October 28th in History: Surprises, Stubbornness and Standing at the Switch

The trouble with looking back down the tracks at October twenty-eighth is that we already know the train didn't jump the rail, so we assume it was always running smooth on good gravel. Yesterday we watched Mayor George McClellan take the throttle of New York's very first subway train back on October twenty-seventh of nineteen oh-four, barreling into a dark underground that regular city folk were terrified would cave right in on their heads. Today, just twenty-four hours later on the autumn calendar, we are stepping right back out into the open daylight where people were trying to build copper giants, hoist steel arches, and dodge atomic annihilation without having the foggiest notion whether their grand schemes would stand or crumble.

Down here on the porch, with the creek water running clear over the limestone and the morning fog burning off the ridge, that is the gap that catches me every time. When you live through a Tuesday, you don't know what Wednesday brings. But when you study history, you read the whole book from the back page forward, and you miss the absolute wonder of how close everything came to falling apart. October twenty-eighth is plumb full of moments where humanity stood right on the switch point, squinting down the iron, hoping to high heaven they were throwing the lever the right way. Now, I know how that sounds. But hang on. When you look at the catalog of this single day across the centuries, you start to see a pattern of stubborn folks refusing to believe the odds.

You have got an immigrant boy born in Spanish Harlem who would break the back of polio, another kid born forty-one years later in Seattle who would put a computer on every kitchen table, and a soggy afternoon in New York Harbor where a French copper lady finally pulled off her veil after almost rotting away in wooden crates. We treat all those things like they were guaranteed by the cosmos. Swear on my tackle box, that is the honest truth of how we misread the past. We turn sweat and panic into granite and marble. Take that copper lady out in New York Harbor. On October twenty-eighth of eighteen eighty-six, President Grover Cleveland stood on Bedloe's Island in a miserable, bone-chilling drizzle, looking up at what they officially called Liberty Enlightening the World.

The mist was so thick you could barely see the top of her torch. Over a million people had packed the muddy streets of Manhattan, bells were clanging, whistles were shrieking louder than a runaway freight on a downhill grade, and Auguste Bartholdi himself was tucked away up inside the statue's crown, holding the rope that would drop the French tricolor flag off her face. What nobody on the reviewing stand wanted to dwell on was just how close that entire project had come to total humiliation. We tell our schoolkids that France gave America a lovely birthday present for the centennial of eighteen seventy-six. Well, first off, she was ten whole years late to the party.

And second off, Uncle Sam acted like somebody had just gifted him an elephant he couldn't afford to feed. The French people had passed the hat to build the statue itself, but the United States had agreed to pay for the massive stone pedestal. And do you know what the American Congress did? They said no. The New York state legislature passed a bill to fund it, and Governor Grover Cleveland, the very man standing there on the platform in eighteen eighty-six, vetoed it because he didn't think the public ought to pay for public art. By eighteen eighty-five, Lady Liberty had arrived from France, chopped up into three hundred and fifty individual pieces, packed inside two hundred and fourteen crates.

And there she sat, in the salt air, while the American committee announced they were flat out of money and thirty feet short on the stone base. Boston newspapers started sniffing around, saying if New York was too cheap to build a porch for the lady, Boston would gladly take the scrap metal and put it up on Boston Common. Philadelphia threw their hat in the ring, too. That was when Joseph Pulitzer stepped in at the New York World newspaper. He didn't go begging to Wall Street tycoons or rail barons. He took to the front page and asked the common working folks for help. He promised to print every single donor's name, no matter how small the coin.

A kindergarten class in Iowa sent in a dollar and thirty-five cents. A butcher gave his Sunday tip money. A washwoman sent in twenty-five cents. Within five months, more than one hundred and twenty thousand regular Americans raised over one hundred thousand dollars, mostly in nickels, dimes, and pennies. When Bartholdi let that flag slip from her copper forehead on October twenty-eighth, it wasn't a triumph of government wisdom or millionaire generosity. It was paid for by folks who worked twelve-hour shifts and wanted to own a penny's worth of an idea. And even that afternoon had its reckonings. Do you know who wasn't allowed on Bedloe's Island for the dedication ceremonies?

Women. Not a single woman from the general public was granted a ticket to set foot on the island, aside from Bartholdi's wife and the young daughter of the French engineer. The dignitaries declared that the island wasn't safe or suitable for ladies in that terrible weather. So what did Lillie Devereux Blake and the New York City Woman Suffrage Association do? They chartered a big wooden cattle boat, draped it from stem to stern in suffrage banners, loaded two hundred determined women aboard, and steamed right out into the harbor. They anchored that barge directly off Bedloe's Island and blasted a foghorn through Grover Cleveland's speech, shouting across the water that it was the height of absurdity to dedicate a giant female statue of Liberty in a country where no living woman had the legal right to cast a ballot.

You look at that green statue today, standing so peaceful in the travel brochures, and it seems like she was always meant to be there. But in eighteen eighty-six, she was a symbol surrounded by unpaid bills, political spats, cold rain, and women on a barge hollering truth through the harbor mist. You hop forward seventy-nine years, to October twenty-eighth of nineteen sixty-five, and you find that same high-wire act playing out on the muddy banks of the Mississippi River in St. Louis, Missouri. That was the morning they put the very last piece into the Gateway Arch. Six hundred and thirty feet tall, stainless steel, designed by that brilliant Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen.

Now, Saarinen had drawn those graceful parabolic curves back in the nineteen forties, but he never lived to see it finished; he died of a brain tumor four years before the completion. And every engineering traditionalist in the country had whispered that two hollow legs, creeping up toward each other from opposite sides of the dirt, would never meet in the middle without twisting or collapsing under their own weight. On the morning of October twenty-eighth, thousands of people sat on lawn chairs along the riverfront with thermoses of hot coffee, waiting for the cranes to hoist that ten-foot-tall triangular keystone section into the gap at the very peak.

Then the sun came up. Nobody had adequately accounted for thermal expansion on that exact scale. The morning sunlight hit the south leg of the arch, warming the stainless steel until that leg expanded by nearly five inches. The north leg was sitting over in the cool morning shade, meaning the gap between the two tips had shrunk by several inches. The final keystone piece, weighing fifty tons, simply would not fit. The cranes were groaning, the cables were humming like guitar strings, and the whole world was watching. The engineers didn't call a conference. They called the St. Louis Fire Department. Firemen hooked their hoses up to the river hydrants and blasted thousands of gallons of cold Mississippi water all over the sunlit south leg for nearly an hour, cooling that skin until the steel sighed, contracted, and opened the gap just enough.

Workers had to use a massive hydraulic jack to pry the legs forty inches apart, praying the steel wouldn't snap, before they slid that keystone home at precisely two o'clock in the afternoon. One little change in the weather, a burst fire hose, or a structural shear, and that monument would have been an international joke. Today, school buses pull up to the base every single morning, kids run through the underground museum, and nobody even thinks about the cold river water that saved the day. The strange thing about this twenty-eighth day of October is that while men were wrestling with copper and steel, other folks were quietly resetting the gears of human life without any cranes or brass bands at all.

Back on October twenty-eighth of nineteen fourteen, in a walk-up tenement in East Harlem, a Russian-Jewish immigrant named Daniel Salk and his wife Dora welcomed their firstborn boy, Jonas. Daniel was a garment worker, designing women's coats in the garment district, working his fingers raw so his boy could go to the City College of New York. Forty-one years later, on October twenty-eighth of nineteen fifty-five, William Henry Gates the Third was born in Seattle, Washington. Think about those two cradles for just a second. Jonas Salk grew up to develop the first safe, effective polio vaccine in nineteen fifty-five, the very year young Gates was drawing his first breath.

When Edward R. Murrow asked Salk who owned the patent on that miracle vaccine, Salk gave that famous, gentle grin and said, "Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" He walked away from an estimated seven billion dollars in potential royalties because he figured a healthy child was worth more than an estate in the hills. Then along comes Bill Gates, growing up in a world freed from polio, who realized that the future of human labor wasn't going to be forged in sweatshops or foundries, but written in lines of logic code. Gates built an empire on precisely the thing Salk gave away: intellectual property.

He guarded his software code with the ferocity of a mother bear, and in doing so, he built the operating system that pulled modern society into the digital age. Two boys, born on the exact same square of the calendar, four decades apart, who pulled human history in completely opposite directions: one through absolute selflessness in biology, and the other through fierce commercial vision in technology. You can't understand the twentieth century without either one of them, and both of their stories started on October twenty-eighth while nobody was paying them the slightest bit of mind. Now, if you want to talk about the absolute peak of high-stakes history, you have to look at a chilly Sunday morning in nineteen sixty-two: October twenty-eighth.

The Cuban Missile Crisis had pushed the entire planet to the razor's edge of thermonuclear war for thirteen days. American families had spent that week digging fallout shelters in their backyards. Children had been doing duck-and-cover drills beneath their wooden school desks. President John F. Kennedy's advisors had drafted airstrike plans for Monday morning to take out the Soviet missile installations in Cuba, knowing full well an invasion would trigger an all-out Soviet strike on Berlin, which in turn would trigger nuclear retaliations across Europe and North America. On the morning of October twenty-eighth, Radio Moscow abruptly broke its normal classical music broadcast.

An announcer came on the air, reading a formal letter from Premier Nikita Khrushchev directly to President Kennedy. Khrushchev announced that the Soviet government had ordered the work on missile sites in Cuba stopped, that the weapons would be crated up, dismantled, and shipped back to the Soviet Union under United Nations observation. When that news hit Washington, folks fell to their knees. People literally wept in church pews across the United States. It looked for all the world like John F. Kennedy had simply stood on the shore, folded his arms, stared Khrushchev down, and made the Soviet bear blink. That was the myth we all swallowed whole: American toughness, steady nerves, total victory through overwhelming resolve.

But that wasn't what actually happened in the room. We know now, thanks to declassified tape recordings and diplomatic cables that came to light decades later, that we were inches from midnight. The day before, October twenty-seventh, a Soviet surface-to-air missile had shot down an American U-2 spy plane over Cuba, killing Major Rudolf Anderson. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were practically banging on the Resolute Desk, demanding that Kennedy launch the bombers at dawn. What saved the world on October twenty-eighth wasn't muscle. It was a secret trade. On the night of October twenty-seventh, Robert Kennedy had slipped into a private meeting with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin.

Kennedy gave Dobrynin a secret pledge: if the Soviets pulled their missiles out of Cuba, the United States would secretly dismantle and remove its Jupiter nuclear missiles stationed in Turkey along the Soviet border within a matter of months. But there was a catch: if the Soviets ever spoke of that deal publicly, the deal was off. Khrushchev took the deal. He swallowed the public humiliation, looking like the man who backed down, while Kennedy got to look like the granite-jawed victor. But the reality was a quiet, agonizing compromise between two men who realized that pride wasn't worth the ashes of five hundred million souls.

If Robert Kennedy hadn't held that quiet conversation, or if Khrushchev had refused the secret terms to save his own political skin in the Kremlin, Monday morning, October twenty-ninth, wouldn't have been a day of celebration. It would have been the end of the line. That is the pivot point right there, friend. When you look back from ten years, twenty years, or sixty years down the track, every landmark event looks like it was etched into the rock from the foundation of the world. We look at the Statue of Liberty and think, of course America built a monument to freedom in the harbor. We look at the Gateway Arch and think, of course Saarinen's mathematics stood true.

We look at the resolution of nineteen sixty-two and think, of course reason prevailed over madness. But what if it hadn't? What if Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper campaign had fallen flat, and those copper crates had been auctioned off to private investors in Philadelphia? What if the fire chief in St. Louis had decided pumping river water onto hot steel was too dangerous for his men, and the keystone had dropped into the river below? What if Nikita Khrushchev had worried more about his standing in the Politburo than the survival of humanity, and let those missiles remain on their launchpads? History isn't an iron rail welded to the ties, guiding us along an inevitable route toward progress.

It's a switch engine being operated in the pitch black by regular men and women who are tired, scared, and improvising as fast as their hands can move. We can already see the evidence of this in our own daily lives; we're just not naming it yet. We sit in our living rooms right now, looking at the technological breakthroughs, the political standoffs, and the culture debates of our own time, convinced that the outcome is either doomed or preordained. We assume the big decisions are being made by masterminds who have calculated every single variable. They aren't. They never were. The lesson of October twenty-eighth is that the world is saved, built, and reinvented not by certainty, but by persistence in the face of absolute confusion.

It is saved by a schoolkid dropping a penny in an envelope. It is saved by a fire crew spraying cold water on a crooked beam. It is saved by an adversary who is willing to look weak in public so the children can wake up on Monday morning. Looking back from ten years from now, we won't say our current era was defined by the crises that threatened to tear it down. We will say it was defined by whether or not ordinary people had the courage to stay at the controls, hold back the fire, and find the quiet compromise before the track ran out. Well. That is about the size of it. The sun is up over the holler now, and that creek is calling my name.

You take care of yourself out there.