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Think you know everything about the history of Thanksgiving? Here’s 21 facts that will prove you wrong
From tales of pumpkin-pie panics to the story of the president who turned his dinner into a pet, Jonny Wilkes uncovers the surprising history behind Thanksgiving: America’s turkey-tastic holiday
There are only two accounts of the first Thanksgiving The story of the first Thanksgiving has been highly mythologised in American history. In 1621, the so-called Pilgrims who travelled on the Mayflower and formed the settlement of Plymouth, in Massachusetts, came together with the local indigenous peoples, the Wampanoag, for a feast to celebrate a good harvest and the growing friendship of settler and Native American in the New World. That is the version long told in schools. In truth, the Pilgrims threw themselves a harvest festival and around 90 of the Wampanoag showed up. Without their help, especially a man named Squanto, the European settlers would have likely perished in their brutal first winter. The only sources for the three-day feast are sparse mentions in writings by two of the Pilgrims, Edward Winslow and William Bradford. Neither actually used the word ‘thanksgiving’, however, and since they gave few details of what happened, the mythologising took over. They may not have eaten turkey at the first Thanksgiving For many Americans, no modern Thanksgiving meal is complete without a turkey as the centrepiece of the table. It’s unclear, however, whether this tradition began in 1621. The Pilgrims cooked up a selection of fowl – which may have included turkey, but could just as easily been duck and goose – while the Wampanoag killed a number of deer, meaning venison was on the menu. They might have had seafood, too, including eels, clams, mussels and lobster. Yes, William Bradford mentioned a “great store of wild Turkies” in the region, but the bird did not become a staple of the Thanksgiving meal until the 19th century. The first Thanksgiving may have happened earlier than 1621 While the 1621 feast became the foundation for the Thanksgiving holiday, perhaps Americans should celebrate a different year. Other acts of thanksgiving, based in the tradition of Christian harvest festivals, took place earlier in the short-lived Popham Colony in Maine and Jamestown in Virginia, both founded in 1607. Two years before the Pilgrims and Wampanoag, the Berkeley Hundred settlement, also in Virginia, held a celebration and decreed that the same day should be “perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God”. The true first Thanksgiving, however, was not English, but Spanish. On 8 September 1565, in what is now St Augustine, Florida, hundreds of Spaniards held a religious ceremony and shared a meal with the local people to mark their safe arrival. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/3C5BDJ6-54ff763-e1764176698213.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting depicts a large crowd of men kneeling on the ground, holding up spears. In front of them, a priest stands in cream and yellow robes and holds a cross" title="A painting depicts Spanish settlers arriving in what is now the city of St Augustine, Florida, in 1565. Their meal with the local indigenous population has been described as the first true Thanksgiving (Image by Alamy)" /> Americans eat around 46 million turkeys every year A major reason why turkey became the meat of choice for Thanksgiving is that the birds are both abundant and large (meaning a lot of meat), and it’s a good thing, too. There’s a reason the holiday is also referred to as Turkey Day. With apologies to the non-meat eaters out there, it is estimated that around 46 million birds are killed for the holiday every year in the US alone, according to the Department of Agriculture. That’s one turkey for every seven or eight Americans. The fastest time to carve a turkey is under four minutes Without wanting to dismay all the Americans who take immense pride in serving up the meal every Thanksgiving, the Guinness World Record for the fastest time to carve a turkey is currently held by a British person. The UK does eat its fair share of turkeys at Christmas, after all. In 2009, Paul Kelly, a turkey farmer in Essex, managed the feat in just three minutes and 19.47 seconds. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/4GettyImages-530209391-de2c182-e1764176657592.jpg" width="1500" height="1002" alt="An illustration of a colourful turkey. It has a red and blue spotted head, with yellow and dark orange feathers across it's front, and blue wings, with a red and black tail" title="A mid-19th century illustration of a turkey. An apocryphal quote attributed to Founding Father Alexander Hamilton states that no “citizen of the United States should refrain from turkey on Thanksgiving Day” (Image by Getty Images)" /> The author of Mary Had a Little Lamb is known as the ‘Mother of Thanksgiving’ Sarah Josepha Hale was a writer, the first American woman to be editor of a magazine and, in 1830, she published the nursery rhyme, Mary Had a Little Lamb (originally titled Mary's Lamb). One of her biggest passions, though, would always be Thanksgiving. Born in 1788 in New England, she grew up with the local celebrations and customs that took place every year, and wanted Thanksgiving to become a national holiday. For years, she embarked on this campaign, writing editorials for her magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book, which had a peak circulation of 150,000, as well as countless letters to presidents asking for their help. Finally getting somewhere with Abraham Lincoln, she is now heralded as the ‘Mother of Thanksgiving’. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/6GettyImages-3245390-8ee41b9-e1764176761138.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white illustration of a woman sitting in a high backed chair. She is wearing a dark dress with a white lace collar and has ringlets in her hair" title="Sarah Josepha Hale is best known as the ‘Mother of Thanksgiving’ – and for writing a much-loved nursery rhyme (Image by Getty Images)" /> In 1705, a town postponed Thanksgiving because of pumpkin pie Until Sarah Josepha Hale’s campaign, it was up to each town and state to determine how to mark Thanksgiving, with most of the events taking place only in the US northeast. For the people of Colchester, Connecticut, the celebrations must include pumpkin pie. The dessert had become a symbol of the bounty of the New World. In 1705, however, they faced a problem: bad weather prevented supplies from reaching them, including the molasses that they needed to make their pies. Rather than have a Thanksgiving without them, the townsfolk elected to postpone the festivities for a week until the molasses could be delivered. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/7GettyImages-509616436-453ca45-e1764177624580.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a bright orange pumpkin pie with small dollops of cream on the top of each slice" title="Can you really have Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie? Well, one town in Connecticut decided to postpone their festivities when they were unable to source the correct ingredients in 1705 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Thomas Jefferson was opposed to Thanksgiving (sort of) In 1789, George Washington issued a presidential proclamation naming Thursday 26 November as a “day of public thanksgiving and prayer”. This did not make the holiday official, as each president had to issue their own proclamations every year. While John Adams followed Washington’s example, the third president, Thomas Jefferson, did not. He did not oppose families coming together for a nice meal – in fact, he encouraged it as governor of Virgina – but he felt that the religious significance of Thanksgiving meant the president could not endorse it. Otherwise, he would undermine the separation of church and state as established by the first amendment of the Constitution, which he had helped get written. Benjamin Franklin preferred turkey to bald eagles The bald eagle has been a national emblem since being chosen to adorn the Great Seal of the United States in 1782. However, the decision did not meet the approval of the great polymath and Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin. He thought the bald eagle had “bad moral character”, “generally poor”, “often very lousy” and a “rank coward”, as he wrote in a letter to his daughter. The turkey, on the other hand, was a “much more respectable bird and withal a true, original native of America,” in his opinion. Read more | Benjamin Franklin's greatest inventions Franklin was effusive in his praise, describing the turkey as “though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.” The cornucopia has ancient origins A horn-shaped basket overflowing with the fruits of the harvest, the cornucopia is a symbol of abundance. As such, it has come to be associated with Thanksgiving and is a common feature of the decorations. The origins of the horn of plenty have nothing to do with the Pilgrims or Wampanoag in 1621, or with Sarah Josepha Hale and Lincoln: it goes back much further. According to ancient Greek mythology, the god Zeus was raised by Amalthea, either an enchanted goat or a water nymph with an enchanted goat. Either way, one day the baby deity broke off one of the horns and it began pouring forth fruits, seeds and nuts. To the Romans, however, Hercules created the horn by snapping it off a river god. Thanksgiving became a national holiday during the American Civil War Sarah Josepha Hale tried for years to get Thanksgiving recognised as a national holiday, but it was with the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 that the circumstances finally came together. In 1863, she wrote to President Abraham Lincoln arguing that Thanksgiving could heal the divided and hurting country, and he agreed. Less than a week later, he issued a proclamation declaring a holiday on the last Thursday of November – and so Thanksgiving has been celebrated ever since, with a few exceptions. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/11GettyImages-515449646-0a00406-e1764176933734.jpg" width="1501" height="1002" alt="a black and white photograph of a large group of soldiers standing around a tall man in a long coat and top hat. Behind them is a series of large tents" title="Abraham Lincoln meets Union troops near Sharpsburg, Maryland, in October 1862. A year later, the Civil War president issued a proclamation declaring Thanksgiving to be a national holiday (Image by Getty Images)" /> A small Pacific island has celebrated Thanksgiving since the 1800s Thanksgiving is not celebrated only in the US: Canada marks it in October, while festivities can be seen in countries around the world. A contender for the most unlikely place has to be Norfolk Island, a tiny Australian territory in the Pacific Ocean home to just over 2,000 people. Yes, Thanksgiving comes on a Wednesday, not Thursday, and there are a lot of local dishes alongside the pumpkin pie, but the holiday is firmly rooted in American traditions. It began in the 1800s when American sailors and whalers made regular stops there. One American, Isaac Robinson, settled on Norfolk Island and made a big deal of celebrating Thanksgiving. After he died, the islanders just kept it going. The inaugural Turkey Trot had only six runners Every year on or around Thanksgiving, around a million people put on their running shoes – and maybe a turkey costume – and take part in their local Turkey Trot, one of many races held all over the US. If nothing else, the run will help counter all the calories about to be consumed. The Turkey Trot began in Buffalo, New York, in 1896, on a much smaller scale. Just six runners started the five-mile course, with four finishing. One pulled out after two miles, while another had to stop when his “late breakfast refused to keep in its proper place”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/13GettyImages-1444263993-f9f153a-e1764176982360.jpg" width="1500" height="1002" alt="A photograph of several people running along a road, each with a number pinned to their front. In the front of the image is a man running dressed as a turkey" title="Thousands of Americans attempt to offset their Thanksgiving calorie intake by taking part in a Turkey Trot – such as this annual event in Dana Point, California, photographed in 2022 (Image by Getty Images)" /> The first Macy’s Parade featured live animals, not balloons Another constant of Thanksgiving television is the Macy’s Parade. Best known today for the storeys-high balloons in the shapes of beloved characters, when the department store first planned a parade through the streets of New York in 1924, the main attraction was a bit livelier – literally. They borrowed animals from Central Park Zoo, including elephants, tigers, bears, camels and monkeys. Some 10,000 people attended the Macy’s Christmas Parade, so-called as it launched shopping season for Christmas, preferably at Macy’s at Herald Square, rather than celebrated Thanksgiving. Read more | The history of Christmas, plus 10 festive facts you might not know Snoopy has the most appearances in the Macy’s Parade The famous Macy’s Parade balloons made their debut in 1927, with the honour of the first character going to Felix the Cat. It is a dog, however, who has been flown through the streets of Manhattan on Thanksgiving more than any other. Since 1968, Snoopy, Charlie Brown’s loyal companion from the beloved Peanuts comics by Charles M Schulz, has clocked up more than 40 appearances with eight different balloons. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/152DB0047-3e97b86-e1764177046383.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a large balloon depicting Snoopy the dog. He is all white with black nose and ears, and has a yellow bird on his head" title="Snoopy has long been a fixture of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, notching up more than 40 appearances. This particular incarnation of the beagle, photographed in 2013, featured his bird friend Woodstock perched on his head (Image by Alamy)" /> Calvin Coolidge was sent a raccoon for his Thanksgiving meal In 1926, President Calvin Coolidge received an unusual present from one of his supporters: a live raccoon, along with a note suggesting that it would make a delicious Thanksgiving meal. Rather than send the animal to the oven, though, Coolidge decided to keep it as a pet. Named Rebecca, she had free rein of the White House and its grounds, and at the end of his presidency Coolidge and his wife, Grace, sent the raccoon into retirement at a zoo in Washington, DC. Read more | 10 famous people in history and their bizarre pets <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/16FFWH1F-8ddae15-e1764177100383.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a woman in a dress and large hat, holding a raccoon in her arms" title="President Calvin Coolidge’s wife, Grace, seen with the couple’s pet raccoon in 1927. The procyonid – which was given the name Rebecca – was originally intended to have been eaten as part of Thanksgiving dinner (Image by Alamy)" /> The Detroit Lions always play Thanksgiving football American football is as much a part of Thanksgiving as turkey, with millions tuning in to the blockbuster matches that afternoon. It’s a big day for the sport, but especially for fans of the Detroit Lions since they play every year. This custom goes back to 1934. When radio executive George Richards bought an Ohio-based team and moved them to Detroit, Michigan, he had the idea to drum up excitement by putting on a game on Thanksgiving, when everyone was off work. It was inspired: the game between the Lions and the champion Chicago Bears sold out, and became an instant annual tradition. In 1966, the Dallas Cowboys got in on the act and now they have their own game too. There were two Thanksgivings in 1939, 1940 and 1941 President Franklin D Roosevelt made a bold decision in 1939 to go against precedent and move Thanksgiving up a week. The issue was that the traditional date for the holiday fell on the last day of November that year, leading retailers to warn FDR about the economic damage a late Thanksgiving would have on Christmas shopping. Not everyone was happy with the date change, dubbed ‘Franksgiving’, with Time magazine even comparing FDR to Adolf Hitler. With many states ignoring it and celebrating on the usual day, the US had two Thanksgivings. Read more | “We analysed Hitler’s DNA – and what we discovered made us gasp” Despite the criticism, the president doubled down and did the same thing the following year. Congress got involved in late 1941, passing a resolution to set the date for Thanksgiving once and for all – but not before that year's festivities had already been impacted too. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/18GettyImages-535083952-ee1697d-e1764177144853.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a smiling couple sitting next to each other at a dining table. The man is carving a turkey while the woman looks on" title="Franklin D Roosevelt carves a turkey during his first Thanksgiving as president, 1933. Six years later, his decision to move the date of the holiday would spark national controversy (Image by Getty Images)" /> The day after Thanksgiving is the busiest day of the year for plumbers Perhaps this should not be all that surprising: with large groups gathering under a single roof to eat a huge meal, clogging up the kitchen drainage and – ahem – bathroom pipes, the pressure on America’s plumbing peaks at Thanksgiving. The day after the celebrations, therefore, proves to be an extremely busy time for plumbers. One national company claims they see a 50 per cent increase in calls from the average Friday. While everyone else is calling it ‘Black Friday’, the plumbers of America have come to refer to it as ‘Brown Friday’. Presidents have the power to pardon turkeys Every Thanksgiving, the president performs one of their stranger duties: the pardon of one or two turkeys. Freed from the dinner table, they are sent for a long life on a farm or petting zoo (or, in some cases, Disneyland). The custom officially began with George HW Bush in 1989, although its roots go back further. When a turkey was sent to the White House for the Thanksgiving meal, JFK, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter all chose to let them live. Ronald Reagan did the same, although he went so far as to use the word “pardon”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/19-WIKIPresidentRonaldReaganreceivesthe40thWhiteHouseThanksgivingTurkey1987-68d3e64-e1764177226575.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A group of people stand around a white turkey as it tries to take flight" title="Ronald Reagan pardons Charlie the turkey in 1987. As well as having to deal with a very flappy bird, the president also had to field questions from the press regarding the Iran-Contra affair" /> The same day also marks the National Day of Mourning For many Americans, Thanksgiving is not a cause for celebration, but a stark reminder of the oppression of the Native American population. The image of the first Thanksgiving – where European settler and indigenous people sat side-by-side in peace – is a myth that glosses over the centuries of brutality and persecution that followed. The last Thursday in November, therefore, is a time of protest. It began in 1970 when Wamsutta Frank James, an elder of the Aquinnah Wampanoag, was refused the chance to give a speech he had written for the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the Mayflower, which spoke of the painful legacy of colonisation and governmental subjugation. Instead, he led a group of protesters in Plymouth and declared the first National Day of Mourning. Today, the United American Indians of New England (UAINE) organise a march and rally to honour their ancestors and educate the public about why Thanksgiving should be about more than giving thanks.
When was the White House built – and why is it white?
How much do you know about the history of the White House in Washington, DC, which has been home to all US presidents since John Adams in 1800?
Inscribed on the stone fireplace of the State Dining Room of the White House are the words: “I pray to Heaven bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.” The blessing, which was engraved there in 1945, came from a letter written by John Adams to his wife Abigail in 1800. He was the second man to be president of the United States, but the first to reside in the world-famous home of the presidency at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, in Washington, DC. A decade earlier, there had been no such place as Washington, DC, on the Potomac River. Founded by the Residence Act of 1790, the new capital would be a modern metropolis laid out in a grid system and with grand boulevards and public spaces everywhere. In the short term, though, it was not a promising place to live: if not hectic with the constant building works, there was nothing around but forests and some wetlands, where sanitation was poor and conditions were cold to freezing. Still, this would be the home of the president. George Washington, the first man elected to the office, personally chose the site for what would be the White House along with city planner Pierre Charles L’Enfant, and launched a competition for the building’s design. When was the White House built? Construction of the White House got underway with the laying of the cornerstone on 13 October 1792. But the the so-called ‘Presidential Palace' would not be finished until after Washington had left office. Even by 1800, when Adams moved in, the building was far from complete. It would be added to, repaired and extended many times throughout the years, not least when it had to be reconstructed following the War of 1812. The photogenic South Portico was added in 1824, followed by the North Portico, completed in 1830. The West Wing was added in 1902 and within, in 1909, the first iteration of the Oval Office. The East Wing was developed in 1942 – it is the focus of a sweeping renovation by President Trump that will see a 90,000-square-foot ballroom added to the building. The White House currently boasts a total of 132 rooms. White House facts: seven things you need to know Here, White House historian Lindsay M Chervinsky explains everything you need to know about the home of the US president… Why is the White House called the White House? The home of the President of the United States is called the White House in reference to its covering with lime-based whitewash to protect the porous sandstone it is built from. By President Jimmy Carter’s administration (1977–81), the paint was so thick that visitors couldn’t see the carving details above the windows and doors, or any of the beautiful molding. The White House underwent a significant external renovation to strip the many layers of paint, which took 20 years and wasn’t completed until President Bill Clinton’s administration (1993–2001). When finished, over 45 coats of paint had been removed from the exterior walls. Read more: American history myths: 7 things people get wrong Who built the White House? The White House was designed by Irish-born architect, James Hoban – whose vision of a neoclassical mansion in the Palladian style won him Washington's competition – but it was built by hundreds of workers, including enslaved people. Over the next eight years, a mix of free African-American and white wage labourers, enslaved workers, and skilled craftsmen built the White House. They worked in a variety of positions, including basic labourers, overseers, sawyers, carpenters, stone workers, and bricklayers. Some of the enslaved workers were owned by the city commissioners charged with overseeing the project, or by Hoban himself. The vast majority, however, were hired out from their owners in Washington, DC, as well as Virginia, and Maryland, who then pocketed the enslaved peoples’ wages. The construction crews were often shuttled back and forth between the White House and the Capitol building sites (which were also built using enslaved labour), depending on which location needed labour or had available materials at any given moment. Was the White House set on fire by the British? Yes. In August 1814, British forces marched into Washington, DC and burned all public buildings in retaliation for the destruction of York [now Toronto, Canada], the year prior. After enjoying a lavish meal laid out by First Lady Dolley Madison, the British forces set fire to the White House. Urban legend suggests that a rain storm arrived and saved the White House. The truth, however, is that the rain actually made the damage worse. While the wet weather saved the surrounding buildings from catching fire, it nearly destroyed the walls of the White House. The stone walls were incredibly hot from the fire and the cold rain caused them to shrink rapidly and crack. Congress quickly appointed a commission to investigate the damage and rebuild the White House. The investigators discovered that almost everything inside had been destroyed except for a few pots and pans in the basement kitchens, but their report concealed the extent of the damage to get the rebuilding process started immediately. Read more: Why does the United States of America celebrate Independence Day on 4 July? Some officials wanted to move the capital to a more developed city – like Philadelphia, New York, or Charleston – because lodging, food, and entertainment options were still quite limited in DC. Furthermore, representatives from states far away from DC, like New Hampshire or Georgia, wanted to shorten their travelling time. They saw the destruction of the White House as an opportunity to move the capital. Eager to maintain a historic link with the earlier presidents, Presidents James Madison and James Monroe rushed to rebuild the White House exactly as before. They even hired the same architect, James Hoban, to complete the renovation. Boston Tea Party: Igniting a Revolution Member exclusive | Discover the causes, tensions, and violent origins of the Boston Tea Party. Join leading experts as they explain the key players involved in the plan – and why tea was so important to the story. Listen to all episodes now Many animals have lived at the White House Most people are familiar with the dogs that have lived in the White House – such as Bo and Sunny Obama, or President George W Bush and First Lady Laura Bush’s Scottish terriers, Barney and Miss Beazley. But there have been a menagerie of animals that have called the grounds home. President Woodrow Wilson welcomed a herd of sheep to the South Lawn and they donated their wool to the Red Cross to create uniforms for soldiers during the First World War. One particularly adventuresome ram named Hi caused a bit of trouble when he repeatedly broke into the Oval Office. John F Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline, had a pet pony named Macaroni; First Lady Grace Coolidge had a raccoon named Rebecca; and President William H Taft had a cow, Pauline Wayne, which roamed in front of the Old Executive Office Building. Perhaps best of all, Alice Roosevelt (Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter) had a garter snake named Emily Spinach that she carried around in her purse and pulled out as a conversation piece at parties. Anne Boleyn’s lapdog and John Quincy Adams’s alligator: 10 famous people in history and their bizarre pets The White House is bigger than you might think it is While the building appears to be two stories from the street, there are actually six floors. There are three floors above ground (the State Floor and two floors for the residence), and three floors below ground. While much of the State Floor and residence layout has remained the same since its construction, many other areas of the White House have changed dramatically. When you enter the White House today, you would probably enter on the Ground Floor, or the first of the basement floors. Until 1901, this floor was primarily a work space. Instead of the China Room, the Vermeil Room, the Library, and the Diplomatic Reception Room, there would have been a kitchen, a laundry room, a storage space for food and dishware, and sleeping spaces for the enslaved or free servants. The basement was notoriously damp and frequently infested with vermin and rodents. Read more: Life after the White House: what the US presidents did next There are other spaces that have been lost to history as well. The White House had a series of stables to house the president’s horses, carriages, coachmen, and grooms. The final and most elaborate stable was converted into a garage in 1909. The attic has also undergone many renovations. In its early years, it was used for storage, sleeping quarters for free or enslaved servants, and a hiding place for the presidents’ children. In 1913 First Lady Ellen Wilson added guestrooms and a painting studio for her own private use. During the Coolidge administration, engineers discovered problems with the roof structure. They installed a sunroom (now the solarium), larger guest and service rooms, and a new steel and concrete roof. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/11/WhiteHouseFloorPlanGettyImages-640477071-b94d8bf-e1761584579153.jpg" width="1500" height="1002" alt="Floor Plan of the second storey of the White House" title="A 1901 drawing by FD Owen of the floor plan of the second story in the White House, which was originally deisgned by architect James Hoban in 1792 (Photo by Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)" /> The White House grounds were once open to anyone When President John Adams moved into the White House on 1 November 1800, there was no fence or gate, and the grounds were open to pedestrians. President Thomas Jefferson added a fence that enclosed the grounds, but they remained open for common use. In 1873, President Ulysses S Grant began closing the grounds at sunset for additional security and in 1893, President Grover Cleveland closed the South Grounds, typically the first family’s garden, after strangers tried to take a picture of his young daughter, Esther. The North and South Grounds were closed permanently during Calvin Coolidge’s presidency at the recommendation of the United States Secret Service. The president’s cabinet hasn’t always had a home at the White House Every president has consulted a cabinet since President George Washington convened the first full cabinet meeting on 26 November 1791. While President John Adams was the first to live in the White House, President Thomas Jefferson was the first to meet with his cabinet in the White House and gathered the department secretaries in his private study on the first floor (now the State Dining Room). By the time of the Civil War, the president’s study had moved to the second floor and Abraham Lincoln met with the secretaries in his office in the south-east corner of the second floor (now the Lincoln Bedroom). Read more: American presidents: 9 things you (probably) didn’t know Theodore Roosevelt built the West Wing to provide more work space for his staff, and to give his large family more room on the second floor of the original building. In 1909, President Taft expanded the West Wing, added the Oval Office, and an official Cabinet room. The Oval Office was moved to its present location during President Franklin D Roosevelt’s presidency. Since then, most cabinets have used the Cabinet room for official cabinet meetings and elected to meet with individual department secretaries in the Oval Office. Lindsay M Chervinsky, PhD is White House Historian at the White House Historical Association, a non-profit dedicated to preserving and sharing the history of the White House. She is the author of The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution
Is Oppenheimer a true story? Meet the real Robert Oppenheimer, ‘father of the atomic bomb’
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer tells the story of the creation of the atomic bomb, a weapon so powerful that it redefined the world order. And at the centre of its development was of the first nuclear weapon, and the paradoxes and moral questions that dogged him for the rest of his life
Few famous scientists have left quite as complex a legacy as J Robert Oppenheimer, the 'father of the atomic bomb' who reflected, in aftermath watching the raw power of the first ever nuclear test in 1945, "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Oppenheimer's moral quandaries and personal demons nestled alongside his scientific brilliance, and all are explored in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which tells the story of the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. Starring Cillian Murphy ( perhaps known to history fans for his role in Peaky Blinders) in the title role, the film follows Oppenheimer’s journey from acclaimed theoretical physicist to director of the top-secret Los Alamos laboratory, where he led team of brilliant minds in a race to unlock the destructive power of the atom. The star cast also includes Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer, Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock, Robert Downey Jr as Lewis Strauss, and Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves. But is any of what we see in the film true? Read on for a full breakdown of the real history in Oppenheimer. Is Oppenheimer a true story? Yes, Oppenheimer is based on true events. The film tells the story of J Robert Oppenheimer, a real-life American physicist who played a central role in the Manhattan Project, the United States’ secret programme to develop the first atomic bomb, which began in 1942. Kitty Oppenheimer, Lewis Strauss, Jean Tatlock, General Leslie Groves – they were all real historical figures who shaped Oppenheimer's life and work. So too were the questions around his political leanings, and the intense scrutiny he endured during the post-war era. Briefed with weaponising atomic energy, the 38-year-old Oppenheimer was chosen by General Leslie Groves to head up the project’s secret research laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and oversaw the development of the world’s first atomic weapons between 1943-45. Prior to taking up the post, he had carried out research into the quantity of radioactive material that would be required to make an atomic weapon, and how destructive it might be. Such insight proved indispensable to the project’s ultimate success. “Everyone we interviewed about his years in Los Alamos always mentioned that the atomic bomb would never have been produced in two and a half years if they had chosen anyone other than Oppenheimer. It turned out that he was a brilliant administrator, and was very persuasive at getting all these large-ego minded scientists to work together.” That was Kai Bird, co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, speaking to us on this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast about the physicist’s life and unique value to the project. Oppenheimer was anti-fascist in his political leanings, explains Bird, and this was his major motivation for building what he called “the gadget”. He knew from the physics that such a weapon was possible; it was simply a large engineering problem. He feared that the German physicists with whom he had studied in the 1920s were just as capable of building this weapon, and believed that they would gift it to Adolf Hitler and Germany would win the war. “He was very fearful that they were way too far behind,” says Bird. “And this gave him the motivation to work hard and to inspire other physicists and scientists at Los Alamos to build the gadget.” An important part of his brilliance, says Bird, is that he was a polymath. “He loved quantum physics, but he also loved the deserts of New Mexico. He first went to New Mexico when he was an 18-year-old, and he fell in love with horseback riding and the very spartan cowboy existence out there.” Oppenheimer also loved French poetry and the novels of Ernest Hemingway, and he also acquired an interest in Hindu mysticism and read the Hindu scriptures, the Bhagavad Gita. “He taught himself Sanskrit so he could read it in the original,” says Bird. It was this multifaceted brilliance that was part of his appeal, says Bird. He differed from other theoretical physicists as he was able to explain concepts in “plain English” and was also a charismatic speaker, though Bird notes that he could also be shy and reticent. He was “very complicated”, says Bird. “He could be sweet and patient with his students, and then in the presence of authority figures, he could suddenly become brusque and even rude. And, of course, this was part of his downfall later.” Watch now: Is Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer guilty of perpetuating a historical myth? View Green Video on the source website Kitty Oppenheimer: who was Robert Oppenheimer married to? J Robert Oppenheimer was married to Kitty Oppenheimer (formerly Kitty Puening). A German American biologist and botanist, Puening studied mathematics, biology, and chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh in the late 1920s, and in the early 1930s became a member of the Communist Party of the America (CPA). Prior to meeting Oppenheimer in 1939, Kitty had been married three times, and was married to her third husband, Richard Stewart Harrison, when her relationship with the physicist began. Kitty became pregnant with their first child in the autumn of 1940, and soon afterwards she obtained a divorce from Harrison, which left Robert and Kitty free to marry in November 1940. A keen horsewoman and lover of the outdoors, Kitty joined Oppenheimer to live in the desert town in Los Alamos, where she worked as a biologist on the health group of the Manhattan Project, conducting blood tests to assess the danger of radiation, before she became pregnant again. During this period, she also suffered with depression and alcohol issues, in part due to the isolation of the military facility. She survived Oppenheimer by four years, dying of an embolism in 1972. What was Oppenheimer’s relationship with Jean Tatlock? Oppenheimer also had an enduring relationship with Jean Tatlock, a woman whom he met in the early 1930s. She was a psychiatrist and also a member of the Communist Part of America, and is often credited with introducing Oppenheimer to radical politics. Some historians have suggested that Oppenheimer and Tatlock were romantically involved following Oppenheimer’s marriage to Kitty in 1940; though their relationship had broken off in 1939, Oppenheimer continued to visit Tatlock in San Francisco until 1943. Tatlock suffered from clinical depression and died by suicide in 1944. Was Oppenheimer a communist? There is no direct evidence that Robert Oppenheimer was a communist, but many people close to the physicist were either members of the party – including Kitty, Jean, and his brother Frank Oppenheimer – or had links to its activity. “Any attempt to label Robert Oppenheimer a party member is a futile exercise,” wrote Kai Bird and the late Martin Sherwin in their 2005 biography, “as the FBI learned to its frustration over many years.” Though Sherwin and Bird concluded that Oppenheimer didn’t join the party himself, he did contribute to Communist Party activities, including an effort to desegregate a public swimming pool in California, and a fund to buy an ambulance to ship it to the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. These associations would “haunt him with the American political authorities and the FBI”, explains Bird. “He fell under FBI surveillance as early as 1940. And by 1954, his FBI file had grown to be about 8,000 pages.” Did Oppenheimer really say, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”? The line is often associated with Oppenheimer, who quoted “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, after the successful detonation of the Trinity nuclear weapon in July 1945. He did say it, but not right away. Immediately afterwards, explains Bird, the physicist turned to his brother Frank and simply said: “It worked.” It wasn’t until a few days later, when he was interviewed by the New York Times, that Oppenheimer quoted the Hindu scripture. “He had a very theatrical sense to him,” says Bird. “He knew how to get up on the stage and perform.” Oppenheimer himself later spoke of the moment in a 1965 NBC documentary: “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture.” The Trinity bomb was successfully tested on 16 July, producing the estimated equivalent of 20,000 tonnes of TNT. German-born Rudolf Peierls recalled that the brilliant blinding flash “told us… we had done our job”. Yet by that time, the war with Nazi Germany was over and so Japan instead became the target. Some Los Alamos staff expressed concern that, as Japan had no bomb project, why should the operation go ahead? Though Oppenheimer grappled with the huge moral weight of deploying such a weapon, he was influenced by Danish physicist Niels Bohr who, upon a visit to the project in 1943 had asked Oppenheimer: “Robert, can you tell me, is it big enough?” – meaning, will it be significant enough to change the nature of warfare? Did Oppenheimer regret the atomic bomb? Though conflicted, Oppenheimer’s position in August 1945 was that the bomb would ignite with such explosive power that it could persuade all of humanity that the world should never again fight total warfare like the Second World War. There is evidence that the decision undoubtedly weighed heavy on Oppenheimer. Bird interviewed Anne Wilson Marks, Oppenheimer’s secretary. She recalled that one day, in the intervening three weeks between the Trinity test and the use of the bomb on Japan, Oppenheimer was muttering under his breath as they walked to work: “Those poor little people, those poor little people.” “Anne stopped him and said, ‘Robert, what are you talking about?’ And he said, ‘Well, the Trinity test shows that the gadget has worked, and now it's going to be used on a large target in Japan, meaning a city. And there are going to be innocents, thousands of innocents killed. Those poor little people.’” This shows, explains Bird, that he was painfully aware of the tragic implications of the gadget. And yet, as Bird and Martin Sherwin considered Anne Wilson Marks’s testimony when writing American Prometheus, “Marty pointed out that, chronologically, that [conversation with Anne Wilson Marks] is the same week that [Oppenheimer] was briefing some of the bombardiers who were going to be on the aeroplane that was going to drop the bomb. And he instructed them exactly at what altitude they should detonate the weapon to have the maximum destructive power, and [said] that it should be dropped on the centre of the city for to have the most destructive implications.” At 2.45am on 6 August 1945, the crew of the Enola Gay aircraft dropped a bomb named Little Boy on Hiroshima, a 4.8-tonne device that detonated with the power of 15,000 tonnes of TNT. Authorities estimated the number of deaths by December 1945 to be around 140,000 (since then, deaths from radiation-related diseases have added to the toll). Japan surrendered on 14 August 1945, five days after a second bomb devastated Nagasaki. Read more | Was the US justified in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War? What happened to Oppenheimer after the atomic bomb? After the detonation of the two atomic bombs in August 1945, Oppenheimer never worked on weapons again. Kitty Oppenheimer’s letters to friends tell of how in the days following the bombs, he plunged into a deep depression, and she feared for his life. As journalist Lincoln Barnett wrote in Life magazine in 1949: “Oppenheimer knew that he and his coworkers had acquired a promethian [sic] burden they could never shed.” Once somewhat recovered, Oppenheimer headed to Washington, DC for briefings on the end of the war, and in October 1945 he met with US President Harry Truman. “By this time, Oppenheimer was determined to try to persuade the president and the policy makers that they needed to understand that this is a weapon that cannot be used defensively, and that we shouldn't rely on it,” says Bird. He believed “that we should try to find some way to impose international regulations, and maybe ban it and control the technology”. President Truman didn’t respond favourably to Oppenheimer’s pro-regulation position or the suggestion that the US had blood on its hands. In response to Truman’s belief that the Russians would never be able to match the technology, Oppenheimer strongly felt that “there were no secrets to this weapon,” says Bird. “The physics was known.” Just a few weeks later in November 1945, Oppenheimer delivered a speech in Philadelphia to the American Philosophical Society, in which he said: “We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon, that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world. We have made a thing that, by all standards of the world we grew up in, is an evil thing. By so doing, by our participation in making it possible to make these things, we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man, of whether it is good to learn about the world, to try to understand it, to try to control it, to help gift to the world of men increased insight, increased power.” Read more | How have nuclear weapons shaped global politics? 10 key moments in the post-war atomic world Why is Oppenheimer known as the father of the atomic bomb? By the autumn of 1945, the Manhattan Project was public knowledge, and Oppenheimer’s position on the development of the world-changing weapons had caused him to become a household name. He was described by Life magazine as “one of the most famous men in the world, one of the most admired, quoted, photographed, consulted, glorified, well-nigh deified as the fabulous and fascinating archetype of a brand new kind of hero, the hero of science and intellect, originator and living symbol of the new atomic age." What was Oppenheimer’s relationship with Albert Einstein? In 1947, Oppenheimer took up a position as Director at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, where faculty members included one Albert Einstein. The pair later became close colleagues, and were united in their desire to highlight the dangers posed by nuclear weapons. Both were against the development of more destructive weapons such as the hydrogen bomb (H-Bomb). Such a weapon “will be 2,500 times as powerful as that which destroyed Hiroshima”, warned a 1955 manifesto by Einstein and philosopher Bertrand Russell, adding that “the best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with H-bombs might possibly put an end to the human race.” While Oppenheimer didn’t sign the Einstein-Russell manifesto, as part of the Atomic Energy Commission (an agency founded to foster and control the peacetime development of atomic science and technology) he frequently worked with Einstein and other eminent scientists to advocate for peaceful use of nuclear fission for energy production. Who was Lewis Strauss – and how did he cause Oppenheimer’s downfall? Lewis Strauss was appointed to the position of chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1953 and quickly formed a rivalry with Oppenheimer so antagonistic that it would lead Strauss to publicly challenge his character, ultimately ending in Oppenheimer's security clearance being revoked. Strauss and Oppenheimer were “like oil and water”, says Bird. “They had bad chemistry. Strauss, although he only had a high school education, prided himself on his knowledge of science and things atomic. Oppenheimer was rather dismissive of these pretensions, and he made it clear what he thought of Strauss. “Famously, he testified at the Senate in the presence of Lewis Strauss and made fun of something that Strauss had just testified to, disparaging his scientific knowledge. So Strauss acquired a deep sort of animosity for Oppenheimer.” In Strauss’s capacity as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, he had access to Oppenheimer’s FBI file – which had been open since March 1941. “Strauss got it into his head, looking at these files, that perhaps Oppenheimer was a security risk. He orchestrated a complicated series of charges against Oppenheimer, and announced that Oppenheimer either had to go through a security hearing and defend himself, or give up his security clearance altogether.” As it happened, Oppenheimer’s security clearance was set to expire in June 1954. Oppenheimer sought the opinion of his friend Einstein, who advised Oppenheimer to walk away, explains Bird, telling him that he shouldn’t have anything to do with the “witch hunt”. So why did Oppenheimer choose to fight the hearing rather than walk away? Oppenheimer felt that he needed to use his celebrity status as a scientist to inform the public and the politicians in Washington about the dangers of nuclear weapons, explains Bird. “He wanted to use his expertise for the public good and participate in the policy debates. And to do so, he needed a security clearance and otherwise he wouldn't be able to brief the president. “And, truth be known, Oppenheimer by this time had fallen in love with the status that he had, his access to the establishment and to power, to be able to walk the halls of Congress and talk to congressmen and senators and the president. There was something attractive about all this that he didn't want to give up. And in this, he was certainly politically naïve.” In the spring of 1954, Strauss orchestrated a hearing that went on for weeks, exposing many private details about Oppenheimer, his political associations and intimate life – details which were later leaked to the New York Times and other newspapers. When was Oppenheimer’s security clearance revoked? On 12 June 1954, it was recommended that Oppenheimer's security clearance not be reinstated, bringing to an end any influence he could have in government or policy. “The result was a public humiliation of America's greatest working scientist, and Oppenheimer never really recovered from it,” says Bird. “He became a public nonentity for the rest of his life.” “It was a terrible black mark on American history,” says Bird. “And Oppenheimer became essentially the sort of chief celebrity victim of the entire McCarthy era.” Oppenheimer held the position of director at the Institute for Advanced Study until 1966, a year before his death from advanced throat cancer in 1967, at the age of 62. Kai Bird is the co-author, with the late Martin Sherwin, of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005, Alfred A. Knopf). This article includes quotes from Bird, who was speaking with Elinor Evans on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full episode now.
Are Bertha and George Russell real? Inside the real Vanderbilt divorces that rocked the Gilded Age
Julian Fellowes, the creator behind HBO’s The Gilded Age, has taken plenty of cues from real history for the characters of Bertha and George Russell, seemingly turning to the lives of Alva and William K Vanderbilt in plotting much of their story. Discover the real history, and what this could mean for everyone’s favourite power couple in series three
Bertha Russell is the undisputed queen of Julian Fellowes’s drama The Gilded Age. In the story so far, glamorous ‘new money’ socialite Bertha (played by Carrie Coon) has conquered New York society through means both fair and foul, and risen to the top of the so-called ‘Four Hundred’. And she’s done it all while holding the steady hand of her husband, ruthless ‘robber-baron-with-a-conscience’ George (played by Morgan Spector). To date, her plot has mirrored many key moments in the life of a real historical figure in New York’s Gilded Age history: Alva Vanderbilt. In the show, Bertha has befriended Ward McAllister (who was a real contemporary of Alva); thrown a grand ball in her Fifth Avenue mansion to signal to Mrs Caroline Astor and the Four Hundred that she means business (as Alva did in 1883); and she has triumphed in the War of the Operas (as Alva claimed victory too). For Bertha, life is perfect, right? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/12/0750TheGildedAgeS02-1-3c0deb0-e1702915513531.jpg" width="620" height="412" alt="Taissa Farmiga as Gladys Russell & Carrie Coon as Bertha Russell. Bertha is thought to be based on Alva Vanderbilt, who secured the marriage of her daughter, Consuelo, to the 9th Duke of Marlborough." title="Taissa Farmiga as Gladys Russell & Carrie Coon as Bertha Russell. Bertha is thought to be based on Alva Vanderbilt, who secured the marriage of her daughter, Consuelo, to the 9th Duke of Marlborough." /> Far from it. When we left the Russells in season two, Bertha had successfully courted the Duke of Buckingham, a British aristocrat visiting New York, and welcomed him publicly as her guest to the opera, evidence that she had finally been accepted by the highest echelons of society. But beneath the surface, all is not well, with others speculating over the lengths to which she had gone in securing the Duke’s alliance. Meanwhile, she and George were at loggerheads over the marital prospects of their daughter Gladys. If show creator Julian Fellowes means to trace real history further in The Gilded Age drama, here’s what that means for Bertha, George, and the rest of the Russell family… Who was Alva Vanderbilt, the inspiration for Bertha Russell? Alva Vanderbilt (née Alva Erskine Smith) was born in January 1853, in Mobile, Alabama, into a wealthy Southern family. Their fortune came from cotton – and as such, their riches were inextricably tied to the trade of enslaved people. When victory for the Union in the American Civil War in 1865 brought about the end of slavery as an economic institution, the Smith family relocated permanently to New York City. Here, Alva soon realised that admittance into the entrenched social circles of Manhattan’s elite would be more difficult than anticipated. She had spent much of her early life in Paris and New York, receiving an education that emphasised language, arts and European manners, but even such a prestigious background would not be enough. Ambitious and socially strategic, Alva sought to change that. In 1875, at 22 years old, she married William Kissam Vanderbilt, grandson of railroad magnate Cornelius ‘Commodore’ Vanderbilt. As evidence of the family’s vast wealth, when Cornelius died in 1877, William Henry – William K’s father – became the richest American. Though William K (or ‘Willie’ as he was known) is described in many sources as personally shy and somewhat passive, particularly in contrast to the manoeuvrings of Alva, he was immensely wealthy – in 1885, he in turn inherited $55m from his father. Read more | Who were the tycoons of the Gilded Age? Meet the ruthless 'robber barons' who made millions Willie and Alva’s union was seen as mutually advantageous: Alva brought charm, social intelligence, and aspirations to elevate the Vanderbilt name into the old-money elite, while William offered vast fortune and access to society’s upper echelons. Amid Alva’s ruthless mission to engineer the Vanderbilts’ social ascent, the legendary 1883 costume ball at the newly completed Vanderbilt mansion on Fifth Avenue is regarded by many as her crowning achievement. The ball, attended by over 1,000 guests, effectively forced Mrs Caroline Astor, gatekeeper of New York’s elite, to formally acknowledge the Vanderbilts as ‘society’. By the 1880s, despite her Southern roots, Alva had positioned herself as a major figure in the social scene of the Gilded Age. Today, physical evidence of her social triumph survives in the form of the Marble House, an opulent mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, gifted by Willie to his wife on her 39th birthday. The Vanderbilt couple commissioned society architect Richard Morris Hunt (who had also designed their Fifth Avenue mansion) to create a ‘summer cottage’ on the coast. Though the name evoked the modest wooden houses that had edged the Rhode Island clifftops years before, the new stretch of mansions on Bellevue Avenue that included the Marble House were modelled more closely on the Palace of Versailles. The Vanderbilts’ summer retreat featured rooms gilded with 22 carat gold, with marble balconies, electric interior lights and hand-carved detail throughout. It survives amid other palaces on the coast, including The Breakers (owned by William K’s brother Cornelius Vanderbilt II) and Beechwood (which belonged to the Astors). When and why did the Vanderbilts divorce? “I always do everything first,” Alva reportedly once boasted. “I blaze the trail for the rest to walk in.” Blaze a new trail Alva did. At a time when divorce among the American elite was still rare and highly stigmatised, Alva, increasingly frustrated with Willie’s infidelity and detachment, sought a legal separation from her husband in 1895. “I was the first girl of my ‘set’ to marry a Vanderbilt,” Alva proclaimed. “Then I was the first society woman to ask for a divorce, and within a year ever so many others had followed my example. They had been wanting divorce all the time, but they had not dared to do it until I showed them the way.” Alva’s case was that Willie had reportedly spent increasing amounts of time away from her, often travelling in Europe and maintaining romantic liaisons with other women. Alva tolerated his behaviour for years, in part because divorce was considered socially damaging, particularly for women. However, by the early 1890s, their marriage had grown cold and emotionally estranged. Alva is reported to have said that she was unwilling to continue living with a man who flaunted his disinterest and infidelity so openly. The couple formally divorced in March 1895, with Alva citing adultery, which was at the time one of the few legally permissible grounds for divorce in New York. Watch | The Gilded Age: Everything you wanted to know View Green Video on the source website The proceedings were handled discreetly, but the implications were significant. Alva retained custody of their three children, including their daughter, Consuelo, and received a settlement reportedly worth $10m (equivalent to around $380m, today). Concerning such high-profile individuals, their divorce was a prominent example of the shifting norms of the Gilded Age, especially regarding women’s agency within marriage. Alva’s radical decision to pursue divorce, despite the potential social backlash, is evidence of both the changing social mores of the time, and Alva’s own indomitable pride and ambition. Consuelo Vanderbilt: the real Gladys Russell? If The Gilded Age's Bertha and George are inspired by Alva and Willie, the latter couple’s daughter Consuelo Vanderbilt is surely the real historical parallel for the character Gladys Russell (played by Taissa Farmiga). Throughout The Gilded Age so far, Gladys has suffered the strict attentions of her mother, in turn restrained or deployed as society currency to assist Bertha’s ambitions. But while Bertha is portrayed as domineering though ultimately acting out of love in the series, the real treatment of Alva’s own daughter is much more severe, to say the least. Born to Alva and Willie in 1877, Consuelo was named after Alva’s close friend, Consuelo Yznaga (a Cuban-American heiress who later became the Duchess of Manchester), which many have interpreted as a signal of Alva’s aim from the beginning: that nothing but the highest status, security and power would do for the Vanderbilt daughter. Consuelo Vanderbilt’s early life was ruled by her mother’s aspirations. There are reports of Alva forcing her young daughter to sit with iron rods inside her corset while she was studying, to encourage good posture, and she was drilled by multiple governesses in etiquette lessons, French and German from an early age. Some sources even have Alva whipping Consuelo with a riding crop when she was disobedient. As Consuelo grew up, she was forced to abide by Alva’s every rule. She was reportedly once told by her mother: “I don’t ask you to think, I do the thinking, you do as you are told.” To Consuelo, summers in Alva’s opulent Marble House felt like a prison. Read more | The Gilded Age: “Entry into a world that really hasn't been covered on television before” Meanwhile, in Gilded Age society a curious pattern was emerging: that of the ‘Dollar Princess’. The somewhat cruel nickname was given to daughters of nouveau riche American families who had wealth and were schooled in social graces – but crucially, had no titles. Many such women were targeted and courted by British aristocrats who needed money to shore up their vast but crumbling estates. Amid this phenomenon, Consuelo was the ultimate prize. By the time she was of an age to marry, the Vanderbilt daughter was one of the most sought-after heiresses of the time. Regarded as delicately pretty and famed for her long, swan-like neck, she also promised access to a vast Vanderbilt fortune (and was worth an estimated $4bn in today’s currency). Alva matched her daughter to Charles Richard John Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough (cousin of Winston Churchill) – but Consuleo’s affections were already engaged elsewhere. She was in love with an American called Winthrop Rutherfurd. Alva shut down the relationship, resorting to emotional blackmail of her daughter – she claimed Consuelo’s defiance had caused her to suffer a near-fatal heart attack – and she even reportedly threatened to shoot Rutherfurd if Consuelo married him. Consuelo later recorded one of her mother’s attempts at diplomacy: “Of course, I’m not forcing you to marry the Duke of Marlborough. You have alternatives, you can marry his cousin, the Duke of Roxburghe instead.” Consuelo Vanderbilt’s wedding: an unhappy match The 18-year-old Consuelo was married to the 9th Duke of Marlborough on 6 November 1895, in St Thomas's Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. The wedding was a spectacle that attracted thousands who gathered to witness the prestigious match. But contemporary accounts of the wedding commented not on what the bride was wearing – a cream satin gown with a five-foot long train trimmed with lace, and a wreath of orange blossoms – but her red-rimmed eyes beneath her veil. By some accounts, the duke told Consuelo shortly after the ceremony that he was in love with another woman, and that he “despised anything that was not British”. He had also negotiated $2.5m in railroad stock from the Vanderbilts, plus an annual allowance of $100,000. Alva had secured a socially successful match for her daughter – at a price. Despite the poor match, Consuelo went on to have great success in her British life, acquitting herself well enough in social circles across the Atlantic that she was chosen in 1902 as one of four duchesses to bear the canopy of Queen Alexandra at the coronation of Edward VII. Blenheim Palace, the duke’s country estate in Oxfordshire, was also transformed by both Consuelo’s dowry and sense of style, undergoing a combination of modernisation and renovation at the turn of the 20th century that is often credited with securing its survival into the present day. Consuelo and her family – she and the duke had two sons – were also painted by famed artist John Singer Sargent in 1905, further enshrining their status among the pantheon of 1900s fashionable society. But the couple continued to live largely separate lives, with extramarital affairs on both sides, and by 1906, when Consuelo was 29 years old, the Marlboroughs had separated. They formally divorced in 1921, and later the same year Consuelo married French aviator Jacques Balsan (whom she had first met more than 25 years earlier at her debutante ball). Though she found happiness in her later years, Consuelo wrote poignantly in her 1952 memoir The Glitter and the Gold of the long shadows cast by her earliest years. “It is a melancholy fact that childhood, so short when compared with the average span of life, should exert such a strong and permanent influence on character that no amount of self-training afterwards can ever completely counter it.” What will happen in The Gilded Age season three? While the real Alva and Willie K were separated by March 1895, half a year before their daughter Consuelo’s marriage to the Duke of Marlborough, in The Gilded Age on screen, George and Bertha have yet to mirror their historical counterparts in ending their marriage. Meanwhile, as per the cliffhanger of season two, it seems that Gladys has been unknowingly promised by her mother to the Duke of Buckingham – and viewers will find out in season 3 if she is forced to go through with the union. In real history, Willie remarried in 1903 to heiress Anne Harriman, and established a base in France from where he bred racehorses. He was frequently seen at French race days accompanied by his daughter Consuelo. He died in Paris in 1920. Alva too married quickly after her divorce, to family friend Oliver Belmont in 1896. Belmont died in 1908, and it was around that time that Alva forged a more political path. She became a prominent figure in the fight for women’s suffrage in the USA, gifting both money and prestige to the movement. Turning her indomitable nature towards the political fight, she opened the Marble House for symposiums and charitable events, and in 1912, she led the Political Equality division of the Women’s Vote Parade in New York City. Alva relocated to France from the early 1920s onwards to be closer to Consuelo, and offered some small recompense when the Duke of Marlborough later sought a Catholic annulment from Consuelo, in order to convert to Catholicism. Alva gave testimony in 1926 accepting some culpability (if not regret) for her daughter’s unhappy marriage: “I forced my daughter to marry the Duke. I have always had absolute power over my daughter. When I issued an order nobody discussed it. I therefore did not beg, but ordered her to marry the Duke.” Alva’s funeral in 1933 took place in St Thomas’s Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue, Manhattan (the same church where her daughter had begun her unhappy union nearly 40 years earlier) and the occasion was a rallying moment for the women’s suffrage cause. Female pallbearers carried her casket, and a banner featuring an embroidered quote from women’s rights activist Susan B Anthony – “Failure is Impossible” – was draped on it. Despite no shortage of wounds inflicted and grudges spawned along the way, Alva had certainly proved anything but a failure in all the goals she had set for herself. Alva is buried with Oliver Belmont at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx. Who knows where Julian Fellowes’ drama will take Bertha, George, and the wider Russell family tree next. But one thing’s for sure, if their story continues to trace the same tracks as the real Vanderbilts, it’s a rocky road ahead…
What is Juneteenth, and why is it celebrated? A historian explains the significance of the holiday today
Each year on 19 June, millions across the US gather to commemorate the day in 1865 when the last enslaved African Americans finally learned of their freedom. Professor Adriane Lentz-Smith explores how the celebrations have evolved over the past 160 years – and the long campaign to have Juneteenth formally recognised as a federal holiday
Every summer, the Juneteenth holiday offers Americans an opportunity to celebrate visions of black freedom in the United States. ‘Juneteenth’ refers to 19 June 1865 – the day that victorious federal troops read out a General Order to the inhabitants of Texas’s Galveston Island declaring that “all slaves are free” – but enslaved people knew the date was a bit arbitrary. President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had ended slavery in the Confederate states more than two years prior, and the ratification of the 13th amendment six months later would end it throughout the US. Emancipation came to the South not as a dramatic, singular event but, instead, agonisingly slowly over space and time. Yet, for all the news that black Texans had passed to each other about slavery and the Confederacy being on the ropes in the years between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Union victory, slaveholders in the Confederacy’s western frontier held fast to their regime until the Union Army’s arrival made emancipation enforceable. Within weeks, the more than 250,000 black people enslaved across Texas began seizing their freedom. Within a year, they had begun commemorating it. And by 1900, historian Quintard Taylor notes, Juneteenth had become more widely celebrated among black Texans than the Fourth of July. Read more | Abraham Lincoln: the greatest US president? Resistance through celebration The holiday served as part of freedpeople’s self-fashioning. Juneteenth is now a national American holiday, but it began as a Texas Emancipation Day, conceived and institutionalised by the formerly enslaved and their descendants. Black women’s clubs, churches and civic organisations marshalled resources to secure spaces for public celebration. In Houston in 1872, for example, they purchased 10 acres that they named ‘Emancipation Park’ and began holding annual celebrations. Black residents in Austin did the same in the early 1900s. In these cities and elsewhere, African Americans celebrated with picnics, parades, balls, rodeos and reunions. They honoured their elders who had lived through slavery and recorded their memories so that the experience would not be forgotten – or, more likely, erased. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/PA0MJN-b2f1b9e-e1750347645459.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white photograph depicting a band of African American musicians standing in a wooded area. They are holding various musical instruments, including guitars, a violin and a double bass. There is a Stars and Stripes flag behind them." title="617 Emancipation Day Celebration band, June 19, 1900" /> In celebrating, they were also resisting. The establishment of Juneteenth as a holiday coincided with white southern elites’ violent resistance to the democratic experiment of postwar Reconstruction and their revanchist rollback of Reconstruction-era democracy. Colloquially known as Jim Crow, the system of economic and political exploitation was secured in part by sadistic violence and in part by narrative claim. To make Jim Crow palatable, even desirable, to white Americans across the regional divides, its defenders argued that US slavery was largely benign, enslaved people mostly content, and the antebellum South a white man’s romantic tragedy. Thus, every time black communities gathered in triumph and jubilation, they gave the lie to the claims of Jim Crow defenders. And in preserving freedpeople’s memories and knitting together family histories out of lives oft-defined by family separation, they built archives that preserved harder, but fuller, histories. A national phenomenon Through the 20th century, Juneteenth travelled with black mobility. Neighbouring states had already taken up the holiday, but the world wars and accompanying Great Migration of African Americans out of the US South and into the north and west meant that Juneteenth celebrations spread to cities like Milwaukee, Seattle and Los Angeles. Civil rights work in the 1960s kept the holiday expanding at the grassroots; the organisers of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign made 19 June a day of national solidarity for their march, spurring participants to carry the holiday from Washington DC back to their hometowns. It took hold because of what it offered. Joy – invaluable in social movements as well as in daily life – but also a way to remember, to honour, and to gird themselves for future struggles. WATCH | Inside a Jim Crow asylum View Green Video on the source website Juneteenth’s journey from a local holiday to a national phenomenon tracks the black freedom struggle in the post-civil rights era and underscores its connection to earlier times. By 1980, Juneteenth had become a legislative issue as well as a local celebration. In Texas, a veteran of the civil rights movement, Al Edwards, had successfully shepherded a bill to make Juneteenth a state holiday. No small feat, as prizewinning historian and Texas native Annette Gordon-Reed has noted, for a state seemingly more interested in its cowboy mythos than its actual history of fighting two wars (the Texas Revolution and the Civil War) to stay a slave regime. The pressure intensifies Amid a growing call over the course of the 1990s and 2000s to have it declared a federal holiday, other states began recognising Juneteenth. The emergence of the Movement for Black Lives as a response to police violence in the 2010s intensified pressure on both state and the federal governments, but the pressure did not come from younger activists alone. In 2016, educator-activist and local historian Opal Lee launched a walking campaign in cities from Fort Worth, Texas to Washington, DC to lobby Congress for the federal holiday she and other civic leaders had been pursuing for decades. As the 89-year-old Lee told a reporter for National Public Radio, the holiday was an offering to her “ancestors” as well as to her “great -great-grandchildren”, her “grandchildren” and her “children”. When President Joe Biden signed the bill finally making Juneteenth a federal holiday in June 2021, Opal Lee was at his side. Read more | Are black histories still being overlooked? George Floyd’s death made the Juneteenth federal holiday possible. Floyd, a Texas-raised athlete who moved to Minnesota and was suffocated by a Minneapolis policeman, died so public and needless a death that it made the American epidemic of anti-black police violence hard to deny. In the short-lived racial reckoning that followed, activists laid out what they believed the nation needed: a return to robust voting rights; reform of militarised policing; a retreat from mass incarceration; and a vision for economic justice. Instead, Congress offered up Juneteenth. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-2150767015-7035ced-e1750347673444.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="President Joe Biden embraces Opal Lee after presenting the civil rights activist with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2024. Biden is wearing a black suit and white tie; Lee is wearing a a white suit and black suit. In the background, we can see attendees of the ceremony and two US flags." title="President Biden Hosts Presidential Medal Of Freedom Ceremony At The White House" /> “A heap of Juneteenths” There was to be no structural change, but perhaps we can look to Juneteenth’s founders as a reminder that countering white supremacist narratives is part of challenging state violence. Many everyday Americans have a hard time contending with slavery, and they shy away even more from thinking through the systems of racialised power and exploitation that developed in slavery’s wake. Juneteenth celebrations offer an opportunity to engage slavery’s histories and legacies, to sit with other people’s memories, to learn, and to find pleasure even in knowing hard things. This will be true and necessary whether the federal government continues to acknowledge the holiday or whether it returns to its vibrant home in the grassroots. Like most celebrations of liberation, Juneteenth marks something powerful and partial. “There’s been a heap of Juneteenths,” one of Ralph Ellison’s characters notes in his follow-up to Invisible Man, an unfinished novel named Juneteenth. “[And] I’ll tell you there’ll be a heap more before we’re truly free.” When freedpeople rejoiced at slavery’s end, they did not celebrate America’s triumph so much as they did their own survival. America was a promise yet fulfilled whereas black life was fact. The way they took the fact and beauty of their living and used it to seed a better future, therein lies the story and its inspiration.
"These women transformed his understanding of the world": making Malcolm X
Malcolm X became one of the most influential leaders in the US civil rights movement – thanks largely, explains Ashley D Farmer, to the women who shaped his life and ideas
On a balmy spring evening in Omaha, Nebraska, Louise Little answered a knock at the door. She must have been terrified when she opened it and saw several knights of the Ku Klux Klan on horseback, demanding that she produce her husband at once. Louise knew she was in trouble. She was all alone save her three children – Wilfred, Hilda, and Philbert – and pregnant with her fourth child, Malcolm. But as the Klansmen brandished their guns, Louise stood her ground. She refused to let them see fear in her eyes or tell them her husband’s whereabouts. In the end, the men left with a threat on their lips as they rode off into the night. Such moments were par for the course for Louise Little, the first of many black women who taught, mentored and shaped the man now known as Malcolm X. Malcolm was born 100 years ago – on 19 May 1925, in Omaha. He was Grenadian-born Louise and Georgia-born Earl Little’s fourth child together. It is easy to see why Earl was smitten with Malcolm’s mother: Louise had travelled extensively, she spoke multiple languages and she was politically engaged. Malcolm’s parents met in Montreal, Canada at a gathering of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). A black nationalist from Jamaica, Garvey captured the black masses with his calls for race pride, and the right for black people all over the world to control their communities and determine their futures. The pair married in 1919, relocated briefly to Philadelphia and then moved to Omaha. By the time Malcolm was born, the Littles were well-known nationalist organisers in the area. Earl was the president of the local chapter of the UNIA, while Louise served as its secretary, managing memberships and writing for the UNIA’s newspaper, The Negro World. Childhood tragedies The couple worked hard to survive during Jim Crow – the state-sponsored racial caste system that deployed disenfranchisement, racial violence and segregation laws to make black people second-class citizens in almost every walk of life. Louise and Earl raised their children as Garveyites, eventually moving to Lansing, Michigan in search of a better life and a bigger black nationalist community. Life came to a screeching halt for six-year-old Malcolm when his father, Earl, announced he was going into town on 29 September 1931. It wasn’t uncommon for Earl to go out like this, but this time Louise had a gnawing feeling that white supremacists were gunning for her husband more than usual. She begged him not to go. But Earl wouldn’t listen. Later that night, Lansing police confirmed her fears. Earl was dead. The officers claimed that Earl had slipped and fallen on the tracks and a streetcar had run him over. But Malcolm claimed the KKK was at fault. They had long wanted his nationalist father dead. Whatever the cause of Earl’s death, Louise was now left to raise their seven children alone. She got by, at first, by following Garvey’s ideals. Grieving as she was, Malcolm’s mother read to him from The Negro World, modelled black economic independence by shopping at black-owned businesses, and fostered his interest in the global black diaspora. Louise Little was Malcolm’s earliest teacher and laid the foundation for him to become one of the greatest black nationalist leaders of the 20th century. But Louise’s life lessons were cut short. Years into the Great Depression, and with too many children to feed, Malcolm’s mother started to fall apart. In December 1939, doctors declared Louise insane and sent her to a mental hospital in Kalamazoo. The state placed the Little children in foster care and sent Malcolm to a juvenile home in the mostly white town of Mason, Michigan. By his own account, Malcolm thrived there, earning good grades and integrating into his school community. But a chance encounter with his half-sister, Ella Collins, changed the trajectory of his life. Inspirational sister Ella, who was one of Earl’s children from his first marriage, visited Malcolm and her other half-siblings when he was a young teen. Malcolm was impressed. “[Ella was] the first really proud black woman I had ever seen,” he recalled in his autobiography. “Ella wasn’t just black, but like our father she was jet black. The way she sat, moved, talked, did everything, bespoke of somebody who did and got exactly what she wanted.” Ella and her husband, Kenneth Collins, adopted Malcolm when he was 15 years old, and welcomed him into their home in Roxbury, the black part of Boston. “No physical move in my life,” Malcolm noted of his relocation in 1941, was “more pivotal or profound in its repercussions. All praise is due to Allah that I went to Boston when I did.” For better or worse, the move opened up a whole new world for Malcolm. Ella did her best to keep Malcolm on the straight and narrow, but the city life was too much of a draw. It didn’t take long for him to join up with the wrong crowd. Malcolm, or ‘Detroit Red’ as he was known on Roxbury’s streets, became part of a five-person larceny ring that plundered its way through jewellery stores and pawn shops across the city. After several close calls, the police finally nabbed the quartet. Read more | How did the US civil rights movement influence Britain? His sisters were Malcolm’s steadying force while he was behind bars. Ella was one of Malcolm’s first and only visitors at the Charlestown State Prison in 1946, where the 20-year-old started his 10-year sentence for burglary. But it was his older sister, Hilda, who prompted the despondent Malcolm to change course. Frustrated, if not embarrassed, by his turn toward crime, Hilda suggested that Malcolm clean up his act while behind bars. He could start by improving his grammar and reading comprehension, she suggested, since letter writing was his only real connection with the outside world. “I did begin a correspondence course in English,” Malcolm recalled after Hilda admonished him. This became the gateway to the world of books. Soon Malcolm started devouring any publication he could get his hands on behind bars, everything from Shakespeare to Asian history. Because of his sister’s prompting, Malcolm Little was on his way to becoming one of the foremost thinkers of the 20th century. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-517350846-CMYK-26622e8.jpg" width="4271" height="2845" alt="A mugshot of Malcolm X as a young man. He wears a trilby hat and looks directly into the camera with a serious expression on his face" title="Mugshots of Malcolm, 1944. On this occasion, he was sentenced to four months in jail following a charge of larceny" /> Perusing books on all sorts of subjects helped open Malcolm’s mind to the Nation of Islam (NOI). While Malcolm was in prison, Ella, along with his older brothers, Wilfred and Philbert, joined the religious organisation that Wallace Fard Muhammad had started in 1930 in Detroit. By the time they joined the Nation, it had a new leader: Elijah Muhammad. Nevertheless, its goals were the same: to “teach the downtrodden and defenceless black people a thorough knowledge of God and of themselves”, worship Allah, and support black nationalist principles such as black political and economic independence. The NOI made sense to Malcolm – who recognised the echoes of Garveyism in the group’s message. By the time he got out of prison in August 1952, he had joined the NOI and changed his name to Malcolm X. Marriage and family Four years later, Malcolm found a life companion in another Nation follower. Betty Dean Sanders grew up in Detroit and attended the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama before relocating to New York to study nursing at Brooklyn State College. At the urging of other nursing students, Betty began attending NOI meetings. She was hesitant at first. Betty had grown up in a loving household that valued women’s independence and the Christian faith. How could she convert to Islam and live by its mandates – everything from its strict dietary restrictions to its conservative gender roles? Yet Nation leaders’ analysis of race relations resonated with the 22-year-old girl who had been to the Deep South and witnessed Jim Crow first-hand. Betty converted in 1956 and married Malcolm X on 14 January 1958, the same day that she received her nursing licence. Betty X, as she was now known, had more formal education than most in her NOI circles. She wanted to work, but Malcolm, who at the time mostly thought of women as helpmates to men, forbade it. So Betty asserted her know-how in other ways. To be sure, she worked hard to raise their six daughters, but she also helped to facilitate Malcolm’s career. When she wasn’t answering phones and managing his schedule, Betty hosted movement luminaries at the couple’s home and offered her opinion on everything from US race relations to world events. After their guests left and Malcolm laid his head down at night, he discussed the movement and his role in it with her. She offered insights and softly steered him as he navigated the turbulent waters of the early 1960s. With Betty by his side, Malcolm became one of the most influential people in the country. He kept up a gruelling schedule, speaking on college campuses and at mosques across the country, sparring with white leaders and journalists, and mobilising Nation members whenever police or politicians attacked one of their own. No matter their political affiliation, activists across the black freedom movement had to concede that Malcolm was one of their biggest and brightest stars. But many wanted to see him stretch politically, to move beyond the Nation of Islam. Movement leaders such as Audley Moore said as much. Moore met Malcolm at an open-air meeting in Harlem in the 1950s. He immediately captivated her with his ability to rouse crowds to black nationalist action, something she hadn’t seen since she had come face-to-face with Garvey in the 1920s. Captivated by Garvey’s message, a 25-year-old Moore had joined the UNIA then and there, and spent the next seven decades building the black nationalist movement in America. So influential was she in shaping modern black nationalism that Moore became known as the “Queen Mother” of the movement and activists came to her house to learn at her feet. Malcolm was one of them. In the early 1960s, Moore’s West Philadelphia home served as a nationalist training ground of sorts – a place where young and old organisers alike came to seek her counsel. Malcolm stopped in when he was in town and Moore jumped at the chance to shape his thinking. She wanted him to embrace the movement for reparations for black Americans that she began in the 1950s and to adopt a more global approach to black liberation – one that included the struggles that African countries were waging against their colonial oppressors. It didn’t take long for Moore to see her influence in his public remarks. “If I take the wages of everyone here, individually it means nothing,” Malcolm told an audience at Michigan State University in 1963. “But collectively all of the earning power or wages that you earned in one week would make me wealthy. And if I could collect it for a year, I’d be rich beyond dreams.” Magnify that by the millions of black people whose wealth and wages had been stolen for centuries, and “You’ll see how this country got so rich so fast,” he continued, laying the groundwork for his audience to understand the argument for reparations. Still, Malcolm tried to remain a dutiful follower of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation. But he couldn’t ignore the rumours. Word on the street was that the NOI leader had fathered several children out of wedlock – a sin in the eyes of the Nation. Malcolm felt betrayed by his mentor. If this were not enough, after Malcolm brazenly remarked that John F Kennedy’s November 1963 assassination was a case of “the chickens coming home to roost”, Muhammad silenced him. By early 1964, it was time for Malcolm to part ways both with his beloved leader and the organisation that shaped him. Black women stepped in to fill the void. In April 1964, Malcolm left for a five-week trip that his sister Ella funded, during which he visited Africa and the Middle East, and made the pilgrimage to Mecca. It transformed Malcolm’s life. He gained a new understanding of Islam outside of the Nation and a new sense of self. He changed his name to El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz. Read more | Emmett Till: the murder that reshaped the American civil rights movement Globetrotting exchanges While abroad, Malcolm stopped in Ghana. The west African country had gained its independence from Britain in 1957 and its president, Kwame Nkrumah, welcomed black Americans to the country. Several black women – including writer Maya Angelou, long-time labour organiser Vicki Garvin, and WEB Du Bois’ wife, Shirley Graham – who were temporarily residing there formed the ‘Malcolm X Committee’ to welcome the activist. Committee members planned dinners to discuss foreign policy, introduced Malcolm to Nkrumah, and facilitated conversations between Malcolm and diplomats from around the world. These women transformed his understanding of the world and their place in it. When he proclaimed that “the most disrespected person in America is the black woman” that same year, he based these claims not only on his time with Betty but also on his conversations with these women. These black female activists also helped Malcolm conclude that the “single worst mistake of the American black organisations and their leaders” was that they “failed to establish direct brotherhood lines of communication” with independent black nations. Malcolm vowed to right this wrong when he returned to the US by creating the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/2AW1FX0-b098ca4.jpg" width="2556" height="1703" alt="The jazz singer and songwriter Abbey Lincoln, pictured here in concert in 1966, was a key figure in the Organization of Afro-American Unity" title="The jazz singer and songwriter Abbey Lincoln, pictured here in concert in 1966, was a key figure in the Organization of Afro-American Unity" /> Malcolm, as most still knew him, modelled the OAAU after the Organisation of African Unity, a conglomeration of African nations founded in 1963 to develop a unified voice and agenda for the continent. His version would align the millions of black Americans with African nations to foster global black liberation. However, he had trouble getting the OAAU off the ground. Days before he was set to debut the organisation, Malcolm wrote to Sara Mitchell, a young woman he had met amid his Harlem organising. He asked her to come to the meeting and offer her “objective analysis of [her] impressions of what we are trying to do, including [her] suggestions as to how we can do better”. Mitchell obliged, offering such trenchant analysis that Malcolm invited her to help write the aims and objectives of the organisation and develop its inner workings. Read more | From Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King: the boycott that inspired the dream Mitchell shaped the scope and substance of the group, calling on Malcolm to abandon the tagline “By any means necessary” and instead to adopt a broader one, “Independence, Justice, and Prosperity”, in order to bring more people into the group. Other capable women, such as longtime organiser Lynne Shifflett, served as the OAAU’s executive secretary. Jazz singer Abbey Lincoln joined as the provisional director of the organisation. Public assassination After some organisational retooling, Malcolm planned to address these women and other members of the OAAU on 21 February 1965 in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. Yet no sooner had he stepped onto the stage than NOI members gunned him down in front of a pregnant Betty and three of his four daughters. Betty and Ella tried to carry on the organisation in the aftermath, with an office filled with women running its daily operations. But it floundered without its leader. Though short-lived, the OAAU exemplified Malcolm’s political values on all fronts. His undying pursuit of black freedom; his ability to evolve in his thinking about how to achieve this; and his understanding that black women were vital to the cause. Yet this is not the Malcolm most remember. Most conjure up soundbites of him throwing the second punch as it were: his labelling of the white man as “the devil” and his support of “violence in self-defence”. Further juxtaposed to Dr Martin Luther King Jr, these and other quips helped the press and popular culture frame Malcolm as a radical and hateful man. Malcolm also said: “Dr King wants the same thing I want. Freedom.” Despite this, even today, many see him as King’s and the civil rights movement’s ‘evil twin’. Lost in this legacy is the fact that white supremacists threw the first punch. Throughout his short life, Malcolm witnessed the black folks around him endure extreme vigilante violence, irrepressible racism and seemingly endless sexism. His goal was to try to offer them another viable path to freedom beyond integration. On the 100th anniversary of his birth and the 60th anniversary of his death, it is just as important to remember that this is the true legacy of Malcolm X – as well as the many female teachers, mentors, lovers and friends who helped make it possible. Timeline: Becoming X 10 key milestones in the life of the influential US black nationalist 19 May 1925 Malcolm Little is born in Omaha, Nebraska, the fourth child of Grenada-born Louise and Georgia-born Earl 29 September 1931 Malcolm‘s father, Earl, dies after being hit by a streetcar in Lansing, Michigan. Malcolm comes to believe that white supremacists were responsible December 1939 After years of hardship raising seven children alone, Malcolm‘s mother, Louise, is sent to a psychiatric hospital. The children are placed in foster care 1941 Malcolm is adopted by his half-sister Ella Collins, and moves to Roxbury, a black neighbourhood in Boston, to live with her family 1946 Malcolm begins a 10-year sentence for burglary at Charlestown State Prison in Boston. There, he resumes his education and devours a range of books, opening his mind to ideas of black nationalism August 1952 Malcolm is released from prison. Having joined the Nation of Islam, the 27-year-old changes his name to Malcolm X 14 January 1958 Malcolm marries 22-year-old nurse Betty Dean Sanders. Alongside raising their six daughters, she nurtures and shapes her husband‘s career: speaking, writing and advocating for black nationalism April 1964 After becoming disillusioned with the Nation of Islam‘s leader, Malcolm travels to Africa and the Middle East, completing his Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) and taking the name El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz 28 June 1964 Having met Ghana‘s first postcolonial leader, Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm founds the secular Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). He aims to attract more members, including women, by adopting a broader approach 21 February 1965 Preparing to address OAAU members at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights, New York City, Malcolm X is shot dead by an assassin angry at his criticism of the Nation of Islam and its leader Ashley D Farmer is an associate professor in the Departments of History & African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin
Was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US in WW2 justified?
For years debate has raged over whether the US was right to drop two atomic bombs on Japan during the final weeks of the Second World War. The first bomb, dropped on the city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, resulted in a total death toll of around 140,000. The second, which hit Nagasaki on 9 August, killed around 50,000 people. But was the US justified? We put the question to a panel of expert historians...
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States in August 1945 brought the Second World War to a sudden and devastating close, and sparked a moral and historical debate that has continued since. Well over 100,000 people, most of them civilians, were killed instantly or in the immediate aftermath, with many more suffering from long-term effects of radiation exposure. The decision by US president Truman to authorise the use of nuclear weapons against Japan was unprecedented. It marked the first (and so far only) time that atomic bombs have been used in warfare. The justification offered at the time was that the bombings would force Japan’s surrender and avoid a prolonged and bloody invasion of the Japanese mainland. Yet the question remains: was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki justified? Historians continue to debate the military necessity, political motivations and moral implications of the bombings. Was it a strategic decision to end the war quickly and save lives? Or a demonstration of power aimed as much at the Soviet Union as at Japan? Here, a panel of historians offers their perspectives on one of the most controversial chapters of the Second World War, and considers whether the US was right to bomb Japan in 1945. Was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki justified? “Yes. Truman had little choice” – Antony Beevor Few actions in war are morally justifiable. All a commander or political leader can hope to assess is whether a particular course of action is likely to reduce the loss of life. Faced with the Japanese refusal to surrender, President Truman had little choice. His decision was mainly based on the estimate of half a million Allied casualties likely to be caused by invading the home islands of Japan. There was also the likely death rate from starvation for Allied PoWs and civilians as the war dragged on well into 1946. Read more | The Manhattan Project: your guide to the building of the first atomic bomb What Truman did not know, and which has only been established quite recently, is that the Imperial Japanese Army could never contemplate surrender, having forced all their men to fight to the death since the start of the war. All civilians were to be mobilised and forced to fight with bamboo spears and satchel charges to act as suicide bombers against Allied tanks. Japanese documents apparently indicate their army was prepared to accept up to 28 million civilian deaths. Antony Beevor is a bestselling military historian, specialising in the Second World War. His most recent book is Ardennes 1944: Hitler’s Last Gamble (Viking, 2015) “No. It was immoral, and unnecessary” – Richard Overy The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was justified at the time as being moral – in order to bring about a more rapid victory and prevent the deaths of more Americans. However, it was clearly not moral to use this weapon knowing that it would kill civilians and destroy the urban milieu. And it wasn’t necessary either. WW2 | The Big Questions Member exclusive | Historian and broadcaster Laurence Rees explains major moments of the global conflict in this five-part series. Listen to all episodes now Militarily Japan was finished (as the Soviet invasion of Manchuria that August showed). Further blockade and urban destruction would have produced a surrender in August or September at the latest, without the need for the costly anticipated invasion or the atomic bomb. As for the second bomb on Nagasaki, that was just as unnecessary as the first one. It was deemed to be needed, partly because it was a different design, and the military (and many civilian scientists) were keen to see if they both worked the same way. There was, in other words, a cynical scientific imperative at work as well. I should also add that there was a fine line between the atomic bomb and conventional bombing – indeed descriptions of Hamburg or Tokyo after conventional bombing echo the aftermath of Hiroshima. To regard Hiroshima as a moral violation is also to condemn the firebombing campaign, which was deliberately aimed at city centres and completely indiscriminate. Of course it is easy to say that if I had been in Truman’s shoes, I would not have ordered the two bombings. But it is possible to imagine greater restraint. The British and Americans had planned in detail the gas-bombing of a list of 17 major German cities, but in the end did not carry it out because the moral case seemed to depend on Germany using gas first. Restraint was possible, and, at the very end of the war, perhaps more politically acceptable. Richard Overy is a professor of history at the University of Exeter and editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of World War Two (OUP, 2015) More from us HistoryExtra members can explore this topic further with exclusive content from our archives WW2 the big questions: final stages of the conflict What if...The Enigma code had not been cracked by Alan Turing and Bletchley Park? Oppenheimer | Is Christopher Nolan perpetuating a historical myth? The PoWs who survived Nagasaki "We’ve come to think that peace is normal, but that's not the reality": Margaret MacMillan on humanity's compulsion to go to war Not a HistoryExtra member? Explore our latest membership offers “Yes. It was the least bad option” – Robert James Maddox The atomic bombs were horrible, but I agree with US secretary of war Henry L Stimson that using them was the “least abhorrent choice”. A bloody invasion and round-the-clock conventional bombing would have led to a far higher death toll and so the atomic weapons actually saved thousands of American and millions of Japanese lives. The bombs were the best means to bring about unconditional surrender, which is what the US leaders wanted. Only this would enable the Allies to occupy Japan and root out the institutions that led to war in the first place. Timeline | The countdown to the bombing of Hiroshima The experience with Germany after the First World War had persuaded them that a mere armistice would constitute a betrayal of future generations if an even larger war occurred 20 years down the line. It is true that the radiation effects of the atomic bomb provided a grisly dividend, which the US leaders did not anticipate. However, even if they had known, I don’t think it would have changed their decision. Robert James Maddox is author of Hiroshima in History: The Myths of Revisionism (University of Missouri Press, 2007) Video: Could the Nazis have built the first atomic bomb? View Green Video on the source website “No. Japan would have surrendered anyway” – Martin J Sherwin I believe that it was a mistake and a tragedy that the atomic bombs were used. Those bombings had little to do with the Japanese decision to surrender. The evidence has become overwhelming that it was the entry of the Soviet Union on 8 August into the war against Japan that forced surrender but, understandably, this view is very difficult for Americans to accept. Of the Japanese leaders, it was the military ones who held out against the civilian leaders who were closest to the emperor, and who wanted to surrender provided the emperor’s safety would be guaranteed. The military’s argument was that Japan could convince the Soviet Union to mediate on its behalf for better surrender terms than unconditional surrender and therefore should continue the war until that was achieved. Read more | How and when did the Second World War end? Once the USSR entered the war, the Japanese military not only had no arguments for continuation left, but it also feared the Soviet Union would occupy significant parts of northern Japan. Truman could have simply waited for the Soviet Union to enter the war but he did not want the USSR to have a claim to participate in the occupation of Japan. Another option (which could have ended the war before August) was to clarify that the emperor would not be held accountable for the war under the policy of unconditional surrender. US secretary of war Stimson recommended this, but secretary of state James Byrnes, who was much closer to Truman, vetoed it. By dropping the atomic bombs instead, the United States signalled to the world that it considered nuclear weapons to be legitimate weapons of war. Those bombings precipitated the nuclear arms race and they are the source of all nuclear proliferation. The late Martin J Sherwin was co-author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer (Atlantic, 2008) Read more | 6 terrible choices people had to make during the Second World War “Yes. It saved millions of lives in Japan and Asia” – Richard Frank Dropping the bombs was morally preferable to any other choices available. One of the biggest problems we have is that we can talk about Dresden and the bombing of Hamburg and we all know what the context is: Nazi Germany and what Nazi Germany did. There’s been a great amnesia in the west with respect to what sort of war Japan conducted across Asia-Pacific. Bear in mind that for every Japanese non-combatant who died during the war, 17 or 18 died across Asia-Pacific. Yet you very seldom find references to this and virtually nothing that vivifies it in the way that the suffering at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been. Read more | What was the Truman doctrine? With the original invasion strategy negated by radio intelligence revealing the massive Japanese build-up on the planned Kyushu landing areas, Truman’s alternative was a campaign of blockade and bombardment, which would have killed millions of Japanese, mostly non-combatants. For example, in 1946 the food situation would have become catastrophic and there would have been stupendous civilian deaths. It was only because Japan surrendered when it still had a serviceable administrative system – plus American food aid – that saved the country from famine. Read more | Stalin’s famine: a brief history of the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine Another thing to bear in mind is that while just over 200,000 people were killed in total by the atomic bombs, it is estimated that 300,000–500,000 Japanese people (many of whom were civilians) died or disappeared in Soviet captivity. Had the war continued, that number would have been much higher. Critics talk about changing the demand for unconditional surrender, but the Japanese government had never put forth a set of terms on which they were prepared to end the war prior to Hiroshima. The inner cabinet ruling the country never devised such terms. When foreign minister Shigenori Togo was told that the best terms Japan could obtain were unconditional surrender with the exception of maintaining the imperial system, Togo flatly rejected them in the name of the cabinet. The fact is that there was no historical record over the past 2,600 years of Japan ever surrendering, nor any examples of a Japanese unit surrendering during the war. This was where the great American fear lay. Richard B Frank is a military historian whose books include Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (Random House, 1999) “No. Better options were discarded for political reasons” – Tsuyoshi Hasegawa Once sympathetic to the argument that the atomic bomb was necessary, the more research I do, the more I am convinced it was one of the gravest war crimes the US has ever committed. I’ve been to Japan and discovered what happened on the ground in 1945 and it was really horrifying. The radiation has affected people who survived the blast for many years and still today thousands of people suffer the effects. Read more | “My God, what have we done?” The moral dilemma of Hiroshima There were possible alternatives that might have ended the war. Truman could have invited Stalin to sign the Potsdam declaration [in which the USA, Britain and Nationalist China demanded Japanese surrender in July 1945]. The authors of the draft of the declaration believed that if the Soviets joined the war at this time it might lead to Japanese surrender but Truman consciously avoided that option, because he and some of his advisors were apprehensive about Soviet entry. I don’t agree with revisionists who say Truman used the bomb to intimidate the Soviet Union but I believe he used it to force Japan to surrender before they were able to enter the war. The second option was to alter the demand for unconditional surrender. Some influential advisors within the Truman administration were in favour of allowing the Japanese to keep the emperor system to induce so-called moderates within the Japanese government to work for the termination of the war. However, Truman was mindful of American public opinion, which wanted unconditional surrender as revenge against Pearl Harbor and the Japanese atrocities. Read more | The Nuremberg Trials: the real history behind the post-WW2 tribunal that brought Nazi leaders to justice Bearing in mind those atrocities, it’s clear that Japan doesn’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to immoral acts in the war. However, one atrocity does not make another one right. I believe this was the most righteous war the Americans have ever been involved in but you still can’t justify using any means to win a just war. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa is a professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the author of Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Harvard University, Press 2005) “Yes. The moral failing was Japan’s” – Michael Kort Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb was the best choice available under the circumstances and was therefore morally justifiable. It was clear Japan was unwilling to surrender on terms even remotely acceptable to the US and its allies, and the country was preparing a defence far more formidable than the US had anticipated. Read more | Who was Hermann Göring? The truth about Hitler’s drug-fuelled enforcer who met his downfall at Nuremberg The choice was not, as is frequently argued, between using an atomic bomb against Hiroshima and invading Japan. No one on the Allied side could say with confidence what would bring about a Japanese surrender, as Japan’s situation had been hopeless for a long time. It was hoped that the shock provided by the bombs would convince Tokyo to surrender, but how many would be needed was an open question. After Hiroshima, the Japanese government had three days to respond before Nagasaki but did not do so. Hirohito and some of his advisers knew Japan had to surrender but were not in a position to get the government to accept that conclusion. Key military members of the government argued that it was unlikely that the US could have a second bomb and, even if it did, public pressure would prevent its use. The bombing of Nagasaki demolished these arguments and led directly to the imperial conference that produced Japan’s offer to surrender. Read more | The science behind the bombing of Hiroshima The absolutist moral arguments (such as not harming civilians) made against the atomic bombs would have precluded many other actions essential to victory taken by the Allies during the most destructive war in history. There is no doubt that had the bomb been available sooner, it would have been used against Germany. There was, to be sure, a moral failing in August 1945, but it was on the part of the Japanese government when it refused to surrender after its long war of conquest had been lost. Michael Kort is professor of social science at Boston University and author of The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb (Columbia Press, 2007) HistoryExtra readers George Evans-Hulme and Roy Ceustermans debate... George Evans-Hulme: Yes, it was justified. The US was, like the rest of the world, soldiering on towards the end of a dark period of human history that had seen the single most costly conflict (in terms of life) in history, and they chose to adopt a stance that seemed to limit the amount of casualties in the war, by significantly shortening it with the use of atomic weapons. It was certainly a reasonable view for the USA to take, since they had suffered the loss of more than 418,000 lives, both military and civilian. To the top rank of the US military the 135,000 death toll was worth it to prevent the “many thousands of American troops [that] would be killed in invading Japan” – a view attributed to the president himself. This was a grave consequence taken seriously by the US. Ordering the deployment of the atomic bombs was an abhorrent act, but one they were certainly justified in doing. Roy Ceustermans: No, the US wasn’t justified. Even secretary of war Henry Lewis Stimson was not sure the bombs were needed to reduce the need of an invasion: “Japan had no allies; its navy was almost destroyed; its islands were under a naval blockade; and its cities were undergoing concentrated air attacks.” The United States still had many industrial resources to use against Japan, and thus it was essentially defeated. Rear Admiral Tocshitane Takata concurred that B-29s “were the greatest single factor in forcing Japan's surrender”, while Prince Konoye already thought Japan was defeated on 14 February 1945 when he met emperor Hirohito. A combination of thoroughly bombing blockading cities that were economically dependent on foreign sources for food and raw materials, and the threat of Soviet entry in the war, would have been enough. The recommendations for the use of the bomb show that the military was more interested in its devastating effect than in preparing the invasion. Therefore the destruction of hospitals and schools etc was acceptable to them. Read more | 7 of the best WW2 films GEH: The USA was more interested in a quick and easy end to the war than causing untold suffering. They had in their hands a weapon that was capable of bringing the war to a swift end, and so they used it. The atom bombs achieved their desired effects by causing maximum devastation. Just six days after the Nagasaki bombing, the Emperor’s Gyokuon-hōsō speech was broadcast to the nation, detailing the Japanese surrender. The devastation caused by the bombs sped up the Japanese surrender, which was the best solution for all parties. If the atomic bombs had not had the devastating effect they had, they would have been utterly pointless. They replaced thousands of US bombing missions that would have been required to achieve the same effect of the two bombs that, individually, had the explosive power of the payload of 2,000 B-29s. This freed up resources that could be utilised for the war effort elsewhere. RC: After the bloody battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the death toll on both sides was high, and the countries’ negative view of one other became almost unbridgeable, says J Samuel Walker in Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and The Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan. Therefore, the US created unconditional terms of surrender, knowingly going against the Japanese ethic of honour and against the institute of the emperor, whom most Americans probably wanted dead. Consequently, the use of the atomic bomb became a way to avenge America's fallen soldiers while also keeping the USSR in check in Europe. The Japanese civilian casualties did not matter in this strategy. Also, it did not prevent the Cold War, as the USSR was just a few years behind on a-bomb research. Read more | Before the atomic bombs, the USA hit Japan with one of the most overlooked (but deadly) campaigns in WW2 At the time, revenge, geopolitics and an expensive project that could not be allowed to simply rust away, meant the atomic bomb had to be hastily deployed “in the field” in order to see its power and aftermath – though little was known about radiation and its effects on humans. GEH: Admittedly, the US did use the atom bomb to keep the USSR in line, and for that it served its purpose. It may not have stopped the Soviets developing their own nuclear device, but that’s not what it was intended for. It was used as a deterrent to keep the (sometimes uneasy) peace between the US and the USSR, and it achieved that. There are no cases of a direct, all-out war between the US and the Soviets that can be attributed to the potentially devastating effects of atomic weaponry. The atomic bombs certainly established US dominance immediately after the Second World War – the destructive power it possessed meant that it remained uncontested as the world’s greatest power until the Soviets developed their own weapon, four years after the deployment at Nagasaki. It is certainly true that Stalin and the Soviets tried to test US dominance, but even into the 1960s the US generally came out on top. RC: The price to keep the USSR in check was steep: the use of a weapon of mass destruction that caused around 200,000 deaths (most of them civilians) and massive suffering through radiation. However, it did not stop the USSR from creating the same weapon within four years. It might be argued that, following the explosions, Japan virtually disappeared from the world stage while the USSR viewed the bombing as an incentive to acquire the same weaponry in order to retaliate in equal force if the atomic bomb was ever used again. Considering the tension between the two countries, a similar attack with tens of thousands of civilian casualties would have created a nuclear apocalypse. If the US had organised a demonstration, as they had briefly considered, the USSR would still have responded in the same manner, while Japan – which had made clear overtures for a (un)conditional surrender – could have been spared. Furthermore, by postponing the use of the bomb, scientists would have had time to understand the test results, meaning further anguish, like the Bikini Atoll [a huge US hydrogen bomb test in 1954 that had major consequences for the geology and natural environment, and on the health of those who were exposed to radiation] could have been avoided. GEH: The large civilian death toll that resulted from the bombings can be seen as a small price to pay by the United States in return for their assertion of dominance on the world stage. The USSR’s development of an atomic weapon had been underway since 1943, and so their quest for nuclear devices cannot be solely attributed to the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It should also be considered that the Soviets’ rapid progress in creating an atom bomb was not exclusively down to their desire to compete with the United States, but from spies passing them US secrets. Postponing the use of the atom bomb would only have prolonged the war and potentially created an even worse fate for the people of Japan, with an estimated five to 10 million Japanese fatalities – a number higher than some estimates for the entire Soviet military in the Second World War. Ultimately, the atomic bombs did what they were designed to do. They created such a high level of devastation that the Japanese felt they had no option but to surrender unconditionally to the United States, hence resulting in US victory and the end of the Second World War. RC: Of course civilian casualties of another nation would have been acceptable to the USA. Japan had made clear overtures to peace, but cultural differences made this nearly impossible (the shame of unconditional surrender goes against their code of honour). The determination to use an expensive bomb instead of letting it rust away; the desire to find out how devastating it was and the opportunity to use the bomb as a strong showcase of US supremacy, made Japan the ideal target. Obviously, the USSR would eventually succeed in creating the a-bomb. Therefore, making Hiroshima & Nagasaki the example of the tremendous power of the bombs would make it clear to the USSR that they too needed such weapons to defend themselves. Moreover, other countries claimed the right of nuclear weapons to defend their citizens. Consequently, the tragic bombings became the example of an arm’s race instead of peace. Furthermore, since Japan was already on the brink of collapse the bombing was unnecessary, and peace talks would have taken place within a decent time frame (even after the cancelled Hawaii summit). The millions of deaths calculated by Operation Downfall [the codename for the Allied plan for the invasion of Japan near the end of the Second World War, which was abandoned when Japan surrendered following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] actually show that only desperation and honour stood between Japan and unconditional surrender. George Evans-Hulme has a passion for military and political history, and enjoys visiting historical sites across the UK. Roy Ceustermans has a master's degree in the history of the Catholic Church, an advanced master's degree on the historical expansion, exchange and globalisation of the world, and a master’s degree in management.
Was JFK about to be re-elected? An expert weighs in on the president's lost second term
Historian Mark White explores whether John F Kennedy would have defeated Barry Goldwater in 1964 – and how his second term might have changed history
On 22 November 1963, President John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. At the time of his death, Kennedy had served fewer than three years as president, but within US politics, he was a figure who already loomed large, his reputation forged by savvy political instincts, his carefully formulated image, and his demonstrable grit as a statesman during the escalations of the Cold War. On that day in Dallas, it’s easy to suppose that Kennedy may have felt justifiably confident about the prospect of the 1964 election that loomed on the horizon. But would the president truly have been re-elected in a landslide? What would a second term have looked like? And how might the USA – and the world – have changed if he had lived? On the podcast | JFK: the man behind the myths “I think Kennedy […] would've beaten his opponent Barry Goldwater comfortably,” says historian Mark White, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. “He averaged 70% approval ratings,” which was “the highest of any president in modern recorded history.” A likely second term Heading into the 1964 presidential electoral campaign, Kennedy remained hugely popular. In particular, his handling of international crises had bolstered his image as a steady foreign policy leader – a necessary thing in the burgeoning nuclear age. Though his legislative progress domestically was widely perceived to be slower, his youthful energy and rhetorical appeal had galvanised much of the electorate, allowing them to be patient with the president’s initiatives. In contrast, his likely Republican challenger, Barry Goldwater, was a hardline conservative senator from Arizona whose campaign would later mark a sharp rightward shift in Republican politics. Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act, advocated for the use of tactical nuclear weapons, and promoted a minimal federal government – a platform that alienated many moderate voters (the kinds of voters that Richard Nixon had wooed in his hotly contested 1960 election battle against Kennedy, and would win over again in his successful 1968 campaign). “[Goldwater] was seen as extreme,” White explains. “Kennedy wouldn’t have had to be particularly aggressive – Goldwater’s positions would have disqualified him in the minds of many voters.” In reality, after Kennedy’s death, Lyndon B Johnson won the 1964 election in a landslide against Goldwater – taking 61% of the popular vote, and all but six states. But White is confident JFK would have enjoyed similar, if not greater, success. “I think we can safely assume that John Kennedy would've been president till January 1969.” A different path on Vietnam? One of the most fervently debated questions surrounding Kennedy’s unfinished presidency is whether he would have escalated the Vietnam War – as Johnson did after 1964. “I think it's most likely he would not have [furthered] the war in Vietnam,” White says. “He already had a fantastic reputation as a foreign policy president,” thanks to his successful diplomacy in handling the Cuban Missile Crisis. Unlike Johnson, White suggests, Kennedy “didn't really need to prove himself.” The Cuban Missile Crisis: World on the Brink Member exclusive | In this HistoryExtra podcast series, we explore the roots of the Cold War standoff and meet the key players in the confrontation. We track the pivotal 13 days at its centre, and the Cold War alliances that saw diplomatic tensions escalate to breaking point Listen to all episodes now Crucially, White points to Kennedy’s growing caution when dealing with the military’s most aggressive advisers. “He became increasingly sceptical of the generals because he noticed they always gave him very hawkish advice,” he notes. “I think he would've been far more able than Johnson was […] to have rejected that advice.” While Kennedy had increased US involvement in Vietnam during his first term, White believes his instincts were moving toward disengagement – or, at the very least, a more cautious path than the one Johnson ultimately took. Domestic ambition – with limits On the domestic front, Kennedy’s second term might have brought real – but more restrained – reform. “He likely would have passed civil rights legislation, in my view,” White says, citing the bill that Kennedy introduced to end segregation in the South. “But I think he had a less radical conception of domestic reform than Lyndon Johnson.” Johnson, Kennedy’s Vice President who succeeded the assassinated leader and sought to honour his legacy, launched the Great Society programme – a sweeping set of social reforms that included Medicare, Medicaid, and a historic expansion of federal anti-poverty initiatives. Kennedy, by contrast, was a more incrementalist politician. The legacy that never was What’s perhaps most fascinating about Kennedy’s lost second term is how it might have reshaped the longer arc of American politics. “Would he have preserved the liberal consensus longer than Johnson was able to? That’s a really interesting question,” White reflects. The 1960s marked a turning point in US political life. The liberal order built under Franklin D Roosevelt – one defined by broad federal powers and expansive social policy – began to fracture under the weight of war, unrest, and growing conservative backlash. Read more | Did Ronald Reagan 'Make America Great Again'? Goldwater’s candidacy, though unsuccessful, laid the groundwork for the resurgence of Richard Nixon, the later rise of Ronald Reagan and the rightward tilt of American politics. Ultimately, John F Kennedy’s time in office ended neither with a noble bowing out at the culmination of a second term, nor with political defeat, but with bloody violence. Mark White is a professor of history at Queen Mary, University of London, and the author of Icon, Libertine, Leader (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). He was speaking to Elinor Evans on the HistoryExtra podcast, listen to the full conversation
Could America have won the Vietnam War? The mistakes that denied the US victory
When US forces entered Vietnam, the nation's leaders believed they could contain communism and secure victory. Instead, they found themselves trapped in a war that drained resources, divided the country and ultimately ended in failure. But was the campaign doomed from the start? Geoffrey Wawro explains
Could America have won the Vietnam War? In a word: no. There were many reasons for this. In the first place, America’s Vietnam War was fought in the shadow of China and the Soviet Union. Every major move the Americans made in Southeast Asia had to be plotted against the possibility of Chinese or Soviet intervention in the war. The three presidents who conducted America into Vietnam – Dwight D Eisenhower, John F Kennedy, and Lyndon B Johnson – all had the Korean War (1950-53) on their mind. It had been a pivotal moment in the Cold War, marked by North Korea's invasion of South Korea – and the United States had been poised to win it in October 1950. But then China had launched 300,000 troops into North Korea, snaring the United States in almost three years of bloody trench warfare that destroyed Harry Truman’s presidency. What was the Vietnam War? The Vietnam War (1954–75) was fought between the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam (known as the Viet Cong) on one side (with additional backing from China and the Soviet Union), and the government of South Vietnam and its key ally, the United States, on the other. Read more | Your guide to the Vietnam War The China threat Though there were Cold War incentives to contain communism, with Senator Joe McCarthy’s “Red Scare” having only recently flickered out, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson feared that invading North Vietnam, to defeat the state sponsor of South Vietnam’s Viet Cong (VC) guerrillas, would almost certainly bring in the Chinese again. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/05/GettyImages-514682786-6a18251.jpg" width="1024" height="685" alt="Military policemen capture a Vietcong guerrilla after a surprise attack on the United States embassy and South Vietnamese government buildings in Saigon on January 31, 1968." title="Military policemen capture a Viet Cong guerrilla after a surprise attack on the United States embassy and South Vietnamese government buildings in Ho Chi Minh City in c1968. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> Pentagon wargames – designed to simulate a US-led war in Southeast Asia under all contingencies – in 1966 predicted that a US thrust into North Vietnam would trigger an intervention by 35 Chinese divisions, at a time when the US had only six divisions in Vietnam, and scant force in reserve. China also threatened to contest any American invasions of Laos and Cambodia, where the 12,000 miles of paths, roads and waterways that comprised the war-sustaining Ho Chi Minh Trail travelled through what were called the “communist sanctuaries”. Why was America interested in Vietnam? American interests in Vietnam went back over a decade before US President Lyndon B Johnson deployed troops. The rise of communists in North Vietnam, led by Ho Chi Minh, in the 1950s had turned the divided country into a Cold War battleground. As the US believed that if one state fell to communism, others would follow – the 'Domino Theory' – they had to get involved (albeit incrementally). Read more | Your guide to the Vietnam War These areas were “sanctuaries” because, from the American perspective, they were too big for the US and its allies to control. They were filled with communist guerrillas (Pathet Lao and Khmer Rouge), and their own militaries were poorly equipped, corrupt and incapable of policing even the narrow border strips colonised by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). The war therefore would have to be waged inside South Vietnam against VC guerrillas and NVA infiltrators. The bombing, the shelling, along with the “search and destroy” sweeps that heaped up most of South Vietnam’s 1.4 million civilian casualties in the war, would have to be inflicted on America’s ally – South Korea – not its enemy. Read more | The war that America could never win? Opposition, dissent and the Vietnam War That disturbing fact alone gave sensible leaders pause. When President Eisenhower was stepping in to take over the faltering French war effort in Indochina in 1954, Senator John F Kennedy observed that: “No amount of military assistance can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, an ‘enemy of the people’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.” Who won the Vietnam War? Certainly not the US, who withdrew in 1973 humiliated, the national psyche and economy in tatters for years to come and more than 58,000 men dead. Vietnam came out even worse as millions perished and the country had been all but destroyed. Yet North Vietnam had stood toe-to-toe against a global superpower and forced them to retreat. Read more | Your guide to the Vietnam War Johnson, who succeeded President Kennedy in 1963, was more sanguine than his predecessor. Kennedy saw all the pitfalls in Vietnam. Johnson saw opportunity: to turn America’s massive high-tech arsenal against the forces of North Vietnam, which he called “a raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country”. “That bitch of a war” But like every American president who waged the Vietnam War, Johnson did it reluctantly. He called it “that bitch of a war”. He wanted to focus his energy (and funds) on the Great Society programmes – such as Medicare and Medicaid, which were introduced in 1965 – and tried to hide or deny the costs of Vietnam so that he could do both. Congress howled at the rising costs of both Vietnam and the Great Society; they had seen the American budget deficit soar from $1 billion in 1965 to $25 billion three years later. Between 1964 and 1967, American spending on education increased from $4 billion to $12 billion annually, on health care from $5 billion to $16 billion. At the same time, spending on Vietnam surged from a few hundred million in 1964 to $25 billion in 1967. This combination of social and military spending ignited America’s ‘Great Inflation’, which would not be tamed until 1983. US inflation doubled in the mid-1960s and doubled again by 1970. Here was another reason the war was unwinnable. American presidents fought it with limited means and appetite. The North Vietnamese fought it with everything they had. Of course, “limited means” in the American context were still massive. “We have a $50 billion [defense] budget, and this is our only war,” Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara chuckled to a general as the war heated up. In McNamara’s view, small increments of American power would suffice to deter or defeat the Vietnamese communists. Listen on the podcast | Could the US have won the Vietnam war? This explained the folly of Operation Rolling Thunder, a limited air campaign against North Vietnamese infrastructure waged from 1965 to 1968. Lyndon B Johnson and his advisers assumed that by gradually escalating the air attacks – while keeping well clear of “flashpoints” such as Haiphong harbour or the railways crossing the Chinese border – they would persuade Hanoi’s politburo to cut its support of the VC. A dream of victory This also explained the folly of General William “Westy” Westmoreland’s ‘search and destroy’ strategy, which was what the Americans enacted from 1965 to 1969. Westy and the administration believed that it would be sufficient to devastate the NVA and VC with heavy casualties. Rising “body count,” McNamara and Westy hypothesised, would reach a “crossover point,” where the ascending line on a graph of American-inflicted communist casualties crossed the descending line of communist manpower. This theory of victory did not reckon with the grim discipline of the North Vietnamese state, where Le Duan was pushing Ho Chi Minh to the sidelines in the mid-1960s, intensifying the war, and vowing that no number of casualties would deter North Vietnam, which fielded an army of 480,000 troops, had 2 million males of military age in reserve, and 120,000 physically fit boys reaching the draft age of 17 every year. In 1967, Hanoi infiltrated 8,500 fresh troops into South Vietnam every month. In 1968, 20,000 a month. These NVA troops joined tens of thousands of VC guerrillas recruited in the South. Search and destroy failed utterly. The NVA and VC learned quickly how to thwart or defeat it – usually by hiding or retreating from the big American sweeps, which were always heralded by the construction of new artillery firebases and helicopter landing zones (LZs). Ninety per cent of American operations in the war made no contact with the enemy. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) – South Vietnam’s million-man army – had an even lower contact rate. This was the reason that body counts were notoriously faked: “if he’s dead and Vietnamese he’s VC.” The American and ARVN generals needed to show progress to mollify the president and pad their own performance reports. Cost of the war Not contacting the enemy in battle in no way reduced the cost of the war. Casualties mounted from accidents, mines, booby traps, friendly fire, and opportunistic ambushes. Helicopter and fixed-wing loss rates climbed as North Vietnam’s Soviet-supplied air defenses improved. With most of Westy’s troops searching the wilderness areas of South Vietnam for infiltrators, most of the nation’s rural hamlets fell under communist control, providing yet more recruits for the VC. American combat infantry – called “grunts” – were overextended, exhausted and demoralised. The American military’s heavy reliance on firepower and mechanisation meant that only about 60,000 of the 543,000 American troops in Vietnam in 1969 were grunts in the field. The rest were the “clerks and jerks” who staffed, supplied and supported the overworked combat infantry and their aircraft. Read more | From the Napoleonic Wars to Vietnam and Iraq: a history of war trauma Here was another reason that the war could not be won by thrusting into Laos or Cambodia to “cut” the Ho Chi Minh Trail – as if that were ever possible. There were not enough troops even to pacify South Vietnam, let alone the big neighbours to the west. Nixon’s timid “incursion” into Cambodia in 1970, hedged about with punctilious rules of engagement and a strict timeline for withdrawal, revealed that even the self-styled “madman” knew that invading the vast sanctuaries was a fool’s errand. After the incursion, and after the ARVN’s even less effectual incursion into Laos in 1971, communist supplies resumed bumping down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the amount of 10,000 tons a week, as if the incursions had never happened. Superpower overstretch ultimately forced the American withdrawal, as early critics of the war had predicted. To put over 500,000 US troops into Vietnam and pay for a multi-million-man South Vietnamese army and militia, Johnson and Nixon stretched US preparedness for other conflicts to the breaking point. By 1968, the US had only one uncommitted reserve division in the United States. Aircraft, artillery, vehicles, and munitions urgently requested by America’s allies around the world could not be supplied “due to priority requirements for Southeast Asia.” Pentagon Research and Development activities and investment in new technologies – like MIRV warheads and advanced fighter aircraft – had to be continually postponed due to the costs of Vietnam. Financially, America’s gold reserves plummeted as foreign governments, spooked by the wartime inflation in the US, converted their dollars and treasury bonds to bullion. This threatened a run on the dollar and would lead to Nixon’s devaluation of the currency in 1971. It would also lead to his admission (to Kissinger) long before the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, that there was no conceivable way to win the Vietnam War. “Peace with honor” was what Nixon called America’s defeat. Dr Geoffrey Wawro is University Distinguished Research Professor of History at the University of North Texas and the author of seven books, including The Vietnam War: A Military History (Basic Books, 2024)
“Risks he should never have taken”: a historian’s take on JFK’s sexual waywardness
Did JFK’s extra-marital affairs risk national security? While some might argue that a president’s private life is irrelevant when considering his legacy as a leader, historian Mark White believes that Kennedy’s sexual dalliances need to be considered as more than just salacious anecdotes
John F Kennedy holds a prestigious position in the American imagination – a man of wartime heroism, soaring rhetoric and youthful charm who embodied postwar optimism. It’s an image made even more potent by his untimely death, killed in Dallas when he was 46 years old. Yet behind Kennedy’s charismatic exterior lies a more troubling portrait: a president whose reckless extramarital affairs risked not only his marriage but also national security. Historian Mark White spoke on the HistoryExtra podcast about grappling with conflicting pictures of Kennedy in his biography of the president, Icon, Libertine, Leader. On the podcast | JFK: the man behind the myths While he credits Kennedy as a capable and, at times, transformational leader, in contrast, the president’s personal conduct was “like looking at the life of an early Roman emperor.” His “sexual waywardness”, says White, was not a footnote but a defining feature of his private life – and it was carried out with breathtaking audacity. Kennedy’s riskiest affairs As historians in the 1970s and ‘80s sought to unpick the image of Kennedy as a president of impeccable character – an image shored up by JFK’s wife Jackie in the wake of his assassination in 1963 – a “slew of revelations” emerged. “It became clear that he'd been a philanderer of spectacular proportions and had affairs with lots of people,” White explains. And it wasn’t just the volume of his affairs – it was Kennedy’s choices of companions that had dangerous implications. One example is Judith Campbell, who from 1960 to 1962, was simultaneously seeing Kennedy and Sam Giancana, the head of the Chicago Mafia. Such a close connection to a significant criminal outfit is “obviously a real concern,” says White, calling the Campbell affair “a major misjudgement on his part.” Another of Kennedy’s affairs, with a woman called Ellen Rometsch in 1963, also courted huge risk. Rometsch was a model seemingly from West Germany, who was married to a West German air force sergeant. In a twist that could be lifted from a Cold War-era spy novel, says White, “what Kennedy didn’t know when he was sleeping with her was that she was originally from communist East Germany.” “She wasn’t a spy, but she could have been,” White notes, “and sexual compromise blackmail is a standard espionage technique.” Speculation has swirled in the decades since about Rometsch’s motives. The most famous example of Kennedy’s extra-marital affairs is a romance with the Hollywood star Marilyn Monroe, says White. “Some biographies disagree on this in terms of timing and so on, but it seems pretty clear he had an affair with her.” Given the profile of Monroe in ’60s America, Kennedy’s attitude seems brazen. These episodes have to be considered as more than salacious anecdotes, says White, acknowledging how they expose Kennedy’s casual willingness to take risks that could have compromised national security. They also, he says, raise serious ethical questions. “You could make the argument that this is a presidential private life, we should just be concerned about his policies,” says White. “But I think one does have to consider it. His presidency wasn't damaged. But those were risks he should never have taken.” How has history regarded Kennedy’s philandering? Many historians and biographers have struggled with how to square Kennedy’s personal flaws with his political legacy, says White. Tracing the generational shift in scholarship, he highlights the early “Camelot School”, which lionised Kennedy, bolstered by Jackie Kennedy’s savvy comparison of her husband to King Arthur in the week after his assassination. “It was deliberate and strategic,” says White. “The implication was that JFK had been so great as a president, it was appropriate to think of him in mythical terms.” But by the 1970s and ’80s, revelations of Kennedy’s private behaviour and the disaster of the Vietnam War had shattered the Camelot illusion. “A whole slew of revelations emerged,” influencing a new school of thought “which I call the ‘Counter-Camelot’,” White explains. These revisionists – including Seymour Hersh and Thomas Reeves – branded Kennedy as a reckless Cold Warrior with a dangerously flawed character. Reeves, one of the harshest critics, argued that “the foundation of all exceptional leadership is a strong sense of character... and JFK just didn’t have that.” Did Kennedy’s affairs affect his leadership? White does agree that Kennedy’s character in private life was “extraordinary” in its recklessness, but insists that defining him solely by his sexual behaviour is reductive. “Character is a complex thing, comprising a multiplicity of traits,” he counters. “When you look at Kennedy in the round, you also can see that he was courageous... he had the capacity to change and grow.” White credits Kennedy with a significant evolution during his presidency – from a stance as a Cold War ‘hawk’ to a more cautious statesman. The Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, White argues, profoundly changed him, instilling a sobering awareness of nuclear brinkmanship. In civil rights, too, Kennedy grew: “He was sickened by what he'd seen” in Birmingham, Alabama in the fight to end racial segregation, and delivered “the great speech of his life” on civil rights in June 1963, introducing legislation that would later become the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It's also of note that, in the context of the modern presidency, the behaviour isn't unique, White says. “We know Warren Harding had affairs. Franklin Roosevelt had affairs. Dwight Eisenhower, prior to his presidency; Lyndon Johnson, a lot of affairs. George Bush Senior. Bill Clinton, certainly.” “They can’t get me while I’m alive” Why have the private affairs of many other presidents not attracted the same levels of attention? White speculates that “people are more drawn to that side of JFK's behaviour because of his perceived glamour.” But none of this negates the astonishing double life that JFK maintained. While crafting a sophisticated image of a devoted family man – complete with glamorous First Lady and his children regularly featuring in press photographs – Kennedy conducted affairs even within the White House itself. “There were at least four women in the White House – administrators, secretaries – that he was sleeping with throughout his time there,” White reveals. This duplicity was enabled by the media culture of the time. Kennedy “understood that responsible journalists didn’t report on politicians’ private lives,” says White. “He wasn’t taking a political risk, for instance, in the same way that Bill Clinton was in the 1990s.” Kennedy is said to have quipped something to the effect of: ‘They can’t get me while I’m alive, and when I’m dead, it’s not something I’m really bothered about.’ It's a remark that can be seen to show the recklessness with which Kennedy viewed his private actions. Yet, as White notes, “I don’t really think it has any impact on his presidency in terms of his policies.” Indeed, says White, Kennedy’s political decision-making was remarkably cautious – at odds with the impulsiveness of his personal life. “If he’s that macho and reckless, why doesn’t he send in troops to overthrow Castro during the Bay of Pigs? Why didn’t he bomb Cuba during the Missile Crisis?” The Cuban Missile Crisis: World on the Brink Member exclusive | In this HistoryExtra podcast series, we explore the roots of the Cold War standoff and meet the key players in the confrontation. We track the pivotal 13 days at its centre, and the Cold War alliances that saw diplomatic tensions escalate to breaking point Listen to all episodes now For White, the paradox of Kennedy is essential to understanding him. He was a leader of enormous symbolic power with a meticulously cultivated image, yet the image hid profound moral complexities. “You can't understand why he's elected president without reference to that image,” he says. “Kennedy develops the most powerful, seductive, mesmerising image of any leader in a western democratic context.” Mark White is a professor of history at Queen Mary, University of London, and the author of Icon, Libertine, Leader (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). He was speaking to Elinor Evans on the HistoryExtra podcast, listen to the full conversation