Official "This Day In History" thread

[kladner]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

April 7

On this day...
"Now let us assume that we lose Indochina," Eisenhower said. "If Indochina goes, several things happen right away. The Malay Peninsula, that last little bit of land hanging on down there, would be scarcely defensible. The tin and tungsten that we so greatly value from that area would cease coming."

According to Politico, he was already on this track, speaking before the U.S. Governors’ Conference in Seattle on August 4, 1953. Perhaps some will find his straightforward statement of a US interest in the region's natural resources refreshing:

Malvina Reynolds took note of this connection at the height of the Vietnam conflagration.

Chorus:
Tungsten, wolfram, makes the steel so hard.
It goes thru the side of an army tank as tho it were a paper card.
If you want to rule the world, never mind wrong or right,
All you got to have is tungsten wolframite.



There's only one thing in all this world hard as the tungsten steel,
That's the heart of a financier working on a tungsten deal.
Only one thing in all this world hard as the tungsten kind,
It's a diplomat with tungsten on his mind.
(Chorus)


The air is full of heavy words all about democracy,
And the boys they fight in many lands to keep the free world free,
And the words have a beautiful ringing sound that keeps us all up tight,
But the fact of the matter is tungsten wolframite.
(Chorus)


Tungsten, wolfram, what a happy sound,
Tungsten in stockpiles and underneath the ground,
Tungsten in China, sheelite** in Malay,
But there are no tungsten mines in the USA.
(Chorus)


**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheelite

[Dr Sardonicus]

April 11

On this day...

In 1865, President Abraham Lincoln spoke to a crowd outside the White House, saying, "We meet this evening, not in sorrow, but in gladness of heart."

Near the end of his speech, he said the following:

The amount of constituency, so to speak, on which the new Louisiana government rests, would be more satisfactory to all, if it contained fifty, thirty, or even twenty thousand, instead of only about twelve thousand, as it does. It is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.

One of those in attendance was John Wilkes Booth.

"That means nr citizenship," he told Lewis Powell, one of his band of conspirators. "Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make."

[Dr Sardonicus]

April 12

On this day...

In 1963, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested and jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, charged with contempt of court and parading without a permit. (During his time behind bars, King wrote his "Letter from Birmingham Jail.")

I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.

[kladner]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

March 30

Also called "Seward's Icebox." A lot of folks thought Seward was crazy to buy this worthless land from Russia. But, as someone pointed out to me, "he had his bearings straight."


According to the US State Department's Office of the Historian, Milestones:

I've been meaning to say that the purchase price worked out to about $0.02 per acre. Such a deal!

[Dr Sardonicus]

(Re: Alaska purchase)

Originally Posted by kladner

I've been meaning to say that the purchase price worked out to about $0.02 per acre. Such a deal!

I actually saw this figure -- 2 cents an acre -- given in a cartoon feature on TV when I was a kid. I can't remember what show it was on.

In 2017, some Russian nationalists were commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Alaska Purchase by yowling about it, yearning to have Alaska back in Russian hands...

[kladner]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

(Re: Alaska purchase)

I actually saw this figure -- 2 cents an acre -- given in a cartoon feature on TV when I was a kid. I can't remember what show it was on.

In 2017, some Russian nationalists were commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Alaska Purchase by yowling about it, yearning to have Alaska back in Russian hands...

I think that I actually learned it in school, probably elementary.

[ewmayer]

Today is the 100th anniversary of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in India, in which hundreds of civilans were mowed down by British machine-gun fire:

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com...w/68859836.cms

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...w/68773961.cms

100 years later, still no formal apology from the UK, merely milquetoast "expressions of regret", a.k.a. "mistakes were made"-style non-apologies.

The great thing about the neoliberalization of all aspects of modern life, including military operations, is that nowadays we have private militias to do much of our imperial massacring for us ... "it wasn't us, it was those Blackwater goons! You can be sure there will be a thorough investigation, followed by possible stern reprimands. That'll teach 'em."

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Today is the 100th anniversary of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in India, in which hundreds of civilans were mowed down by British machine-gun fire:

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com...w/68859836.cms

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...w/68773961.cms

100 years later, still no formal apology from the UK, merely milquetoast "expressions of regret", a.k.a. "mistakes were made"-style non-apologies.

This massacre was portrayed in the movie Gandhi. My absolute favorite line is when Colonel Dyer said, "My intent was to inflict a lesson that would have an impact throughout all India." I think it's fair to say that, in this, he was wildly successful. Just not in the way he had in mind.

The Raj and the House of Lords were thrilled. The House of Commons, not so much.

Amritsar and the "Golden Temple" was also the place where Operation Blue Star took place in June 1984.

[Dr Sardonicus]

April 16

On this day...

In 1947, the cargo ship Grandcamp, carrying ammonium nitrate, blew up in the harbor in Texas City, Texas; a nearby ship, the High Flyer, which was carrying ammonium nitrate and sulfur, caught fire and exploded the following day; the blasts and fires killed nearly 600 people.

The History Channel page gives the following description of how the first explosion happened. I'm not sure it could have been stopped, but the firefighting efforts, to say the least, did nothing to prevent it. The firefighters simply didn't know what they were dealing with. (I have a fuzzy recollection of a similar predicament during the fires and explosions in a chemical plant near Houston after Hurricane Harvey.)

On April 16, the Grandcamp was being loaded with ammonium nitrate as well as tobacco and government-owned ammunition. Cigarette smoking, although officially banned, was a common practice by longshoremen on the docks. Just two days prior to the explosion, a cigarette had caused a fire on the docks. On the morning of April 16, smoke was spotted deep within one of the Grandcamp‘s holds.

Some water and an extinguisher were used to fight the fire, but hoses were not employed for fear of ruining the cargo; there were already 2,300 tons loaded on the ship. While the ammunition was removed from the ship, the crew attempted to restrict oxygen to the hold in hopes of putting out the fire. Apparently they did not realize that because of ammonium nitrate’s chemical composition, it does not require oxygen in order to burn.

The Waymarking page gives the following account:

The Texas City port explosions of 1947 stand today as the worst industrial accident in US History.

On 16 Apr 1947 when the SS Grandcamp's cargo of ammonium nitrate fertilizer caught fire and then exploded. The fire started slowly, but grew in intensity as it was being fought. An hour and 15 minutes after the fire was spotted by the crew members, as it was being aggressively battled by the Texas City Volunteer Fire Department and ship's crew members, the Grandcamp exploded.

The force of the Grandcamp's explosion knocked people over 10 miles away in Galveston, and blew windows out of buildings 40 miles away in Houston. People 100 miles away in Louisiana felt the shock wave created by the blast. The area around the explosions was a moonscape of utter destruction, for miles in every direction.

That same explosion destroyed the Monsanto Chemical Company plant, and caused further explosions of chemical tanks and refineries along the waterfront.

The Grandcamp's explosion touched off an explosion in the SS High Flyer, which was docked next to the Grandcamp, and also carried a cargo of ammonium nitrate. For hours after the Grandcamp explosion the crew of the High Flyer had trued to free her from her mooring in harbor and float her away from the dock, to no avail. After her explosion, the High Flyer's propeller was found a half mile away, parts of it shorn off by the force of the explosion and fearsome shrapnel.

The High Flyer's explosion started a domino effect of more destruction: it damaged more refineries that then exploded, and blew another ship (the SS Wilson B. Keene) to bits.

Almost 600 people died on this awful day, including all but one of Texas City's volunteer firefighters died that day.

The High Flyer's propeller was installed in a memorial to the explosion in a small plaza with a couple of state historic markers in the 1980s. After 9/11, increased concerns about port security led to the decision to remove and relocate the markers and the propeller to new homes. The propeller was reinstalled here in 2012.

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

April 16

On this day...

I knew someone whose father perished in the Texas City disaster.

[Dr Sardonicus]

April 17

On this day...

In 1961, some 1,500 CIA-trained Cuban exiles launched the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in an attempt to topple Fidel Castro, whose forces crushed the incursion by the third day.

From the [url=https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2016-featured-story-archive/the-bay-of-pigs-invasion.htmlCIA's own web page[/url]:

Following Castro’s orders, Raul Roa, the Cuban Foreign Minister, called an emergency session of the United Nations Political and Security Committee in New York on the afternoon of April 15. The session was attended by US Ambassador to the UN, Adlai Stevenson.

Stevenson held up pictures of the planes as he adamantly stated the US had nothing to do with the airstrikes. He insisted that the attacks were conducted by defectors from Castro’s own air force. The pictures, however, proved to be the unraveling of the cover story.

On close inspection, one could make out a metal nose on the plane flown by the defector; FAR aircraft noses were plastic. Ambassador Stevenson, who was unaware of the covert operation, was furious when the truth was revealed.

Cancel the Strikes!

Phase Two, April 16: This was bad news for President Kennedy whose number one priority was hiding the hand of the US Government, which was becoming more exposed as the operation proceeded. Lying to the UN had serious consequences and a second strike would put the United States in an awkward position internationally. Political considerations trumped the military importance of a “D-Day” air strike.

That worked out well...

BTW, also on this day...

In 1492, a contract was signed by Christopher Columbus and a representative of Spain's King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, giving Columbus a commission to seek a westward ocean passage to Asia.

Of course, as we all know, and was known in his day, Columbus was laboring under a misconception about the size of the earth, so never found a westward passage to Asia.