Today in American History: Abraham Lincoln Born in a Log Cabin He Built with his Own Hands1

“Be excellent to each other.”

—Abraham Lincoln, San Dimas High School, 1988

NOTES 
1. According to an unknown but now legendary American student that, for all we know, may actually have existed. 

Today's Good News

In case you are looking for some good news today, keep this in mind:

After sixty years, Joseph Stalin remains dead. Better yet, doctors do not expect his condition to improve.

Joseph Stalin: alive, 1878–1953. Dead, ever since.

Drunk History

Bowling in the Dark does not condone public drunkenness, unless it’s educational. Or funny. Today we learn a lot about cell phones and tennis shoes, both of which existed, believe it or not, in 1804.

Drunk History Vol. 1 - Featuring Michael Cera from Drunk History     

Executive Order 9066: February 19, 1942

  

Just imagine a menace like this loose on your streets.¹

 On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed United States Executive Order 9066, allowing the government to remove more than 100,000 U.S. residents of Japanese ancestry—the majority of them American citizens—from their homes and place them in internment camps. Many were given only days to find caretakers or storage for the possessions they were not permitted to take with them; many had to sell their homes, farms, or businesses, “usually at great financial loss.”²

Fortunately for America’s soul and conscience, this policy of infringing on the rights of its own citizens was the result of clearheaded strategic thinking and military necessity. It was designed to put an end to the plague of clandestine fifth-column terrorist attacks that had never happened, perpetrated by tens of thousands of citizens who had done nothing wrong, who were never put on trial because they had never been charged, and never been charged because no crime had been committed in the first place—and had nothing to do with bigotry, widespread stereotyping, ignorance, or hatred.

Nothing at all.

“I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. Let ’em be pinched, hurt, hungry, and dead up against it. Let us have no patience with anyone whose veins carry his blood. Personally, I hate the Japanese and that goes for all of them.”

— Henry McLemore, Sacramento Union, Jan. 30, 1942²

“A viper is a viper, wherever the egg is hatched—so a Japanese-American, born of Japanese parents, grows up Japanese, not an American.”

—Los Angeles Times, 1942⁴

“Their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even citizen Japanese.”

— Henry L. Stinson, Secretary of War, l942⁵

“The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.”

—Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, landing a two-for-one shot on both
Constitutional rights and common sense, February 1942⁶

“[T]he hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.”

—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1940⁷

As the date of the above quotation clearly indicates, Roosevelt was talking about something else entirely—the Italian invasion of France in June 1940—but it struck us as a particularly apt statement. It’s unknown whether Roosevelt or millions of panicked or bigoted Americans knew that in February 1942, theirs were the hands that held the dagger.


REFERENCES
1. WRA photograph by Carl Iwasaki.
2. “Japanese American internment,” Wikipedia article, accessed 19 February 2012, right before breakfast.
3. archive.itvs.org.
4. nuclearfiles.org.
5. archive.itvs.org.
6. du.edu.
7. millercenter.org. 

Today in Rock History: Ozzy Osbourne Updates His Diet Plan

Thirty years ago today—January 20, 1982—the shambling, incomprehensible wreck once known as Ozzy Osbourne inexplicably bit the head off of a bat that was (also inexplicably) thrown onstage during his concert in Des Moines, Iowa.

No, it wasn't this kind of bat. We just like
having fun with Photoshop.

Depending on the version of the story you hear, the bat was 100% alive, totally dead, or presumed to be fake. It’s likely that we’ll never be sure of the full story, since the odds are good that at this point even Ozzy—or perhaps especially Ozzy—is a bit hazy on the details.


Other questions that likely never will be answered include:

1. What kind of nut throws a fake bat onto a rock-concert stage?
2. What kind of nut throws a real bat—live or dead—onto a rock-concert stage?
3. What kind of maniac five-star über-nut sees a bat fly through the air (which is, in fact, how live bats generally travel) and land on his stage, assumes it’s fake, and figures the best way to test his theory is to bite its head off?

Exhibit A: maniac five-star über-nut.

. . . actually, now that we think about it, those questions aren’t actually unanswerable at all:

1. A nut.
2. at least two kinds of people would do this: (a) an only moderately-nutty Ozzy Osbourne fan, or, if we didn’t know for sure that he was onstage at the time of the incident, (b) Ozzy himself.
3. The very same kind of nut that, only a few months earlier, bit the head off an unmistakably live dove in front of a room of CBS record executives. 

Completely coincidentally, it was right around 1982 that some folks started to suspect that there was something slightly unusual about Ozzy Osbourne.