Events

Eight members of the Chicago White Sox conspired with gamblers to lose the 1919 World Series on purpose, and when the Cincinnati Reds won the championship on October 9, the fix was already an open secret in press boxes and betting parlors across the country. The Black Sox Scandal nearly destroyed professional baseball, produced the sport's most famous ban, and created the commissioner system that governs the game to this day. The conspiracy was born from resentment. White Sox owner Charles Comiskey was the most notoriously cheap owner in baseball. His players — including "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, one of the greatest hitters in the game's history — were paid well below market rate. Comiskey had promised bonuses that never materialized and charged players for laundering their own uniforms. First baseman Chick Gandil, already connected to gambling circles, approached gambler Joseph "Sport" Sullivan with a proposition: for $100,000, he could deliver a World Series loss. Sullivan lacked the bankroll, so the scheme expanded to include Arnold Rothstein, the New York underworld financier later immortalized as Meyer Wolfsheim in "The Great Gatsby." Rothstein's involvement brought both capital and organizational sophistication. Eight White Sox players — Gandil, pitcher Eddie Cicotte, shortstop Swede Risberg, utility man Fred McMullin, center fielder Happy Felsch, third baseman Buck Weaver, pitcher Lefty Williams, and Jackson — were recruited into the fix, though their individual levels of participation varied dramatically. The Series itself was transparently crooked to anyone paying attention. Cicotte, the ace pitcher, hit the first batter he faced — reportedly the prearranged signal that the fix was on — and lost Game 1 by making uncharacteristic errors. Williams lost Games 2 and 8. Sportswriters noted suspicious plays throughout, and gambling odds shifted wildly between games as the fixers struggled to control which games would be thrown. A grand jury investigation in September 1920 produced confessions from Cicotte and Jackson, though both later recanted. All eight players were acquitted at trial in August 1921 when key evidence — including the signed confessions — mysteriously vanished from the prosecutor's files. Federal Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, hired as baseball's first commissioner specifically to restore public trust, banned all eight players for life regardless of the verdict. Jackson's lifetime ban remains baseball's most debated injustice, given his .375 batting average in the Series and his disputed degree of participation.

A gunman leaped onto the running board of a slow-moving royal motorcade on the streets of Marseille on October 9, 1934, and fired a semiautomatic pistol into the open car, killing King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou. The assassination — captured on newsreel cameras in the first political murder filmed in real time — was the most consequential act of political violence in Europe between the two world wars and exposed the fragility of the international order that was supposed to prevent another conflict. The assassin was Vlado Chernozemski, a Bulgarian revolutionary working for the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) in coordination with the Croatian Ustasha movement. Both groups wanted to destroy the Yugoslav state: IMRO sought Macedonian independence, while the Ustasha, led by Ante Pavelic from exile in fascist Italy, wanted to separate Croatia from Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia. The plot received material support from Hungary and Italy, both of which had territorial grievances against Yugoslavia and France's alliance system. Alexander had arrived in Marseille that morning on a state visit intended to strengthen the Franco-Yugoslav alliance against Nazi Germany and revisionist Hungary. The security arrangements were catastrophically inadequate. The motorcade moved through crowded streets at walking speed with minimal police escort. When Chernozemski broke through the thin crowd barrier and reached the car, he emptied his pistol's magazine before being cut down by a mounted policeman's saber and beaten to death by the crowd. Barthou, sitting beside Alexander, was struck in the arm. The wound was survivable, but in the chaos he was transported to a hospital without receiving a tourniquet. He bled to death from a severed artery — a failure of basic first aid that altered European diplomacy. Barthou had been the architect of France's eastern alliance system, working to encircle Germany through treaties with the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and other eastern European states. His death removed the most capable and energetic anti-German voice in French foreign policy. Barthou's successor, Pierre Laval, pivoted toward appeasement, eventually signing accords with Mussolini and undermining the alliances Barthou had built. The assassination's long-term consequence was the weakening of precisely the diplomatic framework that might have contained Hitler's expansion before it became unstoppable.