"History, that excitable and unreliable old lady." - Guy de Maupassant
This Week in History presents summaries of a few selected historical events for each calendar week of the year.
October 5 - And now for something completely different (1969)
On this day in 1969, a 17th century castaway struggles to emerge from the sea, finally throwing himself upon the beach and looking directly at us gasps "It's ... " and the surreal animations of Terry Gilliam flash upon the screen as the announcer intones "Monty Python's Flying Circus." Over the next five years, viewers around the world would be amused, astonished and bewildered by 45 episodes, broadcast by the UK's BBC, of one of the most madcap and maddening television series ever produced.
Its humor ranged from the dry wit of New Yorker cartoons to slapstick, invoked intellectual references unlikely to be known to but a fraction of its audience, and lampooned the politicians and celebrities of the era. Sketches seemingly began at random points and sometimes ended just as abruptly, with no punchline or closure, interleaved with montages of strange illustrations. Some hailed it as genius, others decried it as devoid of taste and meaning. None could adequately define its humor so the world came to describe it by the self-referential term
Pythonesque.
The comedy troupe came together almost by accident. Although the six members (John Cleese, Eric Ïdle, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam) had at various times, on various shows, worked together as performers or writers in smaller groupings, it wasn't until the Flying Circus that they all united on one project. Chapman and Cleese had been offered their own show by the BBC and the other four were offered one on ITV (the BBC's younger sibling). ITV didn't have a studio available at the time so ultimately all six combined their talents in a single show for the BBC.
Infused with ideas and wanting to break new ground in television comedy, they developed the concept of stream-of-consciousness as their comedic foundation. By using continuity devices such as recurring characters as announcers and Gilliam's animated transitions, the individual sketches had an integral flow. A Flying Circus episode could be looked at as the chaotic ramblings within one person's mind.
Monty Python was often on the cutting edge of broad transformations in society at the tail end of the 1960s and early 1970s. In the following clip, we see a loud-and-proud cross-dressing lumberjack. The humor isn't directed at the lumberjack, but at those around him, gently mocking their puzzlement as they discover he doesn't fit their expectations of a traditional "manly man."
Monty Python went on to produce insanely clever and biting feature films, such as Life of Brian and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Eventually the individual members went their separate ways, developing their own careers but leaving behind a legacy of innovation that influenced the next generation of comedic writers and performers.
Monty Python's Flying Circus has become so deeply entwined with British culture that prospective citizens are questioned about some of its most famous sketches in the examinations for UK citizenship.
Keep reading below the orange historical marker about more events during the second week of October.
October 6 - This train is bound for ... history (1866)
The old spiritual goes "This train is bound for glory." The train leaving Seymour, Indiana on this day in 1866 was bound for another fate.
John Reno, Simeon Reno, and Frank Sparkes boarded the train that night in Seymour. After it was under way, the bandits put on masks, broke into the express car (where valuables were guarded), overpowered the expressman and robbed a safe of $16,000. They pushed another safe off of the train where their confederates were waiting to break it open (they didn't succeed). Pulling the emergency stop cord to get the engineer to halt the train, the desperados fled on waiting horses, having accomplished the world's first train robbery.
Long a plague in the surrounding area,
the Reno gang centered around the siblings of one family: Frank, John, Simeon, and their sister Laura Reno. Horse thieving, murder, armed robbery and bounty jumping brought them notoriety; executing witnesses to their crimes brought them silence from the townspeople and nearby residents whom they terrorized.
That first train robbery broke the hold they had over their fellow citizens. An armed posse tracked down the gang, capturing several of its members and lynching them. It still didn't stop the Reno brothers from carrying out more violence and mayhem.
They repeated their railroad success by robbing three more trains over the next two years. In May of 1868, the gang hijacked the locomotive and express car of a train near Marshfield, Indiana, uncoupling the trailing passengers cars and speeding away to break into the safe at leisure. Netting $96,000 (about $1.7 million in today's dollars) and killing the guard, the crime captivated the nation's press and was sensationalized as "the Great Train Robbery."
By this time, the famed Pinkerton Agency had been hired by insurers to pursue and apprehend the miscreants. Learning of their plans, Pinkertons were waiting on board when the gang tried to rob yet another train on July 9, 1868. They opened fire, wounding two of the outlaws, but all except one escaped. Over the next few months, all would be caught at locations around the midwest and all the way up into Canada; all ten ended up being lynched by vigilantes subsequent to their apprehension.
Once again, the Reno gang made history. Frank Reno and his confederate, Charlie Anderson, were the last two members apprehended and were in federal custody. It was the only time in history that federal prisoners were seized by a mob and hanged before trial. No one was ever charged or arrested for the crime. The only surviving gang member was John Reno, who had been arrested early in the year and was serving a 25 year sentence at the Missouri state penitentiary.
The Reno gang's contribution to history didn't end with their lynchings. In 1903, the motion picture company of Thomas Edison released a groundbreaking film based on their exploits,
The Great Train Robbery.
The film created a new genre: the action movie (early films were simple non-narrative visual presentations of activities like acrobats, dancers or parades). Just ten minutes long, the dramatic adventure of dastardly deeds and heroic justice thrilled the audience and turned it into the world's first blockbuster, not to be overtaken in popularity until 1915 when The Birth of a Nation was released.
The Great Train Robbery was also the first western. Although the genre typically involved cowboys or cavalry troopers battling Indians (no one used "Native American" back in the westerns' heyday), a dramatic train robbery became a staple feature of westerns, usually with the villains riding alongside the train and jumping onto it from horseback (which never once happened in real life).
Had the Reno brothers lived a little later and been a little smarter, they might have stopped after their first trailblazing crime, written a memoir, sold the movie rights, and retired in luxury to Palm Beach.
October 7 - Diogenes douses his lamp (1996)
Screw it, it's hopeless now...I'm going home
Diogenes the Cynic, a Greek philosopher of ancient times, was famed for carrying a lamp during broad daylight. When passersby inquired why he did so, he replied that he was searching for an honest man but encountered nothing but liars and scoundrels. Had he been living until modern times, I imagine that on this day in 1996 he would have put out his lamp and gone home forever in despair of ever succeeding at his quest.
It was on this day that Fox News began broadcasting.
Fox News Channel came to life because of two men: Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes. Murdoch, the heir to an Australian media mini-empire built upon his father's holdings, eventually expanded to the United Kingdom where he purchased some of its most popular tabloids and newspapers. Plunging into new communications technology, he purchased the controlling interest in satellite broadcaster Sky Television.
Murdoch launched a 24 hour news channel, Sky News, in 1989 which still operates today, broadcasting in dozens of countries around the globe. Licensed under UK laws which require neutrality in news reporting, Sky News is generally considered to provide reliable and impartial journalism.
Of course, Rupert Murdoch's own political and economic views skew well to the right. After acquiring the Fox Entertainment company in the United States in the mid-1980s, he wanted to create a new non-stop news channel, unencumbered by fairness laws, in the looser regulatory structure of the U.S. media. Cable television, unlike programming broadcast over the public airwaves, was the media equivalent of the old Wild West absent a sheriff. So a cable news channel it would be.
Roger Ailes' career began in television production in the 1960s before moving on to another kind of stage-managed production: politicians and their campaigns. As President Nixon's media advisor, Ailes already had dreams and schemes for pushing rightwing propaganda into the news, working on a never-implemented project to be named
Capitol News Service. It would videotape interviews and briefings with conservative politicians all day long, editing and copying the tapes for express delivery to local stations throughout the country, supplying them with an endless stream of pre-packaged propaganda for their news broadcasts. All of this would be paid for by the White House. If they'd only referred to Nixon as
Dear Leader in the broadcasts, we would have thought we were in North Korea.
Apparently leopards sometimes do change their spots. During his Nixon years, Ailes suggested legislation limiting political ads to a relatively short period before elections. He also expressed disdain for the seemingly interminable presidential campaigns and the media's shallow treatment of them as horse races:
"In my opinion, if the news media would quit trying to create false excitement by covering all potential presidential candidates in terms of a popularity poll, which is meaningless at this stage, they would be taking a giant step forward in journalistic responsibility."
Of course nowadays Fox is one of the champions of exactly that practice, even shifting their support and news slant in order to prop up or tear down candidates as they rise and fall in the favor of Murdoch and Ailes.
Fired by Nixon for disloyalty, Ailes nevertheless kept working in politics. Ailes collaborated with Lee Atwater, the dark prince of political ratfucking, on George H.W. Bush's campaign in 1988 against Michael Dukakis. They came up with the strategy of indelibly linking Dukakis with a vicious killer and rapist, Willie Horton, in the public mind. According to Ailes,
"The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it."
With such natural talents for creative spin and calumny, it was no surprise when Murdoch tapped him to head up his new American venture in day-and-night news coverage. Assembling a team of hosts, talking heads, pundits, reporters and technical staff early in 1996, Ailes had Fox News ready for its launch on October 7. He and Murdoch were determined to rapidly build up Fox's viewership by making it accessible everywhere; they reversed the standard practice of charging cable companies to carry their channel and instead paid up to $11 per subscriber to cable companies for carrying Fox News.
Today, Fox News Channel has a global reach. It is available by cable and/or satellite in almost all countries of the Americas, parts of Europe, Russia, parts of Asia and Africa, and Murdoch's old stomping grounds of Australia (and New Zealand).
Edward R. Murrow, one of the finest reporters in the history of broadcasting understood how to reach his viewers and gain their respect and trust:
"To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful."
Fox News adopted
a different philosophy and strategy. Fox simply tells its viewers what they already suspect to be true: America is in the tentacles of a vast leftwing conspiracy against all that they value. It has lost its greatness and its glorious past due to the evil machinations of liberals, progressives, Democrats, gays and lesbians, people of color, atheists, Muslims, and women who refuse to stay in the kitchen and nursery. Credibility and truthfulness aren't needed when the persuasion is all-pervasive and just reinforces existing beliefs, no matter how implausible or ridiculous.
It's been a winning formula with their strongest demographic, older whites (in the U.S., their typical viewer is somewhere north of 65 years of age). Fox News viewers, thanks to constant confirmation of their biases and fears, rate FNC highly for accuracy and fairness in reporting: pretty much everyone else rates FNC as a noise machine for rightwing propaganda.
It's also been a winning formula as highly paid welfare for failed conservative politicians and staffers. Its lineup of jobless wingnuts and felons hired as pundits, analysts and hosts includes Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, Zell Miller, G. Gordon Liddy and Karl Rove, as well as everyone's favorite man-on-dog scold, Rick Santorum.
Lest anyone think the extremists are limited to a few consultancies on Fox News Channel, let's remember a few of the featured hosts, those who had or still have their very own shows: Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin, Greta Van Susteren, Oliver North and perhaps the most disturbingly muddled and paranoid talking head of all time, Glenn Beck.
Hauling all of the mendacious, unhinged and conspiracy-addled contributors, special guests and featured presenters of Fox News Channel would have the loco-motive of the crazy train straining under a full load.
October 11 - And now for something completely not different (1862)
During the Civil War, the common foot soldiers of the Confederacy popularized a phrase: ‘a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.’ While the saying might be new, the idea was not. Since the first ancient king convinced his peasants to join battle on behalf of himself and his nobles, the rich and powerful have waged wars for their own glory and acquisitions while the common folk suffered the horrors and slaughter but usually failed to gain any benefit.
Barely a year into the war, the South was already facing the prospect of defeat. Supplies were short, inflation was running rampant, and able-bodied troops were becoming ever more scarce. The Confederate Congress addressed the last problem on April 16, 1862 by passing legislation conscripting all white Confederate male citizens, aged 18 to 35, into the army, to serve a period of three years. Known as the First Conscription Act, the law had a provision allowing the conscript to send someone else in his place.
There were a few oddities about that. First, if all of the eligible men were already being drafted, where would a legal substitute come from? The only possibilities were foreign mercenaries or Southern deserters gaming the system for payment; both were suspected of being likely to abandon the field and their comrades. Second, it reeked of elitism, with rich men able to buy their way out of danger while poor men were forced to the battlefronts.
Exemption document under the Twenty Negro Law
While the original law was broadly despised, the Second Conscription Act sealed the deal, convincing the populace that the rich and powerful were contemptuously squandering the lives of their less affluent fellows. Passed on this day in 1862, the
Twenty Negro Law, as it was popularly known, exempted owners of 20 or more slaves from compulsory military service. In detail, it was somewhat broader than that, allowing slaveholders to pool their resources, granting an exemption if two plantations within five miles of each other had a combined total of 20 slaves.
The fantasies of Gone with the Wind and modern day Confederate rebels are just that, fantasies. The culture of demure belles and elegant balls in stately mansions existed for but a few, the less-than-1% of their day, just as in our day. About three-fourths (74%) of white southerners owned no slaves at all. Another 23% owned one or more slaves, but less than 20; rather than an imposing plantation house, they typically lived in a modest cabin with perhaps one domestic servant and two or three field hands. Only about 3% owned 20 slaves or more, qualifying for the legal exemption from conscription.
So the average southern soldier was not a fancy gentleman, fighting to preserve his property of human chattel and genteel way of life. He was offering his life and limbs to protect the economic interests of a sliver of society who weren't willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause; the wealthy planters had little more regard for him than they did for the blacks they kept in bondage and misery.
As the South grew more desperate in the later stages of the war, the exemptions were narrowed and the age of eligibility was expanded up to 45 years of age. However, by then the cat was already out of the bag: the soldiers knew that they were fighting on behalf of their economic masters.
It was indeed a poor man's fight to benefit the rich men who instigated it for their own welfare. Some things never change.
A closing request from this evening's train conductor
Last week I wrote a diary that didn't get much traction, for whatever reason. I am asking you to give me just 5 minutes of your time...and trust me, it will be 5 minutes you will not regret. Click on my diary and don't waste your time with the blather I wrote there, just spend 4 minutes and 37 seconds watching the embedded video. It will move you and give you hope as you see the heartfelt reactions of good and caring people to discrimination against strangers they just met. And with hope, we can build a better future.
The remaining 23 seconds that I asked for? Please forward the video to somebody: facebook, twitter, an instant message or email. You will want to do so, it's really that good. Thank you.
Awesome LGBQT anti-discrimination video from Spain
And that's the news for this week in history. Goodnight, and have a pleasant tomorrow.