On August 9th…

A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures.
~Robert Penn Warren

1854 – Walden (first published as Walden; or, Life in the Woods), by Henry David Thoreau, was published by Ticknor and Fields in Boston. The book was a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings; detailing Thoreau’s experiences over the course of two years, two months, and two days in a cabin he built near Walden Pond, amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts. The book compressed the time into a single calendar year and used passages of four seasons to symbolize human development.

1936 – At the Berlin Olympics, African American track star Jesse Owens won his fourth gold medal of the Games in the 4×100-meter relay. His relay team set a new world record of 39.8 seconds, which held for 20 years. In their strong showing in track-and-field events at the XIth Olympiad, Jesse Owens and other African American athletes struck a propaganda blow against Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, who planned to use the Berlin Games as a showcase of supposed Aryan superiority.

1945 – The devastation wrought at Hiroshima three days earlier was not sufficient to convince the Japanese War Council to accept the Potsdam Conference’s demand for unconditional surrender, so a second atomic bomb was dropped on Japan – this time in Nagasaki – by the United States, resulting finally in Japan’s surrender.
The explosion unleashed the equivalent force of 22,000 tons of TNT. The number killed is estimated at anywhere between 60,000 and 80,000 (exact figures are impossible because the blast obliterated bodies and disintegrated records).

1969 – Shortly after midnight, members of Charles Manson’s cult killed five people in movie director Roman Polanski’s Beverly Hills home; Polanski’s pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, noted hairstylist Jay Sebring, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, screenwriter Wojciech Frykowski, and 18-year-old Steven Parent, who had been visiting the property’s caretaker. The following evening, the group killed again, murdering supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary in their home. The savage crimes shocked the nation and, strangely, turned Charles Manson into a criminal icon.

1974 – Richard M. Nixon stepped down from the presidency of the United States and was succeeded by Vice President Gerald R. Ford. Nixon resigned rather than face almost certain impeachment because of the Watergate scandal, in which he was charged with misuse of presidential powers to violate the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens, obstruction of justice, and failure to respond to House Judiciary Committee subpoenas.
After taking the oath of office, President Ford spoke to the nation in a television address, declaring, “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.”
At that time it was over, but the election of 2016 has brought an even bigger nightmare to Americans.

1976 – Hurricane Belle, a Category 3 storm, approached the North American mainland, with winds reaching 111 miles per hour. It seemed headed for a direct hit on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, but skirted the region as it weakened to a Category 2. Still, even this glancing blow caused severe flooding and erosion in the resort communities on the Outer Banks.
Belle then moved northeast along the coastline. In Atlantic City, New Jersey, the world-famous boardwalk suffered $1 million in damages. Hundreds of thousands of people lost electrical power in New Jersey. As Belle weakened to a tropical storm on August 10, it hit Long Island. Again, hundreds of thousands lost power and the region was later declared a federal disaster area. The following day, Belle struck Connecticut, wiping out a large apple harvest. The storm then moved north to Vermont. There, torrential rains caused by Belle caused flash flooding and the deaths of two more people.
By the time Belle had run its course, the storm had killed 12 people and caused $24 million in damages.

1985 – Arthur Walker, a retired U.S. Navy officer, was found guilty of espionage for passing top-secret documents to his brother, who then passed them to Soviet agents. Walker was part of one of the most significant Cold War spy rings in the United States.
Walker, his brother, John, and John’s son, Michael, were charged with conducting espionage for the Soviet Union. John Walker, also a Navy veteran, was the ringleader, and government officials charged that he had been involved in spying for the Soviets since 1968.
Arthur Walker was sentenced to life in prison and fined $250,000. John and Michael Walker later pled guilty to espionage charges, with John receiving two life sentences and Michael receiving 25 years in prison. A fourth conspirator, Jerry Whitworth, a friend of John Walker’s, was convicted in 1986 on 12 counts of espionage and sentenced to 365 years in prison.

1995 – Like his band the Grateful Dead, which was still going strong three decades after its formation, Jerry Garcia defied his life-expectancy not merely by surviving, but by thriving creatively and commercially into the 1990s – far longer than most of his peers. His long, strange trip came to an end, however, when he died of a heart attack in a residential drug-treatment facility in Forest Knolls, California. A legendary guitarist and true cultural icon, Jerry Garcia was 53 years old.

2004 – Terry Nichols was sentenced to 161 consecutive life sentences on state murder charges in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. In a 2007 affidavit, Nichols claimed that in 1992, co-conspirator Timothy McVeigh claimed to have been recruited for undercover missions while serving in the military. Nichols also said that in 1995, McVeigh told him that FBI official Larry Potts, who had supervised the Ruby Ridge and Waco operations, had directed McVeigh to blow up a government building. Those claims were dismissed by government officials.

2014 – Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man, was fatally shot by Darren Wilson, 28, a white Ferguson, MO police officer. The disputed circumstances of the shooting of the unarmed man sparked existing tensions in the predominantly black city, where protests and civil unrest erupted. The events received considerable attention in the U.S. and elsewhere, generating a national debate about the relationship between law enforcement and African Americans, and about police use of force doctrine in Missouri and nationwide.

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