A First Draft of History: Week of April 23-30
1800 - President John Adams approved legislation to appropriate $5,000 to purchase "such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress," thus establishing the Library of Congress. The first books, ordered from London, arrived in 1801 and were stored in the U.S. Capitol, the library's first home. The first library catalog, dated April 1802, listed 964 volumes and nine maps. Twelve years later, the British army invaded Washington and burned the Capitol, including the then 3,000-volume library.
Former president Thomas Jefferson, a staunch supporter of the library, responded to the loss by selling his personal library, the largest and finest in the country, to Congress to reestablish the library. The purchase of Jefferson's 6,487 volumes was approved in the next year, and a professional librarian, George Watterston, was hired. In 1851, a second major fire at the library destroyed about two-thirds of its 55,000 volumes, including two-thirds of the Thomas Jefferson library. Congress responded quickly to the disaster, and within a few years a majority of the lost books were replaced.
After the Civil War, the collection was greatly expanded, and by the 20th century the Library of Congress had become the de facto national library of the United States and one of the largest in the world. Today, the collection, housed in three enormous buildings in Washington and other off-site locations, contains more than 17 million books, as well as millions of maps, manuscripts, photographs, films, audio and video recordings, prints, and drawings.
1865 - Days after the end of the Civil War, the worst maritime disaster in American history took place when the steamboat Sultana, carrying over 2,000 passengers, exploded and sank in the Mississippi River, killing all but 400-600 of those aboard. The Mississippi, with its dikes and levees damaged by four years of war, stood at flood stage, and most of those who died were drowned. All but 100 of those killed were Union veterans, and most were Yankee survivors of Andersonville and other Confederate prisoner of war camps. It must have been a hell of a thing to survive the war and the prison camps only to die on the way home.
Adding to the tragedy was the fact that it could have been prevented. The Sultana was launched from Cincinnati in 1863. The boat was 260 feet long and had an authorized capacity of 376 passengers and crew. It was soon employed to carry troops and supplies along the lower Mississippi River. On April 25, 1865, it left New Orleans with 100 passengers. It stopped at Vicksburg, Mississippi, for repair of a leaky boiler. The boilermaker on the ship advised Captain J. Cass Mason that two sheets on the boiler had to be replaced, but Mason ordered the boilermaker to simply patch the plates until the ship reached St. Louis. Mason was part owner of the riverboat, and he and the other owners were anxious to pick up discharged Union prisoners at Vicksburg because the federal government promised to pay $5 for each enlisted man and $10 for each officer delivered to the North. So, the captain was rushing, and he crammed far too many people onto the boat to maximize his profits. When the Sultana left Vicksburg, it carried 2,100 troops and 200 civilians, more than six times its capacity. On the evening of April 26, the ship stopped at Memphis before cruising across the river to pick up coal in Arkansas. As it steamed up the river above Memphis, a thunderous explosion tore through the boat. Metal and steam from the boilers killed hundreds, and hundreds more were thrown from the boat into the chilly waters of the river. The Sultana had only one lifeboat and a few life preservers. A board of inquiry later determined the cause to be insufficient water in the boiler--overcrowding was not listed as a cause. The Sultana accident is still the largest maritime disaster in U.S. history.
International News:
The French had the first round of their presidential election last weekend, with Socialist candidate Francois Hollande edging incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy 28% to 26%. Those two men will face off again in the final runoff vote on May 6th. Should Hollande win, it will be the first victory for the socialists since 1988. The big news from the election though was the strong showing by the right-wing National Front party and its candidate Marine Le Pen, who won almost 20% of the vote. The National Front is typically depicted in the press as an extremist anti-immigrant party, but in fact it has toned down its xenophobic rhetoric in recent years and has become something of a populist, anti-establishment, workers’ party. That means that its supporters may not automatically go over to Sarkozy in the run-off election, which would mean big trouble for his chances. Two notable things about this election, at least from an American perspective: turnout was over 80%, which is actually lower than 2007 but remarkable by American standards (in 2008, for example, our turnout was only about 57%). Also, in reading about the election I learned that once the voting begins, French law forbids the publication of exit polls or predictions before all polls close. In general, I think the French are overly restrictive when it comes to freedom of speech and of the press, but that law seems like a pretty good idea to me.
Distressing news from Nigeria this week, where followers of a Muslim sect associated with al-Qaeda killed 21 Christians in attacks on two church services in the country’s north. The sect, Boko Haram, has launched numerous attacks on government forces and Christian civilians; in fact, it has been blamed for killing over 450 people this year alone. Last Christmas, the group carried out a suicide bombing of a Catholic church that killed at least 44 people. The group is seeking to impose strict Islamic law across Nigeria, even in the predominantly Christian regions.
And more bad news from Syria as well, where violence continued to rage this week, exposing as a charade a supposed ceasefire between government and rebel forces brokered by the U.N. Here are just a few highlights from the fighting:
Perhaps most ominously, a suicide bomber killed nine people on Friday when he detonated an explosives belt outside a Damascus mosque.
On Wednesday, Syrian forces shot dead four civilians on a bus on Wednesday and fighting raged near Damascus, dissidents said. In the city of Hama, an anti-regime hotbed, an explosion ripped through a building, killing at least 12 people and wounding dozens more, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. As a sign of how hard it is to get accurate information about the situation in Syria though, another activist group, the grassroots Local Coordination Committee, said the blast was caused by a rocket launched into the building and put the death toll much higher at 54, including several children. A third activist source said the explosion may have come from inside the building.
Also in defiance of the truce accord, shelling was relentless in Douma, east of the capital, residents said. A woman who visited Douma on Tuesday night said the town had been under constant shelling and was without water, power or mobile phone signal. Pro-government gunmen were wandering the streets, she added, preventing people from leaving their homes.
On Saturday, gunmen in inflatable dinghies killed several security officials in an attack on a military unit on Syria's Mediterranean coast, near the northern port of Latakia, 22 miles south of the Turkish border. This was the first seaborne assault reported during the revolt. The Syrian regime has accused Turkey of allowing weapons and funds to flow to insurgents throughout the 13-month-old uprising. Turkey also plays host to the leadership of the rebel Free Syrian Army.
Also over the weekend, Lebanese authorities found weapons including rocket-propelled grenades and rifles on board a ship intercepted in the Mediterranean which may have been trying to supply Syrian insurgents, according to security sources. And in a village north of Damascus where army defectors had taken refuge, activists said Syrian forces killed at least 10 people. Meanwhile, five members of the security forces were killed in an explosion targeting two vehicles near Damascus.
The United Nations says Syrian forces have killed 9,000 people since the start of the revolt in March 2011. Syrian authorities blame foreign-backed militants for the violence and say 2,600 soldiers and police have been killed. This in a country with a population of 23 million.
So, that U.N. ceasefire doesn’t really seem to be working. U.N. monitors are trickling in and officials say 30 of a planned 300-strong mission should be in place by Monday to reinforce observers already stationed in anti-regime hotbeds such as Idlib, Hama, Homs and Deraa.
The presence of the monitors has emboldened many thousands of protesters to resume demonstrations after weeks of military crackdowns, but activists say regime forces responded swiftly. There is frustration inside and outside Syria about the slow rate at which the monitors are being deployed. Peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous said it would take a month to deploy the first 100 monitors of the UN mission. In response, a resident of Homs who did not wish to be identified asked, "It takes them a month to arrive? Are they coming on horses?" The reasons for the slow deployment were not clear.
National News:
It seems it’s been a week – several weeks actually – of government employees run amok. I’ll get to the misbehavior of members of our state government in a moment, but first let’s consider the federal level.
A twelfth Secret Service employee has been implicated in the agency's prostitution scandal. Two agents resigned Friday and another was fired. That brought the total number of agency departures to six, all stemming from the events at a hotel late last week in Colombia before President Barack Obama arrived for a summit meeting.
Two supervisors and another employee were forced out of the agency earlier in the week. All of the agents being investigated have had their top-secret clearances revoked. Meanwhile, the lawyer for two Secret Service supervisors said that Obama's safety was never at risk, and he criticized leaks of internal government investigations in the case.
Eleven Secret Service employees were initially put on administrative leave following an incident in Colombia that involved at least some agency personnel bringing prostitutes to their hotel rooms. News of the incident, which involves as many as 20 Colombian women, broke a week ago after a fight over payment between a prostitute and a Secret Service agent spilled into the hotel hallway. The scandal now involves 12 officers and supervisors and at least 11 military members who were working on security before Obama arrived in Cartagena for the Summit of the Americas.
In Colombia Friday, Colombian prosecutors spent more than three hours questioning a taxi driver who led reporters to the home of the young woman who he said was the prostitute who launched the scandal by complaining of not being paid by a Secret Service agent. The Colombian investigation into the case began Thursday to ensure that none of the prostitutes involved was a minor.
One of the fired agents had joked on his Facebook account about his work with former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin while he was protecting her in 2008. "I was really checking her out, if you know what i mean?" Perhaps we should just switch to an all-female secret service. If I’m not mistaken, Momar Gadhafi had a corps of female bodyguards, but of course things didn’t end too well for him.
Anyway, an Air Force colonel and a military lawyer were also dispatched to Colombia this week. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, patronizing prostitutes is a crime for military personnel.
This scandal at the Secret Service comes on the heels of another big scandal involving misbehavior by government employees, this time at the General Services Administration.
The scandal broke over revelations about a GSA conference in Las Vegas that cost more than $800,000, as well as violations of travel and spending rules. The controversy, which includes allegations of personal travel under the guise of government business and an employee award program that exceeded spending limits, so far has focused on one of 10 regions of the GSA -- an agency with a multibillion-dollar budget and more than 12,000 employees. Among other things, it turns out that GSA employees avoided rules against supplying food at government work conferences such as the Las Vegas event by creating fake awards in order to hold ceremonies at which food would be allowed. Apparently they can’t have food at work sessions, but they can at awards ceremonies, so they turned everything into an awards ceremony.
The revelations have prompted widespread indignation and put a spotlight on wasteful spending by the GSA, which handles government real estate and other nonmilitary procurement. And according to investigators, since this story broke many more GSA employees have come forward with evidence of other instances of rule-breaking. The revelations that have already come out prompted GSA Administrator Martha Johnson to resign.
The GSA has a history of misconduct dating back decades. Senators from both parties on called for the agency to clean house as it roots out corruption. At least four congressional hearings have already taken place with regard to the controversy. Jeff Neely, the GSA staff member who organized the Las Vegas conference, was hauled before Congress but he declined to testify before the committees, citing his Fifth Amendment rights. Of course Republicans and Democrats disagree on the real meaning of this controversy. Democrats sought to frame the controversy as an ongoing problem at GSA rather than anything unique to the Obama administration, while Republicans depicted it as a systematic failure resulting from a culture of misconduct at the agency and, more broadly, as yet another example of big government abuse.
It is hard to know what to make of all these cases of government employees acting like they’re above the law. Of course one argument is that these cases don’t really signify anything – those who misbehave are just a few bad apples, or “knuckleheads” in the terminology of President Obama. On the other hand, how many rotten apples does it take before one begins to wonder if perhaps there’s something wrong with the tree itself?
The problem of government employees abusing their power is of course not limited to Washington, D.C….
State News:
It was a terrible, awful, no-good, very bad week in the state, because the news this week shed yet more light on the sordid state of N.C. politics. I spoke two weeks ago about the sexual harassment cover-up in the N.C. Democratic Party that led to several high-profile resignations, voluntary and not-so-voluntary, and this week it was more of the same.
Charles Thomas, chief of staff to House Speaker Thom Tillis, resigned late Thursday after admitting to a romantic relationship with a lobbyist. Thomas served one term in the House representing Buncombe County before returning to Raleigh in 2011 to manage the speaker's office. Thomas, who’s married with children, was engaged in a romantic relationship with Jessica Hayes, a lobbyist for the North Carolina Home Builders' Association.
And in other news, North Carolina's Division of Emergency Management this week fired two assistant directors, Steve Sloan and Emily Young, and a community development specialist, Carole Ingram, whose children got unadvertised, high-paying jobs to work on disaster relief last year. So, nepotism is alive and well in our fair state.
And then there’s the piece de resistance of N.C. political sleaziness, our former senator, Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee, and candidate of the Democratic presidential nomination, John Edwards. Edwards, in case you haven’t heard, is charged with conspiracy, filing false campaign reports and four counts of accepting illegal campaign contributions in connection with the nearly $1 million two donors secretly paid in 2007-08 to hide his pregnant mistress, Rielle Hunter, as he ran for the White House.
His trial got underway this week, and the testimony was flying hot and heavy. One of the star witnesses for the prosecution, former Edwards confidante, top aide, and bootlicker Andrew Young, testified throughout the week.
You may recall that Young initially claimed paternity of Hunter's daughter in an attempt to protect Edwards from media speculation about an affair during the 2008 campaign. He was also the conduit for hush-money from Edwards’ supporters to the mistress. At let me just remind you that it was not an august media outlet like the New York Times or the Washington Post that broke this story – they preferred to bury their heads in the sand when it came to a poster child of the left – rather, it was the National Enquirer.
Anyway, Young testified this week that Edwards was so desperate to find a way to support his mistress that he sought help from several people and concocted an elaborate plan to hide payments made to her once he found a willing donor. Young ultimately suggested getting Rachel "Bunny" Mellon, a millionaire socialite from Virginia who fervently believed Edwards was born to be president, to provide the money. Apparently Edwards reminded Mellon of the Kennedys, so she thought he should be president, which is of course completely asinine…not the part that Edwards is like a Kennedy, because that’s dead-on, but rather the part that he should therefore be president.
Mellon offered $1.2 million over time, but said she didn't want her lawyers involved. So, she wrote checks from her personal account, routed the payments through her interior decorator, to Young. His wife would then use her maiden name to deposit the money into the family's account, and Young would send some money to Hunter.
According to Young, Edwards assured him that he had checked with campaign finance experts, who told him the secret payments to Hunter were legitimate non-campaign expenses.
Young said he had to discuss the payments in code with Edwards, who said he needed to maintain his distance in case he was ever named U.S. attorney general. That was his goal in 2008 once it became clear he wouldn’t be president. Still, Young said, Edwards instructed him to put Hunter on a $5,000 monthly allowance so she wouldn't spend too much too quickly and to keep her creditors from getting the money.
The cover-up took on added urgency once Hunter learned she was pregnant in the summer of 2007. Young said Edwards was angry when he heard she was expecting, calling her a "crazy slut" and saying odds were that the child wasn't his.
Hunter again threatened to go public about the affair, and Edwards had her move from New Jersey to North Carolina. Young then rented a mansion in the gated Governor's Club community in Chatham County for Hunter, and when that didn’t work out either, he and Edwards got another wealthy supporter, who also happened to be the finance chairman of the campaign, to pay for private jets and luxury hotels for Hunter and Young and his family to keep them away from the press. The merry band then traipsed from south Florida to Aspen, Colo., to San Diego and eventually wound up in Santa Barbara, Calif.
Prosecutors played for jurors several voicemail messages from Edwards, Baron and Hunter that Young saved to corroborate his story. Edwards mentioned "her" in at least two, which Young said were references to Hunter. Apparently Young also has a sex tape of Edwards and Hunter, but I don’t believe that’s been discussed yet.
Young also testified that Edwards repeatedly promised to take care of him and his family for covering up the affair, but he became more skeptical that Edwards would follow through with a job and other compensation as contact between them became more infrequent after Edwards dropped out of the race in January 2008 and Hunter's baby was born a month later. Apparently things got so bad between Edwards and Young that Young feared Edwards might try to have him killed, especially after a heated exchange during an August 2008 meeting on the side of a deserted road in rural Orange County. Seriously, I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.
Edwards' defense team maintains that most of the money went to Young and that Edwards was unaware of the payments. The rest of the money, they contend, was merely a gift by a longtime friend and wasn't a campaign contribution. In cross-examination this week, the defense tried to pick apart Young’s testimony and to undermine his credibility.
Defense lawyer Abbe Lowell highlighted inconsistencies in Young's testimony, comparing it with "The Politician," his 2010 tell-all book about Edwards' affair and failed campaign, as well as interviews he gave while promoting the book, statements to government investigators and his testimony to a federal grand jury. The cross-examination was so slow-moving and combative that apparently even the judge grew exasperated at one point, instructing the defense to get on with it.
There are all sorts of other sordid, convoluted details to this saga involving the man who would have been our vice president, at least if the Volvo-driving crowd in Chapel Hill had had their way, but you get the idea. Any anyway, I’ll certainly keep you posted as the trial unfolds. For what it’s worth, I read a lot of commentary about the trial this week, and the consensus seems to be that while Edwards is an absolute scumbag – there’s no dissent on this point – he’s probably not guilty of the campaign finance charges. It’s not that he was honest about it, but he probably insolated himself from the process enough that he can plausibly deny that he knew what was going on. Anyway, we’ll see if the jury agrees. I certainly don’t think anyone’s going to be shedding tears if he does end up in jail.
Cosmic News:
A minivan-sized meteor blew up over northern California on Sunday morning, and now everyone from NASA scientists to schoolkids is looking for fragments of the fireball in the Sierra Nevada towns of Coloma and Lotus. One local resident referred to the search as being "like a giant easter egg hunt for adults."
By an amazing coincidence, the site where the first meteorites were found Wednesday is just a mile from where gold was first found at Sutter's Mill in Coloma in 1848. According to one meteorite hunter, these fragments are the first of their kind to fall to Earth since the 1960s and may contain particles that predate our sun.
And in more cosmic news…this week a researcher at Arizona State University spotted lava flows shaped like coils of rope near the equator of Mars, the first time such geologic features have been discovered outside of Earth.
These twisty volcanic patterns can be found on Hawaii's Big Island and in the Pacific seafloor on our planet. While evidence for lava flows is present in many places on Mars, none are shaped like this latest find.
Not only are the shapes of these lava flows unusual, but so too is their size. The largest Martian lava spiral measured 100 feet across — bigger than any on Earth. It is further evidence that Mars was volcanically active recently — geologically speaking within the past 20 million years.
For more than a decade, scientists debated whether this maze of valleys near the Martian equator was sculpted by ice or volcanic processes. This new evidence seems to establish that they were made by volcanoes. (which is what I’ve been saying all along…)
Andrew Stern is, among other things, an historian, an Ocracoke resident, and a board member at Ocracoke’s community radio station, WOVV 90.1FM where you can hear his weekly broadcast of “A First Draft of History” every Monday morning at 9am.
