June 5 in History

Harriet Beecher Stowe had never visited a Southern plantation when she began writing the most politically explosive novel in American history. Uncle Tom’s Cabin started appearing in serial form in the National Era, an abolitionist newspaper in Washington, D.C., on June 5, 1851. Stowe had promised the editor a story that would run for three or four installments. She wrote for forty-one weeks. Stowe was the daughter, sister, and wife of prominent Protestant clergymen, and she wrote from a religious conviction that slavery was a sin against God that stained every American who tolerated it. Her immediate catalyst was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required citizens in free states to assist in the capture and return of escaped slaves. The law forced Northerners who had previously ignored slavery to become complicit in it, and Stowe’s fury at that complicity drove her prose. Published as a book in March 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold 300,000 copies in its first year in the United States and over a million in Britain. The novel’s depiction of slavery’s brutality, particularly the death of Uncle Tom at the hands of the sadistic Simon Legree and the desperate river crossing of the enslaved mother Eliza, reached readers who had never engaged with abolitionist arguments. Stage adaptations played to packed theaters across the North. Southern critics attacked the book as propaganda and several states banned its sale. The novel did not cause the Civil War, but it radicalized millions of readers who might otherwise have remained indifferent to slavery’s expansion. When Abraham Lincoln allegedly met Stowe in 1862 and said, "So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war," he was exaggerating for effect. But only slightly. No other work of American fiction has altered public opinion on a political question with comparable force or speed.

Congress destroyed the gold standard in a single paragraph. House Joint Resolution 192, passed on June 5, 1933, voided every gold clause in every public and private contract in the United States. Creditors could no longer demand repayment in gold or its equivalent. Every debt in America, from Treasury bonds to farm mortgages, would be paid in paper dollars at whatever value the government chose to assign them. The resolution was the most radical monetary action in American history since the Civil War. The gold standard had been strangling the economy. Under the classical system, every dollar was backed by a fixed quantity of gold, which meant the money supply could not expand faster than the gold reserves. During the Depression, this constraint was catastrophic. Banks failed by the thousands, deflation crushed farmers and debtors, and the Federal Reserve could not inject liquidity into the system without violating its gold obligations. Countries that abandoned gold earlier, like Britain in 1931, recovered faster. President Franklin Roosevelt had already taken the United States off the gold standard domestically in April 1933, prohibiting private gold ownership and halting gold exports. The June 5 resolution completed the break by eliminating the legal requirement that debts be payable in gold. Roosevelt then used his new monetary freedom to devalue the dollar by 41 percent, raising the official price of gold from $20.67 to $35.00 per ounce in January 1934. The devaluation made American exports cheaper, raised commodity prices, and provided the inflation that debtors desperately needed. The Supreme Court upheld the resolution in a contentious 5-4 decision in 1935, with the dissent warning that the government had effectively repudiated its own obligations. The gold standard never returned. The Bretton Woods system of 1944 maintained a limited gold link for international transactions, but Richard Nixon severed that final connection in 1971. The paper dollar, unbacked by anything except the full faith and credit of the United States government, became the foundation of global commerce.

Milton Berle told Elvis Presley to leave his guitar backstage, and that decision changed American popular culture. On June 5, 1956, Presley performed "Hound Dog" on The Milton Berle Show without an instrument to hide behind, free to move his entire body in front of forty million television viewers. He ground his hips, dropped to his knees, and thrust his pelvis at the camera with a grin that was equal parts joy and provocation. The studio audience of teenage girls screamed so loudly that the band was inaudible. Their parents reached for the telephone. The backlash was immediate and vicious. The New York Times called the performance "a rock-and-roll variation on one of the more standard acts in the pointless art of strip-teasing." The Catholic weekly America demanded that the networks ban Presley from the airwaves. A congressman from Florida wrote to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover warning that Presley was a menace to American youth. Jack Gould, the most influential television critic of the era, wrote that popular music had "reached its lowest depths" with the performance. The controversy made Presley more famous than any amount of positive press could have. "Hound Dog," backed with "Don’t Be Cruel," was released as a single the following month and became the best-selling record of 1956, spending eleven weeks at number one. Ed Sullivan, who had publicly declared he would never book Presley, reversed himself and signed a three-appearance deal for the then-unprecedented sum of $50,000. During the third appearance, in January 1957, CBS famously filmed Presley only from the waist up. The Berle Show performance marked the moment rock and roll moved from a musical genre to a cultural revolution. Presley did not invent the music. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Fats Domino had been recording it for years. What Presley did, by performing Black musical traditions on mainstream white television with uninhibited physical abandon, was make the style impossible for America to ignore or contain.

Israeli pilots flew so low over the Mediterranean that Egyptian radar never saw them coming. At 7:45 AM on June 5, 1967, nearly the entire Israeli Air Force launched simultaneous strikes against Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian airfields. Within three hours, 452 Arab aircraft were destroyed, most of them still on the ground. The air campaign decided the Six-Day War before the ground war had properly begun. Tensions had been escalating for weeks. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had ordered United Nations peacekeepers out of the Sinai Peninsula in May, moved 100,000 troops and 1,000 tanks to the Israeli border, and closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. Jordan signed a mutual defense pact with Egypt. Syria had been shelling Israeli settlements from the Golan Heights for months. Israel’s military leadership concluded that war was inevitable and that striking first was the only way to offset the numerical advantage of a three-front conflict. The ground offensive moved with a speed that shocked the world. Israeli forces captured the entire Sinai Peninsula and reached the Suez Canal in three days. Jordanian forces were driven from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including the Old City and its Western Wall, by June 7. The Golan Heights fell on June 9 after a concentrated armored assault. By the time a ceasefire took hold on June 10, Israel had tripled its territory. The military victory was total and its political consequences remain unresolved. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula, and Golan Heights created a new reality that defied the predictions of every diplomatic framework. The Sinai was returned to Egypt in 1982 as part of the Camp David Accords. The Golan Heights was annexed in 1981. The West Bank and Gaza became the center of a conflict between Israeli security demands and Palestinian self-determination that, nearly six decades later, has produced neither peace nor a viable state for either side.

Sirhan Bishara Sirhan waited in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles with a .22 caliber Iver Johnson revolver. At 12:15 AM on June 5, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy walked through that pantry after claiming victory in the California Democratic primary. Sirhan fired eight shots. One bullet entered behind Kennedy’s right ear and lodged in his brain stem. Kennedy lay on the concrete floor, conscious but unable to move, while busboy Juan Romero knelt beside him and placed a rosary in his hand. He died at Good Samaritan Hospital twenty-six hours later. He was forty-two years old. Kennedy had entered the presidential race just eighty-two days earlier, announcing his candidacy on March 16, four days after Eugene McCarthy’s strong showing in the New Hampshire primary demonstrated Lyndon Johnson’s political vulnerability. Kennedy ran on opposition to the Vietnam War, poverty, and racial injustice. His campaign drew enormous, chaotic crowds. He was mobbed in city after city, his cufflinks ripped off, his hands scratched bloody by supporters who grabbed at him with a fervor that unnerved his security detail. The California primary was supposed to be the turning point. Kennedy won with 46 percent of the vote, defeating McCarthy and positioning himself as the leading challenger to Vice President Hubert Humphrey for the Democratic nomination. His victory speech in the Ambassador Hotel ballroom ended with the words "on to Chicago," referring to the convention. He never made it past the hotel kitchen. Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian born in Jerusalem, said he killed Kennedy because of Kennedy’s support for Israel. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment when California abolished capital punishment in 1972. Kennedy’s assassination, coming just two months after Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder, plunged the country into a despair that defined 1968 as the year American optimism broke.

Five young men in Los Angeles, all previously healthy, all gay, were dying of a pneumonia that had no business killing them. On June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control published a brief report in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report describing cases of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia among five homosexual men treated at three Los Angeles hospitals between October 1980 and May 1981. Two were already dead by the time the report appeared. The article, dry and clinical at just two pages, was the first official recognition of the epidemic that became known as AIDS. Dr. Michael Gottlieb, an immunologist at UCLA, had noticed the pattern: young men with devastated immune systems, riddled with infections that normally appeared only in transplant patients on immunosuppressive drugs. All five had cytomegalovirus and candidal mucosal infections. Their T-cell counts were virtually zero. Gottlieb alerted the CDC, which published the report as a routine epidemiological notice. An editorial note at the bottom suggested the cases might indicate "a cellular-immune dysfunction related to a common exposure." Within weeks, similar clusters appeared in New York and San Francisco. By the end of 1981, 270 cases of severe immune deficiency had been reported among gay men, and 121 of those patients were dead. The disease had no name, no known cause, and no treatment. Researchers initially called it GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency) before the term Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome replaced it in 1982 as cases appeared in hemophiliacs, intravenous drug users, and Haitian immigrants. The virus responsible, HIV, was identified independently by French and American researchers in 1983 and 1984. Effective antiretroviral treatment did not arrive until 1996. In the fifteen years between that first CDC report and the drugs that transformed AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable condition, the disease killed over 300,000 Americans and approximately 10 million people worldwide. The delay in political response, shaped by stigma and indifference toward the communities hardest hit, remains one of the great failures of modern public health.

Two armies that had once fought together as allies turned a Congolese city into a killing ground. Ugandan and Rwandan forces, both nominally present in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to pursue rebel groups threatening their borders, began fighting each other in the streets of Kisangani on June 5, 2000. Six days of artillery exchanges, small arms fire, and house-to-house combat killed an estimated 760 Congolese civilians and wounded over 1,700. Large sections of the city were reduced to rubble. Kisangani, the third-largest city in the DRC, had become a strategic prize in the overlapping conflicts collectively known as Africa’s Great War. Uganda and Rwanda had jointly invaded the Congo in 1998 to overthrow President Laurent-Desire Kabila, their former ally, but the two countries quickly fell out over control of the eastern Congo’s vast mineral wealth. Diamonds, gold, coltan, and timber made the region worth fighting for. The populations living there were treated as obstacles. The June 2000 battle was actually the third armed clash between Ugandan and Rwandan forces in Kisangani in two years. Each time, the combatants destroyed more of the city and killed more civilians. The United Nations, which had deployed a small peacekeeping mission to the Congo in 1999, lacked the mandate and the troops to intervene. The Security Council issued condemnations. Neither Kampala nor Kigali was moved. The International Court of Justice ruled in 2005 that Uganda had violated international law through its military activities in the DRC and owed reparations. In 2022, the court set the amount at $325 million. The Kisangani battles exposed a truth about the Congo wars that the international community was slow to acknowledge: foreign armies were not in the country to restore stability but to extract resources under the cover of security operations. The conflict eventually killed an estimated 5.4 million people, mostly through disease and starvation, making it the deadliest war since 1945.