1096 Seljuk Turks at Chivitot slaughter thousands of German crusaders. [Early Nazi-punching.]
1529 The Pope names Henry VIII of England Defender of the Faith after defending the seven sacraments against Luther. [How'd that work out for ya, Popey? Cue Herman's Hermits.]
1600 Tokugawa Ieyasu defeats his enemies in battle and affirms his position as Japan's most powerful warlord.
1917 The first U.S. troops enter the front lines at Sommerviller under French command.
1961 Bob Dylan records his first album in a single day at a cost of $400.
1967 The "March on the Pentagon," protesting American involvement in Vietnam, draws 50,000 protesters.
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Historynet]
Demonstrators including radicals, liberals, black nationalists, hippies, professors, women’s groups, and war veterans march on the Pentagon.
The rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial started peacefully, though Dr. Benjamin Spock—baby specialist, author, and outspoken critic of the war—did call President Johnson “the enemy.” After the rally, the demonstrators, many waving the red, blue, and gold flag of the Viet Cong, began marching toward the Pentagon. Violence erupted when the more radical element of the demonstrators clashed with the soldiers and U.S. Marshals protecting the Pentagon.
The protesters surrounded and besieged the military nerve center until the early hours of October 23. By the time order was restored, 683 people, including novelist Norman Mailer and two United Press International reporters, had been arrested. This protest was paralleled by demonstrations in Japan and Western Europe, the most violent of which occurred outside the U.S. Embassy in London when 3,000 demonstrators attempted to storm the building.
Did not know this:
On this day in 1921, President Warren G. Harding delivers a speech in Alabama in which he condemns lynchings—illegal hangings committed primarily by white supremacists against African Americans in the Deep South.
Although his administration was much maligned for scandal and corruption, Harding was a progressive Republican politician who advocated full civil rights for African Americans and suffrage for women. He supported the Dyer Anti-lynching Bill in 1920. As a presidential candidate that year, he gained support for his views on women’s suffrage, but faced intense opposition on civil rights for blacks. The 1920s was a period of intense racism in the American South, characterized by frequent lynchings. In fact, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) reported that, in 1920, lynching claimed, on average, the lives of two African Americans every week.
During the 1920 presidential campaign, Harding’s ethnicity became a subject of debate and was used by his opponents to cast him in a negative light. Opponents claimed that one of Harding’s great-great-grandfathers was a native of the West Indies. Harding rebuffed the rumors, saying he was from white “pioneer stock” and persisted in his support of anti-lynching laws. Although the anti-lynching bill made it through the House of Representatives, it died in the Senate. Several other attempts to pass similar laws in the first half of the 20th century failed. In fact, civil rights for blacks people were not encoded into law until Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964.
Harding’s public denunciation of lynching would appear insincere if one were to believe allegations that he had actually been inducted into the Ku Klux Klan while in office. In 1987, historian Wyn Wade published The Fiery Cross, in which a former Ku Klux Klan member claimed to have witnessed Harding’s initiation into the Klan on the White House lawn. Scholars have since pored over Harding’s papers, but have found no evidence to support this allegation.
Important local action & inspiration. Eff yer bitch ass, Harrison Otis, & those of all your horrid descendants too:
A massive explosion destroys the Los Angeles Times building in the city’s downtown area, killing 21 and injuring many more. Since Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Otis, a virulent opponent of unions, believed that the bomb was directed at him, he hired the nation’s premier private detective, William J. Burns, to crack the case. In addition to printing numerous editorials against unions, Otis was the leader of the Merchants and Manufacturing Association, a powerful group of business owners with extensive political connections.
Burns’ investigation led him to the Bridge and Structural Iron Workers Union and their treasurer, John J. McNamara. In April 1911, after Burns got a confession out of Ortie McManigal, who had allegedly been the intermediary between McNamara and two bomb experts, he personally arrested John McNamara and his brother in Indiana. Without any legal authority, Burns also managed to get the brothers to California, where they were to be prosecuted.
Union members and left-wing supporters rallied around the McNamara brothers. After a large defense fund was raised, union representatives pleaded with Clarence Darrow to take the case. Darrow, who was the best defense attorney America had to offer, had already gotten “Big Bill” Haywood, the union leader of the Industrial Workers of the World, off on murder charges in Idaho a few years earlier. Offered $50,000, he reluctantly took the case.
Even though public opinion supported the McNamaras, Darrow’s own investigation was turning up evidence to prove that the brothers were actually guilty. Even worse, members of the defense team were trying to bribe the jury just to keep up with the prosecution’s own bribery tactics. Darrow worked out a deal with Otis and the prosecutors that the brothers would plead guilty to escape the death penalty, which they did.
Nevertheless, this resolution was not satisfactory to either side, and Darrow got caught in the middle. Otis arranged for Darrow’s prosecution on bribery charges, and the union deserted the great defense lawyer. Not only did they refuse to pay his fee for the McNamara case, they refused to assist in his defense. Earl Rogers, a notorious drunk, but also a brash, formidable, and effective Los Angeles attorney, took Darrow’s case.
After a long trial, Rogers secured a mistrial for Darrow, who was later acquitted after a second trial. Darrow went on to try even more distinguished cases, including the Leopold and Loeb murder trial and the Scopes evolution trial.
And speaking of Nazis, as we are so often forced to here:
On this day in 1941, German soldiers go on a rampage, killing thousands of Yugoslavian civilians, including whole classes of schoolboys.
Despite attempts to maintain neutrality at the outbreak of World War II, Yugoslavia finally succumbed to signing a “friendship treaty” with Germany in late 1940, finally joining the Tripartite “Axis” Pact in March 1941. The masses of Yugoslavians protested this alliance, and shortly thereafter the regents who had been trying to hold a fragile confederacy of ethnic groups and regions together since the creation of Yugoslavia at the close of World War I fell to a coup, and the Serb army placed Prince Peter into power. The prince-now the king–rejected the alliance with Germany-and the Germans retaliated with the Luftwaffe bombing of Belgrade, killing about 17,000 people.
With Yugoslavian resistance collapsing, King Peter removed to London, setting up a government-in-exile. Hitler then began to carve up Yugoslavia into puppet states, primarily divided along ethnic lines, hoping to win the loyalty of some-such as the Croats-with the promise of a postwar independent state. (In fact, many Croats did fight alongside the Germans in its battle against the Soviet Union.) Hungary, Bulgaria, and Italy all took bites out of Yugoslavia, as Serb resisters were regularly massacred. On October 21, in Kragujevac, 2,300 men and boys were murdered; Kraljevo saw 7,000 more killed by German troops, and in the region of Macva, 6,000 men, women, and children were murdered.
Serb partisans, fighting under the leadership of the socialist Josef “Tito” Brozovich, won support from Britain and aid from the USSR in their battle against the occupiers. “The people just do not recognize authority…they follow the Communist bandits blindly,” complained one German official reporting back to Berlin.
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HISTORY]
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