"That Damn Fool Will Get Himself Killed By Some Other Damn Fool"

The most dramatic assault in Congressional history happened on May 22, 1856 but, of course, we can't start there. 

Charles Sumner was born in Boston in 1811 and was educated at the Boston Latin School - an elite school founded in 1635 whose notable alumni include Samuel Adams, John Quincy Adams, Henry Ward Beecher, Leonard Bernstein, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John F. Fitzgerald (JFK's grandfather), Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Hutchinson, Cotton Mather, and numerous other politicians, priests, painters, and physicians. 

Sumner graduated from Harvard in 1830 and from Harvard Law School three years after that. Sumner began practicing law in 1834 and also lectured at Harvard Law. The Whigs nominated him for Congress in 1846, but he declined the nomination and was one of the founding members of the new Free Soil Party - a precursor to the then-Republican Party that was anti-slavery and pro-protective tariffs for the U.S. economy - and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1850 as a Free Soiler (such an unfortunate term) and re-elected in 1856 as a Republican, seeing as how the Free Soil Party merged with the new Republican Party. Sumner was an outspoken abolitionist, calling for equal rights for Blacks, and opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Preston Brooks was born in Roseland, part of Edgefield County, on the Georgia/South Carolina border, just north of Augusta, in 1819. Edgefield County...well...so, it wasn't the friendliest place in the world. You could say there was a history of violence with young Preston Brooks. In 1840 the editor of the Edgefield Advertiser was a young man named Louis T. Wigfall. Wigfall had wasted his somewhat moderate inheritance on gambling, liquor, and prostitutes, and thought that politics was a fine place to hone his oratorical skills (history rhyming again). In his brief tenure as the Advertiser's editor, Wigfall - supported South Carolina's Unionist candidate for governor, John P. Richardson, in 1840 despite the Advertiser being a Nullifier newspaper.

(Quick aside: South Carolina was big mad about the 1828 Tariff - known as the Tariff of Abominations in the South - and as a result threatened to secede from the United States in the "South Carolina Exposition and Protest." Anonymously written, everyone sort of figured out that John C. Calhoun had written it. Problem being that Calhoun was Andrew Jackson's vice president. The vice president was actively arguing to split apart the Union. Jackson, through the Force Bill, and through Jackson threatening to personally lead the military into South Carolina and "hang every leader...of that infatuated people...by martial law, irrespective of his name, or political or social position." While South Carolina backed down with the quickness, there were still Nullifiers - so called due to their stance to nullify the Tariff of 1828.)

Anyhow, in 1840 Preston Brooks took issue with Wigfall over his editorial support for the gubernatorial campaign of the anti-nullification Richardson which naturally led to a duel that injured them both - causing Brooks, who was shot in the hip, to use a walking stick for the rest of his life. That's an important detail. Wigfall left South Carolina in 1848 for Nacogdoches, Texas to practice law and would go on to become a U.S. Senator in 1859, but was expelled from the Senate when he expressed support for the Confederacy. Wigfall served in the Confederate Senate as a representative from Texas and would be Jefferson Davis' military aide before he resigned.

Brooks was expelled right before graduating from the institution that would become the University of South Carolina for threatening police officers with firearms. This did not prevent Brooks from getting elected to the South Carolina State House of Representatives in 1844, nor did it prevent him from becoming a practicing attorney in Roseland in 1845. Brooks was also a captain in Company D of the Palmetto Regiment in the Mexican-American War. 

In 1853 Brooks was elected to the 33rd United States Congress as a hardcore pro-slavery Democrat in the House of Representatives (again, please do keep in mind that Republicans and Democrats gradually switched platforms over about 100 years). This was a fractured, contentious session of Congress, what with the debate over slavery in Kansas and Nebraska. Three years later in March 1856 Brooks would write, "The fate of the South is to be decided with the Kansas issue. If Kansas becomes a hireling [i.e. free] State, slave property will decline to half its present value in Missouri...and abolitionism will become the prevailing sentiment. So with Arkansas; so with upper Texas."

Fast forward to the floor of the Senate on the afternoon of May 19, 1856. The gallery was choked with spectators, despite the 90-degree temperatures inside the building. Charles Sumner rose to give a speech that he had tried for two months - dating back to Brooks' essay - to schedule, titled "The Crime Against Kansas." It took him five hours over the course of two days, from May 19 to May 20, to deliver the speech. Part of the 112-page speech (of which he memorized every word) went as such:

I fearlessly assert that the wrongs of much-abused Sicily, thus memorable in history, were small by the side of the wrongs of Kansas, where the very shrines of popular institutions, more sacred than any heathen altar, have been desecrated...where the ballot-box, more precious than any work, in ivory or marble, from the cunning hand of art, has been plundered...and where the cry, "I am an American citizen," has been interposed in vain against outrage of every kind, even upon life itself. Are you against sacrilege? I present it for your execration. Are you against robbery? I hold it up to your scorn. Are you for the protection of American citizens? I show you how their dearest rights have been cloven down, while a Tyrannical Usurpation has sought to install itself on their very necks!

(This is where it gets real)

I must say something of a general character, particularly in response to what has fallen from Senators who have raised themselves to eminence on this floor in championship of human wrongs. I mean the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Butler), and the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Douglas), who, though unlike as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, yet, like this couple, sally forth together in the same adventure. I regret much to miss the elder Senator from his seat; but the cause, against which he has run a tilt, with such activity of animosity, demands that the opportunity of exposing him should not be lost; and it is for the cause that I speak. The Senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight. I mean the harlot, Slavery. For her, his tongue is always profuse in words. Let her be impeached in character, or any proposition made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance or manner of hardihood of assertion is then too great for this Senator. The frenzy of Don Quixote, in behalf of his wench, Dulcinea del Toboso, is all surpassed. The asserted rights of Slavery, which shock equality of all kinds, are cloaked by a fantastic claim of equality. If the slave States cannot enjoy what, in mockery of the great fathers of the Republic, he misnames equality under the Constitution in other words, the full power in the National Territories to compel fellowmen to unpaid toil, to separate husband and wife, and to sell little children at the auction block then, sir, the chivalric Senator will conduct the State of South Carolina out of the Union! Heroic knight! Exalted Senator! A second Moses come for a second exodus!

The direct blows of Sumner's speech were leveled at South Carolina Senator Andrew Pickens Butler - who wasn't even in the Senate that day to hear the speech due to the fact that he was recovering from a stroke. Butler owed his political career largely due to his alliance with John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson's vice president who initially proposed South Carolina's secession from the Union. But it's worth mentioning that Sumner also aimed his words at Stephen Douglas, who leaned over to a colleague during the speech and said of Sumner, "That damn fool will get himself killed by some other damn fool." Sumner had already referred to Douglas as a "brutal, vulgar man without delicacy or scholarship [who] looks as if he needs clean linen and should be put under a shower bath...a noise-some, squat, and nameless animal...not a proper model for an American senator." Two years after Sumner's speech, in his re-election campaign, Douglas would square off against his Republican challenger in a series of debates over, in a lot of cases, slavery and economic anxiety states rights. His opponent? Abraham Lincoln. While Douglas was elected by a 78-22 margin in 1852, he beat Lincoln just 54-46 in 1858 and launched Lincoln as a national political force.

The day after Sumner's speech, May 21, pro-slavery forces burned down the Free State Hotel and destroyed the printing presses of the free-state newspaper Herald of Freedom, in what is known as the Sack of Lawrence. Three days after that an abolitionist named John Brown and his sons (and others) killed five pro-slavery men on Pottawatomie Creek.

Two days after Sumner gave his speech, one day after the Sack of Lawrence, and two days before the Pottawatomie Massacre, Sumner, 45 years old, 6'2" / 185lbs, was sitting at his desk on May 22, 1856 "signing his postal frank to envelopes containing copies of the printed speech" minutes after the Senate had adjourned for the day when Rep. Preston Brooks - who, wait for it, was Senator Butler's cousin - walked in to the Senate. Brooks wanted to challenge Sumner to a duel. Fellow South Carolina Representative Laurence Keitt talked Brooks out of it, saying that Sumner wasn't a gentleman worthy of the honor of a duel. Instead, he picked a metal-topped cane that, at the time, was also used to discipline misbehaving dogs. Do remember that Brooks needed to use a walking stick because he got shot in the hip in the duel with Wigfall 16 years earlier. 

Brooks was walking with Keitt towards Sumner's desk when he came across the Senate's principal executive clerk Colonel Joseph H. Nicholson, who asked "How is Colonel Brooks today?" to which Brooks responded, "Well, I thank you." Brooks then inquired about the presence of a lady in the Senate lobby, and whether or not she could be removed from the scene, presumably to avoid doing what he was about to do in front of a woman, after which he walked over to Sumner's desk, leaned over and said:

Mr. Sumner, I have read your speech carefully, and with as much calmness as I could be expected to read such a speech. You have libeled my state, and slandered my relation, who is aged and absent [Note: Senator Butler was 60, but would die the following year], and I feel it to be my duty to punish you for it. 

Then Brooks slammed the metal part of his cane on Sumner's head. And then he did it again. And again. Nicholson:

I think several blows had been inflicted before Senator Sumner was fully in possession of his locomotion, and extricated from his desk, which was thrown over or broken from its fastenings by the efforts of the Senator to extract himself. 

Sumner had been trapped by his own desk. He broke his desk trying to get up and Brooks followed him around, smashing Sumner's head "with as much quickness as was possible for any man to use a cane on another whom he was intent on chastising," Nicholson testified in the Senate investigation, estimating that Brooks' attack was 10-12 blows of such force that his cane broke into pieces. Sumner collapsed near the desk of Vermont Senator Jacob Collamer and had to be carried away, unconscious, while Brooks simply and calmly walked out of the Senate, unobstructed by stunned onlookers.

South Carolinians sent Brooks "dozens" of new canes, many of them bearing the phrase "Good Job," or "Hit Him Again." On June 3, 1856 the Richmond Enquirer published an editorial saying, in part:

We consider the act good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in consequences. These vulgar abolitionists in the Senate are getting above themselves. They have been humored until they forget their position. They have grown saucy, and dare to be impudent to gentlemen!...The truth is they have been suffered to run too long without collars. They must be lashed into submission.

When John May and Joseph Hale each donated 15 acres of land for the seat of government in Hernando County, Florida (north of Tampa) in 1856, it was named "Brooksville," in honor of Preston Brooks. In 1858 the Georgia legislature named a county on the Georgia/Florida border after him. 

Brooks was fined $300 in a DC court for assault. Anger spread throughout the House of Representatives, who called for Brooks' expulsion. On July 14, 1856 - two months after the assault on Sumner - the House voted on whether or not to kick Brooks out of the House of Representatives. While 121 members voted in favor of removing Brooks, 95 voted against it - about 23 votes short of the 2/3 majority required. They did, however, successfully censure Rep. Keitt. 

After the vote in the House of Representatives, Reps. Brooks and Keitt resigned their seats in the House of Representatives, but not out of any remorse or guilt, with Brooks saying, "I should have forfeited my own self-respect, and perhaps the good of my countrymen, if I had failed to resent such an injury by calling the offender in question to a personal account." Also, "They have written me down upon the history of the country as worthy of expulsion, and in no unkindness I must tell them that for all future time my self-respect requires that I shall pass them as strangers."

This meant that a special election was called to fill Brooks' and Keitt's vacant seats at the end of July. In a vote showing that South Carolinians weren't turned off by the assault on Senator Sumner, both Brooks and Keitt were elected and retook their places in the House of Representatives by the beginning of August.

Senator Sumner didn't fare as well. It took him three years to fully recover from the caning at the hands of Rep. Brooks. He returned to the Senate off-and-on, his vacant desk serving as a powerful reminder of the path Congress was headed towards in the coming years. Eight months after the attack, the Massachusetts State Legislature held its election for Sumner's seat (Senators were elected by State Legislatures, not the people of the state, until the 17th Amendment was ratified in 1913), who unanimously re-elected Sumner to his seat. The New York times wrote:

The reelection of Mr. Sumner marks (Massachusetts') appreciation of his faithfulness in the discharge of his duties and of his fearless defense of her free principles, while the unprecedented unanimity which has attended that election is an emphatic condemnation of the cowardly and brutal assault of which he was made a victim. It may be said with truth that Mr. Sumner goes back to the Senate with the sympathy and support of the whole people of Massachusetts.

Sumner returned to the Senate full-time in 1859 and became a champion of equal rights for Blacks. He was one of the first congressmen to link the Civil War and the full abolition of slavery, writing that slavery was "the mainspring of Rebellion," and calling for the government to "simply throw (Slavery) upon the flames madly kindled by itself, and the Rebellion will die at once." When Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Sumner approved but also complained that it didn't go far enough. 

In order to get Senate approval for what would end up as the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, Sumner organized a coalition with abolitionists and members of the Women's National Loyal League (sometimes the order of "National" and "Loyal" are flipped), which was created by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. The League had a campaign to collect one million signatures on a petition for a Constitutional amendment calling for the abolition of slavery. To receive the petition, Sumner asked the Senate to create a special committee, which was approved with Sumner as the chair. On February 9, 1864 Sumner entered the Senate chamber flanked by two tall Black men carrying steamer trunks full of petitions to abolish slavery. Sumner then gave a speech entitled "The Prayer of One-Hundred Thousand" in which he said the petitions represented "a might army, one hundred thousand strong...They ask for nothing less than universal emancipation."

In 1870 Sumner introduced a civil rights bill - a bill he considered to be his most important piece of legislation - guaranteeing all citizens "equal and impartial enjoyment of any accommodation, advantage, facility, or privilege." The bill failed, in part, because Sumner was so outspoken in his beliefs, so unwilling to compromise, that he ended up alienating many of the Radical Republicans. Sumner clashed with President Grant over the annexation of the Dominican Republic and lost the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee as a result. 

Still a member of the Senate, Sumner had a heart attack in 1874. With Frederick Douglass at his bedside, Sumner pleaded with him about the civil rights bill, saying, "Don't let the bill fail. You must take care of [my] civil rights bill." He died on March 11, 1874 and he laid in state in the Capitol Rotunda. When lying in state at the Massachusetts State House, members of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment - popularized in the movie "Glory" - stood guard. The Springfield Republican lamented:

The noblest head in America has fallen, and the most accomplished and illustrious of our statesmen is no more.

The Senate did pass an amended version of Sumner's prized legislation - the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The bill was more watered-down than Sumner's bill, and it only passed when supporters agreed to drop the provision banning segregated schools. Eight years after its passage the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional, saying that Congress could regulate the behavior of States, but not individuals, setting up a showdown culminating in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, in which the Supreme Court ruled that segregation was legal, provided the accommodations were "separate but equal" - a ruling that most assuredly would have devastated Sumner.

Rep. Preston Brooks did not fare as well as Sumner. On the evening of January 27, 1857 - about six weeks before the new congressional term was to begin - Brooks caught a severe case of croup and died, violently. The telegram announcing his death read, "He died a horrid death, and suffered intensely. He endeavored to tear his own throat open to get breath." The Washington Evening Star wrote, "No man ever in Congress has been more universally and sincerely beloved here, for no other has been endowed with a nobler nature or more lovable traits of character." Preston Brooks was 37 years old. 

Rep. Laurence Keitt was re-elected in 1858 and 1860, and resigned to serve in the Confederate House of Representatives, after serving as a delegate in the South Carolina secession convention. Keitt was the Colonel of the 20th South Carolina Regiment of Volunteers and eventually rose to the rank of Brigadier General. On June 3, 1864 Keitt was shot from his horse and killed at the Battle of Cold Harbor. Laurence M. Keitt was 39 years old. 

The Civil War had been coming since the Constitution itself was ratified, things just sped up in the 1850s, and the caning of Charles Sumner showed the country that war was on its way.

The Fire At Cocoanut Grove

It's kind of hard to imagine 492 people burning to death in 12 minutes in a building with a capacity of 460, but perhaps that's a telling detail. Yet on November 28, 1942 that's precisely what happened at the Cocoanut Grove club in Boston. It was 39 years after the deadliest fire in American history - Chicago's Iroquois Theatre caught fire and killed 602 people. Just two years prior to the Cocoanut Grove fire, the Rhythm Club in Natchez, Mississippi caught fire and killed 209 people.

Two orchestra leaders - singer Mickey Alpert and bandleader Jaques Renard - opened the Cocoanut Grove nightclub (named after LA's famous Cocoanut Grove inside the Ambassador Hotel) together at 17 Piedmont Street, near Boston's Theatre District in 1927 during the height of Prohibition. Initially Alpert and Renard insisted that the Cocoanut Grove abide by the law and not serve alcohol, trusting that live music would bring people literally to the club. An offer of money to open the club came from California mobster Jack Berman, who was hiding out in Boston. The problem was that Jack Berman was actually Jack Bennett, a former oil investor who had made a fortune manipulating the stock market. Financing Cocoanut Grove was an extremely good way to launder that money. Alpert and Renard refused the money, opened it themselves and, while they may have been great musicians, they were terrible businessmen. They sold Cocoanut Grove to "King" Charles Solomon for $10,000 in 1931. 

Solomon - the son of Russian immigrants who settled in Boston's West End - was, how do you say, problematic. Federal agents called him "Al Capone of the East," as Solomon had a number of dirty little fingers in a number of dirty little pies. According to historians, Solomon was "at the peak of his crime renaissance, with a complete sideline of alki-cooking, morphine, heroin, cocaine, and the dandruff-like little granules which produce delirious uproar. He hogged the bail-bond market, owned a large loan-shark company at usurious rate, held full partnership in the white slave industry, a cut in a growing lottery racket and drivers and such like et ceteras built on human mischief. Solomon was so committed to bringing the finest illegal rum from Central America to Boston that he had a fleet of boats guided by secret radio stations in Long Island and New Jersey. 

But! Solomon loved the theatres and nightclubs in Boston. Solomon was your typical gangster: well-dressed and with beautiful women (and vaudeville stars) on his arm. Solomon had already been indicted on January 24, 1933 when he went to the restroom at 3:30am in Boston's Cotton Club, and was promptly shot and later died at Boston City Hospital without giving up the names of the men who shot him. The Boston Globe reported, "Bullets sang the requiem of 'King' Solomon yesterday and wiped forever from his face the smile that thousands knew."

While the club itself didn't initially serve alcohol, Solomon obviously turned it into a speakeasy, a gritty gangland hangout. With Solomon dead, ownership transferred to Solomon's lawyer Barney Welansky, who turned it into a spectacle: The Cocoanut Grove was a single-level structure with an intentionally-dimly lit bar in the basement called the Melody Lounge. On the first floor was a huge bandstand, dining area, ballroom, with several separate bars scattered around the premises. There was even a retractable roof in the dining room to allow for viewing of the moon and dancing under the stars, tiki torches and tropical themes dominating the decor to make it seem like a scene out of Casablanca. It was such a successful nightclub that it expanded several times, with basically no thought given to the design or the safety of the "upgrades." Welansky made Alpert - known as "the second Al Jolson" - Cocoanut Grove's emcee to appeal to tourists and soldiers waiting to deploy to Europe, but underneath it all, Cocoanut Grove was still a mob hangout. The bookkeeper for the Grove was Rose Gnecco Ponzi, ex-wife of Charles Ponzi, whose financial shenanigans in 1920 were so audacious that the Ponzi Scheme is named after him.

Out of fear of employees taking unauthorized breaks and customers skipping their tab, the exits were nailed shut. The only way in and out was through a revolving door on Piedmont Street. Employees at the Cocoanut Grove included underage workers, unlicensed workers to make repairs, cutting corners on the supplies in order to increase profits. Those pretty palm trees were actually made of highly flammable material. The electrician hired to wire the building didn't have a license. When asked about the flimsy and unsafe "upgrades" Welansky simply replied that he was too close to Boston mayor Maurice Tobin to have to worry about getting shut down.

In early November 1942, Welansky bought a three-story building next to the Grove and turned it into the Broadway Lounge. The expansion brought the Cocoanut Grove complex to over 9,700 square feet just on the ground floor. On November 20, 1942 Boston Fire Prevention Lieutenant Frank Linney pronounced Cocoanut Grove "good" as far as fire prevention goes. 

One of the employees Welansky hired was 16-year old Stanley Tomaszewski, "one of the swellest kids" according to one of his teachers at Roxbury Memorial High School for Boys. He was a starter on the football team who worked nine-hour shifts as a busboy for $2.47 + tips. He used the money to help his janitor father, sick mother, and to buy War Bonds. At about 10:15pm on Saturday, November 28, 1942 - fifteen minutes after the main show was supposed to start - Tomaszewski was at work helping to bus the tables of the almost-1000-strong/way-over-capacity crowd. A couple was seated in the downstairs basement and, wanting a little more intimacy, unscrewed a nearby lightbulb. The bartender told Tomaszewski to screw it back in, which he did, though whether he simply screwed it in or lit a match/lighter to see is unknown. What is known, however, is that the palm tree burst into flames, catching a satin canopy hanging from the ceiling on fire, as well, creating "a shimmering blue flame."

Image from the New England Historical Society

Waiters tried to put the fires out with seltzer water, to no avail. According to investigators, the fire spread at a rate of 400 feet per minute, racing up the stairwell out of the Melody Lounge and into the ballroom, upon which the fire burst into a giant ball of flame. For many occupants of Cocoanut Grove the first sign that something was amiss was when a screaming woman with her hair on fire.

Firefighters were nearby putting out a car fire when they saw smoke rising from the Cocoanut Grove. A Boston police officer yelled as he drove past Ladder 15's firehouse, "It's the Cocoanut Grove and it's going like hell!" As the fire spread, the people inside Cocoanut Grove realized the exits were all locked and so en masse made for the revolving door at the front of the club, partially and temporarily blocked by a 5'4" Grove employee in a gray suit demanding that they pay before they leave. It was at the revolving door that firefighters discovered piles of human bodies, apparently eight-feet high, unable to get out of the nightclub.

Abandoned cars made it difficult for fire and rescue personnel to reach the front of the club. It was 28 degrees at the time of the fire, with the temperature dropping steadily. The water used to douse the flames froze the firehoses to the ground. Soldiers and sailors streamed in to help. One firefighter said some victims had breathed in flames so hot that, even when they got outside, the first breath of frigid air made them drop "like stones." 

Those lucky enough to make it out were taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, which was soon overwhelmed by the number of victims - for an hour and fifteen minutes a new patient was admitted every 11 seconds. Doctors were so desperate to save lives that they tried new methods of treatment such as administering plasma, and using penicillin, which had only been discovered 14 years earlier. A week earlier Massachusetts General Hospital had run a mock emergency drill to prepare for a theoretical German Luftwaffe attack, and as a result had plenty of gauze and saline available. 300-350 people survived the fire, 166 were hospitalized, and 491 were killed inside Cocoanut Grove in 12 minutes - one more death was added on January 9, 1943, a survivor who committed suicide. More people died from smoke inhalation than from burns.

It could have been worse: earlier on the 28th Boston College played Holy Cross at Fenway Park. The expectation was that Boston College would beat the absolute dog piss out of Holy Cross. After all, Boston College was 8-0 and had outscored their opponents 249-19. Holy Cross was 4-4-1, one of those wins was a 60-0 romp against the Fort Totten Redlegs, which wasn't a college at all, but instead a football team comprised of soldiers preparing for World War 2 based in Queens. Expecting an easy victory (influenced, perhaps, by Holy Cross being 26-point underdogs), Boston College had already booked a party at the Cocoanut Grove that night to celebrate their impending bid to the 1943 Sugar Bowl. The program for the game featured the captains from both Boston College and Holy Cross - the Boston College co-captains were Fred Naumetz and Mike Holovak. Their numbers: 55 and 12, respectively. Anyway, that get together at Cocoanut Grove was canceled when Boston College got whooped, ironically, 55-12 by Holy Cross (Bill Simmons just got a semi and has no idea why). The biggest college football upset until 1982 likely saved a whole bunch of lives. Mike Holovak later went on to work for the Houston Oilers in 1981, served as the Oilers' general manager from 1989 to 1993, and retired from the Tennessee Titans in 1999.*

Western movie star Buck Jones had a cold. He had been traveling the country on a War Bond tour and attended the Boston College-Holy Cross game with Mayor Tobin, and Buck Jones just wanted to go back to his hotel. But movie agents wanted Jones to go to a dinner in his honor at Cocoanut Grove, and so he went. He died of his injuries in the fire on November 30. Clifford Johnson, a 20-year old member of the Coast Guard, helped people get out despite suffering severe burns over 50% of his body. He spent 21 months in the hospital and went through "hundreds of surgeries." He was released from the hospital, married his nurse, and...died in a vehicle fire in Missouri in 1956.

Once the literal smoke cleared, investigators set out the next day to find the cause of the fire. Tomaszewski, the 16-year old busboy, wasn't done any favors when the Boston Herald ran a front-page headline screaming, "Bus Boy Fixing Light With Match Set Fire," but he was later cleared when the official cause of the fire was "of unknown origin." Tomaszewski had to stay at the Kenmore Hotel for weeks, guarded by police for his own safety.

History has shown that the main cause was Welansky himself for his cost-and-corner-cutting measures. Welansky and nine Cocoanut Grove employees were indicted. Mayor Maurice Tobin narrowly avoided indictment, himself. But only Welansky - who was actually at Massachusetts General Hospital recovering from a heart attack on the night of the fire - was charged and found guilty, of manslaughter. He was sentenced to 12 to 15 years in prison but 3.5 years into his sentence, in the late stages of cancer, was pardoned by Tobin who at this point was governor of Massachusetts. Welansky died nine weeks later, telling reporters before he died that he "wished he had died in the fire." Governor Tobin went on to be Harry Truman's Secretary of Labor.

After the investigation was concluded, officials reclassified restaurants and nightclubs as "places of public assembly," thus requiring more stringent safety measures to be in place, things we take for granted now, like automatic fire sprinklers, all exit doors swinging outward, emergency lighting, and illuminated exit signs. Revolving doors were still allowed, but had to either be collapsible or have conventional doors swinging outward on either side of the revolving door. The Portland Press-Herald wrote that the Cocoanut Grove fire was "a perfectly stupid way to learn elementary public safety."

Stanley Tomaszewski graduated from Boston College, got married and had three kids, and had a long career as a federal auditor. He died in 1994 at the age of 68. Today, 17 Piedmont Street is the site of eight luxury condominiums and a small plaque commemorates the victims of the 5th-worst loss of life in US History behind 9/11, Pearl Harbor, the sinking of the Titanic, and the Iroquois fire in Chicago. 

*The Houston connection with Holovak is courtesy of @Texophilia.

The Only Woman To Ever Swear In A President

November 22, 1963 is a date in American history that will live forever. Not only is it the subject of my favorite novel of all-time (which I have had to maintain a rather impressive amount of will-power, if I may say so myself, not to begin again today for the 4th time), but it's a turning point of What Used To Be America, and What America Is Today. I do not believe this to be a controversial statement. 

It's one of the most famous photographs in American history:

Today we're talking about the woman in the bottom left-hand corner administering the oath of office to Lyndon B. Johnson as the 36th President of the United States on November 22, 1963. The assassination of John F. Kennedy - 57 years ago today - has left an indelible mark on the United States. As I seemingly revisit it every year, I'm still learning new things about it. Today we focus our time on Sarah Tilghman Hughes, aka the 5'1"/100-pound "Sarah T."

Sarah Tilghman was born in Baltimore on August 2, 1896 to parents whose family trees in America span back to the 1660s. After graduating from public schools in Baltimore and then Goucher College (for whom Goucher's Politics Center is named) Tilghman taught science for two years in North Carolina because, in her words, "about the only thing a girl could do at that time was to teach school." Looking for something else, Tilghman enrolled in law school at George Washington University. 

To help make ends meet, Sarah worked for the Washington, D.C. Police Department, going to law school at night and working for the police department during the day, mainly helping women and children. She graduated from George Washington with an LL.B degree in 1922 - two years after the 19th Amendment was ratified, giving women the right to vote. 1922 was a big year for Sarah Hughes: not only did she graduate from law school, Sarah married classmate George Ernest Hughes (hometown: Palestine, Texas). Mr. & Mrs. Hughes moved to Dallas, where George started a private law practice. 

She had trouble finding a job in Texas due to, ahem, legal firms not being terribly willing to hire a woman. In 1923 Sarah Hughes joined the law firm of Priest, Herndon, and Ledbetter, technically getting a free working space in exchange for some receptionist work. 

Hughes was elected to the Texas House of Representatives in November 1930. Hughes - elected in Dallas - was the youngest of four female members of the 42nd Legislature (the three other female members were elected in Bryan, Slocum, and Texas City), the 3rd incarnation of the Texas State House of Representatives to feature at least one woman (Edith Eunice Wilmans of Dallas was the first female member of the Texas State House). Elected to the State House of Representatives three times, Hughes was the "Most Valuable Member" in her second term - the year Franklin D. Roosevelt won his first presidential election. In 1935 Texas Governor James Allred appointed Hughes to the 14th District Court in Dallas - the first female district judge in Texas (in early 1965 just three out of 412 federal judgeships were held by women)  - where she served seven terms. 

Though she ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1946, Hughes became national president of the Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs in 1952, a group that advocated for women in public office. They nominated Hughes as Adlai Stevenson's vice president in 1952 - the first woman ever considered for a Vice Presidential run, though she withdrew her name from consideration before a vote was taken, later saying, "The thing that I got the most fun out of was running for vice president of the United States. I knew I had absolutely no chance, but it was doing something I would like to see more women do."

In 1954 Sarah Hughes co-authored an amendment to the Texas state constitution with Helen Edmunds Moore - who had been elected to the Texas State House of Representatives in 1928 - that allowed women to serve as jurors in criminal trials. The amendment passed. Four years later Hughes ran for a seat on the Texas Supreme Court against Joe Greenhill, losing 50.6-49.4, or by 14,000 votes out of 1,147,751 ballots cast. It wasn't a huge setback for Hughes. 

A "tough and exacting jurist," the 35th President of the United States - John F. Kennedy - appointed Hughes (who was co-chairman of the Kennedy-Johnson campaign committee in Dallas) as Texas' first female federal district judge, a new seat created in 1961, the only female district judge appointed by President Kennedy. According to Robert Caro Hughes' appointment almost didn't happen because JFK's brother and Attorney General Bobby Kennedy thought she was too old (she was in her Age 65 season) and they were trying to pack the courts with young, idealistic judges. Hughes was long-aligned with Kennedy's Vice President, Lyndon B. Johnson, campaigning for LBJ when he ran for Senate in 1948, but Johnson acquiesced to Kennedy. However, Johnson's (and Hughes') buddy - the longest-serving Speaker of the House of Representatives, Sam Rayburn - who had accepted and approved Hughes' temporary nomination for VP - held up a bill that Bobby Kennedy wanted passed until Hughes was nominated, and ultimately confirmed by JFK as a recess appointment in 1961. The move outraged Lyndon B. Johnson, not because she made the bench, but because of the damage it did to his word, saying, "Sarah Hughes now thinks I'm nothing. The lawyer I offered the job to - he thinks I'm the biggest liar and fool in the history of the State of Texas."

Hughes had been a part of the program on October 24, 1963 in Dallas when Adlai Stevenson came to deliver a United Nations Day address that resulted in Stevenson getting hit over the head with a sign. Because, Dallas. Almost a month later, on November 22, Hughes was at a luncheon at the Dallas Trade Mart to receive the president in Dallas, but of course Kennedy never attended that luncheon. 

Hughes already had plans to have dinner in Austin that Friday night and, after hearing that there had been "an accident," she was preparing to leave. Gathering her things at home in Highland Park at 2:15pm, just over an hour after Kennedy had passed away, Hughes called her office at the courthouse to check in and was told that U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Barefoot Sanders (whose life is interesting in its own right) wanted to speak to her. Lyndon B. Johnson needed someone to swear him in as president. There were other options but Johnson wanted Hughes because, as Hughes said, "One of them was Joe Estes, who was a so-called Eisenhower Democrat and was appointed by Eisenhower, and the other one was T. Whitfield Davidson, who had enjoined the Democratic executive committee from certifying Johnson's name when he was nominated for the Senate."

Her next step was to get to LBJ for the swearing in, and somehow find a copy of the oath of office, on the way. The original plan had been for Kennedy - once he had wrapped up his appearances in Dallas - to go to Johnson's ranch on Highway 290 between Fredericksburg and Austin. Hughes, after initially thinking she had sworn in so many people as a judge that she could just wing administering the oath of office, wondered if LBJ would go ahead to his ranch, or be sworn in back at Washington. Highland Park was about ten minutes from Love Field - where Air Force One had landed earlier that day - and she drove herself to the airport. Upon arriving at Love Field Hughes was blocked by police, but they knew her and, after verifying with Air Force One that she was there to swear Johnson in, she was waved through and found that someone had called the Attorney General - JFK's brother Robert - and gotten a copy of the oath of office. 

Hughes boarded Air Force One where LBJ and his party were in the second compartment. Hughes began to get ready when Johnson said, "Mrs. Kennedy wants to be here. We'll wait for her." After a few minutes Jackie - who had already gone from Parkland Hospital to Air Force One - emerged from the rear of the plane, and stood next to Johnson. Before administering the oath to Johnson, Hughes leaned over to Jackie and whispered, "I loved your husband very much." 

Hughes began:

I have learned that under tense circumstances people don't do very well at remembering long sentences and it's better to make them short. Just as soon as - and the oath of office is in the Constitution, but it does not contain the words "So help me God!" Well, every oath of office that I had ever given ended up with "So help me God!" So it was just automatic that I said "So help me God!"

She is still the only woman to have ever administered an oath of office to a president. Hughes left Air Force One before it took off for Washington and returned home where she gave interviews the rest of the afternoon. Hughes did travel to Washington for Kennedy's funeral (and was able to get in to St. Matthew's Cathedral when Judge James Noel told security Hughes was the one who swore Johnson in) and Johnson's inauguration and inaugural ball. Johnson named Hughes to the UNESCO Commission in 1963. 

In 1969, Hughes ruled in Shultz v. Brookhaven General Hospital that female hospital aides and orderlies should receive equal pay as their male counterparts. The following year saw that Hughes was one of three members of a panel of federal district court judges who unanimously ruled that Texas' abortion statutes violated "Jane Roe's" right to privacy under the 9th Amendment. When the State of Texas appealed to the Supreme Court, the resulting Roe v. Wade decision confirmed that women have a fundamental right to an abortion. Two years later (and a year before the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade) Hughes oversaw Taylor v. Sterrett, which upgraded prisoner treatment in the Dallas County Jail, a place she referred to as "a factory for crime."

Hughes retired as an active federal judge in 1975 but continued as a senior judge for seven years after that, passing away in 1985 at the age of 88 and was buried at Hillcrest Mausoleum and Memorial Park in Dallas. Upon Hughes' death Lady Bird Johnson wrote:

I've known and admired (Hughes) since my university days in the 1930s, when she was a young Texas legislator. Lyndon and I enjoyed her friendship and were so proud of her and the service she gave to Texas. 

The Compromise of 1877

For absolutely no reason at all, I thought we'd spend a little time talking about the Election of 1876 and it's fallout. First off, the 1870s were a WILD time in America. They're on that post-Civil War industrial economy where industry is booming - mainly because you had Robber Barons like Carnegie, Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Vanderbilt, etc. absolutely wearing out the working class, and enabled to do so by the laissez-faire approach to business from the government (laissez-faire is a French term which means "hands-off" where the government, in this instance, just doesn't try to regulate business. If you can get some off-the-boat immigrant from Ireland to work for 10 cents an hour, do you, type of thing.)

1876 was also just three years after an economic depression hit that was so bad it was known as the Great Depression until 1929 when, uh, that one took the cake. The cause of that depression was railroads, which were the largest employer of Americans behind agriculture. Jay Cooke & Co. was the Union Army's financier during the Civil War and, when that war was over, the government made it a federal agent in financing railroad construction, and man they went nuts. After the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869, Jay Cooke & Co. were behind the Northern Pacific Rail Road - a second transcontinental railway. But on September 18, 1873 they realized they had overextended themselves and declared bankruptcy. In the fallout, 89 of the country's 364 railroad companies had gone bankrupt. Within two years 18,000 businesses followed suit. Unemployment was at 14%. Railroad worker strikes swept across the US as wages were cut and working conditions suffered. 

The 1876 presidential election was just 11 years after the end of the Civil War. Republicans (and do not forget that, from the 1850s to the 1960s, the Republicans and Democrats flipped platforms) had been overseeing Reconstruction in the South, tasked with making sure Southern states complied with the Civil War Amendments, and attempting to undo the Southern "Black Codes" designed to keep the formerly-enslaved population as second-class citizens. Two years prior, in 1874, the predominantly-Southern Democrats gained control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the Civil War as the people grew weary, in part, of Reconstruction, the Republican response to the Panic of 1873, not to mention the corruption of Ulysses S. Grant's administration, and the unending corruption of Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall outfit. With the Southern Democrats in control of Congress, the Reconstruction writing was on the wall.

The presidential election of 1876 came down to New York's Samuel Tilden vs. Ohio's Rutherford B. Hayes. It wasn't apparently a great choice for the people:

This was the "what smells worse: your butt or your feet" presidential election of its day, something, perhaps, to which you may be able to relate. 369 Electoral Votes were up for grabs, meaning the winning candidate needed 185 to win. But the candidates - on their face - don't seem to have been that bad of a choice. 

On one side you had the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, a former protégé of Martin Van Buren who went on to become governor of New York and broke up Tammany Hall as well as the "Canal Ring," - a corrupt group of politicians who had mismanaged the Erie Canal for their own personal enrichment. If anti-corruption was your single-issue, Tilden was your guy.

Republicans ran Ohio's Rutherford B. Hayes - a lawyer, devout Methodist father of three (soon-to-be four) who joined the Union Army despite being almost 40 years old when the Civil War broke out saying that he would rather die than live having done nothing for the Union. Wounded five times, he (obviously) survived the war and emerged as a Brigadier General. He was elected to the House of Representatives upon the end of the Civil War and then to be Governor of Ohio. But Black Americans assumed that a Hayes victory would mean the reinstatement of slavery.

Election Day came, and 82% of registered voters did vote - a number not since topped (though I'm keeping an eye out on the 2020 voter turnout). 4,036,298 votes were cast for Hayes. 4,300,590 were cast for Tilden. But, as we all know, that's not exactly what matters. That 264,000 vote margin resulted in a 184-165 Electoral College advantage for Tilden. One vote shy of a Tilden win. But three states were disputed: Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Coincidentally (or not), these were the only three Southern states controlled by Republicans. The combined total of Electoral College votes in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina? 19. One Electoral Vote out of those three would give Tilden the presidency, while Hayes needed all 19 (Oregon was going through some stuff, but ultimately gave their one undecided Electoral Vote to Hayes, making it 284-266). 

Both sides claimed victory in the three states. Both sides alleged fraud by the other. Democrats, with their alleged 3% margin (assuming you could trust the counting of votes throughout the country), declared "Tilden or War." An article in the October 1893 issue of The Atlantic, retelling the Election of 1876, said:

Those of each party were convinced that they had gained an honest victory, and were indignant with those of the other party for denying or even doubting it. The feeling of mutual hostility had been greatly intensified by party leaders, orators, and presses. In some of our cities it took all the terrors of a police court to keep Democrats and Republicans from breaking the peace. Members of Congress who had begun by being angry on their own account, and who felt under some obligation to represent the anger of their constituents, exploded when they began to discuss the subject with their opponents, at the hotels and in the club-rooms of the city of Washington. It took quiet and sensible men some time to learn that they could gain nothing by arguing the question with those of opposite political views, and men of a different stamp never did learn it.

There's that rhyming couplet of history. 

How would Congress react? Some argued that the President of the Senate should determine the votes, since it was that position that had counted and declared the Electoral College vote since American government had been a thing. But the President of the Senate was a Republican, and Democrats would never accept a result by a Republican. Another argument was that the House of Representatives should determine the votes, since that body is where the election goes if there isn't a majority in the Electoral College. But the Democrats controlled the House, and Republicans would never accept a result by a Democrat. A third argument was to let the Supreme Court decide the election since it was, theoretically, at least, an impartial body. But seven members of the Supreme Court at that time were appointed by Republicans, and Democrats would have hollered. A "leading Democrat" (according to the 1893 article in The Atlantic) remarked on the floor of the House that "within 100 Days, people would be cutting each other's throats."

Faced with the challenge of how to deal with votes from three states neither side totally trusted, a compromise was made by the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives and the Republican-controlled Senate: create a bipartisan commission of five members from the House (three Democrats and two Republicans), five from the Senate (three Republicans and two Democrats), and five Supreme Court justices (two appointed by Democrat presidents, two appointed by Republican presidents, and one independent) called the Electoral Commission to determine how to allot the 19 remaining votes in the Electoral College. When the Joint Session of Congress began on February 1, 1877, the Electoral Commission got to work. A large crowd gathered in the gallery as the Florida returns were being counted. The New York Times wrote:

There was a great desire to witness a fair count, and curiosity was increased by the expectation that the new law would afford some new diversion to the formality of the counting.

The inner workings of the Electoral Commission can be studied more deeply by clicking on any of the above links. In the interest of Doing Something Else tonight, let's say that perhaps a deal was inevitable. Republicans wanted the presidency. Democrats wanted federal troops and federal oversight out of their states. Nicholas E. Hollis tells us about the Wormley Agreement, in which representatives of both campaigns met at Washington's Wormley Hotel - a block northeast of Lafayette Square - which was founded by James Wormley (worthy of a separate post), whose father had obtained his certificate of freedom with the help of lawyer Francis Scott Key, and turned the hotel into "an internationally-renowned hospitality business catering to the most prominent visitors and residents of the capital." At the Wormley, however, it was proposed that the three contested states - Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina - would award their votes to Hayes in exchange for Republicans agreeing to remove federal troops from those states. 

At 4:10am on the morning of March 2, 1877 - a mere two days before the inauguration of whoever won - all three states gave their Electoral Votes to Hayes, giving the Republican Hayes a 285-284 result in the 1876 Electoral College in exchange for the end of Reconstruction. Republicans sold out Black citizens for almost 100 years in exchange for four years of the presidency. What came next for Black Americans was generations of segregation, Black Codes, Plessy v. Ferguson, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Again we turn to Congressman Monroe:

Again, we see how absurd has been the statement that there was fraud in the count, that somebody was cheated by the manner in which it was conducted. The simple narrative of facts which has now been given refutes such a charge. If anybody was cheated, who was it? Certainly not the Republicans; for their candidate was made President. Nor was it the Democrats; for the bill in accordance with which the electoral votes were ascertained and declared was specifically their measure. 

The cheated number was the Black community of the United States of America - who at that point had gone from "Property" to "Citizens" by a significant portion of the country in less than 12 years. Within two months of taking office, Hayes removed federal troops from surrounding the statehouses in South Carolina and Florida. Republican James Garfield won the election of 1880 by less than 10,000 votes out of over nine million ballots cast. Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina all voted for the Democratic candidate Winfield S. Hancock.

The Cape Ann Earthquake of 1755

This morning a magnitude 3.6 earthquake struck underneath Buzzards Bay, off the southern coast of Massachusetts. Yale seismologist Maureen Long said it was "a fairly typical earthquake for New England." But that hasn't always been the case, and first we need to go to Portugal. 

At about 9:30am on November 1, 1755 - All Saints' Day in the overwhelmingly Catholic capital city - an earthquake hit Lisbon, Portugal. There were actually three separate earthquakes over the course of ten minutes estimated at a range from 7.7 to 9.0 on the Richter scale that were felt as far away as Morocco. Church bells rang due to the vibrations of the ground in Austria. An estimated 50,000-70,000 people were killed in the earthquakes, some by falling buildings like the many residents who had retreated to the safety of St. Paul's Church after the first earthquake, and were killed when the resulting aftershocks collapsed the buildings. Others in that number were killed as the resulting fires that lasted for five days were fanned by strong winds, or by a 20' foot tall tsunami that slammed into the coasts of both Portugal and Morocco. The tsunami continued across the Atlantic, a 9-to-16-foot wave hitting the Caribbean island of Antigua. It was a real bad day. 

The Rev. Charles Davy wrote in his journal that he was "instantly stunned with a most horrid crash, as if every edifice in the city had tumbled down at once. The house I was in shook with such violence, that the upper stories immediately fell." Virtually all of the architecture and culture of Lisbon was wiped out and rebuilt from the literal rubble, including some of the first instances of pre-fabricated houses. 

Since the earthquake happened on a major religious holiday, priests and other religious authorities said the sin of the people was to blame. The Enlightenment-era's Voltaire soon wrote a poem called "Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, or An Examination of That Axiom 'All is Well,'" in which he clapped back at philosophers like Alexander Pope who said that the world is an inherently good place where Things Happen for a Reason:

Oh, miserable mortals! Oh wretched earth!

Oh dreadful assembly of all mankind!

Eternal sermons of useless sufferings!

Deluded philosophers who cry, 'All is well,' ...

...What crime, what error did these children,

Crushed and bloody on their mothers' breasts, commit?

Did Lisbon, which is no more, have more vices

Than London and Paris immersed in their pleasures?

Lisbon is destroyed, and they dance in Paris!

Still, the science of seismology can be traced back to the Lisbon earthquake after Portuguese King Joseph I had the Marquis de Pombal go throughout Portugal to find out how many shocks the people felt, at what time, how far apart, descriptions of damage, etc. that have allowed seismologists to go back and get an accurate picture of what exactly happened in Lisbon. This growing field of study would have another opportunity to grow soon. 

Shortly before 4:30am local time on November 18, 1755 - seventeen days after the Lisbon earthquake - the ground started to shake in New England. 25 miles east of Cape Ann, Massachusetts was the epicenter of a 6.0-6.3 earthquake. While it did not have the same effect on New England that the earthquake in Lisbon did, the Cape Ann Earthquake did knock over about 1/3 of the chimneys in Boston (around 1,600 chimneys), bent church steeples, and caved in several brick walls after the shaking lasted for 7-10 seconds. Some Boston streets were impassable due to the number of bricks clogging them up. It was felt from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Winyah, South Carolina. There was damage in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Portland, Maine. Fences fell down all the way to Montreal.

The Boston Gazette reported on November 24 that sailors on a ship 210 nautical miles away from Boston thought they had run aground, such was the shaking on the ship, and realized it was an earthquake only when they saw fish "large as well as small" dead on the surface of the Atlantic. Future Founding Father and President John Adams was just 20 years old when the Cape Ann Earthquake happened. At 20 years old it was this event that marked the first of thousands of pages he would write in his diary:

We had a severe Shock of an Earthquake. It continued near four minutes. I was then at my Fathers in Braintree, and awoke out of my sleep in the midst of it. The house seemed to rock and reel and crack as if it would fall in ruins about us. Chimnies were shatter'd by it within one mile of my Fathers hosue. 

I know that we've talked a lot about chimneys as a measure of destruction. And you, dear reader, may sit there thinking, "So what? It's a chimney." And I understand that. But losing your chimney in New England in the middle of November was no joke. Your fireplace was your source of heat and your source of cooked food. I've lived in Upstate New York in the middle of November and, buddy, I wouldn't recommend it. 

Aftershocks followed well into December, but the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony was quick to determine the real cause: the sin of all mankind. It is unlikely that residents of Boston would have known about the Lisbon earthquake (the sailing time between the two places would have been about 23 days). Still, many religious leaders in Massachusetts reacted in much the same way their Catholic counterparts did across the Atlantic. 

The Massachusetts Historical Society estimates that in the weeks and months following the Cape Ann Earthquake, no fewer than 27 "sermons, poems, and accounts of other earthquakes" were written in New England. Massachusetts' Jeremiah Newland wrote a broadside called Verses Occasioned by the Earthquakes in the Month of November, 1755 that reminded fellow Puritans that, if they didn't change their sinful ways, God would punish New England  "strong enough to sink the whole Creation..." just like He did Lisbon. Newland wasn't alone.

Thomas Prince was New England's first historian (his A Chronological History of New England, in the Form of Annals began with, no kidding, Adam & Eve) and the minister of the Old South Church in Boston, who followed up the events of November 18, 1755 with Earthquakes the Works of God and Tokens of His Just Displeasure, which really rolls off the tongue, but it doesn't exactly mince words about what caused earthquakes: God's wrath. He was already on-record as saying a 1727 earthquake in New England was an example

Eliphalet Williams (whose brother William, yes, William Williams was a signer of the Declaration of Independence) wrote The Duty of a People, Under Dark Providences, or Symptoms of Approaching Evils, to Prepare to Meet their God soon after the Cape Ann Earthquake - just 64 pages of bleakness indicating that the recent events of Boston and surrounding areas were shots across the bow from God Himself. And the Reverend Doctor Eliphalet Williams was 29 when he wrote that!

It's important to remember that the earthquake coincided with the end of a period of revivalism generally known as the First Great Awakening, that called people a call to get back to the original principles of God (often with dramatic reminders that, at literally any moment, God could plunge you into the very pit of hell). Part of the reason for this was that many Puritans who had come to Massachusetts to participate in the City Upon A Hill experiment were now two, three, sometimes four generations deep. In order to be a full participating member of the Puritan Church you needed a conversion narrative, in which your life was different before and after one specific event that confirmed your belief, faith, and trust in God. Well, if you had grown up in Massachusetts, life dominated by the Puritan Experience, you were unlikely to have one of these conversion experiences. And so on for your children and grandchildren: Puritanism was simply your way of life. There was no Before. If you weren't a member in good standing in the Puritan Church, you weren't going to Heaven, end of story. 

Prior to the First Great Awakening, not even considering the eternal implications of being a good Puritan, if you weren't a full member of the Puritan Church in Massachusetts you couldn't hold office or vote. Grandparents got nervous, and this led to the passing of the Halfway Covenant, a 17th-century compromise between Puritan leadership and its members that allowed children to be baptized at birth, but not take the Lord's Supper (thus achieving full membership) until that conversion experience happened. Puritan leaders like Jonathan Edwards argued against the Halfway Covenant as unnecessary and many Puritan churches granted full membership to convinced believers - kind of an iffy arrangement, but one that all of organized religion has gone with ever since. 

Still, the effects of the Enlightenment were beginning to make their way into New England by the time of the earthquake. Benjamin Franklin's discoveries with lightning, in a very on-brand move, saw lightning rods as safe ways to protect people and property from lightning strikes. The aforementioned Thomas Prince, however, updated his God's wrath-caused-the-1727-earthquake theory to say that lightning caused the earthquakes, since the lightning rods were directing lightning directly into the ground. And it's hard to argue with a 1755 brain genius for assuming that lightning rods were causing the very ground to crumble. Lightning rods were Man's way of trying to outsmart God. Thus, earthquakes were a reminder that Man wasn't crap. John Winthrop (not THE John Winthrop, but the professor of math & science at Harvard) said electricity was to blame for the earthquakes, but that lightning rods might just have been a gift from God. 

Perhaps the events of the First Great Awakening, the fire & brimstone sermons, the Cape Ann Earthquake, were what could push the good people of Massachusetts to a conversion experience or at least a change of heart about how you had been living your life. Maybe the largest earthquake in New England history was just the event that got you to Heaven. And it only cost some chimneys. 

You can click this link to see just how many earthquakes there have been in the Northeast, just from 1975-2017. But if another Cape Ann Situation hit Boston today, the damage would be far more than chimneys. Since Boston is built on a literal landfill (which makes so much sense, tbh) a 6.0-6.3 earthquake anywhere near there would cost billions of dollars in damage and kill/injure thousands. Enjoy your night!

Why Are There Nine Supreme Court Justices?

For absolutely no reason at all I thought we'd spend a little time talking about the Justices of the Supreme Court, specifically, why are there nine of them? 

The Constitution...well, the Constitution isn't a foolproof document. It's not, you know, the Bible. The Constitution doesn't address the rights of people of color, or women. As it relates to the function of the Supreme Court the Constitution doesn't even outline what the exact power of the Supreme Court would be, nor does it explain how the Judicial Branch should be organized, nor does it even set out how many justices should sit on the Supreme Court, their qualifications, age, experience, or even citizenship. The only reason there's a Chief Justice at all comes from Article 1 Section 3 in which it says, in reference to impeachment proceedings:

When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no person shall be convicted without the concurrent of two thirds of the members present. 

Like a lot of issues the United States would encounter - be it slavery or women's rights - if you look to the Constitution for guidance, you're likely to find that the Founding Fathers (in all their infinite wisdom) kicked the can down the road for someone else to deal with. The Constitution of the United States was ratified so as to replace the Articles of Confederation because, buddy, the Articles of Confederation sucked.

So when the Washington administration and the 1st Congress took office, figuring out the judiciary system was fairly important - the first bill to come before the Senate was "An Act to Establish the Judicial Courts of the United States," or Judiciary Act of 1789. It established the "structure and jurisdiction of the federal court system," as well as creating the office of the Attorney General. The basic system established with the Judiciary Act of 1789 is basically the same today, with a few changes here and there. We'll get into those in a minute.

The Judiciary Act of 1789 divided the country into 13 judicial districts (one for each state) which were then organized into an Eastern, Middle, and Southern District. Initially there was a Chief Justice and five Associate Justices. That makes six - two for each District. Until 1890 the Justices of the Supreme Court were obligated to "ride circuit" and hold court twice a year in each judicial district. What about 3-3 ties? Maeva Marcus, a research professor at George Washington University and the director of GWU's Institute for Constitutional History, said they weren't worried about that because they were all Federalists, anyway.

After declining Washington's offer to become his first Secretary of State, New York's John Jay accepted the position of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court hoping that the judicial branch would be on equal footing with the executive and legislative branches. The first real test was 1793's Chisholm v. Georgia. The State of Georgia had purchased supplies from South Carolina merchant Captain Robert Farquhar during the Revolutionary War, but later refused to pay because Farquhar was a British loyalist. After Farquhar died, Alexander Chisholm became executor of Farquhar's estate, and promptly sued the State of Georgia in the Supreme Court for the unpaid amount (this was A Thing at the time). Upon notice of the lawsuit, Georgia said it was immune from lawsuits because it was a sovereign state, and just...didn't show up. 

On its face, Georgia's was a preposterous argument. Article III Section 2 of the Constitution says federal courts can decided cases "between a State and citizens of another State." They ruled in Chisholm's favor, ordering Georgia to pay up. Remember that - at the time - there were two political parties: Federalists (like Alexander Hamilton and John Jay) and Anti-Federalists (like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison), whose entire platform was to support the opposite of whatever the Federalists wanted. As soon as the Supreme Court ruled against Georgia, it led to an outcry against the overreach of the federal government - precisely what the Anti-Federalists feared. Georgia still said they wouldn't pay. John Jay quit the Supreme Court to be the governor of New York, angry over the lack of respect for the judiciary as well as the demands of riding the circuit, given the transportation quality of late-18th century American roads. By 1795 Congress had passed and the states had ratified the 11th Amendment, which said the judicial branch's power doesn't extend to lawsuits brought against a State by a citizen of another state or foreign country. Congress neutered the Supreme Court...for a while.

There were three Chief Justices in the first eleven years of the Supreme Court from 1789-1800: Jay, John Rutledge (who lasted just over four months because he served in an interim capacity during a Congressional recess. When Congress returned from recess, the Senate didn't confirm him and his nomination was withdrawn. Nevertheless his four months count) and Oliver Ellsworth (who wrote the Judiciary Act of 1789). Ellsworth's term lasted the duration of the Adams administration, and retired because of "the gravel and the gout" in his kidneys.

This is where things get a little weird with the executive branch and the judiciary. Over the course of the campaign for the presidency in 1800, the incumbent Federalist John Adams and Secretary of State/OG Anti-Federalist (who by this point went by the Republicans) Thomas Jefferson waged a bitter war more reminiscent of recent political campaign history than what you would expect. 

The Federalists called Jefferson an "atheist in religion, and a fanatic in politics" (history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme). Yale President Timothy Dwight said a Jefferson presidency would result in the Bible being "cast into a bonfire, our holy worship changed in a dance of Jacobin [frenzy], our wives and daughters dishonored, and our sons converted into the disciples of Voltaire...Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of distress, the soil will be soaked with blood, the nation black with crimes."

Federalist newspapers warned prospective voters (i.e., White Dudes) with excessive use of All-Caps:

Shall I continue in allegiance to GOD - AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT; or impiously declare for JEFFERSON - AND NO GOD!

Thomas Jefferson - or, rather, James Callender (who is responsible for spilling the beans about Jefferson and Sally Hemings), a friendly newspaper editor, fired back by saying that Adams had a "hideous hermaphroditical character which as neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." Devastating. The election of 1800 is deserving of a separate post. Basically, Jefferson and his proposed vice president Aaron Burr tied in the electoral college. After some shenanigans from Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton convinced his fellow Federalists that it was better to give their vote to a Jefferson, who at least was somewhat consistent and seemed to believe in something, rather than Burr, the guy who (wait for it) "would do anything to get his hands on power." 

By December 1800 Adams didn't know who would be president, but he knew it wouldn't be him. he was trying to find a new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to replace Ellsworth. Congress was soon to debate reducing the number of Supreme Court Justices from the six that Washington had set to five, in order to avoid ties, and Adams thought it improper to nominate a sixth member of the Supreme Court while Congress was debating such a bill. He nominated Secretary of State John Marshall, mainly so that Jefferson wouldn't get to do it. The Senate wasn't happy, as it was a surprise nomination, but they didn't have much time before the Jefferson Administration was running the show, and figured that even a bad Federalist was still better than a Jeffersonian Republican. John Marshall was confirmed as Chief Justice on February 4, 1801. They still did not know who would be president, but for a month (the inauguration was then on March 4) Marshall served both as Adams' Secretary of State and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

On February 17, 1801 Jefferson prevailed over Burr on the 36th ballot. Burr would be Jefferson's vice president for the next four years which was likely extremely awkward. John Adams finished 3rd. He and his son John Quincy Adams would be the only one-term presidents until 1840. 

While Adams peacefully left office after such a bitter campaign, he and the Federalists did do one thing that would eventually give the Supreme Court the power John Jay so desperately desired: they installed as many Federalist judges as they could until the day of Jefferson's inauguration, which Adams did not stay to attend, so as to place a check on the Jefferson Administration.

On March 2, 1801 - two days before Jefferson's inauguration - Adams submitted 42 judicial appointments to the Senate, which they confirmed on March 3, with Jefferson's inauguration on March 4. When Jefferson saw the commissions for these "Midnight Judges" (or Midnight Appointments) he told his Secretary of State (and future president) James Madison to simply not deliver the commissions to four of the intended judges. Later that month Jefferson wrote Henry Knox [edited for clarity]:

This outrage on decency shall not have its effect, except in the life appointments which are irremovable, but as to the others I consider the nominations as nullities & will not view the persons appointed as even candidates for their office, much less as possessing it by any title meriting respect.

One of these commission-rich but appointment-poor judges was named Stephon William Marbury, appointed to be the Justice of the Peace in Washington, D.C. When Marbury did not receive his commission, he appealed to the Supreme Court, led by...Chief Justice - and Adams' Secretary of State - John Marshall. Marbury v. Madison, which was handed down on February 24, 1803, is the first truly landmark case in Supreme Court history. 

Marshall decided, through some actually brilliant legal analysis, that the Supreme Court's power was too narrow under the powers vested by the Constitution to decide the fate of Marbury's appointment. I'll turn it over to Kent State:

The Constitution, [Marshall] concluded, allowed the Supreme Court 'original jurisdiction' in only a limited number of specified situations, and they did not include the kind of order Marbury asked for. Since Marbury was only following the guidelines of a provision of the Judiciary Act of 1789, Marshall concluded that this provision was unconstitutional. 

Jefferson was pissed, but Marshall's ruling didn't give anything for Jefferson to punch at, since the Court itself was refusing to grant the power under the Judiciary Act. Marbury v. Madison also established the precedent of Judicial Review - in which the Supreme Court now had the power to rule laws passed by Congress as unconstitutional. 

In a clap-back by Jefferson's Republicans, they impeached Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase in 1805 for politicizing his seat on the bench, "tending to prostitute the high judicial character with which he was invested, to the low purpose of an electioneering partizan," having continually referred to Jefferson and the Republicans as atheists. The Senate, which consisted of 25 Jeffersonian Republicans and nine Federalists, acquitted Chase - because being combative isn't necessarily treason - and he remained on the Supreme Court until his death in 1811. Regular reminder that successfully impeaching anyone is hard, and that's on purpose. 

After Marbury v. Madison and the acquittal of Samuel Chase, finally the Supreme Court was on equal footing with the other branches of government. That was a very long aside, but it's important to know how the Supreme Court was elevated from a branch that Georgia could just drop like 3rd Period French to being the Scissors in Governmental Rock, Paper, Scissors. 

Anyhow, the number of Supreme Court justices changed six times before 1869. One of those times was another lame-duck Adams/Federalist attempt to reduce the power of Jefferson with the Judiciary Act of 1801, which reduced the number of Supreme Court justices from six to five...beginning with the next vacancy meaning that Jefferson would have to wait for two vacancies before he could nominate a Republican. Petty af. That act was repealed almost immediately, returning the number of justices to six. 

As the United States expanded west, however, it increased the number of circuit courts. In 1837 the number of district circuit courts were expanded, which resulted in Andrew Jackson nominating two additional Justices. By 1857 there were nine circuit courts, meaning there were nine Supreme Court Justices. Who establishes the number of these particular courts? Congress. In 1863 a 10th court was added to cover California/Oregon and, frustrated over Dred Scott v. Sandford, Lincoln added a 10th Supreme Court justice to ensure an anti-slavery majority. After Lincoln was assassinated and the extremely problematic Andrew Johnson had already vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Congress reduced the number of Supreme Court justices to seven in an effort to make sure he couldn't fill a vacant seat. With the passage of the Judiciary Act of 1869, the number of Supreme Court justices was increased from Johnson's seven back to nine, including one Chief Justice, as a gift to President Ulysses S. Grant. Nine Supreme Court Justices has been the number ever since, though there were some challenges.

By the 1930s the Supreme Court was extremely Republican, which wasn't exactly what President Franklin D. Roosevelt was looking for when he was trying to get New Deal legislation passed. Four of the nine members of the Supreme Court: Pierce Butler (confirmed 1922), James McReynolds (confirmed 1914), George Sutherland (confirmed 1922), and Willis Van Deventer (confirmed 1903) - straight-up hated the New Deal. Known as the Four Horsemen, they gained a majority when the Herbert Hoover-appointed Owen Roberts, in his Age 60 season was the youngest of that particular iteration of the Supreme Court, started to vote with the elder statesmen to make a conservative majority on the Court, started to invalidate key pieces of FDR's New Deal. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes was the Secretary of State for Republican presidents Warren G. Harding and Herbert Hoover, struck down an impressive amount of New Deal legislation - including a minimum wage for women and children, for God's sake. 

Roosevelt was tired of it. Thanks to the vagaries of the Constitution he didn't need an amendment to change the composition of the Supreme Court but he did need Congress. The 75th Congress (1937-1939) enjoyed a Democratic super-majority thanks to the popularity of FDR and the New Deal. In February 1937, emboldened at the outset of a 2nd term as president, FDR proposed adding an additional Justice for any Supreme Court justice over the age of 70. That number, at the time, would bring six additional Justices to the Supreme Court - of his choosing - resulting in a Supreme Court of 15 members. This was FDR's infamous Court-Packing Scheme. Eventually FDR backed down after two justices upheld the National Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act, but that was the last major effort to change the very structure of the Supreme Court. 

I know we all like to think that this country is based on hallowed traditions, but one of those traditions is the petty tinkering with institutions based on how it benefits the party in power in that particular instance. That said, the precedent for an equal number of Supreme Court Justices for every district court has long been established. And right now? There are 12 regional circuits.