October 29 in History

Sir Walter Raleigh, courtier, explorer, poet, historian, and prisoner, knelt before the executioner's block at the Old Palace Yard in Westminster on the morning of October 29, 1618, and reportedly told the headsman, "Strike, man, strike!" He was 66 years old and had spent the last thirteen of those years in the Tower of London. His execution marked the end of the most extraordinary and turbulent career in Elizabethan England. Raleigh had been one of Queen Elizabeth I's favorites, a dashing figure who helped establish the first English colonies in North America, introduced tobacco and potatoes to England (or so legend claims), and wrote some of the finest poetry of the Elizabethan age. He organized expeditions to Virginia and personally led two voyages to South America in search of El Dorado, the fabled city of gold. Elizabeth rewarded him with estates, monopolies, and the captaincy of the Yeomen of the Guard, making him one of the wealthiest and most visible men in England. Everything changed when Elizabeth died in 1603 and James I took the throne. Raleigh had powerful enemies who persuaded the new king that he had been involved in a conspiracy to place a rival claimant on the throne. Raleigh was convicted of treason in a trial widely regarded as a travesty of justice, with the Lord Chief Justice reportedly telling the jury that Raleigh had "the most horrible treasons that ever existed." The death sentence was suspended, and Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower, where he spent thirteen years writing The History of the World, a vast work of scholarship and reflection. In 1616, Raleigh persuaded James to release him for one final expedition to the Orinoco River in search of a gold mine. The expedition was a disaster. Raleigh's men attacked a Spanish settlement in violation of the king's explicit orders, and Raleigh's eldest son was killed in the fighting. Spain's ambassador demanded Raleigh's head, and James, desperate to maintain peaceful relations with Spain, obliged. The original treason conviction from 1603 was dusted off and enforced. Raleigh faced his execution with theatrical composure, running his finger along the blade and remarking, "This is a sharp medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases." His wife, Bess, had his head embalmed and reportedly kept it in a velvet bag for the remaining 29 years of her life.

Sixteen million shares changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange on October 29, 1929, a volume record that would not be surpassed for nearly forty years. The ticker tape ran four hours behind actual trades. Prices fell so fast that many investors had no idea they had been wiped out until they read the evening papers. Black Tuesday was the day the Roaring Twenties died, and the Great Depression was born. The crash had been building for weeks. September's record highs gave way to increasingly volatile trading in early October. Black Thursday on the 24th saw the first wave of panic selling, briefly halted by a bankers' consortium that bought blue-chip stocks to stabilize prices. Black Monday on the 28th destroyed the illusion of stability when the Dow fell nearly 13 percent with no intervention. By Tuesday morning, the panic was total. Sell orders flooded in from across the country before the opening bell. Margin calls, demands that investors put up more cash to cover their leveraged positions, forced millions of shares onto the market simultaneously. There were virtually no buyers. Stocks that had been worth fortunes a month earlier sold for pennies. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell another 12 percent, bringing the two-day loss to roughly 25 percent. Outside the Exchange, crowds gathered on Wall Street. Police Commissioner Grover Whalen stationed extra officers around the financial district. The rumors of mass suicides were largely exaggerated, but the despair was real. The human cost multiplied over the following years. Banks that had lent heavily to stock speculators began failing. Credit dried up. Businesses closed. Unemployment rose from 3 percent in 1929 to 25 percent by 1933. Industrial production fell by nearly half. Farm prices collapsed, and foreclosures swept across rural America. The global economy followed the United States down as international trade contracted and European banks, heavily exposed to American loans, failed in cascading waves. Black Tuesday did not cause the Great Depression by itself. Structural weaknesses in the banking system, agricultural overproduction, income inequality, and the Federal Reserve's tight monetary policy all contributed. But October 29 was the moment the illusion of permanent prosperity shattered. The crash destroyed public faith in financial markets and led directly to the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the regulatory framework that governed American finance for the rest of the century.

Israeli paratroopers dropped into the Sinai Peninsula on October 29, 1956, and armored columns crossed the border into Egypt, launching the military operation that became the Suez Crisis, the Cold War's most dangerous intersection of colonial ambition, superpower rivalry, and Middle Eastern nationalism. Within a week, Britain and France would join the attack, and both superpowers would force them to retreat in humiliation, redrawing the geopolitical map of the world. The crisis began four months earlier when Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, the vital waterway connecting the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean that had been owned and operated by an Anglo-French company since its construction in 1869. Nasser seized the canal to fund the Aswan High Dam after the United States and Britain withdrew their financing offer, a move Nasser interpreted as economic warfare. Britain and France, whose economies depended heavily on the canal for oil shipments from the Persian Gulf, were furious. Prime Minister Anthony Eden viewed Nasser as a new Mussolini and secretly colluded with France and Israel to retake the canal by force. Under the Protocol of Sèvres, Israel would invade the Sinai, providing Britain and France with a pretext to intervene as "peacekeepers" separating the combatants, while actually seizing the Canal Zone. The Israeli assault went according to plan. Within days, Israeli forces under General Moshe Dayan overran the Sinai, routing the Egyptian army and reaching the outskirts of the canal. Britain and France issued their ultimatum, then began bombing Egyptian airfields on October 31 and landed paratroopers at Port Said on November 5. The military operation succeeded. The diplomatic reaction destroyed it. President Dwight Eisenhower, who had not been consulted, was livid at being ambushed by his own allies during a presidential election. The Soviet Union threatened rocket attacks on London and Paris. The United States imposed economic pressure through the International Monetary Fund, threatening Britain's currency reserves. Eisenhower and Khrushchev, finding themselves on the same side for the only time in the Cold War, demanded a ceasefire. Britain and France withdrew by December. Suez ended the era of European colonial intervention in the Middle East. Eden resigned in disgrace. Nasser emerged as the hero of Arab nationalism. And the United States and Soviet Union demonstrated that global power had shifted permanently from London and Paris to Washington and Moscow.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart stepped onto the podium at the Estates Theatre in Prague on the evening of October 29, 1787, and conducted the premiere of Don Giovanni, the opera that would be recognized as one of the supreme achievements of Western music. The audience, which had been waiting months for a new work from the composer who had conquered their city the previous winter with The Marriage of Figaro, erupted in ovations so prolonged that several numbers had to be repeated. Mozart had composed Don Giovanni in an extraordinary burst of creative energy during the summer and autumn of 1787, working from a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, the Venetian poet who had also written Figaro. Da Ponte adapted the story of Don Juan, the legendary Spanish libertine, from a recent opera by Giuseppe Gazzaniga, transforming a stock comic villain into a figure of terrifying vitality and charm. Mozart's music elevated the character further, giving him some of the most electrifying music ever written for the human voice. The opera was unlike anything audiences had encountered. Mozart refused to categorize it as either comedy or tragedy, calling it instead a "dramma giocoso," a playful drama. The work veers between farcical comedy and genuine horror, sometimes within a single scene. The supper scene in the final act, in which the stone statue of the Commendatore returns from the dead to drag Don Giovanni to hell, remains one of the most dramatic moments in operatic history. Prague adored the work. The city had adopted Mozart as its favorite composer after Figaro, and Don Giovanni confirmed the relationship. Mozart reportedly wrote the overture the night before the premiere, finishing the score so late that the ink was still wet on the orchestral parts when the musicians sight-read it at the performance. Whether this story is literally true or slightly exaggerated, it reflects the ferocious speed at which Mozart worked. Vienna's reception, when the opera was performed there in May 1788, was cooler. Emperor Joseph II reportedly told Mozart, "The opera is divine; perhaps even too beautiful for the taste of my Viennese." Mozart replied, "Let us give them time to chew on it." Time has proven him right. Don Giovanni is performed hundreds of times each year at opera houses worldwide and is routinely cited by conductors, singers, and scholars as the greatest opera ever composed.

Delegates from sixteen European nations and several humanitarian organizations gathered in Geneva on October 26, 1863, and over four days of deliberation adopted a series of resolutions that created the International Committee of the Red Cross, establishing the framework for the modern laws of war. The conference concluded on October 29 with eighteen states endorsing the principles that wounded soldiers should be treated regardless of which side they fought for, that medical personnel on the battlefield should be considered neutral, and that a distinctive emblem, a red cross on a white background, should identify them. The driving force behind the conference was Henry Dunant, a Swiss businessman who had witnessed the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino in 1859, where roughly 40,000 Austrian, French, and Sardinian soldiers lay dead, dying, or wounded on the field with virtually no organized medical care. Dunant mobilized local civilians to tend the wounded of all nationalities and later published A Memory of Solferino, a graphic account of the suffering he witnessed, which he distributed to political and military leaders across Europe. Dunant's book proposed two ideas: that every country should establish a permanent voluntary relief society to assist military medical services during wartime, and that an international agreement should protect wounded soldiers and those who cared for them. The Geneva lawyer Gustave Moynier and the Swiss general Guillaume-Henri Dufour helped organize the 1863 conference that translated these ideas into institutional form. The conference's resolutions led directly to the First Geneva Convention, signed in August 1864 by twelve states, which established the legal protections for wounded soldiers and medical personnel that remain the foundation of international humanitarian law. The red cross symbol, an inversion of the Swiss flag chosen to honor the host country, became one of the most recognized emblems in the world. The organization that began with Dunant's horror at Solferino has since expanded into a global movement with 192 national societies, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. The Geneva Conventions have been revised and expanded three times, most recently in 1949, and now protect not only wounded soldiers but also prisoners of war and civilians in conflict zones. Every armed conflict on Earth is subject to rules that trace directly to those four days in Geneva.

Office workers in lower Manhattan leaned out of their windows on October 28, 1886, tore long strips from stock ticker machines, and hurled them into the streets as President Grover Cleveland's procession passed below on its way to Bedloe's Island for the dedication of the Statue of Liberty. The impromptu blizzard of paper created the first ticker tape parade, a tradition that would mark every major New York celebration for the next century. The Statue of Liberty itself had been nearly two decades in the making. French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and engineer Gustave Eiffel (who designed the internal iron framework) had created a 151-foot copper figure representing Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom, as a gift from France to the United States commemorating the centennial of American independence and the friendship between the two republics. The statue was completed in Paris, disassembled into 350 individual pieces, shipped across the Atlantic in 214 crates, and reassembled on a massive granite and concrete pedestal on Bedloe's Island in New York Harbor. Funding the pedestal had been a national embarrassment. Congress refused to appropriate the money, and wealthy Americans showed little interest. Publisher Joseph Pulitzer launched a fundraising campaign in his newspaper, the New York World, shaming the rich and collecting small donations from more than 120,000 contributors, most giving less than a dollar. Pulitzer's campaign raised over $100,000 and turned the pedestal into a populist cause. The dedication ceremony on October 28 drew enormous crowds. Hundreds of boats jammed the harbor. Cleveland pulled a cord that released the French tricolor draped over the statue's face, and a cannon salute from nearby warships was so loud that speakers on the platform could not be heard. Suffragists chartered a boat and circled Bedloe's Island in protest, pointing out the irony of a female figure representing liberty in a nation that denied women the vote. The statue quickly became the most recognizable symbol of America to immigrants arriving by sea. Between 1886 and 1924, more than 14 million people entered the United States through nearby Ellis Island, and for most of them, the first sight of their new country was the copper figure holding a torch above the harbor. Emma Lazarus's sonnet "The New Colossus," with its famous lines about "huddled masses yearning to breathe free," was inscribed on a bronze plaque inside the pedestal in 1903, giving the statue the meaning it carries today.