50th Anniversary of the Roswell Incident

In early July, 1947, a sheep rancher near Roswell, New Mexico, found pieces of strange metal foil littering his land.  The material was unlike anything he had ever seen.  Officials at a nearby air-force base said the debris was from a weather balloon.   But some people didn't believe it.  They claimed the metal was from an alien spacecraft that had crashed to earth.  The government, they said, was hiding the evidence.

The alleged crash and cover-up of a UFO (unidentified flying object) became known as the Roswell Incident.  By the time the 50^th anniversary of the event occurred in 1997, the story had been wildly exaggerated.   Some people claimed to have seen alien bodies as well as alien spacescraft.  As the anniversary neared, the air force released a paper explaining how secret military work may have inspired the stories.

The original debris came from a high-altitude spy balloon the report said.  Further, the “alien bodies” were crash-test dummies, and the “UFOs” were secret spy planes.

The report didn’t dampen Roswell’s anniversary celebration.  For six days in July, people toured the alleged crash site, visited UFO museums, and attended concerts and extraterrestrial-themed costume parties.  Nor did the report change the minds of those who continued to insist that aliens had crashed at Roswell 50 years before. 

A 1997 Time magazine poll found that one of every three Americans believe that aliens have visited earth.

Barbara Jordan

“My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, and it is total,” Congresswoman Barbara Jordan told a national television audience on July 25, 1974.   She was not about to stand by and watch “the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.”  At that time, Jordan was participating in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on President Richard Nixon’s serious abuse of presidential powers.  Jordan’s vote again Nixon helped lead to the President’s resignation in August.

A brilliant scholar and a thrilling orator, Jordan became the first African-American elected to Congress since the 1870s.  Her eloquent denunciation of Nixon at the committee hearings in 1974 stirred the nation.  Two years later, she became the first black woman to deliver the keynote address at a Democratic National Convention.  Her presence there, she noted, proved that “the American Dream need not forever be deferred.”  After retiring from Congress in 1979, Jordan taught at the University of Texas in Austin.   In 1992, though confined to a wheelchair due to multiple sclerosis, she again addressed a Democratic convention.  Less than four years later, however, she died at the age of 59.   President Lyndon B. Johnson once said Jordan “proved that black is beautiful before we knew what [the saying] meant.”

Jordan’s love of and respect for the U.S. Constitution was so great that she always carried a copy of the document in her purse.

The Battle of Bunker Hill

The Revolutionary War had begun in April, 1775, and British troops controlled Boston.  The Americans controlled the surrounding countryside, and they knew that the British wanted to take Charlestown, just across the Charles River from Boston.   On the night of June 16, twelve hundred American troops moved to fortify Bunker’s Hill in Charleston.

Throughout the night, the Americans feverishly dug trenches to protect them if attacked.   At dawn, British General Thomas Gage ordered his ships to fire cannons at the American fortifications.  The cannons failed to hit their target, but Gage sent 2,000 troops across the river anyway.

The Americans were short of gunpowder.  Colonel William Prescott, their commander, ordered them to hold their fire “until you see the whites of their eyes.”  As the British charged, sudden fire from the Americans cut them down.  The British charged a second time and were forced to retreat.  During the third attack, the Americans ran out of gunpowder, and the British took the hill.  But the battle gave hope to the Americans.  The British suffered 1,000 casualties, twice as many as the Americans.  And it was clear that the inexperienced American troops would fight valiantly for their country.

For unknown reasons, the Americans actually fortified and fought for Breed’s Hill instead of Bunker’s Hill.  But the battle was named after the neighboring hill they were sent to defend.

The painting with this post is The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill.   ElementaryHistoryTeacher over at History Is Elementary provides an excellent explanation of the painting and how it relates to the battle here.

The Repeal of Prohibition

On December 5, 1933, the 21^st Amendment to the Constitution ended what had been called America’s “noble experiment.”   The experiment was Prohibition – a nationwide ban on the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages.  The ban had been in place for nearly 14 years.

Prohibition had become the law of the land in 1920, when the 18^th Amendment took effect.  Its supporters hoped that banning alcoholic drinks would make American society better.  But that didn’t happen.   From the start, the ban proved impossible to enforce.  People made their own alcoholic drinks – “bathtub gin” – and visited illegal bars called speakeasies. 

Smugglers and gangsters, such as Chicago’s Al Capone, made fortunes selling bootleg (illegal) liquor and beer.  Crime, corruption, and alcoholism increased. 

Prohibition divided the nation.  “Drys” supported it, and “wets” opposed it.  But in 1933, most Americans realized that the ban was probably doing more harm than good.   Congress passed the 21^st Amendment, and Prohibition ended in December when Utah became the 36^th state to ratify it.

Some American counties and towns are “dry” today.  They have local laws forbidding the sale of alcoholic beverages.

1860

“A house divided against itself cannot stand”……Abraham Lincoln warned in 1858.   Two years later, Lincoln was elected President of a nation divided by the bitter issue of slavery.  And as he predicted, the house began to shake.

In June, 1860, the Democratic Party had split apart.  Northern Democrats, opposed to slavery, named Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas as their presidential candidate.  Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky.  The Republicans were united in their antislavery stand and nominated Lincoln, the Illinois lawyers whose speeches opposing the spread of slavery had made him a hated figure in the South.   No candidate won a majority of the popular vote, but Lincoln won the largest share and a majority of the electoral vote.

Infuriated by Lincoln’s victory, South Carolina’s leaders did not wait for his inauguration.  They met in Charleston on December 20 and voted to secede from the United States.  Bells rang out and crowds cheered.  The Charleston Mercury published a special edition with a headline reading, “The Union Is Dissolved.”   As the fateful year of 1860 drew to a close, the U.S. was rushing headlong into the tragic, agonizing Civil War.

The Saratoga Campaign

The first years of the Revolutionary War were discouraging for Americans.   British forces were larger, better trained, and better equipped.  American victories were few, but in the fall of 1777, Americans defeated the British in two battles that turned the war in their favor. 

In the summer of 1777, the British army under General John Burgoyne moved south towards Albany, New York.   Burgoyne planned to gain controls of the Hudson River and separate New England from the other colonies, but about 25 miles north of Albany, at Bemis Heights, an American force under General Horatio Gates blocked his path.   The British tried twice to get around Gates.  On September 19 and again on October 7, the armies clashed at Freeman’s Farm, a mile north of Bemis Heights.  The Americans were victorious both times.

Burgoyne pulled back to Saratoga (now Schuylerville).  He expected help from British forces in southern New York, but relief did not arrive.  The Americans surrounded the British, and on October 17, Burgoyne and his 5,000 men surrendered.  The victories near Saratoga gave Americans new confidence and convinced the French that Americans had to resolve and skill to defeat Britain.  As a result, France entered the war as an American ally.

One of the heroes of the Saratoga campaign was Benedict Arnold, who later betrayed the American cause.

The image you see here is a painting by John Trumbull titled The Surrender of General Burgoyne, and it hangs in the Rotunda of the United States Capital.

Coal Miners

“In addition to isolation and darkness, the [coal] miner sometimes works in mud and water, sometimes stripped to the waist because of the heat, sometimes in suffocating gas and smoke.”  Those words from a 1922 U.S. Department of Labor report told only part of the story.  Coal miners also faced lung disease, explosions, and cave-ins that trapped miners underground, where they often died.

Coal filled 90 percent of U.S. energy needs at the time.   Some 10 million tons of coal was mined annually in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century.

The miners, some of them boys as young as 10, worked 10 or more hours a day to supply the coal the country demanded.  Their pay was low, and many were in debt to the mine owners, who owned the stores at which miners bought food. 

The United Mine Workers (WMW), formed in 1890, tried to improve the lives of the miners, but the owners fought bitterly against the union.   They even hired their own armies to beat or kill striking miners.  But under the leadership of John L. Lewis, who became the union’s president in 1920, the UMW gradually achieved its goals:  Child labor was prohibited.  The mines were made safer.  And miners worked fewer hours and earned higher pay.   A song from the 1830s shows how important the UMW was to coal miners: 

My daddy was a miner

And I’m a miner’s son

And I’ll stick with the union

Till ev’ry battle’s won.