February 20 in History

A printer from Providence, Rhode Island, built a postal network that helped win the American Revolution before the government he served even existed. William Goddard created the Constitutional Post in 1774 as a patriot alternative to the British Crown Post, whose royal postmasters were opening and reading colonial mail. When President George Washington signed the Postal Service Act on February 20, 1792, he formalized a system that Goddard had improvised from nothing — and added a radical provision that would shape American democracy: newspapers would be carried through the mail at subsidized rates. Goddard understood that communication was infrastructure. The Crown Post, run by Benjamin Franklin until he was fired in 1774, served British intelligence as much as colonial commerce. Letters between revolutionary leaders were intercepted regularly. Goddard’s alternative post, funded by subscription and staffed by patriot riders, gave the Continental Congress a secure communication network. Franklin, freed from his Crown appointment, became Postmaster General of the Constitutional Post in July 1775. The 1792 act did more than create a government department. It established that the federal government would build and maintain post roads connecting every settlement in the nation, not just the profitable routes between major cities. Crucially, it set newspaper postage at a fraction of letter rates, ensuring that political information would flow cheaply to every corner of the country. Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting America four decades later, marveled that frontier settlers in Michigan received the same newspapers as residents of New York. The postal system expanded with astonishing speed. By 1800, the United States had more post offices than Britain and France combined. By 1831, the Post Office was the largest organization in the country and the largest employer outside of agriculture. Postmaster General was a cabinet position of enormous patronage power. The mail system was, for most Americans, the only regular contact they had with the federal government. Washington signed a law creating a postal service, but what he actually built was the nervous system of a democracy — the mechanism by which a continent-spanning republic could function as a single political community.

Anthony Eden walked out of the British Cabinet on February 20, 1938, over a principle that his prime minister considered irrelevant: that dictators should not be rewarded for aggression. Eden’s resignation as Foreign Secretary was the most dramatic break in Neville Chamberlain’s government before Munich, a public signal that Britain’s appeasement policy had opponents at the highest level. Eden was 40 years old, the most popular politician in Britain, and he was throwing away the career trajectory of a future prime minister over a disagreement about talking to Mussolini. The immediate cause was Chamberlain’s eagerness to negotiate directly with Benito Mussolini’s Italy without preconditions. Eden believed that opening talks while Italian "volunteers" were fighting for Franco in Spain and Italian forces occupied Ethiopia would legitimize aggression and undermine the League of Nations. Chamberlain believed that personal diplomacy with dictators could prevent another war. The two men had been clashing privately for months. Eden’s concerns went deeper than Italy. He saw Chamberlain’s approach to foreign policy as fundamentally naive — a businessman’s belief that reasonable men could always reach a deal, applied to leaders who viewed concessions as weakness. Eden had dealt directly with Hitler and Mussolini and harbored no illusions about their ambitions. He also resented Chamberlain’s habit of conducting back-channel negotiations through personal emissaries, bypassing the Foreign Office entirely. The resignation speech in the House of Commons was measured but devastating. Eden made clear that the disagreement was not personal but structural: "I do not believe that we can make progress in European appeasement if we allow the impression to gain currency abroad that we yield to constant pressure." Winston Churchill, watching from the backbenches, recognized a potential ally. The anti-appeasement faction in Parliament grew stronger. Eden had been right about appeasement, but rightness in 1938 brought only a decade of waiting — he would not become prime minister until 1955, and his own premiership would end in the Suez disaster that proved Eden had learned the lessons of appeasement too well.

Over a thousand American heavy bombers crossed the English Channel on the morning of February 20, 1944, and for the next six days the Allied air forces systematically destroyed the German aircraft industry in the most concentrated bombing campaign of the European war. Operation Argument, known as "Big Week," sent wave after wave of B-17s and B-24s against fighter factories, ball-bearing plants, and assembly facilities across Germany. The operation cost the Allies 226 bombers and over 2,000 airmen, but it broke the Luftwaffe’s ability to defend German airspace and made the D-Day invasion possible. By early 1944, the Allied strategic bombing campaign was in crisis. American daylight bombing raids deep into Germany were suffering unsustainable losses. The October 1943 raid on Schweinfurt’s ball-bearing factories had cost 60 bombers out of 291 — a 20 percent loss rate that would destroy the Eighth Air Force in five missions. Something had to change before the planned invasion of France in June. Two developments made Big Week possible. The P-51 Mustang, fitted with a Merlin engine and drop tanks, could escort bombers all the way to Berlin and back. And General Jimmy Doolittle, who took command of the Eighth Air Force in January 1944, changed fighter doctrine: instead of staying close to the bombers, escort fighters were unleashed to hunt German interceptors aggressively. The hunters became the hunted. Big Week targeted aircraft factories at Leipzig, Regensburg, Augsburg, Stuttgart, and Brunswick. The Eighth Air Force flew from England while the Fifteenth Air Force struck from Italy. Over six days, the combined forces dropped nearly 10,000 tons of bombs. German fighter production facilities were heavily damaged, though Albert Speer’s dispersal program would rebuild much of the capacity within months. The irreplaceable loss was pilots: the Luftwaffe lost hundreds of experienced fighter pilots who could not be replaced at the rate they were being killed. Big Week did not destroy German aircraft production, but it destroyed the Luftwaffe’s ability to contest Allied air superiority — and air superiority over Normandy was the prerequisite for everything that followed on June 6.

Three times the launch had been scrubbed. Twice for weather, once for mechanical issues. By the time John Glenn finally squeezed into the Mercury capsule Friendship 7 on the morning of February 20, 1962, the pressure was enormous: the Soviets had put two men in orbit, and America’s space program was running on fumes and national anxiety. Four hours and 55 minutes later, Glenn splashed down in the Atlantic as a national hero, having orbited the Earth three times and survived a reentry that nearly killed him. Glenn was 40 years old, a Marine fighter pilot who had flown 149 combat missions in World War II and Korea and held the transcontinental speed record. He was also the most telegenic of the Mercury Seven astronauts, the one NASA executives and reporters instinctively trusted to represent the program to the public. His selection for the first American orbital flight was driven as much by personality as by performance. The Atlas rocket launched at 9:47 AM from Cape Canaveral. Glenn reached orbit in five minutes and began circling the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour, 162 miles above the surface. He described the view to Mission Control in Houston with the measured enthusiasm of a test pilot who could not quite contain his wonder. He observed "fireflies" outside his window — frozen particles from the spacecraft’s cooling system, glowing in sunlight. Then the flight turned dangerous. During the second orbit, a sensor indicated that the heat shield might have come loose. If true, Glenn would burn up during reentry. Mission Control made the decision to leave the retrorocket package attached during reentry, hoping it would hold the heat shield in place. Glenn was told only that they wanted to observe the effect. He reentered the atmosphere watching chunks of burning retropack fly past his window, not knowing if the heat shield was next. It held. The sensor had been faulty. Glenn’s three orbits did not match the Soviets’ seventeen, but they restored American confidence in the space race and proved that the nation could compete — even from behind.

The most performed ballet in history was a flop at its premiere. Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake opened at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow on February 20, 1877, to an audience that was unimpressed, critics who were dismissive, and a production so mangled by cost-cutting and incompetent choreography that the composer himself came to believe the work was a failure. It took eighteen years and a completely new staging for Swan Lake to become the defining masterwork of classical ballet. Tchaikovsky composed the score on commission from the Bolshoi in 1875-1876, reportedly for the modest fee of 800 rubles. The music was revolutionary for ballet — symphonic in ambition, emotionally complex, and far more demanding than the simple accompaniments ballet audiences were accustomed to. This was precisely the problem. The choreographer, Julius Reisinger, lacked the skill to match the music’s sophistication. Dancers were accustomed to light entertainment, not dramatic storytelling. The orchestra struggled with passages that would have challenged a concert ensemble. The production cut and rearranged Tchaikovsky’s score freely, inserted music by other composers, and simplified the choreography to accommodate a prima ballerina who could not handle the dual role of Odette and Odile. Reviews were mixed to poor. The ballet ran for a few seasons, mostly because the Bolshoi had invested in new sets, then disappeared from the repertoire. Tchaikovsky died in 1893 believing Swan Lake was his weakest major composition. In 1895, two years after Tchaikovsky’s death, choreographers Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov restaged Swan Lake for the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. They restructured the libretto, choreographed the iconic "white acts" with their geometric corps de ballet formations, and treated Tchaikovsky’s music with the seriousness it deserved. The result was a sensation that has never left the repertoire. Swan Lake’s resurrection is a reminder that masterpieces sometimes need a second production more than they need a first audience.