The Forgotten History Blog

Although it’s hard to contextualize today, during the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the FBI was secretly engaged in a wide-ranging and largely illegal counter intelligence program within the United States.

COINTELPRO as it was dubbed, was formally meant to protect the United States from elements deemed “subversive” by the US government. Many of these supposedly “subversive” elements included harmless Civil Rights activists like Dr Martin Luther King, whom the FBI wrongly suspected as being communist.

Above: Dr King in prison, one of the many times he was arrested for civil disobedience The program was uncovered in 1971 when a group of anonymous civil liberties activists broke into a Pennsylvania FBI office and stole reams of documents revealing the illegal activities. The documents were then leaked in a series to the media, which (after some initial hesitation) began to publish them, provoking a Congressional investigation and reforms within the FBI.

Among the classified documents which were subsequently released (though millions more remain classified), are documents that reveal that FBI agents secretly engaged in operations meant to harass Dr King. As the leader of the COINTELPRO operation said in a classified memo, “We must mark [King] now, if we have not before, as the most dangerous Negro in the future of this Nation… it may be unrealistic to limit [our actions against King] to legalistic proofs that would stand up in court or before Congressional Committees.”

After the FBI had been illegally tapping King’s phone, they believed they had evidence that he had been engaging in an extra-martial affair. Just before he was set to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, they mailed him tapes of the recorded phone conversations along with a letter which they pretended was written by African Americans threatening to expose him, unless he did “the only thing left for you to do. you know what it is… You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”

King obviously didn’t kill himself, and instead fought for Civil Rights for another four years until being assassinated. To read the declassified portions of the secret FBI letter, click here.

It’s not unusual for politicians to bend the truth when making accusations about opposing candidates’ records, but what some conservatives accused Bill Clinton of doing during his term in office was far beyond the norm.

Although it’s now largely forgotten, a myriad of dubious allegations faced Clinton during the 1990s, including allegations that he was a serial murder, serial rapist and drug dealer (and the accusations went on, and on, and on).

Above: The First Couple, 1993-2001

So many accusations were alleged against the Clintons that in 1998, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton claimed that there was a “vast right wing conspiracy” against her family.

One of the most well known conservative smear merchants during the 1990s was a conservative magazine called the American Spectator. The Spectator was then financed by a conservative billionaire who funded an effort with the blanket purpose “to unearth damaging information about President Clinton.” It published numerous reports accusing Clinton of all kinds of wrongdoings, many of the most significant of which were written by a journalist named David Brock.

Brock, then a best selling conservative author, helped fabricate scandals including one in which Clinton supposedly engaged in sexual encounters arranged for him by Arkansas State Troopers. It was later revealed that the troopers interviewed for the story were bribed, and Brock recanted all of his conservative reporting, effectively ending his career as an admitted “right wing hit man.”

After exposing more conservative hoaxing designed to bring down the president, Brock later founded the nonprofit group Media Matters for America, a liberal group which seeks to undermine elements of conservative bias in the media. The crusade against the Clintons was also written about in the book and film The Hunting of the President.

During the 2008 presidential election, both members of the Republican ticket, John McCain Sarah Palin, said that they were advocates of “states’ rights.” This was not terribly surprising, considering that every Republican elected to the White House for the past 30 years has extolled the virtues of states’ rights at one point or another.

But what many don’t know– or have forgotten– is that the term “states’ rights” actually has a sinister and deeply racist origin.

Above: Riiiiiiight. The phrase was originally used as a code word by conservatives to court southern racists, assuring them that they were supporters of their right to have as much discrimination in their state laws as they wanted. In other words, they believed in the individual states’ right to be institutionally racist and they wouldn’t let the federal government disrupt them.

Southern political pamphlets using the term date back to the 1800s, even before the Civil War. The words even adorned the official state flag of Georgia in the mid-1800s.

During the Civil Rights Movement, conservative governor George Wallace proudly declared his support for “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” but later said he wished that he had declared his support of the more subtle “States’ rights now! States’ rights tomorrow! States’ rights forever!”

Similarly, former Republican National Committee Chair (and Ronald Reagan/George H. W. Bush advisor) Lee Atwater admitted in an interview that “states’ rights” was deliberately coded terminology. “You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires.”

“So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff,” Atwater continued. “You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.” Why was Atwater so blunt? At the time of the interview he was told he’d be quoted anonymously, although his identity as the source was revealed some 25 years later.

Movie trailers have been around since at least 1912, but they didn’t always run before the movies they’re attached to.

In fact, movie trailers (as you might guess by their name, trailers) used to trail behind films in theaters, not before them. Nowadays, the thought of showing advertisements for upcoming films after movies instead of before them makes little sense, because with the main attraction over with, why would the audience stick around to watch commercials?

Above: A screencap from the “Casablanca” movie trailer The answer is that often times in the early days of movies, the main attraction wasn’t over when the movie finished. It was common in the early decades of movies to show them in double features– i.e. one movie right after another. In the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and so on, trailers would often play after the first movie and before the second (which was often the blockbuster movie that people had come to actually see; the first was often a B-movie).

Starting in the 1920s and 1930s, theatrical trailers were often supplemented with newsreels, public service announcements, and short animated films, in a precursor to the diversity of modern day television programming.

Early on, trailers were cobbled together by individual theaters hoping to promote upcoming films, but soon the studios got into the act, eventually sub-contracting out the task of creating trailers to outside companies (a practice which is still largely followed today).

Although nowadays it’s better known as a game that kids play at summer camp, tug of war used to be an actual Olympic sport, with ten countries having competed for the coveted gold medal in the early 20th century.

The rules were simple: drag the rope in your team’s direction far enough and you won. The number of team members for each game varied slightly, with each team consisting of between five and eight members for each Olympics. Teams would wear matching uniforms for the competition, which was considered part of the track and field games.

Above: These tug-of-war champs were Olympians The sport has been contested at five Summer Olympics from 1900 to 1920, although only a handful of countries competed each time. Still, they kept including it (although today it likely would have been canceled due to lack of participation). Great Britain won the most cumulative medals, with five in all throughout the years.

Like any other game, tug of war involved a definite strategy. In 1908, the American team boycotted the competition, accusing their British counterparts of cheating– by using boots with spikes on them to dig into the ground.

Some would say that the old title was more descriptive or honest. The US Department of Defense, which is commonly known as the DoD for short, actually used to be titled more bluntly, “Department of War.”

The name change occurred in the late 1940s. With World War II over, the United Nations was taking steps towards what it hoped would be a lasting peace. In its Charter, the UN outlawed wars of aggression (wars which aren’t fought in defense), and as a result, top US military brass felt the American bureau needed a name, if only for PR reasons.

Above: The official Dept of War seal So, from 1947 through 1949, Congress adopted a series of laws renaming (and reorganizing) the American national military establishment to a more politically correct naming scheme. Accordingly, the Secretary of War was renamed the Secretary of Defense. Perhaps only one vestige of the old naming scheme remains: the US Army War College in Pennsylvania.

Following suit, several other countries also renamed their war departments around the same time. For example, Great Britain similarly used to have a War Office, which was renamed to the Ministry of Defence in 1963.

The president who served the shortest period of time after being elected to office was William Henry Harrison. Harrison was president for only 30 days, 12 hours and 32 minutes before keeling over at age 68. The circumstances under which President Harrison, the first ever to die in office, died are disputed until this day.

Harrison was elected in 1840 running as a rugged, tested and weathered war hero. The day that Harrison was sworn into office was rainy and cold, and to make matters worse, the newly elected president chose to deliver his entire 8,444-word speech to the assembled crowd (and this was after it had been edited for length by a friend). The speech, which still ranks as the longest inaugural speech in American history, took two hours to read.

Above: President Harrison, wearing considerably more clothing than he was on his inauguration day. Perhaps this was not the smartest choice in retrospect. Also not so smart of him: refusing to wear a hat or even a coat in the pouring rain.

A month later he was dead of pneumonia, which he may have contracted while he was savoring every moment of his inauguration day out in the rain. It’s unclear whether he came down with the illness at the inauguration or afterwards, but what is known is that the cures of the day, which included opium, snakes and caster oil.

His grandson, Benjamin Harrison, later became the 23rd president of the United States. On the day that the younger Harrison was sworn in, he reportedly wore a full suit of leather armor– just in case. He lived on to serve a complete term, although later ironically died of pneumonia as well.

The year was 1865, and just months earlier the US Civil War had ended with the surrender of the Confederacy. With the war over, the problem of counterfeiting had become rampant, with one third to one half of all American currency judged to be fake.

The reasons for this were twofold: first, spending due to the war had spiraled out of control, and second, the country had just shifted over to a uniform paper currency as opposed to the earlier system which had more than a thousand government-sanctioned banks handing out literally 10,000 different types of currency. With people unfamiliar with the new bills and thinking that this would fix counterfeiting once and for all, Americans were too trusting of anything that looked like the new federal currency.

Above: What makes the world go ’round To alleviate the problem of counterfeiting, the US Secret Service was established as a new division of the US Treasury. Interestingly enough, some of the first agents hired to track down counterfeiters were men who had been imprisoned for forgeries themselves.

Ironically, during the war, the Union had encouraged counterfeiting of Confederate money in hopes that by flooding the market with large amounts of it, it would decrease its value. Doubly ironically, the Union-created counterfeits were often higher quality than the originals.

The margarine and dairy industries have been at war since the late 1800s when the lower-cost butter substitute was first invented.

Early on, butter manufacturers believed that if margarine ever became popular it might cut into their sales significantly. And they were right. In order to fight the new product, the dairy industry set out to restricts availability and undercut its appeal in both the courtroom and Capitol Hill.

Dairy industry lobbyists worked both in individual states and also on a federal basis to fight the emerging margarine industry. Congress passed the Margarine Act of 1886, which put a two cent tax on the product, as well as restricted its sale and manufacture.

Above: An advertisement for do-it-yourself margarine coloring, 1948. In the following years, the pro-butter side managed to pass laws in 32 states either prohibiting margarine manufacturers from coloring their product yellow like butter, or actually requiring them to color it pink, which they hoped would make it less appealing to consumers. Margarine manufacturers began to sell do-it-yourself yellow coloring kits for consumers to buy and use at home to make their butter substitute more palatable as a reaction. Meanwhile, additional federal laws were also passed, the last of which was repealed in 1996.

By contrast, both federal and statewide hate crimes laws are a relatively new invention, with the first federal hate crimes legislation being enacted in the 1990s. To this day, the National Association of Margarine Manufacturers website still refers to the dairy industry as “dairy militants.”

The Republican Party has never had a rosy relationship with gays and lesbians, and this incident probably didn’t help much.

It was January 1995, and Republicans had swept into power a few months beforehand. The new House Majority Leader was Dick Armey, a conservative Republican.

Armey, who had been elected from Texas (where a string of murders of gays had recently happened), was known for opposing hate crimes legislation protecting gays and lesbians.

Above: A real Dick, Mr Armey In criticizing a fellow Representative, Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts), who is openly gay, Armey referred to him as “Barney Fag” in an interview.

According to a column published in the New York Times a short time after the incident, Representative Armey tried to get reporters not to air the tape of him using the word and, failing that, attacked the press for reporting about it.

Armey later claimed that he merely mispronounced Representative Frank’s last name. Frank responded after hearing of the incident, “I rule out that it was an innocent mispronunciation… I turned to my own expert, my mother, who reports that in 59 years of marriage, no one ever introduced her as Elsie Fag.”