2020—Rep. Katie Porter [D-Calif.]: “You don’t know the cost to mail a postcard?” Postmaster Louis DeJoy, laughing, confesses: “I don’t.”
1970—Graduate student Robert Fassnacht is killed and three others are injured when peaceniks blow up a physics lab at the U. of Wisconsin.
1967—Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin scatter 300 one-dollar bills on the floor of the Stock Exchange. Bedlam erupts as greedy capitalists scramble.
1964—I.F. Stone reports the U.S. government and press “have kept the full truth about the Tonkin Bay incidents from the American public.”
1963—The State Department orders Ambassador Lodge to encourage Vietnamese generals to stage a coup.
1954—Genial old Ike signs the first U.S. law banning a political party—the Communist Party, of course.
1936—After a 12-year hiatus, J. Edgar Hoover gets the OK from FDR to begin the FBI’s Golden Age of spying on domestic political groups.
1889—On St. Pierre, off Newfoundland, murderer Auguste Neel becomes the only person ever to be guillotined in North America.
1827—The first U.S. labor paper, The Mechanics Gazette, is published in Philly. By 1832 there are 67 more.
1814—U.S. tactical errors and sheer panic allow British troops to march unopposed into Washington, D.C. where they set fire to the Presidential Mansion and the Capitol.