Joe's Daily U.S. History Lesson -- May 1

MAY 1 1960- At the time really bad day for U.S. politics. …The Russians shot down an American U2 plane out of the sky. What was the American plane doing there? The same thing we use satellites for to this day: to spy on other countries. Other countries do it, and have been for a long time.

So there’s two sides to this one. For one thing, flying over another country uninvited is considered an automatic act of war. However, Russians had spies here in the U.S., in the same way America had been flying the U2 in Soviet Space for four years. Furthermore, in 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower proposed an “open skies” plan, in which each country would be permitted to make overflights of the other to conduct mutual aerial inspections of nuclear facilities and launchpads.

However Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev refused the proposal, continuing the established Soviet policy of rejecting international inspections in any form. Well America knew the Russians were building a nuclear bomb of their own, and we had a plane that could go up to 70,000 feet.

The Russians won’t ever be able to even know it’s there, let alone shoot it down. Right? Besides, even if they found out, the pilot could just take a suicide pill and destroy so he won’t have to risk uncovering the operation. Right?

That way, in case something did happen, we could just say it was a weather plane that veered off course. The Russians can’t prove otherwise, right?

That pilot’s name would be Francis Gary Powers and not only did he not destroy the camera equipment, he didn’t take his suicide pill. Nope. And Nikita just couldn’t wait to show off what he found and display Powers in front of the international community. Eisenhower still refused to apologize, and at the Paris summit meeting later, Khrushchev let Eisenhower have it and angrily stormed out of the meeting.

1844-The Great Pacificator is nominated as presidential candidate by the Whig party. This would be one of three presidential elections Henry Clay lost. Clay was born in 1777 in Hanover County, Virginia. When he was three years old he watched the British ransack his house. Those naughty British. So when the War of 1812 hit, he fully advocated to go to war as a War Hawk. He served under President John Quincy Adams , he was a proponent of Alexander Hamilton’s American System, which contained a tariff to protect and promote American industry, a national bank to foster commerce, and federal subsidies for roads, canals, etc, which is another way of saying he was for a strong national bank. He rejected Texas annexation due to the slave issue, wanted to admit California as a free state and at o ne point talked South Carolina from seceding from the Union. He was instrumental in brokering terms for the Missouri Compromise with his pals John Calhoun and Daniel Webster. In his personal life, Clay loved gambling, drinking, and horses.

He died of tuberculosis in 1852 and is buried in Lexington, Kentucky. Send flower.

2:05

  1893 – Chicago World’s Columbian Expo opens up, this year with a new American invention, the moving sidewalk.

Alfred Speer got the patent in 1871 and put his invention right on the 3500 foot pier so folks riding the ferry didn’t have to walk to the entrance of the Fairgrounds. They could just stand. Just like we do on moving sidewalks we see in airports today.  The ride was 5 cents and carried passengers across going about 2 miles per hour, or the passenger could get on a second parallel platform which ran 4 miles per hour and had benches, according to an 1890 issue of Scientific American Mag. Not sure how the benches did not wrap around the conveyor belt system because the issue doesn’t get into that.

This is it! This is the future of urban transportation and it has arrived now in the year 18931! Next thing you know, we’ll have these moving walkways that can take us from Cleveland to Cincinnati! They’ll be able to zip commuters to work all over New York City!  Not so fast. Max Schmidt, who worked with Speer on the design, came up with plans for the Brooklyn Bridge, plus systems in Atlanta, Boston, L.A., Detroit, and Washington D.C. The plans didn’t call for the fact that passengers won’t go on this thing if it’s raining or snowing. Plus the maintenance isn’t worth the headache, and the public transportation currently in place was already way more efficient.