Ticker-Tape Parades
Fresh off their 27th World Series win, the New York Yankees will take a victory lap through lower Manhattan this morning. It will be their record-setting ninth trip down the so-called “Canyon of Heroes,” the skyscraper-lined stretch from the island’s southern tip to City Hall. And if past ticker-tape parades for sports champions are any guide, they can expect to be showered with up to 50 tons of confetti and shredded paper.
The stock ticker — a machine that tracked financial data over telegraph lines and stamped it on strips called “ticker-tape” for the sound the printing made — had barely been around two decades before Wall Streeters realized that throwing its ribbony paper out the window was a fun way to celebrate. They first did it on October 29, 1886, inspired by the ceremony to dedicate the Statue of Liberty. The practice was still a novelty ten years later, when the New York Times reported that office workers had “hit on a new and effective scheme of adding to the decorations” at a parade for presidential candidate William McKinley by unfurling hundreds of ticker-tape reels out the window.
By 1899 two million people turned out to make Admiral George Dewey, hero of the Battle of Manila Bay, the first individual honored with a ticker-tape parade. Former President Teddy Roosevelt got one in 1910 upon returning from his African safari. But it wasn’t until 1919, when Grover Whalen was made New York City’s official greeter, that ticker-tape parades took off: from 1919 to 1953 he reportedly threw 86 of them, many at the urging of the State Department. The luminaries he feted in his early years included Albert Einstein in 1921 — the only scientist ever honored with a ticker-tape parade — as well as the U.S. Olympic team in 1924 and Charles Lindbergh in 1927. By then, of course, the tradition had spread: thousands of Chicagoans showered boxer Gene Tunney with paper that year when he arrived in the city to defend his world title; Boston and St. Louis have also held ticker-tape parades, though New York remains their epicenter.
However, all were not happy. A 1904 letter to the editor urged the New York Times to speak out against the “evil” practice, suggesting that parade horses spooked by falling ticker tape might plow into the crowd on the sidewalk and cause “disaster.” A few years later, an overzealous reveler reportedly neglected to tear the pages out of a phone book and instead threw the whole thing out the window; it struck a passerby and knocked him unconscious. By 1926, New York Stock Exchange officials had grown concerned about the cost of tossing miles of ticker tape out the window any time someone important came to town: they considered buying confetti to distribute to employees but decided against it. In 1932, another irate Times letter-writer demanded that lobbing paper be “promptly and strictly banned,” to be replaced by tossing flowers or waving handkerchiefs, the more dignified customs of “civilized cities” in Europe and South America.
In 1945, V-J Day prompted the most lavish ticker-tape parade in history–5,438 tons of material were flung on New York City’s streets. On Aug. 14, 1945, three thousand street-sweepers worked through the night to clean it up, only to have their efforts undone when the merriment continued the next morning. A few months earlier, General Dwight Eisenhower and the Allied Forces were celebrated at the same canyon. The April 20, 1951 parade honoring ousted General Douglas MacArthur was the biggest parade thrown for an individual. [Above, photo by Mark Kauffman].
Queen Elizabeth (and her uncle Edward while he was still Prince of Wales) and Pope John Paul II received a ticker-tape parades and so did the Yankees, the Mets and the Rangers. The Apollo 11 astronauts were also honored, but by this time, the Stock Exchange was upgrading to electronic boards, leaving them little use for ticker tape, and the parades dwindled. There were only a handful in the 1970s and 1980s. John Glenn saw a fete in 1998 honoring him for becoming the oldest person to go into space, at age 77. Coming 36 years after his first one, it put him in an elite club of multiple-parade honorees, including Amelia Earhart, Dwight Eisenhower, and Charles de Gaulle. Rear Admiral Richard Byrd, a polar explorer, had three ticker-tape parades. That is a record for one individual.
[Excepted from Laura FitzPatrick's article in Time Magazine].
New York Post cover, featuring the tickertape parade to honor “Wrong-Way Corrigan”.
Filibuster
Sometimes “democracy’s finest show” sometimes “tyranny of the minority”, filibuster is used in many political systems across the world─including the U.K., Canada, Australia and France, but they require members to actually enact the filibuster (i.e., actually do the endless talking) so they are used very rarely. But in the U.S. Senate, however, the mere threat of it can stall the legislature, which somehow makes it the only legislative body that requires a three-fifths majority to bring bills to a vote. So how did it all began?
In 1806, Vice President Aaron Burr believed that a procedure for limiting/ending debates was improper. It was the long accepted practice of the gentlemanly Senate back then to allow each member sufficient time to speak before a vote. However, no one invoked a filibuster until 1841 over the issue of the firing of Senate printers. It lasted six days, but later that year Kentucky Senator Henry Clay’s banking bill was filibustered for 14 days. The procedure slowly got out of control and in 1917, President Wilson called for a cloture rule to cut off debate. It was first invoked two years later to end a filibuster against the Treaty of Versailles. [Originally, the cloture was by two-thirds, but in 1975, it was reduced to three-fifths, now the magic number 60.]
In 1939’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Jimmy Stewart’s one-man filibuster further popularized the practice. Four years earlier, Louisiana Senator Huey P. Long read the Constitution, plays of Shakespeare and even recipes for oyster dishes for 15 hours to prevent a New Deal employment bill. But the longest uninterrupted filibuster on record belongs to South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who stopped a vote on a 1957 civil rights bill for 24 hours and 18 minutes–from 8:54 p.m. on August 28 and to 9:12 p.m. the next evening, he subjected the fellow senators to a long and hot summer night. “He read these monotonously, even listlessly from the lectern,” The New York Times reported, “so that the classic phrases might have been so many items from the telephone directory.” Above, Senator Thurmond holds up his speech, which contained the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, Washington’s Farewell Address, and other historical documents.
The previous record holder was Wayne Morse, an independent from Oregon who four years before had filibustered an offshore oil bill in 1953 for 22 hours and 26 minutes, without sitting down. Thurmond, on the other hand, did several times but his theatrical grandstand was approved by many Southerners, and empathized even by his political nemeses. Sen. Paul Douglas of Illinois, a staunch liberal and supporter of civil rights, poured Thurmond colleague a glass of cold orange juice. Yet, Thurmond’s filibuster never stood a chance of derailing the bill. Most of his Southern colleagues were reluctantly willing to swallow the ineffective bill (Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson watered it down to get it passed), but it passed two hours later in a 62-15 vote. However, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 proved ineffective and it would take a much stronger measure, the 1965 Voting Rights Act–this time Johnson lent his full support.
The most effective effort to end a filibuster was that of Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia who attempted to end a 1987–1988 Republican filibuster against a campaign finance reform bill through a procedure that had last been wielded in 1942: he directed the Senate sergeant-at-arms to arrest absent members and bring them to the floor.
Edward and Wallis with Hitler
In 1936, Edward VIII abdicated to marry the woman he loved, a divorcee Mrs Wallis Simpson.However, the Guardian claimed that the king’s decision was due to Mrs. Simpson being a Nazi sympathizer and this was totally unacceptable to the prime minister at the time, Stanley Baldwin. The former Austrian ambassador, Count Albert von Mensdorff-Pouilly-Dietrichstein, who was also a second cousin once removed and friend of George V, believed that Edward himself favoured German fascism as a bulwark against communism.
In 1941, while they were holidaying in Florida, the exiled former king and his consort, now the Duke and the Duchess of Windsor, were spied upon by the FBI on the orders of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. These FBI files, written in the 1940s and now released under America’s Freedom of Information Act, detailed that the Duchess might have been passing secrets to a leading Nazi with whom she was thought to have had an affair and that His Majesty’s Government had known for the fact for some time.
Following Edward’s accession, the German embassy in London sent a cable for the personal attention of Hitler himself. It read: “An alliance between Germany and Britain is for him (the King) an urgent necessity.” In October 1937, the Windsors visited Nazi Germany, met Hitler at his Obersalzberg retreat (above), dined with his deputy, Rudolf Hess, and even visited a concentration camp. The camp’s guard towers were explained away as meat stores for the inmates. The visit was against the advice of the British government and during the visit the Duke gave full Nazi salutes.
At the outbreak of war, the duke served as a military liaison officer in Paris. Hitler made an abortive attempt to bring Edward and his wife to Nazi-sympathetic Spain, and greatly alarmed, the British establishment finally packing the duke off to the Bahamas from 1940-45. Deeply disenchanted by the society that had spun him, the Duke made his Nazi sympathies explicit, once telling a journalist that “it would be a tragic thing for the world if Hitler was overthrown”. In another break from his usual unassuming boyish behavior, he remarked, “After the war is over and Hitler will crush the Americans. We’ll take over. They (the British) don’t want me as their King, but I’ll be back as their leader.”
After the war, the duke and duchess returned to France. He died there in 1972, while the Duchess lived on until 1986.
You, too, can kiss off Carter
In ‘76, Democratic nominee for president, Jimmy Carter criticized detente and claimed he would drive harder bargains with Leonid Brezhnev than Gerald Ford had done. Ronald Reagan, who was contesting the Republican nomination, said the same thing, only more vociferously. Going into a defensive crouch, Ford passed up a chance for a strategic-arms pact that year and may have cost himself the election. Jimmy Carter won the election, but continued the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks started by the previous Republican administrations.
SALT II was a nuclear arms treaty which attempted to reduce all categories of delivery vehicles on both sides to 2,250. SALT II helped the U.S. to discourage the Soviets from arming their third generation ICBMs. An agreement was reached in Vienna on June 18, 1979, and was signed by Leonid Brezhnev and Carter. This opened a “window of vulnerability”, opposed by many hawks from the both sides of the aisle in Congress. [Sidenote: in response to the refusal of the U.S. Congress to ratify the treaty, then a junior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, met with the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko, "educated him about American concerns and interests" and secured several changes that neither the Secretary of State nor President could obtain.] Carter had to appease the conservatives with 200 MX missiles in 4600 silos costing the government $33 billion.
Six months after the signing, the Soviet Union deployed troops to Afghanistan, and in September of the same year, senators including Henry M. Jackson and Frank Churchdiscovered the so-called ”Soviet brigade” on Cuba. In light of these developments, the treaty was never formally ratified by the United States Senate. When the 1980 Presidential Election came, the Reagan campaign made devastating use of the above photograph of Carter embracing Brezhnev at the summit meeting where the arms pact was finally signed, adding a caption, YOU, TOO, CAN KISS OFF CARTER. The voters obliged.
The SALT II’s terms were, nonetheless, honored by both sides until 1986 when the Reagan Administration withdrew from SALT II after accusing the Soviets of violating the pact.
A Nazi Funeral in London
The above extraordinary photo captured in April 1936, showed the funeral of the German Ambassador Leopold Von Hoesch, with the people clearly giving the Nazi salute on the balcony of the Germany Embassy on Carlton House Terrace, overlooking The Mall.The above image and footage were unearthed for the Discovery Channel programme: ‘Wartime London with Harry Harris’, a London cab driver and historian who has driven a taxi for two decades.
The Grenadier Guards and Nazi soldiers march together down The Pall Mall with a coffin with a swastika on it. Well-liked by most British statesmen, including Sir Anthony Eden and Sir John Simon, von Hoesch was considered as the best hope for enhancing the Anglo-German relations during the early 1930s. Hoesch (1881–1936), a career diplomat but no Nazi, would be disturbed by this display of Nazi pageantry at his funeral–he frequently feuded with Hitler over the disarmament and vocally denounced Hitler’s invasion of Rhineland. If it were not for this untimely death, it was most likely that he would have been recalled.
Von Hoesch was replaced by his nemesis, Joachim von Ribbentrop. The 6-9 Carlton House Terrace, currently occupied by the Royal Society and the National Academy of Science, was the former home of the German Embassy and within the sight of the Buckingham Palace. Ribbentrop modernized the building near the Foreign Office, with Albert Speer himself flying in from Berlin to design a grandiose embassy that would convey some of the portentous glamour of the Third Reich. Speer was also responsible for a staircase inside the building made from Italian marble, donated by Mussolini. No. 7 was used as a base to house German military attachés and the headquarters of the Nazi espoinage machine in London.
The Germans were kicked out at the outbreak of war, and the building was stripped of its Nazi fixtures before it was rented to the Royal Society in 1967. There are still signs that this was once a Nazi residence, including the border designs of swastikas on the floor of one public room. A memorial to Giro, Leopold von Hoesch’s dog which died in 1934 when he made a fatal connection with an exposed electricity wire, was also buried here. The dog’s grave on the front garden to No 9, with the epitaph “Giro: Ein treuer Begleiter” (“Giro: A true companion”), remains Great Britain’s sole Nazi memorial, situated somewhat inappropriately in an area filled with monuments to heroes of the British Empire.
The Edwardians in color
It was the only known color photograph of Britain’s King Edward VII. Found in April 2009 in a cupboard in Exbury, the informal portrait, which shows the monarch dressed in a kilt and full highland costume. It was taken in September 1909 by a close friend Lionel de Rothschild, a banker and Conservative MP, who invited the king to one of his regular trips to Scotland for the autumn grouse season, at Tulchan in Strathspey, 15 miles from Balmoral. The portrait is thought to be one of the last pictures of Edward, who died eight months later.
Rothschild was an enthusiastic amateur photographer who experimented in taking the pictures and went about perfecting the new process of taking images. These images were discovered by Lionel de Rothschild, his grandson, wrapped in old newspapers in Exbury House, which has been in the Rothschild family for 90 years. Now the photograph now forms part of the Rothschild Archive. The picture is an example of an autochrome, the first colour photographic method to be commercially viable, and the archives include 700 non-royal images from the early 1900s, including one of the earliest known photographs of London Zoo, taken in 1910; that of Lady Helen Vincent, a renowned beauty of the time and the wife of the diplomat Sir Edgar Vincent, posing beside a stone sculpture; and that of three soldiers posing at a Military Encampment at Tidworth, Wiltshire, in 1911 and that of members of the de Rothschild family enjoying a day out in the woods in 1912. These photos show the Edwardian world in a new light, in a soft and subtle colour.
Note: autochrome plates could not be printed or copied and had to be seen through a viewer.
Rockefeller gives Middle Finger
Today “Liberal Republican” is an oxymoron, but in the 70s and the 80s, they did exist, Nelson Rockefeller was their leader. Elected four times as governor and one of America’s wealthiest politicians, Rockefeller resigned in 1973 to devote all of his time to a potential presidential run in 1976. But when Vice President Spiro T. Agnew resigned in disgrace after pleading guilty to not paying taxes, Rockefeller called Nixon and asked for the vice presidency.
Nixon decided instead to appoint House Minority Leader and Michigan congressman Gerald Ford. After Nixon’s resignation Gerald Ford was sworn in as President. Ford offered the Vice Presidency to Rockefeller. Knowing that he would not be the nominee for president in 1976, Rockefeller relaxed and enjoyed his duties as vice president. This attitude was caught on camera, above in Binghamton, NY.; A heckler was shouting insults and Rockefeller leaned over the podium and gave him the finger. The picture appeared in newspaper across the nation, the public opinion was divided: some criticizing it as a crude gesture, but others admitting that it was nice to see politician who wasn’t afraid to show just what he really meant.
Shortly after taking office both Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Rockefeller had been diagnosed with cancer and had to have mastectomies. It was major headline news and focused the nations attention on the dangers of breast cancer. Then when California’s former two-term governor Ronald Reagan announced that he would be a candidate for the Republican nomination, Ford had to appease the conservatives, and replace Rockefeller was replaced on the ticket with Senator Robert Dole of Kansas. It was a rally for Dole in Binghamton that Rockefeller hold up his middle finger with ’sneering, Satanic expression’. For him, not running for reelection again, the defiant middle finger was a kind of declaration of independence freeing him from the unspoken rule that politicians must always flatter the audience and ignore the hecklers.
He retired soon after; Rockefeller could have died with the respect, but it was reported that his fatal heart attack was induced by a more than the usual late night ‘office work’ with a young female associate.
Annenberg Curtsy
In March 2009 died Leonore Annenberg, the society doyenne who was President Ronald Reagan’s first chief of protocol and who, with her late husband, the ambassador and publisher Walter H. Annenberg, gave away billions to philanthropic causes. She was 91.
Not long after his inauguration in 1981, Reagan nominated Leonore “Lee” Annenberg as his chief of protocol; it was a position on the rank with ambassador, requiring confirmation by the Senate, which sailed through on a 96-to-0 vote and rolled up her Bill Blass sleeves. ”It’s the first paying job I’ve ever had,” she joked, but invited diplomats to dinners at her own expense.
Unorthodox, superbly rich and headstrong, she was never a popular figure inside the White House, and a picture of her curtsying to the visiting Prince Charles at Andrews Air Force Base was later splashed across the front pages of hundreds of newspapers, with some commentators said it was unseemly in the republic which gained its independence by overthrowing the same dynasty Lee was curtsying to.
What made matters worse was a repeated curtsy, this time by Diana Vreeland, the former editor of Vogue and a longtime friend of the Reagans, at the private dinner for Prince Charles at the White House. Nancy Reagan was photographed next to Vreeland unfazed and smiling. The press went wild.
The British Consulate’s insistence that this was the correct form while meeting royalty didn’t help either. A few weeks later, on July 17th, when she met Prince Charles again at the Royal Ballet’s 50th Anniversary gala in the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, Lee Anneberg decided not to curtsy again.
For the Annebergs, the last straw was a presidential trip to Egypt for the funeral of the assassinated president, Anwar El-Sadat. Normally, the protocol chief would have handled the arrangements, but they were taken over by the White House. Mrs. Annenberg resigned after 11 months in office, saying she wanted to spend more time with her husband.
Fordlandia
No Botanists, surveyors and experts were consulted in choosing the site of Fordlandia, thereby creating the city in the middle of a swampland.
It was a grand, if eccentric, economic experiment, but by staging it in the Amazonian jungles, the American industrialist Henry Ford made a fatal error. In 1927, 65-year old tycoon sent two ships to scout the area. Ford wanted all of the parts he needed for his vehicles, but did not have the rubber; to break the Europeans monopoly on rubber, he made a deal with the Brazilian government to buy 2.5 million acres of Amazon land, roughly the size of Connecticut.
He planned not only to plant rubber trees, but also to mine the land for gold; drill for oil; and harvest timber. In addition, he hoped to bring his American-style sensibilities to the region: the production line; sanitation; buildings such as Churches, cottages; a hospital; a movie theater; and the idea of fair wages for hard work.White picket fences, movie screen, hospital, water tower, “main street,” three schools, church, hamburgers, square dancing lessons, etc etc.
What he didn’t bring was a an expertise in growing rubber trees, or an understanding of the Amazon and it’s people. They planted the trees so closely packed. Disease and insects plagued the land, and Ford had to relocate the city. Although he never actually bothered to visit the place, puritanical Henry Ford allowed no alcohol or tobacco in the city. The workers hated their unfamiliar lifestyles that they revolted and the Brazilian army had to be called it.
Later, an “Island of Innocence” 5 miles upstream which had bars, clubs, and brothels, was built. Henry Ford envisioned his own version of Gold Rush era San Francisco, but then synthetic rubber came along. Announcing curtly, “our war experience has taught us that synthetic rubber is superior to natural rubber for certain of our products,” Ford finally threw his towel in 1945. By this time, he had lost over $20 million in Brazil (modern equivalent: $200 million). Ford sold the land back to the Brazilian government for $250,000, a token sum. Not a single drop of rubber from Fordlandia made it to the states.
Kleine Wiedervereinigung
The Saarland Guards take down the Customs sign between two neighboring countries
Chancellor Adenauer in the Saarland
It has been nearly twenty years since the Berlin Wall fell and two Germanies were reunited. In our recounting of this post-war German history, we often forget at least one other important event: The 1957 Kleine Wiedervereinigung (or small reunification) between Germany and the Saarland.
To that point, the Saarland had been one of the world’s most hotly disputed areas. Occupied by the French during the Napoleonic Wars, the Saarland was where the first shots of the Franco-Prussian War were fired. After this, the Saar became German until WWI, after which Britain and France established a nominally independent occupation government, sanctioned by a 15 year League of Nations mandate.
When this expired in 1935, a plebiscite returned the Saarland to Germany, and twenty years later, in a similar referendum, two thirds of the Saarland voted against autonomy and for the reunification with Germany. Thus on 1st January 1957, it was returned to German control for the second time in 22 years.
The Saarland joins as the tenth state in the Federal Republic. Visiting the state, which rolled out the red carpet for him, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer said he hoped Germany’s “lost” territories in the East might some day follow the example of the Saar. They did.
(Between 1945-1957, the Saarland had its own separate sports teams, and represented autonomously in the Olympics and other competitions. It was ruled by a Minister-President, who at the moment of its reunification was Adenauer’s close friend, Hubert Ney, above, directly behind Adenauer).
the Minister-President oversaw the last lowering of the independent Saarland’s flag
The 1972 Munich Marathon
Norbert Sudhaus was allegedly the first
American Franker Shorter was the eventual winner
On September 10, 1972, German student Norbert Sudhaus wore a track uniform and joined the Olympic Marathon Race in Munich for the last quarter-mile as a gag. He entered the stadium and ran part way around the track. Thinking he was the winner, the crowd began cheering him. Officials then realized the hoax and ushered the jokester off the course. That didn’t help poor Frank Shorter, the American who eventually won the marathon but who entered the stadium to the sound of boos and catcalls (directed at Sudhaus) and the sight of a commotion far ahead of him. When asked what he thought of the guy who came in ahead of him, Shorter said, “What guy?”
Funnily enough, this was the third time in Olympic history that an American had won the marathon—and in none of those three instances did the winner enter the stadium first. In 1904, the winner Fred Lorz was disqualified when it was discovered that he covered most of the course by car, using low visibilities as a cover, and an American won the race. Four years later, the gold medal was defaulted to American Johnny Hayes after the first person to cross the line was disqualified for receiving a misplaced assistance from the officials. Only in 1984, Joan Benoit Samuelson would become the first American to cross the marathon line first and win.
William Safire (1930-2009)
An obscure first time governor when Richard Nixon chose him as his running mate, Spiro Agnew was one of America’s ‘Most Admired Men’ less than a year later. His role was that as the voice of the so-called “silent majority” and boy, he delivered one scathing one criticism after another on political opponents, especially journalists and anti-war activists. His unusual, often alliterative epithets (joint products of Angrew and two White House speechwriters William Safire and Pat Buchanan) included such gems as “pusillanimous pussyfooters”, “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history” and “an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.”
The last was directed towards the press corps. Another phrase, also directed towards the media, ”nattering nabobs of negativism” was especially enduring. First used during Agnew’s address to the California Republican state convention in San Diego on September 11, 1970, the phrase was coined by William Safire, who died earlier this month at the age of 79 after a legendary career at the New York Times.
There Safire was the first regular conservative commentator for the liberal newspaper, and was beloved even by liberals for his witty “On Language” column where he playfully skewered language fumblers from across the political spectrum. Safire, a college dropout, was a longtime Republican operative; he set up the famous Nixon-Khrushchev ‘kitchen debate’ in Moscow, won the Pulitzer Prize for his columns, and never quailed from voicing strong opinions; one of his last controversial columns called Hillary Clinton a “congenital liar.”
In the end, William Safire may be remembered for “nattering nabobs of negativism”, and his “rules for writers”: Remember to never split an infinitive. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. Avoid clichés like the plague. And don’t overuse exclamation marks!!
(Above, Agnew, Safire, Buchanan, and other members of the Nixon speechwriting team on a flight to a campaign stop in 1972).
