May 27: Bridges, Birthdays & Bold Beginnings—History’s Surprises Unfold

On May twenty-seventh, 1937, two hundred thousand people paid a quarter each to walk across a bridge that everyone said could not and should not be built. Last episode, we talked about Napoleon crowning himself—a man forging his own myth out of ambition and ceremony. Today is about a different kind of myth-making. Not about a single person's glory, but about the stubborn, defiant, collective will to build something permanent in a world that loves to tear things down. May twenty-seventh is a day for impossible things.

It’s a day where the blueprints of history get drawn not with ink, but with steel, and stone, and sometimes, with words that hit like a hammer. Let's start in 1703. Russia. Peter the Great, a man who was more force of nature than tsar, wants a "window to Europe." He doesn't just want a port; he wants to drag Russia, kicking and screaming, into the modern world. So what does he do? He finds a miserable, indefensible swamp at the mouth of the Neva River—land he just captured from the Swedes. And he says: Here.

We will build our new capital. Here. On this marshland, prone to flooding, with no local stone for foundations, no infrastructure, nothing. It's an act of pure, autocratic, insane will. He calls it Saint Petersburg. He uses tens of thousands of conscripted peasants, working in brutal conditions. Thousands die. But the city rises. It’s a testament to what a single, absolute vision can achieve when it has no regard for human cost. For two hundred years, it was the glittering heart of the Russian Empire.

A city literally willed into existence. Now jump forward to 1941. The North Atlantic. Another testament to human will, but this time, one of destruction. The German battleship Bismarck. At the time, it was the largest warship ever commissioned, a 50,000-ton monster of steel and firepower, the pride of the Kriegsmarine. It was considered unsinkable. For nine days, it terrorized the British Royal Navy, sinking their beloved flagship, the HMS Hood, with almost all hands lost. The entire British fleet was mobilized with a single, furious order: Sink the Bismarck.

And on May twenty-seventh, they did. Crippled by a lucky torpedo from a biplane—a flimsy, obsolete-looking thing launched from an aircraft carrier—the Bismarck was cornered, shelled relentlessly by battleships and cruisers, and finally, scuttled by its own crew to keep it from being captured. It was a brutal, dramatic end. A symbol of technological might, hunted down and destroyed. It wasn't a victory of construction, but a victory of dogged, desperate pursuit. The sea took back the steel. And then there are the legacies built not of stone or steel, but of ink and paper.

On this same day, May twenty-seventh, two women were born who would change the world with their words. Julia Ward Howe, born in 1819, saw Union soldiers marching through Washington D.C. singing "John Brown's Body," and a friend told her she should write better lyrics for the tune. That night, in the dark, she scribbled the words to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." A song that would become the anthem of a nation's moral crusade. And then there's Rachel Carson, born in 1907. A quiet biologist who wrote a book called Silent Spring.

A book that calmly, meticulously, and beautifully exposed the devastation being caused by pesticides like DDT. The chemical industry attacked her viciously. They called her a hysterical, unscientific woman. But the book was undeniable. It launched the modern environmental movement. It led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. One woman, one book, changed how we see our relationship with the entire planet. No steel, no cannons. Just the truth, delivered with courage. So let’s go back to that bridge.

The Golden Gate. Because that’s the story that ties it all together. Looking back from today, the Golden Gate Bridge seems… inevitable. It’s the postcard of San Francisco. It’s just… there. But for decades, it was a fantasy. An impossibility. The Golden Gate Strait is a mile-wide channel of furious tides, corrosive salt fog, and winds that can hit seventy-five miles per hour. The ground is unstable, right on the San Andreas Fault. Every expert said it couldn’t be done. The War Department said it would be a hazard to navigation.

Ferry companies, who made a fortune carrying people across the bay, lobbied against it. The project was derided as "the thirty-five million dollar steel harp." And yet. The chief engineer, Joseph Strauss, was a man possessed. He wasn't even a suspension bridge expert, initially. He was a small man, barely over five feet tall, but he spent more than a decade fighting for this bridge. He fought politicians, he fought financiers during the Great Depression, he fought the unforgiving physics of the strait itself.

He was so obsessed, so convinced, that he managed to convince a whole city, and then a whole region, to believe with him. The construction itself was a war against nature. Men dangled on cables hundreds of feet above the churning water. Divers descended into the violent currents to place dynamite for the tower foundations. The weather was a constant enemy. But Strauss did something revolutionary. He made safety a priority. He insisted on hard hats—a new concept then. He required special glasses to prevent glare.

And most famously, he installed a massive safety net underneath the bridge during construction. It cost one hundred thirty thousand dollars, and people scoffed. But that net saved the lives of nineteen men. They became known as the "Halfway to Hell Club." Think about that. In an era where worker deaths on major projects were just accepted as a cost of doing business—look at Peter the Great's city—here was a project that valued human life. This wasn’t just about conquering nature. It was about doing it with conscience.

And then came opening day. May twenty-seventh, 1937. The bridge was finished. And for the first day, it was open only to pedestrians. They called it "Pedestrian Day." Two hundred thousand people showed up. They ran, they walked, they tap-danced, they played accordions. A man proposed to his girlfriend. People brought roller skates and unicycles. It was a city throwing a party for itself, on a structure that was supposed to be a dream. They paid their twenty-five cents and walked into the future. On that day, Joseph Strauss, this stubborn, visionary engineer, stood there and said, "The Golden Gate Bridge, the bridge which could not and should not be built...

stands before you in all its majestic splendor, in complete refutation of every attack made upon it." That’s the connection. That’s the thread. Peter the Great’s Saint Petersburg was an act of will, forcing a city onto a swamp to build an empire. The sinking of the Bismarck was an act of will, a nation focusing its entire naval power to destroy a single, terrifying threat. Rachel Carson and Julia Ward Howe—their work was an act of will, using the power of language to reshape how a nation thinks about justice, and how a world thinks about its own survival.

But the bridge... the bridge feels different. It feels like the best version of that will. It wasn't built by a tyrant. It was funded by citizens who voted to put their own homes and farms up as collateral, in the middle of the Great Depression, to back the construction bonds. It was built with a regard for human life that was almost unheard of. And its opening wasn't a military parade or a coronation. It was a festival. It was two hundred thousand ordinary people walking across something extraordinary they had built together.

When we look back at May twenty-seventh, we see these monumental events. A city founded. A battleship sunk. A bridge opened. Ideas that changed the world. It’s easy to see them as isolated points in time. But they’re not. They are all answers to the same fundamental question: what do we do with the power we have? Do we use it to command, to destroy, to persuade, or to build? The past isn't a museum of finished things. It’s a workshop. It’s filled with the blueprints of projects that seemed impossible until they were done.

The Golden Gate Bridge wasn’t just a way to get from San Francisco to Marin County. It was a statement. A two-billion-vehicle, one-point-seven-mile-long declaration of faith in the future, built in the darkest of times. The lesson of May twenty-seventh is that the world we see around us was not inevitable. It was chosen. It was fought for. It was constructed, piece by stubborn piece. And the question it leaves for us, the one that hangs in the air like that bridge in the fog, is simple. What are we choosing to build right now?