Christmas Every Day

1920 Foundation of the Negro Baseball Leagues

Racial laws and hostile social attitudes in early-twentieth-century America precluded the integration of most professional sports. In the case of baseball, this had led to African Americans forming their own teams and leagues as early as the 1880s. In 1920 under the aegis of the National Association of Colored Professional Base Ball Clubs, the Negro National League was founded with eight teams (three of them named Giants and two named Stars): the Chicago American Giants, the Chicago Giants, the St. Louis Giants, the Cuban Stars, the Dayton Marcos, Detroit Stars, Indianapolis ABC’s, and the Kansas City Monarchs. The NACPBBC was augmented the next year by the addition of the Negro Southern League but competition was fierce and player raiding was common when it came to rival associations such as the Eastern Colored League and the American Negro League.

Teams folded frequently, whole leagues went under, but the 1930s might be considered the Golden Age of Negro Baseball with players such as Cool Papa Bell, Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson. The switch-hitting Bell was reckoned the fastest man in the sport; it was said that he could switch off the light and be under the bed covers before the room was dark. Another story had him hitting a pitch up the middle and being struck by the ball as he slid into second base. Paige was an astonishing pitcher who toiled for a host of clubs, among them the Chattanooga Black Lookouts, the Birmingham Black Barons, the Baltimore Black Sox  and the Pittsburgh Crawfords — one of them, the Bismarck Churchills of North Dakota, was integrated. He would often invite his infielders to take a break on the field while he struck out the side. Catcher Josh Gibson was one of the greatest hitters — for power or average — in history. He retired with a .441 batting average and hit close to 800 home runs.

The post-war integration of baseball, led by Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers spelled the beginning of the end for Negro Leagues. A few of the stars at the end of their careers found employment in the majors — Satchel Paige pitched into his late 50s for the Cleveland Indians, St Louis Browns, and Kansas City Athletics — and various teams lingered as barnstorming propositions. In 2020 Major League Baseball announced that it would acknowledge the Negro Leagues as fully professional and recognize their statistics.

 

 

 

1770 Birthday of David Thompson

A tip of the beaver hat today to the man dubbed the “greatest practical land geographer that the world has produced”.

David Thompson was born in London to a poor Welsh family and was given a practical education in mathematics and surveying by a charity foundation. At the age of 14 he was indentured to the Hudson’s Bay Company and sent to the northern port of Churchill in what is now Manitoba, Canada. After serving as a clerk at several of the company’s trading posts, he became a fur trader and surveyor, mapping routes deep into the interior, despite a limp and the loss of vision in one eye. He became fluent in four native languages, compiling dictionaries of these tongues, and was almost always on excellent terms with tribes he encountered.

In 1797, frustrated because the HBC wanted him to abandon surveying and concentrate on the acquisition of furs trapped by native hunters, he switched his allegiance to the North West Company which was then involved in a heated rivalry with his old employers. There, his surveying skills were more highly valued. He worked along the disputed American border, Lake Superior, up the Mississippi River, and into the Rocky Mountains. His contributions were so valuable to the NWC that he was made a full partner of the firm.

In 1799 he married a 16-year-old (some say 13-year-old) Métis woman, Charlotte Small, with whom he enjoyed a 58-year marriage and 11 (some say 13) sons and daughters. She and their children often accompanied him on his travels.

With American explorers such as the Lewis and Clark expedition  pushing farther west, the North West Company commissioned Thompson to find a way to the Pacific Ocean. From 1807 to 1812 Thompson explored territories in what is now British Columbia, Washington, Montana, and Idaho, claiming vast swaths for Great Britain as he went.

Before retiring to Montreal in 1812 so that his children could get an education, Thompson had walked or paddled over 55,000 miles and charted 1.9 million square miles of wilderness. His later years were marked by ill health, poor finances, and neglect by the companies he had worked so hard for. He died in poverty in 1857 and was buried in an unmarked grave. Only in the 20th century was his massive contribution to history recognized. Thompson’s journals, enormously valuable for geographical, botanical and sociological observations, were finally published; statues and memorials were erected to him in Britain, Canada, and the United States; an exploration vessel, an astronomical observatory, a highway, and a university were named after him.

1944 The abduction of General Kreipe

In May 1941, Germany launched a daring parachute attack on the island of Crete which was garrisoned by Greek, British, and Commonwealth troops. Though the price paid in blood was so high that Germany never again attempted another airborne attack like it, the paratroopers secured airfields into which reinforcements could fly, and, after 11 days of bitter fighting, victory was largely achieved. Guerrilla resistance by native Cretans and Allied troops hiding in the hills continually took its toll on the Wehrmacht, prompting harsh reprisals and atrocities. 

The British Special Operations Executive (S.O.E., responsible for violent behind-the-lines activities) decided that its agents should kidnap the brutal head of the German occupation, the so-called “Butcher of Crete”, Friedrich Wilhelm Müller, but, by the time the plan was to be put into effect, Müller was replaced by the milder General Heinrich Kreipe. With Kreipe now the target, Major Patrick Leigh Fermor (the brilliant travel writer whose works should be read by all of you) and Captain William Stanley Moss, with their team of native resistance fighters, plotted to abduct the general as he drove home. 

On the night of April 26, disguised as German troops, they stopped Kreipe’s car, knocked the driver unconscious, and, holding the general at gunpoint, drove unmolested through 22 German roadblocks. Kreipe had a reputation for grumpiness and impatience with delays, so his kidnappers had an easier time. Eventually they abandoned the car and headed into the mountains, leaving false clues that they hoped would lead the Germans to believe that the team would be quickly evacuated by submarine. They eluded a vast Wehrmacht manhunt while they tried to arrange contact for a pickup that would take them to Egypt. 

Kreipe was a decent sort of chap, not a Nazi, and he had Fermor had many conversations. One morning, the captive German began to greet the dawning sun’s glint on a mountaintop with lines from an ode by the Roman poet, Horace, and, Fermor finished the recitation, as they both knew the Latin by heart. “We had both drunk at the same fountains,” wrote Fermor about the incident.

Though the general was successfully taken by boat to captivity in Egypt, the reprisals by the German army, led again by Müller, were bloody. Here is his order:

Because the town of Anogia is the centre of the English Intelligence on Crete, because the people of Anogia committed the murder of the Sergeant Commander of the Yeni-Gave, as well as of the garrison under his orders, because the people of Anogia carried out the sabotage of Damasta, because in Anogia the guerrillas of the various groups of resistance take refuge and find protection and because it was through Anogia that the kidnappers with General Von Kreipe passed using Anogia as a transit camp, we order its COMPLETE DESTRUCTION and the execution of every male person of Anogia who would happen to be within the village and around it within a distance of one kilometre.

CHANEA 13TH AUGUST 1944, THE GENERAL COMMANDER OF THE GARRISON OF CRETE, H. MULLER.

For this and other war crimes, Müller was executed by the Allies in 1947

1951

Canadians defeat the Chinese at Kapyong

The Korean War began with a North Korean invasion of the South, a surprise attack which just about succeeded in conquering the whole peninsula but which was eventually driven back by American troops. The American occupying forces were joined by units from other countries in a war authorized by the United Nations. Among them were Canadian soldiers.

The U.N. counterattack pushed the North Koreans deep into their own territory but, in October 1950, hundreds of thousands of Communist Chinese troops crossed the Yalu river and forced U.N. units to retreat. The front gradually stabilized around the original border on the 38th parallel. The Canadian Encyclopedia tells the story of the epic battle at Kapyong:

In mid-April, the Chinese withdrew just past the 38th Parallel as part of a plan to lure UN forces into a position where they would be vulnerable to a major counter attack, which was unleashed on the South Korean army on 22 April 1951. The South Koreans were dislodged by the Chinese offensive, and the following day the British brigade was ordered to protect the South Korean withdrawal through the Kapyong River valley (about 20 kilometers south of the 38th parallel in central Korea).

The second battalion of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (2PPCLI), and the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment, were assigned forward hilltop positions, the Canadians on the west side of the valley and the Australians on the east.

The Australians bore the brunt of the initial attack and after heavy combat were forced to withdraw, with 155 casualties, late on 24 April. While the Australians fought, Stone ordered his Canadians, about 700 troops, to dig in on Hill 677 and prepare to repel a large brigade of massing Chinese forces, estimated at nearly 5,000-strong. After attacking the Australians, the Chinese turned their attention to the PPCLI, which managed — through heavy all-night fighting on 24 and 25 April — to stop the Chinese advance.

At one point in the battle, 400 Chinese soldiers descended on a single Canadian company of roughly 100 men, but the attack was repelled with numerous examples of valour: Private Wayne Mitchell, despite being wounded, charged the enemy three times with his Bren gun. He earned the Distinguished Conduct medal for his efforts.

The Chinese launched most of their attacks at night, in successive waves, using an intensive and aggressive approach of mortars, grenades and machine gun fire close to the Canadian front. On the night of the 24th, the Canadian battalion headquarters was attacked, and the assault was repelled with heavy fire.

The relentless waves of Chinese soldiers almost overran the position of D Company. With his men securely entrenched below ground, company commander Captain J. G. W. Mills, desperate and overrun, called for an artillery strike on the position of his own 10 Platoon. A battery of New Zealander guns obliged, firing 2,300 rounds of shells in less than an hour, destroying the Chinese forces on that position. The following night, Private Kenneth Barwise recovered the lost Vickers machine gun position in D Company, grabbed the gun, and ran back to his platoon. He had also single-handedly killed six Chinese soldiers during the attack on D Company, earning the Military Medal.

Amid the fighting, Stone refused to allow his men to withdraw — believing that the hill was a critical strategic point on the UN front — thereby stemming the tide of the Chinese offensive. While they defended the hill, the Canadians were cut off, and had to be supplied via air drop, allowing them to continue the fight until the Chinese retreated. As Canadian soldier Gerald Gowing remembered: “We were surrounded on the hills of Kapyong and there was a lot of fire. We were pretty well out of ammunition and out of food too. We did get some air supplies dropped in, but we were actually surrounded . . . that was a scary moment, let me tell you.”

The 2PPCLI were eventually relieved on the front line by a battalion of the 1st US Cavalry Division

The holding action of the Australians and Canadians at Kapyong allowed the UN forces to consolidate their troops for the next stage of operations. The Canadians had fought tenaciously against a Chinese army with a force several times their size. Stone, and other veterans of the Second World War, utilized their experiences in fighting on the rugged terrain of Sicily and Italy and applied it to the hills of Korea to good effect, but at a price. There were 23 Canadian casualties, including 10 soldiers killed, as well as an estimated 2,000 Chinese casualties.

The battle contributed significantly to the defeat of the general Chinese offensive against the South that spring, protecting the capital city of Seoul from re-occupation, and plugging the hole in the UN line to give the South Koreans time to retreat. The wider Communist offensive of 1951 was halted about a week after the battle, and from that point on the Korean conflict became largely a war of patrols and enemy harassment, rather than large-scale attacks, as the front lines stabilized and the two sides embarked on peace talks.

Both the Canadians and the Australians received the United States Presidential Unit Citation from the American government, the first time a Canadian unit had been so honoured.

1184 BC

The end of the Trojan War

Now as for the carrying off of women, it is the deed, they say, of a rogue: but to make a stir about such as are carried off, argues a man a fool. Men of sense care nothing for such women, since it is plain that without their own consent they would never be forced away. The Asiatics, when the Greeks ran off with their women, never troubled themselves about the matter; but the Greeks, for the sake of a single Lacedaemonian girl, collected a vast armament, invaded Asia, and destroyed the kingdom of Priam.

So said Herodotus, the inventor of history. In trying to explain the centuries-old antipathy between Europe and Asia, he had recourse to the story of the Trojan war, a 10-year siege prompted by the kidnapping of Helen of Sparta by a prince of Troy. This story was told most famously by Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey but also by dozens of oral bards, Greek playwrights, and Roman poets.

For centuries, scholars debated the truth of these legends and most were sceptical; it was not until the excavations undertaken in 1873 by Heinrich Schliemann on a mound near Hisarlik that academics began to take the existence of a Bronze Age Troy seriously. Schliemann’s discovery of golden treasures there and at Mycenae in Greece convinced many that the events described by Homer had actually taken place (even though the archaeological layer Schliemann declared to be Homeric was later shown to be too early in time.)

If the Trojan War legends do describe a real conflict between a prosperous city guarding the entrance to the Black Sea and a confederation of Greek raiders, when did it take place? My money is on the calculation by the Alexandrian Greek genius, Eratosthenes, who placed the end of the war at 1184 BC, a date that corresponds to Level VII on the chart below.

1970

The Hutt River Principality is declared

The Principality of Hutt River, situated 595 km north of Perth, Western Australia and about 75 square km in area, declared its independence from Australia under the rule of His Royal Highness Prince Leonard I of Hutt, born Leonard Casley. His wife was styled “Her Royal Highness Princess Shirley of Hutt, Dame of the Rose of Sharon.” His son, Prince Graeme, succeeded to the throne upon his father’s abdication at the age of 91.

The declaration of sovereignty arose over a dispute about a wheat production quota. When Casley got nowhere with his protests, he renounced Australian claims on his land and set up his own sovereign state which has issued its own stamps and coins for some decades. The principality has been engaged in legal wrangles with the Australian government which refuses to recognize its independence and Australian courts have declared that “the arguments advanced by the applicants [were] fatuous, frivolous and vexatious.” Nonetheless the Crasley dynasty maintains its claims and attracts thousands of tourists a year to its desolate domain.

1984

Australia chooses a national anthem

In 1878 the song “Advance Australia Fair” was first performed. Its composer Peter Dodds McCormick said of it:

One night I attended a great concert in the Exhibition Building, when all the National Anthems of the world were to be sung by a large choir with band accompaniment. This was very nicely done, but I felt very aggravated that there was not one note for Australia. On the way home in a bus, I concocted the first verse of my song & when I got home I set it to music. I first wrote it in the Tonic Sol-fa notation, then transcribed it into the Old Notation, & I tried it over on an instrument next morning, & found it correct. Strange to say there has not been a note of it altered since. Some alteration has been made in the wording, but the sense is the same. It seemed to me to be like an inspiration, & I wrote the words & music with the greatest ease. 

Here is a 1927 rendition of it, replete with British jingoism that a later generation would excise. Fans of royalty will note the appearance of our Queen and her late consort.

Though widely popular, it did not replace “God Save the Queen” as the national anthem until a referendum in which “Advance Australia Fair” nudged out “Waltzing Matilda” as the winner. The current version, more politically correct than the original, now reads:

Australians all let us rejoice, For we are young and free; We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil; Our home is girt by sea; Our land abounds in nature’s gifts Of beauty rich and rare; In history’s page, let every stage Advance Australia Fair. In joyful strains then let us sing, Advance Australia Fair.

Verse 2 Beneath our radiant Southern Cross We’ll toil with hearts and hands; To make this Commonwealth of ours Renowned of all the lands; For those who’ve come across the seas We’ve boundless plains to share; With courage let us all combine To Advance Australia Fair. In joyful strains then let us sing, Advance Australia Fair.

1913

Birth of the Most Hated Woman in America

Madalyn Murray O’Hair was a cantankerous and foul-mouthed activist and one of the most influential women of her generation. Her relentless court cases and her founding of American Atheists scored a number of victories for godlessness and the separation of church and state in America.

Born into a Presbyterian family, she led a disordered life for some time, marrying, serving in the Second World War, discarding a husband, taking a lover, having children by different men, battling depression, and fleeing to Europe to defect to the Soviet Union, which she respected for its state atheism. After the USSR declined her bid for citizenship, O’Hair returned to Baltimore where she launched a lawsuit against the local school board for requiring Bible readings. The case reached the Supreme Court in 1963 and O’Hair was victorious: compulsory Bible readings were outlawed in American public schools. She would go on to try and prevent an astronaut from a Bible reading in space; she encouraged governments to tax the Catholic Church; she railed against the phrase “In God We Trust” on currency; and tried to ban the pope from holding mass in a public park. She served as the president or de facto leader of American Atheists from 1963 to 1995.

Her oldest son, William Murray, left atheism for Christianity and was disinherited by his mother. She remarked on his apostasy: “One could call this a postnatal abortion on the part of a mother, I guess; I repudiate him entirely and completely for now and all times. He is beyond human forgiveness.” He is now a Baptist minister and continues to speak out against O’Hair’s irreligion.

In 1995, she, her son Jon, and her grand-daughter Robin were kidnapped by a former employee of American Atheists and forced to withdraw considerable sums of money before they were murdered, dismembered and buried on a Texas ranch.

A recent movie, The Most Hated Woman in America, cast the attractive actress Melissa Leo as O’Hair. Somewhere, O’Hair is snickering.

1865 Lee surrenders at Appomattox

The American Civil War, aka the War Between the States, aka the War of Northern Aggression, aka the War for Southern Independence, aka the Great Rebellion, had begun effectively in 1861 with the bombardment of a Union fort in Charleston harbor. It effectively ended four years later with the decision by Robert E. Lee to surrender his Army of Northern Virginia after losing a final battle to Ulysses S. Grant close to the village of Appomattox Court House. Lee had been trying to link up with other remaining Confederate forces but, surrounded and cut off from supplies, had to admit that he, and the Southern cause, were finally at the end of their rope. “There is nothing left for me to do”, he said, “but to go and see General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths.”

On the afternoon of April 12, in the parlor of a house owned by Wilmer McLean, Lee met Grant and agreed to very generous terms: the rebels would down their major weapons but would be allowed to march home under parole keeping their personal baggage, sidearms, and horses. Food for the journey was provided by the Union commissary and there was a tactful lack of triumphalism in the behaviour of the Northern Army. General Joshua Chamberlain, hero of Little Round Top, ordered his men to salute the passing grey-clad soldiers:

Instructions had been given; and when the head of each division column comes opposite our group, our bugle sounds the signal and instantly our whole line from right to left, regiment by regiment in succession, gives the soldier’s salutation, from the “order arms” to the old “carry”—the marching salute. [Confederate General] Gordon at the head of the column, riding with heavy spirit and downcast face, catches the sound of shifting arms, looks up, and, taking the meaning, wheels superbly, making with himself and his horse one uplifted figure, with profound salutation as he drops the point of his sword to the boot toe; then facing to his own command, gives word for his successive brigades to pass us with the same position of the manual,—honor answering honor. On our part not a sound of trumpet more, nor roll of drum; not a cheer, nor word nor whisper of vain-glorying, nor motion of man standing again at the order, but an awed stillness rather, and breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead!

Secessionist armies remained in the field as far away as Texas but Lee’s surrender prompted theirs as well. On May 9, the end of the war and of the Confederate States of America became official.

 

 

A very grim day in history with a number of catastrophic events.

1250

Louis IX (later St Louis), King of France, is captured by Muslim forces during the ill-fated Seventh Crusade. He will be ransomed and return home, but will not lose the crusading spirit. On his next attempt to invade North Africa he will die at Tunis.

1453

Mehmet II begins the Ottoman siege of Constantinople which will eventually capture the city and bring down the Byzantine Empire.

1712

A rebellion by black slaves to burn down New York breaks out. It begins with arson and then an ambush of white people, killing 9 and wounding 6. The perpetrators were hunted down and captured; most of them were burnt at the stake, though one was broken on the wheel. Laws were tightened to prevent any repetition of such an uprising.

1968

Quebec politician Pierre Elliot Trudeau wins the Liberal Party leadership and becomes Prime Minister. Canada has yet to recover.

1973

Major League Baseball sanctions the use of the “designated hitter” for the American League. The National League continues to hold out against this hideous innovation.