"History is principally the inaccurate narration of events which ought not to have happened." - Earnest Albert Hooton
This Week in History presents summaries of a few selected historical events for each calendar week of the year.
October 20 - Black batters up! (1924)
Many of us first heard of women's professional baseball by way of the delightful 1992 film A League of Their Own, starring Geena Davis and Tom Hanks. Hollywood has not yet given us a motion picture about blacks in the early years of baseball, pre-integration, so few of us are familiar with the history of Negro Leagues baseball.
Moses Fleetwood Walker
There had been some black players, such as
Moses Fleetwood Walker on major league baseball teams after the Civil War but they suffered the prejudices of the times. Some fans and other players blatantly discriminated against them, at times forcing the cancellation of scheduled games. When the South's
Jim Crow laws (and unlegislated customs) were fully enacted, integrated teams became almost impossible: the logistics of traveling in southern states were completely unworkable with so many restrictions on social mixing of the races. The major leagues quietly banned black, latino and other mixed or non-white players from their teams.
In response, black players, coaches and supporters formed the Negro Leagues. Because of America's obsession with shades of skin color at that time, the Negro Leagues actually included non-blacks as well (mainly latinos) so they were frequently referred to by the more inclusive name Colored Leagues.
In 1887, the first Negro league was created under the moniker of the National Colored Base Ball League but folded after just a few weeks. Black baseball continued but in a haphazard manner compared to the organized competition of white Major League Baseball.
In 1920, Andrew 'Rube' Foster, a one-time pitcher and later a team manager and promoter of black baseball, organized the Negro National League. Ed Bolden, the owner of a Pennsylvania team, joined with other competitors of Foster to establish the rival Eastern Colored League in 1922. The race was now on to show which league had true championship talent.
Foster and Bolden agreed to hold an inter-league match, just like Major League Baseball's own World Series. On this day in 1924, the first Colored World Series championship was played, with the Negro National League's Kansas City Monarchs trouncing Ed Bolden's own Hilldale Daisies in a 5-0 victory.
Pre-game lineup of the teams at the first Colored World Series (click to embiggen)
The Colored World Series continued through 1927 but stopped with the dissolution of the Eastern Colored League in 1928. Eventually a new league was formed and the Negro World Series was played throughout the 1940s. But its time was almost over.
In 1947, Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers and played his first game as a black major league player, reintegrating Major League Baseball after a hiatus of more than half a century. With black players increasingly being signed by the majors, the Negro Leagues were no longer a necessary alternative. Major League Baseball had a declared goal of full integration so merging with the Negro Leagues and keeping them separate was not an option. Both the teams and the leagues slowly faded away into history.
Moses Walker, the original first black major league player, never saw the Colored World Series, having died six months prior to the premiere event.
Keep reading below the orange historical marker about more events during the fourth week of October.
October 22 - All dried up...and that's a good thing (1938)
This morning, I made a sandwich and put it in tupperware to take to work. As I walked out the door, I put on my bowler hat and mackintosh to keep the rain off my cardigan and slipped my wellingtons on. In my coat pocket, I had my trusty derringer, just in case. To amuse myself, I tootled my sousaphone while I walked. On the way to the office, I noticed a zeppelin gently gliding across the gray sky and saw that a zamboni was grooming the ice at the outdoor rink. The documents in my briefcase were in braille and I wondered how I would be able to make chesters of them.
OK, that last one was a ringer. All of the other highlighted words were originally people's names but now are common nouns for things they invented or popularized during their lives. Even in our so-called paperless world, we still make xeroxes of documents but if things had been slightly different, we might be making "chesters" today.
Carlson's first successful xerographic copy
On this day in 1938,
Chester Carlson finally achieved his goal of the previous seven years: making copies of papers without messy liquids and chemical processes. His method of dry copying would eventually become known as xerography or electrophotography and is the foundation for every photocopier and laser printer all over the world.
Duplicating machines already existed in Carlson's time, using various processes such as photostat, ditto, mimeograph and cyanotype. Each one was, to be blunt, a pain in the posterior. Some required the document to be typed or written on special stencil sheets; others required the original document to be photographed and turned into a negative. All required chemical solutions that were messy, smelly or dangerous. There was no way to take any single page, slap it into a machine and have a duplicate pop out without mess or bother.
Chester Carlson studied physics at Cal Tech in Pasadena, graduating in 1930 just as the Great Depression got into full swing. Applying for job after job, he met with no success until finally Bell Laboratories in New York City took him on as a research engineer. A year later, he transferred to the company's patent office as an assistant, a career move which would prove invaluable in the future. During the 1930s, he would work at several other companies before ending up as the head of the patent department of another electronics firm.
Having seen the scores of typists and copyists at his jobs, as well as knowing how tedious it was to copy material by hand during his studies, Carlson dreamed of finding a way to easily and instantly copy books and documents. In his spare time, he visited the public library and pored over their journals on science and technology. One day he came across an obscure article by a Hungarian physicist, Pál Selényi, describing a method for using a beam of ions to create an electrostatic charge on a plate; a fine powder then would adhere to the charged areas but leave the uncharged areas clear. Carlson imagined how the dark powder, which we now call
toner, might be transferred to a sheet of paper pressed against the plate, resulting in a perfect copy of the original image.
Carlson spent several years working out a practical means for using this process. He hired another physicist, Otto Kornei, and the two men experimented with various compounds, photosensors, light sources and base plates. Finally, on October 22 of 1938, they found the right combination and produced the world's first xerographic image.
For the next eight years, the business world reacted to Carlson's breakthrough with the same lack of interest as the medical world had to Fleming's discovery of penicillin. Pitching his invention to manufacturers was a fruitless endeavor; even IBM, the world leader of office equipment, failed to see how much demand there would be for instant copies.
Eventually a manufacturer of photographic paper, Haloid Company, took an interest in Carlson's work and reached a licensing arrangement with him, one that he wisely negotiated due to his former years of experience in patent deals. Even then, Haloid didn't realize the full potential of their investment for general purpose copying; rather they proposed it as a solution to the U.S. military's worries about photographic copy methods in the event of nuclear war (radiation would fog the film used in those processes). With large grants from the army, Haloid developed prototypes of what ultimately became our familiar office copiers.
Xerox 914, first modern photocopier
Early models were still awkward to use, requiring one or more manual steps in the process of copying. Haloid persevered and introduced the Xerox 914 in 1959, the world's first modern photocopier which required nothing more than the press of a button: 27 seconds later, a perfect copy would slide out to the waiting user.
By this time, Haloid was deeply committed to xerography as its future and changed its name to reflect its new direction. We know it today as the Xerox Corporation and the word "xerox" has become popular as both a noun and verb for copies and copying.
Chester Carlson ended up one of the wealthiest people in America, at least in terms of how much he earned rather than how much he kept. Carlson's ambition in life, as he told his wife, was "to die a poor man." He became one of the great donors of the 20th century, sharing his wealth with such institutions as the NAACP, the New York affiliate of the ACLU, universities and a Zen monastery. Most of his fortune had already been given away by the time of his death in 1968 and his will provided bequests for most of what remained.
We can assume that Chester died a happy man, as he had wished, having given so much to so many. It's too bad that "chester" didn't become part of the vernacular instead of "xerox" so we could honor his philanthropy every time we push the Start button on our copiers.
October 24 - A name that will forever live in infamy (1945)
While you might wish that your name could become synonymous with a useful invention or a significant contribution to humanity, you would probably be horrified to think of it as eternally associated with the vilest of crimes and betrayals, Such was the fate of the once president of Norway, whose very name has now become a noun that describes a treasonous collaborator: quisling.
History's face of treachery, Vidkun Quisling
Vidkun Quisling grew up in a family headed by a pastor of the state Church of Norway, by all accounts an affectionate child surrounded by loving parents and siblings. He was clearly very intelligent, gaining top marks on his examinations for entrance to the Norwegian Military Academy. Transferring later to the Norwegian Military College, he graduated with the best score in the college's history and joined the army's General Staff.
He served as a military attaché (and sometimes intelligence officer) in Norway's legations in Russia, Finland and the Ukraine. In Russia, he handled diplomatic affairs on behalf of the United Kingdom (which had broken off official channels to the Soviets) and was awarded honors as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). In the Ukraine, he played an important role in relief efforts for a major famine, working closely with Fridtjof Nansen, an influential Norwegian explorer, diplomat and winner of the 1922 Nobel peace prize. Several European principalities awarded Quisling knightly orders in appreciation for his humanitarian work.
Quisling permanently returned to Norway at the tail end of 1929 and immersed himself in politics. His views seem based on negative reactions to his experiences in Soviet Russia, leaning heavily toward the reactionary right. After Fridtjof Nansen died in 1930, Quisling arranged publication of a political manifesto that purportedly encompassed the social and political goals of his one-time mentor, calling for a stronger government and resistance to Marxism. He followed up with a book which was avowedly racist, making a big splash in Norway's political pond.
Appointed minister of defense in the coalition government of 1931, Quisling spent his two years in that post adopting and advocating increasingly hardline positions. He became the fører (führer) of a new party, National Unity, a kindred spirit to Germany's Nazi party. As he and his party became more extremist, their popular support waned to the point that it had barely 2,000 members by the time the Germans invaded Norway in 1940.
Lack of popular support didn't deter Quisling from his vision of himself as head of a new Norwegian reich. As the Germans moved into the country and the king and royal family evacuated northward, Quisling went on the radio and announced a coup d'etat with himself to be prime minister.
King Haakon, from his new seat of government in Elverum, denounced Quisling and urged his people to resist his illegitimate government as well as the Nazis. Realizing that Quisling could never deliver popular support for a Nazi regime, Hitler withdrew his recognition of the Quisling government and appointed Josef Terboven as Reichskommissar, or military occupation governor.
Vidkun Quisling, Heinrich Himmler, Reichskommissar Josef Terboven, General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst (L-to-R)
Quisling was down but not out. He went to plead his case to Hitler himself, convincing the German dictator of his abilities and loyalty. Soon the
Reichskommissar was forced to again acknowledge
Quisling as head of government and support his National Unity party as the only permitted political force in the kingdom.
Norway next found its Nazi-imposed government emulating the behaviors and crimes of Germany: Jews rounded up and sent to concentration camps, labor union activists and communists imprisoned and executed, a Norwegian version of the Hitler Youth created to indoctrinate the next generation, and more.
Although he was utterly dependent on Nazi support for his regime, at times Quisling argued against the worst excesses of the Reichskommissar's orders. It is no excuse for the terrible things he instigated or agreed to but perhaps it shows that his upbringing as the son of a kind and peaceful minister was not entirely forgotten.
As World War II in Europe and the Thousand Year Reich came to end, Quisling saw the writing on the wall. He tried to interest King Haakon's government-in-exile in a power sharing arrangement, hoping to avoid prosecution as a war criminal. The offer was rebuffed and Quisling and his allies were arrested in May of 1945.
His trial for crimes against the nation showed clear evidence of his participation in atrocities. He was found guilty of virtually all of the charges against him and his appeals were denied: Norway's judgment against him would be carried out.
On this day in 1945, Vidkun Quisling, who had hoped to be acclaimed the führer of a new Norway, was executed by firing squad, despised by the nation which he had betrayed.
Although he didn't coin the neologism, Winston Churchill was one of early users of it, castigating Quisling and his fellow travelers in a speech in 1941:
"A vile race of Quislings—to use a new word which will carry the scorn of mankind down the centuries—is hired to fawn upon the conqueror, to collaborate in his designs and to enforce his rule upon their fellow countrymen while groveling low themselves."
In America, we use the name of Benedict Arnold to imply treachery and betrayal of country. From the perspective of the rest of the English-speaking world, Arnold was actually the hero of his story: persecuted for loyalty to his rightful monarch. Outside of the United States, in English and in many European languages,
quisling is the term that pops to mind for someone who betrays his people and collaborates with their enemies. As Churchill predicted, Vidkun Quisling will forever bear the scorn of mankind.
And that's the news for this week in history. Goodnight, and have a pleasant tomorrow.