This Day in History
July 8th
1800 - Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse introduces smallpox vaccine. To demonstrate his confidence he injected his son. Waterhouse had been a college roommate of President John Adams, but Adams did not respond to his letter about the vaccine. So he wrote to Vice President Jefferson and when Jefferson became president he supported the use of vaccine.
I imagine then as now there were plenty of anti-vaxxers.
1898 - Soapy Smith killed. Smith ran an organized crime ring in the Klondike Gold Rush town of Skagway, Alaska. He got his nickname in Colorado by selling bars of soap for five dollars. He’d announce some of the bars had a hundred dollar bill inside the wrapping. One of his first customers would shout with happiness upon finding the bill. Of course this would be a plant. Smith would usually leave a town in haste. He ended up in Skagway fleecing miners and would be miners. There he set up a saloon where rigged poker games took place to separate miners from their gold dust. He had a fake telegraph office collecting fees for messages that went nowhere. Smith also appointed himself deputy sheriff and arrested anyone who caused too much trouble after losing his money. Tired of his antics Skagway formed a vigilante committee. Smith tried to bust into a meeting the committee was having. Guards confronted him and first words were exchanged, then gunfire, and Smith and a guard were killed. Smith’s gang broke up and his reign of corruption ended. Each year now in Skagway a celebration is held known as Soapy Smith’s Wake.
I wonder if the dude who shot him gets any mention.
1957 - 1st Thinkers’ Conference at Pugwash, Nova Scotia. During the height of the Cold War, scientists met at a lodge, later to become known as the Thinker’s Lodge, to discuss eliminating nuclear weapons in the world. Twenty-two of them, from ten countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain, met to discuss the role and responsibility of scientists in the eradication of nuclear armament. The meeting has been described as both groundbreaking and controversial. Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell inspired the meeting but Einstein died before the conference convened and Russell was too frail and ill to attend.
Why this should have been controversial beats me. Inspirational maybe. Especially given Putin’s nuclear threats driven by his criminal invasion of Ukraine. The original Thinkers’ Lodge is now mainly used as a venue for weddings and special events. In researching the 1st Thinkers’ conference I found much more website space devoted to the lodge for events than the intent of the original conference itself. Gotta keep one’s priorities straight.
Birthdays:
1839 - John D. Rockefeller. Business magnate. Son of a snake-oil salesman who boasted he liked to cheat his sons to teach them about life, Rockefeller went to work at age 16 as a bookkeeper. At that point he started learning and analyzing business techniques. He left that job to form a business partnership with an oil driller and in 1863 built his first oil refinery. Despite being an abolitionist he paid his way out of serving in the Union Army during the Civil War because, in his words, he was too important to the company. While developing innovative business techniques he also employed ruthless business practices to overwhelm competitors and acquires their companies. Among his tactics were buying up the supply of oil barrels, equipment and parts to cripple competitors, and hindering their ability to operate. Neither was he above bribing lawmakers. He soon developed a monopoly on the oil industry, known as Standard Oil. Anti-trust laws were written to break up his monopoly but they did little to slow Rockefeller’s accumulation of wealth. He became the world’s richest man and maybe the richest ever although that’s probably challenged by some in the tech industry now. The last forty years of Rockefeller’s life were devoted to philanthropy. This was a practice he started back when he was a bookkeeper and by his twenties he was giving over ten percent of his earnings to charity. Rockefeller died in 1937 at age 97 but his name still lives on when thinking of great wealth.
Not an easy subject to assess. He deserves a lot of praise for what he did with his money but an equal amount of criticism for how he accumulated it.
1907 - George Romney. Businessman, politician. Romney was born into a Mormon colony in Mexico. In 1912 the colony along with Romney’s family was forced to flee back to the U.S. because of the Mexican Revolution. Romney entered the business world after attending but never graduating from college. He worked for Alcoa for nine years and then was in Detroit at the start of World War Two where he helped coordinate planning between the automotive and aircraft industries. One of the things he accomplished was to establish housing for Black workers near a Ford plant. Romney entered politics and was elected governor of Michigan in 1962 as a Republican. While in office he enacted personal and corporate income taxes and also promoted civil rights bills. He made a run in the 1968 Republican presidential primaries but was undone by commenting his earlier support for the was in Vietnam was because the military had brainwashed him. Appointed as Secretary of HUD Romney had ambitious plans to provide more housing for the poor and to desegregate the suburbs, plans that were rejected by President Nixon. He retired from public life in 1973 and devoted his time to volunteering and the Mormon Church. Romney died in 1995 at age 88.
Raise taxes, Civil Rights, housing for the poor, desegregate the lily white suburbs, what kind of Republican was he anyway?
1908 - Nelson Rockefeller. Politician. Grandson of John D. Rockefeller, he served as governor of New York and was the 41st vice president of the U.S. from 1974 to 1977. Rockefeller’s political efforts included trying to protect the environment and increased spending on health care and the arts. He declined to run for VP in President Ford’s reelection campaign in 1976, retired, and died two years later at age 71 in 1979.
In today’s world Rockefeller would be labeled a RINO - Republican in name only. Along with George Romney.
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