September 14 in History

Theodore Roosevelt was hiking in the Adirondack Mountains when a ranger arrived with an urgent telegram on September 13, 1901. President William McKinley, shot eight days earlier by an anarchist at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, had taken a fatal turn. Roosevelt raced down the mountain through the night by buckboard wagon, but McKinley died at 2:15 a.m. on September 14 before he arrived. At forty-two, Roosevelt became the youngest president in American history, and the country lurched into a new political era. McKinley had been greeting the public at the Temple of Music in Buffalo on September 6 when Leon Czolgosz, a twenty-eight-year-old unemployed factory worker who had fallen under the spell of anarchist ideology, approached in the receiving line with a revolver concealed beneath a handkerchief. He fired twice at point-blank range. One bullet bounced off a coat button; the other lodged in McKinley’s abdomen, passing through the stomach and pancreas. Surgeons operated immediately but could not locate the bullet, and gangrene set in within days. McKinley’s presidency had been defined by the gold standard, protective tariffs, and the Spanish-American War that made the United States an imperial power. He was a cautious, corporate-friendly Republican, and the party bosses who had placed Roosevelt on the ticket as vice president, partly to neutralize his reformist energy, were horrified at the prospect of him in the White House. Senator Mark Hanna reportedly muttered, "Now look, that damned cowboy is president of the United States." Roosevelt wasted little time confirming their fears. He launched antitrust prosecutions against railroad monopolies, mediated the 1902 coal strike in favor of workers, signed the Pure Food and Drug Act, and established the national parks system. The Progressive Era he ignited reshaped the relationship between government and industry for decades. Czolgosz was tried, convicted, and electrocuted within seven weeks of the shooting, but the assassination’s most lasting consequence was the accidental elevation of the most transformative president since Lincoln.

A Soviet sphere packed with instruments and pennants bearing the hammer and sickle slammed into the lunar surface east of the Sea of Serenity at roughly 7,500 miles per hour on September 14, 1959. Luna 2 became the first man-made object to reach another celestial body, and the impact scattered Soviet emblems across the Moon’s regolith in what amounted to the most dramatic flag-planting in history. The Soviet space program had been attempting lunar missions since January 1959, when Luna 1 missed the Moon by nearly 4,000 miles due to a timing error in its upper-stage engine cutoff. The engineering team, led by chief designer Sergei Korolev, corrected the trajectory calculations, and Luna 2 launched aboard a Vostok rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome on September 12. The spacecraft carried no braking system; the mission was a controlled crash, designed to prove that Soviet rockets could reach the Moon and deliver a payload with precision. The probe transmitted data on radiation belts and cosmic rays during its 33.5-hour flight, confirming that the Moon possessed no significant magnetic field or radiation belts of its own. Soviet astronomers at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in England tracked the signal until the moment of impact, at which point transmission ceased abruptly, confirming the crash landing. The achievement was announced by Nikita Khrushchev, who happened to be visiting the United States at the time and presented a replica of the pennants to President Eisenhower as a diplomatic gift and a not-so-subtle reminder of Soviet technological superiority. Luna 2 landed during a period of maximum American anxiety about the space race. Sputnik had orbited the Earth two years earlier, and the United States had yet to match any major Soviet first. The impact on the Moon deepened the sense of urgency that would lead President Kennedy to commit the nation to a crewed lunar landing within the decade. Ten years later, Apollo 11 fulfilled that pledge, but Luna 2 holds the distinction of being the first human artifact to touch another world.

Congress authorized the first peacetime military draft in American history on September 16, 1940, requiring all men between twenty-one and thirty-five to register for potential military service. The Selective Training and Service Act passed by a single vote in the House of Representatives, reflecting a nation deeply divided between interventionists who saw war with Germany as inevitable and isolationists who believed America could and should stay out of the European conflict. The legislation emerged from a growing recognition that the United States military was woefully unprepared for a major war. The Army had fewer than 270,000 soldiers in mid-1940, ranked nineteenth in the world behind Portugal and just ahead of Bulgaria. France had fallen to Nazi Germany in six weeks that June, Britain stood alone across the English Channel, and Japan was expanding aggressively in East Asia. President Roosevelt, seeking an unprecedented third term, tread carefully between the public desire for peace and the strategic necessity of building a fighting force. Senator Edward Burke and Representative James Wadsworth introduced the bill, which required twelve months of military training for draftees, limited their service to the Western Hemisphere, and capped the standing army at 900,000 men. The draft lottery took place on October 29, 1940, when Secretary of War Henry Stimson, blindfolded, drew capsule number 158 from a glass bowl, selecting the first men for service. Roughly 16 million Americans would eventually serve in World War II, the vast majority through the Selective Service system. The peacetime draft of 1940 gave the military a year of training and organizational buildup before Pearl Harbor, an advantage that proved critical when the country entered the war in December 1941. Without it, the United States would have faced the Axis powers with a skeletal, undertrained force. The draft remained in effect continuously from 1940 until 1973, shaping American society, politics, and the Vietnam-era antiwar movement that ultimately ended conscription.

Joe Kittinger launched from Caribou, Maine on September 14, 1984, in a helium balloon called the Balloon of Peace, and landed in Savona, Italy 83 hours and 40 minutes later, becoming the first person to fly a gas balloon solo across the Atlantic Ocean. The flight covered 3,535 miles. He was 56 years old. Born in Tampa, Florida on July 27, 1928, Kittinger was an Air Force test pilot and career adventurer whose life reads like a catalog of improbable feats. He is best known for Project Excelsior in 1960, when he stepped out of a balloon gondola at 102,800 feet, the edge of space, and free-fell for over four minutes before opening his parachute. He reached speeds of 614 miles per hour during the descent. The record for highest parachute jump stood for 52 years, until Felix Baumgartner broke it in 2012 with Kittinger himself serving as capsule communicator on the ground. During the Vietnam War, Kittinger flew 483 combat missions as a fighter pilot. He was shot down on May 11, 1972, and spent eleven months as a prisoner of war at the Hanoi Hilton. He was tortured and kept in solitary confinement. His Atlantic crossing in 1984 was plagued by equipment problems. His communication gear failed. His heater broke, leaving him at high altitude in freezing temperatures. He navigated by celestial observation and dead reckoning. When he landed in northern Italy, he had been awake for most of the flight, surviving on minimal food and water in an unpressurized gondola that offered little protection from the cold. The flight demonstrated that long-duration, high-altitude balloon travel was feasible for solo pilots, expanding the envelope for atmospheric research and adventure flights. It built on a tradition of balloon exploration that stretched back to the eighteenth century while pushing the technology's limits with modern materials and meteorological forecasting. Kittinger was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for his career of achievements. He died on December 9, 2022, at 94.

Napoleon Bonaparte rode into Moscow on September 14, 1812, expecting to receive a delegation of city officials bearing the keys to the Russian capital. Instead, he found empty streets, deserted mansions, and a city stripped of provisions. The Grande Armee, 600,000 strong when it crossed the Niemen River three months earlier, had been reduced to roughly 100,000 exhausted soldiers by disease, desertion, and the brutal Battle of Borodino fought a week before. The prize they had marched so far to claim was a trap. The Russian strategy of trading space for time, implemented by generals Barclay de Tolly and then Kutuzov, had refused Napoleon the decisive battle he needed. The French army advanced deeper into Russia through a summer of scorching heat, its supply lines stretching to the breaking point across hundreds of miles of hostile territory. Borodino, fought on September 7, killed or wounded roughly 70,000 men on both sides but decided nothing strategically. Kutuzov withdrew his battered army and allowed Napoleon to enter Moscow unopposed. Fires broke out across the city within hours of the French arrival. Whether set by Russian patriots, released convicts, or accidental sparks remains debated, but Governor Rostopchin had ordered the fire brigades to evacuate their equipment before the French arrived. The conflagration burned for three days and consumed three-quarters of Moscow’s buildings, destroying the shelter, food stores, and winter quarters Napoleon desperately needed. Napoleon waited five weeks in the smoldering ruins, sending repeated peace overtures to Tsar Alexander I, who refused to reply. On October 19, with temperatures dropping and no prospect of negotiation, Napoleon ordered the retreat. The return march through the Russian winter became one of the greatest military catastrophes in history. Starvation, cold, Cossack raids, and the crossing of the Berezina River reduced the army to fewer than 27,000 effective soldiers by the time it staggered out of Russia in December. The invasion’s failure shattered Napoleon’s aura of invincibility and set the coalition of European powers on the path to his abdication in 1814.