The political activist and member of the Socialist Party of America was involved in some of the largest labor disputes in the early 1900’s. The first time his efforts landed him in prison was when he called for the American Railway Union (ARU) to boycott trains carrying Pullman cars during the Pullman Strike. The federal government order the strike to be broken in order to keep the postal service running. When Debs called on the ARU to continue with the strike, ignoring the court order, President Grover Cleveland called in the US Army to break the strike. Debs served 6 months in prison for his involvement.
The second time Debs found himself in prison was after his criticism of the United States’s involvement in World War I. The government had passed the Sedition Act of 1918 in an effort to keep the country unified during their war efforts. It was under this act that Debs was found guilty of trying to undermine the established order. He was sentenced to ten years in prison and began his sentence in April 1919. The Sedition Act was repealed in December, 1920.
In 1921 the Attorney General requested for President Wilson to release Debs due to health issues. Wilson denied the request and wrote: “While the flower of American youth was pouring out its blood to vindicate the cause of civilization, this man, Debs, stood behind the lines sniping, attacking, and denouncing them....This man was a traitor to his country and he will never be pardoned during my administration”
Debs was in prison until December 1921 when he was pardoned by President Harding.
Robert Prager came to the United States from Germany in 1905 at the age of 17. He never settled in one place for long and 1930 found him living in Illinois, working as a coal miner. Patriotic hysteria had descended on the country now that the United States had enetered the war against the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary.
In April 1918 a group of miners warned Prager to stay away from the mine in Maryville. The following day he left his home in Collinsville, a short distance away, and posted copies of a document attacking a member of the miners union. Back at his home a mob captured him and he was rescued by a policeman who threw him in jail. Word soon got out there was a “German spy” in custody. A mob, fueld by “patriotism”, stormed the jail, removed Prager, and hung him in front of two hundred people.
Eleven men were tried for the murder and the jury found all eleven innocent.
Edith Wilson was President Woodrow Wilson’s second wife. His first wife, Ellen Wilson, had died early in his first term. Just over one year and four months after her death and still in his first term as president he was remarried. Since the courtship happened so quickly there were rumors of an affair and theories the couple had murdered Wilson’s first wife.
Edith Wilson was Edith Bolling Galt before she became first lady. In 1904 she became the first woman licensed to drive in Washington D.C. The vehicle she was licensed to drive cost $1600 (in 1904) and ran on electricity. We now think of electric cars as being the future but in the early 1900’s this was modern technology. In her future as First Lady she would drive around the city and police officers would stop traffic to wave her through.
The Birth of a Nation was the first feature length film and also was the first film screened in the White House. The movie is important for it’s advancement of the genre of film and is preserved in the National Film Registry. Three hours long, it’s first part depicts the Civil War, complete with a re-enacted assassination of President Lincoln, and it’s second part follows the path of Reconstruction. It paints the Ku Klux Klan as heroes against the threat of African-Americans. African-Americans were depicted by white actors in blackface.
The Birth of a Nationwas adapted from a novel titledThe Clansman by Thomas Dixon. It’s name was changed from The Clansman to The Birth of a Nationafter Dixon suggested the title change due to it’s treatment of the civil war. Dixon had met future President Woodrow Wilson at Johns Hopkin University. Both men were born in the south and held racist beliefs. He arranged for the private screening of the film in the White House. One of the panes of text even quoted Wilson’s History of the American People, saying “The White men were roused by mere instinct of self-preservcation… until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the south, to protect the Southern country.”
The movie’s sequel, The Fall of a Nation, was the first sequel ever made.
It happened after World War 1 was incited in June 1914 by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. This event triggered a cascade of alliances to be called into effect which brought most European coutnries to war. One month after the assassination, amidst escalating conflict, the New York Stock Exchange shut it’s doors out of fear foreign investors would sell their assets to fund the war effort overseas.
At the time, foreigners owned billions of dollars in U.S. railroad stock. If they sold their assets and accquired gold they could ship the metal overseas and use the currency to fund the war. The United States, who didn’t want to abandon the gold standard, decided to suspend all trading in order to keep whatever gold they had within it’s borders.
The war caused the European countries to abandon or suspend the gold standard. This led to a weakening of their currencies but the exchange rate stayed relatively stable, meaning American goods costed less than their European counterparts. As a result the value of American exports tripled, it’s trade surplus exceeded one billion dollars for the first time, and America changed from a net debtor to a net creditor country.
The shutdown of the NYSE lasted until November 28, 1914.
The Ludlow Massacre of 1914 occurred when the Colorado National Guard and forces from the coal mining companies fired into a group of striking coal miners. The striking miners had erected a tent colony in Ludlow, Colorado, land leased by the miner’s union close to a mine whose chief owner was John D. Rockefeller Jr.
Shooting began when the striking miners tried to flank a machine gun erected by the mining companies near the camp. The gunfight continued all day long and by day’s end nineteen people had lost their lives and the tent colony had been destroyed.
The following day “a telephone linesman going through the ruins of the Ludlow tent colony ... found the charred, twisted bodies of eleven children and two women.” They had taken cover in a pit below a tent and suffocated when the tent above them had caught fire, trapping them beneath.
This initial massacre sparked ten days of fighting that only ended after President Wilson sent in federal troops to disarm both sides. A report on the massacre led to both the 8-hour work day and the development of child labor laws.
The Scopes Monkey Trial was the trial which brought the issue of whether or not it was appropriate to teach evolution in public schools to the forefront of the national consciousness. On one side of the argument stood those believing in the literal interpretation of the bible and on the other side were those who believed in the importance of teaching students modern science.
The groundwork for the showdown began with the passing of Tennessee’s Butler Act which made it illegal to teach evolution in public schools. John Scopes, a substitute teacher, allowed himself to be accused of violating this act in order to bring the issue to the courts. William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential nominee and former Secretary of State under President Woodrow Wilson, agreed to represent the state of Tennessee and, by extension, the literal interpretation of the bible. Over the course of the trial Bryan was called to the stand and forced to defend his own personal beliefs on whether or not the bible was indeed factual.
Scopes's lawyer declined to make his closing speech which, under rules of the court, prevented Bryan from presenting his closing speech. Bryan distributed his closing statement to reporters but never presented it in court. His speech appealed to the jury to allow God’s word to be the driving force to change civilization for the better. Scopes was found guilty but after the appeal process the verdict was set aside on a technicality.
Bryan died in his sleep a mere five days after the conclusion of the initial trial, ending his long and storied career in the public spotlight.
The incident is detailed in a book called The Washing Away of Wrongs by Song Ci. The investigator determined that a villager was murdered by a sickle. They also knew that blow flies are attracted to human tissue and blood. With these two pieces of knowledge the investigator asked the members of the village to lay their sickles down in the village square. Blow flies soon began to gather on one sickle, the sickle that was covered in the blood of the murdered villager. The owner of the sickle soon broke down and confessed to the murder.
Not only was this the first example of forensic science being used to solve the murder, it was also the first recorded use of insects to solve a crime. It brings to mind the movie The Silence of the Lambs. Buffalo Bill raised a very specific type of moth, the Death Head’s Moth, and he would stuff the pupa down his victim’s throat. In the movie, this fact was instrumental in the investigation and the roots of this type of evidence collection can be traced hundreds of years back to China.
The mansion was built by Sarah Winchester in the Santa Clara Valley of California after she was left the sole remaining heir to the company which made Winchester rifles. Her husband, the son of the founder of the company, and infant daughter had died leaving Sarah in sole possession of a sizable fortune. The distraught woman went to a medium after the death of her family and was told to continuously build a home to house the spirits of all those killed by Winchester rifles. She followed the medium's advice and in 1884 construction began in California and continued for 38 years until her death in 1922.
The Winchester House reached a height of seven stories before an earthquake in 1906 left the building four-stories tall. It has become a tourist attraction due to it’s randomly constructed rooms made without a master building plan.
During 1786 and 1787, Daniel Shay led thousands of farmers in a rebellion against the Massachusetts State Government called Shay’s Rebellion. The participants were all fed up with the economic conditions after the Revolutionary War that saw them lose their land and possessions when they couldn’t pay their taxes. During this time, the federal government was unable to fund a national army so the responsibilty fell to the states and private citizens to defend themselves with their own men.
The rebellion's first priority was to overtake the Armory in Springfield. This invasion was stopped by a recently-formed Massachusetts state militia. When the rebels left to regroup their forces a privately-formed militia comprised of three thousand men marched on Springfield and put an end to the rebellion with few casualties.
When General George Washington heard about the uprising of his fellow citizens he came out of retirement to head the Constitional Convention. With Washington as it’s leader the convention ratified the US Constitution, giving the central government much more power than before.
The Second Amendment says “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” In the atmosphere immediately following Shay’s Rebellion it didn’t seem economically feasible to keep a standing army capable of suppressing future rebellions. What the writers had in mind, instead of an indivdual having the right to bear arms, was that the state had the right to bear arms. It was the right of each state to keep a militia capable of controlling their population. The founding fathers assumed there would be future uprisings and wanted to make sure the states rights to take action was guaranteed. Thomas Jefferson, when he heard about Shay’s Rebellion, best articulated the founding fathers's attitude towards the uprising: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
