November seventh turns out to be the anniversary of three of the oldest things around. In 1492, on the outskirts of Ensisheim, France, a meteorite fell — it’s the oldest one with a record of when it arrived. Then in 1665, in London, the London Gazette was first published. It’s the oldest journal in the world that still exists. Then in 1786, in Stoughton, Massachusetts, the Stoughton Musical Society was founded. It’s still around (now it’s called the Old Stoughton Musical Society), and it’s the oldest performing group in North America (at least the oldest one started by the Europeans, who arrived thousands of years after the actual residents).
So what is it about November 7 that’s connected with things lasting a long time? It didn’t apply to everything — for example, it’s also the date in 1918 that Kurt Eisner overthrew the Wittelsbach dynasty in the Kingdom of Bavaria. It was a socialist uprising (note the year; there was a lot of that going around at the time). Eisner became the first premier of the new People’s State of Bavaria, but he was a much better agitator than he was an administrator. The new government turned out to be pretty inept at the basic things like keeping the trains running, and they were voted out the very next year.
The Wittelsbach dynasty, though, has had a much longer history. It goes back to a Bavarian named Berthold, who died in the year 980. His descendants acquired Wittelsbach Castle a bit later, and ever since they’ve been the House of Wittelsbach. But they branched out across Europe as well, and over the next 8 centuries various members of the extended family became Kings of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Greece, Hungary, and Rome. Two of them became Roman Emperors. And for that matter, you can make a case that George I of Great Britain was part of the family as well, because his mother was Sophia of the Palantine, and she herself was the daughter of Frederick V, who was…oh never mind, it’s absurdly complicated. In any case, the Wittelsbachs had been meddling with a large swath of Europe for the past millennium when the idea of socialism started to capture hearts and minds in the early 20th century.
Hearts and minds weren’t the only things captured during the Palmer Raid on November 7, 1919. It was the first of a series of nationwide raids in the US conducted by Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general, Mitchell Palmer. They were afraid of the same kind of socialist uprising that had happened in Russia and Bavaria, and arrested over 10,000 people suspected of thinking about a solution to the grinding poverty they lived with. Their possible solution was (supposedly) a more socialist society.
The problem with socialist governments of that era was generally the same thing that immediately went wrong with the one in Bavaria; they just weren’t very good at governing. Too often, their projects didn’t work out. Of course, just because the US jailed and deported everybody they suspected of thinking that way doesn’t mean that a non-socialist government’s projects work any better. On November 7, 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (a government project) collapsed just a few months after they finished it.
On the other hand, the Internet is a government project too, and it generally works. On November 7, 1994 — a few years before most people had even heard of it — the Internet got its first radio broadcast when the University of North Carolina student radio station started a webcast.
There was another event on November 7, 2000, when the Drug Enforcement Administration discovered the biggest LSD lab they’d ever found. It was hidden in a missile silo in Kansas — a silo that existed at all because of November 7, 1957. That was the day the Gaither Report was issued by a Congressional committee. It recommended the US build more missile silos and bomb shelters because some socialist governments’ not-very-good projects were technically quite far ahead of the US government’s not-very-good projects in the area of nuclear missiles. At least the committee was afraid they were. They really didn’t know for sure. But fear may be the most effective motivator for humans.
Things get a bit jumbled in translation sometimes. Decades later it turned out that the Soviet Union’s missiles weren’t nearly as technically advanced as Congress was afraid they were. But then that was really just par for the course; the whole USSR was founded on the October Revolution — but it was actually started on this very day in 1917 (and remember, this is November, not October) when the Bolsheviks stormed the Tsar’s palace. Except there wasn’t any Tsar any more; he had exited the role eight months before. And there was hardly anybody in the Winter Palace; the whole royal family had moved out.
All in all, the events of November 7 are complicated and confusing and contradictory enough to make a good piece of hard-to-fathom modern art. Which isn’t a bad idea, come to think of it. Maybe it could hang in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Seeing as how that place opened its doors on November 7, 1929.
