May 6 in History

Charles III, Duke of Bourbon, was killed by an arquebus shot while scaling the walls of Rome at dawn on May 6, 1527. His death should have ended the assault. Instead, his leaderless army of 20,000 Imperial troops, many of them unpaid German Landsknechts and Spanish veterans, stormed the city with a ferocity that stunned even sixteenth-century Europe. The Sack of Rome lasted over a week and became one of the defining atrocities of the Renaissance. The attack grew from the tangled politics of the Italian Wars, in which Pope Clement VII had shifted his allegiance from Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to the League of Cognac, an alliance with France, Venice, and Milan. Charles V, furious at the pope's betrayal, sent an army south through Italy but failed to pay it. The troops, starving and mutinous, were promised the wealth of Rome as compensation. The city's defenses were feeble. Rome's garrison consisted of roughly 5,000 militia and 189 Swiss Guards. The Swiss fought a rearguard action on the steps of St. Peter's Basilica, losing 147 men while allowing Pope Clement VII and a handful of attendants to escape through the Passetto di Borgo, a fortified corridor connecting the Vatican to Castel Sant'Angelo. What followed was systematic plunder. Imperial soldiers looted churches, palaces, and private homes. They ransomed cardinals and nobles, tortured citizens to reveal hidden valuables, and destroyed priceless manuscripts and artworks. Nuns were assaulted. Tombs were broken open for jewelry. Lutheran Landsknechts, harboring Reformation hatred for the papacy, staged mock papal elections and paraded through the streets in stolen vestments. The pope remained besieged in Castel Sant'Angelo for seven months before surrendering and paying a massive ransom. The sack killed an estimated 6,000 to 12,000 Romans and drove the city's population from 55,000 to under 10,000. The event shattered the papacy's political authority in Italy and is widely regarded by historians as marking the end of the Italian High Renaissance.

Thirty-six seconds. That is how long it took for the largest flying object ever built to transform from a symbol of technological triumph into a burning skeleton of aluminum framing over the landing field at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. The Hindenburg disaster on May 6, 1937, killed 36 of the 97 people aboard and one ground crew member, and it destroyed public confidence in rigid airship travel permanently. The LZ 129 Hindenburg was 804 feet long, nearly the length of the Titanic, and held 7 million cubic feet of hydrogen gas in sixteen cells within its duralumin frame. The Zeppelin Company had wanted to use nonflammable helium, but the United States, the only commercial producer, had embargoed helium exports to Nazi Germany. Hydrogen was lighter and provided better lift, but it was catastrophically flammable. The airship had completed ten successful round trips between Frankfurt and Lakehurst in 1936. On this flight, its first of the 1937 season, the Hindenburg arrived over Lakehurst on the evening of May 6 carrying 36 passengers and 61 crew. Captain Max Pruss circled the field for over an hour waiting for a thunderstorm to pass before beginning his approach. At 7:25 PM, as ground handlers grabbed the mooring lines, witnesses saw a small flame near the top of the tail section. Within seconds, the hydrogen ignited in a chain reaction that consumed the ship from stern to bow. Radio broadcaster Herbert Morrison, recording a routine arrival for WLS Chicago, captured the destruction in real time. His anguished narration, "Oh, the humanity!" became one of the most recognized phrases in broadcast history. The cause remains debated. Leading theories include static discharge igniting a hydrogen leak, a structural bracing wire snapping and puncturing a gas cell, or the flammability of the outer fabric's aluminum-doped coating. Whatever the ignition source, the disaster ended the age of rigid airships. Every major airline that had considered zeppelin service abandoned its plans within weeks.

Gustave Eiffel climbed 1,710 steps to plant the French tricolor at the summit of his iron tower on March 31, 1889. The public had to wait until May 6, when the Exposition Universelle officially opened and visitors were first permitted to ascend the structure that half of Paris's cultural establishment had condemned as a monstrosity. Over two million people rode the elevators during the six-month fair, and the tower that artists had called a disgrace became the most visited monument on Earth. The tower was conceived as a temporary entrance arch for the 1889 World's Fair, celebrating the centennial of the French Revolution. Eiffel's firm won the design competition against 107 other proposals, and construction began in January 1887. The project required 18,038 individual iron pieces, 2.5 million rivets, and a workforce of 300 laborers on site who assembled the prefabricated components with extraordinary precision. Opposition was fierce and public. A petition signed by Guy de Maupassant, Alexandre Dumas fils, Charles Garnier, and other prominent figures called the tower "a gigantic black factory smokestack" that would disfigure the Paris skyline. Maupassant reportedly ate lunch in the tower's restaurant because it was the only place in Paris from which he could not see it. The engineering was revolutionary. At 984 feet, the tower was nearly double the height of the Washington Monument, then the world's tallest structure. Eiffel's team used wind-tunnel data and mathematical models to design the curved iron lattice that distributed wind loads efficiently across the four legs. The tower's sway in high winds never exceeds 4.75 inches, a remarkable achievement for a structure built without computers or modern materials science. The planned twenty-year permit would have required demolition in 1909, but the tower's value as a radio transmission platform saved it. Military wireless signals broadcast from the summit during World War I proved the structure's strategic worth. The Eiffel Tower has since welcomed over 300 million visitors, undergone multiple renovations and repainting cycles, and remains the most recognizable architectural silhouette in the world.

Congress did not pretend the law was about anything other than race. The Chinese Exclusion Act, signed by President Chester A. Arthur on May 6, 1882, banned Chinese laborers from entering the United States for ten years, made Chinese residents permanently ineligible for citizenship, and established the first immigration restriction in American history based explicitly on national origin and ethnicity. Chinese immigration to the United States had surged during the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s. By 1880, roughly 105,000 Chinese immigrants lived in the western states, representing less than 0.2 percent of the total population. They worked in mining, railroad construction, agriculture, and laundry services, filling labor needs that white workers avoided. Anti-Chinese violence had been escalating for years. The 1871 Chinese Massacre in Los Angeles killed at least 17 people. Rock Springs, Wyoming, and other western towns experienced mob attacks on Chinese communities. The nativist movement portrayed Chinese workers as an economic threat who depressed wages through their willingness to accept lower pay, and a cultural threat whose customs and religions were incompatible with American society. California's congressional delegation led the legislative push. Senator John F. Miller argued on the Senate floor that Chinese immigrants were "machine-like" workers incapable of assimilation. President Arthur vetoed an initial version that imposed a twenty-year ban, considering it a violation of the Burlingame Treaty with China. The revised ten-year version passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. The act was renewed in 1892 by the Geary Act, which added the requirement that Chinese residents carry identification certificates at all times. Subsequent legislation made the exclusion permanent in 1902. The law was not repealed until 1943, when China's status as a World War II ally made the racial ban diplomatically untenable, though immigration was limited to a token quota of 105 persons per year. The Chinese Exclusion Act established the legal and bureaucratic framework for all subsequent American immigration restriction.