History Notes this week of March 6

241 B.C.  —  Battle of the Aegates Islands

Roman triremes sink the Carthaginian fleet in the Battle of the Aegates Islands off the western tip of Sicily, bringing to an end the First Punic War.

This decisive naval victory gave Rome control of Sicily — its first overseas province — and established it as the dominant Mediterranean power. Carthage, forced to pay a crushing war indemnity, would nurse its grievances for another generation before Hannibal launched his famous invasion of Italy in the Second Punic War.

321 A.D.  —  Constantine Decrees the Day of the Sun

Emperor Constantine I issues a decree for a universal day for the worship of the sun. The edict was carefully designed to give pagans and Christians a common day for worship of Sol Invictus, who was Constantine’s monotheistic ‘spiritual patron’ before he became a Christian. The sun-day was the also the first day of the Roman week. Constantine’s personal life straddled both camps; the edict effectively confirmed and formalized the Christian transition of the traditional Lord’s Day Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday in honor of the Resurrection.

Constantine’s genius lay in bridging competing religious worlds during a period of profound social flux. His 313 Edict of Milan had already legalized Christianity throughout the Empire; this later decree wove Christian and pagan observance into a single civic calendar. Sunday remains the near-universal day of rest and worship across the Western world as a direct result.

1276  —  Augsburg Declared an Imperial Free City

Augsburg is declared an Imperial Free City. It went on to become home to the Fugger banking empire and a significant mercantile and university industry. It is the only city in Germany to have its own legal holiday, celebrating the Peace of Augsburg on August 8th every year. The rest of Germany has to work on that day, poor souls.

The Fugger family, based in Augsburg, became arguably the most powerful bankers in 16th-century Europe — financing Habsburg emperors, funding the papacy, and bankrolling entire wars. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) — the holiday commemorated there to this day — was a landmark agreement that, for the first time, formally recognized Lutheranism alongside Catholicism within the Holy Roman Empire.

1507  —  Death of Cesare Borgia

Death of Cesare Borgia (b.1475), son of Pope Alexander VI, brother of the notorious femme fatale Lucrecia Borgia, and one of the primary hereditary princes studied by Nicolo Machiavelli in his classic treatise, The Prince. The Borgias represented the epitome of the self-perpetuating religio-politico-criminal power centers in the north-central tier of Italy, coming often into contact and conflict with the equally intense Medici dynasty of Florence. Machiavelli’s interest in Cesare’s princely career zeroed in on the fact that while his ruthlessness and cunning was effective enough to keep himself and his cronies in power, in the end, what Machiavelli described as his ‘princely virtue,’ that is, his political power, was power actually endowed by the pope, power that was lost on Alexander’s death and the accession of a new pope who did not have the Borgia family interest at the center of his papacy.

  Cesare died as he had lived — violently — ambushed and killed in a skirmish near Viana in Navarre. He was just 31. His sister Lucrezia, by contrast, underwent a remarkable transformation after her brother’s fall, becoming a generous patroness of the arts in Ferrara and earning genuine admiration as a duchess. History, as usual, was unkind to the woman.

1702  —  Birth of Anne Bonney, Pirate

Birth of Anne Bonney (d. circa 1733) an Irish-American pirate of some renown.

Anne Bonney sailed with the notorious Calico Jack Rackham in the Caribbean and was renowned — alongside fellow female pirate Mary Read — for fighting ferociously when their ship was captured in 1720. When Rackham and his male crew were reportedly found drunk and incapacitated, the two women were reportedly the only ones who put up a real fight. Rackham was hanged; Anne’s fate after her trial remains a historical mystery.

1708  —  The Last Royal Veto in British History

Britain’s Queen Anne withholds the Royal Assent for the Scottish Militia Bill, the last time a British monarch vetoes legislation. Coming less than a year after the 1707 Acts of Union with restive Scotland, one can understand her reluctance to sanction an independent armed force in the northern reaches of her realm.

In the three centuries since, no British monarch has dared refuse Royal Assent — making it, in practice, a constitutional formality rather than an active power. The unwritten British constitution operates on the understanding that the Crown acts on the advice of ministers; this silent surrender of royal veto power is one of the defining moments in the evolution of parliamentary democracy.

1726  —  Birth of Admiral Richard ‘Black Dick’ Howe

Birth of Admiral Richard Howe (d.1799), brother of General Sir William Howe. The siblings commanded the British navy and army forces respectively during the opening hostilities of the American Revolution. Admiral Howe was nominally sympathetic to the American cause. When a peace initiative with the Continental Congress failed, he resigned his commission, but it was not accepted before the French Revolution broke out in 1789, and Howe was assigned to command the Channel Fleet. He led several notable victories against the French, but his greatest victory came at home, when he almost single-handedly ended the Great Mutiny in 1797. His swarthy complexion earned him the nickname of ‘Black Dick’ Howe.

The Great Mutiny of 1797 — in which sailors of the Royal Navy at Spithead and the Nore staged a mass strike over pay, conditions, and rotten food — was one of the most alarming moments for the British government during the Napoleonic era. Howe’s personal intervention, walking ship to ship and addressing the grievances of individual sailors, defused the crisis where threats of force had failed. He remains one of the most respected flag officers in Royal Navy history.

1781  —  Herschel Discovers Uranus

German-born British musician, composer, mathematician, and astronomer Frederick William Herschel discovers the planet Uranus, using a telescope of his own design and manufacture. The brilliant polymath had been studying and cataloging the rings of Saturn, and more particularly, the phenomenon of double stars, when he happened upon a non-stellar object that appeared to move in the planetary plane. This was the first discovery of a planet visible only through a telescope. Herschel followed this with subsequent discoveries of multiple moons of Saturn, and a large number of nebulae in deep space.

  Herschel initially named the new planet ‘Georgium Sidus’ — George’s Star — in honor of King George III, which was not warmly received outside of Britain. The name Uranus, suggested by astronomer Johann Bode, eventually stuck. The discovery doubled the known size of the solar system overnight, and was the first planetary discovery since antiquity — an epochal moment in the history of science.

1792  —  Birth of Sir John Herschel

Birth of British polymath Sir John Herschel (d.1871), astronomer, chemist, mathematician and early adapter to the new science of photography.

John was the son of Uranus-discoverer William Herschel, and proved equally formidable. He cataloged thousands of nebulae and star clusters in both the northern and southern hemispheres, invented the cyanotype photographic process (the blueprint), coined the terms ‘photography,’ ‘negative,’ and ‘positive,’ and corresponded extensively with Charles Darwin. He was one of the last true universal scholars before science became irreversibly specialized.

1841  —  The Amistad Ruling

The United States Supreme Court rules that the West Africans who mutinied and captured their ship Amistad were enslaved illegally. The case was a huge step forward for the abolitionist movement in the U.S.

Former President John Quincy Adams, then 73, came out of retirement to argue the case before the Supreme Court on behalf of the Africans — delivering a two-day argument widely considered one of the great legal addresses in American history. The 35 surviving Africans were eventually repatriated to Sierra Leone in 1842. The case galvanized the abolitionist movement and is considered a pivotal moment on the long road to the Civil War.

1848  —  Senate Ratifies Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

The United States Senate ratifies the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

The treaty, which formally ended the Mexican-American War, transferred roughly 525,000 square miles of territory — present-day California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming — to the United States in exchange for $15 million. The acquisition instantly reignited the most toxic political question in American life: would the new territories be slave or free? It set the stage directly for the crisis of 1850, the Compromise, and ultimately the Civil War.

1849  —  Birth of Luther Burbank

Birth of American botanist Luther Burbank (d.1926), who invented, via cross-fertilization, grafting and hybridization, over 800 new plant species. Genetic engineering, if you will, but more naturally.

Among Burbank’s most enduring creations are the Russet Burbank potato — now the dominant potato variety used for French fries worldwide — the Shasta daisy, and the Santa Rosa plum. Working without formal scientific training, Burbank’s empirical genius anticipated the principles of Mendelian genetics and presaged the modern science of plant breeding by decades.

1850  —  Webster’s ‘Seventh of March’ Speech

Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts rises on the floor of the Senate to give an impassioned speech in support of the developing Compromise of 1850. As the debate raged on, this speech is often referred back to as his ‘Seventh of March Speech.’

Webster’s speech was an act of political courage and self-sacrifice — his support of the compromise’s Fugitive Slave provisions was widely condemned by New England abolitionists and effectively ended his presidential ambitions. He famously declared: ‘I speak today for the preservation of the Union. Hear me for my cause.’ The Compromise of 1850 bought the country roughly a decade of uneasy peace before the Civil War made it all moot.

1855  —  Birth of Percival Lowell

Birth of American astronomer Percival Lowell (d.1916), who became famous in the public imagination from his detailed observations of the surface of Mars, on which he surmised were the remains of a complex series of canals indicating the presence of a sentient civilization on the red planet. Although his canal theory has since been disproven, it remains a staple of science fiction writing to this day. More importantly, Lowell’s mathematical modelling of the orbits of Uranus and Neptune set the conditions for the search for Planet-X, a search finally vindicated two decades later by Clyde Tombaugh, working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff.

Lowell’s Mars canal obsession — which he developed into a popular trilogy of books — captured the public imagination and directly inspired H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom series. Though he died before his Planet X was found, the observatory he founded and funded discovered Pluto in 1930, fourteen years after his death. The ‘PL’ in Pluto is partly a tribute to Percival Lowell.

March 8, 1862  —  CSS Virginia Attacks the Union Fleet

The Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia (ex-USS Merrimack) sorties from the Gosport Navy Yard in Portsmouth and attacks the Union fleet blockading the mouth of the James River. Her first target is USS Cumberland, which she sinks by ramming. Virginia then attacks USS Congress, which puts up a stiff fight, damaging Virginia’s stack and two cannons, but without creating appreciable damage to her iron cladding. Congress’ captain intentionally runs the ship aground and surrenders. While offloading prisoners, a Union shore battery at Newport News Point suddenly opens fire on Virginia. In reply, Virginia fires red-hot shot into the stricken Congress, which explodes and burns to the waterline. As Virginia begins her transit back to Norfolk for battle damage repairs, she commences a third attack, this time against USS Minnesota, whose captain tried to escape but ran aground on a sandbank. Being late in the day, Virginia left her quarry for the night and continued down the Elizabeth River, with plans to complete the destruction of the Union fleet the next morning. Meanwhile, the newly-commissioned USS Monitor is enroute under tow from New York, and about to enter the Chesapeake at Cape Charles.

The shock of Virginia’s rampage sent panic through Washington. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton reportedly feared she would steam up the Potomac and shell the Capitol. In a single afternoon, wooden warships — the backbone of every navy in the world — had been rendered obsolete. Naval warfare would never be the same.

March 9, 1862  —  Monitor vs. Virginia — The First Battle of Ironclads

Fresh from her shocking destruction of the Union blockading fleet off of Newport News Point, and with basic battle repairs made overnight, CSS Virginia steams out to finish the job on the remaining Union ships. But unknown to her crew, the radical USS Monitor had already raised steam off of Fort Monroe to protect the damaged USS Minnesota. A furious gun battle raged between the two ironclads for four hours, with neither ship doing appreciable harm to the other. Late in the battle, Virginia scored a hit on Monitor’s pilot house, blinding her captain, Lieutenant John Worden. Command passed to his XO, Lieutenant Samuel Green, who turned the ship back to continue the fight. Virginia, constrained by falling tide, broke off her attack and returned to Norfolk. Monitor, under orders to protect Minnesota, did not pursue. The dramatic battle, watched by thousands on the Hampton Roads shorelines, was the world’s first clash of iron-armored warships. It ended with neither ship decisively victorious. Neither ship engaged in combat again. As Union forces advanced on Norfolk in May 1862, the crew of Virginia stripped her of her cannons, ran her aground on the flats at Craney Island, and blew her to smithereens. USS Monitor sank off of Cape Hatteras the following December.

The two-day battle at Hampton Roads was arguably the most consequential naval engagement in American history. Every major naval power on earth immediately began converting their wooden fleets to iron. USS Monitor’s innovative rotating gun turret became the template for warship design for the next century — you can trace a direct line from Worden’s little cheese-box-on-a-raft to the great battleships of World War II.

1865  —  The Confederacy Authorizes Black Soldiers

With their fighting prowess in dire straits, the Confederate Congress authorizes the enlistment of black troops into the Confederate Army, with the promise of freedom as the primary motivation of the enlistment package. The law stipulated that the enlistment and release from slavery was contingent on agreement of the slave’s master, but coming this late in the War between the States, with the South teetering on collapse and the Emancipation Proclamation promising freedom already, the act did little to draw the South’s black population to fight on its behalf.

The act exposed the Confederacy’s central ideological contradiction with brutal clarity: a nation founded on the premise that Black men were suited only for bondage was now asking them to die in its defense. General Robert E. Lee himself had advocated for the measure months earlier, arguing military necessity demanded it. He surrendered at Appomattox less than a month later, on April 9, 1865.

1875  —  Birth of Maurice Ravel

Birth of French composer Maurice Ravel (d.1937). I bet you can hum his most famous work, can’t you?

That would be Bolero (1928), commissioned as a ballet piece and built entirely from a single, relentlessly repeated melody over a crescendo that lasts nearly 15 minutes — one of the most audacious compositional conceits in classical music. Ravel considered it a somewhat frivolous experiment; audiences made it one of the most performed orchestral works in the repertoire. He is also celebrated for his Piano Concerto in G, La Valse, and his orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

1876  —  Alexander Graham Bell Makes the First Phone Call

Alexander Graham Bell makes the first telephone call on his new invention with those immortal words: ‘Mr. Watson, come here! I want to see you!’ Watson responded, thus completing the first electrical transmission of two-way speech.

Characteristically, Bell had filed his patent for the telephone just three days earlier — on February 14, 1876 — beating rival inventor Elisha Gray to the patent office by a matter of hours, a coincidence (or not) that sparked decades of bitter legal dispute. Bell went on to co-found AT&T and was awarded the first-ever gold medal of the National Geographic Society. He refused to keep a telephone in his personal study, finding it an intrusion on his work.

1888  —  The Great Blizzard of 1888

First day of The Great White Hurricane, also known as the Great Blizzard of 1888. The storm eventually dumped between 40 and 50 inches of snow from the upper Chesapeake through the Canadian Maritime provinces. Forty knot winds whipped up drifts up to 50 feet deep, with numerous reports of three story houses becoming completely covered. Commerce was paralyzed for over a week and over 400 deaths are attributed to the storm, 200 in NYC alone. Minimum central pressure was 29.00 in.Hg or 982 mb.

The storm’s devastation — particularly the paralysis of New York City, where elevated trains were frozen solid and streets became impassable canyons — directly inspired the construction of the New York City subway system, which opened in 1904. The argument was simple: an underground railway cannot be buried in snow. The Great Blizzard of 1888 is thus a founding event of modern urban transit infrastructure in America.

1899  —  Birth of Gracie Doll

Birth of Gracie Doll (d.1977), part of a German acting family whose careers climaxed in 1939 with the release of The Wizard of Oz.

Gracie Doll was one of the many ‘little people’ performers recruited from vaudeville and entertainment circuits across the country to play the Munchkins in MGM’s landmark production. The shoot was notoriously chaotic — the cast was large, the costumes elaborate, and the Technicolor cameras unforgiving. The film, of course, became one of the most beloved in cinema history, and the Munchkin performers’ contribution to it has grown in recognition and appreciation over the decades.

1903  —  Birth of Lawrence Welk

Birth of band leader and entertainer Lawrence Welk (d.1992) in Strassburg, North Dakota. A native German speaker (his parents emigrated from a German-speaking region of Ukraine), his English elocution was always entertaining, beginning songs with ‘A-one and a-two…’ and finishing a piece with ‘Wunnerful, wunnerful!’ We Boomer kids probably remember his TV show’s ‘champagne music’ as pretty hokey, but Grandma and Grandpa made sure we always watched it with them. The Lawrence Welk Show remains in syndication with PBS.

The Lawrence Welk Show ran on ABC from 1955 to 1971 — 16 years in prime time — and then in syndication for another decade, making it one of the longest-running musical variety programs in television history. Welk’s wholesome, polished brand of music was deliberately countercultural during the rock-and-roll era, and he never apologized for it. He made his performers dress modestly, banned suggestive lyrics, and ran a tight ship — which his devoted older audience absolutely adored.

1906  —  Death of Susan B. Anthony

Death of Susan B. Anthony (b.1820), one of the leading forces of the Women’s Suffrage movement, and the first actual woman (as opposed to a stylized Liberty) to be featured on U.S. currency, the quarter-sized 1979 dollar coin. Of some discomfort to the current radical feminist movement today was her harsh denunciation of conditions that lead to rationalizing abortion, to say nothing of the act itself.

Anthony never saw her cause triumphant — the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote was not ratified until 1920, fourteen years after her death. Her last public speech, delivered at her 86th birthday celebration, ended with what became her epitaph: ‘Failure is impossible.’ She had been arrested and tried in 1872 for the audacity of casting a ballot in a federal election, and spent the remaining 34 years of her life making sure it would never again be considered a crime.

1912  —  Amundsen Announces He Reached the South Pole

Norwegian Antarctic explorer Roald Amundsen re-establishes contact with the outside world, with the electrifying report that he and his expedition reached the South Pole on the 18th of December, 1911.

The race to the South Pole is one of the great dramas of the Age of Exploration. Amundsen’s rival, British Royal Navy Captain Robert Falcon Scott, arrived at the Pole just 34 days after the Norwegians — only to find Amundsen’s tent and a Norwegian flag waiting for him. Scott and all four of his companions perished on the return journey, just eleven miles from a supply depot. Amundsen’s meticulous planning and use of sled dogs had made the difference; Scott’s tragic romanticism cost five brave men their lives.

1913  —  Death of Harriet Tubman

Death of the great abolitionist Harriet Tubman (b.1820), founder of the Underground Railroad, whose personal efforts freed more than 70 slaves from their servitude in thirteen separate expeditions. During the Civil War, Tubman served as a nurse and advisor to Union forces in South Carolina, and acted as a scout on the Combahee River Raid that freed over 700 slaves from their plantations. Her exploits before and during the war made her widely known in the press. In her later years she became deeply engaged in the women’s suffrage movement, working closely with Susan B. Anthony and other prominent leaders of the movement.

Tubman is one of the most remarkable figures in American history by any measure: an escaped slave who voluntarily returned South thirteen times, who ran intelligence operations for the Union Army, who survived a severe head injury inflicted by an overseer that caused narcoleptic episodes for the rest of her life — and who never, in all her missions, lost a single passenger on the Railroad. Her reputed maxim: ‘I never ran my train off the track, and I never lost a passenger.’

1916  —  Pancho Villa Raids Columbus, New Mexico

Mexican gang leader Pancho Villa leads 500 caballeros on a raid into Columbus, New Mexico.

The Columbus Raid was the first armed attack on American soil by a foreign military force since the War of 1812. President Woodrow Wilson responded by dispatching Brigadier General John ‘Black Jack’ Pershing on the Punitive Expedition into Mexico with 10,000 troops — the last major deployment of U.S. cavalry in military history, and the first use of aircraft in American combat operations. Pershing never caught Villa. The experience, however, prepared both Pershing and the U.S. Army for the far larger conflict they would soon enter in Europe.

1918  —  Russia Moves Its Capital Back to Moscow

Fresh from their capitulation to the Central Powers in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the new communist government of Russia moves the capital of the country from the splendor of Saint Petersburg, where it was founded 215 years earlier by Peter the Great, back to the ancient Kremlin fortress of Moscow.

The move was driven by practical fear as much as ideology: German forces, despite the treaty, were still advancing, and Petrograd (as St. Petersburg had been renamed in 1914) was dangerously close to the front. Moscow, deep in the interior, was far more defensible. The city would not regain its status as Russia’s cultural and symbolic capital — rechristened Leningrad in 1924 — until the Soviet collapse in 1991, when it was renamed St. Petersburg once again.

1922  —  Birth of Cyd Charisse

Birth of Cyd Charisse (d.2008). The actress and dancer was best known for her films with Fred Astaire and as the Scottish mountain girl who falls in love with Gene Kelly in Brigadoon (1954).

Charisse trained as a ballerina from childhood and brought a technical precision and sensual elegance to Hollywood dance that set her apart from nearly every contemporary. Fred Astaire, not a man given to hyperbole about partners, called her ‘beautiful dynamite.’ Her extended dance sequence with Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain (1952) — the seductive ‘Broadway Melody’ dream ballet — is widely regarded as one of the finest dance sequences ever committed to film.

1928  —  Collapse of the St. Francis Dam

Exactly two years after its completion, the St. Francis Dam in Southern California suddenly collapses, sending a 120 foot tall wall of water tearing down the San Francisquito Canyon, completely wiping the town of Santa Paula off the map, and ending its run into the Pacific Ocean near the border between Ventura and Los Angeles counties. The torrent of 12.4 billion gallons of water killed a confirmed 375 persons, with over 300 more never accounted for. Bodies washed ashore all along the coast as far south as Mexico.

The dam’s builder, William Mulholland — the real-life inspiration behind the sinister water baron figure in Chinatown — personally inspected the dam the morning of the collapse and declared it safe. The failure destroyed his reputation and career; he resigned shortly thereafter and lived out his final years in remorse and seclusion. The disaster remains the second-deadliest civil engineering failure in American history, after the Johnstown Flood of 1889.

1933  —  FDR’s First Fireside Chat

Newly inaugurated President Franklin D. Roosevelt sets up a wireless studio in the White House and makes the first of his 30 Fireside Chats, a media venue that made the most of his dulcet voice and political savvy to speak directly to the American people. It also permitted significant public exposure without the concomitant exposure of his crippling polio.

Roosevelt had been inaugurated just eight days earlier. His first chat explained his decision to declare a national banking holiday and the mechanics of the subsequent Emergency Banking Act — the kind of dry financial policy explanation that might have glazed over the eyes of a Depression-weary nation. Instead, it was warmly received. When banks reopened the following Monday, deposits outnumbered withdrawals for the first time in years. The power of direct, reassuring presidential communication had been established.

1934  —  Birth of Yuri Gagarin

Birth of Yuri Gagarin (d.1968). In 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut became the first human to ‘slip the surly bonds of earth’ and orbit our planet in the vacuum of space. He died under mysterious circumstances in 1968. Unsurprisingly, the Soviet Union wouldn’t release information on his death.

Gagarin’s 108-minute flight aboard Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961 stunned the West and electrified the world. The son of a carpenter and a milkmaid, his working-class origins were a gift to Soviet propagandists. His easy smile and natural warmth made him an international celebrity. The circumstances of his death — a routine training flight in a MiG-15 that went unaccountably wrong — have fueled speculation ever since, with theories ranging from drunk air traffic controllers to deliberate sabotage.

1938  —  The Anschluss — Germany Absorbs Austria

German troops en masse cross the border with Austria, essentially conquering the country without firing a shot. The Nazi regime refers to the action as the Anschluss, literally a ‘connection’ that had been a pressure point between Germany and Austria since the end of the Great War, and for which a plebiscite was scheduled for the 11th March but then abruptly ignored when the reality of the imminent German occupation took hold. Adolf Hitler himself crossed the border at his home town of Braunau and spent the night in Lintz. Over the next three days Hitler made a triumphant automobile tour of Austria, finishing the annexation of the country at a rapturous mass rally in Vienna.

The enthusiastic crowds greeting Hitler in Vienna were an uncomfortable fact that historians have wrestled with ever since. Austria would spend much of the Cold War era hiding behind the ‘first victim of Nazi aggression’ narrative — technically true in a legal sense, but belied by the cheering throngs. The Western democracies’ failure to respond meaningfully emboldened Hitler for the next step: Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, six months later.

1940  —  Birth of Chuck Norris

Birth of Chuck Norris.

Born Carlos Ray Norris in Ryan, Oklahoma, he served as a U.S. Air Force police officer, where he first began studying martial arts. He went on to become a Tang Soo Do world champion before turning to acting. His film and television career — most notably Walker, Texas Ranger — made him a global action icon. He also became one of the internet’s most beloved subjects of absurdist humor, giving rise to the ‘Chuck Norris Facts’ meme that made him, improbably, a beloved figure far beyond his viewing demographic.

1941  —  FDR Signs the Lend-Lease Act

FDR signs into law the Lend-Lease program to start the process of shoring up Great Britain’s defenses in the face of relentless Nazi pressure. The act is not universally applauded within the United States.

Lend-Lease was one of the most consequential legislative acts of the 20th century. By the war’s end, the United States had extended roughly $50 billion in aid (approximately $800 billion in today’s dollars) to 30-plus Allied nations — Britain, the Soviet Union, and China being the principal recipients. The programme effectively made the United States the ‘Arsenal of Democracy,’ as Roosevelt had promised, while keeping American soldiers out of the fight for another nine months, until Pearl Harbor made neutrality impossible.

1942  —  MacArthur Leaves Corregidor

After two weeks of ignoring FDR’s direct presidential order, General Douglas MacArthur abandons Corregidor under the cover of darkness, leaving command of the besieged U.S. and Philippine armies to Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright. The island fortress had been under essentially continuous Japanese artillery and aerial bombardment since December 29th, and Roosevelt reasoned that a living MacArthur would be more useful in leading the eventual re-conquest of the Philippines than a captured or killed MacArthur. On his arrival in Australia, MacArthur issued his most memorable promise: ‘People of the Philippines, I shall return.’ Wainwright held out under increasingly dire conditions until surrendering the citadel on May 6th.

MacArthur’s escape — carried out by PT boat through Japanese-controlled waters and then by B-17 — was both physically daring and politically fraught. The men he left behind were bitterly critical; many felt abandoned. Wainwright and the survivors of Corregidor and Bataan endured the notorious Bataan Death March and years of brutal imprisonment. MacArthur returned, as promised, wading ashore at Leyte on October 20, 1944, in a moment staged with characteristic theatrical flair.

1950  —  Birth of Franco Harris

Birth of Franco Harris (d.2022). There may be a couple of you out there who are fans of his former football team. Maybe.

Franco Harris played 12 seasons for the Pittsburgh Steelers, won four Super Bowls, and was a cornerstone of one of the greatest dynasties in NFL history. He is perhaps most immortalized by the ‘Immaculate Reception’ — his miraculous catch of a deflected pass off the turf in the final seconds of the 1972 AFC Divisional playoff against the Oakland Raiders, which remains one of the most debated and celebrated plays in football history. He died in December 2022, just days before the 50th anniversary of the play — a loss that struck Pittsburgh deeply.

1954  —  Siege of Dien Bien Phu Begins

Under the direction of General Vo Nguyen Giap, the communist Viet Minh army opens the siege of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu.

The French command had established the base at Dien Bien Phu deliberately, intending to lure the Viet Minh into a set-piece battle where French firepower would prevail. General Giap obliged — but the French had catastrophically underestimated his ability to haul heavy artillery through the jungle and up the surrounding hills. The 57-day siege ended with the fall of the fortress on May 7, 1954 — a defeat that ended French colonial ambitions in Indochina and, fatefully, opened the door for American involvement.

1957  —  Cuban Students Storm Batista’s Presidential Palace

In Havana, Cuban student revolutionaries storm the presidential palace of President Fulgencio Batista.

The attack, organized by the Revolutionary Directorate, very nearly succeeded — Batista escaped to the upper floors of the palace by a matter of minutes while fierce fighting raged below. More than 35 attackers were killed in the assault and its aftermath. The attack was carried out independently of Fidel Castro’s separate revolutionary movement in the Sierra Maestra mountains; the two factions had a complicated, often competitive relationship right up to Batista’s flight from Cuba on New Year’s Eve, 1958.

1959  —  Birth of Barbie

Birth of Barbie, the fashion doll, designed by Charlotte Johnson. 67 years and 1,000,000,000 (+) (with a B) sales later, she remains Mattel Inc.’s most profitable line of business.

Barbie — full name Barbara Millicent Roberts — debuted at the American International Toy Fair in New York City on this date. She was the brainchild of Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler, who was inspired watching her daughter Barbara play with paper dolls and imagining adult lives for them. Handler’s insight was revolutionary: before Barbie, nearly all dolls were babies or children, and girls played at being mothers. Barbie let little girls imagine being astronauts, presidents, and surgeons instead.

1985  —  Gorbachev Becomes Soviet General Secretary

Accession of Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party.

At 54, Gorbachev was the youngest member of the Politburo and a deliberate break from the succession of elderly, ailing leaders who had preceded him. His twin policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) were intended to revitalize the Soviet system — instead, they unleashed forces that dissolved it. Within six years, the Berlin Wall had fallen, the Warsaw Pact had collapsed, and the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist. Whether this was the greatest geopolitical accident of the 20th century, or its most farsighted act of statesmanship, historians are still debating.

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Wayne Creed

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