History Spotlight, 3/26

Dr. Jonas Salk announces his discovery of a vaccine for polio on this day in 1953. It is difficult for people of my generation to comprehend what a nightmare polio was. HIV/AIDS doesn't even begin to compare. Polio is, perversely, largely a disease of modern sanitation. Prior to the medical and sanitation revolutions in the late 19th century people were exposed to a whole raft of viruses on a daily basis, especially in the cities. As part of this, they picked up a low-level immunity to polio. Children with weaker immune systems still got it, but it wasn't on an epidemic level. Once sanitation levels increased, people's natural immunity went down and incidents of polio went up. By 1952, there were 58,000 cases of polio reported, with 21,000 of them leading to loss of motor function.

Polio spreads easily through human contact. No animals are known to contract it. Its usual avenue of transmission is through out old pal, the fecal-oral highway. Someone uses the bathroom, doesn't wash his hands (perhaps due to being evil), then shakes your hand. Then your wipe your nose with your hand or settle in for a gold-mining session and congrats, you've contracted polio. In places with group showers (summer camps, for example) the transmission gets even easier.

During most of the 20th century, medical science was on an onward-and-upward kick. A vaccine for smallpox, once the curse of everyone from serfs to kings, was developed and it seemed possible that any disease out there just needed some good old-fashioned science thrown at it and a cure would be found. With a disease ravaging the world's youth and with science at that point triumphant over many other types of disease, it was only natural that a race for a vaccine begin.

The first few attempts were unsuccessful. One variety, developed in 1936 required much more dead polio viruses for one dose than was feasible. Another version caused allergic reactions, but no immunity to polio. Still another version actually caused a number of fatal cases. In 1948, a researcher named John Enders successfully isolated and cultivated the polio virus, making it much easier to examine in the lab without having to go out and get samples in the wild. In 1952, Jonas Salk announced the creation of a dead virus vaccine that could be administered through injection. Five years after that, an orally administered vaccine was developed and the world breathed a sigh of relief.

These days, polio is on its way to following smallpox to the ash heap of history. Smallpox was announced as being completely eradicated in 1977. In 1988, the World Health Organization announced its plan to eradicate polio. Worldwide cases of polio went from 350,000 in 1988 to 1,300 in 2007.

History Spotlight, 3/25

King Richard "Coeur de Lion" I of England proves why arrogance doesn't equal immortality on this day in 1199 when he catches a crossbow bolt to the neck. If you've seen The Lion in Winter or any of the various flavors of Robin Hood, you know the drill: Richard had been off beating on the Muslims in the Holy Land for a while, leaving England (which was much larger in those days and encompassed a big chunk of France) under the rule of his brother, John. Like the Steward of Gondor, John wasn't really the king, but ran things in the king's name. Unlike the Steward of Gondor, John wasn't at all shy about trying to have his brother declared dead and have himself made king.

When Richard returned from the Crusades, he wasn't overly impressed with his younger brother. Not that he was ever impressed with him - the depiction of their relationship in Lion in Winter is pretty much spot on. He wound up publicly forgiving him in order to present a unified family to the people.

While John was pretending to run England and Richard was pretending to run the Holy Land, France had been eying England's holdings on the Continent. Quite frankly, they had a point. "Why should England, separated by 21 miles of the treacherous English Channel be running land that rightfully belongs to us?" Well, it's hard to argue with that. As for Richard, he felt that England was the rump state and that he was rightfully the king of France (all of it). After all, the Plantagenets were of French stock, mostly spoke French and saw the holdings in England as merely a ready source of cash and cannon fodder (except they didn't have cannons back then, but you get my point).

King Richard of England and King Phillip of France had been good friends since they were kids. In fact, if you want to go by The Lion in Winter, they were much, much more than friends, although most historians have refused to comment on that. In any event, they were pals and the spat over who got to run France was to be their undoing.

Richard had a fortress in Normandy named (and no, I'm not kidding) "The Saucy Castle," a better name for a gay bar I could not have come up with. That doesn't have anything to do with the story, but I wanted to bring it up.

Richard won several important victories over Phillip, but like most Plantagenets, in victory he got cocky and cruel. During Lent, he went on a rampage, burning, looting and generally pillaging his way through the French country side. He heard a rumor about one little castle at Chalus-Chabrol that was supposed to hold a huge cache of Roman gold that the peasants were keeping secret. He laid siege to the castle and demanded that the gold (which didn't exist) be turned over to him. On the morning of March 25, 1199 he was walking the perimeter, inspecting the work of the siege brigade. Occasionally, one of the defenders would take a shot at him, but he felt he was safely out of range. He wasn't. A crossbowman got in a lucky shot and hit Richard in the collar bone - right in that meaty section between your neck and your arm. Antiseptic medicine being completely nonexistent, the wound quickly became gangrenous and Richard died on April 6th. Prior to his death, he generously pardoned the boy who had shot him and let him go with a hundred shillings. After Richard's death, his forces were not so generous. They rounded the boy up and had him flayed alive.

History Spotlight, 3/24

Famed American animator Ub Iwerks is born on this day in 1901. In 1919, he met Walt Disney while they were slaving away in anonymity in an art studio in Kansas City. They mutually decided that there had to be a better way to make a living and founded the Laugh-O-Gram cartoon studio. Walt used it as a stepping stone to get many of his contemporaries in to animation, including Friz Freling. The company didn't last long, as Kansas City isn't exactly hotbed of movie making. Iwerks and Disney moved out to Los Angeles to try again.

Iwerks's first character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit had a great deal of success in 1928. But when Disney went to Universal head Carl Laemmie to ask for a budget increase, Lammie instead reminded him that Universal owned the character and that the budget would be cut by 20 percent. Laemmie furthermore informed Disney that he had put most of Disney's employees under contract with Universal, with the exception of Iwerks and a couple others.
Disney and Iwerks learned a valuable lesson from this: control your own creation.

Iwerks worked feverishly to come up with other characters including Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar. Whether or not it was he or Disney who created Mickey Mouse, is certainly a matter of debate. Iwerks animated the first few Mickey Mouse characters entirely by hand and soon burned out under the workload and under Walt's autocratic style. He also felt that he wasn't getting enough (or any) of the credit. In 1930, he left Disney to start his own studio.
A number of people inside the industry had the same idea that Iwerks had -that the Disney studio's success was due mostly to Iwerks's talent and hard work- and he had several prominent backers.

Unfortunately, Iwerks was trying to start a cartoon studio from the ground up in an industry that was swamped with cartoon studios. Iwerks Studios never presented a serious threat to Disney, Fleischer or Warner Brothers and it went out of busness in 1936. In 1937, he was hired by Leon Schlesinger Productions (Warner Brothers) to create four new Porky Pig shorts and a couple more for the also-ran Columbia Pictures cartoon studio, but he soon found himself back in Disney's employ in 1940. At Disney, he concentrated on improving special effects and is given credit for combining live action and animation seamlessly in Song of the South. He died of a heart attack in 1971 at the age of 70.

He was known in the industry for being a fast, competent worker whose productions always came in on time and under budget. Among cartoon aficionados, he was known for having an absolutely crazy imagination. Chuck Jones said it best when he noted that "Iwerks is Screwy spelled backwards." Here's one of my favorites, Balloon Land:

History Spotlight, 3/23

Tsar Paul I of Russia gets whacked in a manner out of a Martin Scorsese picture on this day in history, 1801. Paul always had the reputation of being a dunderhead and nut, but modern history revisionism has attempted to paint him in a more sympathetic light. It doesn't work, he still comes off as a dunderhead and a nut.

Paul was born in 1754, the son of Catherine "The Great" and, maybe, the future Emperor Peter III. That whole horse thing about Catherine may or may not be true (I'd rather not think about it) but Cathy sure did love the kind of stallions that went on two legs. From almost the moment of Paul's birth Catherine allowed the rumor to be spread that Peter wasn't his father but that it was really Sergei Saltykov, a big side of beef who was Catherine's first and favorite lover. Nobody really knows for sure, as Paul did look a lot like Peter and Cathy was kind of a manipulative bitch who liked to screw with her husband's head. But she did get around.

He was mostly raised by his grandmother, the Empress Elizabeth. That's good because the only thing keeping Cathy from putting him to death was that she had already used up her quota of murders that month. After he grew up and got married (to a woman his mother chose), he still occasionally found ground up chunks of glass in his food. There's a scene I'd like to see: "Aw, Mom, are you still trying to kill me?" "Just for old time's sake, son!" Man, what a weird family.

At some point, either Cathy sent him away or he decided to stop tempting fate and took the opportunity to leave court and set up an estate. When she died in November of 1796 and he ascended to the throne of Russia, he probably breathed a sigh of relief. But he turned out to be about as stable as any other randomly selected Romanov and immediately started to tick people off. He recalled the expedition sent to conquer Persia right when everybody was getting psyched up for it and he made a point of talking about how he wasn't really illegitimate which only made people think about it all the more. Remember how Peter the Great dragged Russia into the modern age, kicking and screaming in the early part of the 18th century? Well, right when they had gotten used to it, Paul starts dragging them back to the middle ages. Finally, he got Russia involved in foreign wars that nobody could quite see the point of. Invade Persia? Sure, Russia had always felt that Persia was theirs anyway, but why pick fights with France in the Mediterranean or the British in India?

The ineptly executed foreign adventures drained the treasury and annoyed the military establishment. The nobility was irked about having to live by some outdated chivalric code. The middle class was bent about the reforms Paul enacted for the peasants, which made it easier to serfs to become middle class. And nobody cared what the serfs thought. Anybody who was in a position to warn Paul or otherwise assist him was thinking, "Geez, I wish somebody would kill that bastard."

'Round about the end of 1800, a conspiracy was hatched among the nobility to settle the Paul question permanently. On the night of March 23, 1801, a group of military officers headed by two generals got good and wasted and charged into the royal bedroom where they found Paul cowering behind some curtains. They dragged him out and attempted to force him to sign a letter of abdication. He resisted, feebly, and they stabbed him a bunch of times, strangled him and finally jumped up and down on him. He was immediately succeeded by his son, 23-year old Alexander I, who was actually in the palace at the time of the murder. General Nicholas Zubov, one of the assassins, clapped him on the back and said, "Time to grow up! Go and rule!"

Thunderbirds are go!

Huzzah and excelsior! My computer is up and running again, so expect posting to begin next week.
Thanks for your patience!

Posting will be light this week

My computer is dead right now and I'm playing the RMA-two step with Asus, so I'll be posting on a catch-as-catch can basis until I get this fixed.
In lieu of actual content, please accept this bizarre parody of Watchmen as a Saturday morning cartoon. It helps if you've read the book or seen the movie.

History Spotlight, 3/13

On March 13, 1964, over a several hour period in New York City's Greenwich Village, Kitty Genovese is attacked by an assailant three different times and is ultimately murdered. The original story is that 38 different people witnessed the murder and none of them called the police because they "didn't want to get involved." The reality is somewhat more complex.
At about 3 AM, Kitty Genovese was walking home from her job as a manager of a bar when she noticed she was being followed. She started to run, but her attacker, one Winston Moseley, quickly overtook her and stabbed her twice in the back. She screamed "Oh my God, he stabbed me!" and Moseley ran away when a neighbor shouted, "Let that girl alone!" There were several other neighbors who heard the screams, but with the windows closed on a raw spring night, none of them recognized it as a cry for help.
There were some calls made to the police, but they were given low priority because it seemed that a woman was only getting beaten on the street, not murdered. Now, I'm certainly no law enforcement officer (just a CIA assassin) but I would think a woman getting beaten on the street would, in fact, fall under police jurisdiction.
Kitty dragged herself off the street to an alley, where Moseley returned ten minutes later and found her. He stabbed her several more times and sexually assaulted he as she lay dying.
Finally, when it was much too late, a witness to the last attack called the police and they arrived a few minutes later. A few weeks later, The New York Times ran a sensational story claiming that, basically 38 people clearly heard the screams for help and none of them did anything about it. While that turns out to be not true, what is true that at least a dozen people saw at least one of the attacks and yet only two of them ever called the cops. Some of them thought it was just a guy roughing up his girlfriend, but really, that's pretty bad too. The NYPD bears no small amount of responsibility, as they had been called to what was at least a domestic disturbance and didn't feel the need to respond. As for Mr. Moesley, he is serving a life sentence in Attica, having last been denied parole on March 13, 2008.

Wow, kind of a downer post for a Friday, huh? To make up for it here is the mildly controversial Bugs Bunny short "Southern Fried Rabbit" (it's because of Bugs in blackface getting whipped by Yosemite Sam). It's still one of my favorites. Have a nice weekend!

History Spotlight, 3/12

Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, is canonized on this day in 1622. Ignatius wasn't one of these "sit around and listen to the music of the spheres and ponder the nature of evil" types. He saw evil (well, evil as he defined it) and went out to fight it.

He was born on October 23, 1491 in Loyola, Spain. As the youngest of 13(!) children, he didn't have much hope for the family fortune (such as it was) so his best bet was to hit the road and try to make a name for himself either as a priest or a warrior. Originally, his name was Inigo Lopez, but he changed it to Ignatius some time after leaving Spain because it sounded less foreign. At the age of 18, he signed on with the Duke of Najera, where he impressed the Duke with his leadership and diplomatic skills. He fought in many battle without injury until May 20, 1521 when, while fighting the French at the Pamplona fortress, he took a cannonball in the legs, breaking both of them. He had several incredibly painful operations on his legs and spent a long period in recuperation.

During this time, he read the De Vita Christi, a biography of Jesus written by Ludolph of Saxony. Ludolph wrote in a much more modern tone than the usual histories of the time. He invited the reader to imagine himself at each of the great moments of Christ's life and to picture what it was like to be there, or even to imagine what Christ was going through Himself. This is all standard stuff for modern historians but for the 1520's it was pretty mind-blowing and Ignatius had his mind well and truly blown.

After his recovery. he decided to abandon his old ways and devote the rest of his life to the Church and, specifically, to the conversion of non-Christians in the Holy Land. As a religious ascetic, he walked to the Holy Land, scrounging meals and lodging when he could and starving and sleeping under a tree when he couldn't. By the time he was in his forties, he had acquired six followers and created the Society of Jesus, a missionary society dedicated to spreading Catholicism and rolling back the Protestant Reformation. He died of malaria in Rome on July 31, 1556 at the age of 65, which is pretty old for the time. He was beatified by Pope Paul V on July 27, 1609 and canonized by Pope Gregory XV on March 13, 1622. The basilica built next to the house he was born in (which still stands) is one of the more famous monuments to him. I chose Ignatius as my patron saint at my Confirmation mostly because of the cool name, but considering my argumentative, conservative nature I think it fits pretty well.

History Spotlight, 3/11

The Great Blizzard of 1888 strikes the east coast of the US on this day. New Jersey, New York and Connecticut, along with parts of Massachusetts received upwards of 5 feet of snow. Winds as high as 45 mph created drifts of over 50 feet high. Temperatures in Central Park dipped down to 6 degrees, a record for the time.
It all started as a typical late-winter day in New England: rainy and warm. As the front moved in and the temperatures dropped, it began to snow heavily on the evening of the eleventh. After midnight on the twelfth, the snow really began coming down and didn't stop for the next 48 hours.
Needless to say, the East Coast from Virginia to Maine was completely locked down. Major US cities were isolated for days, as all the telegraph lines were down and over 200 ships were either grounded or wrecked. It took almost eight days to clear the New York to Boston rail corridor. To make matters worse, when the snow started melting, then the flooding began. In all, it is estimated that 400 people died during the blizzard.

History Spotlight, 3/10

At 6:30 am on Saturday, March 10, 1906, the Courrieres mine disaster occurred in northern France. In all, 1099 miners (many of them children) were killed. It was the worst mining accident in the world until the Benxihu Colliery accident in China in 1942, which killed 1,549 people. The accident was caused by a dust explosion, where combustible dust (in this case, coal) suspended in the air in a confined location is ignited. What actually ignited the coal dust is still unknown. There are two theories: one, improper use of explosives or two, a miner's lamp igniting concentrated methane which, in turn, ignited the dust. There is evidence to support both of these theories but, as anyone who could give eye-witness testimony perished in the blast, we'll probably never know.

Rescue attempts began immediately after the explosion, but the lack of trained mine rescuers in France along with the huge scale of the disaster meant that what rescuers there were, weren't very helpful. Within two days, experts from Germany and the United Kingdom had arrived, but by April 2, only 194 bodies had been recovered. The complexity of the mine also hampered rescue efforts. It had many openings and may tunnels that connected to one another. Ostensibly, this was to make exit easier in case of a collapse but, in reality, all it did was allow the blast to collapse even more of the mine than it would have.

In all, about 600 miners made it to the surface alive, although many of them suffered injuries from the blast or gas inhalation. Twenty days later, the last 13 survivors were brought to the surface having subsisted on horse and condensation for all that time. The disaster was one of the early big media sensations. Freedom of the press was a relatively new concept in France (it had only been codified into law since 1881) and the proximity of Paris meant that no less than five newspapers were vying with each other for the big story.

History Spotlight, 3/9

David Rizzio, the Italian secretary of Mary, Queen of Scots is murdered by Mary's husband, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley in Holyrood Castle in Edinburg, Scotland on this day in Edinburgh, Scotland. Rizzio was born in Turin in 1533. His father was a music teacher and he had always wanted to rise in status. This led Rizzio to courts of various low-rent nobles in Europe: the Duke of Savoy in Nice, then the Count de Morret. In 1561, while in the service of de Morret that Rizzio found himself in Scotland, as the Count was there on diplomatic business.

Rizzio tried to move another notch by getting himself into the Mary's court. They weren't hiring (it probably didn't help that he was thought to be extremely ugly), so he got in good with the Queen's musicians who had just thrown out a member needed someone to sing bass. It was a Pete Best/Ringo Starr situation.

This was the entry Rizzio needed into the Scottish court. Because of his upbringing, he was already a skilled musician and singer and his affable Continental manner soon brought him to the notice of the Queen. Queen Mary may have been born in Scotland, but she had been raised in France since she was five years old and the loud, brash ways of the Scots frequently aggravated her. Mary and Rizzio soon became good friends and she made him her secretary in 1564.

All the things that made him such an attractive companion only served to annoy the Scottish nobles: he was a climber, he was lowly born, he was Catholic and he was a foreigner. Rizzio didn't think much of the Scots, either and the private little giggles that he and the Queen would share only annoyed them all the more. It didn't help that one of these nobles, Lord Darnley who she had married in 1565, was a certified nutjob, alcoholic and abusive. If he were alive today, you'd see him on an episode of Cops.

Darnely didn't like Rizzio at all. He didn't like all the time Mary was spending with Rizzio and, most of all, he didn't like the way Mary treated him like he wasn't good enough for her. Darnley started spending his time drinking and thinking about what his wife, who wouldn't touch him, was doing with that Italian guy all those hours behind closed door. Darnley's buddies laid it on thick too. One can imagine them out on a day's hunt, getting well stewed, and his pals going, "I can't believe you're putting up with that, man! You're, like, her boss!"

On March 9, 1566 it all came to a head. Darnley and his cronies burst into the Queen's private dining room and demanded that Rizzio be turned over to them. The Queen refused and Rizzio hid behind her. Everybody's screaming - Darnley, his pals, the Queen. Rizzio is praying loudly in Italian. People outside of the castle (Holyrood is in town) were understandably concerned and several hundered of them soon showed up with makeshift weapons to offer assistance. Darnley jammed a pistol in his wife's back and made her dismiss the crowd.

Rizzio was then stabbed 56 times, thrown down a flight of stairs, stripped of his valuables and quickly buried. Mary had him dug up and interred in the sepulcher of the Kings of Scotland, which really annoyed the nobles even more.

History Spotlight, 3/6

"There's no basement in the Alamo!"

The Battle of the Alamo ends after an 13-day siege on this day in 1836. The territory of Texas had always been a thorn in the side of Mexico. Technically a part of Mexico, but settled and occupied by people who didn't consider themselves Mexicans. Of course, for their part, Mexico had been considered a part of Spain up until the Mexican War for Independence and had only been a sovereign nation since 1824. What, exactly, comprised this new country called Mexico was a matter for debate. Still is, depending on who you talk to.
At the end of the war, like the US at the end of the American Revolution, Mexico was flat broke and didn't have the money to field an army to keep the domestic peace. In a place like Texas, which was sparsely populated and what population it did have was mostly really, really angry Comanche Indians. To try to kill two birds with one stone, the Mexican government encouraged the Texans to start their own militias and also loosened up immigration policies into the territory. This started a flood of immigrants from the US into Mexico and soon the native-born Mexicans were outnumbered by the immigrant Americans (I think that's pretty funny).
After that, it was the same old story: Immigrants bringing in their own culture (in this case, slavery), the host culture belatedly trying to rescind the laws that made immigration so attractive in the first place (Anglo immigrants weren't supposed to have to pay property taxes for ten years). The Anglos mostly ignored the new laws that were inconvenient to them and the new Mexican government, being 700 miles away in Mexico City couldn't do much about it. By 1834, there were 30,000 Anglos and 5,000 slaves to 7,800 Mexicans in Texas.
Texas was not a choice assignment for soldiers serving in the Mexican military and many, if not most of the in Texas were hardened criminals who were given the choice of Texas or the noose. Mexico was also trying to dictate which crops the Anglo Texans were to grow. Texans wanted to grow cotton, which was fetching very high prices on the international market and the Mexican government wanted corn and wheat. Along with all of this, the Mexican government was staunchly Catholic and expected the Protestant settlers to tithe (that is, give 10% of their earnings) to the Mother Church.
Geez, I'm not even up to the actual battle yet. OK, so tensions rose and everyone said, "Let's have a war."
On February 23, 1836, the Mexican army arrived at the sometime-capital of Texas, San Antonio and laid siege to the city's defenders who occupied the Alamo mission. Things stayed that way for a few weeks until March 6 when 3000 Mexican troops started an all-out assault on the 187 defenders inside. Things went downhill rapidly. The first two assaults were repulsed, but the third one did the trick and the walls were breached. The defenders retreated to interior rooms where room-to-room fighting began. This didn't last long and of the 187 defenders, only five survived and they were swiftly executed.
News of the prolonged defense of, and defeat at the Alamo spread swiftly and, rather than demoralize the colonists, it only swelled the ranks of Texan General Sam Houston's army. The battle cry of "Remember the Alamo!" was raised and Santa Anna was soon driven out of the Texan territory which became the Republic of Texas until it joined the Union on December 29, 1845.

History Spotlight, 3/5

One of the events that served to turn the American colonies against the Crown, the Boston Massacre took place on this day in 1770. After the end of the French and Indian War (which was really between France and Britain - the Indians were just guns hired by the French) Britain raised taxes on the colonies to pay for it. These taxes were incredibly unpopular. Well, there's no such thing as a popular tax, but these were really unpopular.

Boston was the epicenter of colonial ire and British General Thomas Gage had a large number of troops set up shop in the city to preserve order. As many 20th Century military leaders could have told him, lots of under-supervised troops surrounded by unfriendly civilians is not a recipe for harmony. After the death of one civilian, Christopher Seider, on February 22, 1770, the Bostonian's mood shifted from "irked" and "annoyed" to downright "enraged." For their part the British troops weren't any happier with the situation. They had specific orders: "Do not provoke the colonials," and so the had to put up with being jeered at and pelted with refuse (and back then refuse wasn't just moldy oranges - dead cats and buckets full of human waste were not uncommon). In an atmosphere like this, the smallest spark was all that was required.

On the evening of March 5, 1770, Private Hugh White was standing guard duty outside the custom house. Edward Gerrish, a wigmaker's apprentice, was passing by and shouted out that White's commanding officer Captain John Goldfinch hadn't paid his wig bill. Yes, this is all about wigs. Goldfinch knew he had paid the bill and ignored him. Gerrish left, had a few drinks, and came back with some buddies and continued with the insults and a barrage of snowballs. Private White left his post (very bad, from a military discipline point of view) and clonked Gerrish on the side of the head with his musket. This only drew a larger crowd who grew more and more drunk and angry. Private White left his post (again!) for the safety of the customs house.

Watching from a nearby guard house, Captain Thomas Preston sent a corporal and several soldiers out to attempt to restore order. The soldiers were surrounded at that point by about 400 very angry civilians and began to form a cordon. Private Hugh Montgomery was thumped on the head with a makeshift club, and as he staggered back to his feet he fired his musket and yelled, "Damn you, fire!" The soldiers fired into the crowd and hit eleven people, killing five, including freed slave Crispus Attucks. In order to prevent full scale rioting from breaking out, General Gage had all troops withdrawn from the center of town to an island off shore. Captain Preston and four of his men who fired shots were brought up on murder charges, with several more to follow.

History Spotlight, 3/4

Infamous hitman Emanuel "Mendy" Weiss rides Old Sparky in Sing Sing prison on this day in 1944. Weiss got started in his grisly trade in the late 1920's as a union enforcer for lower level Genovese boss Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, but he was soon to move up in the world.

Towards the end of Prohibition, an alliance, the National Crime Syndicate, was formed between New York boss Lucky Luciano and Chicago boss Johnny the Fox Torrio. In order to keep the peace, they assigned Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky the duties of enforcers. Siegel and Lansky formed the infamous Murder, Inc. Soon enough, Siegel and Lansky had legal troubles of their own and control of Murder, Inc. passed to Lepke who brought along his protégé, Mendy Weiss.

Weiss quickly showed an aptitude for killing people, if not for working with them. On October 23, 1935 he and Charlie "The Bug" Workman entered a restaurant in New Jersey and shot Dutch Schultz and two companions. In his haste to leave, Mendy lept into the getaway car and order the driver, Seymour "Piggy" Schenchter, to leave, ditching Bug Workman in the restaurant while he finished off Schultz. Workman was forced to walk the twelve miles from Newark to New York City.

Workman subsequently filed a grievance against Weiss with Murder, Inc's board of directors. Ditching your accomplice at the scene of a crime was punishable by death. Weiss argued that Workman had only stayed behind to steal Schultz's wallet and watch and that he, not Weiss was putting the hit in jeopardy. With two valuable hitmen's word against each other, the board of Murder Inc, decided to do the only logical thing and have Piggy Schenchter tortured and killed, even though he had nothing to do with the foul-up. After all, a good hitman is hard to find, but drivers are a dime a dozen. Don't get involved with the mob, kids.

The job that would prove to be Weiss and Buchalter's (and a few more) downfall was the hit of Brooklyn candy store owner Joseph Rosen. Rosen had been forced out of the garment trade for refusing to play ball with the mob. He was now making noises about going to the anti-mob crusader Thomas E. Dewey and spilling his guts. The 1936 murder would go unsolved until 1940 when Abe "Kid Twist" Reles turned state's evidence and revealed many interesting things about a number of unsolved murder cases, one of which was the Rosen job.

Weiss fled New York for Kansas but was quickly arrested and extradited for trial. Using Reles' testimony, along with other mob informants a guilty verdict was returned for Buchalter, Weiss and Louis Capone and they both got the death penalty. All three of them went to the chair on the same day. Weiss' last words were "I'm here on a framed-up case, and Governor Dewey knows it. Give my love to my family, and everything."

History Spotlight, 3/3

Russia of the 19th Century was a backwards state. One of the very few (and the only one of any consequence) European powers to still practice feudalism, nearly 80 percent of the population were serfs. If you were to sit down and play a round of "Who Had It Worse" with the slaves of the antebellum South or the serfs of Russia, you'd be scratching your head. In a system that had existed without change for nearly a thousand years, serfs were bound to the land (and landowner) where they were born. They could not marry without the landowner's consent and they could not get and education or start a business.

By the time the 19th Century rolled around, the need for some kind of reform was apparent. There were frequent bloody uprisings and even more bloody reprisals. Russia's pathetic showing against the British during the Crimean War (what they considered to be their own back yard) only highlighted Russia's backwards nature. While Peter the Great had advanced Russia by light years during the 18th Century, he had made very little headway with the serf issue and in the hundred or so years since his death, many serf-related reforms had backslid to the old ways.

It was the uprisings, the lousy military, and the fact that every other Western nation on Earth was rolling their eyes at Russia's backwardness (and they were, of course, ignoring the Raj, slavery, and Algeria) that made Tsar Alexander II lend his formidable political weight to the reform movement. On his side: 80 million completely powerless serfs. Standing against him: 100,000 landowners who liked free labor.

Emancipation reform had been tried at various other times but, similar to civil rights reform in the US during Jim Crow, it had battered itself against a rock that refused to split. In the US, it was the Southern Coalition in the Senate and in Russia, it was a coalition between the Tsar and the landowners. Three gentlemen, Nikolay Milyutin, Alexei Strol'man, and Yakov Rostovtsev, worked with the Tsar on writing the Emancipation Manifesto.

The big issues was, of course, what to do with the serfs? Do they have to stay with their landlords? If not, where do they go? And who's going to work all that land? Stalin would have cut that Gordian Knot without a moment's hesitation but thankfully, Alexander II was no Stalin. The landlords wanted to give the serfs their freedom, but no land. This would have made having the right to leave meaningless because they would have nowhere to go and nothing to do when they got there. To assuage the landlord's fears, three measures were added to the proclamation: first, there was a transition period of two years. Second, landowners got huge tracts of state-owned land. Third, the landowner would be compensated for land lost by the government with low-interest loans.

In the end, nobody was very happy. The serfs found themselves free from bondage, but with out money or land they had nothing to do with it. It reminds me of the liberated slaves in the US who had nothing to do except keep working the same plot of land for the same guy.

History Spotlight, 3/2

On this day in 1791, one of my favorite pieces of analog technology, a semaphore machine, is unveiled in Paris, France. The message, "If you succeed, you will bask in glory" was sent between Paris and Brulon, a distance of about 10 miles. It always take a a little getting used to these days, but in the past communication over long distances was incredibly difficult. Sure, we all know that it was difficult in theory, but the actual fact of it creeps up on you at odd times.

Optical telegraphy had been around for thousands of years. There was that awesome scene in Return of the King where those guys on a mountain top are keeping watch for those other guys to land on the shore, and when they do the first guys lit up a big bonfire that can be seen from another mountain top and it starts a whole chain of signals all the way back to wherever.
Well, that's basically the principle of a semaphore machine chain, except that, rather than one message (if you see a fire, that means the bad guys have landed) you can use sempahore flags to send whole messages. So, you get a guy on a hilltop and another guy on a separate hilltop reading the signals and there you go.

It was during the French Revolution that the need for very fast communication became apparent, as France was in political disarray and surrounded on all sides by enemies. Claude Chappe and his brother came up with the idea of a system of buildings that would house semaphore stations and instead of just a guy with flags there would be huge mechanical arms holding much larger flags. Despite having their equipment destroyed by mobs several times, the system was a success and by the time electronic telegraphy drove it out of service in the 1850's, there were 556 stations covering nearly 3,000 miles.

Claude Chappe

Claude's first major project after the system was demonstrated was a line from Paris to Lille, a distance of about 143 miles. In 1794, it conveyed the news of the French capture of the town of Condé-sur-l'Escaut on the French-Belgian border during the war with Austria back to Paris in less than an hour. This was a huge deal back then and when Napoleon took over he made sure to invest heavily in this new technology.

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The Chappe Brother's next big line was the 230 mile one to Strasbourg, along the German border. The system was extremely labor intensive and required a trained dedicated staff all along the line. If one guy is off having a nip of brandy when a message is coming through (or has just had a nip and garbles the message) then the whole effort is pointless. Claude had the idea of charging private citizens to use the service and maybe making some money off it along with being able to pay his men what they were worth.

Much like the Pony Express, the system was totally outclassed by the electric telegraph. On a simple cents-per-word basis, the electric telegraph operated at a cost of many times less than a semaphore chain. Plus, electric telegraphs operate 24 hours a day and in bad weather and the operators don't need to be as skilled or dedicated and so the curtain rapidly fell on Claude's invention. You can still find many of the old buildings scattered around France, if you know where to look and many of them still work, although the network is in tatters and nobody is sending messages on it by this point.