November 5th Through Time: Gunpowder, Votes and Unfinished Business

On November fifth, the world has a habit of mistaking a closed case for a settled matter, wholly unaware that the real story is only just getting warmed up. Yesterday, when we looked at November fourth, we watched Howard Carter scrape through the limestone plaster into Tutankhamun's gold, and we saw a historic presidential vote shift the American political map. But twenty-four hours later on the calendar, history stops looking for buried treasure and starts wrestling with the sheer stubbornness of human will. If you sit on this rocker long enough and watch the creek tumble past, you come to realize people back then suffered from the exact same trouble we do.

They looked at the trouble right in front of their noses and thought, well, we got that sorted out. When English guards hauled a nervous soldier out of a Westminster cellar in 1605, the crown assumed it had simply caught an isolated fanatic and saved the kingdom. When a federal marshal knocked on a parlor door in Rochester, New York, in 1872, the local authorities honestly believed an indictment would put an end to women demanding the ballot box. They couldn't see around the bend in the track. Hindsight gives us the whole switchback layout: we get to see how the very things they tried to snuff out ended up catching fire and burning for four hundred years.

Take that damp Tuesday midnight in London, back in 1605. Now, I know how that sounds. A fellow with a lantern and thirty-six barrels of gunpowder sounds like the start of a wild tale from a railroad depot stove, but swear on my tackle box, that is the honest truth. King James the First was fixing to open Parliament. Underneath the House of Lords sat a vaulted storeroom leased by a gentleman named Thomas Percy. The conspirators, led by Robert Catesby, had packed that room with roughly two and a half tons of black powder, hidden beneath bundles of firewood and iron bars to multiply the blast. Their man on the ground was Guy Fawkes, seasoned from fighting in Flanders, carrying slow matches and a pocket watch.

To the men holding the lanterns, this looked like a desperate, bloody gamble that would wipe out the king, his bishops, and his nobles in one thunderous roar to restore a Catholic monarch. What looked right to the royal investigators was simple: round them up, hang them, burn effigies, and slam the door shut on religious dissent. But they didn't realize they were creating the blueprint for public remembrance. They passed an act of Parliament calling for an annual public thanksgiving every fifth of November. Londoners lit bonfires to celebrate the king's deliverance, children began begging for pennies with ragged stuffed dummies, and over four centuries, the event twisted completely inside out.

The plotters lost their lives, but Fawkes's painted smirk became a universal emblem of political defiance, adopted centuries later by street demonstrators across the globe who never set foot in an English chapel. Now roll the clock forward two hundred and sixty-seven years to November fifth, 1872. Over in Rochester, New York, fifty-two-year-old Susan B. Anthony put on her bonnet, walked into a barbershop in the eighth ward, and demanded that the election inspectors register her and her three sisters to vote. Those young inspectors — Beverly Jones, Edwin Marsh, and William Hall — were scared out of their boots. The Fourteenth Amendment had recently declared that all persons born or naturalized were citizens, and Anthony leaned on that counter with the law in her hand, arguing that citizenship without the ballot was an empty shell.

She told them she would hold them personally liable in court if they refused her. So, they gave in. She dropped her vote in the box for Ulysses S. Grant. Three weeks later, an officer showed up in her parlor to serve a federal warrant for voting without having a lawful right to vote. The authorities figured a quick trial and a brisk fine would teach agitators to stay in their lane. What looked like a cut-and-dried misdemeanor to the federal prosecutor, Richard Crowley, backfired spectacularly. At her trial, Justice Ward Hunt refused to let Anthony testify on her own behalf, took the case completely out of the jury's hands, and directed a verdict of guilty.

He fined her one hundred dollars. Anthony stood right up and told him, not one penny shall go toward this unjust penalty. And she never paid a single red cent. Because Justice Hunt didn't jail her for refusing to pay, she couldn't appeal to the Supreme Court, which the judge thought was a clever trick to bury the issue. Instead, the transcript of that trial became the most effective piece of protest literature in nineteenth-century America, printed in newspapers from Boston to San Francisco, accelerating the suffrage movement instead of crushing it. While we're talking about folks born to shake the tree, you have to look at the babies that entered the world on this fifth of November.

Back in 1855, in a little frame house in Terre Haute, Indiana, Eugene Victor Debs was born. He started out as a locomotive fireman on the Terre Haute and Indianapolis line before organizing the American Railway Union and running for president from a prison cell. Two years later, on November fifth, 1857, in a log cabin in Erie County, Pennsylvania, Ida Tarbell drew her first breath. Her daddy was an independent oil producer whose business got squeezed dry by John D. Rockefeller's South Improvement Company scheme. The oil barons reckoned they had settled the market through secret railway rebates. They had no idea that little girl in the cabin would grow up to write nineteen serialized articles for McClure's Magazine, systematically pulling apart the Standard Oil monopoly until the Supreme Court ordered it broken into thirty-four separate companies.

You sit back and study those moments, and what strikes you is how fragile the whole contraption was. None of this had to happen the way it did. Guy Fawkes was only caught because someone got cold feet. Ten days before the planned blast, an anonymous letter landed in the hands of William Parker, Lord Monteagle, warning him to skip Parliament because they shall receive a terrible blow and yet they shall not see who hurts them. If Monteagle had tossed that scrap into the fireplace, or if the king's men had waited six more hours, British history would have fractured into pieces we can't even assemble from here. And look at Anthony in that Rochester barbershop.

If those three young inspectors had simply stood their ground and said no, Anthony would have been the one filing a dry civil petition that likely would have stalled in lower courts for years. Instead, their hesitation forced the federal government to become the aggressor, turning an ordinary polling place into a national courtroom drama. The powers of the day assumed that applying raw authority always restores the old quiet. They mistook silence for surrender. That brings us square to the present. Looking back from ten years down the road, what are we living through right this second that will make our grandchildren shake their heads at our short memories?

We watch new movements bubble up in city centers and online forums, and the respectable consensus always wants to treat them like passing disruptions — an irritation to be managed, regulated, or smoothed away with an official decree. We do just what the crown did with Fawkes, and what the judges did with Anthony, and what the railroad cartels did with Debs. We see the disruption, but we fail to see the tectonic plate shifting underneath the ballast. The lesson waiting on the fifth of November is that real power rarely sits where the titles are. It gathers in the cellars, on the parlor rugs, and behind the reporters' desks. The people trying to preserve the status quo almost always believe they're closing a loop, when in fact they're providing the friction that makes the fire catch.

We can already see the evidence of this in our own public squares; we're just not naming it yet. Well. That is about the size of it for today. The creek is running steady, and the dusk is settling in over the ridges. Take care of yourselves, keep your eyes on the track ahead, and we will talk again tomorrow.