Christmas Every Day

1871

The Pembina Raid

Since 1866, Irish nationalists in the United States had been launching cross-border attacks into Canada hoping that military success in that British territory would lead to an end to the occupation of Ireland. The raids on Quebec, Ontario and New Brunswick by these well-armed bands (most of them veterans of the Civil War) had been bloody but unsuccessful. A last desperate plan was launched in 1871 to invade Manitoba from the Dakota Territory and link up with dissident Métis under Louis Riel. The Fenian leadership gave the plan little chance of success but supplied arms for the effort.

The leaders in this scheme were W.B. O’Donoghue and John O’Neill. O’Neill was an Irish immigrant who had fought in the American Army on the western frontier and in the Civil War, reaching the rank of captain, and had taken part in two previous Fenian raids in 1866 and 1870. O’Donoghue had taken part in the Red River rebellion in 1870 as an associate of Louis Riel and had served as treasurer of the provisional government; he accompanied Riel in fleeing to the United States after the arrival of Canadian troops. He favoured involving the American government on the side of Métis inhabitants of what had become Manitoba but, when Riel demurred, Donoghue approached the Fenians. He had drawn up a constitution for the Republic of Rupert’s Land, the new state he intended to establish (with himself as President).

With 35 men recruited from the unemployed of Minnesota and disgruntled Manitoba Métis, O’Donoghue and O’Neill launched an attack on Canadian soil — or what they thought was Canadian soil. They had, in fact, captured a Hudson’s Bay Company post on the American side of the border. Most were arrested by American authorities and O’Donoghue fell into the hands of Métis who returned him to the United States. This was the last of the Fenian raids. Though it looks farcical at this distance the Canadian government had been deeply worried lest the Red River Métis joined the venture and turn Manitobans’ thoughts toward union with the U.S.A.

610 Hercalius deposes Phocas

Phocas was a very bad emperor indeed. He ascended the throne of the Byzantine (or Eastern Roman) Empire in 602 with the support of the army and the Constantinople mob, murdering the incumbent emperor Maurice and his six sons. This was the first successful violent coup in almost three hundred years and with no inherent legitimacy he had to maintain his rule with terror and violence. The borders collapsed under barbarian pressure from the north and Persian pressure in the east; rebel generals began marching on the capital, rioting broke out in the empire’s cities. Phocas responded with more terror, including the murder of Maurice’s wife and daughters.

In 610 a fleet lead by Heraclius, the son of the governor of the African provinces, landed near Constantinople. The local military and civil service went over to him and declared him the new emperor; Phocas’s bodyguard deserted him, and Heraclius entered the capital in triumph. When Phocas was dragged before him, Heraclius sneered “Is this how you have ruled, wretch?” Phocas replied, “And will you rule better?” Heraclius personally killed his predecessor on the spot and had his head paraded through the capital.

Heraclius went on to a long, if troubled reign, ruling until 641.

October 1

1910 Domestic Terrorism

The early 20^th century saw epic struggles between employers’ groups and the American labour movement, with violence – kidnappings, sabotage, beatings and murder – frequently used by both sides. On this date in 1910 a bomb, planted by a labour organizer working for the Iron Workers Union, exploded outside the building housing the Los Angeles Times. The explosion killed 21 newspaper employees and injured 100 others.

Private detectives working for employers soon identified a number of suspects and, using corrupt and illegal practices, arrested three union officials and brought them to Los Angeles for trial. The Iron Workers hired famed attorney Clarence Darrow to defend two of them, brothers J.B. and J.J. McNamara, while the third arrested man agreed to testify for the prosecution. Despite claims by socialists and their supporters that the pair had been framed, it was clear that the evidence would convict them. Darrow agreed to a plea bargain that sent J.B. McNamara to jail for life on the charge of murder whil J.J. pled guilty to a lesser charge and received a light sentence.

The effects of the trial were significant. Capitalists were worried about class war and labour leaders feared a backlash; both sides agreed to cooperate with the federal government in setting up a Commission on Industrial Relations that led to an 8-hour day and reduced tension between employers and workers.

From the Wikipedia article:

The 1892 Wyoming Seminary vs. Mansfield State Normal football game, played September 28, 1892, was the first-ever American football game played at night. The game was played between Wyoming Seminary (a private college preparatory school located in the Wyoming Valley of northeastern Pennsylvania) and Mansfield State Normal School in Mansfield, Pennsylvania.

The lighting system brought in turned out to be inadequate for gameplay. The game itself lasted only 20 minutes and there were only 10 plays. Both sides agreed to end at halftime with a 0–0 tie after several players had an unfortunate run-in with a light pole.

This historic game is celebrated by a yearly reenactment of the original game played between Wyoming Seminary and Mansfield State Normal School during an autumn festival known as the “Fabulous 1890s Weekend.” The re-enactment of the game is a play-by-play version of the actual game as recorded. Fans who watch the game are sometimes known to correct players when they deviate from the original recorded plays.

The 100th anniversary of the game happened to occur on Monday, September 28, 1992. Monday Night Football celebrated “100 years of night football” with a game between the Los Angeles Raiders and the Kansas City Chiefs at Arrowhead Stadium. The Chiefs won 27–7 in front of 77,486 fans.

1915 The death of John Kipling

The life expectancy of a junior officer in the British Army on the Western Front in the First World War was rather short — six weeks was the average length of time an officer in a front-line unit could be expected to serve before being killed or wounded. Armed only with a swagger stick or a pistol, they were required to walk ahead of  their men across no-man’s-land into the teeth of withering rifle and machine-gun fire. Tens of thousands of young men of the educated class perished in the mud of Flanders. Such a one was John Kipling, only son of the great poet Rudyard Kipling whose hymns to British imperialism had shaped much of the moral landscape of his country.

When the war erupted in 1914 many, including Rudyard Kipling, saw the struggle as one of civilization against barbarism, especially after news of German atrocities in Belgium and the sinking of civilian passenger ships became widespread. Kipling Senior was employed in the development of propaganda to support the war effort and his son was eager to join the armed forces. John tried to join the Royal Navy but his eyesight was too weak to allow him a naval career. He was rejected twice for the same reason by the Army, but his father had connections high up in the chain of command and convinced the generals that his son should be given a commission in a prestige unit, the Irish Guards. After months of training in England, John was sent as an 18-year-old second lieutenant to the front lines just in time for the disastrous Battle of Loos. This was the first British attack to use poisonous chlorine gas, a weapon pioneered by the Germans at Ypres, and the first to employ aircraft as tactical bombers. Nonetheless, the infantry charge on the German trenches failed — on one afternoon, the twelve attacking battalions suffered 8,000 casualties out of 10,000 men in four hours. John Kipling was one of those casualties.

The website “Epitaphs of the Great War” notes that letters of condolence arrived from all over the world. A few of them remain in the Kipling Archive at Sussex. Words of comfort took a different form in those days; I’m not sure we’d appreciate them today, I’m not sure the Kiplings appreciated them then: “I do not imagine that any two parents in England will more cheerfully make the sacrifice or more heroically bear the loss,” (Lord Curzon); “There are so many things worse than death” (Theodore Roosevelt). The novelist Marie Corelli struck the right note when she wrote, “You foresaw what was coming years ago – but few listened to your clarion call of warning”. To her the soldiers were the innocent and their fathers the guilty ones, guilty because they had ignored the warnings about German militarism. This is exactly how Kipling felt, and it is the meaning behind his famous epitaph:

If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.

His father, who was at the Front as a war correspondent, searched desperately for his son’s body but it was not until 1992 that his burial place was located. Kipling’s search and grief are recounted in the play (and later movie) My Boy Jack.

One of my favourite diversions when I travel is to have my picture taken beside the statues of famous historians, imagining that I, too, one day, will be immortalized in bronze by a grateful nation, gazed at uncomprehendingly by generations of school children, and used as a toilet by neighbouring birdlife. Here is a photograph of me and the statue of Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson, erected in Bergen, Norway.

Snorri was born in 1179 and died on this date in 1241, one of the few of my profession to be thought worthy of assassination. He was born into a rich Icelandic family and married well, becoming prosperous and head of the Althing, the national assembly. On a visit to Norway he made an impression and was cultivated by those hoping to add Iceland to the King of Norway’s domain. Back in Iceland, his unionist position was not well-received by other chiefs; civil strife broke out and continued for years. Eventually Snorri was murdered, cowering in his cellar, with the connivance of the Norwegian king he had once sided with.

Snorri’s lasting fame comes from his historiography. The Prose Edda, Egli’s Saga, and the Heimskringla give us valuable information on the mythology and history (legendary and otherwise) of Iceland and Norway.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is often forgotten that the decision by Nazi Germany to invade Poland in September 1939, and thus to start the Second World War, was only made possible by a secret agreement with the government of the USSR. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of the previous month contained clauses that partitioned Poland into German and Soviet zones of influence and allowed Russia to drive into Poland from the east while the Wehrmacht struck from the west.

On this date in 1939, German and Soviet forces met, and in token of their victory over Poland, held a celebratory military parade in Brest-Litovsk (ironically the site of a humiliating capitulation by Lenin’s Bolshevik government to imperial Germany in World War I). Standing on the platform in the photo above are two geniuses of tank warfare, Germany’s Heinz Guderian and the Soviet Semyon Krivoshein.

The Soviets occupied eastern Poland until 1941 when Hitler’s surprise attack, Operation Barbarossa, broke the peace treaty with the USSR and opened up a new front in the war. In the interim the Soviets had taken hundreds of thousands of Polish prisoners and massacred the officer class in the Katyn forest in 1940. The Red Army would return in 1944 and drive out the Germans. Their stay would last until the fall of eastern European communism in 1989.

 

96

The assassination of a tyrant

The Romans, after dispensing with their Republic, tried a series of imperial dynasties. The problem was that, while the founder was often a man of restraint and competence, his children or grandchildren were likely as not to be monsters. The very able Augustus gave way to the paranoid Tiberius, the ghoulish Caligula, the dotard Claudius, and the fiendish Nero. After a year of four rival claimants Nero was replaced by the moderate Vespasian. Unfortunately Vespasian’s decent son Titus died early and was replaced in 81 AD by the younger Domitian, whose tale Chambers takes up here:

The obituary for this day includes the name of one of those monsters, who disgrace so frequently the annals of the ancient Roman empire. On 18^th September, 96 A. D., the Emperor Domitian was assassinated by a band of conspirators, after having rendered himself for many years the terror and detestation of his subjects. The son of Vespasian, and the brother and successor of Titus, he exhibited in the commencement of his reign a great show of righteous severity, and came forward as a reformer of public morals. Several persons who had transgressed the laws of conjugal fidelity, as well as some vestal virgins who had violated their vows, were punished with death. It was not long, however, before his real character showed itself; and he became a disgrace to humanity by his acts of cruelty and avarice. Cowardice and falsehood entered largely into his disposition, which, if we are to credit all the accounts that have descended to us, seems to have scarcely had a redeeming point. Multitudes of persons were put to death, either because the emperor desired their wealth, or from his having become apprehensive of their popularity or influence. Secret informers were encouraged, but philosophers and literary men were slaughtered or banished, though Martial and Silius Italicus could so far degrade poetry, as make it the vehicle for flattery of the imperial monster.

A favourite amusement of his, it is said, was killing flies, in which he would spend whole hours, and nothing seemed to give him greater pleasure than to witness the effects of terror on his fellow-creatures. On one occasion, he invited formally the members of the senate to a grand feast, and caused them on their arrival to be ushered into a large hall, hung with black and lighted with funeral torches, such as only served to exhibit to the awe-struck guests an array of coffins, on which each read his own name. Whilst they contemplated this ghastly spectacle, a troop of horrid forms, habited like furies, burst into the apartment, each with a lighted torch in one hand, and a poniard in the other. After having terrified for some time the members of Rome’s legislative body, these demon-masqueraders opened the door of the hall, through which the senators were only too happy to make a speedy exit. Who can doubt that the character of Domitian had as much of the madman as the wretch in its composition?

At length human patience was exhausted, and a conspiracy was formed for his destruction, in which his wife and some of his nearest friends were concerned. For a long time, the emperor had entertained a presentiment of his approaching end, and even of the hour and manner of his death. Becoming every day more and more fearful, he caused the galleries in which he walked to be lined with polished stones, so that he might see, as in a mirror, all that passed behind him. He never conversed with prisoners but alone and in secret, and it was his practice whilst he talked with them, to hold their chains in his hands. To inculcate on his servants a dread of compassing the death of their master, even with his own consent, he caused Epaphroditus to be put to death, because he had assisted Nero to commit suicide.

The evening before his death, some truffles were brought, which he directed to be laid aside till the next day, adding, ‘If I am there;’ and then turning to his courtiers said, that the next day the moon would be made bloody in the sign of Aquarius, and an event would take place of which all the world should speak. In the middle of the night, he awoke in an agony of fear, and started from his bed. The following morning, he had a consultation with a soothsayer from Germany, regarding a flash of lightning; the seer predicted a revolution in the empire, and was forthwith ordered off to execution. In scratching a pimple on his forehead, Domitian drew a little blood, and exclaimed: ‘Too happy should I be were this to compensate for all the blood that I cause to be shed!’ He asked what o’clock it was, and as he had a dread of the fifth hour, his attendants informed him that the sixth had arrived. On hearing this he appeared reassured, as if all danger were past, and he was preparing to go to the bath, when he was stopped by Parthenius, the principal chamberlain, who informed him that a person demanded to speak with him on momentous business of state. He caused every one to retire, and entered his private closet. Here he found the person in question waiting for him, and whilst he listened with terror to the pretended revelation of some secret plot against himself, he was stabbed by this individual, and fell wounded to the ground. A band of conspirators, including the distinguished veteran Clodianus, Maximus a freedman, and Saturius the decurion of the palace, rushed in and despatched him with seven blows of a dagger. He was in the forty-fifth year of his age, and fifteenth of his reign. On receiving intelligence of his death, the senate elected Nerva as his successor.

1963 The Birmingham Church Bombing

In the early 1960s demands for voting rights and civil rights for African Americans were met by violence, particularly in the southern states. There, support for separation of the races was a deeply entrenched social belief and the Ku Klux Klan attracted many men (and women) who would fight for segregation. Increased media attention, the popularity of leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and political considerations by the Kennedy regime in Washington turned up the pressure. Vigilante attacks on civil rights workers and those attempting to march or vote escalated to murder.

On the morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963 a bomb was placed outside Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church. The church had been active in organizing protests against segregation and this made it a target in the eyes of some. At 10:22, fifteen sticks of dynamite under the porch exploded killing four children and wounding 22 others. The dead were four little girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair.

This atrocity did much to energize the civil rights movement and discredit southern segregationists but justice for the victims was not easily forthcoming. The federal government dispatched FBI agents to help in the investigation and the state of Alabama issued a paltry $5,000 reward for information. Martin Luther King condemned Governor George Wallace, a vociferous segregationist, telling him “the blood of four little children … is on your hands. Your irresponsible and misguided actions have created in Birmingham and Alabama the atmosphere that has induced continued violence and now murder.”

The FBI eventually identified 4 members of a Klan splinter group as the perpetrators — Thomas Blanton, Jr., Herman Frank Cash, Robert Chambliss, and Bobby Frank Cherry — but no federal action was taken against them while J. Edgar Hoover headed the FBI. In the 1970s a new Alabama Attorney General secured a murder conviction against Chambliss who had purchased the dynamite. In 2000 the federal government reopened the case and convicted the two surviving bombers, Cherry and Blanton, of murder, 37 years after the deed. All four of the accused maintained their innocence throughout.

490 B.C. Athens defeats the Persians at Marathon

Darius, the Persian emperor, was bent on expanding his realm into the Greek world. The help given by the newly-democratized city of Athens to Greek cities in Asia Minor in their resistance to Persia persuaded Darius to invade their territory with a huge fleet and army. He landed his army at Marathon, some 25 miles from Athens, because it was an area supposedly loyal to Hippias, a former Athenian tyrant who accompanied the Persians and who hoped to be restored as a puppet ruler under Darius.

Sparta declined to send help immediately to its fellow Greeks, using the excuse of a religious festival, but the small city of Plataea sent 1,000 men to aid the Athenian force of 9,000 hoplites — heavy infantry. Under Miltiades the Athenians blocked the Persians from moving inland and forced a battle, despite being outnumbered by at least 2 to 1. The Persians seem to have been taken by surprise by a sudden Greek charge, panicked, and were slaughtered in great numbers on the beach.

The Athenian victory was important because it convinced Greece that Persia was not unbeatable and because, had they lost the battle, their experiment with democracy would have ended.  

Ten years later, the son of Darius, Xerxes, returned to Greece with an even larger force and confronted the Hellenes in battles at Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea.