August 17 in History

Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta stood before a small crowd in Jakarta on the morning of August 17, 1945, and read a brief proclamation declaring Indonesian independence from the Netherlands. The entire text was 47 words long. The flag was raised, the anthem was sung, and the fourth most populous nation on Earth began its existence. The Dutch would spend the next four years trying to take it back. Indonesia had been a Dutch colonial possession since the early 17th century, when the Dutch East India Company established control over the spice-rich archipelago. Three and a half centuries of colonial rule had extracted vast wealth in rubber, oil, tin, and agricultural products while keeping the indigenous population largely excluded from political power and higher education. Japanese occupation during World War II, from 1942 to 1945, shattered the myth of European invincibility and gave Indonesian nationalists like Sukarno a political space that Dutch rule had denied them. The timing of the declaration was calculated. Japan had surrendered two days earlier, creating a power vacuum before Allied forces could arrive to restore Dutch authority. Young Indonesian nationalists kidnapped Sukarno and Hatta on August 16, pressuring them to declare independence immediately rather than wait for a negotiated handover. The text was drafted that night at the home of Admiral Maeda Tadashi, a sympathetic Japanese naval officer, and typed on an ordinary piece of paper. The Dutch, backed initially by British forces, attempted to reimpose colonial rule through two military campaigns in 1947 and 1948, known euphemistically as "police actions." Indonesian guerrilla forces fought a four-year war of independence that killed an estimated 100,000 Indonesians. International pressure, particularly from the United States, which threatened to cut Marshall Plan aid to the Netherlands, eventually forced the Dutch to recognize Indonesian sovereignty on December 27, 1949. Sukarno became the new nation's first president, governing an archipelago of 17,000 islands, hundreds of ethnic groups, and a population that today exceeds 275 million.

Peter Fechter was 18 years old when East German border guards shot him as he tried to climb the Berlin Wall on August 17, 1962. He fell back on the Eastern side, landing in a narrow strip between two barriers known as the death strip, and lay there bleeding and crying for help for nearly an hour. West Berlin police and American soldiers watched from the other side, unable to intervene without risking an international incident. East German guards eventually carried his body away. He became one of the Cold War's most powerful symbols of communist oppression. Fechter was a bricklayer from East Berlin who had planned his escape with a coworker, Helmut Kulbeik. The two young men hid in a carpentry workshop near the wall on Zimmerstrasse and waited for what they judged to be a quiet moment. They sprinted toward the barrier. Kulbeik made it over. Fechter, just behind him, was struck by gunfire from East German guards as he reached the top of the wall. He tumbled back to the ground on the eastern side. What followed was broadcast to the world. West Berliners gathered on their side of the wall, screaming at the guards to help the dying teenager. American military police at nearby Checkpoint Charlie were under orders not to enter East German territory. Western witnesses threw first-aid kits over the wall, which landed near Fechter but beyond his reach. He called out for help repeatedly, his cries growing weaker, until he lost consciousness. East German border guards retrieved his body approximately 50 minutes after he was shot. Fechter's death provoked outrage across West Berlin. Crowds of several thousand marched on Checkpoint Charlie, throwing stones at Soviet military buses. The incident intensified international condemnation of the wall, which had been erected just one year earlier. At least 140 people died attempting to cross the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989, but Fechter's death, because of its public nature and the agonizing wait, became the most infamous. A memorial now stands at the site on Zimmerstrasse where he fell.

Four hundred thousand people descended on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York, over the weekend of August 15-18, 1969, for what was billed as "An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace and Music." They got rain, mud, inadequate food and sanitation, and some of the most legendary musical performances ever recorded. Woodstock became the defining cultural event of the 1960s counterculture and a permanent symbol of a generation's belief that the world could be remade through music and communal goodwill. The festival was originally planned for the town of Woodstock in Ulster County, then moved to Wallkill in Orange County when a site was secured, then moved again to Bethel after Wallkill's town board passed a law banning the event. Yasgur, a politically conservative dairy farmer, agreed to rent his 600-acre property for $75,000. The organizers, four young men in their twenties, had expected perhaps 50,000 attendees. When ten times that number materialized, the fences came down and the festival became free. Thirty-two acts performed over four days, including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, Sly and the Family Stone, Jefferson Airplane, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Hendrix's closing performance, a distorted, feedback-drenched solo rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" played at 9 AM on Monday morning to a crowd that had dwindled to roughly 30,000, became the festival's most enduring musical moment. Richie Havens improvised "Freedom" as his encore when he ran out of prepared material. Santana, largely unknown, played a set fueled by mescaline that launched their career. Three people died during the festival, two from drug overdoses and one from a tractor accident. Two babies were born. The lack of food, water, and medical facilities created conditions that could have produced a disaster, yet the crowd remained largely peaceful. Governor Nelson Rockefeller considered sending in the National Guard but was talked out of it. Rolling Stone later named Woodstock one of the 50 moments that changed rock and roll. The festival's mythology has only grown in the decades since, though attempts to recreate it, most notoriously Woodstock '99, have demonstrated that the original was a product of a specific cultural moment that could not be manufactured again.

Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson, and Larry Newman touched down in a barley field near Miserey, France, on August 17, 1978, completing the first successful balloon crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. Their helium balloon, the Double Eagle II, had traveled 3,120 miles from Presque Isle, Maine, in 137 hours and 6 minutes. Seventeen previous attempts by other balloonists had ended in failure or death. The three men from Albuquerque, New Mexico, succeeded where all others had not. The Atlantic had defeated balloonists since 1873, when the first attempt ended in disaster shortly after launch. The challenges were formidable: unpredictable weather systems, the impossibility of steering a free balloon with precision, the risk of sudden altitude loss over open ocean with no possibility of rescue, and the sheer physical endurance required for days of continuous flight in a cramped, unheated gondola. Abruzzo and Anderson had themselves failed in their first attempt, Double Eagle I, in September 1977, ditching in the ocean off Iceland after their balloon lost helium in a storm. For their second attempt, they enlisted Newman, a hang glider enthusiast and businessman, and commissioned a larger balloon from balloon manufacturer Ed Yost. The Double Eagle II stood 112 feet tall and carried a gondola equipped with radio communication, navigational instruments, and enough provisions for a week. The crew launched at 8:43 PM on August 11, 1978, riding the jet stream eastward across the North Atlantic. The crossing was not without drama. The balloon dropped dangerously low over the ocean on the third night when cooler temperatures caused the helium to contract. The crew jettisoned ballast to regain altitude. They navigated by radio contact with weather stations and ocean vessels below. When they crossed the Irish coast, they knew they had succeeded where every predecessor had failed. The landing in France was rough but safe. The three men were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, and their gondola was donated to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, displayed alongside the Wright Flyer and the Spirit of St. Louis.

Rudolf Hess hanged himself with an electrical cord in a garden summerhouse at Spandau Prison in West Berlin on August 17, 1987. He was 93 years old, blind in one eye, and had been the sole inmate of a 600-cell prison for 21 years, guarded in monthly rotation by soldiers from the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. His death ended one of the strangest imprisonments of the 20th century and eliminated the last surviving member of Adolf Hitler's inner circle. Hess had been Hitler's deputy since the earliest days of the Nazi Party, serving as the man who transcribed Mein Kampf during Hitler's imprisonment in Landsberg in 1924. He rose to become Deputy Fuhrer, the party's second-ranking official, and administered the vast Nazi bureaucracy. Then, on May 10, 1941, he did something that bewildered the world: he flew a Messerschmitt Bf 110 solo from Germany to Scotland, apparently hoping to negotiate a peace deal with Britain before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. He parachuted into a field near the Duke of Hamilton's estate, was captured by a farmer, and spent the rest of the war in British custody. At the Nuremberg Trials, Hess was convicted of crimes against peace and conspiracy to commit crimes but acquitted of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and transferred to Spandau. The other six convicted Nazis held there were released over the following decades as their sentences expired. After Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach were released in 1966, Hess remained alone. The Soviet Union repeatedly vetoed Western proposals to release him, viewing his continued imprisonment as a symbol of the wartime alliance's judgment against Nazism. The cost of maintaining Spandau for a single prisoner ran into millions annually. Hess's death was ruled a suicide, though his son Wolf Rudiger Hess spent years alleging that British agents had murdered his father to prevent him from revealing details about his 1941 peace mission. Spandau Prison was demolished within weeks of Hess's death, razed to prevent it from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. died on August 17, 1988, his 74th birthday, in Poughkeepsie, New York. He had spent a lifetime navigating the peculiar burden of bearing one of the most famous names in American history while building a public career of genuine substance. Born on Campobello Island in 1914, the fifth of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's six children, he grew up in the White House during the Great Depression. He graduated from Harvard and the University of Virginia School of Law. His wartime service in the Navy earned him the Silver Star and the Navy Cross for combat against German U-boats in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean. He won a seat in Congress in 1949 and served five terms representing a New York City district. His legislative focus was civil rights and labor protections, positions that put him ahead of much of his own party. He championed fair employment practices and pushed for anti-discrimination measures when the Democratic Party's southern wing still blocked most civil rights legislation. His most significant contribution to American public life came in 1965, when President Johnson appointed him the first chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC was brand new, created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and had no enforcement teeth. It could investigate complaints and attempt conciliation but could not sue. Roosevelt built the commission's institutional culture, hired its first staff, and established the procedures for processing discrimination claims. The framework he created survived long after he left and became the foundation for the EEOC's later expansion into active litigation. After leaving government, he moved through business ventures, farming, and an unsuccessful run for governor of New York in 1966. He was married five times. His public life never matched the scale of his father's, but the civil rights infrastructure he helped build affected the working lives of millions of Americans.