Today in History, November 13, 2001:
U.S. President George W. Bush signed an executive order that would allow for military tribunals to try any foreigners captured with connections to the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.
It was the first time since World War II that a president had taken such action. The home territory of the United States had been attacked with a tremendous loss of innocent lives. For a time, the nation came together in common cause.
Today in History, November 12, 1864:
The burning of Atlanta.
Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and his army had taken Atlanta in September, and subsequently ordered the citizenry to evacuate the city. That order set off a firestorm of complaints and criticism from Confederate military and civilian leaders. Sherman stuck to his guns…the South could expend the resources to care for and secure their populace. Sherman’s supply lines stretched from Nashville, TN and were constantly threatened by Confederate army raids, so he knew he could not hold Atlanta for long.
But then, he didn’t want to. He stayed in Atlanta long enough to rest and build up supplies. On today’s date in 1864 he ordered the industrial district and anything that might prove useful to the enemy burned. The fires spread and eventually as much as 40% of the city went up in flames.
Sherman sent Gen. Thomas back towards Nashville to tie up the Confederate Army of the Tennessee led by Gen. John Bell Hood.
He then took his army east across Georgia, laying waste to the countryside in the same fashion that he had destroyed the city of Atlanta. This horrified the South, and Sherman’s acts are still points of contention. However if you read Sherman’s thoughts on his decisions, he was merely trying to end the war more quickly by reverting back to ancient principles of war. From times when armies fed themselves and armed themselves by living off of the land they were currently in. Sherman and his army took what they needed and destroyed what was left in order to deny the enemy its use. This was also intended to bring the war to the doorstep of the Southern citizens in the hope that they would press for the termination of hostilities.
By Christmas he would be able to send a telegram to President Lincoln: “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty guns and plenty of ammunition, also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.”
Today in History, November 10, 1775:
The First Continental Congress commissions a local innkeeper to raise two battalions of Marines to serve in the Revolutionary War. At Tun Tavern in Philadelphia the recruiting took place, and the United States Marine Corps was born. Aboard numerous US Navy ships during the Revolution, at Tripoli, during the Civil War, Belleau Wood, Iwo Jima and dozens of places in between, when the chips were down, the cry went out, “Send in the Marines!”
Today in History, November 8, 1966:
A Hollywood actor and Screen Actor’s Guild President is elected for the first time to his first term as California Governor, defeating Democrat political veteran Governor Pat Brown (yes, Governor Jerry Brown’s father.)
On October 27, 1964 Ronald Reagan had given a speech entitled, “A Time for Choosing” while campaigning for failed Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. That “moment in time” is referred to in political circles as “The Speech” because its dynamic message and Reagan’s powerful delivery, while it didn’t succeed for Goldwater, propelled former Democrat Reagan into a fireball career which would lead him not only to the Governorship, but to two terms as one of America’s most beloved and respected Presidents. He was so revered by the American people, that it is only natural for leftist to revile him. He is an excellent example of why you must watch closely for bias when researching individuals and events.
Here are a couple more versions of “The Speech”, one of it in its entirety if you are interested, and one which has been adapted to more modern events. I share this because that one speech echoed down through history for other events…including “I hear you! And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear from ALL of us soon!”
Today in History, November 7: 1983 – A bombing in the US Senate.
The Senate was expected to be in session late, but managed to finish early, around 7 PM. A few hours later a bomb which had been placed beneath a bench outside the Republican cloakroom exploded. The device blew the doors off of the office of Democrat leader Robert Byrd and nearly destroyed the painting of Senate legend Daniel Webster.
A five year investigation led to the arrest of six members of the “resistance conspiracy” for the Senate bombing, and bombings at Ft. McNair and the historic Washington Navy Yard.
Shocking, but not as unusual as one might think.
In 1971 a bomb was set off in the Senate by the “weather underground”, another radical group.
In 1915, a German Harvard University professor planted 3 sticks of dynamite in the Senate building in protest of American financiers who we assisting Great Britain in WWI. He then attempted to assassinate JP Morgan. After being arrested, he committed suicide.
Today in History, November 5, 1605: …The Gunpowder treason and plot…
The Gunpowder Plot. Several Catholic conspirators had hatched a plan to blow up the Parliament building in London while the king and parliament met.
One of the conspirators told a relative not to attend, and that relative told authorities. On the night of November 5th, conspirator Guy Fawkes was caught lurking in the basement of the building, and subsequently 20 barrels of gunpowder he had hidden there were located.
Fawkes named his conspirators under torture. Several, including Fawkes, were sentenced to be drawn and quartered. As Fawkes climbed a ladder to the gallows, he jumped to his death. Today is Guy Fawkes day in England, celebrating the failure of the plot.
In recent years it seems to have become popular to don a Guy Fawkes mask to render yourself anonymous to protest anything from injustice to prices.
The Fifth of November
Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
The Gunpowder treason and plot;
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!
Guy Fawkes and his companions
Did the scheme contrive,
To blow the King and Parliament
All up alive.
Threescore barrels, laid below,
To prove old England’s overthrow.
But, by God’s providence, him they catch,
With a dark lantern, lighting a match!
A stick and a stake
For King James’s sake!
If you won’t give me one,
I’ll take two,
The better for me,
And the worse for you.
A rope, a rope, to hang the Pope,
A penn’orth of cheese to choke him,
A pint of beer to wash it down,
And a jolly good fire to burn him.
Holloa, boys! holloa, boys! make the bells ring!
Holloa, boys! holloa boys! God save the King!
Hip, hip, hooor-r-r-ray!
Today in History, November 3: 1943 – The USS Oklahoma (BB-37) is re-floated at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii after a months long salvage operation. She had been on Battleship Row on December 7, 1941 when Japanese torpedoes caused her to capsize quickly. After being decommissioned, the ship was sold for scrap, being too old and too damaged for further service. En route from Pearl to San Francisco, the Oklahoma slipped the line from her tow ship and sank to the bottom of the Pacific. I guess she didn’t want to end up in a scrap yard.
https://www.militarytimes.com/2015/07/27/remains-of-pearl-harbor-victims-exhumed-for-identification/
Today in History, November 2, 1948:
“Dewey Defeats Truman”.
The Chicago Tribune is so confident that New York Governor Thomas Dewey will win the Presidential election that the paper publishes it’s desired results in an early edition…but Truman won by 2M votes.
Most sources will describe this as a solitary example of media bias, however in 2000 the media almost in it’s entirety called the election for Al Gore as Florida polls closed…several hours before the polls closed in the majority of the nation. Many voters, hearing the news as they drove home, decided there was no point in going to the polls. As it turned out, not even Florida could be declared for Gore at that point.
The media’s actions would send the nation into a legal limbo for weeks as the victor was determined in the courts. In the attached photo a victorious President Truman holds up the erroneous headline.
In 2016, the polls….and the media…reported it was nearly a forgone conclusion that Secretary Clinton would win.
Today in History, November 1, 1924:
– This should make you Oklahoma proud. Law enforcement proud. THIS is what its all about: On this day, William Tilghman is murdered by a corrupt prohibition agent who resented Tilghman’s refusal to ignore local bootlegging operations. Tilghman, one of the famous marshals who brought law and order to the Wild West, was 71 years old.
Known to both friends and enemies as “Uncle Billy,” Tilghman was one of the most honest and effective lawmen of his day. Born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, in 1854, Tilghman moved west when he was only 16 years old. Once there, he flirted with a life of crime after falling in with a crowd of disreputable young men who stole horses from Indians. After several narrow escapes with angry Indians, Tilghman decided that rustling was too dangerous and settled in Dodge City, Kansas, where he briefly served as a deputy marshal before opening a saloon. He was arrested twice for alleged train robbery and rustling, but the charges did not stick.
Despite this shaky start, Tilghman gradually built a reputation as an honest and respectable young man in Dodge City. He became the deputy sheriff of Ford County, Kansas, and later, the marshal of Dodge City. Tilghman was one of the first men into the territory when Oklahoma opened to settlement in 1889, and he became a deputy U.S. marshal for the region in 1891. In the late 19th century, lawlessness still plagued Oklahoma, and Tilghman helped restore order by capturing some of the most notorious bandits of the day.
Over the years, Tilghman earned a well-deserved reputation for treating even the worst criminals fairly and protecting the rights of the unjustly accused. Any man in Tilghman’s custody knew he was safe from angry vigilante mobs, because Tilghman had little tolerance for those who took the law into their own hands. In 1898, a wild mob lynched two young Indians who were falsely accused of raping and murdering a white woman. Tilghman arrested and secured prison terms for eight of the mob leaders and captured the real rapist-murderer.
In 1924, after serving a term as an Oklahoma state legislator, making a movie about his frontier days, and serving as the police chief of Oklahoma City, Tilghman might well have been expected to quietly retire. However, the old lawman was unable to hang up his gun, and he accepted a job as city marshal in Cromwell, Oklahoma. Tilghman was shot and killed while trying to arrest a drunken Prohibition agent.
Today in History, October 30: 1938 – “The War of the Worlds”. For Halloween, Orson Welles had produced a radio show based on a nineteenth century novel by H.G. Wells. After a disclaimer preceding the show, it was designed as if the events were actually occurring, as if newsmen were reporting an actual invasion of the Earth by Martians….
Unfortunately, most Americans were listening to another popular radio show as The War of the Worlds began, and tuned in AFTER the disclaimer. As many as a million people thought they had actually tuned into coverage of aliens landing and assaulting the planet. The show described people all over the country fleeing in terror; which actually did occur since so many thought it was real. Part way through the show, Welles was informed of the mass panic and interrupted the show with another disclaimer….”This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that The War of The Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be: the Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying “Boo!” Starting now, we couldn’t soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night, so we did the best next thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the C. B. S. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn’t mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. So goodbye everybody, and remember, please, for the next day or so the terrible lesson you learned tonight: that grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody’s there, that was no Martian — it’s Halloween.”
It was 1938. Unfortunately, within a year, the world would find the horrors they imagined were all too real; but they didn’t need aliens in WWII.
Mark Loves History! 