This Day in New York History

THIS DAY IN NEW YORK HISTORY

It’s 5:32 p.m., the precise time that Prohibition ended seventy-five years ago (December 5, 1933). Happy Repeal Day!

Prohibition began with the passage of the National Prohibition Act, known popularly as the Volstead Act after Representative Andrew Volstead of Minnesota, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who sponsored the bill. President Woodrow Wilson vetoed the bill on October 28, 1919, but Congress overrode the veto that very day. The 18th Amendment went into effect on January 29, 1920. Volstead lost his bid for re-election in 1922, after serving for 10 terms. Coincidence?

Here’s the text of the Amendment:

Section 1. After one year from the ratification of this article
the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors
within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from
the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof
for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

Section 2. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Section 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall
have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the
legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution,
within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States
by the Congress.

Technically, the amendment didn’t ban alcohol, but it made obtaining it legally very difficult.
 
“Prohibition” is the name given to the amendment and the collection of acts passed under its authority. Prohibition made gangsters rich. According to the National Archives site, there were in New York City in 1925 at least 30,000 speakeasies and perhaps as many as 100,000. The policy became increasingly unpopular after the onset of the Great Depression. It was finally repealed when Utah (situational irony!) became the 36th state to ratify the 21st Amendment.

You can find out more about Prohibition at this site from Ohio State University.

THIS DAY IN NEW YORK HISTORY

Exactly seventy years ago today, radio signals emanating from the twentieth floor of 485 Madison Avenue caused a panic. The occasion was the 8:00 p.m. broadcast of the CBS show Mercury Theater On Air, a special Halloween episode that featured an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s novel War of the Worlds (1898).

The broadcast was the brainchild of Orson Welles, who became famous as a result. The radio adaptation was written Howard Koch, who departed from Wells’s novel by setting the action not in England but in Grovers’s Mill, New Jersey. The conceit behind the radio play was to present the story as if it were actually happening in real time, and Welles used recordings of the Hindenburg disaster to inspire the cast and crew.

Events from the novel were presented as if they were news bulletins interrupting the regularly scheduled programming, with Welles first appearing in the guise of Professor Richard Pierson, “a famous astronomer.” Because many listeners tuned in late to the broadcast, they believed the fake bulletins to be real, causing a panic. A front-page article in The New York Times the next day described the furor:

The broadcast, which disrupted households, interrupted religious services, created traffic jams and clogged cqmmunications systems, was made by Orson Welles, who as the radio character, “‘The Shadow,” used to give “the creeps” to countless child listeners. This, time at least, a score of adults required medical treatment for shock and hysteria.

In Newark, in a single block at Heddon Terrace and Hawthorne Avenue, more than twenty families rushed·ont·of their houses with wet handkerchiefs and towels over their faces to flee from what they believed was to be a gas raid. Some began moving household furniture.

Wikipedia has a good account of the broadcast and its aftermath. A television film called The Night That Panicked America dramatized these events and was broadcast on Halloween night, 1975. A documentary called The Day That Panicked America was released in 2005.

It is tempting now to read Welles and Koch’s adaptation as a meditation on world events, and the public’s response may well have been fueled by a sense of national unease at the increasing belligerence of Germany, which had annexed the Sudetenland on the first of the month, and Japan, which spent October invading Canton. Steven Spielberg’s effective 2005 adaptation of Wells’s novel seems, in retrospect, also to be a meditation on fears of invasion from abroad. Although Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp follow Welles and Koch by setting the tale in New Jersey, the film is clearly marked by the events of 9/11. “Is it the terrorists?” 10-year-old Rachel Ferrier (Dakota
Fanning) screams, as she and her father, Ray (Tom Cruise), attempt to escape from Bayonne in a minivan.

You can stream or download the 1938 broadcast from the Internet Archive, which also has an interesting set of materials related to the Hindenburg.

The first recorded celebration of “Columbus Day” took place in New York City on October 12, 1792, three hundred years to the day after Columbus first reached the Caribbean. The ceremony was organized by the Society of St. Tammany, also known as the Columbian Order, and included the dedication of a monument, a 14-foot “portable monumental obelisk” that was illuminated and made to simulate black marble. It depicted scenes from Columbus’s life. The New York Times ran a piece about this monument on August 4, 1889, describing it in some detail, though even then its whereabouts were unknown.

One hundred years later, a statue of Columbus by the Italian sculptor Gaetano Russo was erected in Columbus Circle, which would become the point at which distances to and from New York City are officially measured.

In the same year, President Benjamin Harrison issued a proclamation urging Americans to celebrate “Columbus Day,” and communities across the country responded with plays, pageants, and other festivities. The following year saw the opening of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, remembered for its famous “White City” and for Frederick Jackson Turner’s address to the American Historical Society on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” [Click here for a virtual tour from the Crossroads site at the University of Virginia and here for the University of Illinois's digital exhibition.]

In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed that every October 12 would be a federal holiday known as “Columbus Day.” President Richard Nixon changed the official date of the holiday to the second Monday in October (which happens, incidentally, to be Canada’s Thanksgiving Day).

In 1992, the insights of multiculturalism led to both introspection and protests around the holidaty. An editorial in the New York Times noted that “today, in New York City, Spain officially commemorates the 500th anniversary by observing a ‘Day of Respect for Native American Cultures.’” The editorial concluded, however, that “it is as unfair to burden Columbus with all the depredations that followed his voyage as it is to credit him alone with the development of the Western Hemisphere. It is enough that a long and different time ago, he opened the way.”