It was December 2, 1823 that US President James Monroe delivered the State of the Union address where he announced what’s now called the “Monroe Doctrine” — the US was going to be neutral in all future European conflicts. The Monroe Doctrine lasted quite a while, although of course the US eventually got involved in two world wars that were, at least initially, European.
Funny thing about those wars, by the way. In WWI both sides used chemical warfare, including one weapon called “mustard gas” (it’s not mustard and it’s not a gas, but the name stuck anyway). Chemical weapons were considered so extreme that after the war everybody agreed, in the Geneva Protocol in 1925, not to use them any more. That included producing them and storing them; all reserves were, everyone promised, destroyed.
But then on December 2, 1943, in the middle of WWII, an air raid by Axis forces sank the SS John Harvey in the Bari harbor in Italy. She of the many US Liberty Ships built during the war to supply cargo. And it turned out that she was loaded with, believe it or not, mustard gas. From the US. Hmmm. In any case, by then the Monroe Doctrine was ancient history, and there had been several other State of the Union addresses outlining different projects and ideas.
For one, it was December 2, 1845 that President Polk delivered the speech based on the popular idea of “manifest destiny,” the idea that the US and its people (in 1845 the term “people” didn’t necessarily mean what you might expect today) were special, and ought to aggressively expand into the west. The idea was used to justify things like the Mexican-American War of 1846, which was kicked off by part of that “aggressive western expansion.”
But it wasn’t as ubiquitous as all that, even in those days. The existence of slavery in the country was a big and growing problem. Just a few years later, on December 2, 1859, John Brown, an anti-slavery militant, was hanged for his abolitionist raid on Harper’s Ferry. That was one of the events that led to the Civil War (thankfully, mustard gas had yet to be invented). Then on December 2, 1865, the ex-confederate states of Alabama, North Carolina, and Georgia ratified the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, and slavery was officially over.
It was, of course, the major story in all the papers of the time — and the newspapers were much more partisan and strident than nowadays. There were some in favor of ending slavery, but there were also some against it. But that’s OK in the US, because there’s freedom of the press here; you can express any ideas you happen to have. It’s an idea often associated with this country, but it wasn’t our idea. The first nation enjoying freedom of speech was Sweden, where the Freedom of the Press Act was passed years before the US even existed — on December 2, 1766.
There were some dissenting ideas about whether freedom of speech was the right way to go in the 1950s during the Cold War. McCarthyism ran rampant in Congress for a while, and you could say it was based on the opposite of freedom of speech. Even being suspected of saying and thinking the wrong things could ruin your life and career. But they did, eventually, come to their senses and on December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 65 to 22 to censure Joseph McCarthy for “conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute.”
The Cold War was based on fear. Although chemical weapons had been banned (although there was that curious case of the SS John Harvey…), there was a new threat: nuclear weapons. That all came from another December 2 event: in 1942 Enrico Fermi and his team at the Manhattan Project started up the first working nuclear reactor. By the time the public found out about nuclear power, there were some pretty high expectations. In the 1960s it wasn’t unusual for people to believe that electric power, generated by nuclear reactors, would soon be available for free. That would, of course, lead to the demise of the oil and gas industry — because of course, it would only be a matter of time before cars and trucks would be nuclear-powered too.
None of that worked out quite as planned, and the fossil fuel industry wasn’t really bothered at all. On December 2, 2001, the energy company Enron went bankrupt, but it had nothing to do with nuclear power supplanting fossil fuels. Their problem was accounting fraud, and the problems brought down their auditor, the Arthur Andersen company, too. In the midst of huge natural gas reserves, oil exploration, nuclear plants, and more, it all came down to money. Not enough of it.
Money was also the issue in another December 2 State of the Union Address. It was 1930, and the Great Depression was at its peak — or, well, deepest trench, perhaps. Herbert Hoover was the president, and he hadn’t responded very well up to that point. Several months after the economic collapse, he signed a law increasing tariffs significantly, which led to other nations raising theirs, trade collapsing further, and the economy sliding even further down. His December 2, 1930 speech proposed stimulating the country back to prosperity by creating a public works program funded by $150 million. It was money, but not enough of it — it probably should have been at least ten times bigger. But it did fund some government projects. You have to wonder, in fact, if buried somewhere in there was funding for a secret project to make and stockpile mustard gas.
