighting wars.” This philosophy, she argued, played into communist hands.
As silly as the episode seems in retrospect, the attacks on freedom of expression during the Red Scare in the United States resulted in a number of books being banned from public libraries and schools during the 1950s and 60s because of their supposedly subversive content. Such well known novels as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo, were just some of the books often pulled from shelves. Hollywood films also felt the pressure to conform to more suitably “all-American” themes and stories, and rock and roll music was decried by some as communist-inspired.
1955 – FBI agents searched the home of John Graham, a chief suspect in the United Airlines plane explosion that killed all 44 people on board on November 1. The jet, which exploded shortly after departing from Denver, contained a hole near the cargo hold and traces of dynamite residue, suggesting that a bomb was responsible for the crash.
One of the passengers on board the flight, Daisie King, was a wealthy woman traveling to visit her daughter. Although the suitcase that she had checked-in had been obliterated by the explosion, her carry-on bag contained a newspaper clipping about her son, John Graham, who had been involved in forgery and theft. When FBI agents questioned Graham, he told the detectives that his mother had packed shotgun ammunition in her suitcase. Graham’s wife provided more intriguing information: just before Graham took his mother to the airport, he had placed a gift-wrapped package in her luggage, explaining that the present was a jewelry tool kit. Graham denied any knowledge of this gift but the FBI obtained a search warrant to investigate further.
A search of the Graham home turned up the ammunition that Mrs. King had allegedly packed, a small roll of copper wire, and a life insurance policy for Mrs. King, naming Graham as the designated beneficiary. Graham’s wife later revealed that he had ordered her to claim that she had been mistaken about the gift package.
Faced with mounting evidence against him, Graham suddenly confessed to planting a bomb in his mother’s suitcase. He told the agents that he had taken a job in an electronics store to learn how to construct the bomb, which consisted of 25 sticks of dynamite, a battery, and a timer. At his televised trial, Graham retracted his confession but was found guilty. He was executed in the gas chamber in January 1957.
1956 – The United States Supreme Court declared Alabama laws requiring segregated buses illegal, thus ending the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
1969 – In Washington, as a prelude to the second moratorium against the war scheduled for the following weekend, protesters stage a symbolic “March Against Death.” The march began at 6 p.m. and drew over 45,000 participants, each with a placard bearing the name of a soldier who had died in Vietnam. The marchers began at Arlington National Cemetery and continued past the White House, where they called out the names of the dead. The march lasted for two days and nights. This demonstration and the moratorium that followed did not produce a change in official policy. Although President Richard Nixon was deeply angered by the protests, he publicly feigned indifference and they had no impact on his prosecution of the war.
1970 – Tidal waves and storm surges struck the shores of the Ganges Delta, wreaking lethal damage on the people of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). A 100-mph tropical cyclone spurred the deadly flood of ocean water that washed over scores of coastal islands and devastated the densely populated delta region. An estimated 500,000 people were killed in the 20th century’s worst disaster by cyclone.
Throughout history, the Ganges Delta had suffered many furious storms, but the November 1970 Bhola Cyclone was the worst natural disaster in the region’s recorded history. It made landfall on November 12 and raged the strongest on November 13. The resulting storm surge, more than 30 feet high and topped by huge tidal waves, washed over offshore islands and carried ocean water many miles inland. The storm and flood destroyed the entire infrastructure of the country’s southern coast.
1974 – 28-year-old Karen Silkwood was killed in a car accident near Crescent, Oklahoma. Silkwood worked as a technician at a plutonium plant operated by the Kerr-McGee Corporation, and she had been critical of the plant’s health and safety procedures.
In September, she had complained to the Atomic Energy Commission about unsafe conditions at the plant (a week before her death, plant monitors had found that she was contaminated with radioactivity herself), and the night she died, she was on her way to a meeting with a union representative and a reporter for The New York Times, reportedly with a folder full of documents that proved that Kerr-McGee was acting negligently when it came to worker safety at the plant. However, no such folder was found in the wreckage of her car, lending credence to the theory that someone had forced her off the road to prevent her from telling what she knew.
1974 – 23-year old Ronald DeFeo, Jr. (circled above) murdered his parents, two brothers and two sisters in Amityville, Long Island. He initially told police officers that the killings had been carried out by a mob hit man. However, another interview soon exposed serious inconsistencies in his version of events. The following day, he confessed to carrying out the killings himself. DeFeo told detectives, “Once I started, I just couldn’t stop. It went so fast.”
DeFeo’s trial began on October 14, 1975. DeFeo’s defense attorney, William Weber, attempted an insanity plea, and the murder suspect told jurors that he heard voices that told him to kill his family. The psychiatrist for the prosecution, Dr. Harold Zolan, stated that DeFeo suffered from antisocial personality disorder. The illness made him aware of his actions, Dr. Zolan said, but he also claimed DeFeo was motivated by a self-centered attitude.
Jurors agreed with the assessment, and on November 21, 1975, they found DeFeo guilty on six counts of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to six consecutive life sentences, and sent to Green Haven Correctional Facility in Beekman, New York. His appeals to the parole board have all been turned down.
The case inspired a book (The Amityville Horror: A True Story) and film (The Amityville Horror).
1977 – After 43 years as a regular feature in hundreds of newspapers, Al Capp brought his comic strip, Li’l Abner, to a final conclusion.
1982 – Boxer Ray Mancini defeated Duk Koo Kim, who had to go through the process of losing several pounds immediately before the fight to make the weight. The lightweight championship bout ended with Mancini knocking out his challenger. Kim’s subsequent death (on November 17) would lead to significant changes in the sport.
1982 – The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington after a march to its site by thousands of veterans of the conflict. The long-awaited memorial was a simple V-shaped black-granite wall inscribed with the names of the 57,939 Americans who died in the conflict, arranged in order of death, not rank, as was common in other memorials.
1985 – Nevado del Ruiz, the highest active volcano in the Andes Mountains of Colombia, suffered a mild eruption that generated a series of lava flows and surges over the volcano’s broad ice-covered summit. Flowing mixtures of water, ice, pumice, and other rock debris poured off the summit and sides of the volcano, forming “lahars” that flooded into the river valleys surrounding Ruiz. The lahars joined normal river channels, and massive flooding and mudslides was exacerbated by heavy rain. Within four hours of the eruption, the lahars traveled over 60 miles, killing more than 23,000 people, injuring over 5,000, and destroying more than 5,000 homes. Hardest hit was the town of Armero, where three quarters of the 28,700 inhabitants died.
1995 – GoldenEye, the seventeenth film in the James Bond series, and the first to star Pierce Brosnan as Bond, premiered in Los Angeles.
1997 – The Lion King opened at the New Amsterdam Theater on Broadway. On June 13, 2006, the Broadway production moved to the Minskoff Theatre, where it is still running after more than 7,500 performances. It is Broadway’s fourth longest running show in history and the highest grossing Broadway production of all time, having grossed more than $1.2 billion.
1998 – President Bill Clinton agreed to pay Paula Jones $850,000, the entire amount of her claim, but without an apology, in exchange for her agreement to drop an appeal to settle a sexual harassment lawsuit. Six months earlier, Judge Susan Webber Wright had granted Clinton’s motion for dismissal, ruling that Jones could not show that she had suffered any damages.
1998 – NBA Hall of Fame coach Red Holzman (New York Knicks) died of leukemia at the age of 78.
2001 – In the first such act since World War II, President George W. Bush signed an executive order allowing military tribunals against foreigners suspected of connections to terrorist acts or planned acts on the United States.
2003 – Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore was thrown off the bench by a judicial ethics panel after refusing to remove a granite Ten Commandments monument from the state courthouse.
2009 – Attorney General Eric Holder announced plans to try professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others in civilian court in New York City. The Obama administration later backed off the plan after Congress prohibited any transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the U.S.
Compiled by Ray Lemire ©2015 RayLemire.com. All Rights Reserved.