New Technology, Old Fear (and, yes, Trump)
The birth and rebirth of a national security apparatus
We tried something new this week—an impromptu video chat about the historical connections to be made in the wake of Donald Trump’s unprecedented conviction Thursday. Check it out and let us know what you think! (But don’t worry, we’re not becoming yet another election news reaction podcast.) Now back to regularly scheduled programming…
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.
Today, you’re in the steady hands of This Day historian Nicole Hemmer.
Here’s what happened over the week ahead in American history…
May 31
1889: The Johnstown Flood kills 2,209 people after the South Fork Dam bursts
1909: The National Negro Committee, forerunner to the NAACP, convenes for the first time.
June 1
1863 : Harriet Tubman prepares to lead Union soldiers on a nighttime to free some 700 enslaved people in South Carolina.
1916: Louis Brandeis becomes the first Jewish person appointed to the United States Supreme Court.
1950: Margaret Smith denounces Senator Joseph McCarthy's tactics with her Declaration of Conscience, challenging the rise of McCarthyism.
1980: CNN launches.
June 2
1919: Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's house is damaged in an anarchist bombing, in-part triggering the so-called Palmer Raids. A young Franklin Roosevelt felt the blast from across the street
1924: President Calvin Coolidge signs the Indian Citizenship Act, granting Native Americans American citizenship
1957: Face the Nation interviews Nikita Khrushchev, providing a rare glimpse into the Soviet leader's thoughts during the Cold War.
June 3
1943: The LA Zoot Suit Riots begin, a conflict between U.S. servicemen and Mexican American youths.
1980: An explosive device is detonated at the base of the Statue of Liberty
2013: The trial of Chelsea Manning for leaking classified material to WikiLeaks begins
June 4
1892: Secretary of State James G. Blaine resigns his post to challenge incumbent president Benjamin Harrison at the upcoming Republican National Convention
1919: The Senate passes the Nineteenth Amendment, a crucial step towards women earning the right to vote in the United States
1945: The United States, Soviet Union, Britain, and France agree to divide up occupied Germany
June 5
1947: U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall outlines the "Marshall Plan" to rebuild Western Europe after World War II
1968: Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles
1981: The AIDS Epidemic officially begins with a US Centers for Disease Control report on pneumonia affecting five young gay men in Los Angeles
In which we take the above collection of events and find themes, throughlines, rabbit holes and more.
1919: Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's house is damaged in an anarchist bombing, in-part triggering the so-called Palmer Raids
2013: The trial of Chelsea Manning for leaking classified material to WikiLeaks begins
On June 3, 2013, Chelsea Manning went on trial for leaking classified information to WikiLeaks. The trial marked a sharp punitive turn for the national security state. Manning had expected to be fired when she was caught, the usual punishment for security breaches. Instead, she was court-martialed, kept in solitary confinement, charged with 22 counts (including a death-penalty offense), and sentenced to 35 years in prison.
Manning, who would most of her sentence commuted by President Obama, had been caught in the machinery of a system put in motion nearly a hundred years earlier. On June 2, 1919, an anarchist named Carlo Valdinoci detonated a bomb at the Washington, D.C. home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The bomb killed Valdinoci and shattered the windows of Palmer’s house.
The aftershocks of the bombing, part of a series of package bombs sent to high-profile Americans, would transform the U.S. government.
Palmer orchestrated a series of raids against suspected anarchists, immigrants, and leftists. To ensure that the raids were carried out with maximum efficiency and thoroughness, he assigned them to the newly appointed head of the Bureau of Investigation’s General Intelligence Division, a 24-year-old named J. Edgar Hoover.
Across the country, thousands were arrested not because the government had evidence of criminal activity, but for their membership in left-wing organizations. Palmer had widespread support for the raids; The Washington Post shrugged off the civil liberties concerns in an editorial that argued, “There is no time to waste on hairsplitting over infringement of liberty.”
That would be Hoover’s philosophy when he was tapped as director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924. Renamed the Federal Bureau of investigation, or FBI, in 1935, the agency would serve as Hoover’s fiefdom for half a century, until his death in 1972. Over those 50 years, Hoover constructed a national security state that ran roughshod over civil liberties.
The intelligence community was briefly chastened by the exposes of the 1970s (check out our episodes on the Family Jewels with Rick Perlstein; though it focuses on the CIA, the FBI comes in for plenty of criticism). But with the War on Terror, it came roaring back, ensnaring not only Chelsea Manning but a number of journalists, whistleblowers, and hackers in an age of new technologies and old fears — an age that we still live in today.
— Nicole Hemmer
A Little More Esoterica
As discussed on Tuesday’s episode, May 28 marks Able and Miss Baker’s ascent into suborbital flight in 1959. At the risk of spoiling a potential future episode, we wouldn’t be fulfilling our duties as the premier destination for animal-related political history if we didn’t share a bit more about the famed rhesus (Able, born in Kansas, died during a routine post-flight operation, preserved by the National Museum of Natural History) and squirrel monkey (Baker, purchased at a pet shop in Miami, appeared on the cover of Life Magazine after returning, died of kidney failure in 1984 after becoming the oldest known living squirrel monkey). Their sacrifice is not forgotten. 🫡
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