from historychannel.com

This Day In History, February, 17....


General Interest

~ 1904 : Madame Butterfly premieres~
On this day in 1904, Giacomo Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly
premieres at the La Scala theatre in Milan, Italy.

The young Puccini decided to dedicate his life to opera after seeing a
performance of Giuseppe Verdi's Aida in 1876. In his later life, he
would write some of the best-loved operas of all time: La Boheme
(1896), Tosca (1900), Madame Butterfly (1904) and Turandot (left
unfinished when he died in 1906). Not one of these, however, was an
immediate success when it opened. La Boheme, the now-classic story of
a group of poor artists living in a Paris garret, earned mixed
reviews, while Tosca was downright panned by critics.

While supervising a production of Tosca in London, Puccini saw the
play Madame Butterfly, written by David Belasco and based on a story
by John Luther Long. Taken with the strong female character at its
center, he began working on an operatic version of the play, with an
Italian libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica. Written over
the course of two years--including an eight-month break when Puccini
was badly injured in a car accident--the opera made its debut in Milan
in February 1904.

Set in Nagasaki, Japan, Madame Butterfly told the story of an American
sailor, B.F. Pinkerton, who marries and abandons a young Japanese
geisha, Cio-Cio-San, or Madame Butterfly. In addition to the rich,
colorful orchestration and powerful arias that Puccini was known for,
the opera reflected his common theme of living and dying for love.
This theme often played out in the lives of his heroines--women like
Cio-Cio-San, who live for the sake of their lovers and are eventually
destroyed by the pain inflicted by that love.
Perhaps because of the opera's foreign setting or perhaps because it
was too similar to Puccini's earlier works, the audience at the
premiere reacted badly to Madame Butterfly, hissing and yelling at the
stage. Puccini withdrew it after one performance. He worked quickly to
revise the work, splitting the 90-minute-long second act into two
parts and changing other minor aspects. Four months later, the
revamped Madame Butterfly went onstage at the Teatro Grande in
Brescia. This time, the public greeted the opera with tumultuous
applause and repeated encores, and Puccini was called before the
curtain 10 times. Madame Butterfly went on to huge international
success, moving to New York's Metropolitan Opera in 1907.

~1957 : Gromyko becomes foreign minister~
Andre Gromyko was installed as Soviet Foreign Minister on February 17, 1957. Gromyko was called to foreign service in 1939 and began by serving under a policy of cooperation with the Nazis before Hitler's attack on Russia. After World War II he became an expert at Cold War diplomacy. Seen first as a hard liner, he shifted his positions as the times demanded. He served through three decades, surviving most of the Soviet leaders he worked for and most of the world leaders with whom he quarreled and negotiated.

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American Revolution

~1782 : French and British battle in the Indian Ocean~
The worldwide implications of the American War for Independence are made clear on this day in history as the American-allied French navy begins a 14-month-long series of five battles with the British navy in the Indian Ocean.
Between February 17, 1782, and September 3, 1782, French Admiral Pierre Andre de Suffren de Saint-Tropez, otherwise known as Bailli de Suffren, and British Vice-Admiral Sir Edward Hughes, commander in chief in the East Indies, engaged in four major battles in the Indian Ocean region: the Battle of Sadras on February 17, the Battle of Providien on April 12, the Battle of Negapatam on July 6 and the Battle of Trincomalee on September 3. The French attacked British possessions on the Indian coast and in Ceylon as part of the world war spawned by the American Revolution. Although Suffren failed to take any of Hughes’ ships, he managed to prevent Hughes from taking any of his own fleet. This alone was a significant improvement in French performance when pitted against the legendary British navy. The fifth and final encounter of the two fleets—the Battle of Cuddalore on April 20, 1783--forced Hughes to leave for Madras, just before Suffren learned of the Treaty of Paris and returned to France.

En route home at the Cape of Good Hope, Suffren received compliments on his strategy from the English captains he had opposed in East India. Napoleon, too, had a high opinion of Suffren, commenting that he would have become France’s Lord Nelson, had he survived. Instead, he died suddenly in France on December 8, 1788, of either a stroke or wounds from a duel.

Hughes also profited from the East India campaign. He returned to Britain extremely wealthy from the various prizes and perquisites he won in the Indies and had his portrait painted in full naval splendor by the renowned Sir Joshua Reynolds.


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Automotive

~1911 : First self-starter installed~
The first self-starter, based on patented inventions created by General Motors (GM) engineers Clyde Coleman and Charles Kettering, was installed in a Cadillac. In the early years of fierce competition with Ford, the self-starter would play a key role in helping GM to keep pace. The Ford Model T's crank starter caused its share of borken jaws and ribs. Charles Kettering, the founder of Delco (Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company), devised countless improvements for the automobile, including lighting and ignition systems, lacquer finishes, antilock fuels, and leaded gasoline. Prior to his work with cars, Kettering also invented the electric cash register.

~1934 : First driving class is offered~
The first driving course was offered at State College High School in State College, Pennsylvania, giving birth to the American tradition of driver's education. The course, like today's courses, provided both classroom and behind-the-wheel instruction. Students who completed Amos Neyhart's course received State of Pennsylvania driver's licenses.

~1972 : VW Bug sets record~
The 15,007,034th Volkswagen Beetle rolled out of the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg, Germany, surpassing the Ford Model T's previous production record to become the most heavily produced car in history. The Beetle or the "Strength Through Joy" car, as the Germans initially called it, was the brainchild of Ferdinand Porsche. He developed the Volkswagen on orders from the German government to produce an affordable car for the people. Developed before World War II, the Beetle did not go into full-scale production until after the war. It became a counter-culture icon in the U.S. during the 1960s largely because it offered an alternative to the extravagant American cars of the time. In 1998, Volkswagen released the "New Beetle" to rave reviews. The "Old Beetle," however, hasn't completely disappeared, as it is still being produced in Mexico.

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Civil War

~1865 : Sherman sacks Columbia, South Carolina~
The soldiers from Union General William Tecumseh Sherman's army ransack Columbia, South Carolina, and leave a charred city in their wake.

Sherman is most famous for his "March to the Sea" in the closing months of 1864. After capturing Atlanta in September, Sherman cut away from his supply lines and cut a swath of destruction across Georgia on his way to Savannah. His army lived off the land and destroyed railroads, burned warehouses, and ruined plantations along the way. This was a calculated effort--Sherman thought that the war would end quicker if civilians of the South felt some destruction personally, a view supported by General Ulysses S. Grant, commander of all Union forces, and President Lincoln.

After spending a month in Savannah, Sherman headed north to tear the Confederacy into smaller pieces. The Yankee soldiers took particular delight in carrying the war to South Carolina, the symbol of the rebellion. It was the first state to secede and the site of Fort Sumter, where South Carolinians fired on the Federal garrison to start the war. When General Wade Hampton's cavalry evacuated Columbia, the capital was open to Sherman's men.

Many of the Yankees got drunk before starting the rampage. General Henry Slocum observed: "A drunken soldier with a musket in one hand and a match in the other is not a pleasant visitor to have about the house on a dark, windy night." Sherman claimed that the raging fires were started by evacuating Confederates and fanned by high winds. He later wrote: "Though I never ordered it and never wished it, I have never shed any tears over the event, because I believe that it hastened what we all fought for, the end of the War." Belatedly, some Yankees helped fight the fires, but more than two-thirds of the city was destroyed. Already choked with refugees from the path of Sherman's army, Columbia's situation became even more desperate when Sherman's army destroyed the remaining public buildings before marching out of Columbia three days later.

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Cold War

~1947 : Voice of America begins broadcasts to Russia~
With the words, "Hello! This is New York calling," the U.S. Voice of America (VOA) begins its first radio broadcasts to the Soviet Union. The VOA effort was an important part of America's propaganda campaign against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The VOA began in 1942 as a radio program designed to explain America's policies during World War II and to bolster the morale of its allies throughout Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. After the war, VOA continued as part of America's Cold War propaganda arsenal and was primarily directed toward the western European audience. In February 1947, VOA began its first Russian-language broadcasts into the Soviet Union. The initial broadcast explained that VOA was going to "give listeners in the USSR a picture of life in America." News stories, human-interest features, and music comprised the bulk of the programming. The purpose was to give the Russian audience the "pure and unadulterated truth" about life outside the USSR. Voice of America hoped that this would "broaden the bases of understanding and friendship between the Russian and American people."

By and large, the first program was a fairly dry affair. Much of it dealt with brief summaries of current events, discussions of how the U.S. budget and political system worked, and a rousing analysis of a "new synthetic chemical substance called pyribenzamine." Music on the program was eclectic, ranging from "Turkey in the Straw" to Cole Porter's "Night and Day." In addition, due to bad weather and technical difficulties, the sound quality for the Russian audience was generally poor. According to U.S. officials in the Soviet Union, Russians rated the program "fair."

VOA broadcasts into Russia did improve somewhat over the years, primarily because music played an increasingly prominent role. U.S. observers had discovered that the Soviet people's appetite for American music, particularly jazz, was nearly insatiable. How many Russians actually ever heard the broadcasts is uncertain, but reports from behind the Iron Curtain indicated that many VOA programs, specifically the music segments, were eagerly awaited each night. By the 1960s, VOA was broadcasting to every continent in several dozen languages. Today, VOA continues to operate, bringing "Life in America" to the world. And with "Radio Marti," which is aimed at communist Cuba, it continues its Cold War tradition.


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Crime

~1906 : The first "Trial of the Century"~

Union leaders Bill Hayward, Charles Moyer, and George Pettibone are taken into custody by Idaho authorities and the Pinkerton Detective Agency. They are put on a special train in Denver, Colorado, following a secret, direct route to Idaho because the officials had no legal right to arrest the three union executives in Colorado. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), of which Hayward was president, tried in vain to stop the unofficial arrests.

Idaho had resorted to this gambit in an attempt to bring the union leaders to justice for the assassination of former governor Frank Steunenberg. On December 30, 1905, a powerful bomb affixed to Steunenberg's front gate exploded and killed him as he was returning to his home in Caldwell, Idaho. The former governor was a target for union miners after his role in breaking a strike in Coeur d'Alene years earlier.

In order to solve the crime, Idaho called in the Pinkerton Agency and the country's most famous private detective, James McParland. He was the man responsible for bringing down the Molly McGuires, a secret Irish society from Pennsylvania's mining district. All men visiting Caldwell were detained and questioned after the bombing, and police began to focus on a man named Tom Hogan.

Through a combination of trickery and intimidation, McParland got Hogan to admit that his name was really Harry Orchard and that he had been hired by the Western Federation of Miners. Orchard implicated Bill Hayward, Charles Moyer, the president of the Western Federation of Miners, and others in the plot to kill Steunenberg. However, these men were in Colorado, where local authorities were friendly to the unions and would not extradite them based on the confession of a murderer.

Government officials in Idaho, including the current governor and chief justice, sanctioned a plan to kidnap Hayward, Moyer, and Pettibone so that they could be put on trial in Caldwell. Despite the blatant illegality of their operation, the union leaders lost their appeals in federal court and were forced to stay in Idaho to be charged with conspiracy to commit murder. However, the union had one more ace up its sleeve.

Clarence Darrow, who was on his way to becoming the country's foremost defender of liberal causes, was brought in to defend the case. It was the first "Trial of the Century," drawing national media attention and celebrity attendees. When none of Orchard's accomplices would corroborate his story, the case came down to Orchard's testimony alone. At Hayward's trial, Darrow made an impassioned 11-hour closing argument that mercilessly attacked Orchard, and the jury acquitted.

Hayward, who was almost certainly guilty, later fled the country to Russia. He was buried at the Kremlin in 1928.

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Disaster

~1993 : Ferry sinks near Haiti~
Approximately 900 people drown when a passenger ferry, the Neptune, overturns near Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on this day in 1993. The ferry was dangerously overloaded, and carried no lifeboats or emergency gear.

The Neptune was a 150-foot boat, with three decks, that made regular trips transporting people, farm animals and some cargo from Jeremie to Port-au-Prince. The 150-mile voyage usually took about 12 hours. The Neptune should have carried a maximum of 650 people, but it regularly took on larger numbers of passengers. In addition, the boat was notorious for its lack of safety equipment.

On the night of February 17, the Neptune was about halfway to Port-au-Prince when it encountered bad weather. There was no passenger list, but it is believed that approximately 1,200 people were on board the ferry at the time, along with numerous animals and a large amount of charcoal. When the Neptune began to roll in the water, the passengers panicked. Many rushed to the upper deck and to one side of the boat. Captain Benjamin St. Clair later reported that the sudden shift in weight caused the upper deck to collapse and the boat to capsize.

St. Clair survived, as did nearly 300 others, some of whom were not rescued from the water until two days later. The rescue response was delayed because the Neptune lacked an emergency radio, and Haiti does not have a Navy. The United States Coast Guard joined in the rescue effort the following day, but recovered many more bodies than survivors.

The exact casualty toll will never be known, but it is estimated that 900 people lost their lives in this disaster.

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Old West

~1820 : Senate passes Missouri Compromise~
The Senate passes the Missouri Compromise, an attempt to deal with the dangerously divisive issue of extending slavery into the western territories.

From colonial days to the Civil War, slavery and western expansion both played fundamental but inherently incompatible roles in the American republic. As the nation expanded westward, the Congress adopted relatively liberal procedures by which western territories could organize and join the union as full-fledged states. Southern slaveholders, eager to replicate their plantation system in the West, wanted to keep the new territories open to slavery. Abolitionists, concentrated primarily in the industrial North, wanted the West to be exclusively a free labor region and hoped that slavery would gradually die out if confined to the South. Both factions realized their future congressional influence would depend on the number of new "slave" and "free" states admitted into the union.

Consequently, the West became the first political battleground over the slavery issue. In 1818, the Territory of Missouri applied to Congress for admission as a slave state. Early in 1819, a New York congressman introduced an amendment to the proposed Missouri constitution that would ban importation of new slaves and require gradual emancipation of existing slaves. Southern congressmen reacted with outrage, inspiring a nationwide debate on the future of slavery in the nation.

Over the next year, the congressional debate grew increasingly bitter, and southerners began to threaten secession and civil war. To avoid this disastrous possibility, key congressmen hammered together an agreement that became known as the Missouri Compromise. In exchange for admitting Missouri without restrictions on slavery, the Compromise called for bringing in Maine as a free state. The Compromise also dictated that slavery would be prohibited in all future western states carved out of the Louisiana Territory that were higher in latitude than the northern border of Arkansas Territory.

Although the Missouri Compromise temporarily eased the inherent tensions between western expansion and slavery, the divisive issue was far from resolved. Whether or not to allow slavery in the states of Texas, Kansas, and Nebraska caused the same difficulties several decades later, leading the nation toward civil war.

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Presidential

~1801 : Thomas Jefferson is elected~
On this day in 1801, Thomas Jefferson is elected the third president of the United States. The election constitutes the first peaceful transfer of power from one political party to another in the United States.
By 1800, when he decided to run for president, Thomas Jefferson possessed impressive political credentials and was well-suited to the presidency. In addition to drafting the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson had served in two Continental Congresses, as minister to France, as secretary of state under George Washington and as John Adams’ vice president.

Vicious partisan warfare characterized the campaign of 1800 between Democratic-Republicans Jefferson and Aaron Burr and Federalists John Adams, Charles C. Pinckney and John Jay. The election highlighted the ongoing battle between Democratic-Republican supporters of the French, who were embroiled in their own bloody revolution, and the pro-British Federalists who wanted to implement English-style policies in American government. The Federalists abhorred the French revolutionaries’ overzealous use of the guillotine and as a result were less forgiving in their foreign policy toward the French. They advocated a strong centralized government, a standing military and financial support of emerging industries. In contrast, Jefferson’s Republicans preferred limited government, unadulterated states’ rights and a primarily agrarian economy. They feared that Federalists would abandon revolutionary ideals and revert to the English monarchical tradition. As secretary of state under Washington, Jefferson opposed Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton’s proposal to increase military expenditures and resigned when Washington supported the leading Federalist’s plan for a national bank.

After a bloodless but ugly campaign in which candidates and influential supporters on both sides used the press, often anonymously, as a forum to fire slanderous volleys at each other, the then-laborious and confusing process of voting began in April 1800. Individual states scheduled elections at different times and although Jefferson and Burr ran on the same ticket, as president and vice president respectively, the Constitution still demanded votes for each individual to be counted separately. As a result, by the end of January 1801, Jefferson and Burr emerged tied at 73 electoral votes apiece. Adams came in third at 65 votes.

This unintended result sent the final vote to the House of Representatives. Sticklers in the Federalist-controlled House of Representatives insisted on following the Constitution’s flawed rules and refused to elect Jefferson and Burr together on the same ticket. The highly influential Federalist Alexander Hamilton, who mistrusted Jefferson but hated Burr more, persuaded the House to vote against Burr, whom he called “the most unfit man…for the office of president.” (This accusation and others led Burr to challenge Hamilton to a duel in 1804 that resulted in Hamilton’s death.) Two weeks before the scheduled inauguration, Jefferson emerged victorious and Burr was confirmed as his vice president.

A contingent of sword-bearing soldiers escorted the new president to his inauguration on March 4, 1801, illustrating the contentious nature of the election and the victors’ fear of reprisal. In his inaugural address, Jefferson sought to heal political differences by graciously declaring “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.”

As president, Jefferson made some concessions to his opponents, including taking Hamilton’s advice to strengthen the American Navy. In 1801, Jefferson sent naval squadrons and Marines to suppress Barbary piracy against American shipping. He reduced the national debt by one-third, acquired the Louisiana Territory, and his sponsorship of the Lewis and Clark expedition opened the west to exploration and settlement. Jefferson’s first term ended in relative stability and prosperity, and in 1804 he was overwhelmingly elected to a second term.

The flawed voting system that was so problematic in the election of 1800 was later improved by the 12th Amendment, which was ratified in 1804.

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Vietnam War

~1966 : Taylor testifies on Operation Rolling Thunder~
In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Gen. Maxwell Taylor states that a major U.S. objective in Vietnam is to demonstrate that "wars of liberation" are "costly, dangerous and doomed to failure." Discussing the American air campaign against North Vietnam, Taylor declared that its primary purpose was "to change the will of the enemy leadership."

The decision to launch a bombing campaign against North Vietnam was controversial. President Lyndon B. Johnson deliberated for a year before deciding to undertake the sustained bombing of North Vietnam. Earlier in the month, he had ordered Operation Flaming Dart in response to communist attacks on U.S. installations in South Vietnam. It was hoped that these retaliatory raids would cause the North Vietnamese to cease support of Viet Cong forces in South Vietnam, but they did not have the desired effect. Out of frustration, Johnson initiated Operation Rolling Thunder.

The new bombing campaign was designed to interdict North Vietnamese transportation routes in the southern part of North Vietnam and thereby slow infiltration of personnel and supplies into South Vietnam. The first Rolling Thunder mission took place on March 2, 1965, when 100 U.S. Air Force and Republic of Vietnam Air Force (VNAF) planes struck the Xom Bang ammunition dump 100 miles southeast of Hanoi. Rolling Thunder continued, with occasional suspensions, until President Johnson, under intense domestic political pressure, halted it on October 31, 1968.

Operation Rolling Thunder was closely controlled by the White House and at times targets were personally selected by President Johnson. From 1965 to 1968, an estimated 643,000 tons of bombs were dropped on North Vietnam. A total of nearly 900 U.S. aircraft would be lost during Operation Rolling Thunder.

~1968 : U.S. casualty rate reaches record high~
American officials in Saigon report an all-time high weekly rate of U.S. casualties--543 killed in action and 2,547 wounded in the previous seven days. These losses were a result of the heavy fighting during the communist Tet Offensive.

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World War I

~1915 : Zeppelin L-4 crashes into North Sea~
After encountering a severe snowstorm on the evening of February 17, 1915, the German zeppelin L-4 crash-lands in the North Sea near the Danish coastal town of Varde.

The zeppelin, a motor-driven rigid airship, was developed by German inventor Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin in 1900. Although a French inventor had built a power-driven airship several decades before, Zeppelin’s rigid dirigible, with its steel framework, was by far the largest airship ever constructed.

The L-4’s captain, Count Platen-Hallermund, and a crew of 14 men had completed a routine scouting mission off the Norwegian coast in search of Allied merchant vessels and were returning to their base in Hamburg, Germany, when the snowstorm flared up, bombarding the airship with gale-force winds.

Unable to control the zeppelin in the face of such strong winds, the crew steered toward the Danish coast for an emergency landing, but was unable to reach the shore before crashing into the North Sea. The Danish coast guard rescued 11 members of the crew who had abandoned ship and jumped into the sea prior to the crash; they were brought to Odense as prisoners to be interrogated. Four members of the crew were believed drowned and their bodies were never recovered.

One month earlier, the L-4 had taken part in the first-ever air raid on Britain in January 1915, when it and two other zeppelins dropped bombs on the towns of Great Yarmouth and King's Lynn on the eastern coast of England. Four civilians were killed in the raid, two in each town. Zeppelins would continue to wreak destruction on Germany’s enemies throughout the next several years of war--by May 1916, 550 British civilians had been killed by aerial bombs.


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World War II

~1944 : U.S. troops land on Eniwetok atoll~
Operation Catchpole is launched as American troops devastate the Japanese defenders of Eniwetok and take control of the atoll in the northwestern part of the Marshall Islands.

The U.S. Central Pacific Campaign was formulated during the August 1943 Quebec Conference. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill agreed on, among other things, a new blueprint for fighting in the Pacific: an island-hopping strategy; the establishment of bases from which to launch B-29s for a final assault on Japan; and a new Southeast Asia command for British Adm. Louis Mountbatten.

The success of the island-hopping strategy brought Guadalcanal and New Guinea under Allied control. Though those areas were important, the Allies also still needed to capture the Mariana Islands, the Marshall Islands, and the Gilbert Islands, which had comprised an inner defensive perimeter for the Japanese. Each was a group of atolls, with between 20 to 50 islets, islands, and coral reefs surrounding a lagoon. The Allies planned an amphibious landing on the islands--all the more difficult because of this unusual terrain.

On February 17, a combined U.S. Marine and Army force under Adm. Richmond Kelly Turner made its move against Eniwetok. Air strikes, artillery and naval gunfire, and battleship fire 1,500 yards from the beach gave cover to the troops moving ashore and did serious damage to the Japanese defenses. Six days after the American landing, the atoll was secured. The loss for the Japanese was significant: only 64 of the 2,677 defenders who met the Marine and Army force survived the fighting. The Americans lost only 195.

The position on Eniwetok gave U.S. forces a base of operations to finally capture the entirety of the Marianas. Eniwetok was also useful to the United States after the war--in 1952 it became the testing ground for the first hydrogen bomb.