January 10
In what is described as the worst industrial disaster in Massachusetts history, the Pemberton Mill in Lawrence, Mass., collapses and traps 900 workers, mostly Irish women. More than 100 die, scores more are injured in the collapse and ensuing fire. Too much machinery had been crammed into the building. – 1860.
A drilling derrick at Spindletop Hill near Beaumont, Texas, produces an enormous gusher of crude oil to coat the landscape for hundreds of feet to signal the advent of the American oil industry. The geyser was discovered at a depth of more than 1,000 feet, flowed at an initial rate of approximately 100,000 barrels a day and took nine days to cap. Following the discovery, petroleum had been used in the U.S. primarily as a lubricant and in kerosene for lamps. – 1901.
The League of Nations formally comes into being when the Covenant of the League of Nations, ratified by 42 nations in 1919, takes effect. – 1920.
January 11
U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt declares the massive Grand Canyon in northwestern Arizona a national monument. – 1908.
January 12
There were unseasonably-warm-weather days prior to January 12, but over the course of 24 hours the temperature plunged to 40 below zero, almost a 100 degree difference from the previous day, in much of North Dakota. The so-called “Schoolchildren’s Blizzard” kills 235 persons, many of whom were children on their way home from school, across the Northwest Plains of the United States. – 1888.
Seattle mayor Ole Hanson orders police to raid an open-air mass meeting of shipyard workers in an attempt to prevent a general strike. Workers were brutally beaten. The strike began the following month, with 60,000 workers walking out in solidarity with some 25,000 metal tradesmen. – 1919.
Ophelia Wyatt Caraway, a Democratic Party member from Arkansas, becomes the first woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate. Caraway, born near Bakerville, Tenn., had been appointed to the Senate two months earlier to fill the vacancy left by her late husband, Thaddeus Horatio Caraway. – 1932.
U.S. president John F. Kennedy signs Executive Order 10988, which guarantees federal workers the right to join unions and bargain collectively. – 1962.
A magnitude 7.0 earthquake devastates the Caribbean island nation of Haiti. The earthquake, which was the strongest to strike the region in more than 200 years, left more than 200,000 persons dead and 895,000 Haitians homeless. – 2010.
January 13
Pope Honorius II grants a papal sanction to the military order known as the Knights Templar, declaring it to be an army of God. – 1128.
January 14
The theologian, musician, philosopher, and Nobel Prize-winning physician Albert Schweitzer is born on this day in 1875 in Upper-Alsace, Germany, now Haut-Rhin, France. – 1875.
U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt issues Presidential Proclamation No. 2537, which requires aliens from World War II-enemy countries, Italy, Germany, and Japan, to register with the United States Department of Justice. The full-scale internment of Japanese Americans began the following month. – 1942.
Pennsylvania Superior Court rules bosses can fire workers for being gay. – 1995.
January 15
The Pentagon, to this day the largest office building in the world, is dedicated just 16 months after groundbreaking. At times of peak employment 13,000 workers labored on the project – 1943.
January 16
The 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibited the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes,” is ratified on this day in 1919 and becomes the law of the land. – 1919.
At midnight in Iraq, the United Nations deadline for the Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait expires, and the Pentagon prepares to commence offensive operations to forcibly eject Iraq from its five-month occupation of its oil-rich neighbor. All evening, aircraft from the U.S.-led military coalition pounded targets in and around Baghdad as the world watched the events transpire in television footage transmitted live by way of satellite from Baghdad and elsewhere. – 1991.
Sources: History.com, Toil and Trouble, by Thomas R. Brooks; American Labor Struggles, by Samuel Yellen; IWW calendar, Solidarity Forever; Historical Encyclopedia of American Labor, edited by Robert E. Weir and James P. Hanlan; Southwest Labor History Archives/George Meany Center; Geov Parrish’s Radical History; workday Minnesota; Andy Richards and Adam Wright, AFL-CIO Washington DC Metro Council.
• “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” —George Santayana, Philosopher