On track

Happy Gadsden Purchase day!

This is the day the conditions of the purchase went into effect and we began to get our $10 million worth – or rather the railroads did, because a transcontinental railroad was the whole point.  Here is what the Gadsden Purchase consisted of: 30,000,000 acres of Southern Arizona and a very small chunk of New Mexico.

Gadsden Purchase

(Let’s hope residents of Phoenix properly appreciate Mr. Gadsden.)

Franklin Pierce, who was our fourteenth president, signed the purchase in 1851.  It’s about the biggest thing he did, except reverse the Missouri Compromise.

Amtrak route

The deal, needless to say, was very unpopular in Mexico and contributed to the unseating in 1854 of General Santa Anna by Benito Juarez.

Without it, there would have been no 3:10 to Yuma, because the railroads declined to build a northern route, when a southern one would be much easier and cheaper.  As you can see, the modern route still follows the outline of the purchase.  I have no idea how you get from Maricopa to Phoenix.  Bus maybe.

* * *

The forty hour week was inaugurated about this time in 1938, as was the minimum wage.  Curiously, these events occurred when millions were out of work, but it was entirely the Roosevelt effect.  What is quite startling is that the first minimum wage was forty cents an hour and the current minimum wage is $7.25 an hour  - which in 1938 dollars is about fifty cents an hour.

The forty-hour week got off to a rough start because the rules were suspended during World War II, but it became the norm post-war.  An interesting chart on Wikipedia shows annual hours worked at various times and places in human history.  It was assembled by Juliet Schor, a professor at Boston College who studies work, leisure and consumption. (Sorry it’s untidy – haven’t figured out how to format it yet.)

Annual hours over eight centuries

Year Type of worker Annual hours

13th century             Adult male peasant, UK               1620 hours

14th century              Casual laborer, UK                       1440 hours

Middle Ages              English worker                              2309 hours

1400–1600                Farmer-miner, male, UK              1980 hours

1840                           Average worker, UK                    3105–3588 hours

1850                           Average worker, U.S.                   3150–3650 hours

1987                          Average worker, U.S.                    1949 hours

1988                          Manufacturing workers, UK          1855 hours

2004                          Average worker, Germany              1480 hours

2008                          Average worker, India                    2817 – 3443 hours

Maybe life wasn’t so bad in the 13th century – but we’re all certainly better off than we were during the 19th.  Below, one of Lewis Hines’ photographs for the National Committee on Child Labor.  These are very young cotton mill workers who worked 10 or 12 hours a day:

Worker at Vermont mill, 1908, Lewis Hines, Library of Congress, ref.01773v.

Operatives in Indianapolis Cotton Mill, 1908, Lewis Hines. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Div., ref 01329v

Pax

Maybe it has something to do with the weather, but June seems to be  the season to start a war. In just two weeks anniversaries related to the War of 1812, WWI and the Korean War have all been marked.  Earlier in the month we missed numerous events related to WWII.

So, weary of war, let us celebrate an enterprising Breton of the 16th century, Jacques Cartier. Cartier was born in St. Malo in Brittany, married into one of the town’s leading families and was chosen by Francois I to try and find a route to China.

Jacques Cartier

That’s pretty much all we know about him, except that he was a very good mariner.  He crossed the Atlantic three times and sailed around the Gulf of St. Lawrence, down the St. Lawrence River and around Newfoundland and in all his crossings and exploration of unknown waters, he never lost a ship.

On this day in 1534 he discovered Prince Edward Island, which of course is a perfectly ridiculous statement since the MicMac already lived there.  If we want to hedge and say he was the first European to see PEI, we’re still on pretty thin ice since the discovery of L’Anse aux Meadows in 1960. L’Anse is the site in Newfoundland where a Norse colony existed some time around 1000 AD.

(L’Anse aux Meadows is actually a corruption of L’Anse aux Meduses. which means Jellyfish Cove.)

Prince Edward Island, courtesy PEI.gov.ca.

Like many explorers, Cartier never found what he was looking for, although La Chine Rapids and La Chine, Quebec, still remind us of his intentions.  But what he found wasn’t too shabby and the St. Lawrence became a great resource for the French for the next two centuries.  The island itself became home to the Acadians, many of whom eventually wound up in Louisiana.

Birthdays today include William Mayo, founder of the eponymous clinic, and George Washington Goethals. Goethals was a West Point graduate (Class of 1880) who joined the Army Corps of Engineers after the academy and worked his way up, helping dredge and dam various rivers, until he became a colonel. Teddy Roosevelt appointed him to build the Panama Canal in 1907, which Col. Goethals did, finishing it two years ahead of schedule in 1914.

Below, suitable for your stereopticon, a view of the first excursion through the new canal.

S.S. Culebra, first excursion through the canal, LoC, PPD.

Over there

The Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on this date in 1914 and that started The War to End All Wars.

Like Queen Victoria, Ferdinand did not grow up expecting to rule.  He was born in 1863 and trundled along being the eldest son of his archduke father, but nothing else loomed on the horizon until 1899,  when Crown Prince Rudolph died in a suicide pact at his hunting lodge at Mayerling. (The photo is of Rudolph, but he and Ferdinand looked a lot alike.)

Crown Prince Rudolph, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Mayerling is another story, one that became the theme of novels, operas and movies, but the upshot was that Ferdinand’s father renounced his right to succession and badda-bing, Ferdinand was the next Emperor in line.

He fell in love with a countess named Sophie, a lady-in-waiting who wasn’t quite blue-blooded enough for a Habsburg, so they carried on secretly for two years and he refused to consider anyone else.  Finally Franz Joseph said okay, but it had to be a morganatic marriage.  That meant any children would have no claim to the throne.  Ferdinand agreed and he and Sophie were married in 1900.  Morganatic also meant that Sophie could not share his rank -  on any formal occasion Ferdinand would be right next to the Emperor, but Sophie had to stand at the end of the line.

Still, they were apparently very happy.  They had four children – the eldest lived until 1990.  Ferdinand was fairly liberal for an Austrian blueblood and believed that the various ethnic groups of the empire should have more autonomy and a chance to complain about things, and he believed in being very tactful with Serbia.

So of course he was the one that got shot.  Gavrilo Princip, a 19-year-old Bosnian patriot, shot and killed both Ferdinand and Sophie.  Princip was not a lone assassin –  he was one of two dozen members of a secret society that were placed strategically along the royal couple’s route that day.

Immediately, the Emperor declared war on Serbia and everybody’s allies got drawn in.  It was A-H, Germany, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria against pretty much everybody else and the reasons were much more subtle and complex than just the assassination – it had more to do with trade and borders.  Like always.

The important things about WWI are a) it led inexorably to WWII and b) 15 million people died, making it one of the bloodiest wars ever.

The photo above is the car Ferdinand and Sophie were riding in on that fateful day;  it is located at the Military Museum in Vienna.

After Ferdinand died, Emperor Franz Joseph designated his grandnephew, Karl, as heir.  Emperor Karl reigned for two years, but went into exile with the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918.  It was all so long ago – except that, amazingly, we are only two steps away.  Karl’s heir, Crown Prince Otto, 98, is still alive, though he has not appeared in public for nearly two decades.

Marching orders

The president fired the general – in the middle of a war – and the public was stunned. So stunned that Congress immediately called for an investigation to ascertain whether or not President Truman had actually had the right on April 11, 1951, to fire Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

The findings of the Joint Committee on Armed Services and Foreign Relations were released on June 27: “…the removal of General MacArthur was within the constitutional power of the President.”

But, the report added, “the circumstances were a shock to the national pride … (and) the reasons assigned for the removal of General MacArthur were utterly inadequate to justify the act.” (Individual Views of Certain Members of the Joint Committee on Armed Services and Foreign Relations of the United States Senate, May 3 – June 27, 1051 (p.46).

Truman boarding a plane, Library of Congress PPD

MacArthur had at least twice indicated disagreement with Truman’s policy in Korea.  So the previous October, Truman had met with him at Wake Island to make sure the general was on the same page regarding U.S. foreign policy.

According to a witness at the meeting Truman was pretty clear:

“There was a 1937 Chevrolet, the only car on the island. And there was a little home, a little spot, about a mile, less than a mile, because the whole island wasn’t a hell of a lot bigger than that. Maybe it was 700 or 800 yards away. So MacArthur got in the car, and so did the President. . . . And he [Truman] always just talked in front of us; everybody did. . . . Well he said, “Listen, you know I’m President, and you’re the general, you’re working for me.” This was about the tone of it. All right, “You don’t make any political decisions; I make the political decisions. You don’t make any kind of a decision at all. Otherwise, I’m going to call you back, and get you out of there. If you make one more move, I’m going to get you out of there.” . .

. - Secret Service Agent Floyd Boring (Oral History Interview, September 21, 1988 , trumanlibrary.org)

Douglas MacArthur -Wikimedia Commons photograph from the Army Signal Corps Collection in the U.S. National Archives.

A few months later, about the time Truman was trying to start peace negotiations with the Chinese and North Koreans, MacArthur sent a letter to a Republican congressman expressing his conviction that the war should be expanded.  That, Truman decided, was the last straw.

Far from being in disgrace,  MacArthur returned to ticker-tape parades in San Francisco and New York and an invitation to speak  before Congress.  From the National Archives Senate Oral History Collection comes a great story from retired White House Photographer George Tames.  Asked the most memorable event of his forty years in Washington, Tames said:

‘. . .inasmuch as I am a great one for theatre and I love grand gestures, it would have to be General MacArthur’s farewell speech to the nation and the Congress to a joint session, for the sheer drama. . . the great day came, and I was in the gallery photographing him, and he was really laying it on.  I always felt that the way the Congress was, that all he had to do was say, “Follow me!” And they would have marched out of the chamber and walked down to the White House and stormed the gates.

‘He was giving his speech, and all of a sudden he said, “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away. And it’s time for this old soldier. . . ” And the House erupted, with senators and congressmen jumping up and shouting: “Don’t go!” “We love you!” “Oh, no!” “Damn that Truman!” “Don’t you go!” “We’ll back you!” Finally he rolled his head up and said, “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” And he just faded away.’

Above and beyond

Growing up with an East and West Germany and an East and West Berlin and why there was a West Berlin in East Germany…it was as confusing as a John Le Carre novel.  Only by looking at a map can you see what an island Berlin was in the middle of an ocean of Soviet-occupied territory.

East and West Germany with air routes to Berlin.

The Soviets clearly found it a major irritant because in the spring of 1948 they began harrassing the Allies, disrupting access to the city in both major and minor ways in an effort to dislodge them

The Autobahn was closed on June 15, ostensibly for repairs, and a week later shipping was halted.  On June 26,  the British and Americans were forced to fly in supplies for troops and nationals.  The next day the Soviets shut down all surface traffic and West Berliners were essentially facing starvation unless something was done.

It was the British who thought of it, a combined UK-USA relief effort from the air.  General Lucius Clay took the idea to President Truman who, in spite of his advisors’ misgivings, agreed to try it.

Thus began the Berlin Airlift.  It has been called the start of the Cold War, but beyond its political impact, it was a signal humanitarian accomplishment.  It was also a logistical triumph – the challenge of getting tons of food and fuel into the two-runway Tempelhof Airport around the clock for ten months is the core of an amazing story.

The success of the airlift depended on good planning and the Douglas C-54.  The USAF was using C-57s, but they weren’t big enough and gradually over the next few weeks the DC54 Skymasters were brought in.

Douglas C54 Skymaster

As for planning, a month into the operation Maj.General William H. Tunner was put in charge. It was Tunner who speeded everything up with his first rule – if a plane couldnt land on its first approach, it had to turn around and go home.  No second try.  No stacking up over the runway.

In a week, the airlift went from bringing in 90 tons a day to a thousand.  By the end of August, 1,500 flights a day were bringing 4,500 tons of food, medicine and fuel to the two million West Berliners who had no other means of survival.

It got such good press for the Allies, that in May of 1949 the Soviets gave up, reopening surface and shipping access.

The technical details are fascinating and lots of them are available at spiritoffreedom.org.  A great source for original CIA and State Department documents is the trumanlibrary.org.  There is a lot more story there.

C-54 landing at Templelhof. Photo, Wikimedia Commons.

Past stand

Not a good day for George Armstrong Custer in 1876 – he and his men were wiped out by the Cheyenne and Sioux at Little Big Horn on this date, but once you’ve said that, just about everything else is open to debate, since public reaction to the event had such a powerful effect on its history.

Custer's Crow scouts: White Man Runs Him, Goes Ahead, Hairy Moccasin, 1907.

First, both the citizenry and officialdom were convinced that only a vastly superior force could defeat the well-armed and well-trained U.S. cavalry.  Thus, for a very long time it was assumed that Custer and his men had been outnumbered by at least three to one.  Over time, that rose until some historians thought it was as much as nine to one.

Second, Custer’s widow Elizabeth was vigilant in defending her husband’s memory, writing three books glorifying his accomplishments.  It became de rigueur not to offend the widow.  Gradually, military figures who might have had evidence to offer passed away and needless to say no one ever thought to ask the Indians.  Even Custer’s own scouts were not interviewed.

Revisionist history  finally began to get around to Little Big Horn after Elizabeth died in 1933 and it is now generally conceded that while the Cheyenne and Sioux might have outnumbered the soldiers, it wasn’t by much.  It was more that Custer was operating with very bad intelligence – he anticipated a small group of warriors – and that resulted in a series of bad decisions.

Photo of Photograph showing Generals Wesley Merritt, Philip Sheridan, George Crook, James William Forsyth, and George Armstrong Custer around a table examining a document. Harpers Weekly, 1865

Gregory Michno has put together a memorable collection of Indian accounts in Lakota Noon that sheds a some light on what happened that day, but a lot of Little Big Horn history is really just pure conjecture.

Sadly, it was a Pyrrhic victory in a way, since the public was so outraged that the Indian wars were newly energized and a Congress which had been considering shrinking the military decided to expand it instead.

In any event, Manifest Destiny triumphed and most of the victors wound up on reservations, except for Sitting Bull and the Lakota that escaped with him to Canada. (Sitting Bull surrendered after five years in Saskatchewan and then joined Buffalo Bill’s wild west show.)

Speaking of war, today is the sixtieth anniversary of the beginning of the Korean War, but one of its most interesting aspects is related to a milestone that must wait until tomorrow.

Break time

It isn’t that today is without significance – New Jersey colony was founded on this date in 1664, after all – but after ten straight days of fact-packed posts, I declare this particular June 24 a mental health day.  And nothing is better for your mental health than eye candy, so…

From the Photochrom Collection (it has no ‘e’) at my favorite site – the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division- here are five of my favorites.

Knights hall, The Hague -05806r

Algerian food sellers -05570v

Photochroms are photolithographs, the result of a process so complicated I can’t begin to understand it, much less explain it.

Scheveningen, Holland-05865v

The library was given a collection of more than six thousand views of popular 19th century tourist spots in Europe. The photos, unfortunately anonymous, were all taken between 1890 and 1900.

Whitby Abbey -09082v

Donkeys for hire -09106v

Most of them are just gorgeous, although there is a surfeit of views of the Alps. But many are perfect for printing and framing or making note cards out of.  Follow the link and pick your own,  or explore the Edward Curtis or WPA collections there.  Have fun.

Take a letter

Christopher Latham Sholes (1819-1890) got his first patent on this day in 1867.  One of those determined entrepreneurs that are the hallmark of 19th Century America, Sholes was out in Wisconsin when he started  working with a friend – Sam Soule – to design a page numbering machine for the printer they worked for.

A very early typewriter, but not actually the first. LoC, PPD.

They showed it to a friend – Carlos Glidden – a lawyer and parttime inventor who suggested they adapt it for letters. (Glidden himself was working on a mechanical plow – everybody was working on something in those days.)

Sholes saw an article about an English machine, but thought he could make a better one and decided to call it a typewriter.

Soule and Glidden helped and the three applied for a patent.  They sent out typed letters and one reached James Densmore of Pennsylvania, who was so impressed he offered to buy a share of their patent without even seeing the machine. Eventually Soule and Glidden dropped out but Sholes stuck with it and Densmore urged more and more improvements.

Advertisement for Underwood typewriters, Library of Congress, PPD

By 1873, they had a good working model which they took to the Remington Sewing Machine Company for an evaluation and instead they got an offer for the patent.  Sholes agreed to sell his half, but Densmore held out for a royalty deal.

You can see where this is going: Sholes walked away with $12,000, while Densmore collected, over time, $1.5 million.

Typewriters then were also the people who used the machines – for the most part the women who were just entering the workforce.  Typewriters were often decorated with flowers to please the typewriters.

Today is also the anniversary of the most expensive hailstorm in US history – Kansas, 1951, 14 million dollars. This is the second hailstorm anniversary in just a week because we are entering hail season, but the most interesting hail story ever comes from Roopkund in northern India, high in the Himalayas.

In 1942, a park ranger discovered hundreds of skeletons scattered around a lake (now called Skeleton Lake).  Nobody knew what had happened to them until 2004, when a forensic team started studying the remains – which dated from some time before the 15th century.

The scientists came to the conclusion that more than three hundred people, stranded on a open plain, had all been killed by very big hailstones.  Be careful out there.

River run

At first, people laughed.

Cuyahoga River. Photo: US EPA

Who ever heard of a river catching fire?  Must be a joke, right?  But  gradually it sank in.  A river could catch fire, if it were polluted enough with oil and flammable chemicals, and all it took was a spark.  Oh, and the Cuyahoga, which runs through Cleveland, wasn’t the only waterway with condition issues – there were others and some were even worse.

That fire, which happened 41 years ago today, wasn’t even the river’s first.  It had caught fire in 1868, 1883, 1887, 1912, 1922, 1936, 1941, 1948, and in 1952.  This is what it looked like in 1952:

Cuyahoga River fire, 1952. Photo: James Thomas, from Cleveland Press Collection, Cleveland State University Library

The ’69 fire wasn’t much by comparison,  but somehow it caught the imagination of a public becoming increasingly sensitive to the environment.  The Cuyahoga fire led not only to the Clean Water Act in 1972, but hastened the creation of the EPA itself.

Hmm. . .seems that first the planet has to get our attention.  It’s been doing that pretty well lately.  The Cuyahoga, meanwhile, is doing much better, as you can see from the photo at top.  You can even eat the fish you catch in some places.

* * *

One hundred and forty years ago, Ulysses S. Grant signed a bill establishing the Department of Justice.  For almost a century, we’d managed with just an Attorney General and whatever staff he needed, but things were getting complicated so the department was created.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons, by Artem.

I have spent countless wasted hours trying to find out how many employees the DOJ has but it is impossible.  Maybe they don’t actually know.  However, its budget is just short of $28 billion per annum and that goes to fund almost forty agencies, including the FBI, DEA, ATF and the Bureau of Prisons among others. Grant would probably be suprised at how it’s grown over the years; no doubt a lot of people work there.

But not Meryl Streep,  She hits the big six-oh today – good lord -  a very happy birthday to her!

On a dime

Frank Winfield Woolworth opened his second retail store one hundred and twenty one years ago today.  He had opened his first store the year before, but it failed in just a few months.  A 19th century capitalist to the core, Woolworth was undaunted – he left New York and moved to Lancaster PA to try again and the rest is dime story history.

(Woolworth Building photo by Carol Highsmith, Library of Congress PPD).

He was the Sam Walton of his time – soon he had a thousand stores and by 1913 he was rich enough to build his own New York skyscraper.  The Woolworth building cost almost $14 million dollars and he paid cash.  Yes, cash.

From 1913 until 1930, when the Chrysler building opened, the Woolworth tower was the tallest building in the world at just under eight hundred feet.

During the Depression you could get a turkey dinner at the dime store for fifteen cents and (below) it was a great place to do your Christmas shopping. Shoppers then looked just as grim as shoppers now.

Woolworth’s went out of business in 1992  - mostly due to the real Sam Walton – and may only be remembered for the  historic lunch counter sit-in of 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina.  A section of that counter is now in the Smithsonian.

Christmas shopping at Woolworths. Photo by John Collier, 1941, Library of Congress PPD

It seems odd to think of growing up without a chance to buy ten cents worth of candy or fake fingernails or a goldfish in a cardboard container after school. Oh, and tinsel – every Christmas it came from the dime store.  Life is much more complicated since the last dime store in the neighborhood closed.

Today is the twenty-seventh birthday of the heir to the British throne.  Curious to have a job – the only one you’re allowed to have – but not know when it starts. Happy birthday, Will.