A Treasury of Great American Scandals

by Michael Farquhar

  1863—In the greatest battle ever fought on the American continent, Union forces defeat invading Confederates at Gettysburg after three days. The decisive victory, occurring simultaneously with the Confederate surrender at Vicksburg, marks the turning point in the Civil War. Later that year, President Lincoln delivers his Gettysburg Address, declaring that the men who died on the battlefield gave their lives so “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

  1863—The U.S. Capitol dome is completed and capped with the Statue of Freedom.

  1865—General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate Army, surrenders to Union commander Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia on April 9. The last Confederate troops surrender a month later, ending the Civil War. The human cost of the four-year struggle is staggering, with approximately 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers losing their lives.

  1865—President Abraham Lincoln is assassinated in Washington, D.C., by Southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth.

  1865—The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution outlaws slavery throughout the United States. It is followed in 1868 by the Fourteenth Amendment confirming the citizenship of blacks, and the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, which makes it illegal to deny voting rights based on race.

  1865—Henry Wirz is executed for war crimes allegedly committed while commandant of the South’s infamous Andersonville Prison. Pages: 191-95.

  1866—The transatlantic cable is completed.

  1866—The Ku Klux Klan is formed to terrorize liberated blacks in the South.

  1867—Secretary of State William H. Seward negotiates the purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7,200,000 (or about 2 cents per acre). Opponents of the purchase deride it as “Seward’s Folly.”

  1867—Christopher Latham Sholes, with assistance from Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soulé, make the first practical typewriter.

  1868—President Andrew Johnson, an opponent of harsh measures against the South during Reconstruction, is impeached in the U.S. House of Representatives due largely to the efforts of radical Republicans. He is acquitted in the Senate by one vote.

  1868—Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is published.

  1869—A silver sledge hammering a golden spike into a railroad tie at Promontory Point, Utah, marks the completion of the world’s first transcontinental railroad. Built in just over three years by 20,000 workmen, it has 1,775 miles of track.

  1870—John D. Rockefeller founds Standard Oil.

  1871—The Great Fire of Chicago leaves over 100,000 people homeless and destroys 17,500 buildings. “Nobody could see it all,” Chicago Tribune editor Horace White later writes, “no more than one man could see the whole of the Battle of Gettysburg. It was too vast, too swift, too full of smoke, too full of danger, for anybody to see it all.”

  1871—Showman P. T. Barnum opens his circus, modestly dubbing it “The Greatest Show on Earth.”

  1872—In Rochester, New York, suffragist Susan B. Anthony illegally votes in the presidential election, and is arrested and fined. At her trial she declares, “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God,” which becomes a slogan of the suffragist movement.

  1872—Congress establishes Yellowstone as the first national park.

  1875—Congress passes a Civil Rights Act, giving blacks equal rights in public accommodations and access to jury duty. The U.S. Supreme Court declares the law unconstitutional in 1883.

  1875—Robert Lincoln, eldest son of the late president, arranges for his mother’s commitment to an insane asylum. Pages: 15-19.

  1875—Texas governor James Stephen Hogg names his daughter Ima. Page: 20.

  1876—Alexander Graham Bell transmits human speech for the first time while developing the telephone. His words are, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you!” spoken to his assistant after spilling battery acid on himself. Bell demonstrates the telephone in Philadelphia as the United States celebrates its 100th birthday.

  1876—General George A. Custer and 264 soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry die in the “Last Stand” battle at the Little Bighorn River during the war with the Sioux Indians. “Where the last stand was made,” Sitting Bull later recalled, “the Long Hair [Custer] stood like a sheaf of corn with all the ears fallen around him.”

  1876—Grave robbers attempt to steal the body of Abraham Lincoln and hold it for ransom. Pages: 278-80.

  1877—Reconstruction officially ends when the last federal troops are withdrawn from the South.

  1877—The first commercial telephone line is installed in Massachusetts.

  1878—A woman suffrage amendment is first introduced in Congress. It fails to pass, but is reintroduced in every session of Congress for the next forty years.

  1878—The stolen corpse of Representative John Scott Harrison of Ohio is discovered hanging by the neck at the Ohio Medical College. Pages: 281-82.

  1879—Thomas Edison, “The Wizard of Menlo Park,” produces the first practical lightbulb. It his perhaps the greatest of his numerous accomplishments, including the invention of the phonograph and improvements to the telephone, telegraph, and motion pictures. “We sat and looked and the lamp continued to burn and the longer it burned the more fascinated we were,” Edison writes. “None of us could go to bed and there was no sleep for over forty hours; we sat and just watched it with anxiety growing into elation.”

  1879—California Electric Light Co. begins operating the world’s first central power plant selling electricity to private customers.

  1880—New York streets are lit by electricity.

  1880 —Senator William Sharon of Nevada commences an ill-fated affair with Althea Hill, a liaison that eventually results in three different U. S. Supreme Court decisions. Pages: 141-47.

  1881—Clara Barton organizes the Red Cross.

  1881—Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady is published.

  1881—President James A. Garfield is assassinated in Washington by Charles Julius Guiteau, a mentally unbalanced drifter. Pages: 262-66.

  1882—The United States bans Chinese immigration for ten years in reaction to simmering resentment over Chinese laborers.

  1883—The Brooklyn Bridge is completed and hailed as the “Eighth Wonder of the World.”

  1883—William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody organizes his Wild West show.

  1884—Construction begins in Chicago on the Home Insurance Building, the world’s first skyscraper.

  1884—“Ma! Ma! Where’s my Pa?” becomes the Republican campaign chant after it is revealed that Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland had sired an illegitimate son during his youth. Pages: 165-67.

  1885—Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is published.

  1886—The Statue of Liberty, a gift from the people of France, is dedicated in New York Harbor and becomes the first view of America for many in the growing “nation of immigrants.”

  1888—George Eastman perfects the “Kodak” box camera, the first designed for mass production and amateur use.

  1889—Herman Hollerith’s punched-card tabulating machine is the first successful computer, and is used to tabulate the results of the 1890 census.

  1889—A dam on the Conemaugh River in Pennsylvania breaks, causing the great Johnstown Flood in which 2,200 are killed. “The water seemed to leap, scarcely touching the ground,” a witness recalls. “It bounded down the valley, crashing and roaring, carrying everything before it. For a mile its front seemed like a solid wall twenty feet high.”

  1890—The Battle of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, which begins after the federal government bans the Sioux’s Ghost Dance (a religious ceremony), is the last major conflict between Native Americans and U.S. troops. It ends with the slaughter of over 200 Lakota Sioux.

  1890—The electric chair is used for the first time in the execution of convicted murderer William Kemmler. It is not a success. “The first execution by electricity has been a horror,” writes an anonymou
s New York World reporter. “Physicians who might make a jest out of the dissecting room, officials who have seen many a man’s neck wrenched by rope, surgeons who have lived in hospitals and knelt beside the dead and dying on bloody fields, held their breaths with a gasp, and those unaccustomed to such sights turned away in dread.”

  1890—The census bureau announces that so many people have filled in pockets throughout the West that it is no longer meaningful to talk about a “frontier line.” The frontier is officially declared closed.

  1891—Warren G. Harding and Florence Kling DeWolfe, aka “The Duchess,” embark on one of American history’s most miserable marriages. Pages : 21-23.

  1891—James Naismith invents basketball.

  1893—Henry Ford builds his first successful gasoline engine.

  1893—Representative William Campbell Preston Breckinridge of Kentucky, a frequent lecturer on the evils of fornication, is sued for child support by his teenage mistress. Pages: 140-41.

  1894—Thomas Edison markets the kinetoscope, an early form of movie in which a viewer peers through a magnifying lens at moving images illuminated by an electric light.

  1895—Charles and Franklin Duryea establish the first American company for manufacturing gasoline-powered automobiles.

  1895—Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage is published.

  1895—The first professional football game is played in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

  1897—The first American subway opens in Boston with 1.5 miles of track.

  1898—In what U.S. ambassador to Britain John Hay calls “a splendid little war,” the U.S. fights Spain over the independence of Cuba. The April to August hostilities, in which Spain is easily defeated, marks the emergence of the United States as a world power and results in the possession of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippine Islands. The war also makes Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders national heroes.

  1901—President William McKinley is assassinated in Buffalo, New York, by anarchist Leon Czolgosz. Pages: 266-69.

  1903—Wilbur and Orville Wright design and build the first successful airplane. The first flight, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, goes 120 feet and lasts about 12 seconds. Man has at last taken wing, yet the feat barely makes a ripple in the nation’s newspapers.

  1903—The Great Train Robbery, an eleven-minute Western film, is the first major motion picture. It is a sensation, giving birth to the “Hollywood Dream Factory.”

  1903—The first World Series is held. Boston defeats Pittsburgh five games to three.

  1905—Eleanor Roosevelt marries Franklin D. Roosevelt, acquiring in the process a most troublesome mother-in-law. Pages: 24-27.

  1905—The body of naval hero John Paul Jones, buried in a long-lost cemetery outside Paris, is finally recovered and brought back to the United States. Pages: 283-86.

  1906—San Francisco suffers one of the worst disasters in American history when a massive earthquake strikes, followed by a conflagration that consumes much of the city. “San Francisco is gone!” reports novelist Jack London. “Nothing remains of it but memories and a fringe of dwelling houses on the outskirts.” At least 3,000 people are killed and 250,000 lose their homes.

  1906—Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is published.

  1906—Senator Arthur Brown of Utah is shot dead by his scorned mistress, Anna Addison Bradley. Pages: 147-49.

  1908—President Theodore Roosevelt settles on William Howard Taft as his successor, resulting in a shattered friendship between the two men. Pages: 79-85.

  1909—Robert E. Peary reaches the North Pole. (Frederick A. Cook’s claim that he had reached the Pole a year earlier is later discredited after a congressional investigation.)

  1911—Under the provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act, the U.S. Supreme Court orders the Standard Oil Company, one of the richest and most powerful businesses in the world, to dissolve into a number of separate entities.

  1912—The Titanic sinks on her maiden voyage, killing 1,517 people, including many Americans.

  1913—Ford Company engineers develop the assembly line, making the manufacture of automobiles cheaper and more efficient. “We now have two general principles in all operations,” writes Henry Ford, “that a man shall never have to take more than one step, if possibly it can be avoided, and that no man need ever stoop over.” With automobiles more readily available to the masses, America takes to the road.

  1914—The Panama Canal is completed, opening a passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in one of the world’s greatest feats of engineering.

  1915—A German submarine sinks the passenger ship Lusitania, killing over half of the nearly 2,000 people on board, including more than 100 Americans. “Remember the Lusitania” becomes a rallying cry when the United States enters World War I two years later.

  1917—The United States enters World War I when Congress declares war on Germany. Over 116,000 Americans die in the conflict, which ends the following year, and more than 234,000 are wounded.

  1918—An influenza epidemic sweeps the world, killing an estimated 20 million people, including about 600,000 in the United States.

  1919—Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s “Red Raids” begin as the Bill of Rights takes a back seat. Pages: 196-202.

  1920—Women are given the right to vote under the Nineteenth Amendment, which states, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

  1920—Prohibition begins following ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment outlawing liquor for all citizens. The ban ushers in an era of bootlegging and violent gang crime.

  1920—The U.S. Senate rejects American participation in the League of Nations.

  1923—President Warren G. Harding dies, mercifully spared full knowledge of his “Goddamn friends’ ” treachery in Teapot Dome and other great scandals of his disastrous administration. Pages: 203-6.

  1925—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is published.

  1926—The first liquid-propelled rocket is launched using technology developed by aerospace pioneer Robert Goddard. “It looked almost magical as it rose,” Goddard writes, “without any appreciably greater noise or flame, as if it said ‘I’ve been here long enough; I think I’ll be going somewhere else, if you don’t mind.’ ”

  1927—Charles Lindbergh becomes the first aviator to make a solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean. “I’m flying along dreamily when it catches my eye,” Lindbergh later writes in his autobiography, The Spirit of St. Louis, “that black speck on the water two or three miles southeast. Seconds pass before my mind takes in the full impact of what my eyes are seeing . . . fishing boats! The coast, the European coast, can’t be far away!”

  1927—Television, later to dominate the American cultural landscape, makes a rather humble debut with the broadcast image of Secretary of Commerce (and later President) Herbert Hoover on two screens.

  1929—The Roaring Twenties come to an abrupt end when the stock market crashes and the nation is plunged into the Great Depression. “It came with a speed and ferocity that left men dazed,” the New York Times reports of the collapse. “The bottom simply fell out of the market.”

  1929—Robert Byrd becomes the first person to fly over the South Pole.

  1929—Gangland violence in Chicago reaches its peak during Prohibition with the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

  1929—William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is published.

  1930—U.S. astronomers announce the discovery of Pluto, the ninth planet in the solar system. They initially believe the diminutive planet to be even bigger than Jupiter.

  1932—Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

  1932—Franklin D. Roosevelt is elected president, to the eternal chagrin of Theodore Roosevelt’s children, his distant relatives. Pages: 86-92.

  1933—As the nation suffers through the Great Depression, with many believing that democracy it
self is in danger of collapse, President Franklin Roosevelt declares at his inauguration, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” The new president immediately launches a massive recovery program known as the New Deal.

  1933—Prohibition is repealed with the Twenty-first Amendment.

  1936—Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind is a best-seller, surpassing in six months sales of the previous best-seller in American history, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

  1939—John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is published.

  1940 —“Democracy is all done . . . ,” Joseph P. Kennedy declares after resigning as ambassador to Great Britain. “Democracy is finished in England. It may be here.” (Democracy survived. Kennedy’s political career did not.) Pages: 28-31.

  1941—On December 7, “a date,” President Franklin Roosevelt declares, “which will live in infamy,” a surprise attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor devastates the U.S. Pacific fleet and propels the nation into World War II.

  1942—President Roosevelt signs into law Executive Order No. 9006, which allows the military to move 112,000 Japanese-Americans from their homes on the West Coast to inland concentration camps.

  1944—Allied forces invade Normandy, France, with over 150,000 troops on five beachheads. “We will accept nothing except full victory,” declares Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower. Thousands of soldiers are killed and wounded, but Europe, and possibly the world, is saved from Axis domination.

  1945—Germany surrenders on May 7, ending the war in Europe. On August 6, an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, drops the first atomic bomb used in warfare on Hiroshima, Japan. The explosion immediately kills an estimated 70,000-100,000 people and destroys an area of about five square miles. “The giant purple mushroom [cloud] . . . was still boiling upward like something terribly alive,” Enola Gay pilot Colonel Paul W. Tibbets Jr. later writes. “It was a frightening sight, and even though we were several miles away, it gave the appearance of something that was about to engulf us.” Another, larger atomic bomb is dropped on Nagasaki three days later, after which Japan surrenders and World War II ends.