October 23rd: The Day Hidden Currents Came to Light

Look out yonder at that creek water slipping over the limestone rocks, where what appears to be a gentle riffle from fifty yards away turns out to be a bone-cracking ledge once your wading boots actually touch bottom. That exact gap between what folks thought was happening in the moment and what we now see from the high ground of time is the very story of October twenty-third. In yesterday's look at October twenty-second, we followed daring bets and quiet revolutions that hid beneath the surface; today, those hidden currents break right out into the open daylight where nobody could pretend the world was staying the same.

You take a man standing on an iron depot platform back in the fall of nineteen fifty-six, or nineteen fifteen, or even two thousand and one. He looks down the rails and thinks he sees a straight clear run ahead of him. He assumes the rules of the yard will hold steady until supper time. Yet from where we are sitting right here on this cedar porch, we have got the dispatcher's ledger wide open on our knees. We can look down through the decades and see every switch that was quietly thrown while folks were just trying to get through their morning coffee. It makes a person smile, but it also puts a quiet weight in your chest.

When you see history with the bark off, you realize nobody gets a handbook explaining that their Tuesday afternoon walk down the avenue is about to reshape the whole country. They just put their hats on, laced their boots, and walked straight into the teeth of it. And that, friend, is why you check the record. Take Budapest, Hungary, on Tuesday, October twenty-third, nineteen fifty-six. If you had been an ordinary shopkeeper sweeping the cobbles that morning, you would have seen university students and factory hands gathering in the sunshine, looking for all the world like any other crowd of youngsters with a grievance. They carried sixteen demands on mimeographed slips of paper.

They wanted free speech, independent courts, and Russian troops out of their country. Now, I know how that sounds to folks today. But hang on. In nineteen fifty-six, standing in the middle of Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe and demanding foreign troops pack their bags was not regular politics. That was reaching your bare hand right into the firebox of a moving steam engine. By evening, more than two hundred thousand people filled the boulevard outside Parliament. They marched down to City Park, threw thick steel cables around the neck of an eight-story bronze statue of Joseph Stalin, hooked them up to heavy trucks, and snapped that tyrant right off at his boots.

The whole crowd cheered as the bronze head rolled into the street. Inside the government house, Prime Minister Imre Nagy found himself swept up by a tidal wave he had not engineered. He formed a new government and declared Hungary was pulling clear out of the Warsaw Pact. For nearly two weeks, ordinary citizens believed they had pulled off a miracle with hunting rifles, homemade petrol bombs, and raw courage. From our porch vantage point, we know the bitter heartbreak that followed on November fourth, when Soviet tanks rolled back in and crushed the uprising, killing between twenty-five hundred and three thousand Hungarians and sending two hundred thousand fleeing across the winter mud into Austria.

At the time, Moscow thought steel treads had settled the matter forever. Yet looking back across the years, that statue falling into the Budapest cobbles was the first crack in a dam that finally broke wide open thirty-three years later, when Hungary opened its western borders and let the whole Iron Curtain crumble down. Earlier still, on this very day in eighteen sixty-four, the Civil War was tearing across the high prairie dirt outside Kansas City at the Battle of Westport. General Sterling Price had led twelve thousand Confederate cavalry into Missouri, hoping to spark a rebel uprising and swing the state away from the Union.

For three days, twenty-nine thousand men clashed back and forth along the timber of Brush Creek. It was the largest battle fought west of the Mississippi River, louder than a derailed coal drag and just as violent. By the afternoon of October twenty-third, Union forces under Major General Samuel Curtis cracked the Confederate defensive line along the limestone bluffs. What looked like a stubborn standoff that morning turned into a complete retreat that shattered Confederate hopes west of the river for the rest of the war. General Price rode south with his wagons empty, and the state of Missouri stayed anchored to the Union.

Those cavalrymen thought they were fighting for the next harvest, but they were settling the border of the American West for the next hundred years. Then you skip ahead to October twenty-third, nineteen fifteen, in New York City. The morning newspapers were full of sneers and condescending chuckles from the politicians down at Tammany Hall. But by noon, twenty-five thousand women were marching up Fifth Avenue shoulder to shoulder, demanding the right to vote. There were no brass bands, no floats, and very little shouting. The old-timers called it the quiet army. They wore white dresses and yellow sashes, marching four abreast past a million spectators who lined the sidewalks from Washington Square right up to Fifty-Ninth Street.

Men stood on the curbs holding their derbies, expecting a spectacle of hysteria, and instead they were met with a silent, iron-willed discipline that stretched on for miles. The referendum for women's suffrage in New York actually failed at the ballot box a few weeks later. To an onlooker in November nineteen fifteen, that march looked like an enormous effort that yielded nothing. But we know better now. That parade broke the back of the opposition's arguments. Just five years later, that very momentum carried the Nineteenth Amendment into the United States Constitution. Now you take a turn toward the darker timber. On the morning of October twenty-third, nineteen eighty-three, in Beirut, Lebanon, American Marines were serving in a four-story concrete building at the airport.

They had been sent there as peacekeepers, ordered to keep their weapons unloaded unless directly fired upon, trying to project calm in a city torn apart by civil war. At six twenty-two in the morning, a yellow truck laden with compressed gas and explosives crashed through the concertina wire fence and blew that barracks to dust. Two hundred and forty-one American service members died, the vast majority of them Marines, alongside fifty-eight French paratroopers killed in a barracks nearby. It was the deadliest single day for the Marine Corps since the sands of Iwo Jima. In nineteen eighty-three, planners in Washington treated peacekeeping like a ceremonial guard duty at a quiet depot.

That Sunday morning shattered every operational assumption the military held about urban security, force protection, and asymmetrical warfare. It completely altered American policy across the Middle East for generations to come. Down in Washington four years later, on October twenty-third, nineteen eighty-seven, the United States Senate took a vote that changed the tone of American law forever. President Ronald Reagan had nominated federal judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Bork was an intellectual powerhouse of originalism, but his views ignited a political firestorm the country had never seen before. When the gavel fell, the Senate rejected him fifty-eight to forty-two.

Before that afternoon, judicial confirmations were largely dignified debates over credentials and character. After that roll call, a judge's name became a verb, the confirmation process turned into trench warfare, and the Supreme Court nominations we watch today were permanently recast in that mold. Yet October twenty-third had a way of delivering delightful surprises, too. On this day in nineteen forty-one, Walt Disney took a desperate gamble and released an animated picture called Dumbo. The studio had nearly gone broke producing Fantasia and Pinocchio, which were expensive marvels that did not earn back their keep. Walt made Dumbo on a shoestring budget of less than a million dollars, clocking in at just sixty-four minutes about a mute baby elephant with oversized ears.

Critics called it a simple cartoon, but audiences weeping through the opening months of the Second World War found pure heart in it. It rescued the studio's ledger books and taught generations that the very thing the world mocks you for might just turn out to be your wings. And if you want to talk about little things that carried huge freight, step into Cupertino, California, on October twenty-third, two thousand and one. Steve Jobs stood on a small stage wearing a black turtleneck and pulled a little white rectangle the size of a deck of cards out of his pocket. It had a mechanical scroll wheel and a five-gigabyte hard drive.

He called it the iPod, boasting it could put a thousand songs in your pocket. The tech writers on the internet laughed themselves hoarse. They pointed out that it cost three hundred and ninety-nine dollars, had no wireless internet, and only worked with Macintosh computers. One famous comment on a gadget website summed it up as: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." Whoo, boy, ain't that something? That funny little white box went on to sell approximately four hundred and fifty million units before Apple retired the line in twenty-twenty-two. But more than that, the iPod dismantled the entire record store industry, trained the whole human race to look down into the palms of their hands for daily comfort, and laid the direct technical groundwork for the smartphone in your pocket right now.

And while the world was turning on those big hinges, this date kept delivering extraordinary people to the depot platform, too. The visionary director Ang Lee was born on October twenty-third, nineteen fifty-four, a man who would give us Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain. The velvet-voiced jazz titan Dianne Reeves arrived in nineteen fifty-six, the civil rights activist Martin Luther King the Third was born in nineteen fifty-seven, and actor Ryan Reynolds slipped into the world on this date in nineteen seventy-six, ready to show everybody how sharp wit could conquer the cinema. Now you stay with me here, because this is where the switch engine backs down a different track.

When we look back at the Battle of Westport, or the women marching down Fifth Avenue, or that crowd tearing down Stalin's bronze legs, our minds love to play a little trick on us. We assume those outcomes were bound to happen, as if history was a passenger train running on an automated timetable where every stop was printed in advance. But it was not inevitable. Not one bit of it. That battle at Westport could easily have swung south if Union cavalry had not stumbled across a local farmer who showed them a hidden gulley through the limestone bluffs that let them flank General Price's guns. If that farmer had stayed in his cellar that morning, Confederate forces might have held Missouri, dragging out the Western campaign into a bloody stalemate through eighteen sixty-five.

Over in Budapest, if the Kremlin had accepted Prime Minister Imre Nagy's proposal for a neutral, non-aligned buffer state instead of sending five divisions of armor back across the Danube, the Cold War might have thawed thirty years earlier than it did. Or look at the suffragists on Fifth Avenue. If those twenty-five thousand women had lost their patience under the jeers of the Tammany Hall machine and turned toward violence, the public backlash could have set the voting rights movement back another twenty years. And what about that little iPod? If Apple had listened to the tech critics that week in two thousand and one and pulled back on portable hardware to focus only on desktop computers, the digital music revolution might have belonged entirely to physical retail discs, and the smartphone landscape would look completely unrecognizable today.

Every single one of those moments was balanced on a razor's edge. What looks obvious now was shrouded in complete fog to the people standing right in the center of the dust. They made their choices not because they knew the final score, but because the conviction in their bellies told them which way they had to push. Looking back from today, that is the great lesson this date leaves on our doorstep. History is never about the dead past; it is about the living present tense. Right now, as you listen to my voice and the creek water runs down over those Tennessee stones, there are people out in the world making choices they think are small, ordinary, and confined to their own town.

A group of folks are gathering on a street corner somewhere holding signs. An engineer is tinkering with a plastic box in a workshop. A judge is giving testimony before a committee. A soldier is standing guard at a remote outpost hoping the radio stays quiet. We judge our own days with the limited view of the cab, seeing only as far as our headlights cut through the evening mist. We assume the current state of things is permanent, just like the Soviet authorities thought their statues were permanent, or the record executives thought vinyl and plastic discs were eternal. We can already see the evidence of the next great turns taking shape around us; we are just not naming them yet.

The decisions being made this very afternoon by ordinary people who feel small and uncertain are the exact switches that folks fifty years from now will look back upon with absolute clarity. So when you lock up your front door tonight, remember those twenty-five thousand women in their white dresses, those Hungarian students staring down the bronze boots of an empire, and even that little baby elephant who turned his oversized ears into wings. The future is never cast in iron until somebody chooses to lay the track. Well. That is about the size of it.