August 19 in History

HMS Guerriere's masts toppled into the Atlantic like felled timber on August 19, 1812, as the American frigate USS Constitution pounded the British warship into wreckage off the coast of Nova Scotia. The battle lasted roughly 35 minutes. When a British cannonball bounced off Constitution's oak hull, an American sailor reportedly shouted, "Her sides are made of iron!" The nickname "Old Ironsides" stuck, and a young nation that had been terrified of the Royal Navy discovered that its ships could fight. The War of 1812 had begun two months earlier, and American fortunes on land were dismal. An invasion of Canada had stalled, and the U.S. Army was poorly trained and badly led. The Navy, with fewer than 20 warships against Britain's 600, was expected to be swept from the seas. Constitution, commanded by Captain Isaac Hull, had narrowly escaped a British squadron just weeks earlier in a chase that lasted three days. When Hull spotted Guerriere sailing alone on the afternoon of August 19, he saw an opportunity to prove the American Navy's worth. Hull closed to within 25 yards before opening fire, a range so short that gunners could see the faces of the men they were killing. Constitution's advantage lay in her construction: she had been built with a double layer of live oak planking from Georgia, one of the densest woods in the world, over a frame of white oak reinforced with copper bolts from Paul Revere's foundry. Her 44 guns threw a heavier broadside than Guerriere's 38. The combination of superior firepower and near-impervious hull decided the contest quickly. Guerriere was so badly damaged that Hull ordered her burned rather than towed to port. Captain James Dacres of the Guerriere surrendered his sword, which Hull refused to accept. The victory electrified the American public at a moment when the war effort desperately needed good news. Congress awarded Hull a gold medal, and Constitution became a symbol of national pride that has been preserved ever since. She remains a commissioned warship in the United States Navy, the oldest still afloat, berthed at the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston.

Francis Gary Powers stood in a Moscow courtroom on August 19, 1960, and heard a Soviet military tribunal sentence him to ten years in prison for espionage. The American U-2 pilot, shot down over Soviet territory on May 1 while photographing military installations from 70,000 feet, had already caused the collapse of a superpower summit and one of the most embarrassing diplomatic episodes of the Cold War. The CIA had been flying U-2 reconnaissance missions over the Soviet Union since 1956, photographing missile sites, airfields, and nuclear facilities from an altitude that was believed to be beyond the reach of Soviet air defenses. The Soviets tracked every flight but lacked the technology to shoot the aircraft down. That changed on May 1, 1960, when a salvo of SA-2 surface-to-air missiles struck Powers' plane near Sverdlovsk, deep inside Soviet territory. Powers ejected and parachuted to the ground, where he was captured by local civilians and handed over to the KGB. The Eisenhower administration's initial response was catastrophic. Assuming Powers was dead and his aircraft destroyed, NASA issued a cover story claiming a weather research plane had gone missing over Turkey. Nikita Khrushchev sprang his trap with theatrical relish, first announcing that a spy plane had been shot down, then, after Washington doubled down on the cover story, revealing that the pilot was alive and had confessed. The Soviet premier displayed the wreckage and Powers' espionage equipment before the world's press. Eisenhower was forced to admit the truth, and a planned summit in Paris between the American president and Khrushchev collapsed before it began. Powers' trial in Moscow was broadcast on Soviet television. He expressed regret for his mission and cooperated with Soviet authorities, a decision that drew criticism from some Americans who believed he should have used the suicide pin provided by the CIA. He served less than two years of his sentence before being exchanged on February 10, 1962, on the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin for convicted Soviet spy Rudolf Abel. Powers worked as a helicopter traffic reporter in Los Angeles until his death in a helicopter crash in 1977.

Augustus died at Nola, a town near Naples, on August 19, 14 AD, after a reign of roughly forty years that transformed Rome from a republic shattered by civil war into a centralized empire spanning the Mediterranean. His last words, according to Suetonius, were directed at his wife Livia: "Have I played the part well? Then applaud as I exit." Born Gaius Octavius in 63 BC, he was the great-nephew and adopted son of Julius Caesar. He was eighteen when Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March in 44 BC. He spent the next thirteen years fighting to consolidate power: first against the assassins Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, then against his fellow triumvir Mark Antony at Actium. By 27 BC, he was the sole master of the Roman world, and the Senate granted him the title Augustus. His genius was political, not military. He disguised autocratic power behind republican forms. He held no permanent office that hadn't existed before; he simply accumulated them. He was princeps, first citizen, not rex, king. The fiction was transparent, but it worked because Romans preferred a polite fiction to another civil war. He reorganized the provinces, professionalized the army, established a permanent fire brigade and police force for Rome, and launched a building program that justified his famous boast: "I found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble." The Pantheon, the Forum of Augustus, and the Temple of Mars Ultor were products of his reign. He created the Praetorian Guard, a permanent bodyguard for the emperor that would eventually become kingmaker and king-killer. His political system, the Principate, inaugurated the Pax Romana, two centuries of relative peace and stability across the empire. The administrative structures he built, provincial governance, tax collection, road networks, and legal frameworks, endured for centuries and formed the foundation on which Western civilization would build. Every Roman emperor who followed, for the next four hundred years, held authority through the precedents Augustus established.

German voters approved the merger of the offices of president and chancellor by a margin of 89.9 percent on August 19, 1934, handing Adolf Hitler absolute power under the title of Fuhrer und Reichskanzler. The plebiscite, held two weeks after the death of President Paul von Hindenburg, completed a transformation that had begun 18 months earlier. In January 1933, Hitler had been an appointed chancellor constrained by a conservative cabinet. By August 1934, he was the unchallenged dictator of Europe's most powerful industrial nation. The speed of the consolidation was breathtaking. The Reichstag fire in February 1933 provided the pretext for emergency decrees that suspended civil liberties. The Enabling Act in March gave Hitler the power to pass laws without parliamentary approval. Trade unions were dissolved in May, opposition parties were banned by July, and the Nazi Party was declared the only legal political party. The Night of the Long Knives on June 30, 1934, eliminated potential rivals within the Nazi movement itself, as Hitler ordered the murder of SA leader Ernst Rohm and scores of others. When Hindenburg died on August 2, 1934, Hitler moved immediately to absorb the presidential powers, including supreme command of the armed forces. The military's oath of loyalty, previously sworn to the constitution, was rewritten to require personal allegiance to Hitler. This was not a formality. When officers later contemplated removing Hitler, the oath weighed heavily on men raised in a tradition of military honor. The August 19 plebiscite was neither free nor fair. Opposition voices had been silenced, the press was controlled, and voters marked their ballots under the watchful eyes of Nazi Party officials. Yet the 89.9 percent approval was not entirely manufactured. Unemployment had fallen dramatically, public works projects were visible everywhere, and Hitler's foreign policy had restored German pride after the humiliations of Versailles. Many Germans voted with genuine enthusiasm for a leader who appeared to be delivering on his promises. The catastrophe that enthusiasm enabled would kill approximately six million Jews and engulf the world in a war that claimed 70 to 85 million lives.

Linus Pauling won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 for his work on chemical bonding, specifically his research into the nature of the chemical bond and its application to the elucidation of complex substances. His 1939 book The Nature of the Chemical Bond is considered one of the most influential scientific texts of the twentieth century. Then he started campaigning against nuclear weapons testing, collecting signatures from over eleven thousand scientists for a petition presented to the United Nations. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962, making him the only person ever to win two unshared Nobel Prizes. The Chemistry Prize was unshared. The Peace Prize was unshared. No one else in history has accomplished this. His activism cost him professionally: the State Department revoked his passport in the 1950s during the McCarthy era, and Caltech colleagues distanced themselves from his politics even as they respected his science. In his later years he became convinced that high doses of Vitamin C could cure cancer and prevent colds. He published two books on the subject and took eighteen thousand milligrams a day, roughly two hundred times the recommended daily allowance. The scientific consensus disagreed with his claims, and controlled studies failed to support his theories. He died at ninety-three of prostate cancer on August 19, 1994, at his ranch in Big Sur, California. The Vitamin C debate outlived him. His scientific contributions to structural chemistry, molecular biology, and the understanding of sickle cell disease as a molecular disorder remain foundational. His career demonstrated that a single mind could reshape multiple scientific fields while simultaneously engaging in political activism that changed international policy.