Bad Days in History, page 1
Also by Michael Farquhar:
Secret Lives of the Tsars: Three Centuries of Autocracy, Debauchery, Betrayal, Murder, and Madness From Romanov Russia
Behind the Palace Doors: Five Centuries of Sex, Adventure, Vice, Treachery, and Folly From Royal Britain
A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans: Pirates, Skinflints, Patriots, and Other Colorful Characters Stuck in the Footnotes of History
A Treasury of Deception: Liars, Misleaders, Hoodwinkers, and the Extraordinary True Stories of History’s Greatest Hoaxes, Fakes, and Frauds
A Treasury of Great American Scandals: Tantalizing True Tales of Historic Misbehavior by the Founding Fathers and Others Who Let Freedom Swing
A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories of History’s Wickedest, Weirdest, Most Wanton Kings, Queens, Tsars, Popes, and Emperors
Published by the National Geographic Society
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Copyright © 2015 Michael Farquhar. All rights reserved. Reproduction of the whole or any part of the contents without written permission from the publisher is prohibited.
Illustrations copyright © 2015 Giulia Ghigini. All rights reserved. Reproduction of the whole or any part of the contents without written permission from the publisher is prohibited.
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Interior design: Melissa Farris / Katie Olsen
v3.1
To my friend Andy Sullivan—a good man who has proved that through courage, faith, and magnificent humor, even the worst days can be transcended.
“Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering—and it’s all over much too soon.”
—Woody Allen
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Selected Bibliography
Photo Credits
Acknowledgments
Introduction
At first glance, the title of this collection seems so simple and direct: It’s all about bad days in history. Yet, on deeper examination, it’s bewilderingly broad. There are literally billions of miserable episodes throughout human history from which to choose; a single year of the 20th century alone could fill hundreds of volumes. Thus, the subtitle. But that, too, is a bit murky. “Gleefully Grim”? What exactly does that mean? Well, take genocide—a decidedly dark topic not often associated with mirth. Unless … unless a perpetrator of such a gross atrocity is having a bad day, just as Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels was on October 26, 1928, when he whined in his diary: “I have no friends.” Or when a State Department spokesperson blathered her way through a press conference on June 10, 1994, desperately trying to avoid using the word “genocide” to describe the mass slaughter in Rwanda.
Still, while the ugliest moments in history are largely avoided here, at least in their rawest form, some days recounted were certainly grimmer than others. A child killer is a child killer, for example, despite the irresistible irony that Gilles de Rais was Joan of Arc’s close ally and, on August 15, 1434, personally dedicated a lavish place of worship that he had funded: the Chapel of the Holy Innocents. To the reader, the juxtaposition of this unholy day with the firing of Beatles drummer Pete Best on the next calendar day, in 1963, might be a bit jarring. And so it goes throughout this “Chronicle of Misfortune, Mayhem, and Misery for Every Day of the Year,” as the rest of the subtitle reads: the sublime, grotesque, unsettling, and absurd, all jumbled together in an awkward waltz through time.
Plucked from all eras of history, and from around the globe, the bad days in this book are intended to amuse, tantalize, and enlighten—without being predictable. Thus, to cite one famously rotten day, Lincoln’s assassination gets short shrift. Look instead for the deleterious effect it had on two ex-presidents several days later. Or discover how surviving the Titanic actually sank the reputation of one of its passengers later that week. Finally, as you peruse this collection, just remember: No matter how lousy your day has been, you can be sure that somewhere in time someone else’s was so much worse.
—Washington, D.C.
November 2014
January
“January, month of empty pockets!
Let us endure this evil month,
anxious as a theatrical producer’s forehead.”
—COLETTE
JANUARY 1
Crappy New Year!
Ah, New Year’s: a day filled with new hope and fresh starts—except when it wasn’t. For some unfortunates in history, January 1 was a dead end. And a rather ghastly one. Take the fifth-century monk and martyr Telemachus, who stepped into the middle of a gladiatorial fight in Rome and tried to stop the human slaughter, only to be stoned to death by the bloodthirsty audience unappreciative of the effort. Or Charles II of Navarre, known as “the Bad,” who in 1387 burned to death in his own bed after an attendant accidentally ignited the brandy-soaked bandages with which the king had been bound head to foot as a remedy for his ailments.
Then there was Louis XII of France, who, though aging and decrepit, was lucky enough to wed a young and beautiful English princess, Henry VIII’s younger sister, Mary, in 1514. Alas, the vigorous attempts to sire an heir proved too much for the gouty old king, and he dropped dead from exhaustion just three months after the wedding. Yet unlike those others whose grim demise fell on the New Year, at least Louis had fun on the way out.
JANUARY 2, 1811
Swatting the Gadfly Who Stung With the Truth
Timothy Pickering was an early American pest; a persistent, self-righteous mosquito who, among other offenses, urged the secession of New England and assiduously undermined the first four U.S. presidents. He called George Washington “a much overrated, semi-literate mediocrity.” John Adams was forced to fire him as secretary of state because of his disloyalty to the administration—and after that he stubbornly refused to resign. Indeed, Pickering was so obnoxious even his own biographer couldn’t stand him. But it wasn’t just his odious personality that earned the obscure Founding Father his most enduring distinction: being the first of only nine U.S. senators ever officially censured. That happened because Timothy Pickering dared to tell the truth.
On October 27, 1810, President James Madison issued a proclamation declaring the annexation of West Florida, a Spanish possession, claiming the region had been part of the Louisiana Purchase. Pickering objected to such a unilateral exercise of executive power. In typical gadfly fashion, he produced before the Senate an old document from France’s then foreign minister, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, stating emphatically that West Florida was not part of the Louisiana Purchase. Only problem was, the document had yet to be declassified—despite the fact that it dated back to the Jefferson Administration. Revealing the classified document was a petty violation, but Pickering’s enemies pounced on it.
Henry Clay, the aggressively expansionist senator from Kentucky, introduced a resolution of censure. Pickering called it a “put-up affair,” which indeed it was. Had the motion been made against someone less unpleasant to his peers, it probably wouldn’t have passed. But Pickering was Pickering, and on January 2, 1811, he became the first entry in the Senate’s official annals of infamy.
JANUARY 3, 1977
Apple Dumpling: A Co-Founder’s Small Sliver of the Pie
Ronald Wayne considered himself a lucky man when Apple Computers was incorporated on January 3, 1977. Not because of the potential windfall, but because he had extricated himself months earlier from what he considered a potentially risky partnership with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. As the company’s co-founder, as well as the most mature and experienced of the three, Wayne had been given a 10 percent stake to essentially serve as Apple’s parent, charged with keeping the two other eccentric geniuses under control. But that, as Wayne later recounted, “was like having a tiger by the tail.” Two of them, actually, and as the only partner with a
JANUARY 4, 1903
Topsy’s Last Stand: The Shocking Execution of an Elephant
Amid the frenzy of invention and astonishing technological advances that characterized the later 19th century, Thomas Edison launched what became known as the War of Currents. It was a ferocious campaign against the use of alternating current (AC)—a system of electricity distribution, perfected by the inventor’s onetime employee Nikola Tesla and backed by George Westinghouse—that threatened to make obsolete Edison’s own direct current (DC) system in powering American homes and industry. Money and prestige were both at stake, and the Wizard of Menlo Park wasn’t about to lose either.
Contrary to his folksy image, the famed inventor was absolutely ruthless in his efforts to discredit the rival system of alternating current, which he sought to portray as being just as lethal as lightning. To that end, Edison’s associates staged a number of unsavory public spectacles in which dogs and other animals were electrocuted using the dreaded rival current.
The war reached its grotesque climax in 1890 when Edison used his considerable influence to ensure that convicted ax murderer William Kemmler would be executed by the newfangled electric chair. Of course, alternating current would be used to demonstrate just how dreadful it could be. Edison, in fact, coined the term for death by electric chair as being “Westinghoused,” hoping it would enter the national vernacular. It didn’t.
By the beginning of 1903, the War of Currents was all but lost as Edison’s DC system was rapidly eclipsed. Still, the ever inventive Wizard conjured one last stunt to prove to the world that alternating current would be the bane of mankind. A misbehaving circus elephant named Topsy had killed three of her handlers—one of them after he put a lit cigarette in her mouth. Such aggression could no longer be tolerated, and it was decided that Topsy would have to die for her crimes. The plan was to publicly hang her at Coney Island. But when the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals objected, Edison suggested Topsy be “Westinghoused” instead. And so on the appointed day, January 4, 1903—in what The New York Times described as “a rather inglorious affair”—the homicidal pachyderm was felled in front of a huge crowd by a 6,600-volt AC charge. And Edison, who had staged the whole sordid episode, captured it all with one of his greatest inventions: the motion picture camera.
JANUARY 5, 1895
Stripped of All Dignity: The Dreyfus Affair
It was just one episode in the prolonged saga of miscarried justice and virulent anti-Semitism that was known as the Dreyfus Affair. But for a man of honor, it was perhaps the most agonizing. On the morning of January 5, 1895, Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery captain of Jewish descent attached to the French General Staff, having been secretly court-martialed and convicted of treason based on manufactured evidence, was forced to undergo an excruciating ritual of degradation before being shipped off to serve a life sentence on the fearsome penal colony Devil’s Island.
At 9 a.m., Dreyfus was marched into the center of the École Militaire courtyard, where, before representatives of all France’s armed forces and stands full of distinguished guests, his self-described “horrible torture” began. “I suffered agonizingly, but held myself erect with all my strength,” he recalled. “To sustain me I called up the memory of my wife and children.”
The sentence of degradation was read aloud, after which Dreyfus suddenly cried out to his comrades, “Soldiers!… I am innocent, I swear that I am innocent. I remain worthy of serving in the army. Long live France! Long live the army!”
Despite his protests, guards stripped Dreyfus of his buttons, braids, and epaulets until his uniform was bare of decoration. Then, as the final humiliation in what one witness described as “a more exciting spectacle than the guillotine,” they broke his saber in two. The ceremony ended with a parade—a walk of shame. “I was compelled to make the whole round of the square,” Dreyfus recounted. “I heard the howls of the deluded mob, I felt the thrill which I knew must be running through those people, since they believed that before them was a convicted traitor to France; and I struggled to transmit to their hearts another thrill—belief in my innocence.”
After five years spent rotting on Devil’s Island, and many more years struggling to rehabilitate his good name, Dreyfus was eventually officially exonerated in the affair that came to sharply divide France. But the French military that had framed him was never quite reconciled to its own dishonor, and in 1985 it rejected a statue of Dreyfus—holding his broken sword—that was to be placed in the École Militaire courtyard where the much maligned soldier had been so cruelly dishonored. Defaced with the slogan “Dirty Jew” in 2002, the memorial now stands forlorn on an obscure Parisian traffic island.
JANUARY 6, 1540
Sooo Not Hot: Henry VIII Meets His Match, Kills His Matchmaker
Thomas Cromwell was Henry VIII’s most adept henchman. He was the ruthless engineer of the English king’s divorce from his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, his split from Rome, and the destruction of his second wife, Anne Boleyn. But as a matchmaker, Henry’s otherwise able minister was a dismal failure—a shortcoming that would cost him his head.
Henry had married three times for love, but after the death of his third queen, Jane Seymour, the king’s influential minister determined a political match was in order to help shore up England’s Protestant alliances in Germany. Cromwell settled on Anne, a princess from the duchy of Cleves. And though he had never set eyes on her, Henry agreed to the match based on the glowing reports of her beauty and grace he had received from his closest adviser and others—as well as a somewhat flattering portrait of the princess by the court painter Hans Holbein.
Having successfully finessed the political alliance with Cleves, Cromwell anxiously awaited his master’s romantic response to his handiwork. It was not a good one. Henry had eagerly set off to the coast to meet his intended and, as he put it, “to nourish love.” But upon first seeing Anne, the king blanched. “I like her not!” he stormed ominously, no doubt leaving Cromwell quaking.
What exactly it was about poor Anne of Cleves that so repelled the king remains a mystery. Perhaps it was simply chemistry—an intangible quality that would have been impossible for Cromwell to detect or convey. All that is certain is that Henry was very unhappy. “I see nothing in this woman as men report of her,” he fumed, “and I marvel that wise men would make such report as they have done!” To Cromwell he railed, “If I had known so much before, she had no coming hither [to England]. But what remedy now?”
Unfortunately, there was no remedy without imperiling the vital Cleves alliance. King Henry VIII, a monarch whose will was rarely thwarted, now found himself stuck: “If it were not that she had come so far into my realm, and the great preparations and state that my people have made for her, and for fear of making a ruffle in the world and of driving her brother into the arms of the Emperor and the French King, I would not now marry her. But now it is too far gone, wherefore I am sorry.”
Having placed his master’s “neck into the yoke,” as Henry put it, Cromwell could only meekly offer his regrets that the king was “no better content.”
By his wedding day on January 6, 1540, Henry had hardly mellowed to the idea of Anne. “My lords,” he said, pausing in front of the chapel at Greenwich Palace, “if it were not to satisfy the world and my realm, I would not do this day what I must do this day for any earthly thing.” And if Cromwell hoped the king’s mood might improve after he actually bedded Anne, he was sorely disappointed the next morning.
