June 6 in History

Thousands of Memphis residents climbed the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River on the morning of June 6, 1862, and watched their city’s defenses destroyed in ninety minutes. Union ironclads and ram boats engaged the Confederate River Defense Fleet in a battle so lopsided that only one Confederate vessel escaped. Seven ships were sunk, burned, or captured. The Union lost no ships and suffered fewer than ten casualties. Memphis surrendered before noon. The engagement was the culmination of a Union campaign to seize control of the Mississippi River, a strategic objective that Abraham Lincoln called the "backbone of the rebellion." Federal forces had already captured New Orleans from the south in April and had been fighting their way downriver from Cairo, Illinois, since February. Memphis was the last significant Confederate stronghold between those two points. Controlling the river would split the Confederacy in two, separating the resource-rich states of Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana from the eastern theater. The Confederate River Defense Fleet was a collection of converted steamboats, inadequately armored and poorly coordinated. The fleet’s commanders were civilian riverboat captains with no naval training and no unified command structure. They faced a Union flotilla that included purpose-built ironclad gunboats and Colonel Charles Ellet’s ram boats, vessels designed to use speed and armored prows to sink enemy ships by collision. Ellet’s flagship, the Queen of the West, charged directly into the Confederate line, and the battle devolved into a close-quarters melee that the outgunned defenders could not survive. Colonel Ellet was the only Union fatality in the engagement, dying two weeks later from a pistol wound sustained during the battle. Memphis’s fall opened the river to Union traffic as far south as Vicksburg, Mississippi, which held out for another year before surrendering on July 4, 1863. With Vicksburg’s fall, the Confederacy was severed, and the Mississippi flowed, as Lincoln said, "unvexed to the sea."

Wall Street operated on the honor system for 150 years, and the crash of 1929 revealed exactly how much that honor was worth. Congress passed the Securities Exchange Act on June 6, 1934, creating the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate stock exchanges, enforce disclosure requirements, and prosecute fraud. For the first time in American history, the federal government would police the markets with subpoena power and the authority to shut down trading. The 1929 crash had exposed a financial system riddled with manipulation. Insiders routinely traded on nonpublic information. Pool operators coordinated buying campaigns to inflate stock prices, then dumped their shares on unsuspecting retail investors. Companies published financial statements that ranged from misleading to fictional. Short sellers spread false rumors to drive prices down. Banks lent depositors’ money to speculators who bet it on margins as thin as ten percent. When the bubble burst, $30 billion in market value evaporated in two weeks, and the banking system collapsed under the weight of bad loans. Senate hearings chaired by Ferdinand Pecora in 1933 and 1934 documented the abuses in withering detail. Pecora, a former New York prosecutor, forced J.P. Morgan Jr. to admit he had paid no income tax in 1930, 1931, or 1932. National City Bank’s chairman, Charles Mitchell, was shown to have sold bank stock to his wife at an artificial loss to reduce his tax bill. The testimony destroyed public trust in the financial establishment and created the political will for regulation that had not existed before the crash. President Roosevelt appointed Joseph P. Kennedy, himself a former stock speculator, as the SEC’s first chairman, reasoning that it took a fox to guard a henhouse. Kennedy proved effective, establishing the commission’s credibility with the financial industry and building an enforcement apparatus that endured. The SEC’s framework of mandatory disclosure, registration requirements, and antifraud rules became the model for securities regulation worldwide and remains the foundation of American capital markets ninety years later.

Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower had already drafted a statement accepting full responsibility for failure. On the morning of June 6, 1944, over 156,000 Allied troops crossed the English Channel in the largest amphibious invasion in human history, landing on five beaches along a 50-mile stretch of the Normandy coast. The note in Eisenhower’s pocket, never released, read: "The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone." Operation Overlord had been in planning for two years. The Allies assembled 6,939 naval vessels, 11,590 aircraft, and an army drawn from a dozen nations in staging areas across southern England. An elaborate deception campaign, Operation Fortitude, used inflatable tanks, fake radio traffic, and the reputation of General George Patton to convince the German high command that the real invasion would target Pas-de-Calais, 150 miles to the northeast. Hitler kept his most powerful panzer divisions there for weeks after the Normandy landings, waiting for an attack that never came. The landings were brutal and chaotic. At Omaha Beach, American troops from the 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions faced entrenched German defenders on bluffs overlooking the shore and suffered roughly 2,400 casualties. Soldiers drowned under the weight of their equipment in water deeper than expected. Tanks designed to float sank. Naval bombardment had missed most of the defensive positions. At Utah Beach, Gold, Juno, and Sword, resistance was lighter, and forces pushed inland by nightfall. Airborne troops who had parachuted behind the beaches in the early morning hours secured bridges and road junctions despite being scattered across the countryside. By the end of June 6, the Allies held a tenuous beachhead and had suffered approximately 10,000 casualties, including 4,414 confirmed dead. The number was lower than planners had feared. Within a week, 326,000 troops, 50,000 vehicles, and 100,000 tons of supplies had crossed the beaches. Paris was liberated on August 25. Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945. The war Eisenhower feared might be lost on that single Tuesday morning was won in eleven months.

Robert Francis Kennedy died at 1:44 AM on June 6, 1968, at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. He was forty-two years old, a father of ten children with an eleventh on the way, and the presumptive front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. He had survived twenty-five hours and forty-one minutes after being shot three times by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel. Kennedy had just won the California primary, the largest remaining contest in the Democratic race. His victory speech in the hotel ballroom had ended with a characteristic blend of idealism and self-deprecation. He thanked his supporters, acknowledged his opponent Eugene McCarthy’s campaign, and closed with "on to Chicago, and let’s win there." An aide directed him through the kitchen to avoid the crush in the main corridor. The decision to take that route was made in seconds. Sirhan fired eight rounds from a .22 caliber revolver at close range. One bullet entered behind Kennedy’s right ear and fragmented in his brain. Two other bullets struck his right armpit. Former decathlete Rafer Johnson and football player Rosey Grier wrestled Sirhan to a steam table and pinned him down. Kennedy lay on the kitchen floor, his eyes open, and asked "Is everybody okay?" before losing consciousness. Surgeons operated for nearly four hours but could not repair the damage. Kennedy’s death, coming sixty-three days after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in Memphis, shattered whatever remained of the political cohesion that had carried the civil rights movement and the Great Society. The 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago descended into violence between police and antiwar protesters. Hubert Humphrey won the nomination and lost the general election to Richard Nixon. The liberal coalition that Kennedy had been attempting to build, uniting working-class whites, African Americans, and Latinos, did not coalesce again in his generation.

Walter Chrysler had retired twice before he built the company that bore his name. A former railroad mechanic who taught himself automotive engineering by disassembling a 1908 Locomobile, Chrysler had run Buick for General Motors, quit over disagreements with Billy Durant, been lured back to rescue the failing Willys-Overland company, and then taken over the struggling Maxwell Motor Company. On June 6, 1925, he reorganized Maxwell into the Chrysler Corporation and launched a car that broke every assumption about what a mid-priced automobile could be. The Chrysler Six debuted at the 1924 New York Auto Show, a full year before the company officially existed. Maxwell’s dealers had to display it outside the show because the car lacked a manufacturer with exhibition credentials. The Six featured a high-compression engine that produced 68 horsepower from six cylinders, roughly fifty percent more power than comparable cars. It also included hydraulic brakes on all four wheels, a full-pressure oiling system, and an air cleaner. The car cost $1,565 and sold 32,000 units in its first year. Chrysler grew with extraordinary speed. In 1928, the company acquired Dodge Brothers, instantly gaining a dealer network, a truck division, and manufacturing capacity that vaulted Chrysler into the Big Three alongside General Motors and Ford. That same year, Chrysler introduced the Plymouth and DeSoto brands to cover the lower and middle price ranges. By 1929, revenue had reached $700 million and the company was building the Chrysler Building in Manhattan, briefly the world’s tallest structure. Walter Chrysler died in 1940, and the company he founded spent the following decades cycling between innovation and near-collapse. Chrysler introduced the first mass-produced car with an automatic transmission in 1941, pioneered the muscle car era with the Hemi engine in the 1950s, and came within days of bankruptcy in 1979 before Lee Iacocca secured a controversial federal loan guarantee. The company merged with Daimler-Benz in 1998, was sold to Cerberus Capital in 2007, went through bankruptcy in 2009, and is now part of Stellantis. The name survives, but the independence Walter Chrysler built from a failed motor company lasted only eight decades.

Swiss pikemen charged downhill into the French camp at dawn and shattered one of Europe’s most professional armies in under two hours. The Battle of Novara on June 6, 1513, routed the forces of Louis XII of France and forced France to abandon the Duchy of Milan for the second time in a decade. The restored Duke Massimiliano Sforza owed his throne entirely to Swiss military power, a debt that reduced him to a figurehead in his own capital. The French had invaded Milan in the spring of 1513 with a large army under Louis de la Tremoille, attempting to reclaim territory lost after the Battle of Ravenna the previous year. They besieged Novara, where Sforza and a small Swiss garrison were holed up. Swiss reinforcements, numbering roughly 8,000 men, arrived from the canton of Uri and attacked without waiting for artillery or cavalry support. They marched through the night and hit the French positions at first light. The assault was tactically reckless and devastatingly effective. French artillery fired into the advancing Swiss columns and inflicted heavy casualties during the approach, but once the pike formations reached the gun line, the battle was decided. Swiss halberdiers overran the cannon positions while the main pike blocks drove into the French infantry and cavalry. La Tremoille’s landsknecht mercenaries, German pikemen hired to counter the Swiss, broke after fierce hand-to-hand fighting. The French army retreated across the Alps, abandoning its baggage, artillery, and any claim to Milan. Novara cemented Switzerland’s reputation as the premier military power in Europe, a status built entirely on infantry discipline and physical aggression. Swiss mercenaries were the most sought-after soldiers on the continent, hired by popes, kings, and city-states who could afford their fees. That reputation ended two years later at Marignano, where Francis I of France used coordinated artillery and cavalry to finally defeat a Swiss pike formation in open battle. Novara was the last great Swiss victory in the Italian Wars, the final proof that men with pikes could beat armies with guns, before gunpowder rendered the method obsolete.