William Bradford, governor of the Massachusetts colony, provided the first account of an earthquake in the New World in his History of Plimmoth Plantation. The earthquake rocked Plymouth on the afternoon of June 5. “It came with a rumbling noyse,” wrote Bradford, “or low murmurs like unto remote thunder. … As ye noyse approached nere, the earth begane to shake and came at length with that violence as caused platters, dishes, & such things as stood upon shelves, to clatter and fall downe; yea, persons were afraid of ye houses themselves. … it was very terrible for ye time … and ye earth shooke with ye violence as they could not stand without catching hold of ye posts and pails yt stood next them, but ye violence lasted not long. And about h‰lfe an hower, or less, came an other noyse & shaking, but neither so loud nor strong as ye former, but quickly passed over, and so it ceased.”
On May 10 a cannon sounded as the Swedish flag rose over Fort Christina, the stronghold of the fledgling colony of New Sweden. Built on the shore of a Delaware River tributary, the tiny settlement was Sweden’s first and only colony in the New World.
New Sweden grew vigorously under the iron rule of Governor Johan Printz, who arrived in 1643. A veteran of the Thirty Years’ War, the four-hundred-pound Printz (local Indians called him “Big Guts”) established additional fortified settlements throughout the southern Delaware River valley.
In 1654, Johan Rising replaced Printz as governor. Rising was a more humane ruler than the despotic Printz but proved overzealous. Shortly after assuming power, Rising captured a Dutch fort at what is now New Castle, Delaware, nominally within Swedish territory. Peter Stuyvesant, governor of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, retaliated the following year, sailing down the Delaware with three hundred troops. He recaptured his fort and then besieged Fort Christina. The Swedes surrendered after ten days, and New Sweden, with its four hundred inhabitants, became a Dutch province.
1738 Two Hundred and Fifty Years Ago
The evangelist George Whitefield of Gloucester arrived in Savannah, Georgia, on May 7. Whitefield’s fervent brand of preaching had already captivated congregations back in England; in America he was to foster the religious revival known as the Great Awakening.
Ordained in 1736, Whitefield joined John and Charles Wesley as one of the pioneers of the Methodist movement. He traveled extensively throughout the colonies, converting the masses and raising funds for his Georgia orphanage.
In Philadelphia a curious Benjamin Franklin showed up at one of Whitefield’s sermons. “I perceived he intended to finish with a collection,” wrote Franklin in his autobiography, “and I silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold. As he proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of his oratory made me asham’d of that, and determin’d me to give the silver; and he finish’d so admirably, that I empty’d my pocket wholly into the collector’s dish, gold and all.”
Franklin described the remarkable transformative effect of the Grand Itinerant’s ministry: “From being thoughtless or indifferent about religion, it seem’d as if all the world were growing religious, so that one could not walk thro’ the town without hearing psalms sung in different families of every street.”
Speaking in the open air, Whitefield could enrapture thousands at a time with his clear, booming voice. The English actor David Gafrick envied the minister’s histrionic abilities. “I would give a hundred guineas,” said Garrick, “if I could only say ‘Oh!’ like Mr. Whitefield.”
1838 One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago
Signs posted throughout Philadelphia on May 15 warned that “a convention to effect the immediate emancipation of the slaves throughout the country is in session in the city, and it is the duty of citizens who entertain a proper respect for the Constitution of the Union and the right of property to interfere.”
More than three thousand reformers gathered at the newly dedicated Pennsylvania Hall the next day as a hostile crowd formed outside. Among the speakers was Angelina Grimké Weld. She and her sister Sarah, the daughters of a wealthy South Carolina plantation owner, were famous in the North for their antislavery lectures. Just two days before, Angelina had married the abolitionist Theodore Weld in an interracial ceremony.
“I have seen it! I have seen it!” Mrs. Weld told the convention. “I know it has horrors that can never be described. I was brought up under its wing. I witnessed for many years its demoralizing influences and destructiveness to human happiness.” As she spoke, stones crashed through the windows. “What is a mob? What would the breaking of every window be? Any evidence that we are wrong, or that slavery is a good and wholesome institution?”
Though the evening passed without further violence, the same mob gathered the next day as the feminist Lucretia Mott and others addressed the convenion. That night the mob set fire to Pennsylvania Hall, burning it to the ground.
1863 One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
April had been a cruel month for Federal troops in Virginia; the mud created by spring rains slowed troop movements to a miserable crawl as Gen. Joseph Hooker’s Army of the Potomac prepared to confront Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Then, as May approached, the sun came out, and the roads dried. Fresh provisions and a visit from President Lincoln cheered the Union soldiers, while Hooker looked forward to a rout. “May God have mercy on General Lee,” Hooker boasted, “for I will have none.”
“Fighting Joe” had reason for confidence: His troops outnumbered Lee’s by more than two to one. If he could lure the Rebels from their heavy fortifications at Fredericksburg, a decisive victory was almost assured.
Hooker planned to force Lee into a retreat by threatening his supply lines while initiating a mock frontal assault. On May 1, when Lee did not retreat into waiting cavalry divisions as expected, Hooker wavered and halted his advance. His hesitation proved fatal. The following day General Lee led forty-five thousand of his men into combat against Hooker in the thick woodlands near Chancellorsville as three divisions of mounted troops under Stonewall Jackson swung around to attack Hooker’s unprepared right flank.
Hooker’s grand scheme to vanquish Lee disintegrated into four days of chaotic fighting and desperate maneuvering. The Confederates lost thirteen thousand men; among the dead was Stonewall Jackson, accidentally shot by his own troops while returning from a nighttime reconnaissance. Union casualties numbered seventeen thousand by the time Hooker withdrew his men.
1888 One Hundred Years Ago
“The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day. …” Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat” appeared in the San Francisco Examiner on June 3.
The ballad hardly seemed destined for immortality, but a young comedian and singer named DeWolf Hopper rescued it from the dugout of time. In New York City, Hopper was appearing in a comic opera called Prince Methusalem. At a special performance before the New York Giants and the Chicago White Stockings, Hopper recited the ballad in the middle of the second act. So popular was his rendition that Hopper added it to his permanent repertoire. He recited the saga of Casey’s strikeout more than ten thousand times throughout his career. “Casey” has been reprinted countless times, set to music, and even produced as an opera, making it the most popular piece of comic verse in American letters.
Thayer himself was somewhat perplexed by the phenomenal success of “Casey at the Bat.” “Its persistent vogue is simply unaccountable,” he wrote years later, “and it would be hard to say, all things considered, if it has given me more pleasure than annoyance.” Hopper attributed the ballad’s popularity to its eternal mythic resonance: “There are one or more Caseys in every league, bush or big, and there is no day in the playing season that this same supreme tragedy, as stark as Aristophanes for the moment, does not befall on some field.”
1938 Fifty Years Ago
On May 26 the House of Representatives established the Committee on Un-American Activities. Congress set up the committee primarily to investigate the activities of Soviet and Nazi agents in the United States. “We shall be fair and impartial at all times and treat every witness with fairness and courtesy,” said the chairman Martin Dies at the committee’s opening session. “The Committee will not permit any ‘character assassination’ or any ‘smearing’ of innocent people.”
In addition to Communist and Nazi infiltrators, HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) set its sights on labor unions, the Work Projects Administration, immigrants and minorities, and even Shirley Temple, who, along with other Hollywood celebrities, had sent a greeting to the leftist French newspaper Ce Soir. “They’ve gone into Hollywood,” said Harold L. Ickes, “and there discovered a great Red plot. They have found dangerous radicals there, led by little Shirley Temple. Imagine the great committee raiding her nursery and seizing her dolls as evidence.”
In 1948 HUAC’s investigation of Alger Hiss propelled the committee member Richard M. Nixon to fame. In the 1950s Joseph McCarthy’s activities in the Senate overshadowed the House committee’s own investigations. McCarthy’s subsequent loss of credibility prepared the way for a dissolution of the committee in 1975.
When Joe Louis went into the ring against Max Schmeling on June 22, he just wanted revenge for Schmeling’s twelfth-round knockout in their 1936 world championship bout. But with Hitler on the march in Europe, the rest of America saw the Louis-Schmeling rematch as a symbolic confrontation between democracy and totalitarianism.
The “Brown Bomber” pounded Schmeling into submission in just over two minutes, and Louis became a national hero.
The Fair Labor Standards Act was enacted on June 25. The bill, applying to industries involved in interstate commerce, established a minimum wage of twenty-five cents per hour, strictly limited child labor, and required time-and-a-half pay for overtime. Also known as the Wages and Hours Bill, this was the last major item of New Deal legislation passed during the Roosevelt administration.
The first issue of Action Comics hit the stands in June, featuring the debut of Superman. “Just before the doomed planet, Krypton, exploded to fragments, a scientist placed his infant son within an experimental rocket-ship, launching it toward earth!” Thus began the saga of the Man of Steel, created by the Cleveland natives Joel Schuster and Jerry Siegel. The alien orphan, rescued by John and Mary Kent of bucolic Smallville, grew up to become “Superman, champion of the oppressed, the physical marvel who had sworn to devote his existence to helping those in need!”
