December 3, 1800, was the day that Aaron Burr nearly became the third president of the US. The 1800 election resulted in a tie between Burr and Thomas Jefferson, so it was up to the House of Representatives to hold a contingent election. After the first ballot, that was tied too, and it stayed that way. It took back-room bargaining and deals to get a few representatives from the Federalist party to switch their votes from Burr to Jefferson, who was from the Democratic-Republican party, so Jefferson was finally elected in the 36th round of voting, on December 3.
There have been some more US State of the Union messages from US presidents on this day, too. Theodore Roosevelt droned on for 20,000 words in 1901, mostly urging Congress to step up their antitrust efforts (which they did). In 1929, Herbert Hoover delivered his first State of the Union, but it was no 20,000-word speech like Roosevelt’s. Hoover didn’t like public speaking, so he just sent a letter. Kind of a different form of “delivery.” In Hoover’s defense, it was 1929, the stock market had just cratered a few weeks prior, and Hoover’s administration was already flailing around making things much worse, so it was probably just fine with Congress not to hear from him.
Speaking of administrations, lots of people have called the 1960s Kennedy administration the Camelot Era. That was partly because of Kennedy’s personal charisma, but it was also because on December 3, 1960, the musical Camelot opened on Broadway, and the Kennedys attended it more than once. Alan Lerner wrote the lyrics and the script, which he based (sort of loosely) on the book The Once and Future King. His partner Frederick Loewe, who wrote most of the music for Lerner’s musicals, wasn’t interested at all in this new play. After all, the pair’s most recent production had been My Fair Lady in 1956, and it was still running just down the street at another Broadway theater. Lerner managed to talk him into it, though, even though Lowe vowed that if this musical didn’t turn out well, he was quitting the whole business.
When the play was initially put on during development, it seemed like it really wasn’t turning out very well. The first time they staged the thing, it ran for four and a half hours. Everything was pretty chaotic. Moss Hart, the director, had to leave the production because of a heart attack. Loewe didn’t want to make any changes without Hart’s involvement, but something had to be done to edit the play down by about half. In the process, they not only removed scenes and songs, but added some here and there — and one number sung by Guinevere was added just minutes before the actress — Julie Andrews — went on stage. Camelot turned out to be a success, but Lerner and Loewe only worked together a couple of times after it, and Moss Hart died of another heart attack just the next year, at a resort.
Hopefully Hart wasn’t staying in Times Beach, Missouri, even though it was originally founded as a resort. It was December 3, 1982 that a soil sample was tested and found there was just a bit of toxic dioxin mixed in. And by “just a bit”, I mean 300 times the safe level of the stuff. It had come from a chemical plant in Verona, Missouri. They had tons of the poison to dispose of, and the best method — incineration — was expensive. So in 1971 a local guy, Russell Bliss, who had a waste oil business, got the disposal contract. Bliss was paid $125 per load of the chemical. They didn’t tell him much about the stuff he was working with. He was a subcontractor; the chemical plant itself was paying another company, IPC, to handle the disposal.
Bliss eventually had over 18,000 gallons of dioxin, and not knowing what else to do with it, just mixed it in with the rest of his waste oil. He had the somewhat-less-than-great idea that if you sprayed oil on a field, it would keep the dust under control. He tried it on his own horse farm, and it worked so well people in the area started hiring him to spray their own land. Judy Piatt and Frank Hampel hired Bliss to spray his oil on their indoor horse arena. That worked too, but a few days later, birds started dropping dead in the arena. Then the horses got sick, and over the next few months, sixty-two of them died.
Bliss denied any responsibility, saying he was just spraying waste oil, and what could go wrong? He kept spraying more properties, and he got a big contract from the town of Times Beach — they paid him $2,400 to oil down 23 miles of dirt roads. It took about 160,000 gallons. But horses kept dying, and children were starting to get seriously ill as well. The Center for Disease Control investigated in 1974, and found…something…in soil samples. They didn’t know what it was, and when they eventually figured out it was dioxin, nobody really knew what its effects were. But when they tested it on animals, the results seemed to be pretty scary. They tracked down Bliss himself and asked him about the dioxin, but he told them he didn’t know where it could have come from. He was probably telling the truth. When he’d gotten the disposal contract from IPC they hadn’t told him what the stuff was. They also didn’t tell him that they were getting paid $3,000 per load and only paying him $125.
Spraying contaminated oil on the ground was only one of the problems. A few years later, when the EPA got involved, they found that the original chemical company (which had gone out of business in 1972) had buried ninety drums of dioxin on a nearby farm. Consistent with their policy of supporting the local economy, they’d paid the farmer $150 for the use of his property. But by 1979, the drums had corroded and were leaking chemicals. Then in 1982, the whole town was evacuated when the Meramec River flooded. Nobody still understood exactly what dioxin was doing to people, and they also had no idea how they were going to clean up what was basically a chemical spill the size of an entire town. Since the town had already been evacuated, the solution was simple: in 1983 the EPA just bought every single house and business in the place and shut it down. The cleanup wasn’t finished for another 14 years.
As if December 3 wasn’t infamous enough, in 1984 another chemical leak — this time it was from a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India — killed nearly 10,000 people and injured up to 600,000 others. Then in 1992, it was December 3 when the oil tanker Aegean Sea spilled 80,000 tons of crude oil on Spanish beaches. I’m not entirely certain this next item can’t also be considered some kind of chemical spill — December 3, 1992 was also the day the world’s first text message was sent, by a test engineer working with Vodafone. There hasn’t been a State of the Union message delivered that way though…not yet.
