Welcome back to the This Day In Esoteric Political History newsletter. Each week, a member of our team (or a friend of the show) gathers together bits of America’s past and attempts to find a throughline that might add a little understanding to our current moment.
Here’s what happened over the week ahead in American political history…
February 6
1778: The Treaty of Alliance is signed by the United States and France.
1820: The first 86 African American immigrants sponsored by the American Colonization Society depart New York to start a settlement in present-day Liberia
1899: The Senate, by a margin of only one vote, ratifies a peace treaty between the US and Spain, forcing Spain to cede Guam and Puerto Rico to the U.S.
1987: Broad no-smoking rules take effect for 890,000 employees in 6,800 U.S. federal buildings nationwide.
1992: President George Bush forces his White House staff to “pledge” that they will stop feeding his dog “Ranger,” who had grown to look “like a blimp, a nice friendly appealing blimp, but a blimp”
February 7
1962: The United States bans all imports and exports from communist Cuba
1972: President Richard Nixon signs the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 into law
1979 : Thousands of tractors descend on Washington, D.C. as part of a protest over agricultural policy
2013: Mississippi officially certifies the Thirteenth Amendment, becoming the last state to approve the abolition of slavery
February 8
1837: Richard Johnson becomes the first VP chosen by the Senate, by a vote of 33 to 16
1915: "The Birth of a Nation,” regarded as one of the most offensive films ever made, opens at at Clune’s Auditorium in L.A.
1968: Three young men are killed in the Orangeburg Massacre after highway patrolmen opened fire on protesters at South Carolina State University
1978: Senate proceedings are broadcast on radio for the first time
February 9
1825: The House of Representatives elects John Quincy Adams the sixth President.
1870: President Ulysses Grant authorizes the Secretary of War to establish a national weather service, the US Weather Bureau
1886 : A mob descended on Seattle’s Chinatown, amid growing tensions between white and Chinese workers
1946: A recently-returned World War II vet by the name of Isaac Woodard is beaten by police, an incident that became a national civil rights rallying cry
1950: Sen. Joseph McCarthy charges the U.S. State Department contains communists
February 10
1916 : At an event attended by much of Chicago’s political and religious elite, an anarchist cook poisoned a batch of soup in an attempt to kill all two hundred attendees
2007: Barack Obama announces his presidential candidacy.
February 11
1794: The first session of the Senate opens to the public
1937: The Flint sit-down strike ends when General Motors recognizes the United Auto Workers trade union
1990: Nelson Mandela is released after 27 years in prison
1953: President Dwight Eisenhower denies all appeals for clemency for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
February 12
1870: Women in Utah become the first in the country to cast ballots in elections. But after granting women the right to vote, Utah then took it back a generation later
1909: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is founded
1988: The U.S. missile cruiser USS Yorktown is bumped by the Soviet frigate Bezzavetny in Soviet waters.
1999: President Bill Clinton is acquitted by the United States Senate in his impeachment trial.
In which we take the above collection of events and find themes, throughlines, rabbit holes and more. This week it’s Nicole Hemmer’s turn at the typewriter.
Whew. We are in a particularly challenging moment, in a particularly challenging year, in a particularly challenging decade. In fact, the 21st century has not gotten often to a heartening start. And history is not always a balm in these moments of struggle: as we’ve talked about on the show countless times, there is no inevitable march toward progress. Sometimes things get worse, and stay worse, for a long time.
But! In an effort to infuse a bit of optimism into dark times, this week is a good chance to recall that people have faced intense and prolonged struggles before, and their actions—as both individuals and groups—have changed the arc of history.
Take, for instance, the sit-down strike that ended this week in 1937 at a General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan. Industrial workers had been organizing for decades: strikes, walk-outs, violent conflicts with factor owners. By the 1930s, the main union in the U.S. was the AFL, which organized skilled workers. Autoworkers, however, were considered unskilled laborers, so they needed a union of their own. In 1935, they formed the United Auto Workers, and just two years later, at the Flint strike, they won recognition from one of the most important auto manufacturers in the country. But this wasn’t just a victory for the UAW—it was the long tail of a victory for workers who had been organizing since the 19th century. The UAW strike was possible in large part due to the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, a law made possible by decades of worker activism.
Or consider what happened this week in 1987: anti-smoking laws went into effect at federal office buildings across the country, bans that protected nearly a million workers from second-hand smoke. As historian Sarah Milov uncovered in her book The Cigarette: A Political History, smoking bans came about because of long-term organizing by public-health activists who sought to fundamentally change the culture of a tobacco-saturated culture. Unimaginable just a decade earlier, when tar, ash, and nicotine stained nearly every surface, public and private, the bans remade public life in the United States, so much so that public smoking, especially indoors, is a vanishingly rare sight.
One more hopeful note from this week in 1990: Nelson Mandela, the South African freedom fighter, was released after 27 years in prison. He would go on to lead his country into the post-apartheid era and oversee the dismantling of formal rules of segregation that defined political, economic, and social life in the country. Apartheid had been in place for nearly half a century in South Africa, so entrenched that it survived the anti-colonial and anti-racist uprisings that reshaped so many countries in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. But the anti-apartheid movement within South Africa, backed by a growing international coalition, put so much pressure on the apartheid regime that it collapsed in the early 1990s. That collapse was not inevitable—it was the result of decades of activism, sometimes with little hope that the regime would change within activists’ lifetimes. But apartheid fell, and Mandela emerged from his prison to become president.
That may not feel hopeful right now, when a fairer, more equitable future seems to be a receding dream, not an imminent outcome. But I wanted to highlight this history to remind us that we’re not alone—that the people who came before us struggled, and fought, and held fast to a vision of a better future. Historians know well that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice only if people bend it. If your goal is justice, then now is the time to continue the work.
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