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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Margaret Beaufort (1441-1509) was the daughter and heiress of John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, grandson of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. Being very beautiful, as well as the heiress of great possessions, she was at the early age of fifteen years anxiously sought in marriage by two persons of high rank and influence. One was a son of the Duke of Suffolk, then chief advisor to the king; the other was Edmund, Earl of Richmond, half-brother to the reigning monarch, Henry the Sixth. Wavering between these two proposals [she was only 9 years old], Margaret, in her perplexity, requested advice from an elderly gentlewoman, her confidential friend. The matron recommended her not to consult her own inclinations, but to take an early opportunity of submitting the question to St. Nicholas, the patron saint of undecided maidens. She did so, and the saint appeared to her in a vision, dressed in great episcopal splendour, and advised her to marry Edmund. Following this advice, she became the mother of Henry Tudor, who afterwards became King Henry VII. Edmund died soon after the birth of his son, and Margaret married twice afterwards: first, Humphrey Stafford, son of the Duke of Buckingham; and, secondly, Thomas Lord Stanley, subsequently Earl of Derby. We are not told if she consulted St. Nicholas in the choice of her second and third husbands.
Margaret founded several colleges, and employed herself in acts of real charity and pure devotion not common at the period. After a useful and exemplary life, she died at the age of sixty-eight years; having just lived to see her grandson Henry VIII seated on the throne of England. She is included among the royal authors as a translator of some religious works from the French, one of which, entitled The Soul’s Perfection, was printed by Wynkyn de Worde. At the end of this work are the following verses:
‘This heavenly book, more precious than gold, Was late direct, with great humility, For godly pleasure therein to behold, Unto the right noble Margaret, as ye see, The King’s mother of excellent bounty, Harry the Seventh; that Jesu him preserve, This mighty Princess hath commanded me T’ imprint this book, her grace for to deserve.’
Dr John Dodd, a famous English preacher whose wasteful extravagance led to his forging financial documents in order to rescue himself from poverty and shame, was hanged on this day on the triangular gallows at Tyburn in London. After being cut down, his body was instantly taken away and attempts were made to revive him with a hot bath. Since hanging at this time usually meant death by strangulation instead of snapping of the neck in the drop, such efforts at revival occasionally succeeded. A 19th-century source tells us:
On the 16th August 1264, Henry III granted a pardon to a woman named Inetta de Balsham, who, having been condemned to death for harbouring thieves, hung on a gallows from nine o’clock of a Monday to sunrise of Thursday, and yet came off with life, as was testified to the king by sufficient evidence.
Dr. Plot, who quotes the original words of the pardon, surmises that it might have been a case like one he had heard of from Mr. Obadiah Walker, Master of University College, being that of a Swiss who was hung up thirteen times without effect, life being preserved by the condition of the wind-pipe, which was found to be by disease converted into bone.
Dr. Plot relates several cases of the resuscitation of women after hanging, and makes the remark that this revival of life appears to happen most frequently in the female sex. One notable case was that of a poor servant girl named Anne Green, who was condemned to death, at Oxford in 1650 for alleged child-murder, although her offence could only be so interpreted by superstition and pedantry. This poor woman, while hanging, had her legs pulled, and her breast knocked by a soldier’s musket [in order to hasten her demise]; she was afterwards trampled on, and the rope was left unslackened around her neck. Yet, when in the hands of the doctors for dissection, she gave symptoms of life, and in fourteen hours was so far well as to be able to speak. Eager inquiries were made as to her sensations from the moment of suspension; but she remembered nothing she came back to life like one awakening out of a deep sleep. This poor woman obtained a pardon, was afterwards married, and had three children.
A second female malefactor, the servant of a Mrs. Cope, at Oxford, was hanged there in 1658, and kept suspended an unusually long time, to make sure of the extinction of life; after which, being cut down, her body was allowed to fall to the ground with a violence which might have been sufficient to kill many unhanged persons. Yet she revived. In this case the authorities insisted on fulfilling their imperfect duty next day. Plot gives a third case, that of Marjory Mausole, of Arley, in Staffordshire, without informing us of its date or any other circumstances.
On the 2nd of September 1721, a poor woman named Margaret Dickson, married, but separated from her husband, was hanged at Edinburgh for the crime of concealing pregnancy in the case of a dead child. After suspension, the body was inclosed in a coffin at the gallows’ foot, and carried off in a cart by her relatives, to be interred in her parish churchyard at Musselburgh, six miles off. Some surgeon apprentices rudely stopped the cart before it left town, and broke down part of the cooms, or sloping roof of the coffin,—thus undesignedly letting in air. The subsequent jolting of the vehicle restored animation before it had got above two miles from the city, and Maggy was carried home a living woman, though faint and hardly conscious. Her neighbours flocked around her in wonder; a minister came to pray over her; and her husband, relenting under a renewed affection, took her home again. She lived for many years after, had several more children creditably born, and used to be pointed out in the streets of Edinburgh, where she cried salt, as Half-Hanged Maggy Dickson.
The instances of men reviving after hanging are scarcely less numerous than those of females. In 1705, a housebreaker named Smith being hung up at Tyburn, a reprieve came after he had been suspended for a quarter of an hour. He was taken down, bled, and revived. One William Duell, duly hanged in London in 1740, and taken to the Surgeons’ Hall to be anatomized, came to life again, and was transported. At Cork a man was hanged in January 1767 for a street robbery, and immediately after carried to a place appointed, where a surgeon made an incision in his windpipe, and in about six hours recovered him. The almost incredible fact is added, that the fellow had the hardihood to attend the theatre the same evening. William Brodie, executed in Edinburgh, October 1788, for robbing the excise-office, had similar arrangements made for his recovery. It was found, however, that he had had a greater fall than he bargained for with the hangman, and thus the design was frustrated.
On the 3rd of October 1696, a man named Richard Johnson was hanged at Shrewsbury, He had previously, on a hypocritical pretence, obtained a promise from the under-sheriff that his body should be laid in his coffin without being stripped. He hung half an hour, and still showed signs of life, when a man went up to the scaffold to see what was wrong with him. On a hasty examination, it was found that the culprit had wreathed cords round and under his body, connected with a pair of hooks at his neck, by which the usual effect of the rope was prevented, the whole of this apparatus being adroitly concealed under a double shirt and a flowing periwig. On the trick being discovered, he was taken down, and immediately hanged in an effectual manner.
After the American Civil War ended in 1865, the push westward by settlers and the military intensified. Most native tribes were forced on to reservations but many maintained a state of intermittent warfare with the government. In 1876 a US Army campaign, one component of which was the 7th Cavalry led by Lt-Col. George Custer, was launched to force Cheyenne and Sioux nations back on to their reservations in Montana and the Dakotas. On June 25th, Custer’s 700-man column encountered a native encampment on the Little Bighorn River, the unusual size of which he did fully appreciate, and, believing he had been detected, Custer ordered an attack.
Custer divided his command into three elements, one of which he led, while the other two were under the command of Captain Frederick Benteen and Major Marcus Reno. Benteen and Reno were ordered to charge in order to bring the native warriors into a battle while Custer was to attack the village itself. Unfortunately Benteen and Reno found themselves facing superior forces and they were forced to retreat and dig defensive positions on a hill, leaving Custer unsupported and riding into what was said to be the biggest gathering of hostiles ever assembled. Instead of facing 800 enemies, Custer had blundered into a camp of thousands under chiefs such as Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Gall; mounted warriors from two directions forced him into a running battle of retreat. In about an hour, Custer and his detachment were dead. Benteen and Reno and their men were under siege for the rest of the day and into the next before the natives melted away in the face of General Terry’s relief column.
Terry’s men found the bodies of Custer, two of his brothers, his nephew and a brother-in-law, plus over 260 others, ritually mutilated where they fell, killed on the run, or in a number of dismounted “last stands”. They were buried on the battle field and the news sent out to a shocked nation about to celebrate America’s centenary.
The native triumph was short lived; their confederacy soon dissolved. Many bands returned to the reservations while Sitting Bull led his people across the border into Canada’s Northwest Territories (now southern Saskatchewan).
