February 9 in History

Andrew Jackson won the popular vote, won the most electoral votes, and did not become president. The Election of 1824 was thrown to the House of Representatives after no candidate secured a majority in the Electoral College, and on February 9, 1825, the House chose John Quincy Adams in what Jackson’s supporters immediately branded the "Corrupt Bargain." The accusation would fuel Jackson’s rage, reshape American politics, and help create the modern Democratic Party. Four candidates from the same party, the Democratic-Republicans, split the vote in a one-party election. Jackson received 99 electoral votes, Adams 84, William Crawford 41, and Henry Clay 37. Under the Twelfth Amendment, the House would choose from the top three finishers, eliminating Clay, the powerful Speaker of the House. Clay threw his support to Adams, who shared his vision of a strong federal government investing in internal improvements. Adams won on the first ballot, carrying thirteen of twenty-four state delegations. When Adams then appointed Clay as his Secretary of State, Jackson’s allies erupted. The Secretary of State position was considered the stepping stone to the presidency; three of the previous four presidents had held the post. Jackson called the deal "the judas of the West" and accused Adams and Clay of trading the presidency for a cabinet appointment. Clay denied any prior agreement, and no direct evidence of a corrupt deal has ever surfaced. But the perception was devastating. Adams’s presidency was crippled from its first day by the accusation of illegitimacy. Jackson spent the next four years building a nationwide political organization dedicated to his election in 1828, effectively creating the first modern political party. His movement emphasized popular sovereignty and direct democracy, arguing that the people’s choice had been overridden by Washington insiders. Jackson won the 1828 election in a landslide, carrying every state south and west of New Jersey. The "Corrupt Bargain" narrative became a foundational grievance of Jacksonian democracy and established the template for American populist politics: the virtuous outsider betrayed by a corrupt establishment.

Japanese forces secretly evacuated 10,652 soldiers from Guadalcanal over three nights in early February 1943, and Allied commanders did not realize the enemy was leaving until the island was nearly empty. On February 9, American troops advancing from the west met a Marine patrol pushing from the east and found no Japanese resistance. The six-month Battle of Guadalcanal was over. Japan’s expansion in the Pacific had reached its high-water mark and was now receding. The campaign had begun on August 7, 1942, when the 1st Marine Division landed on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands to capture a Japanese airfield under construction. The landing was the first American ground offensive of the Pacific War, and it was almost abandoned within days when a Japanese naval force destroyed four Allied cruisers at the Battle of Savo Island, forcing the transport ships to withdraw before all supplies were unloaded. The Marines held a thin perimeter around the airfield, renamed Henderson Field, and fought off repeated Japanese counterattacks. The jungle fighting was brutal. Malaria infected virtually every American on the island. Tropical ulcers, dysentery, and fungal infections were endemic. Food ran short. The Japanese launched suicidal banzai charges across the Tenaru River and through the ridgelines around the airfield. At sea, the two navies fought a series of ferocious engagements, including the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal in November 1942, where the United States lost two admirals in a single night engagement. Both sides lost roughly twenty-four major warships during the campaign. The Japanese high command, recognizing that the attrition was unsustainable, organized Operation Ke, a nighttime evacuation by fast destroyers that extracted the surviving garrison between February 1 and 7. The soldiers who were rescued were emaciated and riddled with disease; many died shortly after evacuation. Guadalcanal cost Japan approximately 31,000 dead, including 9,000 from disease and starvation. American losses were 7,100 killed. The campaign demonstrated that Japan could be beaten on the ground and that the United States was willing to absorb the cost.

Senator Joseph McCarthy waved a piece of paper before a Republican women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950, and claimed it contained the names of 205 known Communists working in the State Department. The number changed within days, first to 57, then to 81, then to other figures, and McCarthy never produced the list. It did not matter. The accusation itself was enough to launch four years of political terror that ruined thousands of careers, imprisoned hundreds, and gave the English language a new word for demagogic persecution. The Second Red Scare had been building before McCarthy exploited it. The Soviet Union had detonated its first atomic bomb in August 1949, years ahead of Western estimates. China had fallen to Mao Zedong’s Communists in October. Alger Hiss, a former State Department official, had been convicted of perjury in connection with espionage charges. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets. Americans were primed to believe that Communist infiltration explained why the postwar world was not going as planned. McCarthy, a first-term Republican senator from Wisconsin with an undistinguished record, seized the moment. His Wheeling speech received national press coverage, and he parlayed the attention into a Senate subcommittee chairmanship that gave him the power to subpoena witnesses and hold televised hearings. His investigative methods relied on innuendo, guilt by association, and the destruction of anyone who challenged him. Witnesses were asked "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?" Refusal to answer was treated as confession. McCarthy’s downfall came during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954, when Army counsel Joseph Welch confronted him on national television with the question: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" The Senate censured McCarthy in December 1954 by a vote of 67-22. He died of liver failure, likely related to alcoholism, in 1957 at age forty-eight. The careers he destroyed took decades to rebuild. The loyalty oaths, blacklists, and surveillance apparatus he championed persisted long after his name became an epithet.

Apollo 14 splashed down in the South Pacific on February 9, 1971, capping the third successful crewed lunar landing and proving that NASA could recover from near-catastrophe. Less than a year earlier, Apollo 13 had nearly killed its crew when an oxygen tank exploded en route to the Moon. The question hanging over the program was whether Apollo could continue. The answer was Alan Shepard. He'd been the first American in space in 1961, a fifteen-minute suborbital flight aboard Freedom 7. Then Meniere's disease, an inner ear condition that causes vertigo, grounded him for nearly a decade. A risky surgical procedure in 1969 restored his balance, and NASA gave him command of Apollo 14. He was 47, the oldest astronaut to walk on the Moon. The mission targeted the Fra Mauro highlands, the same site Apollo 13 was supposed to have explored. The Lunar Module Antares had landing radar problems during descent, and Shepard and Edgar Mitchell had to troubleshoot a software fix in real time. They landed successfully on February 5, 1971. On the surface, Shepard and Mitchell conducted two EVAs totaling over nine hours, collecting 94.35 pounds of lunar samples and deploying a suite of scientific instruments including a seismometer and a laser ranging retroreflector. The geology was significant: Fra Mauro was believed to contain ejecta from the massive Imbrium impact event, material that could reveal the Moon's deep interior history. Shepard famously smuggled a makeshift six-iron golf club head onto the mission, attached it to a sample collection tool, and hit two golf balls on the lunar surface. He shanked the first. The second, he claimed, went "miles and miles." In the Moon's one-sixth gravity, it probably traveled 200 to 400 yards. Stuart Roosa orbited overhead in the Command Module Kitty Hawk, conducting experiments and photographing potential future landing sites. The crew splashed down southeast of American Samoa and was recovered by the USS New Orleans. The mission restored confidence in the Apollo program after the trauma of Apollo 13.

Seventy-three million Americans watched four young men from Liverpool play five songs on a Sunday night variety show, and the country’s cultural landscape shifted overnight. The Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, drew the largest television audience in American history to that point, capturing roughly 45 percent of all viewers in the country. Crime reportedly dropped during the broadcast. Teenage girls screamed so loudly inside the CBS Studio 50 theater that the band could barely hear themselves play. The Beatles had arrived at John F. Kennedy Airport two days earlier, greeted by roughly 3,000 fans who had been alerted by radio stations promoting the visit. American disc jockeys had been playing "I Want to Hold Your Hand" since late December 1963, and the single had reached number one on the Billboard chart on February 1. Capitol Records, which had initially refused to release Beatles records in the United States, had finally capitulated and backed the single with a $50,000 marketing campaign. Sullivan had witnessed Beatlemania firsthand during a trip to London’s Heathrow Airport in October 1963, where he was caught in a crowd of fans waiting for the band to return from a European tour. He booked them for three consecutive Sunday night appearances, paying $10,000 for all three shows. The February 9 performance opened with "All My Loving," followed by "Till There Was You" and "She Loves You." After a comedy act and other performers, the Beatles returned with "I Saw Her Standing There" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand." The broadcast accelerated a cultural revolution already underway. Within weeks, the Beatles held the top five positions on the Billboard Hot 100 simultaneously, a record never matched. Every guitar manufacturer in America reported shortages. Bands formed in garages across the country, directly inspired by what they had seen on television that Sunday. The British Invasion that followed reshaped rock music, fashion, and the relationship between youth culture and mass media. Sullivan, who had launched Elvis Presley on the same stage eight years earlier, had done it again with four men who made it look like even more fun.