Abolitionism entered national politics on November 13, when a convention at Warsaw, New York, unanimously nominated James G. Birney for President. The convention was an open rebellion by the politically activated wing of the movement against the ideological leadership of William Lloyd Garrison and marked the first appearance of what would later emerge as the Liberty party.

Garrison’s antislavery newspaper, the Liberator, had been the most influential organ of the antislavery movement since its inception in 1831, but its increasingly strident repudiation of all political activity alienated those who believed in constitutional change. Garrison’s fight to make the country recognize slavery as a sin relied upon moral persuasion rather than partisan politics. His opponents began to see him as a liability to the cause and met at Warsaw to form a national party committed to ending slavery through political reform. The new party was still nameless when it made the repentant former slaveowner Birney its representative, but it coalesced into the Liberty party in time to contest the 1840 election. The new party posed no real threat to the Democrats or Whigs that year, but many veterans of the 1839 convention would continue their struggle as leaders in the later Free Soil and Republican parties.

The number of states in the Union grew to forty-two in November with the addition of four Western states. President Benjamin Harrison, who as a Republican senator in 1888 had fought for the new states, signed the legislation admitting North and South Dakota on November 2, Montana on November 8, and Washington on November 11.

With the congressional balance between Democrats and Republicans at a stalemate throughout the 1880s, admission for any single state was impossible. But the Western territories were growing too fast for either party to continue to put off their demands for statehood. The Helena (Montana) Herald spoke for the Western viewpoint in 1879: “Our Territorial governments are false in theory, and are rendered worse by the vicious practice of making the places under those governments a sort of lying-in hospital for political tramps. With every appropriation the government nominally makes for our benefit, a dozen hungry wolves are sent with it to devour all and still more of our substance.”

Both parties campaigned in 1888 for admission of the Montana, Washington, and Dakota territories. Democrats in Congress fought the idea of splitting the heavily Republican Dakota Territory into two states, but after the Republicans had gained strong majorities in both houses in the 1888 election, the lame-duck Fiftieth Congress decided to try to take credit for what was already inevitable. In February of 1889 it passed the omnibus bill enabling North and South Dakota to enter the Union with Washington and Montana.

On November 14 the New York World journalist Nellie Bly began her attempt to circle the world, challenging the eighty-day voyage undertaken by Jules Verne’s fictional character Phileas Fogg. An early master of the new journalism, in which the reporter becomes a part of the story, Bly began her journey on a steamship bound for Europe. In Amiens, France, she briefly met with Verne, shrugging off the author’s judgment that she would never make it on time. She completed the trip in only seventy-two days, six hours, and eleven minutes.

The nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Cochrane had begun her career in journalism with the Pittsburgh Dispatch in 1885, taking the by-line Nellie Bly from a Stephen Foster song. In 1887 she went to New York and, as a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer, frequently went undercover to write inside stories on society’s injustices: she had herself committed to an insane asylum in order to expose the mistreatment of the mentally ill, she took a job in a sweatshop to show the exploitation of female workers, and she had herself arrested in order to write of the abuses women suffered in prison.

The irony of Nellie Ely’s career was that she became famous for a story that was completely theatrical. With the World highlighting her progress reports on its front page, Bly’s accounts of hopping from steamer to train to burro to rickshaw electrified the country. EVEN IMAGINATION’S RECORD PALES BEFORE THE PERFORMANCE OF THE WORLD’S GLOBE-CIRCLER, trumpeted her paper upon her return. Nellie Bly’s feat was the perfect Pulitzer story: morally uplifting, long-running, and exclusive to his paper.

Upon her return Bly returned to her original work in investigative reporting, but she would always be remembered most for having traveled around the world. She married in 1895 and retired from journalism, returning only briefly in the few years before her death in 1922.

President Lyndon Johnson took advantage of his incumbency and the negative public image of his Republican opponent, Sen. Barry Goldwater, to win an overwhelming victory in the November 3 presidential election. Johnson accumulated 61.4 percent of the popular vote while carrying forty-four states.

“I lost whatever small chance I ever had to be President in San Francisco at the Republican National Convention,” Goldwater wrote years after the 1964 election. Mutual distrust between the moderate wing of New York’s governor Nelson A. Rockefeller and Goldwater’s conservative wing of the Republican party had broken out in open warfare when Goldwater’s nomination became likely that summer. The Pennsylvania governor William Scranton’s description of Goldwater’s candidacy as “a whole crazy-quilt collection of absurd and dangerous positions that would be soundly repudiated by the American people” was typical of the attacks the Arizona senator faced in Republican primaries. “By the time the convention opened I had been branded as a fascist, a racist, a trigger-happy warmonger, a nuclear madman, and the candidate who couldn’t win,” Goldwater remembered.

The truth was probably that no candidate could have beaten Lyndon Johnson that November. As successor to a martyred President, Johnson represented the continuation of the Kennedy administration’s policies; as the man who engineered passage of the Civil Rights Act, Johnson would gain the support of 95 percent of the nation’s black voters. Moreover, Democratic candidates dominated the 1964 election, sending large majorities to both houses of Congress. But Goldwater’s losing campaign marked the end of the five decades of struggle for ideological control of the Republican party that had begun with Theodore Roosevelt’s third-party candidacy in 1912.

On November 4 a New York criminal court convicted the comedian Lenny Bruce of giving an obscene performance at a Greenwich Village nightclub. The court sentenced Bruce to four months in prison and fined the nightclub owner who had employed him. The principal witness for the prosecution was a police inspector named Herbert S. Ruhe, who had drawn the distasteful job of attending Bruce’s performance and writing down the offensive words he heard. Bruce insisted that the prosecution was misrepresenting his comedy by removing individual words from the context in which he had used them, but the court ruled that his expletive-filled monologue was “patently offensive to the average person in the community, as judged by present day standards.”

Bruce’s attorneys produced an array of scholarly authorities who described Bruce as “one of our sharpest, most cogent, articulate satirists writing or speaking today,” but the court disagreed. Though Bruce remained free pending an appeal, club owners were afraid to hire a comedian who was hounded by police officers poised to arrest him if he uttered an obscenity.

Bruce died in Hollywood of a drug overdose in 1966. “Although he seemed to be doing his utmost at times to antagonize his audiences,” recalled The New York Times, “he also displayed an air of morality beneath his brashness that some felt made his lapses in taste often forgivable and sometimes necessary.” Two years after his death the New York Appellate Court reversed his conviction, ruling that while Bruce’s comedy was “coarse, vulgar and profane . . . it was error to hold that the performances were without social importance.”