Juneteenth

On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order officially declaring slavery illegal in the states currently rebelling from the Union.  With a stroke of a pen, he freed some 75,000 slaves currently living in Confederate territories occupied by the Union at the time, and did jack shit for the 3.4 million slaves still living in the Confederacy and the 400,000 slaves still living in the Union. However, as a symbolic gesture, it was an important one.  Not only did it formally tie the Union cause to ending slavery, something that had been steer cleared of to avoid pissing off racist northerners who purely saw the purpose of the war as maintaining the union, it also sowed discord in the Confederacy, who feared widespread slave revolts.  Due to this, the Confederates did their level best to keep news of the proclamation from spreading, but of course news spread quickly through the grapevine.  As a result, thousands of slaves began escaping and making their way towards Union lines.

In many ways the Emancipation Proclamation was more a political and military maneuver rather than an abolitionist one.  On the war front, the proclamation promised to sow discord behind Confederate lines, shrinking their available labor force while at the same time bolstering Union ranks by allowing former slaves to serve in the army.  On the political front, the proclamation gave Lincoln credibility amongst the abolitionists who were increasingly controlling the Republican party, guaranteeing he would secure his party’s nomination for the next election.  It also made supporting the Confederacy no longer an option for Britain and France, countries that had outlawed slavery decades earlier but still had been supporting the Confederacy because it weakened the United States.

As the Confederacy crumbled over the next 28 months, and Union soldiers occupied an increasingly significant part of the rebel territory, hundreds of thousands of slaves were set free.  However, after being freed they were pretty much left to fend themselves.  Unsure what else to do, former slaves formed large refugee camps around military outposts, or followed the Union army as it made its way deeper into the Confederacy.  Mostly disregarded, they began to succumb to disease and starvation, a problem largely ignored in the northern states, even by abolitionists.  Some 250,000 former slaves died in the months following being set free.

General Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, bringing the war to an official end.  Wait, not entirely.  Another Confederate army remained active in North Carolina until April 26 and another in Alabama until May 4.  Even then the war was not entirely over.  Far to the west, Texas remained unbowed.  Cutoff in 1863 when the Union took control of the whole of the Mississippi River, Texas had remained an isolated pocket largely unconnected to the rest of the war.  When a small Union contingent attempted to land at Brownsville at the southern tip of the state, they were repulsed after a short skirmish.  However, though the commanding general in Texas was more than willing to continue fighting, his troops, not really all that onboard with the idea, abandoned him.  With no army, Texas surrendered on May 26.  Union General Gordon Granger did not arrive to occupy the state until 24 days later, arriving on June 19.  One of his first orders was to proclaim all slaves in Texas to be free, ending slavery in the former Confederacy, though not in the United States.  Slavery was not ended in Delaware and Kentucky until the passage of the 13th Amendment on December 6.  The Five Civilized tribes in the Confederate aligned Indian Territory, now the state of Oklahoma, did not free their slaves until the following year.

Anyways, getting back to Texas, news quickly spread amongst the 250,000 slaves in the state that they sure as shit didn’t have to do what a bunch of asshats told them to do anymore.  Rather pleased with this turn of events, they of course celebrated, a tradition they continued the next year on June 19, which later became known as Jubilee Day.  The celebration remained an annual occurrence amongst the African-American population of Texas for years afterwards, becoming known as Juneteenth in the 1890’s.  However, the celebration of the holiday dropped sharply at the end of the century, due to a combination of the growth of Jim Crow laws, African-Americans migrating to urban areas to find work, and the children of former slaves being more interested in integration.  A revival took place during the 1930’s and 1940’s, during which time it started spreading to other parts of the country, but it declined again during the Civil Rights era which again focused on gaining freedoms and integration.  A second revival began in the 1970’s, leading to its recognition as a state holiday in Texas in 1979, eventually becoming common nationwide amongst the African-American community by the 1990’s.  Today it is becoming more mainstream, with calls to make it a national paid holiday.

Feminist Spirits

In the late eighteenth century, peace loving Quaker intellectuals kicked off the abolitionist movement in what would become the United States, asking the rather pertinent question that if they were going to go with the whole all men are created equal thing, wasn’t it kind of being a dick still owning slaves.  As a result, most of the northern states outlawed the practice by the start of the nineteenth century.  Spurred on by such enlightened thought, many women began asking similar questions regarding their own station in life, to which these same Quaker men responded by mumbling an answer about the designs of god and quickly changing the subject.

Fast forward a couple of decades, and the United States became seized by a massive religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening, largely spurred on by people anxious about the rapid changes taking place in the world around them.  The result was numerous new religions, which quickly came to prominence.  Surprising for the time, women outnumbered men as converts to these new religions, which probably had nothing to do with the fact that it gave them the ability to get out of the house and tell their husbands to fuck off, because in the grand scheme of things God most definitely outranked some random dick toter.  Women became the primary drivers of many new prayer groups as well as missionary and reform societies.  As a result, the ministers of the time, not being complete idiots, began playing to their audience, highlighting women as having an important role as the primary educators of their families regarding religion and ethics.  For the first time since perhaps the early days of Christendom, women were viewed as spiritual beings with a role in achieving salvation every bit as important as that held by men.  However, they most certainly were not allowed to be ministers, because you know, who would take the word of God seriously if it came via a voice an octave or two higher than what people were used to.

Anyways, shifting gears a bit, in 1848, two teenagers in New York named Catherine and Maggie Fox began playing a prank on their parents involving pretending to talk to spirits via various clever tricks that made it appear that an invisible force was communicating via rapping on the walls and tables of the house.  As pranks often do, this one quickly got out of hand, with neighbors being called in and eventually an innocent man getting arrested for the murder of somebody who most certainly never existed.  Feeling somewhat guilty about this turn of events, the girls admitted the hoax to their older sister Leah, who rather than telling them to come clean, instead convinced them to double down on the whole thing with her added to the mix.  Within a year, the Fox sisters were touring the country, exhibiting their ability to talk to spirits to sold out crowds. Such was born the Spiritualist movement, with countless copycats appearing with new innovative ways to bilk people out of their money via seances, where the so-called mediums went into trances and spoke for the dead.  In a time when countless loved ones often died untimely deaths, hundreds of thousands of people found comfort in the idea that they could speak to those who had already passed.

Now for whatever reason, the majority of these spiritualist mediums were women, which probably had nothing to do with the fact that it was one of the few ways they could speak up and actually be listened to at the time.  It probably also didn’t hurt that thanks to the Second Great Awakening women were viewed as just being naturally more spiritual than men.  Whatever the reason, numerous women found themselves able to speak up for themselves for the first time, albeit through the supposed words of some dead guy, and it didn’t take them long to start peppering their seances with messages regarding the so-called gentler sex not getting the shit end of the stick all the time.  With millions of adherents, Spiritualism became the primary driver of new feminist ideas in the nineteenth century.  People who otherwise might have been resistant to such ideas, both women and men, found themselves reconsidering given the majority of the spiritual world seemed to be fully onboard.  Though many decried the mediums as frauds, ironically them being women was used as proof that their powers were real.  After all, everyone knew that women were too delicate to lie, and their brains too silly to string along the long eloquent speeches spewing forth from the mouths of the mediums.  Nope, it definitely had to be spirits.

By the late nineteenth century, the idea of Spiritualism began to wane, giving way to the scientific method and people actually thinking about shit, though it continued as a mainstream movement into the twentieth century.  However, the feminist ideas spread by the Spiritualists continued to propagate and grow, flowering into the first wave feminist movement, many of the leaders of which were Spiritualists, which led to a great shift in the early twentieth century regarding the rights of women, culminating with women being granted the right to vote in 1920.

The Great Pineapple Race

In May of 1927, Charles Lindbergh completed the first non-stop airplane flight across the Atlantic Ocean, netting himself a prize of $25,000 (around $370,000 in today’s money) and catapulting him from some guy flying a mail plane to the most famous man in the world.  The feat got aerial enthusiasts around the world all hot and bothered, probably none more so than James Dole, the half crazed pineapple king of the world.  Born into a well off WASP family in Massachusetts, Dole had purchased the entire Hawaiian island of Lanai, turning it into a giant pineapple plantation which utilized immigrant labor and shitty working conditions to produce 70 percent of the pineapples in the world.  Wanting to have his own air thing, Dole declared he was hosting an air race between California and Hawaii in August of that year, promising a cash prize of $25,000 to the winner.  Dole had all sorts of visions of establishing air travel for tourism and shipping pineapple back to the mainland.  However, pretty much every aviation expert told him that the trip would be super dangerous, given the navigation technology of the time, and that doing it as a race was likely to get a shit ton of people killed.  However, Dole had a full on idea boner, so he of course ignored them.

Unsurprisingly, most serious aviators decided that the prize money wasn’t enough to most likely drown in the Pacific.  However, the thirst for fame and fortune drew fifteen daredevil teams into the fray.  Unfortunately, the glory of the attempt was quickly dissipated when the Army Air Corps flew a plane from Oakland to Oahu in June, a feat repeated by a civilian plane in July.  Undaunted, Dole simply pretended that the flights didn’t happen and continued making preparations.  In August, the teams began to arrive in Oakland, minus one who had been unable to acquire a plane, which is kind of important.  Of the remaining fourteen teams, three crashed on their way to the event, two were disqualified for not having big enough fuel tanks, and one took all of this as a bad omen and withdrew.  The remaining eight teams, pretty much all of whom suffered some kind of mechanical issue getting to Oakland, soaked up the adoration of the public and media and prepared for the start of the race.

On August 16, watched by a crowd of some 100,000 people, the eight planes took off from Oakland, destined for Honolulu.  The pilots included Norman Goddard, a Navy pilot in a custom built monoplane; Livingston Irving, the son of the mayor of Berkeley; Jack Frost, who was sponsored by the newspaper tycoon Randolph Hearst; William Erwin, a World War I flying ace; Auggy Pedlar, who flew with a middle school teacher and aerial enthusiast named Mildred Doran; Martin Jensen, whose wife had raised money for him to buy a plane; Arthur Goebel, a movie stunt pilot whose specialty was parachuting and crashing; and Bennett Griffin, who was not interesting in any way whatsoever.

Things went to shit pretty much immediately.  Both Goddard and Irving crashed on takeoff and Griffin, Erwin, and Pedlar all returned within half an hour with engine trouble.  Of the three, only Pedlar got back into the air, though Irving tried but instead just crashed his plane for a second time.  Of the four planes that managed to make it into the air, Goebel was most competent; flying at 4,000 feet to aid in stellar navigation and utilizing radio communications with ships strung across the route.  He landed in Honolulu after 26 hours with only a pint of fuel remaining in his tank.  In comparison, Jensen flew at an altitude of 50 feet, navigating by pure dead reckoning, miraculously arriving in Honolulu second with only five gallons of fuel remaining.  The planes piloted by Pedlar and Frost were never seen again.  Their loss sparked a massive search over an area of 350,000 square miles, which included 42 Navy ships and 12 civilian vessels.  Erwin, having gotten his plane fixed, joined the search, but soon after disappeared as well.  No sign of the three planes was ever discovered, though rumors and hoaxes continued for years afterwards.

In total, ten people died due to the race.  However, it did prove Dole’s concept correct, though it would be nearly a decade before planes regularly began carrying fresh pineapple to the mainland.  The first regular commercial airline flight between Los Angeles and Honolulu was established in 1935.  It took sixteen hours.  Today the same trip takes five hours.  Goebel continued his flying career, becoming the first pilot to fly non-stop across the U.S. west to east in 1929.  He competed in many other races, served as a pilot during World War II, and died in 1973.  Jensen also continued flying, but not with as much luck.  A month after the Dole race he attempted a non-stop flight from Los Angeles to New York, for some reason bringing along a lion owned by MGM Studios.  He and the lion died when his plane crashed in Arizona.  As for crazy old James Dole, the race was considered a media fiasco due to the high cost of life.  He was later removed from managing his own company in 1932.  He died of a heart attack in 1958.

Image: https://picryl.com/media/hess-bluebird-special-for-dole-air-race-lair-december-151927-9e477b