The Battle of Bamber Bridge

June 1943 marked almost five years of World War II for Europe, and almost two years of World War II for the United States. While June 1943 wasn't completely devoid of action, there was an awful lot happening on the home front. Regard:

Nile Kinnick - the University of Iowa quarterback/halfback/punt returner who was the 1939 Heisman winner, consensus 1st Team All-American, and AP Male Athlete of the Year (beating out Joe DiMaggio, Byron Nelson, and Joe Louis) - who had passed up an NFL career, left law school after a year to join the Naval Air Reserve. He reported for duty three days before the attack on Pearl Harbor and was killed in a routine training mission on June 2, 1943 off the coast of Venezuela. The University of Iowa still plays their home football games at Kinnick Stadium.

In California on June 3 the Zoot Suit Riots began, in which 50 servicemen from the Los Angeles Naval Reserve Armory went out looking for young Hispanic or Black kids wearing Zoot Suits, beat them up, and took their suits. On June 6, a young college student from Ohio named Paul Newman was called up for active duty. On June 14 - Flag Day - the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, that schools could not threaten students and teachers with expulsion or punishment if they did not salute the flag. 

The next day - June 15, 1943 - in Beaumont, Texas 4000 white workers at the Pennsylvania Shipyards Company began looting homes, businesses, and automobiles in Beaumont's Black neighborhoods. On June 20 a fistfight at Belle Island Park in Detroit set off three days of riots that resulted in 34 deaths (of which 25 were Black, and 17 of those fatalities at the hands of the police) and over 700 injuries. And this brings us to the Battle of Bamber Bridge - a notable battle as it featured Black American soldiers fighting...white American soldiers.

Bamber Bridge - situated southeast of Preston on England's northeast coast - was the home of Air Force Station 569, which also included the 1511th Quartermaster Truck Unit whose role as a logistics unit was to provide materials to other Air Force bases in Lancashire. The United States military was segregated, and had been since the Militia Acts of 1792 required "every free, able-bodied, white male citizen" between the ages of 18 and 45 to join the militia. Ever since, Black soldiers were allowed to serve in the military albeit in segregated units. 

The 1511th Quartermaster Truck Unit were almost entirely comprised of Black soldiers, though all but one of their officers were white, and mostly incompetent (a defined military strategy, it seems). The all-white 234th US Military Police Unit was stationed on the north side of town, and there had been some skirmishes between the two. George Orwell would write in December 1943:

Even if you steer clear of Piccadilly with its seething swarms of drunks and whores, it is difficult to go anywhere in London without having the feeling that Britain is now Occupied Territory. The general consensus of opinion seems to be that the only American soldiers with decent manners are the Negroes.

According to Anthony Burgess who, after the War, would go on to write "A Clockwork Orange," when one Military Police officer demanded that a local pub owner segregate his bar, all three pubs in Bamber Bridge responded by placing "Blacks Only" on the doors of their establishments, and served the Black troops before their white counterparts. It wasn't lost on the Black American soldiers how differently they were treated overseas in England compared to back home in the USA, or even by the leadership of the military for which they served. 

On the night of June 24, 1943 some of the Black soldiers were drinking with the locals at Ye Olde Hob Inn, in Bamber Bridge. The MPs had orders to arrest any soldier was out of camp without a pass, or was improperly dressed, or were disorderly. It was after 10pm, closing time, and a bartender had just refused a drink to some of the troops. Corporal Roy A. Windsor and PFC Ralph F. Ridgeway went to Ye Olde Hob and found Private Eugene Nunn dressed in a field jacket, not his standard Class A Uniform. Windsor and Ridgeway asked him to step outside.

Nunn allegedly refused, and a crowd gathered around with many of the British patrons (including members of the British Auxiliary Territorial Service) supporting the Black troops. A white British soldier confronted the two MPs, asking, "Why do you want to arrest them? They're not doing anything or bothering anybody." Private Lynn Adams, of the 1511th, advanced towards the MPs with a bottle in his hand, Corporal Windsor drew his gun. The 1511th's Sgt. William Byrd was able to defuse the situation and get the MPs to leave, upon which Adams threw his bottle at the MP's jeep. Windsor and Ridgeway returned to their base to get reinforcements and go back to the pub to arrest the Black soldiers. 

As the members of the 1511th walked back to base, the group of MPs caught up with them and a fight broke out, Private Nunn took a swing at an MP, and MP Carson W. Bozman shot Private Adams in the neck (he survived). The other members of the 1511th scampered back to their base and, now armed with rifles and a machine gun truck, went to the MP camp just after midnight to confront the MPs, both sides throwing bottles and cobblestones, and firing off round after round in the darkness. Another Black soldier was shot in order to prevent him from throwing a cobblestone. 

By 4am it was over. One Black soldier - Private William Crossland - was dead, shot in the back. Five soldiers had been shot. Another had bruises. Two MPs had a broken nose and a broken jaw, respectively. 

Two trials took place shortly after the Battle of Bamber Bridge, resulting in 27 of 32 Black soldiers being found guilty of charges varying from assault to riot to mutiny. The first of these trials was held at an American base near Chorley, south of Bamber Bridge. Four soldiers involved in the first brawl at the pub were charged "with various" offenses and were found guilty. All four received between 2.5 and four years of hard labor and dishonorably discharged, though the 2.5-year sentence was overturned on appeal.

The second trial was held at Eighth Army Air Force HQ in London. 35 soldiers stood trial on charges of mutiny, seizing arms, rioting, firing upon officers and MPs, ignoring orders, and failing to disperse. Seven of those were found Not Guilty. The remaining 28 were sentenced to prison for anywhere from three months to fifteen years. The presiding officer over the court-martial "made an immediate plea for clemency," arguing that discipline at the camp was suspect at best, and poor leadership from the officers led to the fight. All of the sentences were reduced. A year later 15 of the men were restored to active duty and six others had their sentences cut to one year. It's unknown if any of the MPs were court-martialed.

                                                                   Following the Court-Martial for crimes during the Battle of Bamber Bridge (credit)

However the incident did force the US military to address racial inequality. The Commander of the Eighth Air Force, Gen. Ira Eaker, wrote that "90% of the trouble...was the fault of the whites," and directed his staff officers to make necessary changes in which the Black units were reorganized, 75 mostly white officers were removed, there were joint white and Black MP patrols, and a forum to air justifiable grievances was created. It was a start, but there were 44 incidents of violence between white and Black American troops in England between November 1943 and February 1944.

Retired Air Force officer Alan M. Osur wrote, "In Great Britain, Blacks performed efficiently because military leaders took their human needs into consideration." The United States military would not be integrated until Truman issued Executive Order 9981 in 1948. 

The Suffragette Who Voted Against Two World Wars

She was a representative - the first female representative in American history - from a state that wasn't even a state when she was born just outside of Missoula, in the Montana Territory, in 1880. Jeanette Rankin was born to John - a Canadian rancher/builder - and Olive, who had moved herself 3/4 of the way across the country to teach school in Montana before marrying John and settling in as a housewife to take care of their soon-to-be seven children, of which Jeanette was the oldest. Montana's statehood, and entry into the Union, was nine years away when Jeanette was born.

In an effort to make sure that the state university was located in Missoula, the city leaders made a deal with Helena - 100 miles to its east - that Missoula would back Helena's push to be the state capital (opposing Anaconda, 100 miles to Missoula's southeast) in exchange for Helena's backing on the university issue. It worked. Montana State University - now the University of Montana - opened its doors in 1895. Jeanette graduated with a degree in biology seven years later. 

From there Jeanette Rankin criss-crossed the country. When John Rankin passed away in 1904, Jeanette visited an uncle in California and began volunteering at the Telegraph Hill Settlement House, the first of its kind in San Francisco, but modeled after Jane Addams' groundbreaking Hull House in Chicago, which made an effort to assist immigrants living in the United States. San Francisco had a large number of immigrants in need of help (thanks, in part, to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882), and so the settlement house formula of providing education services to children as well as health services for their families was followed by Telegraph Hill. Eventually they expanded to include a kitchen, garden, gymnasium, library, and an operating room. Telegraph Hill would launch the first school nurse program on the west coast. 

Armed with an interest in social work, Jeanette graduated from - the now-Columbia University School of Social Work in 1909. Jeanette again traversed the country, this time to Spokane, Washington to help needy children, and found herself as a student volunteer on a women's suffrage campaign. Washington State would end up becoming the fifth state to allow women to vote, and Rankin ended up working as a field secretary for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), whose previous presidents included Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Carrie Chapman Catt. 

NAWSA's strategy was hard but simple: getting enough states to give women the right to vote would force the federal government to act. In late 1910, Rankin found that her home state of Montana was about to introduce a women's suffrage resolution. The resolution was a hoax in some capacity, however, but Rankin was able to convince a state legislator to introduce the resolution, anyway. In February 1911 Rankin testified in support of women's suffrage, becoming the first woman to address the Montana legislature in the process. Her testimony likely swung the majority of the Montana House of Representatives to support women's suffrage, which the state adopted in 1914. 

Rankin spent much of the next two years organizing support through NAWSA where it was most needed, visiting 15 states from Delaware to Florida. She organized immigrant workers in Manhattan's Garment District after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and ultimately helped win basic workplace safety regulations. With plenty of political experience came an opportunity: the women's suffrage brought women the right to hold office.

In 1916, when over 300 women were running for office in Kansas alone, Rankin declared her candidacy for one of Montana's two congressional seats. You may be asking yourself, "Self, how could she do this?" And I simply respond, "Women had the right to vote in Montana, which means women had the right to hold office." 

Rankin's campaign was managed by her brother Wellington, a Harvard grad and Rhodes Scholar who settled into public life as a lawyer who specialized in industrial accident cases, a niche that brought him into conflict with many of the state's largest corporations, like the Anaconda Copper Company, the largest employer in the state. Oh, the Anaconda Copper Company just so happened to own most of the state's newspapers, and completely ignored Rankin's campaign. It didn't work.

Rankin, who campaigned on many popular Progressive Party issues: nationwide suffrage, child welfare laws, and Prohibition, was the first woman to hold national office, the first female member of Congress. She would say in a statement after her election was official:

"I am deeply conscious of the responsibility, and it is wonderful to have the opportunity to be the first woman to sit in Congress. I will not only represent the women of Montana, but also the women of the country, and I have plenty of work cut out for me."

The 19th Amendment was still over two years away from being introduced.

Rankin's first day in office was April 2, 1917 and the House of Representatives paused for "sustained applause" when Rankin was sworn in. The day began, however, with a breakfast for Rankin hosted by both NAWSA and it's more militant faction, the National Women's Party led by Alice Paul - a rare show of unity between the two groups.

President Woodrow Wilson convened Congress eight months early to consider the United States' response to Germany's resumption of Unrestricted Submarine Warfare. However, just before the House adjourned for the afternoon, Rankin introduced the Susan B. Anthony amendment, guaranteeing women's suffrage in the Constitution. Her historic first day brought another first: the first woman to call for a constitutional amendment from the floor of Congress.

But of course this wasn't why Wilson brought Congress back. Later in the evening President Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany to "make the world safe for democracy." Rankin was in a bind: she needed support for the suffrage movement, but voting against war - even as a lifelong pacifist - might cause support for suffrage to suffer. 

Ultimately, Rankin and 49 other congressmen - including House Majority Leader Claude Kitchin (D-NC) and Extremely Pro-Military congressman Albert Britten (R-IL) voted against war, as well. 49 of the 56 No War votes in the House and Senate, however, were from Midwestern or Western states, so Rankin's vote was in line with the geography. But 373 representatives voted in favor (after the Senate passed the war resolution 82-6 two days earlier), and so with Wilson's signature, the United States went to war against the German Empire. NAWSA distanced themselves from Rankin, issuing a statement that read, "Miss Rankin was not voting [on war] for the suffragists of the nation - she represents Montana." The Helena Independent (please do remember how many of Montana's newspapers were mouthpieces for the Anaconda Company) wrote that Rankin was "a dagger in the hands of the German propagandists, a dupe of the Kaiser, a member of the Hun army in the United States, and a crying schoolgirl."

In 1918 Rankin opened debate on the House floor regarding what would eventually become the 19th Amendment - giving women the right to vote - by addressing her colleagues, "How shall we answer their challenge, gentlemen? How shall we explain to them the meaning of democracy if the same Congress that voted for war to make the world safe for democracy refuses to give them this small measure of democracy to the women of our country?" That bill failed, but Rankin noted that she was "the only woman who ever voted to give women the right to vote."

And here's what's important about the 19th Amendment. The 19th Amendment didn't really, if we're picking nits, give women the right to vote. Women already had the right to vote in Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, obviously Montana, Nebraska, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, and Washington. That's 20 of the 48 states. What the 19th Amendment did do was tell the other 28 states they could not deny women the right to vote.

Rankin was busy supporting miners' rights back home in Montana (where a large amount of Montana's natural resources benefitted the War effort) and earning the already-established hatred of the Anaconda Copper Company. She also personally investigated poor treatment of female workers at the U.S. Treasury Department, which resulted in the immediate institution of an eight-hour work day.

Redistricting shenanigans in Montana led Rankin to not run for re-election in the House, and instead focus on a bid in the Senate. However, the extremely powerful Nonpartisan League, who opposed Big Banks and corporations, encouraged its members to vote in the Democratic primary, not the Republican one - a massive blow to Rankin's chances, which saw her lose the Republican primary by fewer than 2,000 votes.

After traveling the world and the United States for much of the 1920s, Rankin moved to northeast Georgia where she designed a house with no electricity, running water, or telephone. Again, a lifelong pacifist, Rankin responded to the unfolding events in Europe by becoming a lobbyist for the National Council for the Prevention of War. She publicized Senator Nye's (R-ND) investigation into arms manufacturers and their role in bringing America into World War 1. Rankin resigned after the Great Depression took its toll on the NCPW's finances, as well as her increasing opposition to FDR's stance on the likelihood of joining World War 2. 

The looming crisis in Europe sent Rankin back home to Montana, where she ran against Jacob Thorkelson, a first-term Norwegian-born doctor who was a noted fascist and anti-Semite that would read selections from Sir Oswald Mosley into the Congressional Record. Mosley, a World War 1 veteran, was elected to Parliament at 22 years old and would eventually come to really appreciate the efforts of Benito Mussolini in Italy, and establish the British Union of Fascists. Thorkelson was A Problem that Rankin easily handled in the Republican primary.

Facing long-time Montana politician Jerry Joseph O'Connell in 1940, Rankin won endorsements from progressives such as Robert LaFollette and Fiorello LaGuardia. Rankin won the election with 54% of the vote - almost 25 years after her first election to Congress. What to do about Europe was the main topic House floor. When the Lend-Lease Bill (allowing the United States to let Britain and France borrow or rent war materials to fight Germany) was up for debate in February 1941 - ten months prior to Pearl Harbor - Rankin spoke from the floor and asked, "If Britain needs our material today, will she later need our men?" Her amendment to require congressional approval before sending American troops abroad failed. 

On December 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy - Rankin was on her way to Detroit when she learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and arrived in Washington on the morning of December 8 preparing to oppose American action in World War 2. When Roosevelt asked a Joint Session of Congress for a declaration of war on Japan, debate opened in the House of Representatives. 

Rankin "repeatedly sought recognition," but with her reputation going before her, Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn - still the longest-serving Speaker of the House - refused to let her speak. Other representatives asked her to either vote for war or to not vote at all, in order to maintain solidarity. "A chorus of hisses and boos" rained down on Rankin as she stated from the floor, "As a woman I can't go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else." She voted no. The resolution to declare war on Japan passed 388-1. 

She faced immediate condemnation. Police officers had to escort Rankin to her office. Rankin's former campaign manager brother Wellington told her over the phone, "Montana is 110 percent against you."  Two days later, when Congress voted to declare war on Germany and Italy, Rankin simply voted "Present." The anger and indignation towards Rankin quickly turned to universal indifference. She focused on free speech issues and wartime fraud, and did not run for re-election in 1942.

The rest of her life was spent between Montana and Georgia, with trips to India - inspired by Gandhi. She led yet another protest against war - Rankin was nothing if not consistent - in Washington DC in 1968 against the Vietnam War, delivering a peace petition to the Speaker of the House. Two years later, Rankin was given a reception and a dinner in honor of her 90th birthday, and in 1972 Rankin was named the "World's Most Outstanding Feminist" by the National Organization for Women. Jeanette Rankin passed away in 1973, pondering yet another run for the House of Representatives. The year prior to her passing, a reporter asked if she would live her life all over again, to which she replied, yes "but this time I'd be nastier."

Mr. Taulbee and Mr. Kincaid

William P. Taulbee was born in Morgan County, Kentucky – about 80 miles east of Lexington up in the mountains – on October 22, 1851. Tutored by his father while also attending “public school” as it existed in rural Kentucky in the 1850s, Taulbee was ordained for the ministry in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. John Wesley, who founded Methodism, hated the idea of slavery. When the Methodist Episcopal Church [MEC] met in Baltimore in December 1784, they officially opposed slavery, carrying on Wesley’s wishes.

That said, Methodists and Baptists softened their stance on slavery in the 19^th century in an effort to appeal to Southern parishioners, saying that the Bible did, in fact, acknowledge the role of slavery in society, but that slaveowners should treat their slaves better. In 1840 James Osgood Andrew, a Methodist bishop in Oxford, Georgia bought a slave. Later that year the MEC chose not to expel Bishop Andrew from its ranks. In 1844 Andrew’s new bride owned an enslaved person inherited from her mother. Now Bishop Andrew owned two enslaved people, drawing criticism from the northern members of the MEC. This time, however, the General Conference decided to suspend the Bishop until he gave up the enslaved persons living with him. Mirroring a debate that was swirling around the country in general in the mid-19^th century, Southern delegates weren’t so sure that the General Conference had the authority to discipline bishops in such a manner. They split, and formed the MEC South [MEC, S]. This was the version of the denomination in which William Taulbee was raised, and preached, earning him the nickname of the “Mountain Orator.”

After shoveling coal and teaching school, Taulbee studied law, winning the clerk seat in the Magoffin County Court in 1878, just a little bit further southeast than Morgan County, moonlighting as a preacher in the MEC,S. Re-elected as county clerk in 1882, Taulbee ran as a Democrat and won a seat in the House of Representatives in 1884 and was re-elected again in 1886. Taulbee’s political future was all but secured. But whispers and rumors soon surrounded him. As Robert S. Pohl noted, the Catlettsburg (KY) Democrat predicted, “We will now say in print what we have predicted to various gentlemen in private, that Pres. Taulbee, should he live, will be governor of Kentucky inside of ten years.” Referring to him as “Pres” is notable, as is the “should he live” qualifier. Why would his life be cut short at such a young age? The Maysfield (KY) Daily Bulletin noted that a recent speech of Taulbee’s had been attended by a crowd “largely composed of ladies.”

Taulbee’s personal life became of note to a journalist with the Louisville Times named Charles Kincaid. Kincaid, who like Taulbee had studied law, had been writing articles saying that Taulbee was personally profiting from his service in Congress. But Kincaid dropped a bomb in December 1887 when he accused the “Silver-Tongued Taulbee” of being “caught in a most compromising position” in the top-floor model room at the Patent Office” with a “Brown-Haired Miss Dodge.” Taulbee grew bolder, according to Kincaid, “Not content with caressing in this place, the Congressman was seen by the old watchman to kiss his sweetheart on the stairway one day: a parting salute, as it were. It smacked like a cow pulling her hoof out of the mud.”

Miss Laura Louisa Dodge was “a little beauty,” Kincaid wrote, “bright as a sunbeam and saucy as a bowl of jelly. She is petite of figure, but plump as a partridge,” with “cheeks like peaches, lips like rosebuds tipped with dew.” And Taulbee got Miss Dodge appointed to her position in the Patent Office, on her appointment she said she was from Kentucky. She wasn’t – she was from Massachusetts and lived with her parents. She also wasn’t yet 18 years old, just a little older than Taulbee’s marriage to Lou Emma Oney Taulbee, with whom they had five children. Laura Dodge moved to the Pension Office, eliminating any conflict with the Patent Office. Kincaid called for Taulbee’s removal, but the story did not find its way into the Washington Post.

Despite buying a house in Washington, Taulbee did not run for re-election in 1888 and went into lobbying, as one does when your political career is basically over. Taulbee selected his successor to run as a Democrat for his seat, but he – as did most of the Democratic Party in 1888 – lost.

Taulbee endured yet another black eye in 1889. The House of Representatives had its own bank, known creatively as the House Bank. Their salaries would get deposited into an account for each representative, who could then write a check to draw against their salary. Over time the House Bank expanded its financial services to include check cashing, wire transfers, deposits from other representatives, and also allowed “check-cashing and other services for House aides and journalists.” Of course some representatives overdrew their accounts, but did so without a penalty though they weren’t allowed to write checks against future salary deposits.

Anyhow, in 1889 a House Bank cashier deliciously named Craven Silcott took off with $75,000 (over $2.2 million today) of deposits and also with a French-Canadian prostitute named Herminie Thiebault but whose street name was Lulu Barrett. They were briefly spotted at Thiebault’s sister’s house in Montreal but escaped again, never to be found again. Members of the House of Representatives who were not affected by Silcott’s theft rejected the idea of reimbursing those affected, but when the Court of Claims reimbursed one member, Congress paid everybody back. Taulbee was one of the ones affected, though because he wasn’t a current member of the House of Representatives, it was uncertain whether or not he would be reimbursed.

Where Taulbee was, well, tall, Kincaid was the exact opposite – a foot shorter than Taulbee, barely 100 pounds, and quite a sickly man. As Taulbee was a Washington lobbyist from Kentucky, and Kincaid was the Washington correspondent for the Louisville Times, they often met, with Taulbee taking pleasure in pulling Kincaid’s nose or ears. Extremely disrespectful, to be honest. Kentucky State Historian James Klotter noted that this was a deliberate disrespect – Taulbee didn’t view Kincaid as someone worth fighting. He occasionally mentioned that he might kill Kincaid.

On the morning of February 28, 1890, tensions between the two Kentuckians had reached a boiling point. The House was due to go into session at 11:30am and the lobbyist and the journalist met each other – coincidentally, apparently – outside the chamber doors. The two exchanged insults, Taulbee allegedly wanted to talk with Kincaid, which Kincaid didn’t want to do. Taulbee, most first-hand accounts agree (again, according to Pohl), said something along the lines of “I wish to see you.” Kincaid said he couldn’t, since he was waiting for a gentleman,” which, you gotta hand it to him, is a pretty good burn.

Taulbee grabbed Kincaid by the lapel of his jacket, possibly also tweaking Kincaid’s nose again. This time the Washington Post did pick up on a Taulbee story. Kincaid, again the physical inferior between the two, said “I am in no condition for a physical contest with you – I am a small man, and not armed.” Taulbee replied, “Then you had better be armed.” Kincaid went home.

At 1:30pm Taulbee was coming down the stairs outside the House chamber with a friend to go to lunch. The stairs were in a Y shape – two staircases from the second floor to the landing, and a single staircase to the first floor. As Taulbee descended a voice from the other staircase said, “Can you see me now?” Taulbee turned, the friend took off. Kincaid had gone home to get his pistol, and shot Taulbee in the face.

Taulbee stumbled around, making his way a few steps below, before some of his friends caught him and eventually took Taublee to nearby Providence Hospital. As Capitol Police officers approached Kincaid, he simply said, “I did it – I am the man who did the shooting.” They turned him over to the Metropolitan Police Department.

Initially it was thought that, though Kincaid’s bullet struck Taulbee below the eye and settled in the back of his skull, it was a non-fatal wound. Kincaid was informed that, though he would be set free with a $2,000 bond, he could be rearrested if Taulbee died. Taulbee seemed to be doing okay, he told his brother what happened: yeah, he grabbed Kincaid; yeah, he probably pulled his ear; but under no circumstances did he pull Kincaid’s nose. On March 4 – four days after the shooting – Dr. John W. Bayne went home for the night, apparently happy with Taulbee’s condition enough to go home and sleep.

Still, doctors could not locate the bullet. On March 5 it was assumed that Taulbee would die, which he did early on the morning of March 11. The bullet had formed an abscess between Taulbee’s brain and skull, paralyzing him until he died.

Kincaid was rearrested. He asked to sleep another hour, this request was denied, though the stressed-out Kincaid was allowed to have his own cell. On March 15 – four days after Taulbee’s death and the day after his funeral – Kincaid, unable to stand on his own, was indicted by a grand jury. Over a month later, he was able to post the $20,000 bail and walked out, awaiting trial.

Kincaid’s defense team was an odd one, led by Indiana Senator Daniel Voorhees. Voorhees was a devout Democrat – from the same party as Taulbee, his neighbor to the south. That said, Voorhess was well-liked by Republican members from across the branches of government, noted for his kind-heartedness and amiability…on a personal level, if not a political one.

The trial – delayed for almost a year to allow Congress time to finish its business and recess - centered around Taulbee’s bullying of Kincaid, noting the number of times Taulbee threw Kincaid across a hallway, or against an iron railing; or when riding an elevator together, Taulbee tried to crush Kincaid’s toes with the heel of his boot. Eight current and former congressmen testified on Kincaid’s behalf. Kincaid eventually took the stand in his own defense, testifying under oath that the 11:30am “meeting” between he and Taulbee ended with Taulbee’s threat, “You damned little coward and monkey, now go and arm yourself.”

The jury was adjourned for deliberations on April 8, 1891. That evening they returned a not-guilty verdict for the reasons of self-defense. Kincaid went back to Kentucky to be a reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer, and died 15 years later at the age of 51, three years after Taulbee’s widow passed away, buried next to her husband. Miss Dodge married a Pension Office official named William Paul ten years after Taulbee’s death. When Paul died in 1927 she married attorney Tracy L. Jeffords, a former assistant U.S. attorney. Jeffords died in 1949, his obituary noting his devotion as a Sunday School teacher at the Francis Asbury Methodist Church. His widow, Laura Louisa Dodge Paul Jeffords, passed away at the age of 89, on December 25, 1959.

 

Taulbee's bloodstains can still be seen in the Capitol building.

The Orteig Prize

The former bar porter had come a long way since emigrating to the United States as a 12-year old from southwest France with 13 francs in his pocket. In 1882, Raymond Orteig joined an uncle living in Manhattan and found a job working at a bar in Wengler's Restaurant on William Street. 

Orteig worked his way up through the hospitality ranks, becoming a waiter before joining Jean-Baptiste Martin as the maître d' at the Martin Hotel at 9th Street and University Place, in Greenwich Village. Martin, who had run a hotel in Panama, initially named his hotel the "Hotel de Panama" but, as this was around the same time as the failed French attempt to build the Panama Canal, the Hotel de Panama reminded potential clients of the Canal, who "associated it with fever and Spaniards, and neither were popular." Martin changed the name of the hotel in 1886 and billed it as New York's "only first-class French hotel," offering a café that appealed to the Bohemians of Greenwich Village, entertaining writers and artists such as Jean and Edouard de Reszke 

When Baptiste decided to move to the greener pastures of Uptown Manhattan and open a restaurant in 1902, the 32-year old Orteig was in a financial place to assume the lease of the hotel, which he renamed the Hotel Lafayette, after the Marquis de Lafayette. People still referred to it as "Old Martin's." Visitors to the Lafayette enjoyed the tile floor and marble-topped tables, where they could be entertained by an orchestra, or the foreign newspapers, or even the board games provided by Orteig. He was a subscriber of the Brasserie Universelle - a Parisian weekly newspaper whose recipes Orteig would introduce to his diners on a regular basis. 

World War I happened. American and French airmen alike gathered in the Lafayette to pass the time during the War, and in its aftermath as Europe figured out how to deal (harshly) with Germany, and it was here that Orteig became friendly with a number of them, gaining an interest in aviation. 

American and French diplomacy was on the rocks. As President Woodrow Wilson tried to whip up support for his League of Nations - sort of a peer-mediation group for countries to work out their differences and a forerunner to the United Nations - France was extremely interested in wearing Germany out for killing over 1.3 million of their soldiers and tearing up their countryside. 

Orteig had an idea to try to mend these diplomatic fences: a $25,000 prize to the first (Allied) aviator to fly non-stop from the New York to Paris, or vice versa. Orteig formally introduced this offer in a letter to Alan Ramsay Hawley, one of the early American aviators, Hawley was the first airplane passenger to fly from New York City to Washington, DC. A retired stockbroker, Hawley and his friend Augustus Post flew in a hot air balloon from St. Louis to...180 miles north of Quebec City, landing in the wilderness and hiking for three days until some fur trappers agreed to help them get back to civilization. Their 1,173-mile journey in a free balloon set an American record that stood for 95 years. 

Post is an interesting figure in his own right. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Post bought the first automobile in New York City and subsequently received the first tickets in the city's history, one for driving through Central Park at 5mph and one for driving on the sidewalk while trying to park. Post founded what would become AAA, and was an original member of what would become the Boy Scouts of America. He built New York City's first parking garage (underneath the St. Nicholas Skating Rink at 66th Street and Columbus Circle), and performed on Broadway. It was Post who gave Orteig the idea to put up his prize for the first Transatlantic flight. 

The $25,000 prize (equivalent to about $373,000 today), offered on May 22, 1919, came just a few weeks before British airmen John Alcock and Arthur Brown successfully flew a plane almost 1900 miles from Newfoundland to Ireland, collecting an earlier-awarded prize from the Daily Mail. It wasn't exactly an easy flight. Alcock and Brown almost clipped the trees upon take-off, an electric generator failed (cutting off the intercom through which the two could communicate, their radio communications, and their heating system), an exhaust pipe broke resulting in a terrifying sound so loud that they couldn't even yell at each other. Alcock and Brown flew through dense fog and a snowstorm, their instruments and carburetor iced up, the trim control broke which caused the plane to pitch forward as they used their fuel. Twice Alcock lost control of the plane, one of which resulted in a spiral dive from which Alcock recovered slightly before hitting the ocean nose-first. They landed in a bog near Clifden, Ireland, causing the plane to nose-over, but both men emerged unscathed. Arthur Brown drily noted that with better weather they could have flown to London. King George V knighted both men a few days later.

It would take a few years, however, for another serious attempt to be made at the Orteig Prize. Rene Fonck, by this point in his Age 32 season, was a legendary French fighter pilot who held the title of "the Allied Ace of Aces." The World War 1 veteran won the Legion d'honneur in 1917 before an incredible 1918 campaign when, over a bet of a bottle of champagne, Fonck shot down six German planes in a three-hour span on the afternoon of May 9 and went on to be a member of the French parliament from 1919-1924. To prepare to win the Orteig Prize, Fonck commissioned legendary helicopter and aircraft designer Igor Sikorsky to re-design his Sikorsky S-35 for the flight. On September 26, 1926 Fonck and three assistants took off for New York when the landing gear collapsed on take-off after hitting a sunken road that stretched across the runway. Fonck and his copilot survived, but the two other assistants died in the crash.

Medal of Honor recipient and polar explorer Richard Byrd (descendant of Virginians John Rolfe and Pocahontas) wanted to win the prize. Byrd planned the flight path of the U.S. Navy's historic May 1919 transatlantic flight and volunteered to attempt to win the Orteig Prize in 1921. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. - Secretary of the Navy - nixed the idea and instead assigned Byrd to the ZR-2 dirigible (blimp) which was going from Hull to Norfolk, UK. Byrd missed his train to the airship on the morning of its departure, which was lucky for him since the blimp broke apart in midair, killing 44 of the 49 crew onboard. In 1925 Byrd may or may not have completed the first aerial trip over the North Pole. We do know, however, that an Army Air Service Reserve Corps Lieutenant named Charles Lindbergh applied to be a pilot on Byrd's North Pole expedition, but his application was received too late. 

Two years later, in 1927, Byrd announced he had the backing of department store magnate and future PGA founding member Rodman Wanamaker's American Trans-Oceanic Company (which unsuccessfully attempted to win the Daily Mail's prize in 1919) and was attempting to win the Orteig Prize. On a practice takeoff with legendary Dutch airplane designer Anthony "The Flying Dutchman" Fokker - who had been commissioned by Wanamaker to design the plane, and whose planes Germany used during World War 1, and whose planes bore his name throughout the 1920s and 1930s - his plane, the America, crashed. Byrd was slightly injured, the plane more so, which was taken in for repairs.

Another serious attempt was taking place backed by the American Legion. Stanton Hall Wooster and Noel Guy Davis, two United States Navy airmen (the US Air Force wouldn't be officially established until 1947) took off on April 26, 1927 with a heavy load of fuel when the American Legion (named after their benefactors) crashed on its nose in Virginia, killing both men. 

On the other side of the Atlantic, Charles Eugene Jules Marie Nungesser - the third-highest ranking French ace pilot in World War 1 - and his navigator, a one-eyed pilot named Francois Coli, known for his long-distance flights pioneered by his 1919 double crossing of the Mediterranean, planned their attempt to win the Orteig Prize. Coli had been planning a transatlantic flight since 1923 but when an accident destroyed his plane and badly burned his flying partner Paul Tarascon. Tarascon lost his foot in a practice flight in 1911 but still went on to serve in both World War 1 and with the French Resistance in World War 2. Coli then joined Nungesser's attempt, both of whom disappeared over the Atlantic in l'Oiseau Blanc ("The White Bird" or "The White Dove") on May 8, 1927. The plane was never recovered. Maybe it crashed in the Atlantic, maybe it crashed in Maine. No one knows. Byrd told his team to suspend operations until their fate was known. 

Meanwhile a 25-year old Minnesota U.S. Air Mail pilot named Charles Lindbergh was preparing his a, attempt, a solo flight backed by St. Louis bankers, in a single-engine plane appropriately called The Spirit of St. Louis. Lindbergh arrived at Long Island's Roosevelt Field (named after Teddy Roosevelt's youngest son, Quentin, was killed in air combat on July 14, 1918) in the middle of May. A few days later, at 7:52am on May 20, 1927, he took off. The following day Lindbergh arrived at Le Bourget Airport, just northwest of Paris, completing a solo flight that took 33 hours. The solo flight removed any clashing personality/ideology conflict, the single engine allowed for less weight and more fuel, Lindbergh saying, "I'd rather have extra gasoline than an extra man." He didn't carry a radio or a parachute to save weight. It worked. 

A number of quality checks were required to verify Lindbergh's attempt: a sealed cylinder that measured atmospheric pressure to prove that the flight was one single leg, a measure of the remaining fuel (85 gallons) sealed in the tanks. 13 French officials, US Ambassador to France Myron Herrick (the only American ambassador to have a Parisian street named after him), Belgian Air Attaché Willy Coppens, and Lindbergh himself signed an official document to verify the effort. Lindbergh's 3,605-mile flight was acknowledged and approved as the world record for a non-stop flight. After 63 consecutive hours of being awake, Lindbergh went to bed.

Raymond Orteig was ecstatic. Orteig rushed to Paris from his vacation in Pau, France - about 500 miles in the south of France - as soon as his son telegrammed him of Lindbergh's departure - to congratulate Lindbergh at the American Embassy, eight years to the day after his prize offer to Alan Hawley. Orteig eventually awarded the purse to Lucky Lindy in New York. 

The popularity of aviation sparked a period of innovation around the world. For Orteig, who died in 1939, he held Lindbergh's achievement close to his heart, hanging the American flag Lindbergh carried on his flight on the wall of the Café Lafayette. Two years after Orteig passed, one of Orteig's sons moved it out of the Cafe to a private room, probably because Lindbergh was a Nazi sympathizer. "Too many pros and cons," Orteig's son told the New York Times. "Particularly for a restaurant. The flag hung there since 1927 when Lindbergh was an aviator and everyone was proud of him. But now he's talking politics. And lately when people noticed the flag a discussion began." 

That discussion probably centered around Lindbergh's involvement with the pro-Hitler "America First" movement. Nazis, man.

On Educational Testing Services And A Rather Impressive and Lucrative History of Failure

Each year in the Spring students across Texas take a standardized test known as the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR test. The tests you take (and have to pass) vary by grade level, and start as early as 3^rd Grade, with Math and Reading. The following grades take the following state standardized tests:

4^th: Math, Reading, Writing

5^th: Math, Reading, Science

6^th: Math, Reading

7^th: Math, Reading, Writing

8^th: Math, Reading, Science, Social Studies

9^th-12^th: Algebra I, English I, English II, Biology, US History

Essentially these cover the core classes: Math, English, Science, Social Studies. It’s possible to get a waiver in high school depending on the student’s status but in order to go from 5^th to 6^th Grade and 8^th to 9^th Grade, students have to pass the Math and Reading exams. You get three tries every year.

According to TexasAssessment.gov, these tests are “designed to measure what students are learning in each grade and whether or not they are ready for the next grade.” The State also notes that the tests will be given in both paper and online format. And that’s where things went crazy this morning across Texas.

The Texas Education Agency runs the show. In the past TEA (which is headed by, wait for it, former software developer Mike Morath) had outsourced state standardized testing to Pearson Education for 35 years. Why dump Pearson after such a long relationship with the State of Texas? A 2013 state audit of Pearson “found holes in state oversight, as well as lax terms that allowed the company to hire former state employees without restrictions or disclosure.”

So beginning with the 2015-16 school year TEA awarded a four-year/$280 million contract to the New Jersey-based Educational Testing Services (ETS) to handle the STAAR test. Before the first tests were even administered, ETS “delivered tests to wrong addresses and prefilled answer sheets with incorrect student information. Confidential student data, including Social Security numbers, were sent to the wrong school districts.” By the time the first round of testing took place in Spring 2016, things were decidedly not better.

A March 2016 computer glitch caused students to lose their answers on over 14,000 tests statewide, affecting mostly Special Education and English Language Learner students who were taking their tests online. TEA had to waive the results from the annual school accountability ratings for that year. Later in the Spring, ETS temporarily misplaced a number of tests from Eanes ISD, a high-performing district on Austin’s west side. In June 2016, ETS missed the deadline to give “some school districts” the scores from the summer re-test, which schools use to determine which students need summer school. Morath, and TEA, left the decision to promote (or not) students from 5^th and 8^th grades up to the school districts, since the data wasn’t there to make the call.

All of these issues led TEA to fine ETS – in their first year overseeing the STAAR tests – $21 million ($6 million in damages + $15 million of their own money to fix the problems encountered that Spring) and said that if ETS didn’t get their crap together by December 2017, they could come back around for some for right-nice fining.

I’m sure you will be shocked to learn that it did, in fact, happen again. Students taking online versions of the STAAR in April and May 2018 found themselves logged out of the testing server, or kicked out of the testing platform altogether. 71,000 test results were thrown out, over 100,000 more students were affected by the glitch. ETS blamed two things: human error and issues with the server stemming from hundreds of thousands of students trying to log in at the same time (which is required at the behest of TEA).

In June 2018 TEA issued another $100,000 fine on ETS and announced they would put the contract up for re-bidding once ETS’ contract ended in August 2019 which TEA apparently awarded to...ETS. When the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools across the country for in-person learning in March 2020, Texas Governor Greg Abbott waived STAAR testing requirements for the 2019-2020 school year, seeing as how it was clear many schools would be closed during the testing window. But what about the 2020-2021 school year?

As with most anything before the Texas Legislature, the decision turned quickly partisan: Democrats called on Abbott and Morath/TEA to cancel STAAR testing, saying that any standardized test that comes after a year of a global pandemic isn’t going to provide valid data relating to student, and school, performance. Republicans said that the test was needed to see how far behind (or not) students/schools are after the COVID year. I’m not here to weigh in on the validity of these arguments.

In February 2021 TEA issued new guidance on the 2021 STAAR tests as many school districts have allowed students to learn remotely as well as in-person. Namely:

-Yes, students have to take them, but! the requirement to pass the STAAR in 5^th and 8^th grade in order to move to 6^th and 9^th grade have been waived.

-High school seniors still needing to pass any of their 9^th-11^th grade tests (the latest test, high school timeline-wise, is 11^th grade, and it’s US History. You don’t have to take any “new” STAAR tests during your senior year) to graduate have to do so.

-Also students take the STAAR test on a school-issued laptop with the testing software pre-loaded, but they take the test in a classroom on campus.

-But STAAR test results will not factor into the dreaded district accountability ratings.

Which brings us to this morning, April 6, 2021.

I was all set to administer the English I STAAR test. Out of 15 students on my list, ten showed up. Two of those ten didn’t have their school-issued laptop to access the test and had to be relocated to the Library. No worries. As I’m reading the ever-so-formal instructions and get to the part where they log in with their respective usernames and passwords, every single one of the students taking their test said their login was rejected. Stepping out into the hallway, pretty much every other test administrator was doing the same thing, wondering what had happened.

ETS’ online testing system had crashed due to the number of students trying to log in at the exact same time…just like it did in 2018.

It did not take terribly long for TEA to issue a statement: “What happened today is completely unacceptable,” the press release said. “ETS, the testing vendor, experienced problems with their database system, which are in the process of being corrected. The 2021 online administration of STAAR will be ETS’s last for the State of Texas. Beginning next year, Cambium Assessment will be taking over these critical testing functions to ensure that users have a seamless online testing experience moving forward. All involved in public education in Texas should expect better than what they have experienced today; we are working to ensure that our students do not experience future testing issues.”

That gives ETS about 43 hours to get their servers (which have had issues for going on three years now) straightened out: the English II STAAR test is scheduled for Thursday morning, April 8. I'm sure it'll be fine.

Whatever happens from today until August 31, when ETS’ contract will be allowed to expire, we know that online testing is here to stay: Beginning September 1 Cambium Assessment (who was awarded a three-year $262 million contract to “manage the administration, scoring and reporting on an online testing platform”) and old testing friend Pearson (three years, $126 million to develop the assessment tests) will run the show.

ETS screwed up early, and they screwed up often. But at least they got a ton of money to do it.

The Valentine's Day (Electricity) Massacre

Let's start by noting that on February 8, the guys at Space City Weather were raising the possibility for potential winter weather in Houston early in the week of February 15. By February 10, they were sounding the alarms. And that was just for Houston. So the idea that the state was caught completely off-guard is disingenuous at best. Why have millions in Texas been without power for multiple days now, trapped in the grip of the coldest weather in decades, 10 years after a similar power crisis? [cracks knuckles]

There are three electric grids in the lower 48 states: the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and then there's Texas. Texas' electricity is managed by ERCOT - the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. ERCOT is technically a non-profit organization that controls 40,000 miles of electricity transmission lines to over 22 million Texans in 75% of the state. Some of the Panhandle isn't serviced by ERCOT, neither is El Paso, or the far East Texas border. 

ERCOT does not generate electricity or manage the state's electrical grid. ERCOT simply schedules power and "ensures the reliability of the electrical network." They didn't do much of either this week. It started on Sunday night, February 14, around 11pm. As temperatures across the state plummeted, energy generating units started switching off thanks to the fact that most did not winterize their units. Essentially, the systems used to generate power literally froze up. With demand for electricity high (people were cold), the supply plummeted. To counter this gap, ERCOT "asked transmission providers to turn off large industrial users that had previously agreed to be shut down. But the situation deteriorated quickly," according to WFAA. At the order of "state power regulators," CenterPoint Energy - which delivers electricity and natural gas to homes - were told to begin rolling blackouts for the Houston area. By 1:30am on Monday, February 15, ERCOT had implemented these rolling outages, and then couldn't get them actually rolling. If you lost power, you were basically screwed, because ERCOT couldn't manage them. By 8am on Monday, February 15 Houston mayor Sylvester Turner was telling Houston residents that there were system-wide power outages across the state. The majority of the power that was knocked offline wasn't wind power (while most West Texas wind turbines did freeze up, that doesn't seem to be a problem with the three wind turbines in Antarctica, or the ones in the Alps), the issue was with oil and natural gas, both of which are "regulated" by the Railroad Commission of Texas. An emergency order from the Railroad Commission on the night of Friday, February 12 called for the management of shortages of natural gas, whose pipelines had frozen thanks, in part, to a lack of winterization protection.

To clarify: Power plants generate electricity from oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, solar, and any other forms of energy. ERCOT "manages the flow" of that electricity within its network, while energy companies like CenterPoint maintain the method of delivery (i.e., power lines and poles). They're separate entities. Then you have Reliant, which markets and sells that electricity to you, the consumer, though Reliant is not responsible for the generation of power, nor the delivery of power. This is a result of 1999's Senate Bill 7, which we'll get to in a bit. 

How much power does it take to generate electricity for a house? At one point over half of the state's energy generators were offline, an estimated 45 gigawatts (or 45,000 megawatts). One megawatt of electricity can power 500 homes. So if 45,000 megawatts are offline, that removes enough electricity to power 22.5 million homes. 

Enter the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. FERC was established in 1977 to replace the Federal Power Commission, which was established in the 1920s to regulate hydropower dams. FDR expanded FERC's power in the 1930s under the Federal Power Act to dismantle utility monopolies during the Great Depression and to set "just and reasonable" wholesale electricity prices, regulate pricing and order refunds for overcharges by utility companies across state lines. Today FERC regulates the United States' natural gas industry, hydroelectric projects, oil pipelines, and wholesale rates. But Texas isn't part of that, and that goes back to FDR. The Federal Power Commission was clear that it brought oversight to "interstate" commerce of electricity. If Texas had its own grid, they could avoid federal oversight. Richard D. Cudahy wrote in 1995, "freedom from federal regulation was a cherished goal - more so because Texas had no regulation until the 1970s." ERCOT - formed in 1970 - doesn't have to abide by federal regulations because it's not interstate commerce, so it takes its orders from the Texas State Legislature and the Governor so as not to follow federal guidelines and regulations. 

Texas has the only deregulated power market in the entire United States, meaning that it's your basic laissez-faire economic market, trading on supply-and-demand. If you're a power company, the only thing that matters to ERCOT is how cheaply you can provide it, and how much ERCOT can charge to sell it. And if you - the energy company - are running a narrow profit margin, there's not much money left over to invest in your infrastructure like, oh I don't know, winterizing your pipelines. This actually works both ways: when it's freezing cold, Texas can't import energy from one of the other two electric grids in the United States. When it's hot in the summer and things are moving along just fine for energy production, Texas can't really export its surplus energy to help out, say, California. And because Texas' power market is deregulated, supply is based on free market pricing, exactly the thing that the FDR's Federal Power Commission was created to stop.

On December 23, 1989 a cold wave consumed the central part of the United States that dropped temperatures to -42 in at Scottsbluff, Nebraska, -21 in Springfield, Illinois and sent almost all of Texas into the single-digits. Busted pipes caused $25 million of damage in Dallas alone. North and South Carolina got a foot of snow. ERCOT implemented rolling power outages for the first time during this  storm. The Public Utility Commission of Texas issued a report in the months following the 1989 storm that recommended "all utilities should ensure that they incorporate the lessons learned during December of 1989 into the design of new facilities" and "ensure that procedures are implemented to correct defective freeze protection equipment prior to the onset of cold weather." These recommendations were not mandatory, and were allowed to lapse as time passed.

Ten years after the 1989 winter storm, the Texas State Legislature passed Senate Bill 7. It broke up most of the state's public utilities. Where previously a city would rely on a municipal utility or an investor-owned one (a co-op if you were in a more rural area) to manage the power plant, power lines, and the customer service side, deregulation meant each of these aspects were given to the lowest bidder. In theory, it's competition that brings down prices (the way I describe this to my students is, "when McDonald's introduced their Dollar Menu, you had a whole bunch of other fast food chains come up with a value menu to retain/attract customers.") In Houston, it was Houston Lighting & Power. After SB 7 it was the Wild West. Then-Texas Governor George W. Bush:

Competition in the electric industry will benefit Texans by reducing rates and offering consumers more choices.

The deregulation was phased in over a number of years, with a price floor set so the existing (former) monopolies couldn't just smash the crap out the startup retail energy providers (REPs), but the full deregulation of the energy industry in Texas was complete by 2007. As a reminder, Texas has had three governors since Ann Richards: George W. Bush, Rick Perry, and Greg Abbott. 

In early February 2011 a similar weather event to 1989 occurred, sending snow and ice all the way to Brownsville, crippling traffic in the Metroplex right before the Super Bowl was scheduled to be played there. The meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service office in Fort Worth said, "Our temperatures rarely stay this cold for this long." Pat McDonald, an NWS forecaster for Austin and San Antonio, said, "We get about one event like this every ten years."

Six months after that February 2011 storm, FERC and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation issued a report that noted many of the power stations that failed in 1989 failed in 2011 and said, in part:

Generators and natural gas producers suffered severe losses of capacity despite having received accurate forecasts of the storm. Entities in both categories report having winterization procedures in place. However, the poor performance of many of these generating units and wells suggests that these procedures were either inadequate or were not adequately followed. 

Following the 2011 storm, the Public Utility Commission of Texas was given the power by the state legislature to require energy generators to report on their "abnormal weather preparations" and to file an emergency plan. Was that actually done? No one seems to know. 

Despite proudly announcing back in November that they were in control of enough energy to last the winter, ERCOT noted of the Valentine's Day Electricity Massacre: "This event was well beyond the design-parameters for a typical or even extreme Texas winter that you would plan for. They began as rotating outages but they're (now) controlled outages and they are lasting longer than what would normally happen because of the magnitude." 

This is despite ERCOT saying on Thursday, February 11 that their system was ready for what the storm was about to bring. On Tuesday, February 16 ERCOT said that the problem (inconveniently, if you're a Texas politician appearing on a popular cable news network) stemmed mostly from the freezing of natural gas pipelines, not from freezing wind turbines. ERCOT estimated that 80% of their grid capacity could be generated by natural gas, coal, and some nuclear sources. Only 7% of what ERCOT forecasted for winter was to come from wind or another renewable energy source. 

Ed Hirs, an energy fellow in the University of Houston's Economics Department, said: "The ERCOT grid has collapsed in exactly the same manner as the old Soviet Union. It limped along on underinvestment and neglect until it finally broke under predictable circumstances."

The Rise and Fall of the Know-Nothing Party

It sounds funny but at one time there was literally a political party that referred to themselves as the "Know-Nothing Party" aka the "Order of the Star-Spangled Banner." They burned hot, they burned bright, they burned out. Their platform was essentially to oppose anything that wasn't white: Immigrants, Catholics, and Jews. This wasn't a new thing, since Germans, for whom English was not their primary language, and the Irish, who spoke accented English and were under suspicion of following not the rules and laws of the United States but instead the Pope and the Vatican. This was the height of mid-19th century "Nativism" - the idea that Native-born Americans (but most assuredly not Native Americans) were superior to literally everyone else. 

They had secret societies whose sole platform was to oppose immigration to the United States. Anti-Catholic sentiment ran rampant. In the early 1830s posters around Boston exclaimed that "All Catholics and all persons who favor the Catholic Church are...vile imposters, liars, villains, and cowardly cutthroats." Samuel Morse, yes, the telegraph guy, wrote a bunch of articles in the New York Observer (he later published these articles in a book) just blowing that dog whistle that the Vatican was sending Catholics to the United States in order to undermine the government. He was popular enough to get nominated - but whooped - in the 1836 New York City mayoral election. 

In August 1834, a group of anti-Catholics in Charlestown (just outside of Boston) - believing that nuns were being held against their will after which priests strangled the babies - stormed an Ursuline convent, chased out the eight nuns and 47 students, and proceeded to ransack it. John Buzzell, a brickmaker from New Hampshire:

The first thing that was done, after getting in, was to throw the pianos, of which nine were found, out of the windows. The mob crowded in such numbers that it was with great difficulty that I got upstairs to the chapel, which was located on the second floor. When I finally succeeded in forcing my way into the chapel I found a fire about the size of a bushel-basket blazing merrily in the middle of the floor. It was made of paper, old books, and such other inflammable stuff as they could lay their hands on, and soon spread in all directions. When the main building was enveloped in flames we went for the cook-house and ice-house, which were separate buildings, and set them on fire. 

Buzzell went on to explain that he broke into the mausoleum, you know, to see if there were any dead girls whose deaths the priests were covering up. He said, and the aforementioned quote is from 53 years (not a typo) after the event, that he was sure there was a young nun named Mary St. John who was in the mausoleum that had not been dead for very long. Mary St. John, however, had testified against Buzzell in court - twice - so obviously he was extremely wrong. 

It didn't stop people from believing the rumors, and it certainly didn't stop people from trying to profit off of them, either. In 1835, Rebecca Reed published "Six Months In A Convent," in which she claimed there was a plot to kidnap her and send her to the aforementioned Montreal convent. The following year Maria Monk published "Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun's Life in a Convent Exposed," a sensational - and completely fabricated - account of her life in a Montreal convent in which a neighboring monastery's priests forced nuns into sex slavery. The book was promoted and likely written by William K. Hoyte and other nativists in New York. Hoyte was the super anti-Catholic head of the Canadian Benevolent Society who was sleeping with Monk. Published by the nativist James Harper in January 1836, it sold over 26,000 copies by July and over 300,000 copies by the time of the Civil War. Harper, the "Harper" in "Harper-Collins Publishing," was elected mayor of New York City in 1844. 

1844 was also the year that anti-Irish sentiments exploded in Philadelphia. In May and July anti-Irish mobs attacked the homes of Irish-Americans, as well as Catholic churches. Zachary M. Schrag, a professor at George Mason, wrote that the riots "stand out for their duration, itself a product of nativist determination to use xenophobia for political gain." Philadelphia mandated singing Protestant songs and reading from the King James Bible in schools. A Catholic school director in Kensington, a northeast suburb of Philadelphia, floated in February 1844 suspending Bible reading in schools until the school board could come to a consensus regarding religion in schools for both Protestant and Catholic students. That went over about as well as you can imagine. Tensions simmered until they boiled over in May, when a teenaged nativist was shot and killed. A second person, who was just watching, died that day as well. Two days later nativists had burned a Catholic seminary and two Catholic churches. The rioting died down a couple of days later only after the U.S. Army and Navy had been sent in. Riots exploded again in July resulting in the deaths of at least 16 people. 

This was the birth of the Know-Nothing Party, who peaked in 1856. That said in 1835 (the year after the Ursuline Riot) New York State's Native American Democratic Association, with support from the Whigs, who were anti-Andrew Jackson Democrats, gained 40% of the vote in the fall elections and, with that, momentum. By the 1840s the country's first true third-party had grown, with chapters in pretty much every major coastal city that had, like, immigrants and whatnot.

But where did the Know-Nothing Party get its name? Due to their origins with secret societies, if anyone was to ask them their platform, they were to respond "I know nothing." It was known that they did favor a 21-year residency requirement before citizenship could be considered, limiting alcohol sales (because, sure, the Irish and Germans were the only ethnic groups getting lit up in the United States), Bible readings in schools, and only allowing Protestants to teach school. As Lorraine Boissoneault wrote in the Smithsonian Magazine (linked above), "They were the first party to leverage economic concerns over immigration as a major part of their platform." Ahh, the long-mentioned "economic anxiety" that has plagued America for generations. Boissoneault explained that the Know-Nothings followed the typical pattern of nativist motivation: Nationalism, religious discrimination, and ethnic divisions stoked by politicians to appeal to the working class. 

Two individuals in particular drove the Know-Nothing Party: A silversmith named Thomas Whitney and prizefighter/butcher William Poole. Whitney wrote the defining work of the Know-Nothing Party: "A Defence of the American Policy, As Opposed to the Encroachments of Foreign Influence, and Especially to the Interference of the Papacy in the Political Interests in the Affairs of the United States." As Whitney owned a printing press, he became the main publisher of Know-Nothing propaganda. And you most likely remember Poole as one of the main influences for Daniel Day-Lewis' character "Bill the Butcher" in Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New York."

This came at a time when German and Irish immigration to the United States was exploding due to economic/political turmoil and a potato famine, respectively. 2.9 million people emigrated to the United States from 1845-1854, coinciding with the rise of the Know-Nothings. Over half of New York City was made up of foreign-born people. 70% of New York City's charity efforts involved Irish immigrants to the city. This simply couldn't stand. Whitney wrote that all people were "entitled to such privileges, social and political, as they are capable of employing and enjoying rationally." Essentially, as Boissoneault says, "only those with the proper qualifications deserved full rights."

The Know-Nothings picked up followers from the declining Whigs and enjoyed political success throughout the 1840s, they really gained steam ahead of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, in which slavery in those territories. By 1855 the governor of Massachusetts and all but two members of the Massachusetts state legislature were Know-Nothings, as well as 40 members of the New York state legislature, eight governors, 43 members of the House of Representatives, and five Senators. William Poole would die in 1855 after getting into a saloon fight with Irish boxer John Morrison and his men, one of whom shot Poole in the chest. Poole stuck around for almost two weeks before succumbing to his injuries. His last words were, "Goodbye boys, I die a true American." The Know-Nothings had themselves a martyr.

1856 was an election year, and the Know-Nothings aka the American Party were excited. But, like many other political groups at the time, they were splintered on the issue of slavery. There were enough abolitionists who still opposed immigration that their 1856 convention to nominate former president Millard Fillmore (with Andrew Jackson Donelson as his running mate) ended when the anti-slavery Know-Nothings left the convention. Fillmore and Donelson remained on the ballot. 

The election came and with it one major final flashpoint, in Baltimore. It makes sense that Baltimore, or Maryland, would be the epicenter of the anti-Catholic sentiment, given that Maryland was originally founded as a safe haven for Catholics in the Colonies. Martin Ford wrote in Humanities that "election rallies were massive provocations, mixing theatrical spectacle with guerrilla warfare, Fourth of July pageantry with thuggery." Knowing that violence was likely, Maryland governor Thomas W. Ligon met with Baltimore Mayor Thomas Swann (a Know-Nothing man) to ensure that Swann would call off his gangs and allow everyone eligible to vote without fear of intimidation. Swann, in fact, did not do that. 

On Election Day 1856, Baltimore had just 45 police officers for a population of almost 175,000 (up from 80,000 in 1830 thanks, in large part, to Irish and German immigration). The city, known as "Mobtown" thanks to the presence of political gangs, engaged in heavy-handed tactics to ensure their candidate was elected. One gang, the Blood Tubs, was so named due to their penchant for dumping tubs of fresh-from-the-slaughterhouse blood on voters who did not vote for their candidate. Other gangs kidnapped immigrants who didn't speak English off the street and take them to vote for their guy. New York's Empire Club came to Baltimore in 1856 to campaign for Democratic candidates, they were trapped in a house by the local Know-Nothings which led to a firefight using "small cannon and firearms." Not far away the Plug Uglies and the Rip Raps - both Know-Nothing gangs - engaged in a two-hour long volley of shots with a Democratic group that killed two. It's hard to get the exact figures, but one estimate had it at 30 dead and 350 injured.

Ligon wrote a report to the Maryland State Legislature in which he said that, "Party animosity ran riot throughout the city; the most desperate encounters took place, in which hundreds of infuriated partisans were engaged; arms of all kinds were employed; and bloodshed, wounds, and death, stained the record of the day...I retired from the scene, convinced that all this might have been prevented, and not without a painful sense of duty unfulfilled," also mentioning that Swann had abdicated his responsibility to ensure a free and fair election. Swann and the Know-Nothings would make further gains in 1858 before fading out.

Despite getting over 800,000 votes (about 21.5%) the Fillmore/Donelson ticket would go on to finish the 1856 election in a distant third place, with just eight electoral votes out of a possible 296. All eight electoral votes came from the state of Maryland. The dismal showing would mark the official end of the American/Know-Nothing Party. Ultimately, what with the growing threat of Civil War, America decided that slavery was a much more pressing issue than immigration. The Know-Nothings faded out just as quickly as they rose to prominence. The pro-slavery members of the party joined forces with the Democrats while the anti-slavery faction joined the emerging Republican party, and please do remember that the two parties switched platforms over the course of the next 100-ish years. 

The nativist streak has been both in the background and in the forefront of American politics ever since. In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act which...did exactly what it sounds like. Thirty years later Congress debated whether or not Italians were "full-blooded Caucasians" and whether or not immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were "biologically and culturally less intelligent" than their white counterparts. Just remember these events as you're watching the news terrified of a migrant horde streaming towards the border - they've been trying this for generations.