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December 20 is Mudd Day

December 20, 2016/1 Comment/in December

Today is Mudd Day. It commemorates the birthday of Dr. Samuel Mudd, who was accused of conspiring to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln and hiding his killer, John Wilkes Booth, after the fact.

Dr. Samuel Mudd

After killing Lincoln on April 14, 1865, Booth fractured his fibula when he jumped from the president’s box seat to the stage of the Ford Theater and fled the scene. He and co-conspirator David Herold rode on horseback to Dr. Mudd’s house, arriving in the middle of the night. Mudd splinted Booth’s leg and let the men rest in a bedroom upstairs. They were at the house for at least twelve hours before leaving in late afternoon to continue their flight.

(The fugitives were cornered two weeks later in a Virginia tobacco shed by Union cavalry. Herold surrendered. Booth refused. Soldiers set the shed on fire and shot Booth as he tried to escape the flames.)

It’s possible Mudd didn’t know about the assassination. He went into town to run errands during the day of April 15th and certainly would have learned the news then. But he failed to report Booth’s visit for another twenty-four hours.

Authorities found Mudd’s hesitation suspicious. His inaction certainly allowed the men more time to escape. Under interrogation, he changed his story several times. He may have done so due to the stress of being questioned. He was arrested on April 26th, coincidentally the same day Booth was killed and Herold taken prisoner.

On June 29, 1865, Mudd was found guilty of conspiring to murder President Lincoln. He was sentenced to life in prison, escaping the death penalty by one vote. Four of the convicted, including Herold, were hanged eight days later.

Mudd was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson and released from prison in 1869. He died of pneumonia on January 10, 1883. Despite ongoing efforts to have his record expunged, Mudd’s conviction has never been overturned. A Facebook page is dedicated to clearing his name and his home has become a museum.

*****

One thing is clear, however. The phrase “your name is mud” has no connection to Dr. Mudd. Use of the word “mud” to label things as worthless or unwholesome dates back as far as the 16th century. Its usage was later applied to people, as documented in a 1703 description of London’s low life, Hell upon Earth:

Mud, a Fool, or thick skull Fellow.

The following citation appeared in an 1823 dictionary of slang terms.

Mud – a stupid twaddling fellow. ‘And his name is mud!’ ejaculated upon the conclusion of a silly oration, or of a leader in the Courier.

Oddly, “mud” was also used as a general intensifier. There are many published examples of “as fat as mud,” “as rich as mud,” “as sick as mud” etc. Eventually, the meanings coalesced into an epithet that insulted a person’s worth and identity, and sometimes carried a threat of violence. “Your name is mud” has been in use ever since.

Happy Mudd Day, we think.

Wright Brothers Day

December 17, 2016/1 Comment/in December

Today is Wright Brothers Day. On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright made the first successful flight of a heavier-than-air, mechanically propelled airplane.

Orville’s brother Wilbur, who’d won a coin toss to determine who flew first, had made the first attempt on December 14, 1903. He was unable to get off the ground and caused minor damage to the plane which took a couple of days to repair.

First flight, December 17, 1903

Orville’s flight over the dunes near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, lasted 12 seconds and traveled 120 feet before landing on the sand. Wilbur followed, and the two switched off several times. Wilbur’s last flight lasted almost a full minute and covered 852 feet.

The brothers’ plans to keep flying were dashed when winds flipped the aircraft, damaging it to the point that it was never used again. The plane known as the Wright Flyer hangs in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum but nearly didn’t make it there.

Samuel Langley, former Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and founder of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, had created the Langley Aerodrome, a plane with no landing gear that had to be launched by catapult. His first flight test had ended in failure nine days before the Wright brothers’ flight.

Langley and the Smithsonian attempted to invalidate the brothers’ patents. After the Aerodrome had been modified and successfully flown a few hundred feet in 1914, the Smithsonian put it on display as “the first man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained free flight.” The attempt to rewrite history was unsuccessful and the courts upheld the patents.

Because of this, Orville Wright—Wilbur died in 1912—refused to donate the Wright Flyer to the museum. Finally, in the 1940s, the Smithsonian Institution admitted it had misrepresented Langley’s Aerodrome and Orville relented. The Flyer arrived at the museum in 1948, shortly after Orville’s death.

In 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a proclamation designating December 17 Wright Brothers Day.

When astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon on July 21, 1969, he carried, in a pocket of his spacesuit, a piece of muslin fabric from the left wing of the Wright Flyer and a bit of wood from its left propeller.

Happy Wright Brothers Day!

December 16, 1773: Boston Tea Party

December 16, 2016/1 Comment/in December

Today is the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. On December 16, 1773, the Sons of Liberty, disguised as Mohawks, stole aboard three British ships and emptied 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. This act of defiance, part of a wave of resistance throughout the colonies, was a protest against British rule. Earlier that year, Parliament had passed the Tea Act to shore up the failing East India Company.

Overall, the price of tea was lowered to undercut the prices of Dutch tea smugglers. (The colonies were legally permitted to buy tea only from the British.) However, it reaffirmed an existing three-pence-per-pound duty, one of many pieces of legislation enacted by Parliament without the input and consent of the colonies; this is often referred to as taxation without representation. The principle of self-governance, not the burden of higher taxes, motivated political opposition to the Tea Act.

The East India Company selected consignees in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Charleston and shipped 500,000 pounds of tea across the Atlantic in September. Meanwhile, colonists held several mass meetings where it was decided to refuse the tea and send it back to England with the duty unpaid.

Under pressure from these groups, the brokers in Charleston, New York, and Philadelphia turned away the shipments. Merchants in Boston, including three relatives of the governor, refused to cooperate and allowed the ships to dock. The Dartmouth arrived on November 28th, the Eleanor on December 2nd, and the Beaver on December 15th.

Around midnight on December 16th, a large crowd gathered to watch Samuel Adams and members of Sons of Liberty board the ships. It took nearly three hours to smash open all 342 chests and dump more than 92,000 pounds of tea into the water. (The tea, by the way, was from China: Bohea, Congou and Souchong black teas, plus Singlo and Hyson green teas.) For weeks, the harbor reeked of it.

The name “Boston Tea Party” was not coined until the 1820s. It was known simply as “the Destruction of the Tea in Boston.” Many colonists, including George Washington, condemned it at the time as an act of vandalism.

Parliament saw Massachusetts as the hub of resistance to British rule and enacted laws to punish the colony in general and Boston in particular. The Coercive Acts of 1774 shut down the port of Boston until damages were paid, nullified colonial self-government in Massachusetts, declared British officials immune from criminal prosecution and required colonists to house British troops on demand.

The Acts were intended to isolate Boston and New England. The other colonies were expected to abandon them and quash any of their own ideas of insurrection due to fear of reprisal. Instead, the Acts outraged and unified the colonists, who rushed to the city’s aid, sent supplies and began to organize groups to discuss the injustice of British rule and mobilize resistance.

In September and October of 1774, the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia and petitioned Parliament to repeal the Coercive Acts, vowing to boycott British goods until then. Massachusetts began forming militias to defy martial law. On February 9, 1775, Parliament declared it to be in a state of rebellion.

On April 19, 1775, the first shots between British and American soldiers were fired at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. It is undeniable that the Boston Tea Party and Great Britain’s draconian response to it helped spark the American Revolution.

There were many other precipitating factors but the Boston Tea Party galvanized the populace and helped build a nation. It has been invoked in recent years by groups that appear to lack a working knowledge of the event. Let’s honor its place in history by treating it with the dignity and respect it deserves. (If you’d like to enjoy a cup of tea while you do, that’s fine with us.)

December 10 is Dewey Decimal Day

December 10, 2016/1 Comment/in December

Today is Dewey Decimal Day. Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey was born on December 10, 1851, in the hardscrabble town of Adams Center in Northern New York State. At the age of 22, while studying at Amherst College in Boston, he devised one of the most efficient methods of classification ever known, copyrighting the Dewey Decimal System three years later in 1876. He’s proven to be much harder to classify.

Dewey abhorred waste, championing conversion to metric measurements and the use of streamlined phonetic spellings. Upon leaving home, he shortened his name to Melvil and attempted to change his last name as well, but admitted defeat when his bank refused to recognize his new signature. Otherwise, we’d be referring to the Dui Decimal System right now.

Many libraries at that time utilized a numbering system that indicated the floor, aisle, section and shelf upon which each book was stored. When rearrangement became necessary, all of the books had to be reclassified. Dewey was determined to devise a simple, workable, permanent classification system.

He formulated a system of Arabic numerals with decimals for book classification. All printed knowledge would be organized into ten numerical classifications ranging from 000 to 900, with as many decimals as necessary to define the content of the book being classified.

Within three years, A Classification and Subject Index For Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library was published. It was widely adopted in the United States and England as well as elsewhere in the world. This system has proven to be enormously influential and remains in widespread use.

In 1883, Dewey was recruited by Columbia University to become its librarian. The following year, he founded the School of Library Economy—the first school for librarians ever organized. It opened on January 5, 1887. He personally enrolled each student. Of the twenty-six, nineteen were women.

Columbia forbade admittance to females. Since Dewey believed that women were destined to become librarians, he ignored this rule. That didn’t make him a feminist, though. His enrollment questionnaire required an applicant to report her height, weight, hair and eye color. Inclusion of a photograph was strongly recommended.

In spite of the school’s financial success, Columbia shuttered it the following year and Dewey moved on, accepting an invitation to become director of the New York State Library in 1883. In 1895, he founded a private resort in Lake Placid, New York, and began to campaign for the Olympic Games to be held there. Ten years later, Dewey was forced to resign as State Librarian after complaints that his Lake Placid Club denied entrance to smokers, drinkers, blacks and Jews.

In 1926, he moved to Florida to establish a new branch of the resort. He died on December 26, 1931, in Lake Placid, Florida. The following year, Lake Placid, New York, hosted the Winter Olympics.

Turns out Dewey was more complicated than his system.

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