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TIME MACHINE
By Arthur Nielsen
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One Hundred and Seventy-five Years Ago
Amid the thunder of British cannon and a Washington mob’s cries of “Hang Madison!,” Dolley Madison scurried around the White House collecting documents and valuables to save from the advancing British army. Across the Atlantic in the Flemish town of Ghent, British and American diplomats were negotiating an end to the war, but their efforts were of no help to America’s capital city on August 24. The President’s wife managed to save an embossed copy of the Declaration of Independence and a painting of George Washington attributed to Gilbert Stuart, but the British were satisfied with what she left behind: a lavish banquet that had been prepared for President Madison earlier in the day, and an abandoned city.
As the American Army all but disintegrated in retreat from the Battle of Bladensburg, an advance force of 1,460 British troops marched into Washington, satisfied their hunger at Madison’s table, and then burned his mansion to the ground in retaliation for the American burning of York (Toronto) a year earlier. Under strict orders not to damage private property, the British torched only U.S. government buildings and even allowed private citizens to talk them out of burning the bank, the post office, and the patent office. The British abandoned Washington to the looters the next day, leaving the machinery of American government in ruins.
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One Hundred Years Ago
By 1889 bareknuckle boxing matches were illegal almost everywhere in the United States, including the rural Mississippi town of Richburg, where on July 8 John L. Sullivan fought Jake Kilrain for twenty thousand dollars in the country’s last bareknuckle match. At the age of thirty Sullivan had deteriorated into a flabby parody of his top form, but for this fight he trained hard for several weeks. By the day of the match he had lost more than forty pounds and still outweighed Kilrain by thirty.
Sullivan may have been past his prime, but he had more than enough power left to dismantle Kilrain. Though the challenger drew first blood, he managed to stretch the fight out to seventy-five rounds only by backpedaling and wrestling with Sullivan, who cursed and taunted him to “stand up and fight like a man.”
The only moment of suspense for Sullivan’s backers came during the forty-fifth round, when the Boston Strong Boy vomited after drinking a mixture of tea and whiskey; ringside experts insisted that Sullivan’s body was rejecting the tea. Kilrain offered a draw, to which Sullivan growled, “No, you loafer” and continued battering the challenger. When Kilrain’s second ended the fight, the champion invited him to enter the ring and accept a similar thrashing.
After the fight the state of Mississippi offered a thousand-dollar bounty for Sullivan’s return, and the governor of New York had Sullivan extradited to stand trial on the charges of prizefighting and assault and battery. Sullivan beat the charges, but legal and travel expenses cost him more than he earned for beating Kilrain, and he vowed never to appear in another bareknuckle match. Nor would he have to, as this match cemented his legend forever. “Never, during even a Presidential election, has there been so much excitement as there is here now,” wrote The New York Times of Sullivan’s exploits.
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Seventy-five Years Ago
Woodrow Wilson was pacing the empty corridors of the White House, agonizing over his wife’s deepening illness, when war broke out in Europe during the first week of August. Wilson immediately offered to mediate any differences between the European powers but received only complaints from the belligerents about the way the other side was conducting the war.
George Harvey defined the impossible situation Wilson faced in the North American Review: “Europe has long been sick—perhaps sick unto death. The forty years’ peace has been no peace, only a feverish truce wherein national rivalries and racial hatreds have intensified and deepened until the day of reckoning was bound to come.” Helpless to alter the nationalist hysteria that drove the overarmed nations of Europe to war, Wilson would urge Americans to remain neutral in thought as well as in name. Though almost all Americans agreed that the United States should remain neutral, public sentiment generally agreed with the New York World that “the Kaiser has plunged his sword into the heart of civilization.”
On August 6, the day Wilson issued the formal proclamation of American neutrality, his wife Ellen died. It is impossible to say what effect Wilson’s personal tragedy had on his unsuccessful effort to mediate an end to the war.
On August 5 the American Traffic Signal Company installed a fifteen-foot device that used red and green lights and a buzzer to control traffic at the corner of Euclid Avenue and 105th Street in Cleveland, Ohio. It was the first appearance of the electric traffic light on American roads.
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Fifty Years Ago
Louis (“Lepke”) Buchalter, the man J. Edgar Hoover called the most dangerous criminal in the United States, surrendered by secret agreement with the FBI chief on August 24 after evading a nationwide manhunt for several months. Lepke had made his fortune controlling unions in the New York garment industry, but his notoriety came from his role as head of a group of underworld assassins known as Murder Inc.
Under intense pressure from the New York County district attorney, Thomas Dewey, Lepke had gone into hiding in 1937, running his crime empire and ordering contract assassinations from subway platforms, restaurant washrooms, and cheap apartments. By 1939 the federal government was also hounding him, and his entire operation was in jeopardy. Desperate to maintain their own organizations, Lepke’s underworld associates convinced him that he would be treated leniently if he gave himself up to Hoover on a lesser narcotics charge. Upon surrendering, though, Lepke quickly learned that his friends had double-crossed him to take the heat off themselves. He was convicted on a narcotics charge and sent to Fort Leaven-worth for a fourteen-year term.
While Lepke was in prison, a mob informer broke the story of the hundreds of hits carried out by Murder Inc., giving Dewey enough evidence to convict Lepke again, this time for murder. Though it was rumored that Lepke had offered the district attorney information about New York’s underworld that would make Dewey an unbeatable presidential candidate, nothing came of it, and he was sentenced to death. On March 4, 1944, Lepke became the only national crime kingpin to go to the electric chair.
On August 23, after failing to convince France or Great Britain to sign a treaty of alliance, the Soviet Union signed a ten-year nonaggression pact with Germany that shocked the rest of the world and cleared the way for the German invasion of Poland that would begin World War II the following month. The German chancellor, Adolf Hitler, had long been convinced that if he could secure himself from the threat of war with the Soviet Union, Germany could expand through Western Europe at will. The Soviet leader Joseph Stalin hoped the agreement would delay the war with Germany that he believed was inevitable. The pact did not create a military alliance, but it did obligate each country not to make war with the other or support a third country that did so.
Communists in the West, who had followed Stalin’s party line in condemning Hitler, were puzzled by Moscow’s new, friendly attitude toward Germany. The French Communist party, based in the Western country most likely to be a target of German aggression, found the pact hard to accept. The French Communist leader Maurice Thorez declared that “if Hitler in spite of everything unleashes war, let him know that he will find before him the united people of France, with the Communists in the front line….” In the instantaneous wave of anti-Communism that swept France, both the party and its newspaper were banned.
The American Communist party waited for instructions from Moscow before deciding that the pact gave “greater opportunities for the people and government of the United States effectively to check Japanese aggression in the Far East.” The party’s general secretary, Earl Browder, went so far as to declare that there would be no war if all the world’s powers signed similar agreements. No one was making that argument two years later, when Germany’s three-front invasion of Russia again showed the world the consequences of trusting Adolf Hitler.
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Twenty-five Years Ago
Two cornerstones of the Johnson administration’s Great Society were set in place in July. On July 2 Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 during a nationally televised ceremony. The law prohibited racial discrimination in public accommodations, in employment or union membership, and in voter registration.
Though Johnson stated that the goal of the law was “to bring justice and hope to our people—and peace to our land,” the Black Muslim leader Malcolm X argued that “you can’t legislate good will.…by promising that which cannot be delivered.” The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., agreed with the President, predicting that the Civil Rights Act would “bring a cool and serene breeze to an already hot summer.” But racial riots later that month in several Eastern cities would demonstrate that the legislation would not solve all the problems that American minority groups faced.
On July 23 the Senate passed the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, Johnson’s bill initiating the War on Poverty. The act authorized $947,500,000 for job training, small-business loans, and community-action programs to fight unemployment and illiteracy. Johnson signed the act into law on August 20.
The Johnson administration had been looking for a pretext to expand military involvement in Vietnam for several months when, on August 2, three North Vietnamese PT boats attacked the U.S. destroyer Maddox as it patrolled the Gulf of Tonkin. The North Vietnamese probably struck on the assumption that Maddox had led a South Vietnamese naval attack against Vietcong installations two days earlier.
Though the Maddox suffered no casualties, President Johnson immediately ordered military retaliation against strategic targets in North Vietnam, and on August 6 he asked Congress to give him the power to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States” in Vietnam. His Southeast Asia Resolution would in effect give him the freedom to wage an undeclared war against North Vietnam. “Like grandma’s nightgown,” Johnson would say later, “it covered everything.”
Sen. Wayne Morse of Oregon warned that Johnson was misleading Congress about the nature of the attack in the gulf, and Sen. Ernest Gruening of Alaska stormed that “all Vietnam is not worth the life of a single American boy,” but they stood alone. Johnson’s so-called Tonkin Gulf Resolution passed the Senate by 88 to 2 and the House of Representatives by 416 to O. The congressmen apparently had support at home for their vote: A Harris poll conducted that week indicated that 85 percent of the American population supported Johnson’s military retaliation against the North Vietnamese.
The U.S. Census Bureau reported on August 31 that California had passed New York as America’s most populous state.
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