Christmas Every Day

1969

Ted Kennedy takes a dive

In the long and squalid annals of the Kennedy family, few incidents are more shameful than the behaviour of Senator Ted Kennedy in the Chappaquiddick incident.

Edward Moore Kennedy was the last remaining son of the famous clan. Though young and already tarnished by scandal (expelled from Harvard for cheating) he had been elected to the Senate for Massachusetts in 1962 and was the white hope of left-wing Democrats who expected he would use the memory of his assassinated brothers to ascend to the White House. That plan was dealt a fatal blow in the aftermath of a July 1969 party, held to celebrate the “Boiler Room Girls”, a group of six young women who had worked on Robert Kennedy’s campaign the previous year. All the women were single and in their twenties; all the men attending were married.

At about 11:15 p.m., Kennedy and one of the women, Mary Jo Kopechne, left the party and drove off in Kennedy’s Oldsmobile. Over an hour later the car, with two people in it, was spotted by a policeman parked on a rural road; when the man approached the car, it departed in a cloud of dust. Shortly thereafter, the car drove off a bridge into the water where it overturned and sank, ending up on its roof. Kennedy was able to escape and walked to the party where he alerted friends to the accident and the fact that Ms Kopechne was still under water. With two companions Kennedy returned to the car where they tried in vain to rescue the trapped woman. Though his friends insisted that he report the incident, Kennedy, instead, dove into the water to swim across the channel and go back to his hotel. There he complained about other noisy guests and went to sleep. In the morning the submerged car was noticed by fishermen and reported to the police; Kennedy and his friends had still not made any contact with the authorities until he heard on the radio that a body had been found in his car. He then attended the police station and dictated a short statement (at variance with the facts).

Despite the fact that the police diver who recovered the body said that Ms Kopechne had survived some hours in the car until the trapped air ran out and that she could have been rescued if Kennedy had called for help, the affair was soon dispensed with. No autopsy was held; Kennedy was convicted only of leaving the scene of a crash. His driver’s license was temporarily suspended. The incident, however, showed Kennedy in the worst possible light and the stink of it prevented Kennedy from daring to run for the presidency until an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination in 1980. Even then he was dogged by the memory of Chappaquiddick when his opponent Jimmy Carter injected it into the campaign. The good people of Massachusetts, however, kept returning Teddy to the Senate, until his death in 2009.

1918

Murder of the Romanovs

A revolution in February 1917 overthrew the house of Romanov and ended the tsarist autocracy in Russia. Tsar Nicholas II was a decent man but a stubborn and incompetent ruler; he and his German-born wife had grown increasingly unpopular and their deposition at the hands of democratic revolutionaries was well-received in the country. The provisional government imprisoned the royal couple, their chronically-ill son, and four daughters in relative comfort in the Urals, with the hope of sending them into exile. However, the Bolshevik coup dropped the family into the hands of people with little thought of mercy. For Lenin’s Communists, Nicholas was a class enemy whose presence abroad would only encourage opposition to world revolution.

On the night of July 16-17, the royal family, a doctor, and three servants were led to a basement and a death sentence was pronounced against them. Seven executioners then shot, bludgeoned, and bayoneted the victims and disposed of their mutilated bodies in crude fashion. A press release by the local soviet read:

In view of the enemy’s proximity to Yekaterinburg and the exposure by the Cheka [Bolshevik secret police] of a serious White Guard plot with the goal of abducting the former Tsar and his family… In light of the approach of counterrevolutionary bands toward the Red capital of the Urals and the possibility of the crowned executioner escaping trial by the people (a plot among the White Guards to try to abduct him and his family was exposed and the compromising documents will be published), the Presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet, fulfilling the will of the Revolution, resolved to shoot the former Tsar, Nikolai Romanov, who is guilty of countless, bloody, violent acts against the Russian people.

In 1979, the bodies of Nicholas, Alexandra, their servants and four children were discovered but it was not until 2007 that the bodies of Alexei and Maria were identified. The royal family is now entombed together in Peter and Paul Cathedral, St Petersburg.

Many of the execution squad met their own grisly ends, either killed by angry peasants or shot by their own party in purges of the Stalin era. A cathedral has been erected over the site of the murders.

1381 Death of an English rebel

In the early summer of 1381 the English peasantry, oppressed by the latests in a series of increased poll taxes, rose in rebellion. The most serious of these risings was that of the men of Kent. Led by Wat Tyler, the peasant army grew to number in the thousands, able to take several towns, including Canterbury, burning tax records and opening the jails. Among the prisoners freed was John Ball (c. 1338-81) a “hedge-priest”, or excommunicated cleric, who may well have been of a Lollard church.

Ball accompanied the rebels in their assault on London and in their attempt to force a meeting with the young king Richard II. When the peasant army was camped on Blackheath outside London he spoke to them of revolution in terms they could understand.  “When Adam dalf, and Eve span” he asked [When Adam was digging and Eve was at her spinning], “who was thanne a gentilman? From the beginning all men were created equal by nature, and that servitude had been introduced by the unjust and evil oppression of men, against the will of God, who, if it had pleased Him to create serfs, surely in the beginning of the world would have appointed who should be a serf and who a lord”. Ball ended by recommending “uprooting the tares that are accustomed to destroy the grain; first killing the great lords of the realm, then slaying the lawyers, justices and jurors, and finally rooting out everyone whom they knew to be harmful to the community in future.”

Though Wat Tyler was murdered, the king promised to honour the promise he made to end serfdom, and the peasants dispersed. When London was free of the threat, Richard II ordered a mass round-up and execution; Ball was arrested in Coventry, and condemned to death by being hanged, drawn and quartered in the presence of the king. His head was exhibited on London Bridge as a warning to would-be rebels.

1917 The Bisbee Deportation

The development of the American trade union movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was often a violent affair: beatings, arson, lynchings, murders, and massacres are part of labour history. On this date in 1917 a remarkable act of lawlessness saw hundreds of people kidnapped and forced on to box cars to compel a settlement favourable to management in a mining strike.

The miners of Bisbee, Arizona were represented by the radical union, the International Workers of the World. The IWW (or “Wobblies”) presented a list of demands on wages and safety that the company, Phelps Dodge, rejected utterly, thus precipitating a walkout of about 8,000 miners. The company, claiming that this work stoppage threatened the American war effort, asked for federal troops to be sent in, but President Wilson refused and appointed a mediator instead.

The mine owners came up with a daring and illegal plan. Deputizing over 2,200 men in a posse and arranging with a railway company to provide transport, the deputies entered Bisbee and arrested 2,000 men (not all of them connected to the strike or the union) at gunpoint and marched them to the trains. Two men, a deputy and a striker, died in a shoot-out. They they were given the choice of denouncing the IWW and returning to work or being forced on to boxcars spread with manure and ridden out of the state. 700 of the prisoners took the opportunity to go back to the mines and the remaining 1300, guarded by machine gun positions, were entrained and sent 170 miles away to New Mexico.

Public opinion was divided when news finally leaked out. Most assumed that the miners had provoked violence and deserved their deportation, though the federal government condemned the action. The Justice Department arrested 21 company officials and sheriffs but a court ruled that the federal government had no jurisdiction; it was a state affair and Arizona declined to prosecute.

A YouTube video illustrates the story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXOVp9LLRAU

1584  The assassination of William the Silent

By 1555 Europe had suffered two generations of religious upheaval. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V had had enough; he had battled Islam in the Mediterranean and Protestantism in Germany, Spain, and the Low Countries but now he was retiring. The German lands he gave to his brother Ferdinand and to his son Philip he bequeathed the Spanish possessions, which included the Netherlands. Ferdinand brought an end to the religious wars in Germany and Austria by the Peace of Augsburg which tolerated the presence of both Catholic and Protestant areas, but Philip was made of sterner stuff. Declaring that he would not be a king over heretics, he resolved to snuff out the reformed religion in all the lands he ruled. This would involve him in religious conflicts in England, France and the Netherlands.

Philip was ruler over the Dutch provinces but the locals enjoyed many traditional liberties and many of them felt that these freedoms should extend to the adoption of Protestantism. An anti-Spanish party grew in the Netherlands, opposed to the introduction of the Spanish Inquisition and the presence of Spanish troops. One of its leaders was William of Orange, known to history as the Silent. Political opposition grew into open rebellion and for decades Protestant forces battled the Spanish. In 1580 William was declared an outlaw by King Philip and a price placed on his head. The proclamation read:

And to the end indeed, that this matter may be the more effectually and readily performed, and so by that means our said people the sooner delivered, from this tyranny and oppression, we willing to reward virtue, and to punish vice, do promise in the word of a king, and as the minister of God, that if there be any found, either among our own subjects, or amongst strangers, so noble of courage, and desirous of our service, and the public good, that knoweth any means how to execute our said Decree, and to set us and himself free, from the aforesaid plague, delivering him unto us quick or dead, or at the least taking his life from him, we will cause, to be given and provided, for him and his heirs, in good land or ready money, choose him whether, immediately after the thing shall be accomplished, the sum of 25 thousand crowns of gold, and if he have committed any offence or fault, how great and grievous soever it be, we promise to pardon him the same, and from henceforth do pardon it, yea and if he were not before noble, we do make him noble, for his courage and valiant act: and if the principal doer, take with him for his aid, in the accomplishment of this enterprise, or execution of this his fact, other persons beside himself, we will bestow upon them benefits and a reward, and will give every one of them, according to their degree, and according to that service which they shall yield unto us in this behalf: pardoning them also whatsoever they have ill done, and making them likewise noble.

These generous inducements to murder proved effective. In March 1582 a French teen-ager named Jean Jaureguay fired at William from point-blank range but his gun was overloaded with powder and it blew off the would-be killer’s thumb instead. He was cut down instantly by William’s guards. In July 1584 an assassin succeeded in taking William’s life.  Balthasar Gerard, a Burgundian Catholic, infiltrated the court of the prince and shot him dead, the first murder of a head of state by a firearm in history. William’s last words were “Mon Dieu, ayez pitié de mon âme; mon Dieu, ayez pitié de ce pauvre peuple.” (My God, have pity on my soul; my God, have pity on this poor people). Gerard was found guilty and hideously tortured.

In commissioning the killing of his opponents Philip created a fashion for targeted assassination. Many English Catholic attempts would be made on the life of Elizabeth I and the Gunpowder Plotters of 1605 attempted to wipe out the whole English ruling class. In France, Henry III sanctioned the murder of his Catholic foe Henry of Guise in 1588 and in the next year was himself murdered.  His successor Henry IV was assassinated in 1610.

1928 The first production of sliced bread

Hats off to Otto Frederick Rohwedder and the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri. Rohwedder was an Iowa jeweller and optician whose earlier attempts at producing a bread-slicing device had literally gone up in flames, but by 1927 he had patented a new technique and sold the first machine to his friend, the Chillicothe baker, Frank Bench. This day in 1928 saw the first use of Rohwedder’s electric bread-slicer to produce “Kleen Maid Sliced Bread”. It proved a great hit and the new product took America by storm, encouraging the sales of bread and spreadables such as jam and peanut butter as well as electric toasters. By 1933 sliced bread was outselling whole loaves.

During World War II the American government briefly banned sliced bread on the belief that it required more wrapping paper to keep the pieces fresh. When it was discovered that the nation’s wax paper supplies were sufficient to withstand any threat to America’s war-time security, the ban was lifted.

A mistaken attribution

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me bring love.
Where there is offense, let me bring pardon.
Where there is discord, let me bring union.
Where there is error, let me bring truth.
Where there is doubt, let me bring faith.
Where there is despair, let me bring hope.
Where there is darkness, let me bring your light.
Where there is sadness, let me bring joy.
O Master, let me not seek as much
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love,
for it is in giving that one receives,
it is in self-forgetting that one finds,
it is in pardoning that one is pardoned,
it is in dying that one is raised to eternal life.

This is a lovely set of sentiments, but it has been wrongly attributed to St Francis of Assisi. It is not found among the saint’s writings and experts point out that the self-centred orientation and repetition of “me” is completely out of character for Francis. Even more strangely, the prayer has been attributed to the murderous Norman, William the Conqueror, who overran England in 1066. In fact, the earliest mention of the poem is in an obscure Catholic publication in 1912, published by  the League of the Holy Mass; it appeared anonymously but it may be the work of the League’s founder, Father Esther Bouquerel.

1805  Birth of the first “forecaster”

Schoolchildren are taught about the voyage of HMS Beagle and its five-year expedition that carried Charles Darwin around the world, providing him with the experiences that would lead to the publication of his theories of evolution. Less well-known is the ship’s captain, Robert Fitzroy (1805-65), who had brought Darwin on board as a gentleman companion. If his story is told at all, it is of a hide-bound traditionalist, at odds with Darwin on matters of religion. Fitzroy’s account is worth relating, both for its religious implications and because the man was, in his own way, a scientist.

Fitzroy was a young Royal Navy officer when he first assumed temporary command of Beagle in 1828, after the suicide of its captain. The ship had been doing survey work near the southern tip of South America when it took on board four natives of Tierra del Fuego who were taken to England to be civilized and Christianized — the hope was that they would return to their people as missionaries. In 1831 Fitzroy was reappointed to Beagle and given the task of a lengthy survey cruise; he was to chart distant waters and report on the hydrography of the areas he visited. As well as carrying back the Fuegians, Fitzroy sailed with young ne’er-do-well and amateur biologist Charles Darwin as someone with whom the captain, isolated socially from his crew, could relate on a personal level and, hopefully, share his scientific interests. It is important to note that Fitzroy on his previous voyages had observed geographical features that must have taken aeons to shape, an observation that challenged any literalist view of Creation and the Flood. As token of this, Fitzroy gave Darwin a copy of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geography.

The voyage was eventful, of course, for Darwin’s work but also because of the often-stormy relationship between the moody and irascible Fitzroy and his guest. Though Fitzroy during the expedition had remained convinced of the immense age of the earth and a sceptic of the account of Noah, he seems to have undergone a religious conversion shortly after his return home, possibly influenced by his recent marriage. He began to doubt the findings of Lyell and Darwin and felt guilty about his part in enabling Darwin’s work. At the famous Oxford debate in 1860 which pitted Darwin’s supporters against his religious opponents, Fitzroy “lifting an immense Bible first with both and afterwards with one hand over his head, solemnly implored the audience to believe God rather than man”. The crowd shouted him down.

But there is more to Fitzroy’s life than this sad portrayal of a man who saw the eternal verities denied and his life’s work twisted, because Fitzroy served nobly as Governor of New Zealand, urging decent treatment of the native Maori and because he was an eminent scientist with his own claim to fame. He was elected to the Royal Society (with the approval of Darwin) and pioneered research in meteorology. He invented new types of barometers to predict changes in the weather. With great industry and intelligence he arranged for systems of weather reporting by land and sea; his office made weather “forecasts” (Fitzroy invented the term) which warned ships away from sailing on dangerous days, thus saving the lives of countless sailors, and laid the foundations for today’s weather science.

Unfortunately, his good nature, which caused him to spend his entire fortune on public works, and his depressive personality led him to commit suicide. Scientists, including Darwin, raised funds to support his family.

1776 The American Declaration of Independence

On this date, the rebellious colonists of British North America published their manifesto, surely one of the most interesting and influential documents in history. While most readers focus on the early parts of the writing, it is instructive to read the lengthy list of abuses which the authors use to justify their uprising against their lawful king. What is even more instructive is to consider a passage that was cut from the original draught:

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither … And he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

In this fascinating paragraph Thomas Jefferson, a slave-owner surrounded in Congress by other slave-owners, criticizes the British for instituting African slavery in America, and blocking attempts to suppress the slave trade, and then criticizes the British for promising freedom to those slaves who remain loyal to the crown.

I have always considered the American Revolution to be an enormous and sad mistake. Had the rebellion failed and the colonists remained under the British crown, slavery would have been abolished decades earlier and far less painfully. A mighty transatlantic anglophone empire would have existed without the curse of a written Enlightenment-engendered constitution that has caused the USA so much grief.

1863 Pickett’s Charge

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think “This time”. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago. 

Thus wrote William Faulkner about the bloody events of July 3, 1863, when the Battle of Gettysburg was lost to the Southern cause, when thousands of rebel infantrymen were blown to bits trudging the three quarters of mile under ferocious fire toward the Union lines.

Robert E. Lee’s invasion of the North was met and blunted at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania by General George Meade. Most historians regard the three-days of fighting at Gettysburg as the turning point of the American Civil, the last time at which the South could realistically contemplate victory, and they look upon Pickett’s Charge as the moment the battle was decisively settled.

Lee’s orders for July 2 involved a massive frontal assault on the centre of the Union line, preceded by an artillery barrage that was to obliterate the northern guns. This plan caused dismay among the generals called upon to carry it out. James Longstreet, the corps commander, told Lee that the charge was doomed to fail: “I have been a soldier all my life. I have commanded companies, I have commanded regiments. I have commanded divisions. And I have commanded even more. But there are no fifteen thousand men in the world that can go across that ground.” Lee insisted it be carried out but Longstreet proved correct. The Confederate artillery did little to silence the northern guns and the grey-clad lines, 12,500 men stretching a mile wide, led by Generals Pickett, Pettigrew, and Trimble, suffered horrible casualties as they moved toward the low stone wall on Cemetery Ridge that was their target. Few made it that far. The charge evaporated into confusion and retreat.

The next day Lee began his retreat back to the South.