December 16, 1773 – In Boston Harbor, a group of Massachusetts colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians board three British tea ships and dump 342 chests of tea into the harbor.
The midnight raid, popularly known as the “Boston Tea Party,” was in protest of the British Parliament’s Tea Act of 1773, a bill designed to save the faltering East India Company by greatly lowering its tea tax and granting it a virtual monopoly on the American tea trade. The low tax allowed the East India Company to undercut even tea smuggled into America by Dutch traders, and many colonists viewed the act as another example of taxation tyranny.
Parliament, outraged by the blatant destruction of British property, enacted the Coercive Acts, also known as the Intolerable Acts, in 1774. The Coercive Acts closed Boston to merchant shipping, established formal British military rule in Massachusetts, made British officials immune to criminal prosecution in America, and required colonists to quarter British troops. The colonists subsequently called the first Continental Congress to consider a united American resistance to the British.
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December 1835 was a bitterly cold month in New York City. For several days in the middle of the month the temperatures dropped to nearly zero. On the night of December 16, a city watchmen patrolling in the neighborhood smelled smoke.
Approaching the corner of Pearl Street and Exchange Place, the watchmen realized the interior of a five-story warehouse was in flames. He sounded alarms, and various volunteer fire companies began to respond.
New York’s volunteer fire companies, led by their popular chief engineer James Gulick, made valiant efforts to fight the fire as it spread down the narrow streets. But they were frustrated by cold weather and strong winds. Hydrants had frozen. So chief engineer Gulick directed men to pump water from the East River, which was partly frozen. Even when water was obtained and the pumps worked, the high winds tended to blow water back into the faces of the firemen. Soon all water froze in their hand-pumped fire engines.
During the very early morning of December 17, 1835, the fire became enormous, and a large triangular section of the city, essentially anything south of Wall Street between Broad Street and the East River, burned beyond control.
When the Erie Canal had opened a decade earlier, the port of New York had become a major center of importing and exporting. And thus the warehouses of lower Manhattan were typically filled with goods which had arrived from Europe, China, and elsewhere and which were destined to be transported throughout the country. On that freezing night the warehouses in the path of the flames held a concentration of some of the most expensive goods on earth, including fine silks, lace, glassware, coffee, teas, liquors, chemicals, and musical instruments. When the fire finally ended it was discovered to have destroyed property worth twenty million dollars of 1835 value, a number three times the cost of the entire Erie Canal.
The fire raged on for two days, ravaging 17 blocks, and destroying 674 buildings including the Stock Exchange, Merchants’ Exchange, US Post Office, and the South Dutch Church. so frigid that volunteer firemen were unable to battle the walls of flame as water froze in their hand-pumped fire engines. A plan was quickly devised. A detachment of U.S. Marines who had arrived from the Brooklyn Navy Yard were sent back across the East River to procure gunpowder. Fighting through ice on the East River in a small boat, the Marines obtained barrels of gunpowder from the Navy Yard’s magazine. They wrapped the gunpowder in blankets so airborne embers from the fire couldn’t ignite it, and safely delivered it to Manhattan.
Charges were set, and a number of buildings along Wall Street were blown up. Marines imploded all the buildings on Wall Street. The rubble formed a wall that stopped the flames from marching northward and consuming the rest of the city.
Newspaper reports about the Great Fire expressed utter shock. No blaze of that size had ever occurred in America. And the idea that the center of what had become the nation’s commercial center had been destroyed in one night was nearly beyond belief.
A detailed newspaper dispatch from New York which appeared in New England newspapers in the following days related how fortunes had been lost overnight: “Many of our fellow citizens, who retired to their pillows in affluence, on awakening discovered they were bankrupt.”
While the Great Fire caused tremendous damage, only two people were killed. But that was because the fire was concentrated in a neighborhood of commercial, not residential, buildings. New York businessman asked for federal aid and only got a portion of what they asked for. But the Erie Canal authority loaned money to many of the merchants who had to rebuild, and commerce continued in Manhattan.
Within a few years the entire financial district, an area of about 40 acres, had been rebuilt. Some streets were widened, and they featured new streetlights fueled by gas. The new buildings in the neighborhood were constructed to be fire-resistant. The Merchants’ Exchange was rebuilt on Wall Street, which remained the center of American finance.
Because of the Great Fire of 1835, there is a scarcity of landmarks dating from before the 19th century in lower Manhattan. But the city learned valuable lessons about preventing and fighting fires, and a blaze of that magnitude never threatened the city again. |
December 16, 1920, One of the deadliest earthquakes in history hits the Gansu province of midwestern China, causing massive landslides and the deaths of an estimated 200,000 people. The earthquake, which measured 8.5 magnitude on the Richter scale, affected an area of some 25,000 square miles, including 10 major population centers.
The great devastation caused by the earthquake was due largely to poor soil conditions throughout the Gansu province, and by the fact that for almost 300 years there had been no recorded earthquakes in the region to stabilize gradual changes to the landscape.
On this day in 1950 – In the wake of the massive Chinese intervention in the Korean War, President Harry S. Truman declares a state of emergency. Proclaiming that “Communist imperialism” threatened the world’s people, Truman called upon the American people to help construct an “arsenal of freedom.”
In November, the stakes in the Korean War dramatically escalated with the intervention of hundreds of thousands of communist Chinese troops. Prior to their arrival on the battlefield, the U.S. forces seemed on the verge of victory in Korea. Just days after General Douglas MacArthur declared an “end the war offensive,” however, massive elements of the Chinese army smashed into the American lines and drove the U.S. forces back. The “limited war” in Korea threatened to turn into a widespread conflict. Against this backdrop, Truman issued his state of emergency and the U.S. military-industrial complex went into full preparations for a possible third world war. The president’s proclamation vastly expanded his executive powers and gave Mobilization Director Charles E. Wilson nearly unlimited authority to coordinate the country’s defense program. Such an increase in government power had not been seen since World War II.
The Soviet Union, which Truman blamed for most of the current world problems in the course of his speech, blasted the United States for “warmongering.” Congress, most of America’s allies, and the American people appeared to be strongly supportive of the President’s tough talk and actions. Truman’s speech, and the events preceding it, indicated that the Cold War-so long a battle of words and threats-had become an actual military reality. The Korean War lasted from 1950 to 1953.
On December 16, 1973, the Buffalo Bills running back Orenthal James “OJ” Simpson becomes the first player in the National Football League (NFL) to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a single season.
After leading the University of Southern California (USC) Trojans to a Rose Bowl victory and winning the Heisman Trophy, Simpson was drafted by Buffalo as the first pick in the 1969 NFL draft. He struggled for several seasons on weak Buffalo teams but first rushed for more than 1,000 yards in 1972, ending the season with a league-leading 1,251. The following year, he totaled 219 rushing yards against the New England Patriots in the next-to-last game of the season, putting his total at 1,803. On December 16, with the Bills facing the New York Jets in New York’s Shea Stadium, Simpson rushed for another 200 yards, for a record-setting total of 2,003.
Simpson had another banner year in 1975, with 1,817 yards rushing, 426 yards on receptions and a then-record 23 touchdowns. All told, he led the league in rushing four times (1972, 1973, 1975 and 1976) during his eight years with Buffalo, and was named NFL Player of the Year in 1972, 1973 and 1975. Plagued by injuries, Simpson was limited to seven games in 1977 and the following year was traded to the San Francisco 49ers. He played only two more seasons in the NFL, gaining a total of just 1,053 yards and averaging less than four yards per carry.
After retiring, Simpson acted and worked as a sportscaster. Though some view him as the greatest football player ever to play the game, he will unfortunately be remembered primarily for something quite different: In June 1994, Simpson was charged with the brutal murder of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. After a sensational and divisive criminal trial, he was acquitted in October 1995, but was later found liable for the deaths in a civil trial and ordered to pay $33.5 million in compensatory and punitive damages.
December 16, 1989 – Federal Judge Robert Vance is instantly killed by a powerful explosion after opening a package mailed to his housenear Birmingham, Alabama. Two days later, a mail bomb killed Robert Robinson, an attorney in Savannah, Georgia, in his office. Two other bomb packages, sent to the federal courthouse in Atlanta and to the Jacksonville, Florida office of the NAACP, were intercepted before their intended victims opened them.
The FBI immediately assigned a task force to find the terrorist, naming their operation VANPAC (for Vance package bomb). The investigators used nearly every forensic method available: DNA profiles were made from the saliva on the stamps, and both the paint on the boxes and the nails that acted as the bomb’s shrapnel were traced back to the manufacturer. Finally, an FBI agent remembered that Walter LeRoy Moody had been convicted in 1972 for setting off a pipe bomb with a similar design to that of the 1989 bombs. A search of Moody’s home failed to turn up evidence linking him to the VANPAC bombs, but bomb experts compared his 1972 bomb to the VANPAC explosives and determined that there was little doubt that the same man had made them all. Purportedly, Moody was upset by the judicial system.
In June 1991, a federal jury convicted Moody on charges related to the bombings and sentenced him to seven life terms plus 400 years in prison. In 1997, an Alabama judge sentenced Moody to die in the electric chair for Vance’s murder.
On this day in 2010, Larry King, the iconic, suspenders-sporting host of TV talk show “Larry King Live,” signs off after 25 years on the air. The 77-year-old King had hosted the hour-long CNN program, featuring interviews with movies stars, world leaders, politicians, musicians and other newsmakers, since June 1985. The farewell broadcast of “Larry King Live” included appearances by Ryan Seacrest, Regis Philbin, Katie Couric, Donald Trump, former president Bill Clinton (via satellite) and President Barack Obama (in a pre-recorded video), among others. Toward the end of the program, Tony Bennett serenaded King, who had become a TV institution, along with his wife and two young sons.
Larry King, who was born Lawrence Zeiger in Brooklyn, New York, in 1933, began his career as a disc jockey and sports announcer for a radio station in Miami Beach, Florida, in 1957. During the 1960s and 1970s, he worked in Miami as a radio and TV host and newspaper columnist before getting his own nationally syndicated radio program in 1978. In June 1985, King joined CNN, the cable news channel founded by Ted Turner in 1980. “Larry King Live,” which anchored CNN’s prime-time lineup, originated from Washington, D.C., before moving to Los Angeles in the 1990s.
The first guest on “Larry King Live” was Mario Cuomo, the governor of New York. The program went on to receive big ratings boosts when billionaire Ross Perot appeared as a guest in 1992 and announced his intention to run as an independent candidate for the U.S. presidency, and in 1993 when Vice President Al Gore and Perot came on to debate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). That edition of “Larry King Live” was the highest-rated in cable history for more than a decade.
Over the course of 25 years, King, who became known for his straightforward, nonconfrontational interview style, consistently landed big-name guests, ranging from Marlon Brando (who famously kissed King on the lips) to Vladimir Putin to Lady Gaga. From a set featuring a color-dotted map of the world on a dark background, King often took call-in, and later email, viewer questions for his interview subjects. He has said that in order to be fresh and learn from his guests, he didn’t prepare extensively for interviews. This approach could occasionally backfire and make King seem out of touch, as in 2007, when he asked Jerry Seinfeld if his sitcom had been cancelled or if he had left voluntarily. A surprised Seinfeld, who had famously exited his show of his own accord, said to King, “Do you know who I am?”
In June 2009, King announced plans to end his show. At the time, “Larry King Live” had fallen into third place in the ratings behind political programs hosted by Sean Hannity of Fox News and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC. By the time “Larry King Live” went off the air in December 2010, the legendary host had conducted some 50,000 interviews, by his account, during his more than 50-year career in radio and television.
rudely written email threat to members of the Los Angeles Board of Education prompted officials to close all 900 schools in the nation’s second-largest school system Tuesday, sending parents from San Pedro to Pacoima scrambling to find day care — while New York law enforcement dismissed a nearly identical threat from the same sender as an obvious hoax.
The unprecedented districtwide shutdown reflected the tense atmosphere over possible terrorist attacks less than two weeks after two Islamic radicals opened fire at a workplace party in San Bernardino, killing 14.
L.A. Unified School District Supt. Ramon Cortines said he made the decision to order the school closures because he couldn’t take a chance with the system’s 640,000 students.
By evening, school officials said they had inspected all campuses and that the FBI had discredited the threat.
“We believe that our schools are safe and we can reopen schools in Los Angeles Unified School District tomorrow morning,” school board President Steve Zimmer said in an evening news conference.
L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti and Police Chief Charlie Beck defended the decision to close the schools, saying investigators did not know at the time whether the threat was legitimate.
“I think it’s irresponsible … to criticize that decision at that point,” Beck said. “Southern California has been through a lot in the past few weeks. Should we put our children through the same thing?”
He said the email included all Los Angeles Unified schools and mentioned explosive devices, “assault rifles and machine pistols.”
“These are obviously things we take very seriously,” Beck said.
The district called and texted parents early Tuesday morning to alert them that schools would be closed — the first systemwide closure since the Northridge earthquake in 1994.
Although the school district could technically be subject to a loss of $29 million in per-pupil funding for closing campuses, state Supt. of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson said that he is certain the district would not be docked those funds.
Alan Glasband, a substitute teacher at San Pedro High School, said he and several other instructors had not received notifications. He said he heard about the bomb threat through a text from a friend.
Another friend, he said, had driven from his home in Norwalk to Orville Wright Middle School near Los Angeles International Airport before he heard the news.
“I’m pretty distraught that they didn’t bother to tell us,” Glasband said.
By midday, elected officials briefed by law enforcement said the threat did not appear to be credible.
Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Los Angeles), a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs committee, said the email lacked “the feel of the way the jihadists usually write.”
Sherman said the roughly 350-word message did not capitalize Allah in one instance, nor did it cite a Koranic verse. He said the elements of the threatened attack also seemed unlikely, such as the claim that it would involve 32 people with nerve gas.
“There isn’t a person on the street who couldn’t have written this,” with a basic level of knowledge of Islam, Sherman said. “Everybody in Nebraska could have written this.”
Still, he added, the person did have a knowledge of Southern California, and the threat could not be immediately discredited.
“I don’t know whether this was sent by a radical Islamic jihadist or somebody who had an anti-Islamic agenda or just a prankster,” Sherman said.
The FBI is working to determine where the email originated and who wrote it. Officials said it was routed through Germany but probably came from somewhere closer.
District officials and law enforcement worked since at least 10 p.m. Monday to decide how to respond to the email, police sources said. Cortines, who is retiring from the school system, told The Times that he was notified at 5 a.m.
All members of the Board of Education were alerted of the threat in an email sent at about 3 a.m. from L.A. School Police Chief Steven K. Zipperman, according to a district source.
One or more board members already were aware of the threat, including Zimmer, who was a recipient of the email.
New York officials received the email at roughly the same time, and with three hours less time to assess it, came to a sharply different decision.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said the threat was “so generic, so outlandish” that it couldn’t be taken seriously.
“It would be a huge disservice to our nation to close down our school system,” De Blasio said.
The mayor went so far as to suggest whoever wrote the threat was a fan of the cable television show “Homeland.”
New York Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton said “we cannot allow ourselves to raise levels of fear. Certainly raise levels of awareness. But this is not a credible threat.”
Brian Levin, a former NYPD officer and director of the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino, said that while “it makes sense to err on the side of safety,” there is a drawback in doing so.
“When a closure like this takes place, unfortunately it will embolden others to try it again.”
At least one group largely celebrated the district closure: students, many of whom were scheduled for final exams in this last week of classes before winter break.
Alexis Diaz, a senior at Roosevelt High in Boyle Heights, and his little brother glided by the deserted campus on hoverboards.
His cousin had called him early to tell him that school was canceled. Diaz didn’t believe him, but he turned on the news and saw that it was true.
“I thought, well, that’s good because I have finals,” he said. “I was ready for the AP Spanish test, but not history.”
Michael Ramirez, 18, skateboarded down the middle of Cypress Avenue in Northeast Los Angeles, popping wheelies and blasting music into white ear buds.
He had been on the way to Lincoln High School when a friend texted that there was no school.
“He said, ‘ISIS or something,’ ” Ramirez recalled.
“I’m kinda tired of hearing all this ISIS,” he said. “It’s annoying. I’ve got finals. But I guess it’s good to take control. Better safe than sorry.”
His plan for the unexpected day off: “Get with some friends; maybe go hit downtown.”
Parents had to rush to find someone to watch younger students, and coped with fears about terrorism that seemed a lot more realistic since the attack in San Bernardino.
Sarah Nichols of Echo Park decided to keep her three elementary school-age children with her for the day.
“I would prefer for them to be with me under the circumstances,” Nichols said.
She didn’t want to explain to them what terrorism was, what kind of danger might have awaited. She just told them it “wasn’t safe to go to school today.”
“I didn’t go into detail because I didn’t want their little minds to wonder,” she said.
howard.blume@latimes.com
stephen.ceasar@latimes.com
hailey.branson@latimes.com
Los Angeles Times staff writers Joe Mozingo, Ruben Vives, Joseph Serna, Joy Resmovits, Bob Sipchen and Sarah Wire contributed to this report.
Tragically, a 17-year-old Montebello student was struck and killed by a city service truck Tuesday morning as he was crossing a street on his way to his charter high school, unaware that it was closed for the day.
The fifth and final Republican presidential debate of 2015 came less than two weeks after the San Bernardino attacks, which thrust the campaign conversation into a new phase, dominated almost exclusively by national security, that continued into Tuesday night. Though the issues were sober, the candidates did not hold back in attacking each other. Here are five takeaways:
Several Republicans on the debate stage reached agreement on this point, underscored by the failure to detect the radicalization of the San Bernardino killers, which they laid at the hands of what they called a timid Obama administration.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz summarized the critique, saying that it’s “not a lack of competence” from President Obama, but “political correctness.”
“Political correctness is killing people,” he added. Others made similar comments.
This has been a running theme throughout the election and a major reason for Donald Trump‘s high poll numbers.
Many core Republican voters, particularly those angry with the establishment, believe the country has become weaker because Obama and other leaders are too afraid of alienating people — at home and abroad. Candidates seeking their votes have used the term as a catch-all to attack the establishment.
It’s way too early to tell whether this will affect his poll numbers, which have been resilient to seemingly tough moments, including the last debate.
But Jeb Bush was able to lodge attacks on Trump’s perceived lack of seriousness several times, including a reference to Saturday morning cartoons. “I won’t get my information from the shows,” Bush said. “I don’t know if that’s Saturday morning or Sunday morning.”
Trump did not have much of an answer.
Trump may lead in national polls, but the two first-term senators sparred repeatedly and were treated by other candidates as the leaders.
Rubio, the senator from Florida, hit Cruz for voting to curb the domestic surveillance program and for voting against the annual defense bill. Cruz, who led in recent polls of Iowa voters, went after Rubio for his role in drafting a comprehensive immigration bill that is unpopular among Republicans, and accused him of siding with Obama and Hillary Clinton in foreign interventions that he said created dangerous power vacuums in the Middle East.
Their clash has become increasingly important in the campaign as Cruz strengthens his hand among the party’s more conservative voters and Rubio tries to consolidate establishment Republicans who have historically determined the party’s nominee.
Their differences over Middle Eastern policy have also become a significant divide in the party over how or whether to confront dictators like Bashar Assad in Syria. Rubio believes defeating him is crucial to national security. Cruz argues that toppling him would create a vacuum that would allow the Islamic State militant group to expand its reach.
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, whose low poll numbers nearly got him knocked off the debate stage, looked like an uncaged bird. He went back to his bread-and-butter libertarian issues, needling Cruz, Rubio and Trump. His strongest moment might have been asserting that Trump’s proposals to close part of the Internet and kill ISIS family members violated the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who seems to have a better shot at breaking through, also had a good time poking his rivals, mocking Rubio and Cruz as bickering lawmakers who are incapable of making executive decisions.
“If your eyes are glazing over like mine, this is what it’s like to be on the floor of the United States Senate,” he said.
Bush may also have had his best debate, but it may not be enough to shift perceptions about his campaign, which has failed to meet expectations.
Both Donald Trump and Ben Carson squelched prior threats to leave the Republican Party to mount independent bids, saying they would stay in the GOP. “I am totally committed to the Republican Party,” Trump said. Dr Carson said the same.
This is Ray with my own personal comment: One thing that came out more clearly than ever during this debate is that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are not enemies. In fact, I saw for the first time the real possibility that when the race comes down to the wire and the Republican Convention is held, I won’t be surprised if Donald Trump will become the Republican candidate for president, and Ted Cruz the Republican’s choice for Vice President. Remember, you heard it here first!
This is Ray Mossholder with Today In History – December 16
Today In History – December 16
