History Notes this week of August 20

43BC: Octavian exercises his influence to get himself elected as part of the Second Triumvirate (i.e., three-way dictatorship) of the Roman Senate. He was born into a noble household as Gaius Octavius Thurinus; adopted in 44BC by Julius Caesar, he became known as Gaius Julius Caesar, and after the battle in Egypt, Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus. Historians use a three-part shorthand to designate the phases of his life: Octavius (64-44), Octavian (44-27), and Augustus (27BC- 14AD). 

79AD: On the feast day of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and blacksmiths, an earthquake is felt on Mount Vesuvius, along with a small plume of ash that does not linger. Revelers in Pompeii and Herculaneum continue the feast. The equivalent in the Greek pantheon is Hephaestus.

79AD: Mount Vesuvius erupts in a cataclysmic explosion of ash and pyroclastic flow that obliterates the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

410: The Visigoth army, under the command of Aleric, begins a three-day sack of Rome.

1456: Completion of the first printing of the Gutenberg Bible.

1607: Death of Bartholomew Gosnold (b.1562). An early gentleman-explorer of the New World, he sailed with Walter Raleigh and was friends with Richard Hakluyt, who wrote extensive volumes on the early voyages of discovery. Gosnold pioneered a direct route to New England in 1602, touching in Maine, identifying and exploring Cape Cod, naming Martha’s Vineyard after his daughter, and returning back to England where he became the prime mover and planner for the eventual Virginia Colony at Jamestown in 1607. He commanded the expedition’s ship Godspeed on the transit to the New World. Although opposing John Smith’s initial location of the colony on Jamestown island, he nevertheless took a strong leadership role in making it a permanent settlement. He died of dysentery only four months after the landing.  

1609: Italian mathematician, astronomer, physicist, and inventor Galileo Galilei presents his first telescope to the Doge of Venice. It was a 3x magnification model, with hand-ground lenses carefully placed within a stable brass tube to give an upright (i.e. not inverted) image to the viewer’s eye. The instruments became very popular for surveying and navigation, providing a steady stream of income that supported Galileo’s other studies. He, himself, used a 30x instrument to make his discovery of four of the moons of Jupiter. His continuing observations and predictions of their movements proved a core theory of orbital mechanics, and thus the validity of Copernican heliocentricity.

1754: Birth of Banastre Tarleton (d.1833), the British Lieutenant-Colonel who distinguished himself during the American Revolution as an exceptionally brutal commander during the British Southern Campaign. His actions in that theater earned him the nickname of “Bloody Ban,” a result of the mass killing of American militia who were in the act of surrendering at the Battle of Waxhaw Creek in North Carolina. The action inflamed the rest of the colonies and led to the battle cry of “Tarleton’s Quarter!” when Americans came back into contact with the Redcoat army.

1793: The revolutionary French National Convention decrees a Levee en Masse, the first nation-wide military draft, in order to create an army large enough to fight the wars spawned by the overthrow of their monarchy. In defense of their own monarchies, Prussia and Austria declared war on France in April of 1792, By the summer of 1793 they were joined by Spain, Great Britain, Piedmont (Northern Italy), and the United Provinces (Netherlands). The military threat to France was significant. The Levee developed under the concept that the new political rights of French citizens brought with it new obligations to the state, which included mobilization of essentially the whole of society in support of France’s war efforts. The result was the world’s first citizen-army, whose performance shocked the much smaller professional corps of the monarchies, and led to France’s eventual domination of the European continent.

1812: Captain Issac Hull, commanding the frigate USS Constitution, engages the British heavy frigate HMS Guerriere off the coast of Nova Scotia and blasts her into a useless and splintered hulk, killing a third of her crew and sending shock waves throughout the Royal Navy. Continuing to close through the Briton’s early cannonades, Hull withheld the order to fire back until they were a mere 25 yards off, at which point he ordered a shattering broadside that swept Guerriere’s decks and almost immediately began her dismasting. Though damaged in the rigging, Constitution comes out of the battle essentially intact. During the battle, Guerriere’s cannonballs were seen bouncing off the stout oaken sides of the Constitution, prompting the cry, “Huzzah! Her sides are made of iron!”

1819: Death of Oliver Hazard Perry (b.1785), the hero of the Battle of Lake Erie, of malaria while surveying the Orinoco River in Venezuela. After his decisive defeat of British forces on the lake, his battle report was deliciously brief: “We have met the enemy and they are ours; two ships, two brigs, one schooner and one sloop.” Perry’s younger brother was Commodore Matthew C. Perry, who opened Japan to US trade in 1854. Later generations of the family included Commander John Rogers, Naval Aviator #2, and Calbraith Perry Rogers, the first person to fly an airplane across the United States.

1831: In Southampton County, the slave Nat Turner leads what he believes will be a God-inspired revolt to throw off the chains of slavery. After months of planning, he and a handful of compatriots during the night of 20-21^st of August begin to gather an “army” by stealthily moving from farm to farm, killing the whites with knives, axes and blunt instruments, and enjoining the now-freed slaves to join them to continue the process until they have enough forces for an expected stand-up fight with the inevitable militia pursuit.  By the time militia formed up in the morning, Turner’s forces had killed 55 whites and swelled their own ranks to approximately 70 slaves and free blacks. The rebellion was quickly suppressed the day after it started, but Turner escaped the dragnet until October 30^th, after which he was tried and executed on November 5^th. 

1834: Birth of Samuel Pierpont Langley (d.1906), astronomer, physicist, and aviation pioneer, whose unsuccessful attempts at flying a man-carrying heavier-than-air machine spoiled an otherwise distinguished career in science and as head of the Smithsonian Institution. The Aerodrome on which he staked his professional reputation was overweight, under-powered and under-controllable; it nearly killed its pilot twice. Its catapult launch from the roof of houseboat on the Potomac River was described as having flight characteristics akin to “a shovelful of mortar” as its ballistic trajectory took it directly to a watery grave. The Smithsonian Institution spent years in a campaign to prove Langley’s success ahead of the Wright Brothers, a campaign which they only recently conceded as false

1839: The French government, after granting Louis Daguerre a lifetime pension for his invention, announces that the Daguerreotype photographic process is “Free to All.” This is great news except in England, where Daguerre filed a patent a year earlier, which limited the island to only one licensed photographer through the life of the patent.

1839: Great Britain captures and occupies Hong Kong Island as a staging base in preparation for the First Opium War.
 
1848: Eight months after the discovery of loose gold near Coloma, California, the New York Herald became the first East Coast newspaper to announce the news to the rest of the world. The gold rush that began during this summer became a veritable flood of Easterners chartering clipper ships to San Francisco, which transformed the city from a sleepy fishing town and army post to a booming den of iniquity and gold-fueled wealth. Because of the one-way nature of commerce, hundreds of ships were left abandoned on the San Francisco waterfront, where their remains are still excavated today during many construction projects.

1851: After sailing across the Atlantic to meet the gentleman’s challenge issued by the Royal Yacht Squadron, the New York-based racing yacht America competes in the 53-mile Around the Isle of Wight sailing race to decisively win the silver cup, the “Auld Mug” that now bears its name: America’s Cup. The New York Yacht Club brings the trophy back to the United States, where they hold onto it until 1983: 25 separate competitive regattas spanning 132 years, comprising the longest winning streak of any sport in history. Witnessing the race finish, and listening to the dismay of her countrymen, Queen Victoria turned to the RYS commodore and asked who finished second. His famous reply: “There is no second, Your Majesty.”

1857: The Panic of 1857: a series of cascading bank failures brought on by a combination of a year-long recession, the Crimean War’s effect on US trade, collapsing banks, collapsing real estate market speculation brought on by railroad failures, collapsing grain prices, the loss of a ship carrying a huge shipment of gold from California and deep uncertainty about whether the US government could back up its debt obligations. As of this week, the stock market lost 66% of its 1852 value, which it did not recover until years after the conclusion of the Civil War. And there was the looming secession of the southern states.

1863: A carefully planned raid by rebel-Rebel gunmen, led by William Clark Quantrill, attacks the anti-slavery town of Lawrence, Kansas, burning a quarter of its buildings to the ground, killing over 200 military-aged men, and pillaging whatever remained. Quantrill’s Raid, also known as the Lawrence Massacre, became one of the bloodiest events in Kansas’ history, which had seen more than its share of abolitionist violence since the first Sack of Lawrence in 1856, and helped cement the title of “Bleeding Kansas” on that front line of the ongoing battle between expanding or restricting slavery in the western territories.

1882: Debut performance of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece, the 1812 Overture.

1902: Theodore Roosevelt became the first US President to ride in an automobile.

1914: Two weeks after Albert I, King of Belgium, denies the Imperial German Army passage into France, the Germans occupy Brussels.

1914: The Battle of Mons (Belgium): After the declaration of war earlier this month, Great Britain began transporting their army across the Channel to Belgium with the mission to hold the left end of the French line. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) under General John French was only 80,000 strong, and organized into two Corps, but they were by far the best-trained professional army anywhere, known especially for the infantry’s skill in rapid-fire rifle marksmanship. After first contact between British bicycle scouts and German snipers on the 21^st, the BEF surged forward to defend the Mons-Conde Canal outside the city of Mons in order to prevent the German right from turning the French line. The BEF was outnumbered 3:1, but were able during the course of the battle to inflict tremendous casualties that halted the German advance in its tracks on its first assault. The Germans then regrouped into open formation and surged forward again, at which point the British position became increasingly untenable. During the night the BEF began an orderly retreat to a pre-established line where they expected to make their next stand, but with the concurrent retreat of the French, the new position could not be held. The retreat continued for two weeks and eventually covered over 250 miles. The Battle of Mons is considered a tactical victory for the BEF, in that they properly held their positions for 24 hours, significantly delaying and inflicting severe casualties on the German advance.

1920: Founding of the National Football League.

1927: Execution of Italian anarchists and convicted murderers Sacco and Vanzetti.

1938: The “Iron Horse” of the New York Yankees, Lou Gehrig, smashes his 23^rd grand slam home run, a record that stood until Yankee slugger Alex Rodriguez hit his 24th in the 2013 season. At the close of his career, Rodriguez finished with a total of 25 of them.

1939: The foreign ministers from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression treaty between the two dictatorships that conveniently contains a secret clause that divides between them the Baltic States, Finland, Romania and Poland. 

1940: Death of Leon Trotsky (b.1879),  Vladimir Lenin’s right-hand* man, organizer and commander of the Red Army, Commissar of Foreign Affairs who negotiated the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Imperial Germany, and staunch opponent of Joseph Stalin’s rise to power in the Communist Party leadership. Trotsky was probably the most clear-eyed of all the original revolutionary cadre during the Russian Revolution, and bitterly resented Stalin’s emphasis on consolidating Communism in Russia, rather than continuing along the pure path of global revolution. “In inner-party politics, these methods lead, as we shall yet see, to this: the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a “dictator” substitutes himself for the central committee.” Trotsky wrote against Stalin after he was exiled to Mexico: “Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other… In Stalin each [Soviet bureaucrat] easily finds himself. But Stalin also finds in each one a small part of his own spirit. Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality.” This week, the bureaucracy had had enough, and NKVD agent Roman Mercader connived his way into Trotsky’s Mexican home and plunged an ice-axe into his head. Amazingly, it did not kill him immediately; after a futile surgery, Trotsky’s last words were, “Stalin has finally accomplished the task he attempted unsuccessfully before.”

1942: Opening guns in the Battle of Stalingrad, putting permanently to rest the abiding fiction of the 1939 pact.

1944: After four years of German occupation, and two and a half months after the landings in Normandy, Allied armies liberated Paris. The local German commander, in an uncharacteristically humane decision, did not burn the city to the ground during his evacuation.

1945: Death of Baptist missionary and OSS agent John Birch (b.1918), at the hands of communist Chinese forces. He is considered the first casualty of the Cold War, and 14 years after his death a rabid anti-communist organization adopted his name as their own. It is too bad for his legacy; during his years in China, Birch did great and honest work for his faith and his country, and was disgusted by the depredations of the Chinese communists in the immediate aftermath of the Japanese occupation.

1947: Death of Ettore Bugatti (b.1881), an Italian engineer and automobile designer, who set up a French company bearing his name that produced some of the most successful and beautiful cars of the 1920s-30s. The name Bugatti was associated with precision and high performance throughout the pre-war period. The marque was revived in 1987 by an Italian entrepreneur who, in 1996, designed and built the EB 110 supercar. Volkswagen Group acquired the marque in 1998 and used its engineering prowess to produce the Veyron 16.4, the world’s fastest production car (top speed just shy of 270 mph).

1948: The House Un-American Activities Committee held its first televised Congressional hearing; a dramatic confrontation ensued between Whittaker Chambers, a former US Communist Party member, and Alger Hiss. Chambers testified under subpoena before the Committee (HUAC) that Hiss had secretly been a communist while in federal service. Hiss categorically denied the charge and subsequently sued Chambers for libel. The jury returned from its deliberations on January 21, 1950. The verdict? Guilty on two counts of perjury.

1953: In coordination with Great Britain’s MI-6, the CIA assists in the coup d’etat of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh, a virulent Persian nationalist who campaigned incessantly against Britain’s economic ties with Iran. His 1951 election brought with it a host of Progressive social reforms and wholesale nationalization of the oil industry, which was not seen in Britain’s best interests. Winston Churchill let it be known to the U.S. that Mosaddegh was also leaning heavily communist, which helped secure American interests. 

1968: Increasingly concerned about the dangerous liberalism undertaken by Czech premier Alexander Dubcek, the Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia in a vivid demonstration of the Brezhnev Doctrine, wherein the USSR retains the right to “protect the gains of the socialist revolution” in any country it could reach.

1968: France detonates its first thermonuclear bomb, the CANOPUS test in the Polynesian test range, becoming the fifth nation to do so. In typical French fashion, photography is the most artistic to come out of the atmospheric test programs of the nuclear powers.

1977: Death of Groucho Marx (b.1890).

1981: Two F-14 Tomcats flying from USS Nimitz (CVN-68) shoot down two Libyan SU-22 Fitters during a Freedom of Navigation exercise in the Gulf of Sidra.

1991: The August Coup– First full day of the coup attempt by Soviet hardliners against the reform government of Mikhail Gorbachev. On this day the Red Army was ordered into Moscow to shell the “White House” parliament building. Moscow mayor Boris Yeltsin climbs up onto a tank with a bullhorn and exhorts the crowd of over 100,000 to keep demonstrating for reform and freedom.

1991: Estonia releases a statement re-asserting its status as an independent Baltic nation, in defiance of the Soviet Union’s 1941 annexation of it and its two sister republics.
 
2007: Death of hotel and real estate mogul, Leona Helmsley (b.1920), the Queen of Mean, who famously declaimed at her tax-evasion trial: “Only the little people pay taxes.”

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Wayne Creed

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