June 19 in History

The first Belmont Stakes was run at Jerome Park Racetrack in the Bronx, New York, on June 19, 1867, three years before the Kentucky Derby and six years before the Preakness Stakes, making it the oldest of the three American Triple Crown races. A filly named Ruthless won the inaugural running, covering the one-and-five-eighths-mile course in three minutes and five seconds. The race carried a purse of $1,500 with an entry fee of $200 per horse, a half-forfeit arrangement typical of nineteenth-century American racing. The race was named for August Belmont Sr., the German-born financier and sportsman who helped establish American thoroughbred racing as a legitimate institution during the Civil War era. Belmont, who served as the American representative of the Rothschild banking family, used his wealth and social position to build Jerome Park in 1866 with Leonard Jerome (Winston Churchill's grandfather) and William R. Travers. The track was designed as a fashionable sporting venue for New York's elite, modeled on the great racecourses of England. Jerome Park closed in 1894, and the Belmont Stakes moved to Morris Park and then to its permanent home at Belmont Park in Elmont, Long Island, which opened in 1905. The track's main course was deliberately designed with long sweeping turns to accommodate the Belmont Stakes' distance, which was standardized at one and a half miles in 1926, making it the longest of the three Triple Crown races and the greatest test of stamina for three-year-old thoroughbreds. The Belmont has served as the decisive race for every Triple Crown attempt since Sir Barton first swept all three in 1919. Only thirteen horses have completed the Triple Crown, most recently Justify in 2018. The race's nickname, the "Test of the Champion," reflects its role as the final barrier between near-greatness and immortality in American horse racing.

The United States Senate passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on June 19, ending a filibuster that had consumed fifty-four working days, the longest in Senate history. The bill, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, had cleared the House in February but faced determined opposition from Southern Democrats who understood that its passage would dismantle the legal architecture of Jim Crow segregation. President Lyndon Johnson signed the act into law on July 2, using seventy-five pens that he distributed to supporters. Johnson had taken up the civil rights cause after President Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, making passage of the bill a memorial to the slain president and a moral imperative for the nation. Kennedy had introduced the legislation in June 1963, prompted by the violence in Birmingham, Alabama, where police commissioner Bull Connor had turned fire hoses and attack dogs on child demonstrators. The bill faced certain death by filibuster until Johnson enlisted Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois, whose support brought enough Republican votes to invoke cloture and cut off debate. The act's provisions were sweeping. Title II prohibited discrimination in public accommodations: restaurants, hotels, theaters, and gas stations. Title VII banned employment discrimination and created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce it. Title VI prohibited discrimination in federally funded programs, giving the federal government leverage over schools, hospitals, and other institutions receiving public money. Southern resistance was immediate. Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, decided in December 1964, upheld the act's constitutionality under the Commerce Clause. Johnson told his aide Bill Moyers after signing the act: "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come." The political realignment he predicted has lasted sixty years.

Jim Davis launched the Garfield comic strip on June 19, 1978, in forty-one newspapers, introducing a fat, lazy, lasagna-obsessed orange tabby cat that would become the most widely syndicated comic strip in history. Davis, a former advertising artist from Marion, Indiana, had previously created a strip called Gnorm Gnat about a bug, which ran for five years without gaining traction. An editor told him there had never been a successful comic strip about bugs. Davis studied the market and noticed that dogs were well represented by Snoopy and Marmaduke, but cats were not. Davis designed Garfield with commercial appeal as an explicit priority. He later acknowledged in interviews that the strip was "built to be marketed," a philosophy that distinguished him from cartoonists who treated syndication as an art form first. Garfield's personality was assembled from broad, universally relatable traits: hatred of Mondays, love of food, contempt for diet and exercise. The character's appeal crossed cultural boundaries because the humor was situational rather than verbal, making it easy to translate. The strip expanded rapidly. Within three years, Garfield appeared in over a thousand newspapers. The first Garfield book, "Garfield at Large," was published in 1980 and became the first book to debut at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. By the mid-1980s, Garfield merchandise was generating hundreds of millions in annual revenue. The suction-cup car window toys became ubiquitous. Garfield holds the Guinness World Record for the most widely syndicated comic strip, appearing in roughly 2,580 newspapers and journals across the world. Davis created a content factory rather than an autobiographical art project: assistants draw much of the strip, and the humor has remained remarkably consistent for nearly five decades. The approach made Davis one of the wealthiest cartoonists in history while attracting criticism from those who view the strip as deliberately formulaic.

Congress passed legislation on June 19, 1862, prohibiting slavery in all current and future United States territories, effectively nullifying the Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, which had ruled that Congress had no authority to ban slavery in the territories. The law was one of several antislavery measures enacted during the Civil War as Northern Republicans, no longer constrained by Southern Democratic opposition, dismantled the legal framework that had protected slavery's expansion for decades. The Dred Scott decision had been the most politically explosive Supreme Court ruling in American history. Chief Justice Roger Taney's majority opinion declared that Black people "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect" and that the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had banned slavery north of the 36th parallel, was unconstitutional. The decision infuriated abolitionists, energized the Republican Party, and deepened the sectional crisis that led to war. Abraham Lincoln built his 1858 Senate campaign and 1860 presidential campaign largely around opposing Dred Scott's implications. With Southern states absent from Congress following secession, Republicans moved quickly on antislavery legislation. The territorial slavery ban was passed alongside other measures: the Confiscation Act of 1862 freed enslaved people held by disloyal owners, slavery was abolished in the District of Columbia in April 1862 with compensated emancipation, and Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862. The territorial ban itself affected relatively few enslaved people directly, as most western territories had small enslaved populations. Its significance was constitutional and symbolic: Congress was asserting the very power Taney had denied, establishing that slavery would not accompany the nation's westward expansion. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, abolished slavery throughout the United States entirely, rendering the territorial ban one component of a broader dismantling that transformed American law.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York, on June 19, 1953, the only American civilians put to death for espionage during the Cold War. Julius died after the first set of electric shocks. Ethel required three rounds of electrocution before being pronounced dead, a detail that horrified witnesses and anti-execution campaigners worldwide. The case remains one of the most contested criminal proceedings in American history. The Rosenbergs were arrested in 1950 after the FBI traced a chain of atomic espionage from Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British physicist who had worked at Los Alamos, through courier Harry Gold, to machinist David Greenglass, who was Ethel's brother. Greenglass testified that Julius had recruited him to pass sketches and descriptions of the implosion lens used in the plutonium bomb to Soviet agents. Greenglass also testified that Ethel had typed up his handwritten notes, a claim he later admitted fabricating to protect his wife. Judge Irving Kaufman sentenced both Rosenbergs to death, declaring that their espionage had caused the Korean War and the deaths of thousands of American soldiers by enabling Soviet atomic capability. The sentence was extraordinary: neither defendant was convicted of treason, which requires wartime acts against one's own country, and the espionage charge typically carried prison terms. The severity reflected Cold War hysteria more than legal precedent. Appeals reached the Supreme Court, which declined to intervene despite last-minute arguments. Declassified Soviet intelligence cables, the Venona decrypts, confirmed in the 1990s that Julius Rosenberg ran an espionage network that passed valuable technical information to the Soviets. Ethel's direct participation appears to have been minimal. Their sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol, spent decades advocating for their parents' vindication and in 2016 petitioned the Obama administration to formally exonerate their mother.