All posts in History

They’ve tried, and failed, to run for the high­est office in the land. I’m not talk­ing about the Lib­er­tar­ian Party, even though that descrip­tion fits them, too. I’m talk­ing about the ladies.

Many women have made a run for the pres­i­dency. Who were they?

Vic­to­ria Wood­hull, 1872: The first woman to run for pres­i­dent, Wood­hull was an Equal Rights Party can­di­date. Ulysses S. Grant won the 1872 elec­tion as a Republican.

Belva Ann Lock­wood, 1884 and 1888: Lock­wood, who also ran on the Equal Rights Party ticket, even­tu­ally became the first woman lawyer to prac­tice before the Supreme Court. In 1884, Demo­c­rat Grover Cleve­land was elected pres­i­dent; in 1888, Cleve­land lost to Repub­li­can Ben­jamin Harrison.

Mar­garet Chase Smith, 1964: Smith, a Maine Repub­li­can, was the first woman to run on a major party ticket, enter­ing pri­maries in New Hamp­shire, Illi­nois, Mass­a­chu­setts, Texas and Ore­gon, among oth­ers. She with­drew after the first round of vot­ing at the Repub­li­can National Con­ven­tion. Sen. Barry Gold­wa­ter won the Repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion and lost in a land­slide to the incum­bent, Lyn­don B. Johnson.

Shirley Chisholm, 1972: The first black woman to run for pres­i­dent, Chisholm ran as a Demo­c­rat and received more than 150 votes at the Demo­c­ra­tic National Con­ven­tion. She was also the first black woman to serve in Con­gress; New York sent her to the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives in 1968. George McGov­ern won the Demo­c­ra­tic nom­i­na­tion that year and lost to the incum­bent, Richard M. Nixon.

Patsy Mink, 1972: A con­gress­woman from Hawaii, Mink ran in the Ore­gon Demo­c­ra­tic pri­mary as an anti-war candidate.

Pat Schroeder, 1988: Schroeder’s headline-grabbing cam­paign never got off the ground after the Demo­c­ra­tic con­gress­woman from Col­orado could not raise enough money. The party’s nom­i­na­tion went to Michael Dukakis and the elec­tion to Repub­li­can George H.W. Bush. Schroeder was first elected to the House in 1972, where she served for 24 years.

Eliz­a­beth Dole, 2000: Dole announced her pres­i­den­tial bid in Jan­u­ary 1999 and dropped out of the race nine months later. Repub­li­cans even­tu­ally nom­i­nated George W. Bush, who defeated Demo­c­rat Al Gore for the pres­i­dency. Dole’s hus­band, for­mer Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., was the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee in 1996, when he lost to Bill Clin­ton. Mrs. Dole is now North Carolina’s senior sen­a­tor, elected in 2002.

And last, but cer­tainly not least–

Carol Mose­ley Braun, 2004: The first black woman to serve in the Sen­ate, Braun was one of 10 can­di­dates to seek the Demo­c­ra­tic pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion in the last pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. Pri­mary vot­ers even­tu­ally tapped Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., as the nom­i­nee. He lost to George W. Bush.¹

1. This list, nat­u­rally, came from that invalu­able fount of knowl­edge, Wikipedia. [↩]

The first Eng­lish casu­al­ties to be suf­fered in an air raid didn’t come from Messer­schmitts or any of Hitler’s Vengeance weapons dur­ing World War II, but from Ger­man blimps, or zep­pelins, in 1915.

The tiny town of Great Yarmouth was bom­barded by a 3 zep­pelins of the Ger­man Navy near the begin­ning of World War I. The zep­pelins, des­ig­nated as L3, L4, and L6, left the north­ern Ger­man coast on the morn­ing of Jan­u­ary 19, 1915 for, what was cryp­ti­cally called “a dis­tant mis­sion to the west”. If it can be believed, these mis­sions were not to include bomb­ing Lon­don, as Kaiser Wil­helm had decreed -

“Tar­gets not to be attacked in Lon­don but rather docks and mil­i­tary estab­lish­ments in the Lower Thames and on the Eng­lish coast.”

The first mis­sion was to encom­pass bomb­ings in the areas of the Thames estu­ary, the mouths of the Hum­ber and Tyne, and the East Anglian ports of Har­wich, Low­est­oft and Yarmouth.

Fre­gat­tenkap­i­tan Peter Strasser, the leader of the mis­sion, lifted off from the Ger­man coast aboard his zep­pelin, the L6, at 9:30 that morn­ing, but his par­tic­i­pa­tion in the raid was to be short-lived, as his zep­pelin devel­oped engine trou­ble off the Dutch coast and was forced to return to Ger­many. Despite the loss of their cap­tain, the remain­ing 2 zep­pelins, com­manded by Kap­i­tan­leut­nant Hans Fritz on L3, and L4, skip­pered by Kap­i­tan­leut­nant Mag­nus von Platen-Hallermund, floated on to England.

Prob­lems began to arise for the remain­ing 2 zep­pelins were blown off course and they made sep­a­rate land­falls over the coast of Nor­folk. With­out radio con­tact between the 2 zep­pelins and with the weather being bad, nei­ther knew where the other was. Locals, on the other hand, began report­ing sight­ings of var­i­ous air­craft to authorities.

Finally, at 8:20 pm, L3 sighted Yarmouth and began its bomb­ing run over the town, trav­el­ing from north to south. Dur­ing the next 10 min­utes L3 is thought to have dropped eight bombs, three of which failed to det­o­nate, and two incen­di­ary devices, caus­ing an esti­mated dam­age and killing or wound­ing a hand­ful of inno­cent bystanders.

Because of the bewil­der­ment of the locals on the ground, the zep­pelins encoun­tered almost no resis­tance, with reports of only one sen­try fir­ing on L3 as it flew overhead.

As for the bomb­ing raids, they achieved lit­tle in mil­i­tary terms. The dam­age was almost all done to pri­vate prop­erty, but psy­cho­log­i­cally the dam­age was huge. No longer were the British Isles immune to attack, with their pow­er­ful navy. Now the enemy could bypass that obsta­cle entirely by just fly­ing over it. This attack, while small, was pri­mar­ily a trial run for larger attacks that would come later on Lon­don, which began on May 31 of that same year. Sev­eral hun­dred peo­ple were killed in sub­se­quent raids that even­tu­ally declined as the British devel­oped incen­di­ary ammu­ni­tion which helped to bring down the zep­pelins and once again regain con­trol of Eng­lish air­space.¹

1. Almost all of the infor­ma­tion for this piece came from an excel­lent write-up on Nor­folk Roots 24. Other details came from The World­wide School site. [↩]

The Ger­man U-Boat U-166, under the com­mand of Hans-Günther Kuhlmann, set sail from Lori­ent, France on June 17, 1942, for the Gulf of Mex­ico as part of Oper­a­tion Drum­beat¹. Now that Hitler had declared war on the U.S., their mis­sion was to harass U.S. ship­ping, of oil and mil­i­tary sup­plies, in the Gulf.

After being under way for roughly a month, Kuhlmann and his crew scored their first kill when the inter­cepted the Domini­can schooner Car­men off the coast of the Domini­can Repub­lic on July 11. Not want­ing to waste his valu­able (and finite) sup­ply of tor­pe­does, he sur­faced and destroyed the schooner with the sub’s deck mounted guns. Two days later he struck gold again, this time with the U.S. steam freighter Oneida, off the east­ern tip of Cuba. From there he and his crew con­tin­ued west­erly along the Cuban coast.

He encoun­tered the fish­ing ves­sel Gertrude on the evening of July 16 about 30 miles north­east of Havana. The trawler was too small to use a tor­pedo on, so he sur­faced, com­mand­ing the crew into life boats before he destroyed it with the sub’s deck guns once again.

For the next 2 weeks Kuhlmann’s crew sailed north­ward into the Gulf of Mex­ico hunt­ing for prey but find­ing none until he found the mouth of the Mis­sis­sippi River, an excel­lent loca­tion to sit and wait for tankers steam­ing east­ward. Patience paid off, when on the after­noon of July 30 he encoun­tered the pas­sen­ger steamer Robert E. Lee.

The Robert E. Lee had been pressed into ser­vice by the Navy, run­ning cargo here, pas­sen­gers there. On July 30 she was car­ry­ing pas­sen­gers from Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, some of which were sur­vivors of other attacks insti­gated by other Ger­man U-Boats. With the heat of sum­mer press­ing down upon the over­crowded Robert E. Lee, the cap­tain was try­ing to find a safe har­bor for his pas­sen­gers. After try­ing and being unable to dock in Tampa, Florida, he headed for New Orleans, along with his U.S. Navy escort, the U.S. sub­ma­rine chaser PC-566, where they met up with U-166.

After pick­ing up radio trans­mis­sions com­ing from the PC-566, U-166 homed in on the loca­tion of the 2 boats. Fir­ing a sin­gle tor­pedo into the freighter’s port side, the Robert E. Lee went down, tak­ing 25 lives with it.

Once the Robert E. Lee began sink­ing, PC-566 jumped into the fight, drop­ping depth 10 charges over the flee­ing U-166. After the drop­ping of the charges, an oil slick was seen ris­ing from the water, but since the other usual evi­dence that a sub was sunk (a rush of air to the sur­face) it was assumed that the sub had escaped. In real­ity the U-166 had been sunk by PC-566.

In 2001 the wreck­age of both the Robert E. Lee and U-166 were found by C&C Tech­nolo­gies while the firm was sur­vey­ing a pro­posed pipeline route for BP Explo­ration and Shell inter­na­tional. The 2 ships rest over 5000 feet down on the bot­tom of the Gulf of Mex­ico.²

1. Admi­ral Karl Dönitz ini­ti­ated this sub­ma­rine oper­a­tion, which was to tar­get all United States ship­ping on the Atlantic seaboard from Maine to the Gulf of Mex­ico. It included 5 long-range sub­marines and, all told, cost the U.S. 397 ships and roughly 5000 lives. [↩]
2. Large por­tions of this piece were researched from The Past Foun­da­tion and Wikipedia. [↩]

Texas, which is bet­ter than all other states because it was once its own coun­try, had, in its entirety as the Repub­lic of Texas, had 4 pres­i­dents, 3 if you’re not count­ing one of the office­hold­ers twice.

From March through Sep­tem­ber of 1836 Texas had as interim pres­i­dent a man named David G. Bur­net. Bur­net, a failed land spec­u­la­tor, was cho­sen at the Con­ven­tion of 1836 to be the interim pres­i­dent of the newly-formed Repub­lic of Texas fol­low­ing the adop­tion of the Texas Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence. After the Bat­tle of San Jac­into Bur­net, along with Mex­i­can pres­i­dent Anto­nio López de Santa Anna, signed the Treaties of Velasco on May 14, 1836, mak­ing Texas a free republic.

But Bur­net was not to con­tinue as pres­i­dent of the weeks-old repub­lic. Burnet’s polit­i­cal enemy, Sam Hous­ton, was elected as pres­i­dent on Sep­tem­ber 5 of that same year. Whether it was out of dis­gust with pol­i­tics or him just being a sour­puss, Bur­net resigned as pres­i­dent on Octo­ber 22, hand­ing over the reigns of power to Hous­ton, who was sup­posed to assume the pres­i­dency in December.

Hous­ton had been a vet­eran of the War of 1812, a lawyer in his adopted home state of Ten­nessee, and had also been a sen­a­tor there. Even with all of the suc­cess he’d had, Houston’s 2 year constitutionally-mandated term was plagued with prob­lems. Texas had a moun­tain of debt left over from the rev­o­lu­tion, and to com­pound on this the new coun­try had no money, and no real way to raise it. Also the new repub­lic lived under the con­stant specter of another immi­nent inva­sion, as Mex­ico had renounced the sign­ing of the Treaties of Velasco. Lastly, Texas was a coun­try that was unrec­og­nized by any nation of the world. Hous­ton sought to imme­di­ately join the United States to alle­vi­ate some of his country’s trou­bles, but, with the slave issue rag­ing, Texas was denied entry into the Union, as it would have entered as a slave state.

At the end of his 2 year term Hous­ton was suc­ceeded by his vice pres­i­dent, Mirabeau Bouna­parte Lamar. Lamar had fought under Sam Hous­ton in the rev­o­lu­tion, join­ing up after the mas­sacres at Goliad and the Alamo. He com­manded the cav­alry dur­ing the Bat­tle of San Jacinto.

Lamar, unlike Hous­ton, wanted Texas to remain an inde­pen­dent nation, even­tu­ally expand­ing itself out to Cal­i­for­nia, and to even­tu­ally rival the United States for con­trol of the North Amer­i­can con­ti­nent. He also was in favor of exter­mi­nat­ing all Texas Native Amer­i­cans. But on the plus side, under him Texas was rec­og­nized by sev­eral Euro­pean coun­tries, and he also founded the new cap­i­tal of Texas in Austin. Through all of this he spent money like it was going out of style, rais­ing the national debt to unheard of heights.

It may have been the prob­lems that Lamar faced that caused his old polit­i­cal rival to once again assume com­mand of Texas, and on Decem­ber 12, 1841, Sam Hous­ton once again became the pres­i­dent of the repub­lic and led the fledg­ling coun­try until it was finally annexed by the United States in 1845.¹

1. I got a major­ity of the infor­ma­tion for this piece either on Wikipedia (for the per­sonal infor­ma­tion about each man) and TexasEscapes.com. [↩]