In April the Federal Red River campaign degenerated into exactly the kind of misguided side show that the new supreme commander, Ulysses S. Grant, had vowed to eliminate from his war effort. The former chief of staff, Henry Halleck, had devised the campaign in the hope that U.S. troops in Mexico could frighten off the puppet dictator that the French emperor, Napoleon III, had installed in Mexico. Grant replaced Halleck too late to prevent a Union column under Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks from marching north through Louisiana in an attempt to invade Texas. The naval force under Adm. David Dixon Porter that followed Banks up the Red River was more interested in seizing cotton than in battling the Confederates.
Neither force even got into Texas. Banks, a former Massachusetts politician with no military experience, had been manhandled in Virginia earlier in the war by Stonewall Jackson, and he repeated this failure in Louisiana at the hands of Jackson’s protégé, Gen. Richard Taylor. On April 8 Taylor routed Banks at Sabine Cross Roads, pursued the Union retreat, and defeated Banks again the next day at Pleasant Hill, ending the Union offensive.
In his haste to escape, Banks almost had to abandon his naval support. Porter’s boats, bloated with commandeered cotton bales, were mired on the Red River’s bottom by unusually low water levels, and only an ingenious damming of the river downstream saved them. Despite the fortunate escape, Grant was furious that troops so frivolously used were unavailable to him for an attack on Mobile that spring.
The Reverend M. R. Watkinson of Ridleyville, Pennsylvania, was distressed about the spiritual health of a nation adrift in the trauma of civil war when he wrote to Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase in November 1861. “If our Republic were now shattered beyond recognition,” he asked, “would not the antiquaries of succeeding centuries rightly reason from our past that we were a heathen nation?” Watkinson proposed that the nation’s faith be represented on its coins by the motto “God, Liberty, Law.”
Secretary Chase, grappling with the politics of war financing, immediately recognized the idea as a chance to tap into the nation’s resurgent religious sentiment. He ordered several new coin patterns based on Watkinson’s model. After considering mottoes like “God Our Trust” and “God and Our Country,” the government settled upon “In God We Trust,” which first appeared on the two-cent pieces of 1864 by order of the Act of April 22. The motto grew in prominence, and since 1938 it has been part of every coin minted by the U.S. government.
1889 One Hundred Years Ago
America’s settlement of its western frontier had for a century followed a pattern of steady migration that gradually filled up an area, built up towns, and pushed back the Indians. On April 22 the first Oklahoma settlers telescoped this process into one frenzied afternoon.
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 had transplanted eastern Indian tribes at great hardship into what is now Oklahoma, a land that no white settlers wanted. The Indians brought with them President Andrew Jackson’s promise that the land would belong to them “as long as the grass grows, or water runs.”
Only fifty years later the tribes faced settlers known as Boomers, who had changed their minds about the territory and were being chased out regularly by the U.S. Army. By the time Benjamin Harrison became President in 1889, the Boomers were demanding that all of the Indian Territory be opened up to them. In March the federal government bent to their will by issuing a law empowering it to buy from the Indians two million acres in the center of the territory, an unsettled area that had been set aside for Indian tribes that never arrived. White settlement in this district would become legal at noon on April 22; cavalry gunshots would be the signal for settlers to swarm into the territory to attempt to claim free 160-acre plots of their own.
The country had never seen a spectacle like “Harrison’s Hoss Race.” The army of one hundred thousand hopeful homesteaders who had been milling around the borders of the unoccupied territory burst forth in a ragtag wave of horses, trains, wagons, and even bicycles. “It seemed as if some thousands of human beings had gone mad,” remembered one pioneer. The first Boomers arrived at the site of Oklahoma City at 12:40 P.M.; within a few hours the bare expanse of prairie had become a tent city of ten thousand people.
The homesteaders faced long odds. There was only one plot for every ten Boomers, and many who thought they had staked claims to legitimate plots were later forced out when streets were surveyed. Further reducing their chances were the Sooners, who earned their nickname by sneaking into the territory before the signal, hiding near choice plots, and claiming them before anyone else arrived. Though for years Sooner was synonymous with treachery among Oklahomans, ultimately they would salute their roguish ancestors by naming Oklahoma the Sooner State.
By nightfall of April 22 thousands of feet, hooves, and wheels had trampled the territory’s prairie grasses and flowers into mulch. Further land runs, erosion, and the plow carved up so much forest and grassland by the time of statehood in 1907 that the Oklahoma native Will Rogers would remark that “we spoiled the best Territory in the world to make a State.”
1939 Fifty Years Ago
April 1: With his military victory all but complete, Generalissimo Francisco Franco of Spain received formal diplomatic recognition of his fascist government from the Roosevelt administration. In also lifting its arms embargo against Spain, the United States became the last Western power to concede that the Spanish Civil War was over. The war had killed almost one million people by the time Franco’s troops marched into Madrid, the final Loyalist stronghold, two days later.
Most observers regarded the Spanish Civil War as a microcosm of the ideological struggle that was dividing all of Europe into armed camps. The fascist governments of Germany and Italy used the war as a training ground for their own troops, supplying up to 40 percent of Franco’s military force. The Soviet Union similarly aided the Spanish Loyalists in opposition to Franco, but the Western democracies contributed only small volunteer groups. Their neutrality effectively guaranteed victory for the side they unofficially opposed. Franco also received on April 1 a telegram from his other notable ally, Pope Pius XII, offering “sincere thanks for Spain’s desired Catholic victory.”
April 20: A twenty-year-old out-fielder named Ted Williams got his first major-league hit for the Boston Red Sox. In his third season Williams would bat .406, an average not since equaled, to establish himself as one of the finest hitters in baseball history. Though he lost almost five full years of his baseball career serving in the Marine Corps as a fighter pilot in World War II and Korea, Williams’s accomplishments were still impressive enough to earn him admission to baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1966.
April 30: The National Broadcasting Company offered “a new deal in communication” when it began regular television service with a broadcast of President Roosevelt at the opening of the New York World’s Fair. About two hundred television receivers, several of them at the fairground itself but some up to fifty miles away, were tuned in to the telecast. While observers like the Harvard engineer Chester L. Dawes scoffed that Americans would never forsake radio for a medium that “demands continuous attention,” the flawless telecast created a ready market for the television receivers that went on sale in New York stores for the first time the next day.
For most families the few hours a week of programming that were available did not justify paying several hundred dollars for one of the early sets, but Americans did buy ten thousand sets before World War II virtually halted television’s progress. Military strategists quickly devoted its technical innovations and materials to radar, a system that operated on the same principles as television. At war’s end, television stormed forward, fueled by the country’s new prosperity and leisure, as well as by a horde of Navytrained radar operators ready to become TV repairmen.
1964 Twenty-five Years Ago
Though the American financial community was pleased by President Johnson’s continuation of John F. Kennedy’s pro-business policies, it was briefly stunned by two judicial decisions in April. On the sixth the Supreme Court of the United States nullified the merger of two Lexington, Kentucky, banks on the grounds that any combination of companies that were “major competitive factors” in the same market violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. The merged bank would have held more than 50 percent of the assets of all banks in Kentucky’s Fayette County.
The next day a federal grand jury indicted eight major steel companies for having conspired to fix prices in the late 1950s. Two years earlier President Kennedy had blocked an industrywide attempt to raise prices and had initiated the litigation against the steel companies. The indictment led economists to question whether the inflation that had followed the Korean War had resulted from natural forces in a free market or from a criminal conspiracy.
With the stock market at an all-time high in April and leading economic indicators almost unanimously favor- able, the business community largely disregarded these setbacks and retained the momentum of one of the longest periods of economic growth in the nation’s history.
April 5: After several weeks of battling kidney and liver disease, Gen. Douglas MacArthur died in a Washington hospital at the age of eighty-four. The charismatic general was one of the most decorated military figures in U.S. history, holding the rank of senior five-star officer at the time of his death. MacArthur had been demonstrating his renowned tenacity in fighting off a series of illnesses for several years; after three major operations in the last month of his life, he was still entertaining bedside visitors with old war stories before falling into a peaceful coma two days before his death. MacArthur’s final struggle seemed to bear out the prediction he had made before Congress in his farewell speech of 1951: “Old soldiers never die—they just fade away.”
April 14: Sidney Poitier won an Academy Award for his performance in Lilies of the Field, becoming the first black American to win the Oscar for Best Actor.
