October 12 is Freethought Day, at least in California. Freethought Day commemorates October 12, 1692, the day the Salem Witch Trials were ended by the governor of Massachusetts Colony (the US didn’t exist yet). The trials had gotten completely out of hand, particularly in the kinds of evidence that were being allowed. The tipping point, for the governor, was “spectral evidence” — that is, supernatural things that somebody claimed to see, but nobody else could. The governor thought that sort of evidence didn’t stand to reason and certainly shouldn’t stand up in court. Freethought Day is a celebration of reason and rationality. There’s an annual Festival of Reason held in Sacramento — although it features the same kinds of bands, booths, and rides most other fairs have. Stuff you don’t really think or reason about, in other words.
Theodore Roosevelt was probably being eminently reasonable on October 12, 1901 when he decided to start officially calling the Executive Mansion the “White House.” That’s what everybody had been calling it anyway, since the early 1800s. Naming, as everybody knows, is important. That’s probably why there isn’t much commemoration of one of the important battles that happened on October 12 — this one was in 1748, and it was the last battle of the War of Jenkins’ Ear.
When you hear a name like the “War of Jenkins’ Ear,” it’s natural to assume that somewhere there must be a geographic feature with that name. But no, the War of Jenkins’ Ear is actually about someone’s ear. Robert Jenkins, to be specific. He was the captain of a merchant ship sailing in the Caribbean in 1731 when his ship was boarded by the Spanish navy. There was evidently some swordplay involved, and Jenkins lost an ear. That escalated tension between Spain and England, which were both trying to steal as much as possible from the new world, and finally war broke out between them. The story that Jenkins’ actual ear was displayed to the House of Commons as an attention-getting stunt was probably not true.
Another attention-getting political stunt that might not be true happened on October 12, 1960 at the United Nations. Nikita Krushchev, at the time the leader of the USSR, was listening to the delegate from the Philippines denounce his country when he erupted angrily and pounded the desk with his shoe. It made all the newspapers, and there was even a photo. But it turned out that the photo was a fake. Krushchev did pound his desk, but not with his shoe. At least probably not. Even at the time, nobody seemed to be able to agree on that detail. Supposedly there was another photo that, by chance, showed Krushchev’s feet — and he was wearing both of his shoes. So if he did use a shoe as a gavel, the whole thing had probably been staged.
Details are, obviously, important. Some details that weren’t attended to at the time seem pretty obvious later, when it’s too late. That’s the way the survivors probably felt in Delft, Netherlands, on October 12, 1654. Or maybe they felt that way on the 13th, after what happened on the 12th. The detail that was overlooked was pretty simple: if you’re storing thirty tons of gunpowder in one building, make sure the building isn’t in the middle of the city. They were, it was, and when the man in charge went to check a sample of the gunpowder on October 12, somehow the whole thing got touched off and exploded. It demolished that whole area of the city. The only bit of good luck was that most of the people who lived in the vicinity were off at a fair in The Hague at the time, so there weren’t as many victims as there might have been.
Reducing the number of victims was the whole point on October 12 2019, when a million people in Japan were evacuated from the path of Typhoon Hagibis. It was a “supertyphoon”; one of the biggest and most destructive storms ever recorded.
Nobody wants to see more victims, of anything really. Well almost nobody. At least one person born today did want to see (or create) more victims — it’s Carlos the Jackal’s birthday.
