Christmas Every Day

1755 The Lisbon Earthquake

On the morning of November 1, All Saint’s Day, at 9:40, a massive earthquake, followed a tsunami, and a series of devastating fires destroyed the city of Lisbon and wrought havoc on much of the Portuguese coastal area. The quake’s effects were felt as far away as Brazil and Greenland. It is estimated that 40,000-50,000 people may have died with many more injured or homeless.

About 85% of the city was destroyed. Palaces, hospitals, churches, homes and government buildings were obliterated. Precious libraries and art work were lost forever as well as much of the architecture of earlier ages. (Those who find the distinctive Portuguese late Gothic style known as Manueline to be too ugly for words will not rue the destruction of the Ribeira Palace.)

The saviour of Lisbon was the Prime Minister Sebastião de Melo, later ennobled as the Marquis of Pombal. His immediate task was to “bury the dead and heal the living” but important decisions were to be made about the future of the city. Should it be abandoned, rebuilt with scavenged material, or levelled and rebuilt from scratch? It was the latter course that was adopted. The dark, narrow and winding streets of medieval Lisbon were gone, and a beautiful new central Lisbon emerged with wide streets laid out in a grid, spacious squares and a handsome neoclassical architecture that came to be known as Pombaline. These new buildings were designed to be earthquake-proof, one of the earliest attempts at anti-seismic building; many of them were pre-fabricated outside the city and moved quickly into place.

Though Lisbon was confidently rebuilt, the disaster seems to have shaken European philosophy as well. Voltaire used the catastrophe to mock the optimism of Leibniz and Pope, asking “And can you then impute a sinful deed/ To babes who on their mothers’ bosoms bleed?/ Was then more vice in fallen Lisbon found,/ Than Paris, where voluptuous joys abound?/Was less debauchery to London known,/ Where opulence luxurious holds the throne?” Kant and Rousseau also weighed in on the subject.

1940 End of the Battle of Britain

In June of 1940 as the armies of Nazi Germany sprawled triumphantly across western Europe, Prime Minister Winston Churchill spoke to the House of Commons:

What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us.

Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’

The Battle of Britain, which was to prepare for a sea-borne invasion of England, was entrusted by Adolf Hitler to the Luftwaffe, his airforce. The plan was to secure a safe crossing of the Channel by wiping out the possibility of resistance by the Royal Air Force. RAF squadrons were to be lured to the sky or destroyed on the ground by the veteran pilots of the Luftwaffe who had successfully destroyed the airforces of Poland, France, Belgium, Norway and the Netherlands. Once the RAF was out of the way, bombing of cities would destroy the British economy and morale and pave the way for an easy invasion. The ineffective performance of the RAF in the skies over France gave Field Marshal Hermann Goering much optimism.

For months in the summer and autumn of 1940 thousands of missions were flown against Britain. Though the RAF was outnumbered, it possessed two excellent fighter craft, the Hurricane and the Spitfire, manned not only by British crews but exiles from Nazi Europe and volunteers from the Commonwealth. Radar intelligence gave the defenders a look at their attackers as they formed up and advanced. It was a close run thing. On October 31, the Luftwaffe abandoned the attempt to destroy the RAF and abandoned plans for an invasion. The Battle of Britain had ended and the Blitz — the attack on British cities — would begin.

 

1831 Nat Turner is arrested

Nat Turner was a slave born in a plantation area of Virginia in 1800. As a youth he was recognized to be of high intelligence and piety, acquiring literacy and a love of reading the Bible. By his early 20s he had begun to experience religious visions which he spoke of as he preached and conducted Baptist services among his fellow slaves. He acquired the nickname of “the Prophet”. One vision in 1828 convinced him that he was destined for great things and he came to believe that he would lead an army against the forces of darkness; Turner began to speak with his enslaved friends about a rebellion against their white masters. Solar eclipses he interpreted as a sign to begin the violence in the summer of 1831.

On August 21, Turner and a gang of perhaps as many as 70 blacks, slave and free, rose up and embarked on an attack on neighbouring plantations. Slaves were freed, weapons were gathered, and whites — men, women and children — were indiscriminately murdered. Their ambition seems to have been to provoke a larger rising, terrorize the white inhabitants, and bring the evils of slavery before the world. But after only two days, local militias were able to crush the rebellion. Turner fled into hiding but on October 30 he was captured.

In the days after the rising, hundreds of blacks died at the hands of vengeful white mobs; Turner and 19 others were executed after trials. The failure of the rebellion led to both harsher legal restrictions on slaves and attempts by some owners to ameliorate the condition of their human chattels.

 

1922 Benito Mussolini takes over Italy

Italy after World War I was in terrible shape. The economy was shattered, politic legitimacy was shaky, and hundreds of thousands of disillusioned veterans looked to radical solutions for the country’s problems. There were monarchist paramilitaries, anarchist gangs, peasant violence, Marxist attacks on industrialist and landowners, and the “black shirts” of Benito Mussolini.

Mussolini was born in 1883, the son to a socialist blacksmith. As a student, he would have fit in with Stalin’s turbulent seminary. (Instead of killing teachers, Mussolini stabbed fellow students).  He first became a teacher, schoolmaster, then a journalist. As he was growing up, he was not a fascist but a socialist, running his own newspaper called Class Struggle. He then became editor of the official Italian Socialist newspaper called Avanti. Mussolini was a very violent kind of socialist and during WWI he was expelled from the Socialist party for wanting Italy to take part in the war. He left the party and joined the army, where he was wounded.

When Mussolini emerged from the war, he was definitely not a socialist. He and a couple hundred discontents of various brands of returning veterans met in Milan and founded the first of the “Fascist fighting squads”. They banded under two symbols, one was the black shirt,  and the other, the fasces — the Roman symbol for authority, consisting of rods bound together with an axe in the middle. These “fascists” wanted an end to democracy and the institution of a totalitarianism: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

In the early 1920s there is widespread violence of the kind that fascists love — thuggery, kidnappings, beatings, murders, sabotage — and conflict between the left wing and the right wing. The fascists seized the opportunity to say that they were the solution to the nation’s disorder. In 1922, Mussolini sent out four fascist columns from different parts of Italy to converge on Rome. They announced long ahead of time that they were going to seize power but none dared hinder their advance. They marched into Rome where the constitutional democracy quickly collapsed and the king Victor Emmanuel III called on Mussolini to form a government. In the Chamber of Deputies, he gave a speech boasting about what a moderate fellow he was.

I am here to defend and enforce to the highest degree the revolution of the black shirts, injecting them intimately into the history of the nation as a force of development, progress, and equilibrium. With 300,000 youths fully armed, fully determined, and almost mystically ready to act at my command. I could have chastised all those who have defamed and tried to hinder fascism, I could have made of this sordid grey assembly hall  a bivouac for my squads. I could have kicked out parliament and constructed a government exclusively of fascists. I could have done so, but did not want to, at least not for the present.

Mussolini will rule Italy until his wartime fall in 1943.

1938 An archbishop denounces “swing music”

Churches have always been ambivalent about dance music, some clergy fearing it is the devil’s tool, an incitement to lascivious behaviour; some have made use of dance music in liturgy and in Christmas carols. The waltz, where a man and a woman hold each other in their arms and sway rhythmically, was denounced in the 19th century. The bishop of Santa Fe condemned dances as “conducive to evil, occasions of sin, [providing] opportunities for illicit affinities and love that was reprehensible and sinful.” In 1938, Francis Beckman, the Catholic Archbishop of Dubuque campaigned against “swing music”.

Beckman (1875-1948) was no stranger to controversy. He was an isolationist in foreign policy and a supporter of the radical priest Father Charles Coughlin whose radio broadcasts beamed antisemitic messages to millions in Depression-era America. He believed that calls for the USA to oppose Hitler were a communist plot. In October 1938,  in a speech to the National Council of Catholic Women, he launched a crusade against contemporary dance music which he termed  “a degenerated musical system… turned loose to gnaw away the moral fiber of young people”. “Jam sessions, jitterbugs and cannibalistic rhythmic orgies occupy a place in our social scheme of things,” said the archbishop, “wooing our youth along the primrose path to Hell!” He went on to say that though the Church was zealously trying to promote and preserve the best of modern art, swing music was among “the evil forces … hard at work to undermine its Christian status, debauch its high purposes and harness it to serve individual diabolical ends.”

Archbishop Beckman’s career was curtailed during the Second World War when it was discovered that he had borrowed money in his diocese’s name to invest in a shady gold mine scheme. He was allowed to retain his post but all decisions were left in the hands of a coadjutor bishop.

1929 Stock Market Crash

The 1920s, “the Roaring Twenties”, in the United States was a time of booming economic expansion with new manufacturing, agricultural improvements, and labour productivity all leading to a feeling of confidence in the future. America seemed to have dodged the economic malaise that was plaguing Europe in the wake of the Great War and leading to extremist political movements. Great trust was placed in the stock market with many believing that they could profit from speculative buying on easy terms (“margin buying” allowed one to purchase stocks at a fraction of their value in the hope that a rise in price would produce a profit with little risk). “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau”, said an economist.

But by 1929 there were uneasy signs: there was a glut of produce, producing panic in the agricultural sector; markets for steel and manufactured goods seemed to be saturated; consumer debt was too high; and brokers were starting to dump shares, suppressing the value of the stock market. There was a minor panic in September which optimists thought might be just a market correction that produced some bargains. But it was not to be so. On October 24, 1929 it was “Black Tuesday”.

The stock market opened that day with a mass sell-off of shares by investors trying to get out while they could; this continued over the next few days, prompting big banks and tycoons to try to shore up the market by buying stocks at inflated prices. This confidence-building effort proved a failure as sellers greatly outnumbered buyers and some shares could not be sold at any price. The market would not return to the level reached on September 3, 1929 until November 23, 1954. The Great Depression that would devastate the world economy had begun.

4004 BC  The world is created

The notion that the universe is not very old found its greatest expositor in James Ussher, the Archbishop of Armagh. His study of history led him to publish in 1650 the highly influential Annales Veteris Testamenti, a prima mundi origine deducti, una cum rerum Asiaticarum et Aegyptiacarum chronico, a temporis historici principio usque ad Maccabaicorum initia producto. (“Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world, the chronicle of Asiatic and Egyptian matters together produced from the beginning of historical time up to the beginnings of Maccabees.”) According to Ussher God created Earth on 23 October 4004 BC (it was a Saturday, around nightfall.)

Estimating the age of the world and creating a universal chronology using the Bible had occupied any number of Jewish and Christian scholars — even Isaac Newton had given it a try. There was a general consensus that the world had been created around 4,000 years before the birth of Christ: Johannes Kepler had placed the date as 3992 BC, the Venerable Bede thought it was 3952 BC, and Jose ben Halafta pegged it at 3761 BC. The trick was to use the genealogies in the Old Testament, which were explicit up to the reign of Solomon, and extrapolate from that point tying Biblical events to the reliable dates of occurrences in other cultures. Then there were astronomical calculations to pin down the date of the equinoxes and adjustments with the Jewish calendar. Then he had to fudge a little on the date of Christ’s birth, placing it at 5 BC. The results were artistically satisfying — the building of Solomon’s Temple could be placed exactly 3,000 years after Creation and 1,000 before the birth of Jesus.

Ussher’s ideas were highly influential and were taken seriously until the 19th century when geological observations began to argue for a much older universe.

2014 Islamic Terrorist Attack in Canada

Joseph Paul Michael Abdallah Bulgasem Zehaf-Bibeau was an unhappy 32-year-old ne’er-do-well. He had a poor employment history and a criminal record for larceny and drug possession. He had converted to the Islamic faith of his Libyan father and expressed support for the jihadi cause of ISIS; he seems to have wished to migrate to the Middle East. In the mosques he attended he was a disturbing and unwanted figure.

In October 2014 he came to Ottawa to apply for a passport; his request for a Libyan document was quickly turned down. He grew more agitated, talked of avenging victims of bombing, and somehow acquired a Winchester rifle, though he could not legally possess firearms. On the morning of  October 22 he drove to the National War Memorial with the gun and approached the three soldiers on ceremonial guard duty; as was customary, their weapons were unloaded. He shot Corporal Nathan Cirillo twice (he would die of his wounds) and fired on the other guards as well. Raising his rifle over his head, he shouted “For Iraq!” He then moved on to Parliament Hill, hijacked a vehicle and drove it to the Centre Block of Parliament where he ran inside. Once in the building he shot an unarmed policeman who tried to grab his gun and exchanged fire with other security officials. He was finally brought down in a hail of bullets from the guns of police and the Sergeant-at-Arms of the House of Commons.

Coming only two days after another Canadian Islamic convert had driven his car into two soldiers in Quebec killing one before he himself was shot dead by police, fears grew about the radicalization of Muslim youth.

1973 Death of a comic genius

Walt Kelly was born in 1913 and began a career in journalism while still in his teens. He added cartooning to his list of talents, moving to California in 1936 to work at the Disney studio as a writer and animator, contributing to such masterpieces as Pinocchio, Dumbo, Fantasia, and The Reluctant Dragon. During World War II he worked for the American army as an illustrator of manuals. During this period he introduced the world to a cartoon possum who would later become famous as Pogo.

After the war Kelly entered the realm of comics and political cartooning. While employed at the New York Star, he started a daily strip involving animals of the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia. Pogo was named after the lead character, an amiable, laid-back possum who occupied the swamp with a host of anthropomorphized creatures such as the blowhard Albert the Alligator, the self-worshipping Beauregard Hound, the poetic turtle Churchy Lafemme, the coquettish skunk Miz Ma’m’selle Hepzibah, and know-it-all Howland Owl. The level of humour and wit was high, ruminations on life were plentiful, and the political satire was biting. Pogo took stands against both communism and right-wing extremism, portraying Senator Joe McCarthy as a sinister wildcat and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev as a pig; Richard Nixon appeared as a spider.

Pogo was enormously popular in syndication and in collections of strips, with Kelly winning numerous prizes for his art and acknowledged as an influence on the genre. There were fitful attempts to continue the strip after Kelly’s death but none could successfully imitate the inimitable.

Startling trivia fact: Pogo’s full name was Ponce de Leon Montgomery County Alabama Georgia Beauregard Possum.

1970 Murder of Pierre Laporte

In the 1960s the movement for the independence of Quebec developed a violent wing. Among those turning to terrorism or “propaganda by deed” was the Front de libération du Québec or the FLQ, a Marxist-Leninist group that combined a desire for independence with plans for a communist revolution. The FLQ carried out bank robberies, bombings, sabotage, kidnappings and murder to advance their cause. On October 5, 1970 the Libération cell of the FLQ, composed of well-educated activists, kidnapped a British diplomat, James Cross, and held him hostage, demanding money, and the release of FLQ prisoners for his return. A few days later, the Chénier cell, a rather more thuggish bunch, kidnapped Labour Minister Pierre Laporte. These actions prompted the federal government to suspend all civil liberties in Canada under the War Measures Act.

Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau won a lot of support for his hard-line stance. “Well, there are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don’t like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is, go on and bleed. But it’s more important to keep law and order in this society than to be worried about weak-kneed people who don’t like the looks of…” A CBC reporter asked: “At any cost? How far would you go with that? How far would you extend that?” Trudeau replied: “Well, just watch me.” The next day Laporte’s body was discovered in the trunk of a car; he had been strangled to death.

The Chénier cell would eventually be tracked down, tried and convicted of murder — though all would eventually be freed and continue their fight for independence in less violent ways. The Libération cell released James Cross in return for safe passage to Cuba; all would eventually return to Quebec.