“In history, a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.”
~Edmund Burke
1843 – Francis Scott Key, an American lawyer, author, and amateur poet, who wrote the lyrics to the United States’ national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner, died from pleurisy at the age of 63.
1863 – Union General John McClernand and Admiral David Porter captured Arkansas Post, a Confederate stronghold on the Arkansas River. The victory secured central Arkansas for the Union and lifted Northern morale just three weeks after the disastrous Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Arkansas Post was a massive fort 25 miles from the confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers. It was designed to insure Confederate control of the White and Arkansas rivers, and to keep pressure off Vicksburg, Mississippi, the last major Rebel city on the Mississippi River.
Following a night of intense bombing by Porter, Union infantry moved toward the fort while the ships passed in front and began firing from the other side of the fort. The Confederate garrison was surrounded, and offered a white flag before the day was out. The Yankees lost around 130 men and suffered about 900 wounded, but they captured 5,000 Confederates and preserved Union commerce on the Arkansas and White rivers.
1863 – The USS Hatteras, a 1,126-ton Union gunboat, was taken by surprise and was sunk off the coast of Galveston, Texas by the 1,000 ton Confederate cruiser CSS Alabama.
1908 – President Theodore Roosevelt turned more than 800,000 acres of the Grand Canyon in northwestern Arizona into a national monument. “Let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is. You cannot improve on it. But what you can do is keep it for your children, your children’s children, and all who come after you, as the one great sight which every American should see.”
1928 – Leon Trotsky, a leader of the Bolshevik revolution and early architect of the Soviet state, was deported by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to Alma-Ata in remote Soviet Central Asia. Against Stalin’s stated policies, Trotsky had called for a continuing world revolution that would inevitably result in the dismantling of the Soviet state. He also criticized the new regime for suppressing democracy in the Communist Party and for failing to develop adequate economic planning. Trotsky lived in internal exile for a year before being banished from the USSR forever by Stalin.
1935 – In the first flight of its kind, American aviator Amelia Earhart departed Wheeler Field in Honolulu, Hawaii, on a solo flight to North America. Hawaiian commercial interests offered a $10,000 award to whoever accomplished the flight first. The next day, after traveling 2,400 miles in 18 hours, she safely landed at Oakland Airport in Oakland, California.
1937 – Nearly two weeks into a sit-down strike by General Motors auto workers at the Fisher Body Plant No. 2 in Flint, Michigan, a riot erupted when police tried to prevent the strikers from receiving food deliveries from supporters on the outside. Strikers and police officers alike were injured in the melee, which was later nicknamed the “Battle of the Running Bulls”.
After the riot, Michigan governor Frank Murphy called in the National Guard to surround the plant.
The strike was organized by the United Auto Workers union, which wanted GM – then the world’s largest automaker – to recognize it as the sole bargaining authority for employees at the company’s factories. Many Americans sympathized with the strikers, and President Franklin Roosevelt was involved with negotiations to end the conflict. The strike lasted over a month, and ended with GM agreeing to grant the UAW bargaining rights and start negotiations on a variety of issues related to improving job conditions for auto workers.
1949 – In Washington, D.C., the cornerstone was laid at the first mosque of note in the United States. Intended to serve as a national mosque for all American Muslims, the Islamic Center was built in a traditional Arabic architectural style, complete with a 160-foot minaret from which prayers were to be announced.
1964 – A landmark report (Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the United States) was published by the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health, chaired by then-Surgeon General of the United States Luther Terry.
Although it was not the first such declaration, or the first declaration by an official of the U.S., it was notable for being arguably the most famous, and certainly had lasting and widespread effects on the tobacco industry and on the worldwide perception of smoking.
1973 – The owners of America’s 24 major league baseball teams voted to allow teams in the American League to use a “designated pinch-hitter” who could bat for the pitcher, while still allowing the pitcher to stay in the game.
The National League resisted the change, and for the first time in history, the two leagues began play using different rules. In addition, the introduction of the designated hitter marked the biggest rule change in major league baseball since 1903, when it was decided that foul balls would be considered strikes. Though it initially began as a three-year experiment, the DH rule would be permanently adopted by the American League and later by most amateur and minor league teams.
1977 – France set off an international uproar by releasing Mohammad Daoud Oudeh, a Palestinian who was the mastermind behind the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Oudeh (also known by his guerrilla name Abu Daoud) had been intercepted by French police in Paris while travelling from Beirut under an assumed name. Under protest from the PLO, Iraq, and Libya, who claimed that because Oudeh was traveling to a PLO comrade’s funeral, he should receive diplomatic immunity, the French government refused a West German extradition request on grounds that forms had not been filled in properly and put him on a plane to Algeria before Germany could submit another request.
He remained unrepentant regarding his role in the Munich attacks. “I regret nothing. You can only dream that I would apologize.” In an Associated Press interview, he legitimized the operation given its success, declaring, “Before Munich, we were simply terrorists. After Munich, at least people started asking who are these terrorists? What do they want? Before Munich, nobody had the slightest idea about Palestine.” Shortly before his death in 2010, Oudeh said in a statement to Israelis, “Today, I cannot fight you anymore, but my grandson will and his grandsons too.”
1979 – Actor Jack Soo (best known for his role as Detective Nick Yemana on television’s Barney Miller) died of esophageal cancer at the age of 61.
1989 – After eight years as president of the United States, Ronald Reagan gave his farewell address to the American people. In his speech, President Reagan spoke with particular enthusiasm about the foreign policy achievements of his administration.
In his speech, Reagan declared that America “rediscovered” its commitment to world freedom in the 1980s. The United States was “respected again in the world and looked to for leadership.” The key, according to the president, was a return to “common sense” that “told us that to preserve the peace, we’d have to become strong again after years of weakness.”
2000 – Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Lemon died from stroke complications at the age of 79. As a member of the Cleveland Indians, Lemon recorded seven seasons of 20 or more pitching wins in a nine-year period from 1948–1956. His 207 career wins would have been much higher if he had not served in the United States Navy during World War II and missed three seasons.
2003 – Calling the death penalty process “arbitrary and capricious, and therefore immoral,” Illinois Gov. George Ryan commuted the sentences of 167 condemned inmates, clearing his state’s death row two days before leaving office.
Ryan’s decision came after it was learned that Jon Burge, a Chicago Police Department detective and commander, had tortured more than 200 criminal suspects between 1972 and 1991 in order to force confessions.
Burge was later convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury charges and sentenced to four years in federal prison.
2010 – Miep Gies, the last survivor of a small group of people who helped hide Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis during World War II, died at the age of 100 in the Netherlands. Gies was working in the building at the time of the raid and avoided arrest because the officer was from her native Vienna and felt sympathy for her. She later went to police headquarters and tried, unsuccessfully, to pay a bribe to free the group.
After the Franks were discovered in 1944 and sent to concentration camps, Gies rescued the notebooks that Anne Frank left behind describing her two years in hiding. These writings were later published as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, which became one of the most widely read accounts of the Holocaust.
In her 1987, memoir, Anne Frank Remembered, Gies wrote: “I am not a hero. I stand at the end of the long, long line of good Dutch people who did what I did and more – much more – during those dark and terrible times years ago, but always like yesterday in the heart of those of us who bear witness. Never a day goes by that I do not think of what happened then.”
2011 – Actor David Nelson (The Adventures of Ozzie And Harriet and the older brother of singer Rick Nelson) died from complications of colon cancer at the age of 74.
Compiled by Ray Lemire ©2016 RayLemire.com. All Rights Reserved.