There are a lot of ways to take, exert, and maintain power over others. A disheartening number of those ways have nothing to do with getting the people you want to lead to agree that they want you to lead them. When they don’t, and you nevertheless insist on being in charge anyway, you can (A) try to convince them, or (B) try to get your way by force. Attempts at option B have shown up on February 23 so often that maybe we should call it Bullies Day. But on the other hand, maybe Befuddled Bullies Day would be more fitting. Let me explain.
In the second decade of the 19th Century in England, there was a radical group that called themselves the Spencean Philanthropists — “Spencean” because of Thomas Spence, who was born in 1750 and became pretty well known for his radical ideas. He thought the time had passed for aristocrats, and the whole idea of nobility and titles ought to be abolished. Most of the land in England was owned by the aristocracy, and Spence’s idea was that when that class was abolished, ownership of the land would pass to local, self-governing democratic groups. More or less like towns, in fact. Every adult, men and women alike, would be able to vote. People who were unable to work should be supported by a “social guarantee.” And children would have the right to be free of poverty and abuse. Pretty radical, right? Naturally the aristocracy threw him into prison.
By about 1820, England was in bad shape. The Napoleonic Wars had ended in 1815, which brought a wave of veterans back to the country, and every one of them needed a job. The country was in a depression, and more political repression was used to try to ward off protests and demonstrations. There was a general sense of unrest around the nation. To make things even more uncertain, King George III had died on January 29, so the government was already in crisis. The Spencean Philanthropists heard from one of their members, George Edwards, that the cabinet ministers were planning a dinner on February 23 at the home of Lord Harrowby, the president of the that council. They put together a plan to attack the dinner, kill all the ministers, and thus overthrow the whole government. With the government out of the way, the ideas of Thomas Spence could finally be implemented.
As conspirators, though, the Spenceans were not particularly adept. The cabinet ministers didn’t have any plan for a group dinner. It’s not that George Edwards had the date wrong, or was misinformed. He was a spy working for the police. He reported everything the Spenceans had planned in their meeting room on Cato Street, and when they set out for the dinner (that wasn’t happening), the police were waiting for them. The whole affair was called the Cato Street Conspiracy in the newspapers when they reported the conspirators’ trial.
Another February 23 conspiracy with a fancy name was the Baltimore Plot of 1861. This one took place in the US, and had to do with the new president-elect, Abraham Lincoln. He was traveling to Washington, D.C. for his inauguration, and his security team — headed by Allan Pinkerton, the founder of the Pinkerton Detective Agency — got wind that there was going to be an assassination attempt when he passed through Baltimore on the 23rd. His train route was secretly altered so he went through Baltimore in the middle of the night of the 22nd instead, when nobody was expecting the president-elect’s train. Lincoln arrived safely in Washington a day early, on February 23. Pinkerton may have been overly cautious; nobody was ever identified as being involved in the Baltimore Plot. But either way, Lincoln made it to his inauguration.
In France, February 23, 1898 is the day they convicted the novelist Émile Zola for writing a front-page newspaper editorial called J’accuse…! It was an open letter to the President of France, accusing the government of antisemitism and falsely imprisoning Alfred Dreyfus for espionage in 1894. Though it took another year, the truth finally emerged. Dreyfus had been unlawfully tried and convicted, and it had been largely because of antisemitism in the government ranks. Zola, who had been convicted twice and had escaped to England, was exonerated and welcomed back home in 1899. A fiasco from start to finish; the whole affair was an exercise in the misuse of power by people who should never have had any in the first place.
Sometimes people who lack power try to exert some by capturing and holding a single individual who might be important, rich, famous, or some combination of all three. That’s what happened on February 23, 1958 in Havana, Cuba. The president at the time, Fulgencio Batista, had organized the Cuba Grand Prix auto race the year before, and the world’s most famous racing drivers and their teams had arrived for the second annual race. Agents of the 26th of July Movement (a group headed by a guy you may have heard of, Fidel Castro) kidnapped the most famous driver of all, Juan Manuel Fangio. Fangio wasn’t political and had never even heard of the movement — he was just involved because he was the top racing driver. The kidnappers hoped to get the race cancelled. It went on as planned, though, and the kidnappers even brought Fangio a TV set so he could watch. They let him go the next day. Fangio was unfazed by the whole thing; he was near the end of his career, during which he won the World Championship five times with four different racing teams. His string of championships stood as the record for 46 years, and nobody has yet equalled it while driving for so many teams. As for the kidnapping, it had absolutely no effect on anything.
There was a kidnapping already in progress on February 23, 1974 when the kidnappers abruptly changed their demands. They were the Symbionese Liberation Army — also known as the SLA — and they had kidnapped the heiress Patty Hearst on February 4. Hearst was a college sophomore at the time. The first demand was for two members of the kidnappers to be released from jail. That didn’t fly, so they decided to demand establishment of a program to distribute food to poor people. The food program was begun, but then on February 23 the demand changed again — sure, the food program was fine, and thanks very much, but the SLA decided what they really needed was some cash. Four million dollars, in fact. Everything ended badly, and the Symbionese Liberation Army — which was partly a radical revolutionary organization and partly a public relations exercise — finally fell apart when its members were killed by police or imprisoned. By the way, don’t confuse the Symbionese Liberation Army with the Free Syrian Army — the latter one was an actual army that captured the city of al-Bab from ISIL in 2017. On February 23, as it happens.
Another February 23 event involving Syria happened in 1966, when a military coup against the Ba’ath Party government succeeded, replacing the Ba’ath Party in power with…the Ba’ath Party. They did get a different President, at least.
But military coups don’t always succeed. On February 23, 1981, Antonio Tejero tried to capture the Spanish Congress of Deputies. It’s the lower house of the Spanish legislature, and Tejero, a Lieutenant Colonel in the Spanish Army, led a group of gunmen in and held the entire legislature hostage for most of a day. They surrendered after about 18 hours, though, and the overall result was…basically nothing.
It’s funny how some people seem to crave power over others more than anything else. Each one of them seems to be utterly convinced that only they can fix whatever problems they see as so important. When you stand back, or above, or at least apart from historic events, though, one thing seems to hold constant. With only a very few exceptions, no matter who gets the power, and no matter how they do it, everything else stays pretty much the same.
