November 7 in History

Thomas Nast drew a panicked elephant labeled "The Republican Vote" stumbling toward a pit in the November 7, 1874, edition of Harper's Weekly, and American politics gained one of its most enduring symbols. The cartoon, titled "The Third-Term Panic," depicted various animals representing newspapers and political factions fleeing from a donkey in a lion's skin labeled "Caesarism," Nast's commentary on Democratic fears that President Grant might seek a third term. Nast was already the most influential political cartoonist in America. His drawings for Harper's Weekly had helped bring down William "Boss" Tweed and the Tammany Hall machine in New York, costing Tweed's ring an estimated $200 million in stolen funds. Tweed reportedly said, "I don't care what they print about me. Most of my constituents can't read. But they can sure see them damn pictures." Nast had also popularized the donkey as a Democratic symbol, first using it in 1870. The elephant cartoon responded to a specific political crisis. Democrats appeared poised to win the House for the first time since before the Civil War, driven by disgust with Grant administration scandals. The New York Herald had warned that Grant harbored dictatorial ambitions, a charge Nast depicted as a donkey dressed in lion's clothing frightening the Republican elephant and other political animals into a stampede. Republicans did lose the House in 1874, ending their post-Civil War dominance. Nast continued using the elephant in subsequent cartoons, and other illustrators adopted it. Within a decade, the elephant was inseparable from Republican identity. Nast's broader legacy extends beyond party symbols: he created the modern image of Santa Claus, influenced Uncle Sam's design, and demonstrated that editorial cartoons could function as genuine political weapons.

Marie Curie received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on November 7, 1911, becoming the first person to win the award in two different scientific disciplines. The prize recognized her discovery of radium and polonium and her work isolating pure radium metal, achievements that required processing tons of pitchblende ore in a leaking shed with no ventilation. Her first Nobel, shared with husband Pierre and physicist Henri Becquerel in 1903 for research on radioactivity, had nearly been denied to her. The original nomination included only Pierre and Becquerel. Swedish mathematician Magnus Goesta Mittag-Leffler warned Pierre, who insisted Marie's name be added. The episode revealed how readily the scientific establishment erased women's contributions. By 1911, Curie was working under extraordinary pressure. Pierre had been killed in 1906 when a horse-drawn cart crushed his skull on a rain-slicked Paris street. She took over his professorship at the Sorbonne, becoming the university's first female professor. A tabloid campaign erupted around her relationship with physicist Paul Langevin, a married former student of Pierre's. French newspapers published stolen letters and portrayed Curie as a foreign home-wrecker. The Nobel committee reportedly considered asking her not to attend the ceremony; she went anyway. The radium she isolated transformed medicine, enabling targeted radiation therapy for cancer. The same element was killing her. Decades of handling radioactive materials without protection caused aplastic anemia, which took her life in 1934. Her laboratory notebooks remain so contaminated that they are stored in lead-lined boxes at the Bibliotheque nationale de France, and visitors must sign a liability waiver to view them. Her body was reinterred in the Pantheon in 1995, the first woman honored there for her own achievements.

Armed workers and soldiers loyal to the Bolshevik Party stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd on November 7, 1917, overthrowing the Provisional Government in a coup that took less than a day and changed the political landscape of the twentieth century. The ministers were arrested in the palace's White Dining Room. Alexander Kerensky, the head of government, had already fled the capital in a borrowed car, disguised as a Serbian officer. The October Revolution, as it became known under the old Julian calendar, was orchestrated by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky through the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. Trotsky had spent weeks positioning loyal units at key points throughout the city. On the morning of November 7, Red Guards seized telephone exchanges, bridges, railway stations, and the state bank with minimal resistance. The Provisional Government, weakened by months of paralysis and the disastrous continuation of World War I, had virtually no defenders. Lenin had returned to Russia from exile in April 1917 aboard a sealed train provided by Germany, which hoped Russian chaos would knock its eastern adversary out of the war. His April Theses demanded an immediate end to the war, redistribution of land to the peasants, and transfer of power to the soviets, the workers' councils that had sprung up across Russia. These positions attracted mass support from war-weary soldiers and land-hungry peasants. The new government moved swiftly. The Decree on Peace called for immediate negotiations to end the war. The Decree on Land abolished private ownership of farmland. Elections for a Constituent Assembly gave the Bolsheviks only 175 of 715 seats; Lenin dissolved the assembly after its first session in January 1918. The Russian Civil War that followed killed millions and ended with the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922, a state that endured for seven decades and reshaped global politics from Berlin to Beijing.

Eleanor Roosevelt was told by her mother-in-law what to wear, how to decorate her home, where to live, and how to raise her children. Sara Delano Roosevelt controlled every domestic detail of her son's household, and Eleanor endured it for years. She discovered Franklin's affair with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer, in 1918 when she found their correspondence. She offered a divorce. Sara blocked it, threatening to cut Franklin off financially. The marriage continued as a political partnership. Born in New York City on October 11, 1884, Eleanor lost both parents by age ten and was raised by her maternal grandmother. She attended Allenswood Academy in London, returned to New York, married Franklin in 1905, and spent the next two decades largely in her mother-in-law's shadow. Franklin's polio diagnosis in 1921 changed the dynamic: Eleanor became his eyes, ears, and political legs, traveling where he could not and reporting back. As First Lady from 1933 to 1945, she held press conferences open only to female journalists, forcing news organizations to hire women. She wrote "My Day," a syndicated newspaper column, for 27 years, averaging 500 to 600 words daily. She traveled the country visiting coal mines, sharecropper camps, homeless shelters, and military bases. She resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1939 when they refused to let Marian Anderson, a Black contralto, perform at Constitution Hall. After Franklin died on April 12, 1945, President Truman appointed her as a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly. She chaired the UN Commission on Human Rights, which drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted on December 10, 1948. The document, which she shepherded through two years of negotiations among delegates from countries with deeply different political systems, has been translated into over 500 languages and incorporated into constitutions worldwide. She was 62 when she began that work, already past the age when most public figures retire. She continued her advocacy, writing, and activism until her death on November 7, 1962, at 78.

Steve McQueen did his own driving in the Bullitt chase scene, one of the most famous sequences in Hollywood history: a 1968 Ford Mustang GT tearing through the streets of San Francisco, with McQueen at the wheel for much of it. He also raced motorcycles professionally, competed at Sebring, and attempted to enter Le Mans before the film's insurance company stopped him. Born Terence Steven McQueen in Beech Grove, Indiana on March 24, 1930, he grew up in a chaotic household. His father left before he was born. He was raised partly by an uncle in Slater, Missouri and partly by his mother in Los Angeles. He joined the Marines at seventeen, spent time in the brig for going AWOL, and later cited the discipline as the thing that saved him. He studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York under Sanford Meisner and broke through in the television series Wanted: Dead or Alive. His film career took off with The Magnificent Seven in 1960 and The Great Escape in 1963, where he performed the famous motorcycle jump attempt himself (the actual jump was done by stuntman Bud Ekins, but McQueen did the riding leading up to it). He became the highest-paid movie star in the world by the late 1960s. His appeal was minimalist: he said less than any leading man in Hollywood, and what he didn't say became the performance. The sand-cooler throwing in The Great Escape, the poker game in The Cincinnati Kid, the silent chase in Bullitt, all relied on physical presence rather than dialogue. Le Mans, his 1971 racing film, was shot during an actual 24-hour race, and McQueen insisted on racing his own Porsche 908 in the event. The film nearly bankrupted him. He was diagnosed with mesothelioma in 1979, a cancer caused by asbestos exposure. He had worn asbestos-lined racing suits and worked in environments with asbestos insulation throughout his career. American oncologists gave him no treatment options. He traveled to a clinic in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico for an experimental immunotherapy protocol that was not approved in the United States. He died there on November 7, 1980, at 50, following surgery to remove a massive tumor.

Americans went to bed on election night, November 7, 2000, without knowing who their next president would be, and the uncertainty lasted 36 days. The contest between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore came down to Florida, where the initial count showed Bush leading by fewer than 2,000 votes out of nearly six million cast. The margin was so thin that it triggered an automatic machine recount, which narrowed Bush's lead to 327 votes and launched the most contentious electoral dispute since 1876. The problems in Florida were systemic. Palm Beach County's confusing "butterfly ballot" design caused an estimated 2,000 Gore supporters to accidentally vote for Pat Buchanan. Thousands of ballots in predominantly Black precincts were rejected by aging punch-card machines that failed to fully punch through, leaving the infamous "hanging chads" and "dimpled chads" that election officials tried to interpret by hand. Felony disenfranchisement laws had removed an estimated 600,000 Floridians from the rolls. Gore requested manual recounts in four heavily Democratic counties. The legal battle escalated through Florida's courts, with the Florida Supreme Court ordering a statewide recount of all "undervotes," ballots where machines had detected no presidential choice. Bush's legal team, led by James Baker and Theodore Olson, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. On December 12, the Court ruled 5-4 in Bush v. Gore that the recount violated the Equal Protection Clause because different counties were using different standards to evaluate ballots. The majority further held that no constitutionally valid recount could be completed before the December 12 safe harbor deadline, effectively ending the contest. Gore conceded the following day. Bush won Florida's 25 electoral votes and the presidency by an Electoral College margin of 271-266, despite losing the national popular vote by over 500,000 votes. The decision remains one of the most debated in Supreme Court history.