History Notes this week of Nov 1

1512: The Sistine Chapel in the Vatican opens for public visitation for the first time since the completion of the great ceiling fresco by Michelangelo.

1517: Augustinian monk Martin Luther makes public his objection to the sale of indulgences by posting on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg a list of 95 “theses” which outlined a comprehensive, biblical-based dissent of papal authority, and set in motion the spiritual, intellectual and political upheaval we now know as the Protestant Reformation.

1520: Fifteen months after departing on his epic voyage of discovery, Ferdinand Magellan enters the narrow strait that now bears his name. The “shortcut” between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans cuts off significant distance from the more navigationally straightforward route around Cape Horn, and it avoids the ferocious westerlies and high sea states of the Horn passage. On the other hand, the narrowness of the channel and those same prevailing westerlies make the strait a particularly difficult passage in a sailing vessel, especially for a square-rigged design that does not go well to windward.

1587: Leiden University, the oldest university in the Netherlands, opens its library. After its initial founding in 1575*, the university itself quickly became the intellectual hub of the Reformation period. It remains on the top tier of academic and research universities world-wide. Leiden, by the way, is one of the most enchanting cities in Holland: canals, windmills, manual drawbridges, Smart cars, thousands of Dutch on bikes, Rembrandt’s hometown…what more could you want?

1605: Discovery, with only hours to spare, of The Gunpowder Plot, an audacious conspiracy by leading British Catholics to blow up the Houses of Parliament and King James I himself, in hopes of leading a violent restoration of Catholicism in Great Britain.
The thirteen conspirators spent months coordinating (in addition to strategic kidnappings, escape routes, and proclamations) access to a large basement storeroom located directly beneath the House of Lords and filling it with multiple barrels of gunpowder, which remained hidden behind firewood and coal. On the night of 4-5 November, the point man for the detonation, Guy Fawkes, worked his way toward the storeroom, disguised as a firewood delivery man. He was stopped and questioned by a watchman but was allowed to continue his work.
Late into the evening, alerted by concerned (ironically, Catholic) Parliamentarians, a renewed search of the Parliament “above and below” the chambers found Fawkes in the room directly below the Lords, carrying a slow match and a pocket-watch, dressed in black and wearing riding spurs. He was arrested on the spot, and when news of the arrest was made public, the Gunpowder conspirators vainly scattered into hiding. They were systematically arrested, tortured, confessed, were tried and found guilty of treason, and then executed by hanging, drawing and quartering, with their limbs sent to the far corners of the realm and the rest of their mortal remains burned into ash.
The successful discovery and destruction of the plot led to immediate celebrations throughout England. One year later, Parliament passed the Observance of 5th November 1605 Act, which called for sermons and services remembering the salvation of England from the plot, complete with the ringing of church bells and celebratory bonfires. The Act remained on the books as law until 1859, but even though revoked the day remains a major holiday in Great Britain, known variously as Guy Fawkes’ Day, Bonfire Night, or Fireworks Night. As part of the tradition, boys will make up an effigy of Fawkes, and after parading the “guy” through town, place it atop the pyre where it is burned.

1734: Birth of colonial era explorer, hunter, adventurer and elected member of the Virginia State Assembly, Daniel Boone (d.1820). After opening up the routes westward from the eastern seaboard into Kentucky, he became one of the nation’s first folk heroes for his exploits in taming the wild frontier west of the Appalachians. He spent his final years even further west in the central Missouri shores of the Missouri River, where he is buried in a modest gravesite near Marthasville, Missouri.

1755: Birth of the Austrian princess Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna, better known as Marie Antoinette (d.1793), wife of French King Louis XVI. Widely regarded during the early days of the Revolution as a spendthrift and empty-headed waste of oxygen, she fought back publicly with a con brio performance as a caring mother and patron of the arts. It was in vain, however, and after the King fell victim to Madame Guillotine, the Queen met a similar fate ten months later under similarly trumped up charges of treason against the French Republic.

1765: Continuing to pursue novel ways to get the American colonies to pay for the French and Indian War, Parliament passes the Stamp Act, a tax levied on every sheet of paper imported into the colonies, with payment proven by the presence of a royal stamp on the paper itself. Colonial leaders become highly agitated by this seemingly arbitrary ability of the government to tax its subjects without consultation.

1772: Increasingly concerned about unchecked British pressure on the American colonies, Samuel Adams and Dr. Joseph Warren of Boston form the first Committee of Correspondence, which functioned as the 18th century version of a blog, except the writing was done with a quill pen on paper or parchment, and the letters traveled by post road or were printed up as handbills. The Committees grew in importance as the Revolution developed, providing a well-read venue for debate, and allowing the leading political leaders of the time to reach an audience far larger than the usual speeches and lectures.

1783: The final public execution is held at London’s Tyburn Gallows. The place played a significant role in 18th century popular culture, with permanent grandstands set up for the regular spectacle. A number of popular catch phrases were coined to describe the happenings: a Tyburn dance or jig (i.e., the post-drop twitching); take a drive to Tyburn (i.e., in the gaol wagon); the Lord Manor of Tyburn (the executioner)… According to the estimable Wikipedia, the condemned were expected to put on a good show, being both well-dressed for the hanging, and displaying no fear. Those that failed to live up to the crowd’s standards were jeered. All in all, I’d say it was a pretty coarse time. The site is now covered by the traffic roundabout at Marble Arch.

1790: British author and political philosopher Edmund Burke publishes his letter, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which he examines the French body politic and its leadership through the lens of the same Natural Law that guided the original revolution in the former British colonies. Burke is not impressed, and says so in scathing and prescient terms that accurately predicted the ruinous events on the continent.
His main argument is that the abstract foundations of the French revolution could in no way account for the complexity of human nature, and were thus doomed to lead to tyranny. Further, he had no time for the rule of intellectuals, arguing that, “What is the use of discussing a man’s abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In this deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor.”

1814: The Congress of Vienna meets to negotiate the form of European politics after the final defeat of Napoleon at the hands of the Sixth Coalition and 25 years of nearly continuous war. The resulting Treaty of Paris exiled the former emperor to tiny Elba off the south coast of France, but you’ll remember that he didn’t really relish the concept of staying there the rest of his life.

1831: Leader of the August slave uprising over in Surrey County, Nat Turner, is tried, convicted and hanged by the neck until dead.

1861: The day after General Winfield Scott resigns as Commanding General of the Army, President Lincoln appoints the young and ambitious George B. McClellan to replace him.

1864: Closing of the Second War of Schleswig, in which Denmark cedes the provinces of Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg to Prussia. This war is one of three initiated by Prussia under the leadership of Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck, and is studied at the war colleges today as a prime example of Clausewitz’ dictum that war is “an extension of diplomacy by other means.” In Bismarck’s context, war was an acceptable and useful action in support of limited and carefully defined territorial and political goals. His other wars were a relatively minor but victorious clash with Austria that he declined to follow up with further conquests, and the Franco-Prussian War, which we’ve been following in DLH for the last several months.
You would be correct if you heard echoes of Bismarck’s philosophy in the present-day language of “irregular warfare,” “calibrated application of force,” “stabilization operations,” “building partner capacity,” and many other obfuscations along those lines. In point of fact, the concept colored the policy positions and decisions we (Joint Staff J-5) helped create* during the First Gulf War in 1990, when the Allied coalition was explicitly built only to expel Saddam from Kuwait, not to “march on to Baghdad” or “destroy the Republican Guard” or any of the other escalations we were accused of not doing.

1871: Birth of American author Stephen Crane (d.1900), whose classic The Red Badge of Courage vividly tells the story of a Civil War private who seeks redemption from his earlier desertion by repeatedly throwing himself at subsequent battles through the eyes of his original idealism; a glory glaringly at odds with the actual war’s gory reality.

1887: Birth of Chiang Kai-sheck (d.1975), Nationalist Chinese leader who followed Dr. Sun Yat-sen in wrenching Chinese society away from its feudal dynastic roots during the Northern Expedition of the 1920s. After Sun Yat-sen’s death in 1927, Chiang became the de facto leader of the Republic of China, and strenuously opposed the rise of the Communists under Mao Tse-tung. After the Japanese defeat in World War II, the civil war that broke out in China eventually drove Chiang, a strong U.S. ally against the Japanese, to the island of Formosa (Taiwan), where he set up the Republic of China government in exile and ruled with an iron fist until his death.

1903: The Colombian province of Panama stages a revolt and declares its independence. The United States immediately recognizes the new nation, and guarantees its defense. Conveniently, the United States also has plans to build a canal across the isthmus, and the new government of Panama graciously cedes the Canal Zone to the U.S. to ensure the security and successful administration of the project.

1905: In an attempt to bring Russia politically into the 19th century, Russian Tsar Nicolas II grants a constitutional creation of a national legislative assembly, the Duma. I wonder how that reform worked out for them?

1911: Birth of the King of the Cowboys, Roy Rogers (d.1998).

1918: After four years of bitter fighting in the southern Alps, Austria-Hungary surrenders to Italy, thus closing the Great War’s Italian front. You may remember that this was the area where Earnest Hemingway was wounded as a Red Cross ambulance driver, and which later became the setting for his novel A Farewell to Arms. The Italian front also served as the backdrop for one of my all-time favorite novels, Mark Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War (1991), whose descriptions of Alpine combat vividly juxtapose the mute grandeur of the mountains with the chaotic brutality of armies clashing below. November 4th is now celebrated in Italy as Armed Forces Day.

1918: Spurred on by communist agitators, and triggered by the issuance of an order to sortie the High Seas Fleet for combat against the Royal Navy, over 40,000 German sailors mutiny in support of a smaller cadre of earlier mutineers who were already imprisoned. Chanting the slogan, “Peace and Bread!” (Frieden und brot!), the sailors surge through the city, overwhelming the police and taking control of key government buildings. News of the mutiny spreads throughout Germany, catapulting the Social Democrat Party (SPD) from a rump of left-wing radicals into a powerful force suddenly at the head of a communist revolution.
With the real possibility of a devastating social revolution compounding German losses on the Western Front, the government convinces the Kaiser to abdicate the monarchy, thereby permitting the formation of an interim constitutional government. Although the SPD did not plan on completely overthrowing the existing order, the revolutionary and political turmoil continued to ferment throughout the major German cities but never proceeded to the level of violence or political angst duplicating the Bolshevik takeover of Russia.
The German revolution fizzled out concurrent with the announcement of the Weimar Republic in August of 1919.

1926: Death of legendary sharpshooter, Annie Oakley (b.1860).

1938: Radio impresario Orson Welles broadcasts a “live” report of H.G. Wells’ sci-fi thriller War of the Worlds. Unfortunately, aliens didn’t really stomp all over New Jersey, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

1939: Birth of Grace Slick, of the Jefferson Airplane [lyric quote from your original].

1939: President Franklin Roosevelt orders the U.S. Customs Service to allow cash & carry sales of armaments to belligerents in the European war, Great Britain in particular. In the context of the earlier quid of the old four-piper destroyers (DLH 10/30), one might wonder about the quo demanded by the President Roosevelt, a quo demanded from an ally whose territory was under direct attack; an ally whose army on the Continent was on its heels and in desperate need of supplies; an ally whose food shipments from the United States were being torpedoed to the bottom of the Atlantic… For our help, Roosevelt demanded money for today’s purchases, and indefinite “lease” agreements to such British colonial holdings as Bermuda, Diego Garcia, the Virgin Islands, unlimited access to Canadian harbors, etc. Quid pro quo has a long, long history in diplomatic circles; it’s pretty much how diplomacy works.

1941: President Franklin Roosevelt signs into law the Lend-Lease Act that commits the U.S. to providing supplies and equipment to Great Britain and her allies in support of her war effort against Nazi Germany.

1941: USS Reuben James (DD-245), a WWI vintage “4-piper” destroyer on Neutrality Patrol in the northeastern Atlantic, is torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat, becoming the Navy’s first combat loss of WWII, with a loss of 105 of her 159 man crew. The sinking ignited high indignation in the United States, even spawning a folk song by Woodie Guthrie: [lyric quote from your original]

1941: Birth of Art Garfunkel.

1942: German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, having had his North African armored juggernaut stopped at the gates of Alexandria, is forced to begin his withdrawal back toward Tunisia as a result of British Field Bernard Montgomery’s armoured breakout at the seam between the German and Italian forces. The advancing British not only split the Axis force, they also threatened to completely encircle the Germans.
Rommel ignored a direct order from Hitler to fight to the last man, deciding instead to save his forces and make a strategic withdrawal to a position where he could counter-attack the soon-to-be overextended British tanks. Rommel’s withdrawal today was the turning point for the Battle of El Alemain.
If you visit the battlefield, you will not see THE spot where the battle took place, although the point where the breakout occurred is well-noted and can be seen from the main highway. But there’s just not much there. What you will see on an El Alemain tour is miles and miles of open, hard pan desert, bounded on the south by a mountain range that runs parallel to the coastline about 20 miles inland, creating a vast, open plain that is ideal for armored maneuver.

1947: Aircraft designer and movie mogul Howard Hughes takes his enormous H-4 Hercules seaplane on a “taxi test” in Long Beach Harbor. The gigantic plane, dubbed the “Spruce Goose” by its detractors, functioned exactly as Hughes thought it would, including getting airborne for its first and only flight, which lasted all of a few moments, climbing to 70 feet and flying about a mile down range. It remains the largest aircraft ever built. After the flight Hughes stored the machine in a climate-controlled hangar, where it remained in pristine flying condition until after Hughes’ death in 1976.

1952: The United States detonates its first hydrogen bomb, Operation IVY MIKE, at Eniwetok Atoll. The blast came in at 10 megatons.

1954: Death of French post-impressionist painter Henri Matisse (b.1869). You probably recognize his work from New York’s Museum of Modern Art, La Dance.

1957: The Soviet Union launches the first living being into orbit, the dog Laika, who survives the launch and initial orbit, but dies within two hours. There was no plan for a de-orbit recovery, and the Soviets announced she died by being automatically euthanized prior to oxygen deprivation. Recently opened archives indicate she actually died from overheating due to a critical component of the booster system failing to detach.

1966: The River Arno floods Florence, Italy, cresting at 22 feet, causing 113 deaths, displacing over 30,000 from their homes, and creating untold havoc on thousands of pieces of Renaissance art and books.

1979: Under the direction of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Iranian University “students” storm the United States Embassy in Tehran and take 90 hostages, 53 of whom are American citizens. Despite a few releases, the Americans are held hostage for 444 days, released by the Iranian government at the hour of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as President at noon on January 20th, 1981.

1984: Death of Indian Prime Minister Indira Ghandi (b.1917), assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards four months after she ordered the Indian army to storm the Sikh temple of Harmandir Sahib to put down a nascent Sikh independence movement. The daughter of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, she became India’s first female PM, and legitimately earned her reputation as a ruthless consolidator of both India’s governing structures and its regional hegemony.

1998: The Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein declares it will no longer cooperate with United Nations weapons inspectors. I haven’t talked to any of the inspectors myself, but I’m willing to bet they didn’t notice much of a difference before and after the announcement.

2006: Death of French composer Paul Mauriat (b.1925), probably best known on this side of the Atlantic for his beautiful instrumental piece Love is Blue (L’amour est bleu) (1967).

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Wayne Creed

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