February 5 in History

Catherine the Great started buying art to prove Russia belonged among Europe’s civilized powers. Nearly a century later, Tsar Nicholas I opened her collection to the public, creating one of the world’s great museums. The Hermitage Museum welcomed its first general visitors in 1852, granting ordinary Russians access to an imperial collection that had been the exclusive property of the ruling family since Catherine began acquiring masterworks in 1764. Catherine’s buying spree was legendary and strategic. She purchased entire collections wholesale, including 225 paintings from the Berlin merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky in 1764, 600 paintings from the collection of Count Heinrich von Bruhl in 1769, and 198 works from the famed Crozat collection in Paris in 1772, which included pieces by Raphael, Giorgione, Titian, and Rembrandt. She corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot, who served as her art agents in Paris. By the time of her death in 1796, the collection numbered roughly 4,000 paintings. Nicholas I commissioned the architect Leo von Klenze to design the New Hermitage, a purpose-built museum structure adjacent to the Winter Palace on the Neva River embankment in Saint Petersburg. The building featured granite atlantes at its entrance, skylit galleries, and climate-controlled rooms designed specifically for displaying art. When it opened on February 5, 1852, visitors had to observe a strict dress code and request tickets in advance through the Imperial Court office. The Hermitage survived revolution, siege, and ideology. After the Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace in 1917, the Soviet government nationalized the collection and expanded it with confiscated private holdings. During the 900-day Siege of Leningrad in World War II, staff evacuated over a million objects to the Urals while curators continued to lecture in the empty galleries, pointing at the outlines where paintings had hung. Today the museum holds more than three million items across six buildings, making it one of the largest art collections on Earth.

Congress overrode President Woodrow Wilson’s veto on February 5, 1917, passing the Immigration Act by overwhelming margins and slamming the door on virtually all immigration from Asia. The law created an "Asiatic Barred Zone" stretching from Afghanistan to the Pacific Islands, prohibiting entry by anyone born within its boundaries. It also imposed a literacy test on all immigrants over sixteen, a provision three previous presidents had vetoed over the prior two decades. Anti-immigrant sentiment had been building in the United States since the 1880s. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had barred Chinese laborers specifically. The Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 restricted Japanese immigration through diplomatic channels. But the 1917 act went further than any previous law, creating a sweeping geographic ban that encompassed India, Burma, Siam, the Malay States, the East Indian Islands, Polynesia, and parts of Russia and the Middle East. The message was blunt: the United States wanted European immigrants, not Asian ones. The literacy test was the law’s other major weapon. Prospective immigrants had to demonstrate the ability to read a passage of thirty to forty words in any language. Presidents Grover Cleveland, William Taft, and Wilson had each vetoed literacy test legislation, arguing it was a thinly disguised class barrier masquerading as a merit standard. Wilson called the test "a fundamental departure from the traditional and long-established policy of this country." Congress disagreed, overriding his veto with a 287-106 vote in the House and 62-19 in the Senate. The act also barred "idiots," "feeble-minded persons," epileptics, alcoholics, anarchists, polygamists, and "persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority," a category used to exclude homosexuals. The law established a template for the even more restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed national origin quotas designed to preserve the ethnic composition of the United States as it existed in 1890. These quota systems remained in effect until 1965.

Thirty-one years after Medgar Evers was shot in the back in his own driveway, his killer was finally convicted. Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist from Greenwood, Mississippi, was found guilty of murder on February 5, 1994, in Jackson, after two all-white juries in the 1960s had deadlocked, allowing him to walk free for three decades. The third jury, this time racially mixed, deliberated for six hours before delivering the verdict. Beckwith, seventy-three, was sentenced to life in prison. Evers, the NAACP’s field secretary in Mississippi, had been leading voter registration drives and investigating the murder of Emmett Till when a bullet from an Enfield rifle struck him in the back on June 12, 1963, just hours after President Kennedy’s televised address on civil rights. He crawled thirty feet to his front door and died at a Jackson hospital within the hour. His wife Myrlie and their three children heard the shot. Beckwith’s fingerprint was found on the rifle abandoned in nearby honeysuckle bushes. The first two trials, in 1964, ended in hung juries despite the physical evidence. The courtroom atmosphere told the story: Governor Ross Barnett walked in during the first trial and shook Beckwith’s hand in front of the jury. Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens’ Council and the Ku Klux Klan, boasted publicly about the killing. He ran for lieutenant governor in 1967 and was feted at white supremacist events. Mississippi’s power structure had no interest in convicting him. The case was reopened in 1989 after journalist Jerry Mitchell and Myrlie Evers-Williams, who had never stopped pressing for justice, uncovered new evidence, including testimony from witnesses who had heard Beckwith brag about the murder. Bobby DeLaughter, an assistant district attorney in Hinds County, rebuilt the case from scratch. The original murder weapon was found in a courthouse closet. Mississippi had changed enough by 1994 to produce a jury willing to deliver the verdict the evidence had always supported.

Four of Hollywood’s biggest names decided they would rather own their own movies than work for someone else. Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and director D.W. Griffith signed the papers creating United Artists on February 5, 1919, forming a distribution company that would let them finance, produce, and control their own films. When Metro Pictures president Richard Rowley heard about the venture, he reportedly said "the inmates are taking over the asylum." The studio system of the 1910s concentrated power in the hands of distributors and exhibitors, not artists. Stars like Chaplin and Pickford drew enormous audiences but received only a fraction of the profits their films generated. Studios assigned projects, controlled release schedules, and owned the negatives. Chaplin was earning $1 million a year but had no say over how his films were marketed or where they played. The four founders wanted to break that model entirely. The idea originated with Fairbanks and Chaplin during a 1918 Liberty Bond tour, where they discovered that the major studios were planning to merge into a single distribution monopoly that would further reduce artists’ leverage. Attorney William McAdoo, President Wilson’s son-in-law, helped structure the deal. Each founder contributed $100,000 in starting capital and agreed to produce a set number of films per year for distribution through the company. The early years were difficult. Producing independently was expensive, and the four founders struggled to deliver enough films to sustain the distribution network. Griffith left in 1924. But United Artists survived and eventually thrived, distributing films by Samuel Goldwyn, Alexander Korda, David O. Selznick, and later, the James Bond franchise. The company proved that artists could control their own commercial destiny. Its model anticipated the independent production deals that now dominate Hollywood, where stars and directors routinely negotiate ownership stakes and creative control.

The United States indicted the dictator it had been paying for years. Federal grand juries in Miami and Tampa returned drug trafficking and money laundering charges against Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega on February 5, 1988, marking the first time the American government had criminally charged a sitting foreign head of state. The indictments detailed a sprawling operation in which Noriega had transformed Panama into a transit hub for Colombian cocaine bound for the United States, allegedly earning $4.6 million in payoffs from the Medellin cartel. The awkwardness of the indictment was that Noriega had been on the CIA payroll since the 1960s. He had provided intelligence on leftist movements in Central America, facilitated covert arms deliveries to the Contras in Nicaragua, and allowed the United States to maintain extensive military operations in the Canal Zone. The relationship continued even as the Drug Enforcement Administration accumulated evidence of his narcotics connections. Multiple U.S. agencies had known about Noriega’s drug trafficking for years but considered him a useful asset in the Cold War struggle for influence in Latin America. The indictments came after Noriega’s former chief of staff, Colonel Roberto Diaz Herrera, publicly accused him of murder, election fraud, and drug dealing in June 1987, sparking massive street protests. The Reagan administration, facing Congressional pressure and unable to sustain the contradiction of funding a war on drugs while protecting a drug-trafficking ally, allowed the Justice Department to proceed. Noriega responded by cracking down on domestic opposition and declaring that the indictments were an act of American imperialism. The standoff escalated for nearly two years until December 1989, when President George H.W. Bush ordered the invasion of Panama. Operation Just Cause deployed 27,000 troops to remove Noriega, who surrendered in January 1990 after taking refuge in the Vatican embassy. He was convicted in Miami in 1992 and sentenced to forty years in prison, reduced on appeal to thirty.