Reading 3 of 7 free1776 Club · all 7 storiesTuesday, November 3
From the desk
Start with 1903, when Panama proclaimed independence from Colombia and the USS Nashville was already at Colón. The Colombian generals who might have crushed the revolt had been steered away from their troops, and that night a gunboat shelled Panama City. Worth a longer look is 1868, when Louisiana voters made John Willis Menard the first African American elected to Congress and the House never seated him. For a quick finish, read how the Tribune printed 150,000 early copies of "Dewey Defeats Truman" before Truman won.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1903Featured · This day in history
Panama breaks from Colombia; an American warship sits off Colón
More than nine months after Colombia's Senate rejected the Hay-Herrán canal treaty, Panamanian separatists in Panama City proclaimed an independent Republic of Panama on November 3, 1903. The Municipal Council confirmed the new republic, and a provisional junta took shape behind it. The USS Nashville had landed at Colón the day before, and the Colombian generals who might have crushed the revolt had been steered away from their troops. That night the Colombian gunboat Bogotá shelled Panama City, and Wong Kong Yee was mortally wounded.
Washington never fired a shot at Panama, yet Theodore Roosevelt's navy decided the outcome. The episode became the standard American example of gunboat diplomacy in Latin America, and it gave the United States the land for the Panama Canal. Roosevelt later boasted about it, and historians still dispute it.
Did you know
QWho arranged the train ride that kept two Colombian generals away from their troops?
María de la Ossa, the wife of independence leader Manuel Amador Guerrero, organized it. She devised the plan, and Amador enlisted two Panama Railway officials, Herbert G. Prescott and James Shaler, who persuaded Generals Tovar and Amaya to travel to Panama City on a railway train, leaving their soldiers behind in Colón. The generals' separation from their men was the hinge of the whole revolt, because Colombian troops without their generals lacked the commanders who might have ordered an attack. The plan needed a railway schedule and a few trusted hosts, not a battalion of rebels. The Panama Railway, the same line the Nashville's landing was meant to protect, supplied the trap.
QWhy did Bogotá hear that Panama was gone three days after it happened?
Trouble with the submarine cables delayed the news, and it did not reach Bogotá until November 6, 1903. By then Panama City had a junta, the Colombian generals had been arrested, and the United States was extending its first, unofficial recognition that same day. Colombia did not accept the loss for years. It formally recognized Panamanian independence in 1909, after receiving a payment of $500,000 from Panama. A government that could not telegraph its own province in time to react was in no position to send an army back across the isthmus.
QHow did American newspapers react when they learned what Roosevelt's Navy had done?
Several attacked it. The New York Times called the American support for the Panamanian plot an "act of sordid conquest," and the New York Evening Post labeled the affair a "vulgar and mercenary venture." Both papers were describing a policy their own government had pursued with the Navy. The criticism had no effect on the outcome. Recognition had been given and the treaty signed. The editorials opened a dispute over the episode that continues today.
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1868civil-rights
Louisiana's 2nd District elects John Willis Menard, a Black newspaper editor, to Congress
With Reconstruction under way, voters in Louisiana's 2nd congressional district went to the polls on November 3, 1868, to fill the seat of James Mann, a Democrat who had died in office. They chose John Willis Menard, a Republican newspaper editor born to free parents of color, making him the first African American elected to the United States Congress. His Democratic opponent, Caleb S. Hunt, contested the result. Menard was never seated.
Menard's victory put a question to the House that it could not answer cleanly: a Black man had been elected, and Congress had to decide whether he could sit. The seat stayed empty, an early sign that Reconstruction's promise of Black political participation would be fiercely disputed.
Did you know
QWhy was a young Interior Department clerk sent to British Honduras in 1863?
In 1863, during the Civil War, Menard was sent to British Honduras to investigate a proposed colony for newly freed slaves. The assignment came while he was working as a clerk in the Department of the Interior under President Abraham Lincoln. The mission concerned where freed people might settle. He stood for Congress five years later. What he reported is not recorded, and no colony resulted from his trip.
QWhose family did Menard's daughter Alice marry into?
Alice Menard, born in 1861 to Menard and his first wife, Lucy Samuels, married Thomas Van Rensselaer Gibbs. Thomas Gibbs was the son of Jonathan Clarkson Gibbs. Menard had married Lucy in 1859, and after the couple separated he married Elizabeth Mary, in either Jamaica or the U.S. Virgin Islands. The record is uncertain on the place. That second marriage produced two more children. Alice's marriage tied Menard's family to the Gibbs family.
QWhere was John Willis Menard first buried, and why was he moved?
Menard died in the District of Columbia on October 8, 1893, and was first buried at Graceland Cemetery in Washington. That cemetery closed in 1894, about a year after his death, and his remains were moved to Woodlawn Cemetery. He had been dead about a year when the cemetery closed. Woodlawn is his recorded final resting place.
1948government
The Tribune's early edition crowns Dewey; the returns say otherwise
Nearly every poll and pundit in the fall of 1948 said Thomas Dewey would beat Harry Truman by a landslide. On the night of the election, the Chicago Daily Tribune, with its composing room on strike and a press deadline set hours early, went to press before most states had reported. The front page of the early edition carried a banner headline reading "Dewey Defeats Truman," written by Washington correspondent Arthur Sears Henning. By morning Truman had won, and later editions replaced the headline.
The Tribune's blunder became the best-known mistake in American political journalism, proof of how far confident forecasts can drift from the count. The early deadline traced back to a labor fight over the Taft-Hartley Act. The copy now sits in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
Did you know
QHow good was the Tribune's man at calling presidential winners before 1948?
Arthur Sears Henning had a record that made the Tribune's confidence understandable. A veteran Washington correspondent and political analyst, he had correctly predicted the winner in four of the five presidential contests since 1928. That reputation, combined with polls that were almost unanimous for Dewey, meant the call did not look reckless from inside the Tribune's building. It looked like routine work. His one earlier miss aside, the second, was printed in large type on the front page and sold in the street.
QWhat had the Tribune said about Truman before the election?
The paper had referred to Truman as a "nincompoop," which fit its long history as a Republican-leaning publication under Robert R. McCormick. The feeling was mutual. In a retrospective article, the Tribune itself wrote that Truman "had as low an opinion of the Tribune as it did of him." That contempt is part of why the St. Louis photograph landed so hard: the president was not holding up a stranger's error, but the mistake of a paper that had called him a "nincompoop". He seems to have enjoyed it, and the Tribune had little room to object.
QDid the Tribune ever try to give Truman a keepsake of the headline?
It did, though not for a long time. Tribune publishers later planned to present Truman with a plaque bearing a replica of the erroneous banner headline, timed for the 25th anniversary of the 1948 election. It was meant as a rueful gift, the paper acknowledging its most famous mistake to the man who had made it famous. Truman died before the plaque could be given to him. The headline outlived both the grudge and the man who had held it up in St. Louis.
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Dorothy Day
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