zayaanhashistory

[zayaanhashistory]

The California Gold Rus

The California Gold Rush was sparked by the discovery of gold nuggets in the Sacramento Valley in early 1848 and was arguably one of the most significant events to shape American history during the first half of the 19th century. As news spread of the discovery, thousands of prospective gold miners traveled by sea or over land to San Francisco and the surrounding area; by the end of 1849, the non-native population of the California territory was some 100,000 (compared with the pre-1848 figure of less than 1,000). A total of $2 billion worth of precious metal was extracted from the area during the Gold Rush, which peaked in 1852.   

On January 24, 1848, James Wilson Marshall, a carpenter originally from New Jersey, found flakes of gold in the American River at the base of the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Coloma, California. At the time, Marshall was working to build a water-powered sawmill owned by John Sutter, a German-born Swiss citizen and founder of a colony of Nueva Helvetia (New Switzerland, which would later become the city of Sacramento). As Marshall later recalled of his historic discovery: “It made my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold.” Days after Marshall’s discovery at Sutter’s Mill, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, ending the Mexican-American War and leaving California in the hands of the United States—a remarkable twist of fate with important ramifications for an America eager for westward expansion. At the time, the population of the territory consisted of 6,500 Californios (people of Spanish or Mexican descent); 700 foreigners (primarily Americans); and 150,000 Native Americans (Barely half the number that had been there when Spanish settlers arrived in 1769). Sutter, in fact, had enslaved hundreds of Native Americans and used them as a free source of labor and makeshift militia to defend his territory and expand his empire. 

Though Marshall and Sutter tried to keep news of the discovery under wraps, word got out, and by mid-March at least one newspaper was reporting that large quantities of gold were being turned up at Sutter’s Mill. Though the initial reaction in San Francisco was disbelief, storekeeper Sam Brannan set off a frenzy when he paraded through town displaying a vial of gold obtained from Sutter’s Creek. By mid-June, shops and businesses stood empty, as some three-quarters of the male population of San Francisco had abandoned the city for the gold mines, and the number of miners in the area ballooned to some 4,000 by August. As news reports—many wildly overblown—of the easy fortunes being made in California spread worldwide, some of the first migrants to arrive were those from lands accessible by boat, such as Oregon, the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii), Mexico, Chile, Peru and China. 

When the news reached the East Coast, press reports were initially skeptical. Gold fever kicked off nationwide in earnest, however, after December 1848, when President James K. Polk announced the positive results of a report made by Colonel Richard Mason, California’s military governor, in his inaugural address. 

Throughout 1849, people around the United States (mostly men) with gold fever borrowed money, mortgaged their property or spent their life savings to make the arduous journey to California. In pursuit of the kind of wealth they had never dreamed of, they left their families and hometowns. In turn, women left behind took on new responsibilities such as running farms or businesses and caring for their children alone. Thousands of would-be gold miners, known as 49ers for the year they arrived, traveled overland across the mountains or by sea, sailing to Panama or even around Cape Horn, the southernmost point of South America. By the end of the year, the non-native population of California was estimated at 100,000, (as compared with 20,000 at the end of 1848 and around 800 in March 1848). To accommodate the needs of the 49ers, gold mining towns had sprung up all over the region, complete with shops, saloons, brothels and other businesses seeking to make their own gold Rush fortune. The overcrowded chaos of the mining camps and towns grew ever more lawless, including rampant banditry, gambling, alcoholism, prostitution and violence. San Francisco, for its part, developed a bustling economy and became the central metropolis of the new frontier. 

The Gold Rush undoubtedly sped up California’s admission to the Union as the 31st state. In late 1849, California applied to enter the Union with a constitution that barred the Southern system of racial slavery, provoking a crisis in Congress between proponents of slavery and anti-slavery politicians. According to the Compromise of 1850, proposed by Kentucky’s Senator Henry Clay, California was allowed to enter as a free state, while the territories of Utah and New Mexico were left to decide the legal status of slavery for themselves. 

After 1850, the surface gold in California largely disappeared, even as miners continued to arrive. Mining had always been difficult and dangerous labor, and striking it rich required good luck as much as skill and hard work. Moreover, the average daily take for an independent miner working with his pick and shovel had by then sharply decreased from what it had been in 1848. As gold became more and more difficult to reach, the growing industrialization of mining drove more and more miners from independence into wage labor. The new technique of hydraulic mining, developed in 1853, brought enormous profits but destroyed much of the region’s landscape. Though gold mining continued throughout the 1850s, it had reached its peak by 1852, when some $81 million was pulled from the ground. After that year, the total take declined gradually, leveling off to around $45 million per year by 1857. Settlement in California continued, however, and by the end of the decade the state’s population was 380,000. 

New mining methods and the population boom in the wake of the California Gold Rush permanently altered the landscape of California. The technique of hydraulic mining brought enormous profits but destroyed much of the region’s landscape. Dams designed to supply water to mine sites in summer altered the course of rivers away from farmland, while sediment from mines clogged others. The logging industry in the area was born from the need to construct extensive canals and feed boilers at mines, further consuming natural resources. 

In 1884, hydraulic mining was outlawed by court order, and soon agriculture became the dominant industry in California, and it remains so today. While a few mines and Gold Rush towns remain, much of the heritage of that era is preserved at places such as Bodie State Historic Park, a decaying ghost town, and at Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park, where Sutter’s Mill once stood. 

[zayaanhashistory]

The Munich Massacre

In what became known as the Munich Massacre, eight terrorists wearing tracksuits and carrying gym bags filled with grenades and assault rifles, breached the Olympic Village at the Summer Games in Munich before dawn on September 5, 1972. The terrorists, associated with Black September, an extremist faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, entered the apartment complex where Israeli athletes were staying. Once inside, they murdered two members of the Israeli team and took nine others hostage. Audiences around the world then watched in horror as the international nightmare unfolded on live TV. 

The terrorists demanded the release of 234 Arab prisoners from Israeli jails, as well as two German terrorists held in West German custody. When authorities attempted to rescue the hostages after a 23-hour standoff, all the hostages, one West German police officer and five Black September members were killed. More than 900 million viewers watched coverage of the terrorist attack on TV, including the now iconic sight of a black ski mask-clad terrorist on the balcony. It was the first time an act of terror was broadcast live and took place during a major global sporting event. Hosting its first Olympics in Germany since Adolf Hitler’s Nazi propaganda and racism-laden 1936 Summer Games in Berlin, the West German government had been looking to highlight its democracy and downplay any military presence. Hailing the event as “the Games of Peace and Joy,” and “the Cheerful Games,” West Germany eschewed uniformed soldiers and police for unarmed guards. Less than 30 years after the end of World War II, when approximately 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, Israel entered the Munich Olympics with its biggest-ever team of officials and athletes. According to the book One Day in September by Simon Reeve, "several of them (were) older Eastern Europeans still bearing physical and mental scars from Nazi concentration camps." Israeli officials had reportedly voiced concern about the lack of security at the Games and a 1972 New York Times report pointed to "glaring" precautionary deficiencies. The way the terrorists were able to take deadly advantage of easy access to the village would change security protocols and preparation for future Olympics. 

Ten days into the Games, on September 5, 1972, under the cloak of darkness, the terrorists stormed the Israeli team's quarters at 4:30 a.m., having been helped over a wire fence by athletes sneaking in after a night out who mistook them for fellow Olympians. Upon breaching the Israeli dorm, wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg and weightlifter Yossef Romano were killed almost immediately. Horrifyingly, Romano, according to the Associated Press, was castrated and Weinberg’s body was thrown to the street. Some escaped, but nine Israelis were quickly taken hostage, including weightlifters David Berger, who was born in America, and Ze’ev Friedman, wrestlers Eliezer Halfin and Mark Slavin, track and field coach Amitzur Shapira, sharpshooting coach Kehat Shorr, fencer Andre Spitzer, weightlifting judge Yakov Springer and wrestling referee Yossef Gutfreund. A 9 a.m. deadline was set for the terrorists’ political prisoner release demands—not meeting it, they said, would result in one hostage being executed every hour. With no counter-terror unit in place, the West Germans took control of the negotiations, with Munich's police chief as well as Libyan and Tunisian ambassadors to Germany, attempting to deal with the kidnappers. According to the Guardian, the terrorists rejected the offer of "an unlimited amount of money" for the release of the hostages, but did extend their deadline multiple times. At least one attempt at a rescue in the athletes’ dorm was botched when the terrorists were able to view officers approaching on TV—their electricity hadn’t been cut off. 

  Israel's immediate response was that there would be no negotiations. "If we should give in, then no Israeli anywhere in the world can feel that his life is safe," Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said at the time. With negotiations failing, the members of Black September demanded transport to Cairo and, with the hostages, were moved via two helicopters to Fürstenfeldbruck air base, about 15 miles away, where a jet was waiting. In a rescue attempt-turned bloodbath, German snipers, with no sharpshooting experience, inadequate gear, bad intelligence and no means of communication with each other, opened fire on the kidnappers. The terrorists returned fire, killing Anton Flieger Bauer, a German policeman positioned in a control tower. All nine hostages, bound in the helicopters, were killed by gunfire and a grenade. Black September leader Luttie Afif and four other terrorists were also left dead, while three were captured alive. Following the attack, the Games were suspended for 34 hours, with a memorial service held September 6 in Olympic Stadium that was attended by 3,000 athletes and 80,000 spectators. The rest of the Israeli team left Munich, as did Mark Spitz, the Jewish American swimmer who had already won seven gold medals at the Games, and the Egyptian, Philippine and Algerian teams, among others. A month later, the three captured terrorists were released in a hostage exchange after the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 615 and received a “hero’s welcome” upon arrival in Libya, according to Reuters. 

Meir and Israel, meanwhile, responded with Operation Wrath of God, a covert Mossad mission to kill the masterminds behind the Munich massacre. Several suspects were assassinated in the coming months, but the mission was suspended when an innocent man was mistakenly killed in Norway in 1973. The target of that shooting, Black September Chief of Operations Ali Hassan Salameh, was assassinated by car bomb in 1979 in the operation’s final mission. 

[zayaanhashistory]

Energy Crisis (1970s)

By the early 1970s, American oil consumption—in the form of gasoline and other products—was rising even as domestic oil production was declining, leading to an increasing dependence on oil imported from abroad. Despite this, Americans worried little about a dwindling supply or a spike in prices, and were encouraged in this attitude by policymakers in Washington, who believed that Arab oil exporters couldn’t afford to lose the revenue from the U.S. market. These assumptions were demolished in 1973, when an oil embargo imposed by members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) led to fuel shortages and sky-high prices throughout much of the decade.  

In 1948, the Allied powers had carved land out of the British-controlled territory of Palestine in order to create the state of Israel, which would serve as a homeland for disenfranchised Jews from around the world. Much of the Arab population in the region refused to acknowledge the Israeli state, however, and over the next decades sporadic attacks periodically erupted into full-scale conflict. One of these Arab-Israeli wars, the Yom Kippur War, began in early October 1973, when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur. After the Soviet Union began sending arms to Egypt and Syria, U.S. President Richard Nixon began an effort to resupply Israel. In response, members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) reduced their petroleum production and proclaimed an embargo on oil shipments to the United States and the Netherlands, the main supporters of Israel. Though the Yom Kippur War ended in late October, the embargo and limitations on oil production continued, sparking an international energy crisis. As it turned out, Washington’s earlier assumption that an oil boycott for political reasons would hurt the Persian Gulf financially turned out to be wrong, as the increased price per barrel of oil more than made up for the reduced production. In the three frenzied months after the embargo was announced, the price of oil shot from $3 per barrel to $12. After decades of abundant supply and growing consumption, Americans now faced price hikes and fuel shortages, causing lines to form at gasoline stations around the country. Local, state and national leaders called for measures to conserve energy, asking gas stations to close on Sundays and homeowners to refrain from putting up holiday lights on their houses. In addition to causing major problems in the lives of consumers, the energy crisis was a huge blow to the American automotive industry, which had for decades turned out bigger and bigger cars and would now be outpaced by Japanese manufacturers producing smaller and more fuel-efficient models. Though the embargo was not enforced uniformly in Europe, the price hikes led to an energy crisis of even greater proportions than in the United States. Countries such as Great Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Norway and Denmark placed limitations on driving, boating and flying, while the British prime minister urged his countrymen only to heat one room in their homes during the winter. 

The oil embargo was lifted in March 1974, but oil prices remained high, and the effects of the energy crisis lingered throughout the decade. In addition to price controls and gasoline rationing, a national speed limit was imposed and daylight-saving time was adopted year-round for the period of 1974-75. Environmentalism reached new heights during the crisis, and became a motivating force behind policymaking in Washington. Various acts of legislation during the 1970s sought to redefine America’s relationship to fossil fuels and other sources of energy, from the Emergency Petroleum Allocation Act (passed by Congress in November 1973, at the height of the oil panic) to the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 and the creation of the Department of Energy in 1977. 

As part of the movement toward energy reform, efforts were made to stimulate domestic oil production as well as to reduce American dependence on fossil fuels and find alternative sources of power, including renewable energy sources such as solar or wind power, as well as nuclear power. However, after oil prices collapsed in the mid-1980s and prices dropped to more moderate levels, domestic oil production fell once more, while progress toward energy efficiency slowed and foreign imports increased. 

[zayaanhashistory]

The Watergate Scandal

The Watergate scandal began early in the morning of June 17, 1972, when several burglars were arrested in the office of the Democratic National Committee, located in the Watergate complex of buildings in Washington, D.C. This was no ordinary robbery: The prowlers were connected to President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign, and they had been caught wiretapping phones and stealing documents. Nixon took aggressive steps to cover up the crimes, but when Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein revealed his role in the conspiracy, Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974. The Watergate scandal changed American politics forever, leading many Americans to question their leaders and think more critically about the presidency. 

The origins of the Watergate break-in lay in the hostile political climate of the time. By 1972, when Republican President Richard M. Nixon was running for reelection, the United States was embroiled in the Vietnam War, and the country was deeply divided. A forceful presidential campaign therefore seemed essential to the president and some of his key advisers. Their aggressive tactics included what turned out to be illegal espionage. In May 1972, as evidence would later show, members of Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (known derisively as CREEP) broke into the Democratic National Committee’s Watergate headquarters, stole copies of top-secret documents and bugged the office’s phones. The wiretaps failed to work properly, however, so on June 17 a group of five burglars returned to the Watergate building. As the prowlers were preparing to break into the office with a new microphone, a security guard noticed someone had taped over several of the building’s door locks. The guard called the police, who arrived just in time to catch them red-handed. It was not immediately clear that the burglars were connected to the president, though suspicions were raised when detectives found copies of the reelection committee’s White House phone number among the burglars’ belongings. In August, Nixon gave a speech in which he swore that his White House staff was not involved in the break-in. Most voters believed him, and in November 1972 the president was reelected in a landslide victory. 

It later came to light that Nixon was not being truthful. A few days after the break-in, for instance, he arranged to provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in “hush money” to the burglars. Then, Nixon and his aides hatched a plan to instruct the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to impede the FBI’s investigation of the crime. This was a more serious crime than the break-in: It was an abuse of presidential power and a deliberate obstruction of justice. Meanwhile, seven conspirators were indicted on charges related to the Watergate affair. At the urging of Nixon’s aides, five pleaded guilty to avoid trial; the other two were convicted in January 1973. By that time, a growing handful of people—including Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, trial judge John J. Sirica and members of a Senate investigating committee—had begun to suspect that there was a larger scheme afoot. At the same time, some of the conspirators began to crack under the pressure of the cover-up. Anonymous whistleblower “Deep Throat” provided key information to Woodward and Bernstein. A handful of Nixon’s aides, including White House counsel John Dean, testified before a grand jury about the president’s crimes; they also testified that Nixon had secretly taped every conversation that took place in the Oval Office. If prosecutors could get their hands on those tapes, they would have proof of the president’s guilt. Nixon struggled to protect the tapes during the summer and fall of 1973. His lawyers argued that the president’s executive privilege allowed him to keep the tapes to himself, but Judge Sirica, the Senate committee and an independent special prosecutor named Archibald Cox were all determined to obtain them. 

When Cox refused to stop demanding the tapes, Nixon ordered that he be fired, leading several Justice Department officials to resign in protest. (These events, which took place on October 20, 1973, are known as the Saturday Night Massacre.) Eventually, Nixon agreed to surrender some—but not all—of the tapes. Early in 1974, the cover-up and efforts to impede the Watergate investigation began to unravel. On March 1, a grand jury appointed by a new special prosecutor indicted seven of Nixon’s former aides on various charges related to the Watergate affair. The jury, unsure if they could indict a sitting president, called Nixon an “unindicted co-conspirator.” In July, the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over the tapes. While the president dragged his feet, the House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Nixon for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, criminal cover-up and several violations of the Constitution. 

Finally, on August 5, Nixon released the tapes, which provided undeniable evidence of his complicity in the Watergate crimes. In the face of almost certain impeachment by Congress, Nixon resigned in disgrace on August 8, and left office the following day. Six weeks later, after Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn in as president, he pardoned Nixon for any crimes he had committed while in office. Some of Nixon’s aides were not so lucky: They were convicted of very serious offenses and sent to federal prison. Nixon’s Attorney General of the United States John Mitchell served 19 months for his role in the scandal, while Watergate mastermind G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent, served four and a half years. Nixon’s Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman spent 19 months in prison while John Ehrlichman spent 18 for attempting to cover up the break-in. Nixon himself never admitted to any criminal wrongdoing, though he did acknowledge using poor judgment. 

His abuse of presidential power had a long-lasting effect on American political life, creating an atmosphere of cynicism and distrust. While many Americans had been deeply dismayed by the outcome of the Vietnam War, and saddened by the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and other leaders, Watergate added further disappointment to a national climate already soured by the difficulties and losses of the previous decade. 

[zayaanhashistory]

The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

The Exxon Valdez oil spill was a manmade disaster that occurred when Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker owned by the Exxon Shipping Company, spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound on March 24, 1989. It was the worst oil spill in U.S. history until the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. The Exxon Valdez oil slick covered 1,300 miles of coastline and killed hundreds of thousands of seabirds, otters, seals and whales. Nearly 30 years later, pockets of crude oil remain in some locations. After the spill, Exxon Valdez returned to service under a different name, operating for more than two decades as an oil tanker and ore carrier. 

On the evening of March 23, 1989, Exxon Valdez left the port of Valdez, Alaska, bound for Long Beach, California, with 53 million gallons of Prudhoe Bay crude oil onboard. At four minutes after midnight on March 24, the ship struck Bligh Reef, a well-known navigation hazard in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The impact of the collision tore open the ship’s hull, causing some 11 million gallons of crude oil to spill into the water. At the time, it was the largest single oil spill in U.S. waters. Initial attempts to contain the oil failed, and in the months that followed, the oil slick spread, eventually covering about 1,300 miles of coastline. Investigators later learned that Joseph Hazelwood, the captain of Exxon Valdez, had been drinking at the time and had allowed an unlicensed third mate to steer the massive ship. In March 1990, Hazelwood was acquitted of felony charges. He was convicted of a single charge of misdemeanor negligence, fined $50,000, and ordered to perform 1,000 hours of community service. 

In the months after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Exxon employees, federal responders and more than 11,000 Alaska residents worked to clean up the oil spill. Exxon played about $2 billion in cleanup costs and $1.8 billion for habitat restoration and personal damages related to the spill. Cleanup workers skimmed oil from the water’s surface, sprayed oil dispersant chemicals in the water and on shore, washed oiled beaches with hot water and rescued and cleaned animals trapped in oil. Environmental officials purposefully left some areas of shoreline untreated so they could study the effect of cleanup measures, some of which were unproven at the time. They later found that aggressive washing with high-pressure, hot water hoses was effective in removing oil, but did even more ecological damage by killing the remaining plants and animals in the process. One of those areas that was oiled but never cleaned is a large shoreline boulder called Mearn’s Rock. Scientists have returned to Mearn’s Rock every summer since the spill to photograph the plants and small critters growing on it. They found that many of the mussels, barnacles and various seaweeds growing on the rock before the spill returned to normal levels about three to four years after the spill. 

  Prince William Sound had been a pristine wilderness before the spill. The Exxon Valdez disaster dramatically changed all of that, taking a major toll on wildlife. It killed an estimated 250,000 sea birds, 3,000 otters, 300 seals, 250 bald eagles and 22 killer whales. The oil spill also may have played a role in the collapse of salmon and herring fisheries in Prince William Sound in the early 1990s. Fishermen went bankrupt, and the economies of small shoreline towns, including Valdez and Cordova, suffered in the following years. Some reports estimated the total economic loss from the Exxon Valdez oil spill to be as much as $2.8 billion. A 2001 study found oil contamination remaining at more than half of the 91 beach sites tested in Prince William Sound. 

The spill had killed an estimated 40 percent of all sea otters living in the Sound. The sea otter population didn’t recover to its pre-spill levels until 2014, twenty-five years after the spill. Stocks of herring, once a lucrative source of income for Prince William Sound fisherman, have never fully rebounded.  

In the wake of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the U.S. Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which President George H.W. Bush signed into law that year. The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 increased penalties for companies responsible for oil spills and required that all oil tankers in United States waters have a double hull. Exxon Valdez was a single-hulled tanker; a double-hull design, by making it less likely that a collision would have spilled oil, might have prevented the Exxon Valdez disaster. 

The ship, Exxon Valdez—first commissioned in 1986—was repaired and returned to service a year after the spill in a different ocean and under a different name. The single-hulled ship could no longer transport oil in U.S. waters, due to the new regulations. The ship began running oil transport routes in Europe, where single-hulled oil tankers were still allowed. There it was renamed the Exxon Mediterranean, then the SeaRiver Mediterranean and finally the S/R Mediterranean. 

In 2002, the European Union banned single-hulled tankers and the former Exxon Valdez moved to Asian waters. Exxon sold the infamous tanker in 2008 to a Hong Kong-based shipping company. The company converted the old oil tanker to an ore carrier, renaming it the Dong Feng Ocean. In 2010, the star-crossed ship collided with another bulk carrier in the Yellow Sea and was once again severely damaged. The ship was renamed once more after the collision, becoming the Oriental Nicety. The Oriental Nicety was sold for scrap to an Indian company and dismantled in 2012. 

[zayaanhashistory]

The Gilded Age

“The Gilded Age” is the term used to describe the tumultuous years between the Civil War and the turn of the twentieth century. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today was a famous satirical novel by Mark Twain set in the late 1800s, and was its namesake. During this era, America became more prosperous and saw unprecedented growth in industry and technology. But the Gilded Age had a more sinister side: It was a period where greedy, corrupt industrialists, bankers and politicians enjoyed extraordinary wealth and opulence at the expense of the working class. In fact, it was wealthy tycoons, not politicians, who inconspicuously held the most political power during the Gilded Age. 

Before the Civil War, rail travel was dangerous and difficult, but after the war, George Westinghouse invented the air brake, which made braking systems more dependable and safer. Soon, the development of Pullman sleeping cars and dining cars made rail travel comfortable and more enjoyable for passengers. It wasn’t long before trains overtook other forms of long-distance travel such as the stagecoach and riding horseback. In 1869, the Transcontinental Railroad was finished and led to rapid settlement of the western United States. It also made it much easier to transport goods over long distances from one part of the country to another. This enormous railroad expansion resulted in rail companies and their executives receiving lavish amounts of money and land—up to 200 million acres, by some estimates—from the United States government. In many cases, politicians cut shady backroom deals and helped create railroad and shipping tycoons such as Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould. Meanwhile, thousands of African American—many of them former slaves—were hired as Pullman porters and paid a pittance to cater to riders’ every need. 

Railroad tycoons were just one of many types of so-called robber barons that emerged in the Gilded Age. These men used union busting, fraud, intimidation, violence and their extensive political connections to gain an advantage over any competitors. Robber barons were relentless in their efforts to amass wealth while exploiting workers and ignoring standard business rules—and in many cases, the law itself. They soon accumulated vast amounts of money and dominated every major industry including the railroad, oil, banking, timber, sugar, liquor, meatpacking, steel, mining, tobacco and textile industries. Some wealthy entrepreneurs such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Henry Frick are often referred to as robber barons but may not exactly fit the mold. While it’s true they built huge monopolies, often by crushing any small business or competitor in their way, they were also generous philanthropists who didn’t always rely on political ploys to build their empires. Some tried to improve life for their employees, donated millions to charities and nonprofits and supported their communities by providing funding for everything from libraries and hospitals to universities, public parks and zoos. 

The Gilded Age was in many ways the culmination of the Industrial Revolution, when America and much of Europe shifted from an agricultural society to an industrial one. Millions of immigrants and struggling farmers arrived in cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Chicago, looking for work and hastening the urbanization of America. By 1900, about 40 percent of Americans lived in major cities. Most cities were unprepared for rapid population growth. Housing was limited, and tenements and slums sprung up nationwide. Heating, lighting, sanitation and medical care were poor or nonexistent, and millions died from preventable disease. Many immigrants were unskilled and willing to work long hours for little pay. Gilded Age plutocrats considered them the perfect employees for their sweatshops, where working conditions were dangerous and workers endured long periods of unemployment, wage cuts and no benefits. 

Wealthy considered themselves America’s royalty and settled for nothing less than estates worthy of that distinction. Some of America’s most famous mansions were built during the Gilded Age such as: Biltmore, located in Asheville, North Carolina, was the family estate of George and Edith Vanderbilt. Construction started on the 250-room chateau in 1889, prior to the couple’s marriage, and continued for six years. The home had 35 bedrooms, 43 bathrooms, 65 fireplaces, a dairy, a horse barn and beautiful formal and informal gardens. The Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island, is another Vanderbilt mansion. It was the summer home of railroad mogul Cornelius Vanderbilt. The Italian-Renaissance style home has 70 rooms, a stable and a carriage house. Rosecliff, also in Newport, was completed in 1902. The oceanfront home was contracted by Theresa Fair Oelrich's and built to resemble the Grand Trianon of Versailles. Today, it’s best known as the backdrop for movie scenes in The Great Gatsby, High Society, 27 Dresses and True Lies. Whitehall, located in Palm Beach, Florida, was the neoclassical winter retreat of oil tycoon Henry Flagler and his wife Mary. The 100,000 square foot, 75-room mansion was completed in 1902 and is now a popular museum. 

The industrialists of the Gilded Age lived high on the hog, but most of the working class lived below poverty level. As time went on, the income inequality between wealthy and poor became more and more glaring. While the wealthy lived in opulent homes, dined on succulent food and showered their children with gifts, the poor were crammed into filthy tenement apartments, struggled to put a loaf of bread on the table and often accompanied their children to a sweatshop each morning where they faced a 12-hour (or longer) workday.Some moguls used Social Darwinism to justify the inequality between the classes. The theory presumes that the fittest humans are the most successful and poor people are destitute because they’re weak and lack the skills to be prosperous. 

Muckrakers is a term used to describe reporters who exposed corruption among politicians and the elite. They used investigative journalism and the print revolution to dig through “the muck” of the Gilded Age and report scandal and injustice. In 1890, reporter and photographer Jacob Riis brought the horrors of New York slum life to light in his book, How the Other Half Lives, prompting New York politicians to pass legislation to improve tenement conditions. In 1902, McClure Magazine journalist Lincoln Steffens took on city corruption when he penned the article, “Tweed Days in St. Louis.” The article, which is widely considered the first muckraking magazine article, exposed how city officials deceitfully made deals with crooked businessmen to maintain power. Another journalist, Ida Tarbell, spent years investigating the underhanded rise of oilman John D. Rockefeller. Her 19-part series, also published in McClure in 1902, led to the breakup of Rockefeller’s monopoly, the Standard Oil Company. In 1906, activist journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to expose horrendous working conditions in the meatpacking industry. The book and ensuing public outcry led to the passing of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. 

It soon became obvious that the huge disparity between the wealthy and poor couldn’t last, and the working class would have to organize to improve their working and living conditions. It was also obvious this wouldn’t happen without some degree of violence. Much of the violence, however, was between the workers themselves as they struggled to agree on what they were fighting for. Some simply wanted increased wages and a better working environment, while others also wanted to keep women, immigrants and blacks out of the workforce. Although the first labor unions occurred around the turn of the nineteenth century, they gained momentum during the Gilded Age, thanks to the increased number of unskilled and unsatisfied factory workers. 

On July 16, 1877, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company announced a 10-percent pay cut on its railroad workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia, the second cut in less than eight months. Infuriated and fed up, the workers—with the support of the locals—announced they’d prevent all trains from leaving the roundhouse until their pay was restored. The mayor, the police and even the National Guard couldn’t stop the strike. It wasn’t until Federal troops arrived that one train finally left the station. The strike spread among other railroads, sparking violence across America between the working class and local and federal authorities. At its peak, over 100,000 railroad workers were on strike. Many of the Robber Barons feared an aggressive, all-out revolution against their way of life. Instead, the strike—later known as the Great Upheaval—ended abruptly and was labeled a dismal failure. Yet it showed America’s tycoons there was strength in numbers and that organized labor had the potential to shut down entire industries and inflict major economic and political damage.  As the working class continued to use strikes and boycotts to fight for higher wages and improved working conditions, their bosses staged lock-outs and brought in replacement workers known as scabs. They also created blacklists to prevent active union workers from becoming employed elsewhere. Even so, the working class continued to unite and press their cause and often won at least some of their demands. Innovations of the Gilded Age helped usher in modern America. Urbanization and technological creativity led to many engineering advances such as bridges and canals, elevators and skyscrapers, trolley lines and subways. The invention of electricity brought illumination to homes and businesses and created an unprecedented, thriving night life. Art and literature flourished, and the rich filled their lavish homes with expensive works of art and elaborate décor. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and made the world a much smaller place for both individuals and businesses. Advances in sanitation and housing, and the availability of better quality food and material goods, improved quality of life for the middle class. But while the middle and upper classes enjoyed the allure of city life, little changed for the poor. Most still faced horrific living conditions, high crime rates and a pitiable existence. Many escaped their drudgery by watching a vaudeville show or a spectator sport such as boxing, baseball or football, all of which enjoyed a surge during the Gilded Age. 

Upper-class women of the Gilded Age have been compared to dolls on display dressed in resplendent finery. They flaunted their wealth and endeavored to improve their status in society while poor and middle-class women both envied and mimicked them. Some wealthy Gilded Age women were much more than eye candy, though, and often traded domestic life for social activism and charitable work. They felt a new degree of empowerment and fought for equality, including the right to vote through women’s suffrage groups. Some created homes for destitute immigrants while others pushed a temperance agenda, believing the source of poverty and most family troubles was alcohol. Wealthy women philanthropists of the Gilded Age include: Louise Whitfield Carnegie, wife of Andrew Carnegie, who created Carnegie Hall and donated to the Red Cross, the Y.W.C.A., and other charities. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, wife of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who helped create hotels for women and solicited funds to create the New York Museum of Modern Art. Margaret Olivia Sage, wife of Russell Sage, who after the death of her miserly husband gave away $45 million of her $75 million inheritance to support women’s causes, educational institutions and the creation of the Russell Sage Foundation for Social Betterment, which directly helped poor people. Many women during the Gilded Age sought higher education. Others postponed marriage and took jobs such as typists or telephone switchboard operators. Thanks to a print revolution and the accessibility of newspapers, magazines and books, women became increasingly knowledgeable, cultured, well-informed and a political force to be reckoned with. 

Jane Addams is arguably the best-known philanthropist of the Gilded Age. In 1889, she and Ellen Gates Star established a secular settlement house in Chicago known as Hull-House. The neighborhood was a melting pot of struggling immigrants, and Hull-House provided everything from midwife services and basic medical care to kindergarten, day care and housing for abused women. It also offered English and citizenship classes. Addams received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. Temperance leader Carrie Nation gained notoriety during the Gilded Age for smashing up saloons with a hatchet to bring attention to her sobriety agenda. She was also a strong voice for the suffrage movement. Nation’s belief that alcohol was the root of all evil was partially due to her difficult first marriage to an alcoholic, and her work with women and children displaced or abused by over-imbibing husbands. Convinced God had instructed her to use whatever means necessary to close bars throughout Kansas, she was often beaten, mocked and jailed but ultimately helped pave the way for the 18th Amendment (prohibiting the sale of alcohol) and the 19th Amendment (giving women the right to vote). Many other pivotal events happened during the Gilded Age which changed America’s course and culture. As muckrakers exposed corrupt robber barons and politicians, labor unions and reformist politicians enacted laws to limit their power. The western frontier saw violent conflicts between white settlers and the United States Army against Native Americans. The Native Americans were eventually forced off their land and onto reservations with often disastrous results. In 1890, the western frontier was declared closed. 

As drought and depression struck rural America, farmers in the west—who vilified railroad tycoons and wanted a political voice—organized and played a key role in forming the Populist Party. The Populists had a democratic agenda that aimed to give power back to the people and paved the way for the progressive movement, which still fights to close the gap between the wealthy and poor and champion the needy and disenfranchised. 

In 1893, both the overextended Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and the National Cordage Company failed, which set off an economic depression unlike any seen before in America. Banks and other businesses folded, and the stock market plunged, leaving millions unemployed, homeless and hungry. In some states, unemployment rose to almost 50 percent.  

The Panic of 1893 lasted four years and left lower and even middle-class Americans fed up with political corruption and social inequality. Their frustration gave rise to the Progressive Movement which took hold when President Theodore Roosevelt took office in 1901. Although Roosevelt supported corporate America, he also felt there should be federal controls in place to keep excessive corporate greed in check and prevent individuals from making obscene amounts of money off the backs of immigrants and the lower class. Helped by the muckrakers and the White House, the Progressive Era ushered in many reforms that helped shift away power from robber barons, such as: 

trust busting 

labor reform 

women’s suffrage 

birth control 

formation of trade unions 

increased conservation efforts 

food and medicine regulations 

tax reform 

civil rights 

election reform 

fair labor standards 

By 1916, America’s cities were cleaner and healthier, factories safer, governments less corrupt and many people had better housing, working hours and wages. Fewer monopolies meant more people could pursue the American Dream and start their own businesses. When America entered World War I in 1917, the Progressive Era and any remnants of the Gilded Age effectively ended as the country’s focus shifted to the realities of war. Most robber barons and their families, however, remained wealthy for generations. 

Even so, many bequeathed much of their wealth, land and homes to charity and historical societies. And progressives continued their mission to close the gap between the wealthy and poor and champion the needy and disenfranchised. 

[zayaanhashistory]

The 1992 Los Angeles Riots

The 1992 Los Angeles riots—also called the Los Angeles uprising—sprung from years of rising tensions between the LAPD and the city’s African Americans, highlighted by the 1991 videotaped beating of motorist Rodney King. On April 29, 1992, anger boiled over after four LAPD officers were found not guilty of assaulting King, leading to several days of widespread violence, looting and arson throughout L.A. By May 3, thousands of National Guardsmen and federal troops had largely curbed the uprising, which left more than 60 people dead and produced about $1 billion in damage. 

The 1980s brought rising unemployment, gang activity, drugs and violent crime to the poorer neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Aggressive efforts to exert control by the Los Angeles Police Department fostered a belief among minority communities that its officers were not held liable for abusive police actions. In August 1988, as part of LAPD Chief Daryl Gates’s “Operation Hammer” drug sweeps, more than 80 officers tore apart a pair of apartment buildings on Dalton Street in South L.A., leaving dozens homeless. In January 1990, a skirmish between the LAPD and Nation of Islam members following a traffic stop resulted in the death of 27-year-old Air Force veteran Oliver Beasley. 

Early on March 3, 1991, an intoxicated parolee named Rodney King led police on a high-speed car chase before stopping in Lakeview Terrace. His subsequent beating, which left him with a fractured skull and cheekbone, was caught on video by Lakeview resident George Holliday, who forwarded it to local station KTLA. Within days, the footage of police repeatedly hitting a Black man with batons was airing on all major networks, drumming up nationwide outrage against the officers involved. On March 15, LAPD Sergeant Stacey Koon and officers Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind and Theodore Briseno were indicted for assault in the King beating, with Koon and Powell also charged with filing false police reports. The African American community endured another blow the following day, when 15-year-old Latasha Harlin's was shot and killed by Korean grocer Soon Ja Du over a disputed shoplifting. Shortly afterward, L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley formed the independent Christopher Commission, named for co-chair Warren Christopher, to investigate operations within the LAPD. In July, the commission published a report that detailed repetitive use of excessive force and recommended a new system of accountability, though Gates staunchly defended his practices. On November 15, Du drew a sentence that included community service and suspended jail time, a decision that outraged Harlin family and supporters. Eleven days later, it was announced the trial for the four officers in the King beating would be moved from Los Angeles County to predominantly white Ventura County. In February 1992, the trial commenced with a 12-member jury that included one Latino, one Asian American and one half-African American. 

  At about 3:15 p.m. on Wednesday, April 29, the jury released their verdict: All four officers were acquitted of charges in the King case, save for a mistrial on one charge against Powell of excessive force. The response was immediate, as protesters took to the streets. Hundreds of people gathered at the Los Angeles County Courthouse to protest the verdict. By 5:30 p.m., the unrest had grown violent near the intersection of Florence and Normandie Avenues in South L.A., where locals attacked passing motorists and forced overwhelmed LAPD officers to retreat. A news helicopter captured footage of white truck driver Reginald Denny being pulled from his rig and beaten nearly to death, with no signs of police assistance. Minutes later, a Latino driver named Fidel Lopez endured a similar attack. 

In a matter of hours, neighborhoods across South and Central Los Angeles were in flames as rioters firebombed thousands of buildings, smashed windows, looted stores and attacked the Parker Center police headquarters in downtown L.A. By the end of the day, California Governor Pete Wilson had declared a state of emergency and ordered the activation of reserve National Guard soldiers. The citywide unrest showed little signs of abating on April 30, prompting the suspension of rapid transit, mail service, schools and professional sports games. Many businesses closed, leaving residents to wait in long lines for food and gas, while other store owners, like bands of armed Korean merchants, chose to engage the looters. Although some 2,000 National Guardsmen had reached the city by 8:00 that morning, a lack of proper communication and equipment prevented effective deployment until later in the afternoon. May 1, the third day of continued rioting, was marked by the televised appearance of King, who asked for the mayhem to stop, quietly pleading, “Can we all get along?” That evening, President George H.W. Bush also took to the airwaves to denounce both the “senseless deaths” of the riots and the police brutality that inspired them, and to announce the dispatch of thousands of federal officers to Los Angeles. 

By May 2, with 6,000 National Guardsmen bolstered by the addition of another 4,000 federal troops and Marines, the disorder had largely quelled. An estimated 30,000 people marched at a peaceful rally for Korean merchants, and volunteers began cleaning up the streets. Meanwhile, arraignments began for some 6,000 alleged looters and arsonists. Highway exits reopened and police began recovering stolen merchandise the following day, the only significant trouble coming when National Guardsmen shot a driver who attempted to run them over. On May 4, Mayor Bradley lifted the citywide curfew, and residents attempted to resume day-to-day activities with schools, businesses and rapid transit resuming operations. Federal troops stood down on May 9 and the National Guard soon followed, though some soldiers remained until the end of the month. 

The final tally for the L.A. riots included 2,000 injuries, 12,000 arrests and 63 deaths attributed to the uprising. Upwards of 3,000 buildings were burned or destroyed and 3,000 businesses were affected as part of the $1 billion in damages sustained by the city, leaving an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 people out of work. At the conclusion of the riots, elected officials set about putting the city back together through a combination of federal grants, collaborations with financial institutions and tax proposals. Governor Wilson and Mayor Bradley tapped Major League Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth to lead the “Rebuild L.A.” effort, which attracted nearly $400 million in corporate investments and set in motion a series of grassroots movements to foster job training and community involvement. 

Attention was also focused on the culpability of the city’s law enforcement. On May 11, former FBI Director William H. Webster was named to head an investigation into the LAPD response during the riots, and in late June embattled Chief Daryl Gates stepped down. In October, the commission issued a report that criticized both the LAPD and City Hall for being unprepared and slow to handle the response to the riots. It issued a list of recommendations, including redeploying desk officers into community patrols and upgrading the city’s communications and information systems. Critics of the LAPD earned some vindication in 1993 when officers Koon and Powell were sentenced to 30 months apiece for violating King’s civil rights. In April 1994, King was awarded $3.8 million in a civil lawsuit against the city. Although the LAPD demonstrated improvements with community-based programs, it resisted implementing most of the recommendations of the 1991 Christopher Commission. It wasn’t until the Rampart Scandal of the late 1990s, which exposed widespread corruption within an LAPD anti-gang unit, that serious change was enacted. 

In 2000, the city of Los Angeles entered a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice that allowed an independent monitor to oversee reforms. After taking over as LAPD chief in 2002, William Bratton was credited with taking steps to overhaul and improve the perception of the department. In 2013, Department of Justice oversight of the LAPD was fully lifted. However, a 2020 report by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights found that thousands of non-traffic infractions issued by police in California were being disproportionately enforced on Black and Latino residents. 

[zayaanhashistory]

The Bosnian Genocide

In April 1992, the government of the Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence from Yugoslavia. Over the next several years, Bosnian Serb forces, with the backing of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army, perpetrated atrocious crimes against Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) and Croatian civilians, resulting in the deaths of some 100,000 people (80 percent of them Bosniak) by 1995. 

In the aftermath of World War II, the Balkan states of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia became part of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. After the death of longtime Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito in 1980, growing nationalism among the different Yugoslav republics threatened to split their union apart. This process intensified after the mid-1980s with the rise of the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, who helped foment discontent between Serbians in Bosnia and Croatia and their Croatian, Bosniak and Albanian neighbors. In 1991, Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia declared their independence. During the war in Croatia that followed, the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army supported Serbian separatists there in brutal clashes with Croatian forces.  

In Bosnia, Muslims represented the largest single population group by 1971. More Serbs and Croats emigrated over the next two decades, and in a 1991 census Bosnia’s population of some 4 million was 44 percent Bosniak, 31 percent Serb, and 17 percent Croatian. Elections held in late 1990 resulted in a coalition government split between parties representing the three ethnicities (in rough proportion to their populations) and led by the Bosniak Alija Izetbegovic. As tensions built inside and outside the country, the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his Serbian Democratic Party withdrew from government and set up their own “Serbian National Assembly.” On March 3, 1992, after a referendum vote (which Karadzic’s party blocked in many Serb-populated areas), President Izetbegovic proclaimed Bosnia’s independence. 

Far from seeking independence for Bosnia, Bosnian Serbs wanted to be part of a dominant Serbian state in the Balkans—the “Greater Serbia” that Serbian separatists had long envisioned. In early May 1992, two days after the United States and the European Community (the precursor to the European Union) recognized Bosnia’s independence, Bosnian Serb forces with the backing of Milosevic and the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army launched their offensive with a bombardment of Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo. 

They attacked Bosniak-dominated towns in eastern Bosnia, including Zvornik, Foca, and Visegrad, forcibly expelling Bosniak civilians from the region in a brutal process that later was identified as “ethnic cleansing.” (Ethnic cleansing differs from genocide in that its primary goal is the expulsion of a group of people from a geographical area and not the actual physical destruction of that group, even though the same methods—including murder, rape, torture and forcible displacement—may be used.) Though Bosnian government forces tried to defend the territory, sometimes with the help of the Croatian army, Bosnian Serb forces were in control of nearly three-quarters of the country by the end of 1993, and Karadzic’s party had set up their own Republika Srpska in the east. Most of the Bosnian Croats had left the country, while a significant Bosniak population remained only in smaller towns. Several peace proposals between a Croatian-Bosniak federation and Bosnian Serbs failed when the Serbs refused to give up any territory. The United Nations refused to intervene in the conflict in Bosnia, but a campaign spearheaded by its High Commissioner for Refugees provided humanitarian aid to its many displaced, malnourished and injured victims. 

By the summer of 1995, three towns in eastern Bosnia—Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde—remained under control of the Bosnian government. The U.N. had declared these enclaves “safe havens” in 1993, to be disarmed and protected by international peacekeeping forces. On July 11, 1995, however, Bosnian Serb forces advanced on Srebrenica, overwhelming a battalion of Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed there. Serbian forces subsequently separated the Bosniak civilians at Srebrenica, putting the women and girls on buses and sending them to Bosnian-held territory. Some of the women were raped or sexually assaulted, while the men and boys who remained behind were killed immediately or bussed to mass killing sites. Estimates of Bosniaks killed by Serb forces at Srebrenica range from around 7,000 to more than 8,000. After Bosnian Serb forces captured Zepa that same month and exploded a bomb in a crowded Sarajevo market, the international community began to respond more forcefully to the ongoing conflict and its ever-growing civilian death toll. In August 1995, after the Serbs refused to comply with a U.N. ultimatum, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) joined efforts with Bosnian and Croatian forces for three weeks of bombing Bosnian Serb positions and a ground offensive. With Serbia’s economy crippled by U.N. trade sanctions and its military forces under assault in Bosnia after three years of warfare, Milosevic agreed to enter negotiations that October. The U.S.-sponsored peace talks in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995 (which included Izetbegovic, Milosevic and Croatian President Franjo Tudjman) resulted in the creation of a federalized Bosnia divided between a Croat-Bosniak federation and a Serb republic. 

Though the international community did little to prevent the systematic atrocities committed against Bosniaks and Croats in Bosnia while they were occurring, it did actively seek justice against those who committed them. In May 1993, the U.N. Security Council created the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague, Netherlands. It was the first international tribunal since the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-46, and the first to prosecute genocide, among other war crimes. Radovan Karadzic and the Bosnian Serb military commander, General Ratko Mladic, were among those indicted by the ICTY for genocide and other crimes against humanity. The ICTY would eventually indict 161 individuals of crimes committed during conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Brought before the tribunal in 2002 on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, Milosevic served as his own defense lawyer; his poor health led to long delays in the trial until he was found dead in his prison cell in 2006. 

In 2007, the International Court of Justice issued its ruling in a historic civil lawsuit brought by Bosnia against Serbia. Though the court called the massacre at Srebrenica genocide and said that Serbia “could and should” have prevented it and punished those who committed it, it stopped short of declaring Serbia guilty of the genocide itself. 

After a trial lasting more than four years and involving the testimony of nearly 600 witnesses, the ICTY found Mladic, who had been dubbed the “Butcher of Bosnia,” guilty of genocide and other crimes against humanity in November 2017. The tribunal sentenced the 74-year-old former general to life in prison. Coming on the heels of Karadzic’s conviction for war crimes the previous year, Mladic’s long-delayed conviction marked the last major prosecution by the ICTY. 

[zayaanhashistory]

The Democratic Convention of 1968

The Democratic Convention of 1968 was held August 26-29 in Chicago, Illinois. As delegates flowed into the International Amphitheatre to nominate a Democratic Party presidential candidate, tens of thousands of protesters swarmed the streets to rally against the Vietnam War and the political status quo. By the time Vice President Herbert Humphrey received the presidential nomination, the strife within the Democratic Party was laid bare and the streets of Chicago had seen riots and bloodshed involving protesters, police and bystanders alike, radically changing America’s political and social landscape. 

Though the 1968 protest at the Democratic National Convention were largely against the Vietnam War, the country was undergoing unrest on many fronts. The months leading up to the infamous 1968 Democratic Convention were turbulent: The brutal assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April had left the country reeling, and although segregation had officially ended, racism and poverty continued to make life difficult for many blacks. The Vietnam War was in its 13th year and the recent Tet Offensive had proved the conflict was far from over, as the draft sent more young men into the fray. It was only a matter of time before a showdown would take place between the government of President Lyndon B. Johnson and America’s war-weary citizens. By the time delegates arrived for the convention in Chicago, protests had been set in motion by members of the Youth International Party (yippies) and the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE), whose organizers included Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden. But Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley had no intention of letting his city or the convention be overrun by protestors. The stage was set for an explosive face-off. The Democratic Party in 1968 was in crisis. President Johnson—despite being elected with a huge majority in 1964—was soon loathed by many of his peers and constituents due to his pro-Vietnam War policies. In November 1967, a relatively unknown and unremarkable Minnesota senator named Eugene McCarthy announced his intent to challenge Johnson for the Democratic presidential nomination. In March 1968, McCarthy won 40 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire presidential primary, thereby validating his candidacy. 

A few days later, Senator Robert F. Kennedy abandoned his support for Johnson and entered the presidential fight. President Johnson saw the writing on the wall and, on March 31, told a stunned nation during a televised address that he would not seek reelection. The following month, Vice President Hubert Humphrey—backed by Johnson—announced his candidacy for the nomination, further dividing the Democratic Party. Humphrey focused on winning delegates in non-primary states, while Kennedy and McCarthy campaigned hard in primary states. Tragically, the race was turned upside down again when Robert Kennedy was assassinated after giving his victory speech following the California primary on June 4. Kennedy’s delegates were divided between McCarthy and dark-horse candidate Senator George McGovern, leaving Humphrey with more than enough votes to clench the Democratic presidential nomination, but also leaving the Democratic party in turmoil just weeks before their national convention. Fed up with Democratic leadership’s penchant for war, yippies protesting at the 1968 Democratic National Convention conceived their own solution: nominate a pig for president. Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman came up with the idea, named their candidate “Pegasus the Immortal” and pledged, “They nominate a president and he eats the people. We nominate a president and the people eat him.” Pegasus the Immortal’s presidential campaign may have been the shortest in recorded history. His chance to become leader of the free world ended abruptly when he, Rubin and other members of his campaign staff were arrested at his first press conference in front of the Chicago Convention Center. (Pegasus's eventual fate remains unknown to this day.) 

In July 1968, MOBE and yippie activists applied for permits to camp at Lincoln Park and hold rallies at the International Amphitheatre, Soldier Field and Grant Park. Hoping to dilute the protestors’ momentum, Mayor Daley approved only one permit to protest at the bandshell at Grant Park. About a week before the convention, despite not having permission, thousands of protestors—many of them from out of state and from middle-class families—set up camp at Lincoln Park, about ten miles from the Amphitheatre. Expecting resistance, protest leaders organized self-defense training sessions including karate and snake dancing. In the meantime, Democratic Party delegates began arriving in a Chicago that was rapidly approaching a state of siege: National Guardsmen and policemen met their planes. Their hotels were under heavy guard and the convention Amphitheatre was a virtual fortress. 

Initially, Mayor Daley let the protestors remain in Lincoln Park. The day before the convention began, however, he ordered Chicago police to enforce the city’s 11:00 p.m. park curfew hoping that a show of force would clear out the protestors before the convention began. The mood at Lincoln Park was festive at first. There were impromptu yoga sessions, music, dancing and the general revelry that happens when like-minded people gather together to protest the establishment. But the mood turned tense as opening day of the convention approached and the police presence increased. Around 11:00 p.m. on Sunday, August 25, a couple thousand police officers wearing riot gear, helmets and gas masks lined up at Lincoln Park. Some threw tear gas into the crowd. Protestors scattered every which way and rushed out of the park, blindly falling over each other as the tear gas assaulted their eyes. The protest grew violent when the police attacked them with clubs and often didn’t stop when someone was subdued on the ground. Eyewitnesses report it was a scene of unrestrained bloodshed and chaos. Later, the police defended their actions by claiming the protestors shouldn’t have broken curfew or resisted arrest. According to Thomas Foran, the Chicago lawyer who would later prosecute protest leaders, many of the protestors were “spoiled brats who thought that they knew better than everybody…they were being encouraged to do things they shouldn’t do by these sophisticated guys whose idea was to shame the U.S. government.” 

On Monday, August 26, the 1968 Democratic National Convention officially opened at the International Amphitheatre. Television cameras captured everything happening on the convention floor but were unable to live broadcast the demonstrations happening outside. Whether the news blackout was due to the electrical workers’ strike (as Mayor Daley claimed) or a deliberate attempt to prevent the public from learning about the citywide protests is unclear. Several states including Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama had multiple slates of delegates competing to be seated at the convention. Many took the battle to the convention floor. A racially diverse delegation from Texas was defeated. The convention soon became a battleground between anti-war supporters and Vice President Humphrey’s—and indirectly, President Johnson’s—supporters. On Tuesday night, when a promised televised prime-time debate on Vietnam was postponed until after midnight when most viewers would be asleep, the anti-war delegates made their fury known to the point that Mayor Daley had the convention adjourned for the night. 

By Tuesday evening, protestors had gathered at the Conrad Hilton Hotel where many of the delegates and candidates, including Humphrey and McCarthy, stayed. As tense police officers tried to maintain control, Mayor Daley sent in the National Guard to help. Protest leader Tom Hayden united the crowd by proclaiming, “Tomorrow is the day that this operation has been pointing for some time. We are going to gather here. We are going to make our way to the Amphitheatre by any means necessary.” On Wednesday, August 28, the promised televised Vietnam debate finally took place to determine if the Democrats would adopt a plank of peace or one of continued war. At the same time, MOBE convened their long-planned and highly anticipated anti-war rally at the bandshell at Grant Park. Up to fifteen thousand protestors gathered, much less than protest leaders had hoped for, and they were quickly surrounded by hundreds of police and National Guardsmen under orders to keep the protestors from reaching the Amphitheatre. Around 3:30 p.m. that afternoon, a teenage boy climbed a flagpole near the bandshell and lowered the American flag. The police moved in swiftly to arrest him as protestors rallied to his aid, assaulting the officers with rocks and food or whatever else they had on hand. Hoping to quell further violence, Davis reminded police that a legal protest permit had been obtained and requested that all police leave the park. In response, the officers moved in and beat Davis unconscious. The police beat protestors at will with clubs and fists. Despite the hostility, anti-violence protest leader David Dillinger still supported protesting peacefully. But all bets were off for Hayden, who feared mass arrests and worsening violence. He encouraged protestors to make for the streets in small groups and head back to the Hilton Hotel. 

As things heated up in Grant Park, they also heated up on the convention floor. The peace plank was defeated, a huge blow to the peace delegates and millions of Americans who wanted the Vietnam War to end, and the delegates erupted into chaos. In the words of one delegate, “We were desolate. All of the work that we had done, all of the effort we had made had, it seemed to us, come to naught…our hearts were broken.” By nightfall, a standoff had ensued in front of the Hilton between thousands of angry protestors and thousands of police officers. No one knows who or what triggered the first blow, but soon police began clearing out the crowd, pummeling protestors (and innocent bystanders) with billy clubs and using so much tear gas that it reportedly reached Humphrey some 25 floors up as he watched the bedlam unfold from his hotel room window. At home in their living rooms, horrified Americans alternated between watching images of police brutally beating young, blood-splattered demonstrators and Humphrey’s nomination. During the nomination process, some delegates spoke to the violence. One pro-McGovern delegate went so far as to refer to the police violence as “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” Late that evening, Humphrey won the presidential nomination with Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine as his running mate. But the win was nothing to celebrate. Any illusion of unity within the Democratic Party was shattered—after Humphrey’s nomination, many anti-war delegates joined protesters in solidarity and held a candlelight vigil. The next day, the remaining protesters and hundreds of anti-war delegates attempted to reach the Amphitheatre again but were deterred with tear gas. At midnight on August 29, the bloody and contentious 1968 Democratic Convention officially ended. 

Over 650 protesters were arrested during the convention. The total number of injured protesters is unknown but over 100 were treated at area hospitals. It was reported that 192 police officers were injured and 49 required medical treatment. Davis, Dellinger, Hayden, Black Panther activist Bobby Seale and four other protest organizers, known as the Chicago Eight, were charged with conspiracy and crossing state lines to incite a riot and brought to trial. After Seale complained about being denied his right to choose his own lawyer, the judge ordered him to appear before the jury each day bound, gagged and chained to a chair. Seale was removed from the Chicago Eight case and ordered to stand trial separately, making the defendants into the Chicago Seven. Seale was sentenced to four years for contempt of court, but the charges were later overturned. After a lengthy, often circus-like trial, the jury found the Chicago Seven not guilty of conspiracy. Five defendants, however, were found guilty of inciting a riot. All convictions were eventually overturned on appeal. The pandemonium at the 1968 Democratic National Convention did little to stop the Vietnam War or win the 1968 presidential election. By the end of the year, Republican Richard M. Nixon was President-elect of the United States and 16,592 American soldiers had been killed in Vietnam, the most of any year since the war began. 

The events of the convention forced the Democratic Party to take a hard look at how they did business and how they could regain the public’s trust. 

[zayaanhashistory]

The Watts Rebellion

The Watts Rebellion, also known as the Watts Riots, was a large series of riots that broke out August 11, 1965, in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles. The Watts Rebellion lasted for six days, resulting in 34 deaths, 1,032 injuries and 4,000 arrests, involving 34,000 people and ending in the destruction of 1,000 buildings, totaling $40 million in damages. 

It was a low-key traffic stop around 7 p.m. on a Wednesday evening that ignited what would become known as the Watts Rebellion. Stepbrothers Marquette and Ronald Frye were pulled over by a white California Highway Patrol officer while driving their mother’s car near the corner of Avalon Boulevard and 116th Street in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Marquette failed a sobriety test and panicked as he was arrested. As Marquette’s anger rose at the thought of going to jail, a scuffle broke out between him and one of the police officers. Ronald joined in, partly to protest the arrest but also to protect his brother. A crowd began to gather, and back-up police arrived under the assumption that the crowd was hostile, which resulted in a fight between someone in the crowd and an officer. Another newly-arrived officer jabbed Ronald in the stomach with his riot baton and then moved to intervene in the fight between Marquette and that officer. 

Marquette was knocked down by the riot baton, handcuffed and taken to the police car. The Frye brothers’ mother, Rena, showed-up on the scene and—believing police were abusing Marquette—rushed to pull the officers off of him, resulting in another fight. Rena was arrested and forced into the car, followed by Ronald, who was handcuffed after attempting to intervene peacefully in his stepmother’s arrest. As the crowd got angrier about the scene they had witnessed, more highway patrol officers arrived and used batons and shotguns to keep the crowd back from the police car. Hundreds more people flocked to the scene to investigate the sirens there. As two motorcycle police attempted to leave, one was spat on. Those police stopped to pursue the woman who they believed did it, the crowd converged around them, sending several other officers into the crowd to assist them. More police cars were called to the scene. The two police found Joyce Ann Gaines and to arrest her for spitting at them. She resisted and was dragged out of the crowd which, believing she was pregnant, became even angrier. By 7:45 p.m., the riot was in full force, with rocks, bottles and more being thrown at the buses and cars that had been stalled in traffic because of the escalating incident. 

The night after the arrest, crowds attacked motorists with rocks and bricks, and pulled white drivers out of their cars and beat them. The following morning, there was a community meeting helmed by Watts leaders, including representatives from churches, local government and the NAACP, with police in attendance, designed to bring calm to the situation. Rena also attended, imploring the crowds to calm down. She, Marquette and Ronald had all been released on bail that morning. The meeting became a barrage of complaints about the police and government treatment of Black citizens in recent history. Immediately following the statement by Rena, a teenager grabbed the microphone and proclaimed that rioters planned to move into the white sections of Los Angeles. Local leaders requested the police dispatch more Black police, but this was turned down by the Los Angeles Police Department Chief William H. Parker, who was prepared to call the National Guard. Word of this decision and subsequent news reports about the teenager’s tirade are credited with causing the riots to escalate. 

Overnight, violence had engulfed the streets as mobs clashed with police, set buildings and cars on fire and looted area stores. Crowds attacked firefighters and obstructed them from putting out fires. By the end the third day, rioting covered a 50 square-mile section of Los Angeles and 14,000 National Guard troops were dispatched to the city, erecting barricades. Further clashes included sniper fire at police and Guardsmen, police raids on vehicles and apartments, and Molotov cocktails. Watts resembled a war zone, and the violence continued three more days. Police Commissioner Parker fanned flames by deriding rioters as “monkeys in a zoo” and implying Muslims were infiltrating and agitating. In the early morning of the final day of the riots, as violence began to subside, police surrounded a mosque, resulting in gunfire and the arrest of people inside. Police ransacked the building next door and tear-gassed the sewers to prevent anyone from escaping. Two fires broke out and destroyed the mosque. Charges were dropped against arrestees and the Muslim community accused police of using the riots as an excuse to destroy their place of worship. Most of the 34 dead were Black citizens. Two policemen and one firefighter were among the casualties, and 26 deaths, mostly the result of Los Angeles Police Department or National Guard actions, were deemed justifiable homicides. 

The riot was not an isolated event, with multiple urban riots across the country taking place in 1964 and 1965 prior to the Watts explosion. In 1964, there was a three-day riot in Rochester, NY, leaving four dead; in the New York City neighborhoods of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, a six-day riot involving as many as 4,000 people following the shooting of a young Black man; in Philadelphia, a three-day riot following the arrest of a Black couple who had gotten into a scuffle with police; and a three-day riot in Chicago when a Black woman attempting to shoplift alcohol was attacked by the store owner and crowds later gathered to protest. Some blamed the Watts riots on outsider agitators, but most understood it as the result of continuing dissatisfaction about living conditions and opportunities, and long-standing tension between police and residents. In 1961, the arrest of a Black male in Griffith Park for riding a merry-go-round without a ticket resulted in crowds throwing rocks and bottles at police. In 1962, the police raided a Nation of Islam Mosque and killed an unarmed man, resulting in massive protests. Over the two years leading up to the riot, 65 Black residents were shot by police, 27 of them in the back and 25 of them unarmed. During that same period, there were 250 demonstrations against the living conditions there. Nationwide, the violence would not end. On August 12, the day after tensions erupted in Watts, Chicago’s troubled Garfield Park neighborhood erupted into three days of violence following the death of Dessie May Williams in a fire truck ladder accident.  

The following year saw fire bombings, riots, and killing in the same city. And the Detroit Riots began two years later, resulting in 43 deaths. The 1992 Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King beating trial of four police officers led to the deaths of 63 people and were a grim reminder that many issues of racism remained unresolved. 

[zayaanhashistory]

Zoot Suit Riots

The Zoot Suit Riots were a series of violent clashes during which mobs of U.S. servicemen, off-duty police officers and civilians brawled with young Latinos and other minorities in Los Angeles. The June 1943 riots took their name from the baggy suits worn by many minority youths during that era, but the violence was more about racial tension than fashion. 

  During the 1930s, dance halls were popular venues for socializing, swing dancing and easing the economic stress of the Great Depression. Nowhere was this truer than in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem, home of the famed Harlem Renaissance. Style-conscious Harlem dancers began wearing loose-fitting clothes that accentuated their movements. Men donned baggy trousers with cuffs carefully tapered to prevent tripping; long jackets with heavily padded shoulders and wide lapels; long, glittering watch chains and hats ranging from porkpies and fedoras to broad-brimmed sombreros. The image of these so-called “zoot suits” spread quickly and was popularized by performers such as Cab Calloway, who, in his Hepster’s Dictionary, called the zoot suit “the ultimate in clothes. The only totally and truly American civilian suit.” As the zoot suit became more popular among young men in Black, Mexican American and other minority communities, the clothes garnered a somewhat racist reputation. Latino youths in California known as “pachucos”—often wearing flashy zoot suits, porkpie hats and dangling watch chains—were increasingly viewed by affluent whites as menacing street thugs, gang members and rebellious juvenile delinquents. 

Wartime patriotism didn’t help matters: After the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into World War II, wool and other textiles were subject to strict rationing. The U.S. War Production Board regulated the production of civilian clothing containing silk, wool and other essential fabrics. Despite these wartime restrictions, many bootleg tailors in Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere continued to make the popular zoot suits, which used profligate amounts of fabric. Servicemen and many other people, however, saw the oversized suits a flagrant and unpatriotic waste of resources. The local media was only too happy to fan the flames of racism and moral outrage: On June 2, 1943, the Los Angeles Times reported: “Fresh in the memory of Los Angeles is last year’s surge of gang violence that made the ‘zoot suit’ a badge of delinquency. Public indignation seethed as warfare among organized bands of marauders, prowling the streets at night, brought a wave of assaults, [and] finally murders.” 

In the summer of 1943, tensions ran high between zoot-suiters and the large contingent of white sailors, soldiers and Marines stationed in and around Los Angeles. Mexican Americans were serving in the military in high numbers, but many servicemen viewed the zoot-suit wearers as World War II draft dodgers (though many were in fact too young to serve in the military). On May 31, a clash between uniformed servicemen and Mexican American youths resulted in the beating of a U.S. sailor. Partly in retaliation, on the evening of June 3, about 50 sailors from the local U.S. Naval Reserve Armory marched through downtown Los Angeles carrying clubs and other crude weapons, attacking anyone seen wearing a zoot suit or other racially identified clothing. In the days that followed, the racially charged atmosphere in Los Angeles exploded in a number of full-scale riots. Mobs of U.S. servicemen took to the streets and began attacking Latinos and stripping them of their suits, leaving them bloodied and half-naked on the sidewalk. Local police officers often watched from the sidelines, then arrested the victims of the beatings. Thousands more servicemen, off-duty police officers and civilians joined the fray over the next several days, marching into cafes and movie theaters and beating anyone wearing zoot-suit clothing or hairstyles (duck-tail haircuts were a favorite target and were often cut off). Blacks and Filipinos—even those not clad in zoot suits—were also attacked and bloodied. 

By June 7, the rioting had spread outside downtown Los Angeles to Watts, East Los Angeles and other neighborhoods. Taxi drivers offered free rides to servicemen to rioting areas, and thousands of military personnel and civilians from San Diego and other parts of Southern California converged on Los Angeles to join the mayhem. Leaders of the Mexican American community implored state and local officials to intervene—The Council for Latin American Youth even sent a telegram to President Franklin D. Roosevelt—but their pleas met with little action. One eyewitness, writer Carey McWilliams, painted a terrifying picture: “On Monday evening, June seventh, thousands of Angelenos … turned out for a mass lynching. Marching through the streets of downtown Los Angeles, a mob of several thousand soldiers, sailors, and civilians, proceeded to beat up every zoot-suiter they could find. Street cars were halted while Mexicans, and some Filipinos and Negroes, were jerked out of their seats, pushed into the streets, and beaten with sadistic frenzy.” 

Local papers framed the racial attacks as a vigilante response to an immigrant crime wave, and police generally restricted their arrests to the Latinos who fought back. The riots didn’t die down until June 8, when U.S. military personnel were finally barred from leaving their barracks. The Los Angeles City Council issued a ban on zoot suits the following day. Amazingly, no one was killed during the weeklong riot, but it wasn’t the last outburst of zoot suit-related racial violence. Similar incidents took place that same year in cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago and Detroit. A Citizens’ Committee appointed by California Governor Earl Warren to investigate the Zoot Suit Riots convened in the weeks after the riot. The committee’s report found that, “In undertaking to deal with the cause of these outbreaks, the existence of race prejudice cannot be ignored.” 

Additionally, the committee described the problem of juvenile delinquency youth as “one of American youth, not confined to any racial group. The wearers of zoot suits are not necessarily persons of Mexican descent, criminals or juveniles. Many young people today wear zoot suits.” 

[zayaanhashistory]

Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first significant law restricting immigration into the United States. Many Americans on the West Coast attributed declining wages and economic ills to Chinese workers. Although the Chinese composed only 0.002 percent of the nation's population, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to placate worker demands and assuage concerns about maintaining white "racial purity." 

The Opium Wars (1839-42, 1856-60) of the mid-nineteenth century between Great Britain and China left China heavily in debt. Additionally, floods and drought contributed to an exodus of peasants from their farms, and many left the country to find work. When gold was discovered in the Sacramento Valley of California in 1848, a large uptick in Chinese immigrants entered the United States to join the California Gold Rush. Following an 1852 crop failure in China, over 20,000 Chinese immigrants came through the custom house in San Francisco (up from 2,716 the previous year) looking for work. Violence soon broke out between white miners and the new arrivals, much of it racially charged. In May 1852, California imposed a Foreign Miners License Tax of $3 month meant to target Chinese miners, and crime and violence escalated. An 1854 Supreme Court case, People v. Hall, ruled that the Chinese, like Black Americans and Native Americans, were not allowed to testify in court, making it effectively impossible for Chinese immigrants to seek justice against the mounting violence. By 1870, Chinese miners had paid $5 million to the state of California via the Foreign Miners License Tax, yet they faced continuing discrimination at work and in their camps. 

  Meant to curb the influx of Chinese immigrants to the United States—particularly California—the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 suspended Chinese immigration for ten years and declared Chinese immigrant's ineligible for naturalization. President Chester A. Arthur signed it into law on May 6, 1882. Chinese-Americans already in the country challenged the constitutionality of the discriminatory acts, but their efforts failed. 

Proposed by California congressman Thomas J. Geary, the Geary Act went into effect on May 5, 1892. It reinforced and extended the Chinese Exclusion Act’s ban on Chinese immigration for an additional ten years. It also required Chinese residents in the United States to carry special documentation—certificates of residence—from the Internal Revenue Service. Immigrants who were caught not carrying the certificates were sentenced to hard labor and deportation, and bail was only an option if the accused were vouched for by a “credible white witness.” China’s government protested these discriminatory laws, but with anti-immigrant sentiment at fever pitch in the United States, there was little they could do. Chinese Americans were finally allowed to testify in court after the 1882 trial of laborer Yee Shun, though it would take decades for the immigration ban to be lifted. 

The Supreme Court upheld the Geary Act in Fong Yue Ting v. United States in 1893, and in 1902 Chinese immigration was made permanently illegal. The legislation proved very effective, and the Chinese population in the United States sharply declined. American experience with Chinese exclusion spurred later movements for immigration restriction against other "undesirable" groups such as Middle Easterners, Hindu and East Indians and the Japanese with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924. 

Chinese immigrants and their American-born families remained ineligible for citizenship until 1943 with the passage of the Magnuson Act. By then, the U.S. was embroiled in World War II and sought to improve relations with an important Asian ally. 

[zayaanhashistory]

Crédit Mobilier

The Crédit Mobilier scandal of 1872-1873 damaged the careers of several Gilded Age politicians. In one of the nation’s earliest political corruption scandals, a number of U.S. Congressmen, including the vice president, faced scrutiny and public outrage when it was revealed that Crédit Mobilier, a phony construction company set up to build the Union Pacific Railroad, had been financed with fraudulent bonds and used stocks to bribe government officials, resulting in hefty profits for its shareholders.   

The fake Crédit Mobilier of America company (its deceptive name was based on the influential French bank Crédit Mobilier, but was not connected to it), ran a fraud scheme from 1864-1867, in which executives of Union Pacific Railroad bilked the U.S. government out of upwards of $44 million, overcharging for railroad construction costs and expenses, bribing top officials and manipulating contracts. Led by Union Pacific’s Thomas C. Durant, the executives, who were also Crédit Mobilier investors, worked with U.S. Rep. Oakes Ames, a Republican from Massachusetts, to sell bargain shares to, and also bribe, a number of congressmen, including then Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax, who was elected vice president on a ticket with Ulysses S. Grant in 1868. The officials were offered low-price stock options and payouts in return for no federal oversight of the company along with the approval of subsidies and various rulings that would keep actual railroad costs lower than what they claimed. “We want more friends in this Congress, and if a man will look into the law (and it is difficult to get them to do it unless they have an interest to do so), he cannot help being convinced that we should not be interfered with,” Ames wrote in a letter to investor Henry S. Mccomb, according to the Washington Post. 

Acting on a tip from a disgruntled Mccomb, who had been denied stock by Ames, the New York Sun newspaper published an expose of the scandal on September 4, 1872. Naming the congressmen involved—and in the thick of sitting president Grant’s reelection campaign—the story included correspondence between Mccomb and Ames, and reported that the sham corporation was granted $72 million in railroad building contracts when only $53 million was actually spent. “The Credit Mobilier stock speculation shows that corruption does exist in high places,” Missouri newspaper the Lincoln County Herald wrote in December 1872, the Washington Post reports, adding that without vigilance by the public, “the first we know we’ll have been sold out to some giant railroad or other monied monopoly.” Public outrage and numerous news editorials led to two House committees and one in the Senate to investigate 13 congressmen in December 1872, with Ames, New York Democrat Rep. James Brooks and Republican Sen. James Patterson of New Hampshire, facing expulsion. “A charge of bribery of members is the gravest that can be made in a legislative body,” Speaker James Blaine of Maine, who appointed one of the investigative committees, said at the time. “It seems to me ... that this charge demands prompt, thorough, and impartial investigation.” 

In the end, Ames and Brooks were censured for using political influence for personal financial gain in 1873, while all the rest, including Colfax and then-Rep. James A. Garfield, who went on to be elected president in 1880, and Sen. Henry Wilson, who replaced Colfax as Grant’s vice-presidential running mate for reelection in 1872 in lieu of the scandal, were absolved of any charges. The Grant-Wilson ticket went on to win the presidential election in 1872, but the scandal tarnished the Republican party and resulted in widespread public distrust of the U.S. government. 

"Well, the wickedness of all of it is, not that these men were bribed or corruptly influenced, but that they betrayed the trust of the people, deceived their constituents, and be their evasions and falsehoods confessed the transaction to be disgraceful," the New York Tribune wrote on February 19, 1873. 

[zayaanhashistory]

Knights of Labor

The Knights of Labor was founded as a secret society of tailors in Philadelphia in 1869. It grew in size and prominence in the early days of the American labor movement from the mid-to-late-1800s and played a key role in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. 

  Uriah S. Stephens, a descendant of early Quaker settlers in New Jersey, founded the Knights of Labor on Thanksgiving Day 1869 in Philadelphia. When Stephens’ family lost everything during the economic panic and depression of the late 1830s, he became an indentured worker, obligated to work without pay in exchange for being trained as an apprentice mechanic. Stephens’ experiences as a worker-led him to believe that massive changes in society were necessary. It wasn’t just enough for a group of workers at one company to strike for higher wages, he believed. Instead, all wage-earners had to be brought together into a single organization, which could then fight for the interests of them all. When the local garment cutters union disbanded after failing to get better wages from local clothing companies, Stephens saw his chance. He called a meeting at his home, and six garment cutters showed up. Stephens explained to them his vision for an organization, “The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor,” whose members would be sworn to secrecy, and follow rituals comparable to Masonry. Over the decade that followed, though, the Knights expanded across the nation, attracting a range of workers in different industries, from blacksmiths and boilermakers to bricklayers and carpet weavers. The only occupations they excluded were bankers, lawyers, gamblers and saloon keepers.  

In 1879, Stephens stepped down, and Terrence V. Powderly, a machinist of Catholic Irish ancestry from Carbondale, Pennsylvania, was elected to take his place. Under Powderly’s leadership, in 1881 the Knights declared that women would be accepted as members and have equal rights in the organization as men did. At the time it was seen as a radical stance. At the height of the Knights’ influence in the mid-1880s, the organization claimed a membership of 700,000. At the apex of their power, the Knights achieved some major successes. In 1884, when the Union Pacific Railroad cut workers’ wages by 10 percent, the Knights quickly organized a strike. Led by organizer Joseph Buchanan, the Knights shut down every railroad shop from Omaha Nebraska to Ogden, Utah, as well as all the branch lines. As Matthew Hild recounts in Greenbackers, Knights of Labor and Populists, it only took four days for the railroad bosses to rescind the pay reduction. When the railroad tried the same move three months later, the Knights launched another strike and forced the company to concede defeat in just five days and restore workers’ pay. Shortly afterward, the Knights waged even bigger successful strikes in 1884-85 against the Wabash Railroad and Southwest railroad system controlled by financier Jay Gould. But it wasn’t just better wages that the Knights campaigned for. The organization championed broad-ranging social and economic reform, including an eight-hour workday, health and safety laws to protect workers, and a system that would provide for them if they were injured on the job—an early version of workers compensation insurance. 

The Knights also advocated an end to child and convict labor, equal pay for women, and laws requiring that employers participate in arbitration to resolve differences with workers. They also advocated nationalization of the railroads and telephone networks, and a graduated federal income tax (similar to the one eventually established in 1913). Even more radically, the Knights supported cooperatively-run workshops—a forerunner of today’s employee-owned companies—as well as cooperative stores. The Knights also opened up their organization to Black workers, and Black people eventually formed the majority of Knights membership in the South, according to Charles Postel’s book Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866-1896. But not every position that the organization took was progressive. The Knights saw Asian immigrants as competition that employers would use to keep down their wages. They supported the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Alien Contract Labor Law of 1885, which barred companies from bringing unskilled laborers into the United States to work under contract. Even after the laws were passed, the Knights’ members weren’t satisfied. In the Pacific Northwest, they attacked Chinese laborers and even burned down the barracks where Chinese coal miners lived. In 1886, the Knights suffered a couple of serious setbacks that started their decline. In March, the Knights mounted a second strike against Gould’s Southwest railroad system in Texas, led by former machinist named Martin Irons. The Great Southwest Strike, as it became known, soon spread to other states, and led to violent clashes between strikers and police. This time, though, Gould hung tough, and after public opinion started to shift against the Knights, they were forced to give up the strike in May. In the end, the strikers got none of what they wanted, and many were blacklisted by Gould’s railroad as well, according to Postel. “Across Gould’s railroad empire, the Knights of Labor was effectively destroyed as an organization,” he wrote.  

Around that time, the Knights also were struck another body blow when a labor demonstration in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, whose organizers included Knights of Labor members, morphed into a riot that took the lives of seven policemen and four workers. Police responded with crackdowns on labor groups in Chicago and elsewhere across the nation. Though the Knights weren’t responsible for the violence, they were blamed for it, and membership began to plummet. 

Though the Knights continued to exist as an organization for decades afterward, their numbers and clout declined, as workers began to defect to organizations such as the American Federation of Labor. The last remaining holdout in the once-mighty Knights finally disbanded in 1949. Nevertheless, many of the reforms advocated by the Knights, such as laws restricting child labor and the eight-hour workday, were eventually achieved. 

[zayaanhashistory]

Bleeding Kansas

Bleeding Kansas describes the period of repeated outbreaks of violent guerrilla warfare between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces following the creation of the new territory of Kansas in 1854. In all, some 55 people were killed between 1855 and 1859. The struggle intensified the ongoing debate over the future of slavery in the United States and served as a key precursor to the Civil War. 

By early 1854, with the United States expanding rapidly westward, Congress had begun debating a proposed bill to organize the former Louisiana Purchase lands then known as the Nebraska Territory. To get crucial southern votes for the bill, Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois proposed an amendment that effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise, which had outlawed the extension of slavery north of the 36º 30’ parallel (Missouri’s southern border) except in Missouri itself. Passed over fierce opposition in Congress and signed into law in 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska and gave each the right to decide whether or not to permit slavery when it joined the Union. Douglas believed that popular sovereignty, as this idea was known, would resolve the ongoing sectional debate between North and South over slavery’s extension into the territories. The Kansas-Nebraska Act divided Douglas’ Democratic Party and inspired the formation of the Republican Party, which opposed extending slavery into new territory. While Nebraska was so far north that it was virtually guaranteed to become a free state, Kansas bordered the slave state of Missouri. Over the next seven years, Kansas became a battleground over the future of slavery in the United States.  

In New England, a group of abolitionists formed the Emigrant Aid Company, which sent anti-slavery settlers to Kansas to ensure it would become a free territory. On the other side, thousands of pro-slavery Missourians flooded into the new territory to illegally vote in Kansas’ first territorial election in November 1854. Pro-slavery candidate John Whitfield easily defeated two Free Soil candidates to become the territory’s delegate to Congress, with only half the ballots cast by registered voters. In March 1855, when elections took place for the first territorial legislature, thousands of heavily armed “border ruffians” showed up in Kansas again. Through illegal votes and intimidation of anti-slavery voters, they ensured the election of a slate of pro-slavery legislators. Northerners and other anti-slavery settlers refused to accept this government and set up their own. Some of these Free Staters, known as “jayhawkers,” armed themselves in preparation for clashes with pro-slavery forces. As tensions increased within the territory, President Franklin Pierce recognized the pro-slavery legislature as the only legitimate government of Kansas.  Sporadic outbursts of violence occurred between pro-and anti-slavery forces in late 1855 and early 1856. In a sharp escalation of that violence, a pro-slavery group stormed the Free State stronghold of Lawrence on May 21, 1856, destroying printing presses, looting homes and stores and setting fire to a hotel. In response to the “Sack of Lawrence,” as it became known, the abolitionist John Brown marched through Pottawatomie Valley in Kansas territory on May 24 along with seven men, including four of his sons. Determined to confront pro-slavery settlers, the group dragged five men from their homes along Pottawatomie Creek and brutally killed them. Despite the visibility of the violence in Kansas, relatively few of the settlers in the new territory were deeply invested in the conflict over slavery. Many of those listed on the pro-slavery side were poor farmers who didn’t even enslave people, while few anti-slavery settlers were champions of Black rights. Both groups simply wanted land for themselves and their families, but were caught up in the ongoing battle that was tearing the nation apart. 

The upheaval in Kansas captured the attention of the entire nation and even spread to Congress. Two days before Brown’s attack in Pottawatomie, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with his cane on the Senate floor in retaliation for Sumner’s angry speech denouncing supporters of slavery in Kansas (including Brooks’ cousin, Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina). In July 1856, pro-slavery forces suppressed a meeting of the Free State government in Topeka, another anti-slavery stronghold. Brown again retaliated, leading his supporters in guerrilla attacks at Black Jack and Osawatomie. That fall, newly appointed territorial governor John Geary ordered armed settlers to disperse, and the violence waned. In late 1857, Free Staters boycotted the vote to send delegates to a constitutional convention at Lecompton, citing illegal pro-slavery influences on the election. Seeking to quickly resolve the issue of Kansas statehood, President James Buchanan pushed Congress to accept the Lecompton Constitution, despite overwhelming opposition from Douglas and others who saw it as an illegal violation of popular sovereignty. As a compromise, Congress sent the Lecompton Constitution back to Kansas for another vote in August 1858; this time Free Staters voted, and the constitution was rejected. 

Though attention on Kansas had waned after 1856, sporadic violence continued, including the murder of a group of Free Staters along the Marais des Cygnes River in May 1858 and the temporary return of Brown, who led a raid to liberate a group of enslaved people in the winter of 1858-59. Brown’s role in the violence in Kansas helped him raise money for his raid on Harpers Ferry in Virginia in 1859. The raid failed, and Brown was executed, becoming a martyr to the abolitionist cause. The unsettled situation in Kansas was still a matter of heated controversy during the 1858 Senate race in Illinois, when the former one-term congressman Abraham Lincoln, now a Republican, challenged Douglas for his Senate seat. Lincoln lost that race but his eloquent performance in their series of debates helped revive his political career and earn him a national reputation by 1860. 

Though Kansas adopted a free state constitution in a convention at Wyandotte in 1859, pro-slavery forces in the Senate refused to let the territory enter the Union as a free state. Only after the Confederate states seceded in the wake of Lincoln’s election in 1860 did Congress approve the Wyandotte Constitution. Kansas entered the Union in January 1861, barely three months before the Civil War began. 

[zayaanhashistory]

The Orangeburg Massacre

The Orangeburg Massacre occurred on the night of February 8, 1968, when a civil rights protest at South Carolina State University (SC State) turned deadly after highway patrolmen opened fire on about 200 unarmed black student protestors. Three young men were shot and killed, and 28 people were wounded. The event became known as the Orangeburg Massacre and is one of the most violent episodes of the civil rights movement, yet it remains one of the least recognized. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, segregation had officially ended in much of the South, but it hadn’t changed the attitudes of some of its white citizens. Many blacks were still persecuted and discriminated against by whites.

One such person was Harry Floyd, owner of All-Star Bowling Triangle bowling alley in Orangeburg, South Carolina. He claimed his bowling alley was exempt from segregation laws since it was private property. But Orangeburg’s black community was determined to change his mind. Orangeburg was the site of two mostly black universities: South Carolina State (SC State) and Claflin University. This put the town in the unique position of having more educated blacks than some other southern states. Many students became involved in the civil rights movement and were determined to turn the tide of racism within their small town and beyond. Local black leaders tried several times to convince Floyd to integrate his bowling alley. He refused time and again stating it would offend his long-time clientele.

On February 5, 1968, a small group of students from both SC State and Claflin went to All-Star Bowling Lanes to protest its whites-only policy. Floyd refused them entry and they left peacefully; word of Floyd’s refusal spread across both college campuses like wildfire. The next night a larger crowd returned to the bowling alley and were met by police who threatened to blast them with water from firehoses. The students fought back by taunting them and lighting matches. A plate glass window was broken, and the police began beating students — male and female alike — with Billy clubs. Protestor Emma McCain later recalled, “I remember feeling the sense of pain when they were beating me. It was almost like they were trying to teach me a lesson or something. We were all unarmed.” By night’s end, fifteen students had been arrested and at least ten students and one police officer were treated for injuries. Again, word spread quickly about the bowling alley unrest, enraging students and escalating tensions in Orangeburg. Expecting looting and violence, some store owners armed themselves.

Governor Robert McNair, supposedly one of the more moderate governors of the Deep South, insisted “Black Power” leaders were inciting the student unrest and called in the National Guard, tanks and all, to intimidate the students and squelch the anticipated violence. The student protestors were joined by Cleveland Sellers, a native South Carolinian and civil rights activist. After graduating from Howard University in 1967, Sellers had returned to South Carolina with the goal of teaching students about black history. His activism, however, put him on the government’s radar and earned him a reputation as a “black militant.”

By Thursday, February 8, Sellers and hundreds of students had gathered on SC State’s campus to protest racial segregation at the bowling alley and other privately-owned establishments. National Guard troops and a heavy law enforcement presence commanded by Chief Pete Strom were also there under orders to keep the protestors on campus and prevent them from inciting a riot. Many of the police officers were armed with shotguns and buckshot. The students started a large bonfire in front of the campus entrance. They taunted law enforcement and threw rocks and other objects at them. Eventually, Chief Strom ordered the fire be put out. As firefighters extinguished the fire, a police officer was struck with a heavy wooden banister. Unsure of what was happening and claiming to have heard gunshots, some police raised their guns and opened fire in the darkness upon the protestors for several seconds. Utter chaos and terror ensued as students scrambled to escape. Three students were shot and killed by the police: Freshman Sammy Hammond was shot in the back; 17-year-old high school student Delano Middleton, whose mother worked at SC State was shot seven times; and 18-year-old Henry Smith was shot three times.

Sellers was taken into custody at the hospital and charged with inciting a riot. Chief Strom claimed Sellers took advantage of America’s fear of black power and fired-up students who would never have staged resistance on their own. Governor McNair also blamed the incident on black power agitators. The Orangeburg Massacre happened within days of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War and, as a result, was largely ignored by the press. In addition, some press coverage was incorrect. Out of the at least 70 armed police officers on the scene of the Orangeburg Massacre, just nine were charged with shooting at the protestors. The federal government brought them to trial for imposing summary punishment without due process of law even though U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark later said the officers had lost their self-control and “committed murder.” At the trial, the officers testified they’d acted in self-defense. Despite no solid evidence to support their claims, all the men were acquitted. One of the officers, Corporal Joseph Lanier, Jr., would say later, “I was just a soldier. I was a person that was there reacting to what my leaders had told me to do.” He also said, “We tried so hard for it not to happen. But it did happen. And for others to think that we were wrong in the way we went about it…you would’ve had to have been in our shoes.”

Sellers wasn’t so lucky: He was brought to trial in September 1970, but the state couldn’t prove he’d incited a riot at SC State on the night of February 8. The judge, however, allowed the state to charge him with rioting at the bowling alley instead and he was convicted and sentenced to one year of hard labor. He was released after seven months. During his incarceration he wrote his autobiography, The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC. Over two decades later, he was officially pardoned. After Sellers’s conviction, the state of South Carolina effectively closed the book on the Orangeburg Massacre, despite no one being held accountable for the students killed and injured that night.

The lack of justice and conflicting accounts of what had happened inflamed the racial divide between black and white residents of Orangeburg. Even many historians have largely left the incident out of civil rights articles and educational textbooks. Survivors of the Orangeburg Massacre were determined the deaths of Hammond, Middleton and Smith would not be in vain. In 1999, many joined with white Orangeburg residents and called for healing in the community. In 2003, Governor Mark Sanford offered a written apology for the massacre. In 2006, Cleveland Sellers’s son Bakari was elected to the South Carolina Legislature. Speaking with emotion at a SC State memorial service to honor those lost in the massacre, he said, “We join here today in our own memorial to remember three dead and 27 injured in yet another massacre that marked yet another people’s struggle against oppression. These men who died here were not martyrs to a dream but soldiers to a cause.”

Despite official government apologies, most survivors of the Orangeburg Massacre feel South Carolina continues to suppress knowledge of what really happened. More than fifty years later, they’re still haunted by the carnage that took place and vow to continue to honor the victims and work to bring the truth to light to prevent a repeat of the tragedy.

[zayaanhashistory]

The 1967 Detroit Riots

The 1967 Detroit Riots were among the most violent and destructive riots in U.S. history. By the time the bloodshed, burning and looting ended after five days, 43 people were dead, 342 injured, nearly 1,400 buildings had been burned and some 7,000 National Guard and U.S. Army troops had been called into service.

In the sweltering summer of 1967, Detroit’s predominantly African American neighborhood of Virginia Park was a simmering cauldron of racial tension. About 60,000 low-income residents were crammed into the neighborhood’s 460 acres, living mostly in small, sub-divided apartments. The Detroit Police Department, which had only about 50 African American officers at the time, was viewed as a white occupying army. Accusations of racial profiling and police brutality were commonplace among Detroit’s Black residents. The only other whites in Virginia Park commuted in from the suburbs to run the businesses on 12th Street, then commuted home to affluent enclaves outside Detroit. The entire city was in a state of economic and social strife: As the Motor City’s famed automobile industry shed jobs and moved out of the city center, freeways and suburban amenities beckoned middle-class residents away, which further gutted Detroit’s vitality and left behind vacant storefronts, widespread unemployment and impoverished despair. A similar scenario played out in metropolitan areas across America, where “white flight” reduced the tax base in formerly prosperous cities, causing urban blight, poverty and racial discord. In mid-July, 1967, the city of Newark, New Jersey, erupted in violence as Black residents battled police following the beating of a Black taxi driver, leaving 26 people dead.

At night, 12th Street in Detroit was a hotspot of inner-city nightlife, both legal and illegal. At the corner of 12th St. and Clairmont, William Scott operated a “blind pig” (an illegal after-hours club) on weekends out of the office of the United Community League for Civic Action, a civil rights group. The police vice squad often raided establishments like this on 12th St., and at 3:35 a.m. on Sunday morning, July 23, they moved against Scott’s club. On that warm, humid night, the establishment was hosting a party for several veterans, including two servicemen recently returned from the Vietnam War, and the bar’s patrons were reluctant to leave the air-conditioned club. Out in the street, a crowd began to gather as police waited for vehicles to take the 85 patrons away. An hour passed before the last person was taken away, and by then about 200 onlookers lined the street. A bottle crashed into the street. The remaining police ignored it, but then more bottles were thrown, including one through the window of a patrol car. The police fled as a small riot erupted. Within an hour, thousands of people had spilled out onto the street from nearby buildings. Looting began on 12th Street, and closed shops and businesses were ransacked. Around 6:30 a.m., the first fire broke out, and soon much of the street was ablaze. By midmorning, every policeman and fireman in Detroit was called to duty. On 12th Street, officers fought to control the unruly mob. Firemen were attacked as they tried to battle the flames.

Detroit Mayor Jerome P. Cavanaugh asked Michigan Governor George Romney to send in the state police, but these 300 additional officers could not keep the riot from spreading to a 100-block area around Virginia Park. The National Guard was called in shortly after but didn’t arrive until evening. By the end of Sunday, more than 1,000 people were arrested, but the riot kept spreading and intensifying. Five people had died by Sunday night. On Monday, the rioting continued and 16 people were killed, most by police or guardsmen. Snipers reportedly fired at firemen, and fire hoses were cut. Governor Romney asked President Lyndon B. Johnson to send in U.S. troops. Nearly 2,000 army paratroopers arrived on Tuesday and began patrolling the streets of Detroit in tanks and armored carriers. Ten more people died that day, and 12 more on Wednesday. On Thursday, July 27, order was finally restored. More than 7,000 people were arrested during the four days of rioting. A total of 43 people were killed. Some 1,700 stores were looted and nearly 1,400 buildings burned, causing roughly $50 million in property damage. Some 5,000 people were left homeless.

The so-called 12th Street Riot was considered one of the worst riots in U.S. history, occurring during a period of fever-pitch racial strife and numerous race riots across America. In the aftermath of the Newark and Detroit riots, President Johnson appointed a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, often known as the Kerner Commission after its chair, Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois. In February, 1968, seven months after the Detroit Riots had ended, the commission released its 426-page report. The Kerner Commission identified more than 150 riots or major disorders between 1965 and 1968. In 1967 alone, 83 people were killed and 1,800 were injured — the majority of them African Americans — and property valued at more than $100 million was damaged, looted or destroyed. Ominously, the report declared that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one Black, one white — separate and unequal. Reaction to last summer’s disorders has quickened the movement and deepened the division. Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American.”

However, the authors also found cause for hope: “This deepening racial division is not inevitable. The movement apart can be reversed.” Additionally, the report stated that “What the rioters appeared to be seeking was fuller participation in the social order and the material benefits enjoyed by the majority of American citizens. Rather than rejecting the American system, they were anxious to obtain a place for themselves in it.”