On February 4, 1789, George Washington is unanimously elected the first president of the United States by all 69 presidential electors who cast their votes. In the electoral rules of the day, electors were chosen by either popular vote, legislative appointment or a combination of the two. Each elector cast 2 votes, one of which had to go to a candidate not from the elector's home state. The person who received the second highest vote total would be vice president, in this case, John Adams with 34 votes. In 1804, the 12th Amendment would mandate separate ballots for the offices of president and vice president. Washington's election came with only 10 of the 13 states participating. North Carolina and Rhode Island had not yet ratified the Constitution and could not vote (forfeiting 7 and 3 electors, respectively), while New York failed to choose its 8 electors in time for the Feb. 4 vote. On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, the 19-year-old granddaughter of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, is kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California, by three armed strangers. Three days later, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a small U.S. leftist group, announced in a letter to a Berkeley radio station that it was holding Hearst as a “prisoner of war.” Four days later, the SLA demanded that the Hearst family give $70 in foodstuffs to every needy person from Santa Rosa to Los Angeles. Randolph Hearst promptly gave away some $2 million worth of food, but the SLA demanded another $6 million. The nation followed the story sympathetically, but in April, the situation changed dramatically when a surveillance camera took a photo of Patty participating in an armed robbery of a San Francisco bank. She later declared, in a tape sent to the authorities, that she had joined the SLA of her own free will. She stayed ahead of the law for more than a year before being arrested for armed robbery. Despite her claim that she had been brainwashed by the SLA, she was convicted in 1976, and sentenced to seven years in prison. She served 21 months before her sentence was commuted by President Carter. She was pardoned by President Clinton in January 2001. On February 4, 2004, a Harvard sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg launches The Facebook, a social media website he had built in order to connect Harvard students with one another. I'll stop here; he doesn't need free publicity from me.
February 5, 1909, immigrant Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland introduces polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride, which he names Bakelite. It is the first plastic made from synthetic components, and will become one of America's most commonly used manufacturing products in the middle part of the 20th century. Most products of that dense, heavy plastic (like telephones, toothbrushes, combs and hairbrushes) you may remember from childhood are in fact made of Bakelite. On February 5, 1777, Georgia formally adopts a new state constitution and becomes the first U.S. state to abolish the inheritance practices of primogeniture and entail. Primogeniture ensured that the eldest son in a family inherited the largest portion of his father’s property upon the father’s death. The practice of entail, guaranteeing that a landed estate remain in the hands of only one male heir, was frequently practiced in conjunction with primogeniture. Georgians restructured inheritance laws in Article LI of the state’s constitution to proclaim that any person who died without a will would have his or her estate divided equally among his/her spouse and children. On February 5, 1994, white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith is convicted in the 1963 murder of African American civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Jackson, MS. Evers was a WWII vet who spent the post-war years working to establish NAACP chapters and register blacks to vote in Mississippi. Beckwith, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, was arrested in Evers' murder in 1964, but two all-white, all-male juries deadlocked on convicting him. The state let the matter go after the second hung jury, but documents came to light in 1989 that showed the jurors were illegally screened. Beckwith was convicted and given a life sentence by a racially diverse jury in 1994. He died in prison in 2001 at the age of 80.
On February 6, 1952, King George VI of Great Britain and Northern Ireland dies in his sleep following a long illness. The second son of King George V, George VI ascended to the throne when his older brother Edward voluntarily abdicated to marry an American divorcee. Princess Elizabeth, the oldest of the king’s two daughters and next in line to succeed him, is in Kenya at the time of her father’s death. She will be crowned Queen Elizabeth II at age 27. On February 6, 1820, the first organized immigration of freed slaves to Africa from the United States departs New York City, bound for Freetown, Sierra Leone, in West Africa. The immigration was largely the work of the American Colonization Society, an organization founded in 1816 by Robert Finley to return freed American slaves to Africa. Congress also helped, providing $100,000 after abolishing the slave trade in 1808. The English had established Sierra Leone as a colony for freed slaves in the 1790's. In 1821, the American Colonization Society found the colony of Liberia south of Sierra Leone as a homeland for freed U.S. slaves outside of British jurisdiction. By the start of the Civil War, roughly 15,000 African Americans will have settled in Liberia. The colony will be granted independence by the US in 1847, and granted official U.S. diplomatic recognition in 1862. It was the first independent democratic republic in African history. On February 6, 1937, John Steinbeck’s novella Of Mice and Men, the story of the bond between two migrant workers, is published. He will adapt the book into a three-act play and see it produced the same year. The story brought national attention to Steinbeck’s work, which had started to catch on in 1935 with the publication of his first successful novel, Tortilla Flat. Steinbeck will later win the Pulitzer Prize, in 1939, for The Grapes of Wrath, and in 1962, wins the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception." (from his Nobel citation)
On February 7, 1962, President John F. Kennedy issues an executive order restricting all trade between the United States and Cuba. The ensuing embargo has had profoundly negative effects on the island nation's economy and shaped the history of the Western Hemisphere for the last half century. On February 7, 1812, an earthquake - estimated by today's technology as an 8.8 on the Richter scale - rocks the state of Missouri. In fact, its felt across the northern United States, toppling walls in Cincinnati, OH, and causing church bells to ring in Boston. The region has been feeling violent tremors for about 3 months - an estimated 8.4 centered near Little Prairie, MO on January 23 is said to have awoken First Lady Dolly Madison in her White House bed. But today's is the strongest yet, and probably one of the most violent quakes in human history. The tremor causes a so-called fluvial tsunami in the Mississippi River, actually making the river run backward for several hours. The quake creates depressions in the earth near the river which quickly fill with water, creating what are today called Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee and Big Lake at the Arkansas-Missouri border. The midwest will feel aftershocks from the quakes for years. In all, it is believed that about 1,000 people died because of the earthquakes, though lack of records for the Native American population in the area at the time makes an accurate death toll impossible. On February 7, 1935, toy and game manufacturers Parker Brothers introduces a new board game, Monopoly. American folklore has it that a man named Charles Darrow invented the game. Actually, the game is based on another game called The Landlord's Game, invented by Elizabeth Magie around 1902. A drawing of her game board, patented in 1904, is pictured below, but Magie never got wide distribution for the game. It went through several evolutions from several designers before Darrow learned of it 30 years later. His version, based on buying and selling locations in Atlantic City, NJ, was rejected by Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers before he began to build and sell sets on his own through NYC toy store FAO Schwartz. Parker Brothers learned of its success there and offered Darrow a contract.
On February 9, 1943, the island of Guadalcanal is declared secured by the U.S. Marine Corps. Guadalcanal is the largest of the Solomon Islands chain, and became militarily significant when the Japanese began building an airstrip there in mid-1942. A hastily planned landing followed, on August 7, 1942, but in fear of exposing vessels to attack, Admiral Frank Fletcher withdrew his naval fleet before more than half of the supplies needed by the Marines were offloaded. The Marines captured the airfield and subsequently brought it into operation (named Henderson Field after a Marine pilot killed at Midway) using mostly captured Japanese equipment. Much of the rations needed for the Marines in the opening weeks of the campaign were also captured from the Japanese. The campaign to take and hold Guadalcanal is considered one of the most significant victories in Marine Corps history. (photo is Henderson Field, taken while still under construction by the Japanese in July 1942) On February 9, 1950, speaking to the Ohio County Women's Republican Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, Senator Joseph McCarty (R-Wisconsin) waves a piece of paper in the air and proclaims, "I have here in my hand a list of 205 [State Department employees] that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” Although McCarthy would never produce any solid evidence that there was even one communist in the State Department, the statement marks the opening of the "Red Scare" of the 1950's. On February 9, 1960, Los Angeles breaks ground on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Over the next 16 months, more than 1500 stars of film, TV, radio, theatre and music will have their names placed on the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard, each name on a star that also includes an icon for their respective area of performance. The first star to be dedicated on the historic walkway honors Academy Award winning actress Joanne Woodward (below). The walk has since been expanded to neighboring Vine Street, and today includes more than 2,600 stars. A few individuals outside of the performing arts have also been honored with stars, for example, the astronauts of Apollo 11. There are also a number of fictional characters, ranging from Mickey Mouse to Godzilla. The Walk of Fame is maintained by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.
On February 10, 1946, 1600 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints leave their home in Nauvoo, Illinois and head west seeking land outside the US to colonize. The Mormons had been persecuted wherever they settled since Joseph Smith founded the church in 1830, mostly over Smith's promotion of polygomy. Smith and his brother were murdered in 1844, and his successor as leader of the church, Brigham Young, made the decision to relocate in Mexican-occupied territory to the west. Despite no knowledge of the territory, or geography in general, Young kept the group together and eventually settled on the shore of the Great Salt Lake in the Utah territory. Other bands of Mormons followed, and by the time of Young's death in 1877, Salt Lake City's population exceeded 100,000. They had not escaped persecution, however; Utah was ceded to the US following the Mexican War of 1848. On February 10, 1906, the British Royal Navy christens its newest battleship, HMS Dreadnought. The Dreadnought is a great leap forward in capital warship technology. She's powered by steam, making her the fastest warship afloat. She's also the largest battleship in the world, and her armament, composed of main and secondary batteries that are uniform, is considered the most efficient arrangement of the day. Every major maritime power of the world quickly begins to follow suit; so complete is the rush to equal her, naval historians now refer to all capital ships built before her as pre-Dreadnought. The HMS Dreadnought herself would have an undistinguished military career, her main accomplishment was to become the only battleship ever credited with sinking a submarine, which she did by ramming the German U-29. She was decommissioned in 1919 and broken up in 1921. On February 10, 1972, about 60 patrons of London's Toby Jug pub are awaiting a performance by a local rocker named David Bowie. Bowie was still trying to make a name for himself, but had confidently proclaimed in a trade magazine interview,"I'm going to be huge." He also talks about his upcoming album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. He's got something in mind, and tonight he springs it on the Toby Jug patrons: Bowie takes the stage as Ziggy Stardust, describing himself to his audience as an androgynous Martian rock star visiting Earth in its dying days. Others have performed in makeup, but Bowie's complete immersion into an alien persona enthralls his audience. On the release of the album, Bowie frequently gives press conferences in his Ziggy Stardust persona, and the act vaults him to stardom in the UK and helps him begin building a solid fanbase in America. Bowie would only occasionally re-visit his alter-ego once the supporting tour was complete, but Ziggy Stardust had undeniably launched him to stardom. (below: Bowie during the Ziggy Stardust tour)
