What Happened Today

The team owners of Major League Baseball  and the Major League Baseball Players Association had been at odds for years by the early 1990s. The owners had even colluded to depress salaries in the late 1980s, and they wanted to get rid of Commissioner Fay Vincent. Once they did that in 1992, they named Milwaukee Brewers owner Bud Selig as "Acting Commisioner," and the owners presented a plan to the Players' Association arguing for revenue sharing among teams and a salary cap for each team. This was rejected outright by the players repeatedly, who saw a salary cap as a way to limit player salaries. By July, with neither side budging, the players agreed they would go on strike on August 12, 1994 if no agreement was made. It was not made, and so the players went on strike. Baseball games were cancelled immediately, with no foreseeable return. After a complete lack of progress, Bud Selig announced on September 9 that the rest of the season was cancelled, including the Postseason and the World Series. It would be the first time in a century no World Series was played. As the 1995 season dawned, the owners settled on using "replacement players." This forced the hand of everyone, and a court decision said that the previous agreements would hold while a new one was negotiated. So Major League Baseball played a shortened season in 1995 and has never had a work stoppage since.

Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary was designed to be a particular kind of prison when the Federal Bureau of Prisons created it in 1933. A reformulated military prison, Alcatraz was a large cement cell block situated on a small rocky island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. The prison was supposed to be escape proof, because no one would survive entering the waters of the Bay. So Alcatraz was opened for the toughest prisoners in the Federal system. No prisoners were sentenced to Alcatraz directly by any judge, but had to be placed there after becoming problematic prisoners at other Federal Prisons. In its time, Alcatraz would house notorious criminals Al Capone, Creepy Karpis, Robert Stroud, Mickey Cohen, and Bumpy Johnson, among many others. There were multiple escape attempts, but no one successfully survived. More importantly, Alcatraz was a new approach to prisons in America, a focus on keeping the most hardened criminals inside of a contained area with no thought for rehabilitation. Alcatraz itself would last less than three decades, but the idea behind it would continue on and on.

When Charles Manson brought his followers to the house of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, he wanted to up the ante on murders that his "Family" had committed the previous night. The LaBiancas were not targeted for any reason other than Manson had seen the home before. The murders of the LaBiancas were not the most notorious murders in the Manson Family's killing spree, as the night before Family members killed actress Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant, and four other people visiting her. The murder of a low level drug dealer, Gary Hinman, had been committed two weeks before that. The main thing that tied the killings together was writing on the wall in blood, often including the word "pigs." After a refusal to tie the crimes together, investigators made the connection. They were assisted by the arrest of the Manson Family at one of their hideaways for an auto theft ring. Then Susan Atkins, the only person present at all three murders, began talking to her bunkmates in jail about the crimes. It was revealed that Manson was a cult leader preaching about triggering a race war. Manson would be put on trial and convicted of murder, while also becoming a cultural icon and a creepy symbol of the death of the 1960s.

The very first use of an atomic weapon in warfare was on August 6, 1945, when the United States Air Force dropped a bomb known as "Little Boy" on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Then, just three days later, the U.S. Air Force dropped another bomb, dubbed Fat Man, on the city of Nagasaki. World War II had become focused on the Pacific theater, as Nazi Germany had surrendered in May. At the Potsdam Conference in July, the United States, United Kindom, and China issued a declaration required Japan's total surrender. The United States had also just tested an atomic bomb at the Trinity test. So when the United states promised "prompt and utter destruction," it was clear what that meant. The Japanese government refused to respond, so the Allies dropped bombs. In actuality, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was unlike anything else ever seen before. Then, to reinforce the promise of "utter destruction," the U.S. took Japan's silence after Hiroshima as a go ahead to bomb another city. Nagasaki wasn't even the intended target. Yet it experienced the same kind of total destruction and the deaths of tens of thousands. And less than a week later, Emperor Hirohito had officially surrendered.

Richard Nixon believed he could fight against the various investigations into the Watergate scandal. Then the "smoking gun tape" was revealed to the public. This was a tape of Nixon talking to his Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman on June 23, 1972, about covering up the President's role in the break-in to the Democratic National Committee's headquarters in the Watergate Complex. The public knowledge of Nixon planning a cover up made his position untenable. Yet Nixon's resignation was really the culmination of two years of investigation. First, the Watergate burglars were sentenced to prison. Then, the Senate began an investigation into the President's role, and a Special Counsel was appointed. When President Nixon sought to fire Special Counsel Archibald Cox, he went through multiple officials at the Justice Department in what was known as the "Saturday Night Massacre." Despite forcing the resignation of his Attorney General, Nixon seemed to be able to survive impeachment proceedings. Then everyone heard the "smoking gun tape," and Republican leaders in Congress told the President he had lost support. With this information, Nixon decided it was best he resign.

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution began large scale American involvement in the Vietnam War, which really had been going on for over a decade. America had even sent some troops, mostly military advisors, to support non-Communist South Vietnam against Communist North Vietnam, in the early 1960s. Then the USS Maddox reported an attack from North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin on August 2, with a separate attack reported on August 4. Although the evidence for such an attack was slim at the time and became even less credible later, President Lyndon Johnson wanted an escalation of American troops in Vietnam. Almost immediately, the United States Congress granted their approval. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was not a declaration of war, but an authorization for the increased use of force. This fact generally exposed a loophole in the Constitution whereby Congress declares War, but the President is the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. Eventually, the Resolution was repealed, and a War Powers Act would limit the scope of the President's general authority. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution had already launched America into Vietnam by that point, however.

The crime William Kemmler was executed for was not particularly notable, as he killed his common law wife with a hatchet while drunk. The way he was executed was pretty notable, as Kemmler was the very first person to be executed in an electric chair. The electric chair was introduced as a concept in the 1880s after work by a Buffalo dentist named Alfred Southwick. Believing a sharp electric shock from a high voltage line was a quick method of execution, Southwick tested this idea in euthanizing animals. In 1886, Southwick was put on a commission seeking a replacement for hanging in New York State. At that point, capital punishment became intertwined with a rivalry over the nature of electricity. Thomas Edison urged the use of alternating current, the main electrical system of his rival, George Westinghouse. So William Kemmler was slated to be executed by electric chair after being convicted in 1889. He then got a lawyer hired by Thomas Edison for his appeals process, but to little avail. The courts said electrocution was constitutional, and so William Kemmler faced the electric chair. Two different attempts were needed to fully kill Kemmler in a disturbing scene. This was still a victory for Edison against alternating current.

American Bandstand broadcast every weekday, showing teenagers across the country the biggest hits in America and the newest dances performed by fellow teenagers. The idea behind Bandstand was that it would be a show for teenagers. Yet the way it presented popular music was relatively conservative. Bandstand began as a show for the Philadelphia market, showcasing pretaped videos of musical performers. Then it changed into a dance program. When Dick Clark took over from original host Bob Horn, who had been fired because of a drunk driving charge, it was geared towards teenagers in a safer way. This made it the ideal show for ABC's national broadcasting slot at 3 PM, which Dick Clark successfully argued to network executives. Bandstand was almost the domestication of Rock n Roll. All the dancers dressed moderately, everyone was well behaved, and the music was always what was popular on radio stations. Despite its demeanor, Bandstand was a haven for gay teens in Philadelphia and showed black performers when other shows refused to. And after it debuted nationally, it became the arbiter for teenage culture.

Anne Frank would become, after World War II, the most famous victim of the Holocaust. Yet when the Nazi police arrested her whole family in 1944, the only people who knew of her were those living in a secret annex in a building in Amsterdam. Anne's father Otto was a German born businessman who had moved to Amsterdam to escape Nazi persecution and then was hidden by the non-Jew he transferred control of his company to in the 1930s. While the family was successfully hidden from deportation and concentration camps for two years, Anne kept a diary. After her father returned from Auschwitz concentration camp after its liberation, he learned his whole family had died and that her diary was preserved. That diary would later be published, first as Het Achterhuis in Dutch, then as Diary of a Young Girl in English, and eventually would become a bestseller. But the girl who wrote it was already dead by that point, as she died in Bergen-Belsen in early 1945. More importantly, the world would be a better place if Anne Frank's diary was unknown, because it would mean the Franks were never arrested.

Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was made Commisioner of Baseball, a brand new position, by the owner of Major League Baseball teams to respond to the Black Sox scandal. The Black Sox were eight members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox--Chick Gandil, Eddie Cicotte, Lefty Williams, Swede Risberg, Happy Felsch, Fred McMullin, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and Buck Weaver--who had conspired with gamblers to throw the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. The rumors began before the series that something was amiss, and when Eddie Cicotte threw the second pitch of the Series straight at Reds second baseman Morrie Rath, the fix was in. The full story would be revealed a little less than a year later, when Cicotte admitted to a grand jury investigating corruption in baseball that he and his teammates had been paid by gamblers to throw the World Series. Weaver and Jackson would say they played no part, while others mostly clammed up. In the court of law, all eight Black Sox were acquitted. In the court of baseball, now run by Commissioner Landis, all eight players were permanently banned from organized baseball.