Scores On This Historic Day

July 1, 1898:  The Battle of San Juan Hill is fought near Santiago, Cuba, as part of the Spanish-American War. This battle has become part of the myth of American greatness, military and civilian. The truth is a bit more complicated. In the 1890s, the people of Cuba rebelled against their colonial overlords from Spain. Many Americans wanted to go to war to free Cuba. Most of those, however, were business lords who wanted to exploit Cuba's natural resources, without Spain keeping them out. They had tried to make deals with Spain, and failed. So they needed to get Spain out of Cuba. All they needed was an excuse. On February 15, 1898, they got their excuse. The battleship USS  Maine  was berthed in Havana Harbor, when there was an explosion, killing 261 sailors. An official U.S. Navy investigation ruled that an external mine caused the explosion. Witnesses among the American survivors denied this, and a much more likely cause for the explosion was a coal fire in the boiler....

July 1, 1893: President Grover Cleveland undergoes surgery for oral cancer. It is kept a secret for the rest of his life, but at least he has a "rest of his life." Cleveland had been elected President in 1884, then lost the Electoral Vote despite winning the popular vote in 1888, and regained the office in 1892. Through the election of 2020, he remains the only former President ever to regain the office. He, Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt are the only 3 men to win the popular vote for President at least 3 times. And yet, on none of those 3 occasions did Cleveland win a majority. Just 2 months into his new term, the Panic of 1893 took place, with the stock market crashing. Cleveland took measures to stop the emergency, but the nation slipped into a depression anyway. And while this was going on, he had  soreness on the roof of his mouth.  Clinical samples were sent anonymously to the Army Medical Museum,  and t he diagnosis was oral cancer. Like a previous Presiden...

July 1, 1876: The publication Library Journal publishes its 1st issue, in Boston. It is founded and largely written by Melvil Dewey, a 25-year-old librarian originally from Adams Center, New York, on Lake Ontario. In this issue, Dewey explained his new cataloguing system for library books, which has come to be known as the Dewey Decimal System. Dewey was also a believer in the metric system, as it was also a base-ten system. But that's never caught on in America. Dewey, identifying himself as "the author," explained his system as follows, with my editing: The plan of the following Classification and Index was developed early in 1873. It was the result of several months' study of library economy as found in some hundreds of books and pamphlets, and in over fifty personal visits to various American libraries. In this study, the author became convinced that the usefulness of these libraries might be greatly increased without additional expenditure. Three years practica...

June 30, 1970: Riverfront Stadium opens in downtown Cincinnati. It is the 1st outdoor Major League Baseball stadium with artificial turf. Within days, it will host the All-Star Game. At the end of the season, it will host the 1st World Series game on artificial turf. It was built on the site of a tenement building, where eventual "Singing Cowboy" Roy Rogers was born. He said, "I was born somewhere between second base and center field." The Cincinnati Reds move in, after 58 years at Crosley Field, and 86 years at that site. The opener does not go well for the "Big Red Machine," as they lose to the Atlanta Braves, 8-2. Hank Aaron went 3-for-4 with 3 RBIs, including the 1st home run in the new stadium, the 567th of his career. Rico Carty goes 2-for-4 with a home run and 4 RBIs. Orlando Cepeda has no RBIs, but goes 3-for-5. For the Reds, Pete Rose goes 3-for-4 with an RBI. Johnny Bench goes 0-for-4. Pat Jarvis is the winning pitcher, while Jim McGlothlin is t...

Vic Delmore June 30, 1959: The St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs, arch-rivals, play each other at Wrigley Field in Chicago. A strange thing happens, as they occasionally do when the Cubs are involved. The Cardinals scored a run in the 1st inning, and another in the 2nd. The Cubs pulled one back in the 3rd, so that it was Cardinals 2, Cubs 1, with 1 out in the top of the 4th, when... this happened: Stan Musial came to the plate. With a count of 3 balls and 1 strike, Cub pitcher Bob Anderson threw a bad pitch, which got past catcher Sammy Taylor, and rolled to the backstop. Musial had checked his swing. Home plate umpire Vic Delmore called ball 4, and awarded 1st base to Musial. That should have been the end of the play. Anderson and Taylor argued with Delmore, saying that, in checking his swing, Musial had foul-tipped the ball, meaning it should be strike 2, and the at-bat should continue. Seeing this, and knowing that neither Delmore nor any other umpire had stopped play, Musia...

June 30, 1936: Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia speaks before the League of Nations, at the Palais Wilson on the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Ethiopia was one of the few independent nations in Africa when Italy invaded on October 2, 1935, in fascist dictator Benito Mussolini's bid to create a new Roman Empire. At the end of the year, for his resistance,  Time  magazine named Haile Selassie its Man of the Year.  On May 7, 1936, Italy completed its annexation of the country. Two days later, Mussolini declared the colony of Italian East Africa, also including Eritrea and Somalia. Like all who had sat on his throne, Haile Selassie claimed to trace his lineage back to the affair between Solomon, one of the Biblical Kings of Israel, and the Queen of Sheba, known in modern Ethiopia as Makeda. But now, the man known to his people as  King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Elect of God, and Lion of Judah  had been overthrown, and had to flee his country. The League of ...

Left to right: Adolf Hitler, Gregor Strasser, Ernst Röhm and  Hermann  Göring, 1932. June 30, 1934: Adolf Hitler, Chancellor of Germany and  Führer  (Leader) of the Nazi Party, as paranoid as ever, consolidates his power with a "purge" that becomes known as "The Night of the Long Knives." Ernst Röhm was the co-founder and leader of the Sturmabteilung (SA, meaning "Storm Division," or "Storm Troopers," also known as the "Brownshirts"),  the Nazi Party's original paramilitary  wing, which played a significant role in Hitler's rise to power. He and Hitler were close friends. But Hitler began to see the independence of the SA, and the penchant of its members for street violence ,as a direct threat to his newly gained political power. He also wanted to appease leaders of the Reichswehr ,  the German military, who feared and despised the SA as a potential rival, in particular because of Röhm's ambition to merge the army and the S...

June 30, 1921: President Warren G. Harding appoints former President William Howard Taft to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He had wanted the job for as long as he could remember. A graduate of Yale Law School, the son of former Attorney General Alphonso Taft, and, like his father, the U.S. Secretary of War, Taft wanted to be on the Supreme Court. He had served as U.S. Solicitor General under President Benjamin Harrison. That wouldn't have been an omen at the time, but he did go on to become the 1st holder of that office to be appointed to the Supreme Court. He has been followed as such by Stanley Reed, Robert H. Jackson, Thurgood Marshall and Elena Kagan. Another, Robert Bork, was appointed to the Court, but rejected by the Senate. Taft and his wife Helen were invited to the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt early in 1908. TR had already announced he would not run for what would have amounted to a 3rd term, and kiddingly told Taft that he...

June 30, 1908: The Tunguska Explosion -- also called the Tunguska Event or the Tunguska Incident -- occurs at 7:17 AM over the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, in what is now Kransnoyarsk Krai, central Siberia, in Russia. The explosion is estimated to have a yield of at least 3 megatons of TNT. To put that in perspective: Little Boy , the Hiroshima bomb, had a yield of 15 kilotons -- so the Tunguska Explosion was 200 times more powerful. The explosion over the sparsely populated East Siberian taiga (snowforest, the Arctic equivalent of a rainforest)  flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 830 square miles, and eyewitness reports suggest that at least 3 people may have died in the event. Had it been over a city, thousands could have been killed. A 1929 photo, showing the still-flattened, not-yet-removed trees The explosion is generally attributed to a meteor air burst: T he atmospheric explosion of a stony asteroid, about 200 feet across.  The asteroid approa...

June 30, 1906:  President Theodore Roosevelt signs the Pure Food and Drug Act into law. This was one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history, and it may have saved your life and mine. It was necessary because, with the growth of American cities in the 19th Century, the time food took to get from farm to table got longer, and food spoiled and became poisonous before many people could get to it. Methods of preventing this including chemicals that were every bit as poisonous as the natural process would have been, including alcohol, opium and cocaine. (Coca-Cola was invented in 1886, and, yes, it did contain a small amount of cocaine at the time, about 9 milligrams per glass. A typical "line" of cocaine is between 50 and 75 milligrams. In 1903, they dropped the ingredient for something safer -- but hardly completely safe.) On February 25, 1906, Upton Sinclair's novel  The Jungle  was published. A Socialist, Sinclair had hoped it would lead to workers ...

June 30, 1900: A fire breaks out on piers owned by Norddeutscher Lloyd (NDL), a German shipping company, on the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey. It kills at least 326 people. The fire began when cotton bales stored on NDL's southernmost wharf caught fire, and winds carried the flames to nearby barrels of volatile liquids, such as turpentine  and oil, which exploded in rapid succession. It burned NDL's Hoboken piers to the waterline, consumed or gutted nearby warehouses, gutted 3 of NDL's major transatlantic liners, and damaged or destroyed nearly two dozen smaller craft. Most of the victims were seamen and other workers, but included women visiting one of the ships. The piers were at the foot of 3rd and 4th Streets, across the Hudson from West 12th Street in Manhattan, New York City. Pier C Park is on the site today. This is 5 blocks north of where the Hoboken Terminal of the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad was built in 1907, now serving New Jersey Transit and the Port Author...