The first American to make an untethered ascent in a balloon rode with the Frenchman Jean-Pierre-François Blanchard over London, England, in November 1784, but eight years later Blanchard himself became the first man to fly above the American continent, taking off from a prison yard in Philadelphia and drifting over parts of New Jersey on the morning of January 9, 1793. “If the day is calm,” the French balloonist had explained to some Philadelphia enthusiasts who wished to follow his flight on horseback, “there will be full time to leave the prison court without precipitation, as I will ascend perpendicularly, but if the wind blows, permit me, gentlemen, to advise you not to attempt to keep up with me. …” In fact, the day was fine for riding as well as for flight. After several rounds of cannon salutes and a bon voyage from the President of the United States himself, Blanchard was aloft. He enjoyed a snack and glass of wine and sampled the air at the exotic altitude of six hundred feet before landing forty-five minutes later on the Jersey side of the Delaware River. His followers were still on the ferry when he landed, but later they all headed for a local tavern along with the two farmers who had discovered the Frenchman.
1893One Hundred Years Ago
Trouble in Paradise
Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokalani was overthrown on January 17 by a coalition of sugar speculators and missionaries (and some rogue Marines) who had felt compelled to act by the recent course of her government. Some 160 U.S. Marines who had been stationed nearby were recruited for the coup effort, but they joined the action only unofficially. Sanford Dole, who had lived most of his life in the Hawaiian Islands as the child of missionaries, had, before his election to the legislature in 1884, been part of the revolution of 1887 that established a constitutional monarchy. He now assumed temporary powers as head of the provisional government while the movement waited for the United States to proclaim its annexation of Hawaii.
Cooperation was slow in coming. President Cleveland opposed the move, and the revolution’s leaders had to wait for a change of government on the mainland to get what they wanted. When Cleveland requested that the group restore Queen Liliuokalani to power, Dole accused the President of attempting to meddle in Hawaiian politics. After establishing the Republic of Hawaii without U.S. government approval, on July 4, 1894, the group made Dole president until 1900, when the McKinley administration finally annexed Hawaii and named Dole the territory’s first governor.
1918Seventy-Five Years Ago
Spring Forward, Fall Back
Borrowing the idea from its English proponent, William Willet, Congress passed a bill effective March 30 to make the most of summer days by setting clocks ahead one hour in spring and back again in fall. The move was not tremendously popular. Farmers were especially suspicious of the change. One reportedly objected, “My corn needs the morning sun.” National Daylight Savings was repealed the following year but sustained state by state until World War II, when it was imposed year-round in 1942. It has been universal in the United States since 1986.
1943Fifty Years Ago
“Barnyard Marriage”
The Colorado judge Benjamin B. Lindsey, admired for his progressive decisions and feared for his unorthodox writings on youth and marriage in the 1920s, died on March 26 in Los Angeles.
Ben Lindsey had been born in 1869 in Jackson, Tennessee, and had grown up in Tennessee and Colorado before being admitted to the bar in 1894. He became a county judge in Denver in 1901, and over the next twenty-six years there he worked up his theories of juvenile rights while gathering case histories for his most notable books, The Revolt of Modern Youth and The Companionate Marriage.
“Barnyard marriage,” was the evangelist Billy Sunday’s pithy appraisal of the judge’s 1927 work, which also drew fire from the Daughters of the American Revolution and a nation of preachers, many of whom declared Lindsey’s idea “Bolshevistic.” “Pal marriage,” “free love,” or “jazz marriage” were the preferred choices of editorial writers.
The judge himself defined the arrangement as “a legal marriage, with legalized birth control, and with the right to divorce by mutual consent for childless couples, usually without payment of alimony.” From the bench Lindsey had observed many cases in which it was just as hard for a childless couple to divorce as for one with many children. He argued that the contentious arrangement of divorce proceedings mostly suited attorneys, and the law should be more forgiving prior to the arrival of children, eliminating most alimony, which kept the man from starting a new family and kept the woman dependent.
Before his two controversial books appeared, Lindsey’s reforming court decisions had made him one of the most admired men in the country; afterward, a large segment of Americans, from carnival preachers to Walter Lippmann, found something to dislike in the judge. Lindsey pressed for the legalization of mail-order birth-control education and prescriptions for diaphragms and wanted compulsory sex education in the schools.
Lindsey missed by twenty years the revival of the “free love” debate and a second generational struggle. After he died of a heart attack, at age seventy-three, his widow distributed his ashes over his home garden and his Denver courthouse.
Swashbuckler
On February 6 a Los Angeles jury acquitted Errol Flynn of statutory rape. His accuser, the dancer Peggy La Rue Satterlee, claimed Flynn had attacked her and another underage girl in August 1941, aboard his yacht en route to Catalina. After the film star had entered her room and climbed into her bed, the New York Post quoted Satterlee as testifying, “I believe I slapped him on the nose. … I might have kicked him, but I don’t think so. I cried.”
A certain seaminess clung to Flynn despite his acquittal: there were just too many bad stories, and after the war the Australian-born movie actor never recovered the drawing power that he had shown with earlier films like The Adventures of Robin Hood.
The February 6 New Yorker reported important changes in the debutante ritual, which was surviving the war climate by daintily joining in the spirit. Proud parents were buying War Savings Bonds to amend for the frivolousness of deb balls, and the Arthur Murray school introduced a “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” dance, complete with stylized “Praise the Lord” and machine-gunning gestures.
1968Twenty-Five Years Ago
Enter Clean Gene …
The hopes of the antiwar movement turned temporarily to the reticent senator from Minnesota. Having said little more than that he opposed the war in Vietnam, Eugene McCarthy took 42 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary on March 12 against a President from his own party.
McCarthy’s scruffier young volunteers had agreed to shave and keep “Clean for Gene” to help him make the case against Lyndon Johnson’s war. McCarthy, who had published spare, declarative poems (“Now, far-sighted I see the distant/danger/beyond the coffin confines of/telephone booths”), came across as muted and bookish on the stump, more like a professor secure in his tenure than a man hungry for the Presidency. “I am prepared to be your candidate,” he red-bloodedly declared in his announcement.
“He’s all we’ve got,” more than one of his student volunteers confessed to reporters. On January 20 Robert Kennedy had said again, “I would not oppose Lyndon Johnson under any foreseeable circumstances.” McCarthy, the argument went, at least had dared to challenge the President. In early January he showed just 12 percent support in the polls, against the roughed-up President’s 39 percent. Opposition to the war as well as the hard work of his volunteers did much of the rest to help him stun Johnson in New Hampshire. McCarthy’s low-key speeches offered quotations from Toynbee and Hannibal.
Over it all hung the threat that Robert Kennedy might change his mind. “Bobby’s tragedy,” the candidate mused, “is that to beat me, he’s going to have to destroy his brother. … That’s kind of Greek, isn’t it?”
… Exit LBJ
Lyndon Johnson had considered giving up his pursuit of a second term long before he actually did it, in a surprise ending to a nationally televised speech on March 31. The advance press copy of Johnson’s address contained his announcement of a halt to bombing in North Vietnam and proposals on American troop levels—dramatic stuff by itself—but gave no warning that the troubled President would then read on to say, “With American sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge here at home, with our hopes … for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes. … Accordingly, I shall not seek, and will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”
Johnson’s address had started out as a part of his re-election effort. With his proposals for de-escalation in Vietnam, the President hoped to unbalance McCarthy’s single-issue campaign as well as to counter the long-dreaded candidacy of Robert Kennedy, who entered suddenly on March 16. He was announcing finally, declared the senator from New York, not “merely to oppose any man, but to propose new policies … and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done, and I feel that I’m obliged to do all I can.” Kennedy had also been watching the Republican polls and, seeing Nelson Rockefeller weakening, relished the idea of thrashing Richard Nixon in a November race.
None of the dozen or so drafts of Johnson’s speech had even hinted at his quitting the race. He had given his alternate ending to the speech to the Teleprompter operator an hour before airtime. Only a handful of people knew he might use it, one of them his wife, at whom he glanced before reading out the final section. The President had been polling his staff on his own viability as a candidate for at least a year, but more increasingly after the Tet Offensive of January 30. Staffers in the White House remembered him occasionally patting his shirt pocket in response to some fresh attack and saying, “I got my resignation right here in my pocket.”
When the President made his announcement, McCarthy was speaking in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and got the news from his audience. The exuberant scene later reminded him of “Orestes being smothered by the Eumenides,” he said. Senator Kennedy, whose campaign to oust Johnson was merely two weeks old, found himself suddenly without a target. “I don’t know what I can do now,” he confessed. “It’s no fun attacking Nixon so early in the game.”
