A Treasury of Great American Scandals (39 page)

1881—
Henry James's
Portrait of a Lady
is published.

1882—
The United States bans Chinese immigration for ten years in reaction to simmering resentment over Chinese laborers.

1883—
The Brooklyn Bridge is completed and hailed as the “Eighth Wonder of the World.”

1883—
William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody organizes his Wild West show.

1884—
Construction begins in Chicago on the Home Insurance Building, the world's first skyscraper.

1885—
Mark Twain's
Huckleberry Finn
is published.

1886—
The Statue of Liberty, a gift from the people of France, is dedicated in New York Harbor and becomes the first view of America for many in the growing “nation of immigrants.”

1888—
George Eastman perfects the “Kodak” box camera, the first designed for mass production and amateur use.

1889—
Herman Hollerith's punched-card tabulating machine is the first successful computer, and is used to tabulate the results of the 1890 census.

1889—
A dam on the Conemaugh River in Pennsylvania breaks, causing the great Johnstown Flood in which 2,200 are killed. “The water seemed to leap, scarcely touching the ground,” a witness recalls. “It bounded down the valley, crashing and roaring, carrying everything before it. For a mile its front seemed like a solid wall twenty feet high.”

1890—
The Battle of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, which begins after the federal government bans the Sioux's Ghost Dance (a religious ceremony), is the last major conflict between Native Americans and U.S. troops. It ends with the slaughter of over 200 Lakota Sioux.

1890—
The electric chair is used for the first time in the execution of convicted murderer William Kemmler. It is not a success. “The first execution by electricity has been a horror,” writes an anonymous New York
World
reporter. “Physicians who might make a jest out of the dissecting room, officials who have seen many a man's neck wrenched by rope, surgeons who have lived in hospitals and knelt beside the dead and dying on bloody fields, held their breaths with a gasp, and those unaccustomed to such sights turned away in dread.”

1890—
The census bureau announces that so many people have filled in pockets throughout the West that it is no longer meaningful to talk about a “frontier line.” The frontier is officially declared closed.

1891—
James Naismith invents basketball.

1893—
Henry Ford builds his first successful gasoline engine.

1894—
Thomas Edison markets the kinetoscope, an early form of movie in which a viewer peers through a magnifying lens at moving images illuminated by an electric light.

1895—
Charles and Franklin Duryea establish the first American company for manufacturing gasoline-powered automobiles.

1895—
Stephen Crane's
The Red Badge of Courage
is published.

1895—
The first professional football game is played in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

1897—
The first American subway opens in Boston with 1.5 miles of track.

1898—
In what U.S. ambassador to Britain John Hay calls “a splendid little war,” the U.S. fights Spain over the independence of Cuba. The April to August hostilities, in which Spain is easily defeated, marks the emergence of the United States as a world power and results in the possession of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippine Islands. The war also makes Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders national heroes.

1903—
Wilbur and Orville Wright design and build the first successful airplane. The first flight, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, goes 120 feet and lasts about 12 seconds. Man has at last taken wing, yet the feat barely makes a ripple in the nation's newspapers.

1903—
The Great Train Robbery,
an eleven-minute Western film, is the first major motion picture. It is a sensation, giving birth to the “Hollywood Dream Factory.”

1903—
The first World Series is held. Boston defeats Pittsburgh five games to three.

1906—
San Francisco suffers one of the worst disasters in American history when a massive earthquake strikes, followed by a conflagration that consumes much of the city. “San Francisco is gone!” reports novelist Jack London. “Nothing remains of it but memories and a fringe of dwelling houses on the outskirts.” At least 3,000 people are killed and 250,000 lose their homes.

1906—
Upton Sinclair's
The Jungle
is published.

1909—
Robert E. Peary reaches the North Pole. (Frederick A. Cook's claim that he had reached the Pole a year earlier is later discredited after a congressional investigation.)

1911—
Under the provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act, the U.S. Supreme Court orders the Standard Oil Company, one of the richest and most powerful businesses in the world, to dissolve into a number of separate entities.

1912—
The
Titanic
sinks on her maiden voyage, killing 1,517 people, including many Americans.

1913—
Ford Company engineers develop the assembly line, making the manufacture of automobiles cheaper and more efficient. “We now have two general principles in all operations,” writes Henry Ford, “that a man shall never have to take more than one step, if possibly it can be avoided, and that no man need ever stoop over.” With automobiles more readily available to the masses, America takes to the road.

1914—
The Panama Canal is completed, opening a passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in one of the world's greatest feats of engineering.

1915—
A German submarine sinks the passenger ship
Lusitania,
killing over half of the nearly 2,000 people on board, including more than 100 Americans. “Remember the
Lusitania
” becomes a rallying cry when the United States enters World War I two years later.

1917—
The United States enters World War I when Congress declares war on Germany. Over 116,000 Americans die in the conflict, which ends the following year, and more than 234,000 are wounded.

1918—
An influenza epidemic sweeps the world, killing an estimated 20 million people, including about 600,000 in the United States.

1920—
Women are given the right to vote under the Nineteenth Amendment, which states, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

1920—
Prohibition begins following ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment outlawing liquor for all citizens. The ban ushers in an era of bootlegging and violent gang crime.

1920—
The U.S. Senate rejects American participation in the League of Nations.

1925—
F. Scott Fitzgerald's
The Great Gatsby
is published.

1926—
The first liquid-propelled rocket is launched using technology developed by aerospace pioneer Robert Goddard. “It looked almost magical as it rose,” Goddard writes, “without any appreciably greater noise or flame, as if it said ‘I've been here long enough; I think I'll be going somewhere else, if you don't mind.' ”

1927—
Charles Lindbergh becomes the first aviator to make a solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean. “I'm flying along dreamily when it catches my eye,” Lindbergh later writes in his autobiography,
The Spirit of St. Louis,
“that black speck on the water two or three miles southeast. Seconds pass before my mind takes in the full impact of what my eyes are seeing . . . fishing boats! The coast, the European coast, can't be far away!”

1927—
Television, later to dominate the American cultural landscape, makes a rather humble debut with the broadcast image of Secretary of Commerce (and later President) Herbert Hoover on two screens.

1929—
The Roaring Twenties come to an abrupt end when the stock market crashes and the nation is plunged into the Great Depression. “It came with a speed and ferocity that left men dazed,” the
New York Times
reports of the collapse. “The bottom simply fell out of the market.”

1929—
Robert Byrd becomes the first person to fly over the South Pole.

1929—
Gangland violence in Chicago reaches its peak during Prohibition with the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

1929—
William Faulkner's
The Sound and the Fury
is published.

1930—
U.S. astronomers announce the discovery of Pluto, the ninth planet in the solar system. They initially believe the diminutive planet to be even bigger than Jupiter.

1932—
Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

1933—
As the nation suffers through the Great Depression, with many believing that democracy itself is in danger of collapse, President Franklin Roosevelt declares at his inauguration, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” The new president immediately launches a massive recovery program known as the New Deal.

1933—
Prohibition is repealed with the Twenty-first Amendment.

1936—
Margaret Mitchell's
Gone With the Wind
is a best-seller, surpassing in six months sales of the previous best-seller in American history,
Uncle Tom's Cabin.

1939—
John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath
is published.

1941—
On December 7, “a date,” President Franklin Roosevelt declares, “which will live in infamy,” a surprise attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor devastates the U.S. Pacific fleet and propels the nation into World War II.

1942—
President Roosevelt signs into law Executive Order No. 9006, which allows the military to move 112,000 Japanese-Americans from their homes on the West Coast to inland concentration camps.

1944—
Allied forces invade Normandy, France, with over 150,000 troops on five beachheads. “We will accept nothing except full victory,” declares Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower. Thousands of soldiers are killed and wounded, but Europe, and possibly the world, is saved from Axis domination.

1945—
Germany surrenders on May 7, ending the war in Europe. On August 6, an American B-29 bomber, the
Enola Gay,
drops the first atomic bomb used in warfare on Hiroshima, Japan. The explosion immediately kills an estimated 70,000-100,000 people and destroys an area of about five square miles. “The giant purple mushroom [cloud] . . . was still boiling upward like something terribly alive,”
Enola Gay
pilot Colonel Paul W. Tibbets Jr. later writes. “It was a frightening sight, and even though we were several miles away, it gave the appearance of something that was about to engulf us.” Another, larger atomic bomb is dropped on Nagasaki three days later, after which Japan surrenders and World War II ends.

1946—
During the first session of the newly formed United Nations, the General Assembly agrees that the organization's headquarters should be in the United States.