The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it.
~Milan Kundera
1789 – George Washington became the first and only president to be unanimously elected by the Electoral College. He repeated this notable feat on the same day in 1792.
The peculiarities of early American voting procedure meant that although Washington won unanimous election, he still had a runner-up, John Adams, who served as vice president during both of Washington’s terms. Electors in what is now called the Electoral College named two choices for president. They each cast two ballots without noting a distinction between their choice for president and vice president. Washington was chosen by all of the electors and therefore is considered to have been unanimously elected. Of those also named on the electors’ ballots, Adams had the most votes and became vice president.
1826 – The Last of The Mohicans by James Fennimore Cooper was published. One of the earliest distinctive American novels, the book was the second of the five-novel series called the “Leather-stocking Tales.”
1861 – The Confederacy “opened for business” when the Provisional Confederate Congress convened in Montgomery, Alabama.
The first order of business was drafting a constitution. Using the U.S. Constitution as a model, a tentative document to govern the new nation was hammered out in four days. The president was limited to one six-year term. Unlike the U.S. Constitution, the word “slave” was used and the institution protected in all states and any territories to be added later. Importation of slaves was prohibited, as this would alienate European nations and would detract from the profitable “internal slave trade” in the South.
Other components of the constitution were designed to enhance the power of the states – government money for internal improvements was banned and the president was given a line-item veto on appropriations bills.
The congress then turned its attention to selecting a president, with delegates settling on Jefferson Davis, a West Point graduate and former U.S. senator from Mississippi who had served as the U.S. secretary of war in the 1850s.
1938 – Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs opened in theaters across the U.S. The first animated feature to be produced in English and in Technicolor, the film defied popular wisdom at the time. Skeptics warned Disney that audiences, especially adults, wouldn’t sit through a feature-length cartoon fantasy about dwarfs.
But Disney put his future on the line, borrowing most of the $1.5 million that he used to make the film. Snow White premiered in Hollywood on December 21, 1937, earning a standing ovation from the star-studded crowd. When it was released to the public on this date, the film quickly grossed $8 million, a staggering sum during the Great Depression and the most made by any film up to that time.
1945 – The Yalta Conference: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin met in the Russian resort town in the Crimea to begin a week-long discussion on the Allied war effort against Germany and Japan – and to settle some nagging diplomatic issues.
While a number of important agreements were reached at the conference, tensions over European issues – particularly the fate of Poland – foreshadowed the crumbling of the Grand Alliance that had developed between the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union during World War II and hinted at the Cold War to come.
The U.S. and Great Britain believed that the London-based noncommunist Polish government-in-exile was most representative of the Polish people. The final agreement merely declared that a “more broadly based” government should be established in Poland. Free elections to determine Poland’s future were called for “sometime” in the future. Many U.S. officials, disgusted with the agreement (and with Roosevelt), believed it condemned Poland to a communist future.
1974 – Patty Hearst, the 19-year-old daughter of newspaper publisher Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, CA by two black men and a white woman, all three of whom were armed.
Three days later, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a small U.S. leftist group, announced in a letter to a Berkeley radio station that it was holding Hearst as a “prisoner of war” and over the course of the next week demanded that the Hearst family donate over $2 million to needy families. That demand was met but Hearst was not freed.
In April, the situation changed dramatically when a surveillance camera took a photo of Hearst participating in an armed robbery of a San Francisco bank, and she was also spotted during a robbery of a Los Angeles store. She later declared, in a tape sent to the authorities, that she had joined the SLA of her own free will.
On September 18, 1975, after crisscrossing the country with her captors – or conspirators – for more than a year, Hearst, or “Tania” as she called herself, was captured in a San Francisco apartment and arrested for armed robbery. Despite her claim that she had been brainwashed by the SLA, she was convicted on March 20, 1976, and sentenced to seven years in prison. She served 21 months before her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter. She was pardoned by President Bill Clinton in January 2001.
1976 – A 7.5-magnitude earthquake leveled much of Guatemala City, killing 23,000 people and leaving one million others homeless. It was 3:04 a.m. when the first large tremor, centered120 miles northwest of Guatemala City, struck. The quake was the result of a collision between the Caribbean and North American plates on the Motagua Fault. In a matter of minutes, about one third of the city was destroyed.
1987 – Wladziu Valentino Liberace, pianist and entertainer who embraced a lifestyle of flamboyant excess both on and off stage, died at the age of 67. The original cause of death was attributed variously to anemia, emphysema, and heart disease, the latter of which was attested to by Liberace’s personal physician, Dr. Ronald Daniels.
Against the wishes of his estate, the Riverside County coroner ordered an official autopsy and determined that Liberace had died of “pneumonia due to complications from HIV.”
1999 – Unarmed West African immigrant Amadou Diallo was shot and killed by four New York City Police Department plain-clothed officers on an unrelated stake-out, inflaming race relations in the city.
Observing that Diallo matched the description of a since-captured well-armed serial rapist involved in the rape or attempted rape of 29 victims, they approached him, and identified themselves as NYPD officers – loudly they would later claim. Diallo ran up the outside steps toward his apartment house doorway, ignoring their orders to stop and “show his hands”. The porch light bulb was out and Diallo was backlit by the inside vestibule light, showing only a silhouette. When he reached into his jacket and withdrew his wallet. Officer Sean Carroll, seeing the man holding a small square object, yelled “Gun!” to alert his colleagues. Mistakenly believing Diallo had aimed a gun at them at close range, the officers opened fire. During the shooting, lead officer Edward McMellon tripped backward off the front stairs, causing the other officers to believe he had been shot. The four officers fired 41 shots, more than half of which went astray as Diallo was hit 19 times.
In 2000, the four officers involved in the shooting Carroll, McMellon, Kenneth Boss and Richard Murphy – were acquitted on all charges of second-degree murder and reckless endangerment. Diallo’s parents filed a $61 million ($20 million plus $1 million for each shot fired) lawsuit against the city and the officers, charging gross negligence, wrongful death, racial profiling, and other violations of Diallo’s civil rights. In March 2004, they accepted a $3 million settlement.
2004 – Facebook, an online social networking service, was launched by Mark Zuckerberg with his Harvard College roommates and fellow students. The founders had initially limited the website’s membership to Harvard students, but later expanded it to colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. Today, it has over 1.2 Billion monthly active users.
Compiled by Ray Lemire ©2016 RayLemire.com. All Rights Reserved.