June 23 in History

Congress handed American labor its biggest legislative defeat in a generation and did it over the president’s veto. On June 23, 1947, the Senate voted 68 to 25 to override Harry Truman’s veto of the Taft-Hartley Act, following the House’s override three days earlier. The Labor Management Relations Act fundamentally restructured the balance of power between unions and employers that had been established by the Wagner Act of 1935. The political backdrop was a wave of massive strikes in 1945-46 that disrupted steel, coal, railroads, and meatpacking. More than five million workers walked off the job in 1946 alone, the largest strike wave in American history. Republicans swept the 1946 midterm elections with promises to rein in union power, and Senator Robert Taft of Ohio and Representative Fred Hartley of New Jersey crafted legislation that labor leaders would call a "slave labor bill." Taft-Hartley banned closed shops, where only union members could be hired, and allowed states to pass right-to-work laws prohibiting union security agreements. The law required union leaders to sign affidavits swearing they were not Communists, authorized the president to impose 80-day cooling-off periods on strikes that threatened national security, and barred unions from contributing to federal political campaigns. Truman’s veto message called the bill "a clear threat to the successful working of our democratic society." The override had lasting consequences. Right-to-work laws spread across the South and West, weakening union density in those regions for decades. The Communist affidavit requirement purged leftist organizers from the labor movement and aligned unions with Cold War foreign policy. Truman’s veto, though unsuccessful, cemented his support among union voters and helped fuel his upset victory in the 1948 presidential election.

NASA’s top climate scientist looked a Senate committee in the eye and said what no government official had been willing to say publicly. On June 23, 1988, James Hansen testified before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that he was "99 percent confident" that global warming was caused by the buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, not natural climate variation. The hearing room was deliberately hot: Senator Tim Wirth had opened the windows the night before and turned off the air conditioning. Hansen was no fringe figure. As director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, he had spent years building computer models of the Earth’s climate system. His testimony drew on decades of temperature data showing the planet warming at a rate consistent with rising CO2 levels from fossil fuel combustion. He told senators the warming trend was already detectable above normal climate noise and would intensify substantially in coming decades, producing more extreme heat waves, droughts, and storms. The testimony landed on the front page of the New York Times and catapulted climate change from a technical debate among atmospheric scientists into a mainstream political issue. Within months, the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and international negotiations that would eventually produce the Kyoto Protocol began taking shape. Hansen became the public face of climate science, a role that would bring him into increasing conflict with political appointees who tried to edit his public statements. Nearly four decades later, Hansen’s 1988 projections have proven remarkably accurate. Global temperatures have tracked closely with his middle-range scenario, and the extreme weather events he warned about have arrived with the frequency his models predicted. His testimony remains the single most consequential moment in the public history of climate science.

Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano walked into a federal courtroom and destroyed the most powerful Mafia boss in America. On June 23, 1992, a jury convicted John Gotti, boss of the Gambino crime family, on all thirteen counts, including five murders, racketeering, obstruction of justice, and illegal gambling. The conviction carried a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole, ending the career of a man tabloids had christened the "Teflon Don" for beating three previous federal cases. Gotti had risen through the Gambino family through a combination of street-level brutality and media savvy. He orchestrated the 1985 murder of boss Paul Castellano outside Sparks Steak House in Manhattan and took control of the family in a brazen power grab that violated Mafia protocol. Gotti cultivated his public image carefully, appearing in expensive suits and holding court at the Ravenite Social Club in Little Italy, where he openly flouted federal surveillance. The breakthrough came when Gravano, Gotti’s underboss and closest confidant, flipped in November 1991. Gravano had learned that Gotti had been secretly disparaging him on FBI recordings, and he agreed to testify in exchange for a reduced sentence on nineteen murder charges. His testimony was devastating, providing an insider’s account of Gotti’s direct involvement in murders, extortion, and the daily operations of organized crime. The FBI also introduced recordings from a bugged apartment above the Ravenite that captured Gotti discussing crimes in his own voice. Gotti spent the remaining ten years of his life at the United States Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, dying of throat cancer on June 10, 2002. His conviction marked the effective end of the Gambino family’s dominance and demonstrated that the federal government’s RICO strategy could topple even the most insulated mob bosses.

Three Wisconsin men received a patent for a machine that would fundamentally change how the world communicates. Christopher Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and Samuel Soule were granted U.S. Patent No. 79,265 for their "Type-Writer" on June 23, 1868, though the device they submitted bore only a rough resemblance to what would eventually reach the market. The early prototype typed only capital letters and was so unreliable that Sholes spent the next five years redesigning it. Sholes was a newspaper editor and politician in Milwaukee who had been experimenting with mechanical printing devices since the mid-1860s. His initial goal was practical: he wanted a machine to print page numbers and address labels. Glidden, a fellow tinkerer, suggested expanding the concept to type full text. The three men built their first prototype from telegraph parts, a piano key, and a glass jar, testing it in a machine shop above a hardware store. The keyboard layout that Sholes developed during his redesign period became the most enduring element of the invention. The QWERTY arrangement, which separated commonly paired letters to prevent the mechanical typebars from jamming, was refined through trial and error and first appeared in an 1873 prototype. Sholes sold his patent rights to the Remington Arms Company, which manufactured the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer beginning in 1874. The machine sold poorly at first, priced at $125, equivalent to roughly $3,500 today. The typewriter’s real impact was social as much as mechanical. By the 1880s, businesses began adopting the technology, and typing became one of the first white-collar professions open to women. The percentage of female clerical workers in the United States rose from 4 percent in 1880 to 77 percent by 1930, a transformation driven largely by the machine Sholes had built over a hardware store.

British and French soldiers opened fire on Chinese demonstrators marching past the Shameen concession in Canton, killing at least 52 protesters in what became known as the Shameen Incident. The massacre galvanized anti-imperialist sentiment across China, triggering a 16-month boycott of British goods in Canton and Hong Kong that accelerated the nationalist movement. The shooting occurred on June 23, 1925, during a period of intensifying labor unrest and anti-foreign sentiment following the May Thirtieth Movement, when British police in Shanghai's International Settlement had killed several Chinese protesters. Workers and students in Canton organized a mass demonstration that marched past the Shameen concession, a small island in the Pearl River where British and French companies maintained offices and residences protected by foreign troops. As the demonstrators passed the concession's perimeter, shooting broke out. The foreign authorities claimed the protesters fired first; Chinese witnesses insisted the foreign soldiers opened fire without provocation. At least 52 Chinese demonstrators were killed and over 100 wounded. The immediate consequence was the Canton-Hong Kong Strike, one of the longest and most effective anti-imperialist actions in Chinese history. Workers walked out of British enterprises in Hong Kong and Canton, and a comprehensive boycott of British goods was organized by the nascent Chinese Communist Party and the Guomindang. The boycott lasted from June 1925 to October 1926 and severely damaged British commercial interests in South China. The incident accelerated the Northern Expedition, the military campaign that would unify much of China under the Guomindang by 1928, and deepened the alliance between Chinese nationalists and communists that would hold until 1927.

Robert Clive defeated an army of 50,000 with fewer than 3,000 soldiers, and the victory changed the trajectory of an entire subcontinent. At the Battle of Plassey on June 23, 1757, Clive’s combined force of British East India Company troops and Indian sepoys routed Siraj ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, in an engagement that lasted barely eight hours and cost the British fewer than 75 casualties. The battle was won before it began. Clive had secretly negotiated with Mir Jafar, one of Siraj’s senior commanders, who agreed to hold back his troops during the fighting in exchange for being installed as the new nawab. When the battle opened with an artillery exchange and a sudden monsoon rainstorm, most of Siraj’s massive army stood idle on the field. Mir Jafar’s forces, comprising roughly a third of the Nawab’s army, never engaged. Siraj fled the battlefield when it became clear his generals had abandoned him. He was captured and executed days later. The immediate cause of the conflict was the Black Hole of Calcutta incident the previous year, when Siraj’s forces captured the British garrison at Fort William and allegedly confined 146 prisoners in a small cell overnight, with most dying of suffocation. Though modern historians debate the exact death toll, the incident gave Clive the justification to mount a punitive expedition from Madras with the backing of the East India Company’s directors. Plassey transformed the East India Company from a trading enterprise into a territorial power. Mir Jafar, installed as a puppet nawab, granted the Company control of Bengal’s revenues, the richest province in India. The wealth extracted from Bengal financed further military expansion and helped fund Britain’s Industrial Revolution. What began as a commercial dispute ended as the first step in nearly two centuries of British colonial rule over the Indian subcontinent.