This Week in People’s History, Oct 9–15
A Long Time Coming, and How!
75 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 9, 1949, Harvard Law School announced that it would soon begin to admit women students for the first time. https://academic.oup.com/jla/article/15/1/48/7246687
A Work of Towering Imagination
65 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 10, 1959, the future of the beautiful Watts Towers in central Los Angeles was at risk. The 17 cement-and-steel structures were the work of construction worker and folk artist Simon Rodia, who single-handedly had taken 33 years to build them in his backyard without any construction permits. Some of the towers were far taller than anything for miles around. One of them was nearly one hundred feet tall, and the L.A. buildings department wanted to tear them down because their structural soundness was unknown.
But the towers, which are one of the world’s most famous outsider art installations, had many admirers who were confident that the towers were safe.
The Committee for Simon Rodia's Towers in Watts persuaded the buildings department to allow for a test of the towers’ strength. If they passed the test, the buildings’ department would leave them alone. On this day a steel cable was attached to each of the three tallest towers and put under a measured strain. When none of the towers was affected, the buildings’ department was satisfied they were not a hazard.
As architect Edward Farrell, one of the towers’ advocates who helped to design the testing procedure, said: “We knew that the towers were very strong, but they had never been tested like that before, so it was a relief to watch them pass it so easily.”
In the years since, the towers, which are visited by some 40,000 people each year, have been designated a National Historical Landmark. Follow the link to a large collection of images of the towers; click on each image to see it full-size https://www.parks.ca.gov/Gallery/613
August Wilson Takes Broadway
40 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 11, 1984, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” by August Wilson, opened in Manhattan and changed Broadway theater forever. The work, which is part of the masterful 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle, was Wilson’s first Broadway production. It marked the beginning of a 2-decade string of Wilson’s theatrical explorations of the African-American experience, including “Fences,” “Joe Turner's Come and Gone,” and “The Piano Lesson.” https://awaacc.org/about/about-august/
Truthfulness Comes Hard at Philip Morris
25 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 12, 1999, the Philip Morris Co., the largest U.S. cigarette maker, gave up its decades-long stonewalling campaign and admitted that there is an ''overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking causes'' diseases including lung cancer, emphysema and heart disease. The announcement came after Philip Morris and other tobacco companies had agreed to pay more than $200 million in damages to reimburse state governments for the expense of providing medical treatment to Medicaid recipients for smoking-related diseases. https://www.publichealthlawcenter.org/litigation-tracker/united-states-v-philip-morris-1999
If Only There Had Been More Advertising
95 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 13, 1929, the head of the U.S. Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce delivered a major speech over the CBS radio network, in which he asserted that “advertising is the key to world prosperity.” Given that the U.S. had practically invented advertising, the country’s prosperity was in the bag.
Eleven days later, on Black Thursday, prices on the New York Stock Exchange lost 11 percent of their value. The largest-ever 1-day decline in U.S. stock prices helped to usher in the Great Depression. What went wrong? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Crash_of_1929
‘We Are Everywhere’
45 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 14, 1979, the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights drew some 125,000 supporters who marched through the capital to demand the passage and enforcement of protective civil rights legislation.
One of the march’s organizers had been San Francisco gay rights advocate Harvey Milk, who was assassinated less than a year before the march took place.
As the day’s official program for the march put it: “Lesbians and gay men are making history here today. . . . We celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. We reaffirm our commitment to the struggle for full human rights. . . . The planet Earth is in crisis; and the crisis worsens each day, while greedy men insist on continuing age-old patterns of dominance, control, and exploitation”. Click here for a 10–minute video history of the march https://youtu.be/eQCrbjXj_Bk?si=o5bNL_ISdXehIAos
Was Nixon Listening?
55 YEARS AGO, Oct. 15, 1969, was a day of the most massive demonstrations ever in opposition to the U.S. war against the people of Vietnam. Some 250,000 supporters of the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam marched in Washington, D.C., plus an estimated 100,000 in Boston, tens of thousands in San Francisco and Manhattan, with hundreds of smaller demonstrations throughout the country. Life magazine described the Moratorium as “a display without historic parallel, the largest expression of public dissent ever seen in this country.” https://jacobin.com/2019/10/vietnam-war-moratorium-protest-gi-movement
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