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Highlights for February 28
1844; Explosion aboard the battleship USS Princeton. kills five members of President Tyler’s party
On 28 February 1844, a large presidential party went on a Potomac River excursion upon the new steampowered battleship, the USS Princeton. On the day’s agenda was firing the ship’s five new cannons. Several prominent Washingtonians, politicians, and cabinet members accompanied President John Tyler on the Princeton. For the most part, the day was uneventful, but upon the last firing of one of the cannons disaster struck. The gun exploded, killing five members of the President’s party and several seamen instantly. President Tyler was safely down below when the blast occurred, but two of his cabinet members, Secretary of State Abel Upshur and Secretary of the Navy Thomas Walker Gilmer, perished.
This tragic event had profound consequences for the nation. Upon Upshur’s death, a few Democrats prevailed upon President Tyler to appoint John C. Calhoun as Secretary of State. At the time of the Princeton incident, Upshur was engaged in negotiations with ambassadors from Texas—which had recently declared its independence from Mexico—for its annexation by the United States. Like Upshur and President Tyler, Calhoun strongly supported annexation and had the wherewithal to make it happen.
Calhoun successfully inserted the Texas annexation issue into the Election of 1844, and helped to insure the election of a man who would support annexation. Both perennial-presidential candidate Henry Clay and former President Martin Van Buren, who sought their parties’ nominations, opposed annexation because they thought it would lead to war. Running on a platform of territorial expansion, James Polk won both the Democratic nomination and the presidential election.
Events proved Clay and Van Buren at least partially correct. The United States did go to war with Mexico, but not until 1846, nearly a year after it formally annexed Texas. In the treaty ending the war, Mexico ceded California, Texas, and what is now the American southwest. Thus the treaty precipitated another crisis about how to incorporate the new territories into the Union, and specifically if slavery would be allowed in them. The Compromise of 1850 imposed what would only be a temporary truce between north and south. It proved to be the last successful compromise before the Civil War.
On February 28, 1982, the J. Paul Getty Museum becomes the most richly endowed museum on earth when it receives a $1.2 billion bequest left to it by the late J. Paul Getty. The American oil billionaire died in 1976, but legal wrangling over his fortune by his children and ex-wives kept his will in probate until 1982. During those six years, what was a originally a $700 million bequest to the museum nearly doubled. By 2000, the endowment was worth $5 billion--even after the trust spent nearly $1 billion in the 1990s on the construction of a massive museum and arts education complex in Los Angeles.
Jean Paul Getty, born in Minneapolis in 1892, built his fortune through the accumulation of oil companies. He began collecting artworks in the 1930s, preferring Renaissance and Baroque paintings and French furniture, and displaying them in his ranch house in Malibu, California. In 1954, he formally opened the J. Paul Getty Museum, which occupied a specially built wing of his Malibu home. Later, his collection outgrew the ranch, so Getty built a new museum in Malibu. The new Getty Museum was modeled after Villa dei Papiri, a Roman villa uncovered in the town of Herculaneum, which was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. It was completed in 1974, but Getty, who lived mostly in England after World War II, died before he could return to Malibu to see it in person. His coffin was sent back to California, and he was buried near his museum on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
In leaving a third of his fortune to the J. Paul Getty Museum, his only stipulation was that the fortune be used "for the diffusion of artistic and general knowledge." This gave the museum extraordinary freedom--an unusual legacy from a man who in his life had sought absolute control over his affairs. The laws governing trusts, however, indicate that the museum must spend 4.25 percent of its endowment three out of every four years in order to retain its tax-exempt status. In the first year after its endowment, that figure equaled $54 million; today the amount the museum must spend three out of four years is more than $200 million. The J. Paul Getty Museum's greatest challenge, therefore, is finding enough art and culture to buy--but not too much that other museums accuse the Getty of hoarding the world's masterpieces.
The museum spent a good chunk of its endowment in the construction of the Getty Center, a six-building complex set on a hilltop in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. The $1 billion complex opened in December 1997. Fourteen years in the making, the Getty Center includes a large museum, a research institute and library, an art conservation institute, a digital information institute, an arts education institute, a museum management school, and a grant program center. The buildings were designed in a modernist style by American architect Richard Meier.
1993 ATF raids Branch Davidian compound
At Mount Carmel in Waco, Texas, agents of the U.S. Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) launch a raid against the Branch Davidian compound as part of an investigation into illegal possession of firearms and explosives by the Christian cult. As the agents attempted to penetrate the complex, gunfire erupted, beginning an extended gun battle that left four ATF agents dead and 15 wounded. Six Branch Davidians were fatally wounded, and several more were injured, including David Koresh, the cult's founder and leader. After 45 minutes of shooting, the ATF agents withdrew, and a cease-fire was negotiated over the telephone. The operation, which involved more than 100 ATF agents, was the one of the largest ever mounted by the bureau and resulted in the highest casualties of any ATF operation.
David Koresh was born Vernon Wayne Howell in Houston, Texas, in 1959. In 1981, he joined the Branch Davidians, a sect of the Seventh Day Adventist Church founded in 1934 by a Bulgarian immigrant named Victor Houteff. Koresh, who possessed an exhaustive knowledge of the Bible, rapidly rose in the hierarchy of the small religious community, eventually entering into a power struggle with the Davidians' leader, George Roden.
For a short time, Koresh retreated with his followers to eastern Texas, but in late 1987 he returned to Mount Carmel with seven armed followers and raided the compound, severely wounding Roden. Koresh went on trial for attempted murder, but the charge was dropped after his case was declared a mistrial. By 1990, he was the leader of the Branch Davidians and legally changed his name to David Koresh, with David representing his status as head of the biblical House of David, and Koresh standing for the Hebrew name for Cyrus, the Persian king who allowed the Jews held captive in Babylon to return to Israel.
Koresh took several wives at Mount Carmel and fathered at least 12 children from these women, several of whom were as young as 12 or 13 when they became pregnant. There is also evidence that Koresh may have harshly disciplined some of the 100 or so Branch Davidians living inside the compound, particularly his children. A central aspect of Koresh's religious teachings was his assertion that the apocalyptic events predicted in the Bible's book of Revelation were imminent, making it necessary, he asserted, for the Davidians to stockpile weapons and explosives in preparation.
Following the unsuccessful ATF raid, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) took over the situation. A standoff with the Branch Davidians stretched into seven weeks, and little progress was made in the telephone negotiations as the Davidians had stockpiled years of food and other necessities before the raid.
On April 18, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno approved a tear-gas assault on the compound, and at approximately 6:00 a.m. on April 19 the Branch Davidians were informed of the imminent attack and asked to surrender, which they did not. A few minutes later, two FBI combat vehicles began inserting gas into the building and were joined by Bradley tanks, which fired tear-gas canisters through the compound's windows. The Branch Davidians, many with gas masks on, refused to evacuate, and by 11:40 a.m. the last of some 100 tear-gas canisters was fired into the compound. Just after noon, a fire erupted at one or more locations on the compound, and minutes later nine Davidians fled the rapidly spreading blaze. Gunfire was reported but ceased as the compound was completely engulfed by the flames.
Koresh and at least 80 of his followers, including 22 children, died during the federal government's second disastrous assault on Mount Carmel. The FBI and Justice Department maintained there was conclusive evidence that the Branch Davidian members ignited the fire, citing an eyewitness account and various forensic data. Of the gunfire reported during the fire, the government argued that the Davidians were either killing each other as part of a suicide pact or were killing dissenters who attempted to escape the Koresh-ordered suicide by fire. Most of the surviving Branch Davidians contested this official position, as do some critics in the press and elsewhere, whose charges against the ATF and FBI's handling of the Waco standoff ranged from incompetence to premeditated murder. In 1999, the FBI admitted that they used tear-gas grenades in the assault, which have been known to cause fires because of their incendiary properties.
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