Admit it: You’re just tickled to send 1995 off to the scrap heap. Not enough of this, too much of this and way too much of that other thing. The new year simply has to be better!
So why not look forward to 1996 by looking backward first? There are all sorts of intriguing anniversaries waiting to be observed-even celebrated, some of them-in the new year: centennials and bi- and tri- and sesquicentennials and such everywhere you turn.
Crusades and cannon. Gold and grapefruit. “Blue Tail Fly” and “Shoo-Fly Pie.” Tootsies. Bikinis. (Or is that Tootsies in bikinis?)
Lots of Chicago highlights. Plus all the news that’s fit to print:
They play for keeps
We can go all the way back to two-digit territory, in fact, to the original 96: A.D. 96 That’s when Roman Emperor Domitian’s reign of terror-persecuting Christians, confiscating property, sending countrymen into exile-came to a sudden end, at the pointy end of a dagger. Among the plotters: The missus herself, the Empress Domitia.
Things were no gentler a few centuries down the road. In 396, Alaric, king of the Visigoths, invaded Greece and plundered Athens. (That’s what Visigoths do-plunder.) In 546, Totila, king of the Ostrogoths, completed his siege of Rome. (That’s what Ostrogoths do.) Once a city of half a million people, fewer than a thousand remained.
Look to the East for important doings in 646; a Great Reform edict moves Japan toward a more centralized government-an emperor served by a Chinese-style bureaucracy, ruling from a permanent capital city. And in the Middle East in 696-1,300 years ago-Arabic is declared the official language of Islam, and Arabic coins become the official currency.
“Rex Anglorum”-“King of the English.” The first man to use the term was the Anglo-Saxon king Offa, who died in 796 after a 40-year reign-not a bad career. Alfred, on the other hand, had a Great career-Alfred the Great, that is. In 896, that English ruler beat back the Danes, condemning future generations to crumpets and scones instead of tasty pastry. In 946, Abu al Qasim Unujur becomes Egypt’s official No. 1-but the man really pulling the strings is Abu al-Misk Kafur, an Ethiopian eunuch. (Don’t ask.)
From Alexandria to Venice in 996, exactly a millennium ago: cane sugar. It’s all sweetness and light for Otto III, too; the 16-year-old is finally crowned Holy Roman Emperor. He was only 3 when his father died, but his succession was disputed by the Duke of Bavaria, one Henry the Troublemaker. Henry kidnapped the tyke (Henry the Felon?), but Otto’s mom and grandmom got him back and eventually put him on the throne.
The First Crusade hits the road in 1096. The effort to restore Christianity in the Holy Land sets off from France under Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless, among others. (Typical Crusade-era conversation: “Hey, who’s in charge of this outfit?” “Peter the Hermit.” “Anyone else?” “Walter the Penniless.” “Sounds good-sign me up!”)
It’s 1346, early in “The Hundred Years War,” and one of history’s most significant battles is about to occur: the English against the French at Crecy. The French have Europe’s best horse soldiers, plus heavy armor, the crossbow and plenty of attitude. The English invaders have foot soldiers, the longbow and “bombards,” the first primitive cannon. The result: a massacre. The French lines are wiped out by the rapid-firing English longbowmen, and the heavily armored French knights can’t even remount once their horses are shot-or scared-out from under them.
A thousand years of cavalry superiority is at an end, as is the unchallenged dominance of the aristocracy, the only ones who can afford the horses and the armor. The foot soldier-the common man-is on the rise.
Smoke and fruit and gas and . . .
Christopher Columbus is on the move in 1496; he returns from his second voyage to the New World. He still hasn’t found India, but from the West Indies he brings back samples of a “bewitching vegetable” that the natives dry, ignite and inhale from a slingshot-shaped pipe inserted in their nostrils. The pipe is called a “tabaco.” We can call it “Indians’ revenge.”
Health takes a step forward 50 years later with Italian physician Girolamo Fracastoro’s first-ever description of typhus; he believes that infections are carried from one person to another by tiny bodies that can reproduce and multiply. Not bad for 1546. There are two major cultural advances that same year. The first Welch book is printed (“Yny Lhyvyr Mwnn”-rough translation: “Buy A Vowel from Vanna”). And “The Proverbs of John Heywood” appear, including such cliches-in-the-making as “A man may well bring a horse to the water, but he cannot make him drink”; “Rome was not built in a day”; “When the iron is hot, strike”; “Look before you leap”; and “Haste makes waste.” Omitted somehow from Heywood’s collection: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”
More words to remember in 1596, 400 years ago: Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” and “King John” have their first performances. If the crowd doesn’t like them, they can always throw tomatoes, introduced into England this very year as an ornamental plant. And making its first appearance in the New World in 1596 or thereabouts: the wagon, the Western Hemisphere’s first wheeled vehicle. It looks a lot like the German farm cart, and the Spanish will use it to haul supplies as they explore and settle the Southwest.
In 1696, seeds from the Polynesian pomelo tree arrive in Barbados; a mutant form of the pomelo, thinner and sweeter, will become the American grapefruit. And on the other side of the world, coffee growing is brought from India to the Indonesian island of Java-a good thing, or today we’d all be asking for “a cup of India.”
Say hello to Princeton University-or its ancestor, anyway; the College of New Jersey is founded by a group of Presbyterian ministers in 1746, 250 years ago. And there’s more learning going on in 1746, as Philadelphian Benjamin Franklin starts experimenting with electricity.
A busy 1796
It’s the marriage of the season in 1796: Napoleon Bonaparte, now a French national hero with this year’s victories in Italy, weds Parisian socialite Josephine de Beauharnais. (And they said it would never last.) Also in France in 1796, astronomer Pierre Simon de Laplace first suggests that the solar system was created from the cooling and contracting of a giant gas cloud.
Across the Channel, a major advance right here on earth, as English physician Edward Jenner introduces the world’s first smallpox vaccination. Jenner has noticed that milkmaids with cowpox don’t catch the much more dangerous smallpox; he takes fluid from a cowpox blister and rubs it into the skin of 8-year-old James Phipps. Though Phipps is later exposed to smallpox, he doesn’t contract the deadly disease.
Closer to home, George Washington declines to offer himself for a third term as President of the United States; in a close and bitter election, John Adams is elected over Thomas Jefferson, who becomes vice president. Washington’s farewell address declares it America’s “true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.”
Tennessee joins the union as its 16th state in 1796. Farther north, Gen. Moses Cleaveland surveys territory purchased by the Connecticut Land Co. and lays out a town where the Cuyahoga River empties into Lake Erie. The General wants to name the town “Cuyahoga.” His men overrule him and opt for the more personal touch; by the 1830’s, Cleaveland’s first “a” has sunk into the lake somewhere.
Bigger all the time
Expansion is the order of the day in 1846, 150 years ago. The United States wants to buy land from Mexico; Mexico doesn’t want to sell. The U.S. response: war. American forces move into disputed territory on the banks of the Rio Grande and bait Mexico into an attack. When the fighting stops in 1848, U.S. territory extends to the Rio Grande, and includes California and what will later become the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada and part of Colorado.
The Canadian-border question is resolved more peaceably the same year. Despite cries of “54-40 or Fight!” the Oregon Treaty essentially splits the disputed territory in half at the 49th parallel. Iowa, meanwhile, is admitted to the Union as the 29th state, while Brigham Young leads his fellow Mormons out of Nauvoo, on a trek that will ultimately take them to Utah’s Great Salt Lake.
“There was an old Derry down Derry,/ Who loved to see little folks merry,/ So he made them a book/ And with laughter they shook/ At the fun of that Derry down Derry.” English poet-artist Edward Lear’s “Book of Nonsense” is a sensation in 1846, and popularizes the five-line verse called the limerick. (Contrary to rumor, Lear never even knew a hermit named Dave.)
The planet Neptune is discovered in 1846; something had to be out there to make Uranus’ orbit wobble the way it did. The Smithsonian Institution is founded, 17 years after Congress receives a 100,000-pound bequest from James Smithson, chemist, mineralogist and illegitimate son of the Duke of Northumberland.
New Jersey’s Nancy Johnson invents the first portable, hand-cranked, ice cream freezer in 1846. In Baltimore, the song “Jim Crack Corn, or the Blue Tail Fly” is published, and Boston dentist William T.G. Morton opens the era of modern anesthesiology. Morton, 27, tests sulfuric ether on himself and on his dog, then uses it to remove one patient’s tooth and another patient’s facial tumor. The patients are grateful. The dog’s reaction is unrecorded.
Good as . . .
. . . gold!
At Bonanza Creek off the Klondike River, on the Canadian side of the Alaskan border, prospector George Washington Carmack strikes pay dirt in 1896; as soon as word gets out, the Klondike gold rush is on.
Others-American farmers, deep in debt-prefer silver, and plenty of it. “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns,” declares Nebraska fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan in Chicago at the 1896 Democratic convention, “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Bryan’s electrifying address gets him the party’s nomination, a place in oratorical history and defeat at the hands of Ohio governor William McKinley.
Another speaker has more success that year: Evangelist Billy Sunday, one-time center-fielder for the Chicago White Stockings, begins preaching and attracts enormous crowds to his revival meetings.
Utah becomes the 45th state in the union in 1896, after the territory’s Mormons agree to give up polygamous marriage. Word of statehood is greeted in Utah with fire alarms and firecrackers and dancing in the streets. (So who needs polygamy?) In Florida, industrialist H.M. Flagler extends his Florida East Coast Railway a little farther south, to the new town of Miami, incorporated that year. Flagler also begins building Miami’s first resort hotel, the Royal Palm.
Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s . . .
. . . a plane. The Smithsonian’s Samuel Pierpont Langley sends his steam-powered model airplane aloft for some 3,000 feet along the Potomac River, the first journey ever of a mechanically propelled flying machine.
Back on the ground in 1896, the Post Office Department begins a new service: Rural Free Delivery. And botanist George Washington Carver joins Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute and devises new methods to make worn-out cotton land productive once again. Grow peanuts, says Carver. Grow sweet potatoes.
Grow children, says philosopher John Dewey, working somewhat different terrain at the University of Chicago. Dewey founds a school in 1896 to try out his progressive ideas about education: It’s the University Elementary School, better known a century later as the Lab School.
French physicist Henri Becquerel examines uranium and discovers “radioactivity” in 1896, while 1895’s big discovery-the X-ray-also advances, as Chicago researcher Emil Grubbe discovers that heavy doses of X-rays can kill living cells. It’s an accidental discovery-Grubbe has ray-burned one of his hands-but he then begins using X-rays against cancerous tumors.
A failing New York newspaper, its circulation down to 9,000, is purchased in 1896 by the publisher of the Chattanooga Times, Adolph Ochs, for $75,000 in borrowed funds. Ochs revamps his new paper, The New York Times, and promises readers “All the news that’s fit to print.” It seems to work.
The first advice-to-the-lovelorn column appears in 1896, in the New Orleans Picayune. Ann Landers isn’t even born yet; Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer writes the column under the pen name Dorothy Dix.
H.J. Heinz sees an advertisement for 21 styles of shoes; he knows a good thing when he sees it. His new advertising slogan? “57 Varieties.” Adolphus Busch introduces Michelob beer in 1896. And don’t forget confectioner Leo Hirschfield. His new penny candy is the first to be wrapped in paper, and he names it for his 6-year-old daughter; her nickname is “Tootsie.”
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” says Winston Churchill in Fulton, Mo., “an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” Churchill’s 1946 plea for the West to resist Soviet aggression strikes some as too hostile; others see it as a vital Cold War wakeup call.
The world spends part of the first post-war year picking up the pieces. The Nuremberg tribunal sentences a dozen Nazis to death for crimes against humanity. The emperor of Japan publicly declares that, centuries of tradition notwithstanding, emperors are not truly divine. And the United Nations selects New York City as its permanent headquarters; an $8.5 million gift from John D. Rockefeller Jr., helps finance the purchase of land for the U.N.’s new home.
She’s wearing a what?
Peace is nice, but just in case, the United States conducts its first Bikini Atoll atomic-bomb tests. In Indochina, meanwhile, there’s already a new war between the French, who have had the run of the place for years, and the Vietnamese under Ho Chi Minh, who say it’s time for new management. On the other side of the world, Argentina elects Juan Domingo Peron as president, and gets his wife Maria Eva Duarte-Evita-as well. (Andrew Lloyd Webber, call your office.)
Some of those returning soldiers are ready to start (or expand) families in 1946: The U.S. birth rate soars almost 20 percent. It’s the perfect opportunity for a new book by one Dr. Benjamin Spock. “The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care” is published in 1946; later retitled “Baby and Child Care,” it will become an all-time bestseller.
Lots of diapers to clean? Tide detergent first appears in 1946. It won’t take much Tide to wash the latest thing in swimwear, though: At a Paris fashion show just four days after that atomic-bomb test, a model wears a scandalously skimpy two-piece bathing suit. The suit-what little there is of it-creates a sensation, and designer Louis Reard reportedly finds the name of the Pacific Ocean bomb site appropriately explosive. The “bikini” is born.
It’ll be years before the bikini makes it to American shores; in the meantime, there’s always a good movie. The best of 1946? “The Best Years of Our Lives,” which will win eight Academy Awards. But don’t forget “The Big Sleep,” “Notorious” and “My Darling Clementine”-and another one that still gets some attention every now and again: “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
On Broadway, there’s no business like show business; Ethel Merman has them singing her praises in Irving Berlin’s hit musical “Annie Get Your Gun,” while Pearl Bailey heads an all-black cast in “St. Louis Woman”; its Johnny Mercer-Harold Arlen score includes “Come Rain or Come Shine.” Other popular songs in 1946: “To Each His Own.” “Ole Buttermilk Sky.” “Shoo-Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy.” And this one, co-written in 1946 by 21-year-old Mel Torme: “The Christmas Song.” (It’s 10 o’clock-do you know where your chestnuts are roasting?)
The St. Louis Cardinals dispose of the (always disposable) Boston Red Sox in the 1946 World Series, while the Chicago Bears beat the New York Giants 24-14 for the N.F.L. championship. And the country’s top athlete, four-legged division, is the “clubfoot comet,” Assault, winner of racing’s Triple Crown.
In the sleepy desert town of Las Vegas, mobster Bugsy Siegel builds the Flamingo Hotel. And one more sign of things to come in 1946:
ENIAC-an “electronic numerical integrator and computer”–comes on-line at the University of Pennsylvania. The world’s first all-purpose electronic digital computer, ENIAC fills a 30-by-50-foot room. It has 18,000 vacuum tubes and a half million soldered connections. It weighs 30 tons.
Put that in your laptop and smoke it. Happy Anniversaries!
