This is Ray Mossholder from the headquarters of Reach More Now in Fort Worth, Texas, and this is Today in History. These are the stories that have made news throughout history – stories that happened on
AUGUST 4
For example, observations in North and South China and Japan of a supernova in 1181 were recorded independently at different locations in North and South China and Japan beginning on August 4. These descriptions fixed the position of the star consistent with the radio source 3C 58, and indicate that it was visible for up to 186 days. Today’s scientists are still studying it. There have only been five appearances of supernovas since God created the heavens and the Earth.
Two On August 4,1753, Virginian George Washington was declared a Master Mason in a Masonic ritual performed by his fellow Freemasons during a secret ceremony in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Washington, who belonged to Alexandria Lodge No. 22, had been initiated into the Masons at age 20 on November 4, 1752. The following year, on March 3, 1753, he passed as a “Fellow Craft.” Five months later, Washington was raised to the rank of Master Mason. Washington was 21 years old and would soon command his first military operation as a major in the Virginia colonial militia.
Freemasonry evolved from the practices and rituals of the stonemasons’ guilds in the Middle Ages. With the decline of European cathedral building, “lodges” decided to admit non-stonemasons to maintain membership, and the secret fraternal order grew in popularity in Europe. In 1717, the first Grand Lodge, an association of lodges, was founded in England, and Freemasonry was soon disseminated throughout the British Empire. The first American Mason lodge was established in Philadelphia in 1730, and future revolutionary leader Benjamin Franklin was a founding member.
There is no central Masonic authority, and Freemasons are governed locally by the order’s many customs and rites. Members trace the origins of Masonry back to the erecting of King Solomon’s Temple in biblical times and are expected to believe in the “Supreme Being,” as well as in the soul’s immortality, and were expected to promote, in Washington’s words, “private virtue and public prosperity” and advocate for religious tolerance. Fellow Masons referred to each other as “Brother.”
Masons follow specific religious rites, and maintain a vow of secrecy concerning the order’s ceremonies. The Masons of the 18th century adhered to liberal democratic principles that included religious toleration, loyalty to local government, and the importance of charity. From its inception, Freemasonry encountered considerable opposition from organized religion, especially from the Roman Catholic Church.
For George Washington, joining the Masons was a rite of passage and an expression of his civic responsibility. After becoming a Master Mason, Washington had the option of passing through a series of additional rites that would take him to higher “degrees.” In 1788, shortly before becoming the first president of the United States, Washington was elected the first Worshipful Master of Alexandria Lodge No. 22.
Masonic rites were witnessed at such events as Washington’s presidential inauguration and the laying of the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.–a city designed with Masonic symbols throughout it.
Masonic symbols, approved by Washington in the design of the Great Seal of the United States, can be seen on the one-dollar bill. The All-Seeing Eye above an unfinished pyramid is unmistakably Masonic, and the scroll beneath, which proclaims the advent of a “New Secular Order” in Latin, is one of Freemasonry’s long-standing goals. The Great Seal appeared on the dollar bill during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, also a Mason.
According to published eyewitness reports, George Washington performed Masonic rites at the laying of the U.S. Capitol’s cornerstone on September 18, 1793. Wearing an apron embroidered with Masonic symbols, Washington led a ceremony laced with the society’s rituals. The apron, along with the trowel and tools used to set the Capitol’s cornerstone in place, is currently housed at the George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia.
Many other leaders of the American Revolution, including Paul Revere, John Hancock, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Boston Tea Party saboteurs, were also Freemasons, Freemasonry has continued to be important in U.S. politics, and at least 15 presidents, five Supreme Court chief justices, and numerous members of Congress have been Masons. Presidents known to be Masons include Washington, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, James Polk, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, James Garfield, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Warren Harding, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Gerald Ford.
In 1923, the national organization of Freemasons purchased the former Revolutionary War site of Shooter’s Hill in Alexandria, Virginia, in order to build a monument to their most esteemed Brother Washington. Assisting in the groundbreaking ceremonies were President Calvin Coolidge and former President William H. Taft, both Masons. Harry Truman, a former Grand Master Mason for Missouri, dedicated a statue of Washington at the memorial in 1950.
Today there are an estimated two million Masons in the United States, but the exact membership figure is one of the society’s many many deeep and many believe very dark secrets.
The Roman Catholic Church specifically warns its members to never join the Masons. In 1983, Prefect Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, with the personal approval of Pope John Paul II, went so far as to create a Declaration on Masonic Associations, which reiterated the Church’s objections to Freemasonry.[29] The Declaration states:
“The faithful who enroll in Masonic associations are in a state of grave sin and may not receive Holy Communion….” and “…the Church’s negative judgment in regard to Masonic association(s) remains unchanged since their principles have always been considered irreconcilable with the doctrine of the Church and therefore membership in them remains forbidden.”[29]
In 1980, after years of study, including dialogue with Freemasons, the German Bishops Conference addressed this question, producing a report on Freemasonry listing twelve points and allegations.[13]
Among the allegations were that Freemasonry denies revelation[14] and objective truth.[15] They also alleged that religious indifference is fundamental to Freemasonry,[16] that Freemasonry is Deist,[17] and that it denies the possibility of divine revelation,[18] so threatening the respect due to the Church’s biblical teachings.
The sacramental character of Masonic rituals was seen as signifying an individual transformation,[20] offering an alternative path to perfection[21] and having a total claim on the life of a member[22] It concludes by stating that all lodges are forbidden to Catholics,[23] including Catholic-friendly lodges[24] and that German Protestant churches were also suspicious of Freemasonry.
The myriad of Protestant churches with so many different denominations take individual stances regarding the Freemasons. Evangelicals and fundamentalists almost in total, warn against joining the Freemasons. The careful and scholarly study over many years conducted by the Roman Catholic Church regarding the Freemasons is highly worth studying for any who want to get as close as possible to the truths about them.
Meanwhile, the Freemasons themselves remain silent and because of the extreme secrecy of this organization they continue to present themselves as a deep dark secret.
August 4, 1783 – Mount Asama erupted in Japan, killing about 1,400 people. The eruption caused a famine, which resulted in an additional 20,000 deaths.
August 4, 1821 –
Reverend William C. Blair, the first Sunday School missionary of the United States, begins his work. In his first year, he will travel twenty-five hundred miles, mostly on horseback, visiting six states, founding sixty-one Sunday schools, inspecting thirty-five others, establish four adult schools, and six tract societies. When giving his report, he will apologize that illness hindered him from doing more. The Sunday and Adult School Union will be so impressed, however, that they will hire additional missionaries.
You’ve no doubt heard the saying from someone about the weather “It’s hotter than H E double toothpicks”. Well, I’ll bet they were saying that in Seville Spain on August 4, 1881, because it was 122ø F (50ø C), in the heat of that day there.
In 1889 on this day – The Great Fire of Spokane, Washington destroyed 32 blocks of that city. Workers quickly rushed to Spokane to help rebuild those charred blocks. It was a massive building project.
1892, August 4, Andrew and Abby Borden were found hacked to death in their Fall River, Massachusetts, home. Andrew was discovered in a pool of blood on the living room couch, his face nearly split in two. Abby was upstairs, her head smashed to pieces; it was later determined that she was killed first.
Suspicion soon fell on one of the Bordens’ two daughters, Lizzie, age 32 and single, a Sunday school teacher who lived with her wealthy father and stepmother and was the only other person besides their maid, Bridget Sullivan, who was home when the bodies were found. Lizzie Borden was arrested and charged with the double homicide. As a result of the crime’s sensational nature, her trial attracted national attention.
Lizzie Andrew Borden was born on July 19, 1860. Her mother died when Lizzie was a young girl and her father, who became a bank president and successful businessman, married Abby Gray, who helped raise Lizzie and her older sister Emma. The sisters reportedly despised their stepmother and, as adults, argued with their father over money matters. Lizzie claimed she was in the barn at the time of the murders and entered the house later that morning to find her father dead in the living room.
The evidence that the prosecution presented against Borden was circumstantial. It was alleged that she tried to buy poison the day before the murders and that she burned one of her dresses several days afterward.
Despite the fact that fingerprint testing was already becoming commonplace in Europe at the time, the police failed to believe in its trustworthiness and refused to test for prints on the murder weapon—a hatchet—found in the Borden’s basement.
The prosecution tried to prove that Lizzie had burned a dress similar to the one she was wearing on the day of the murders and had purchased a small axe the day before. But Lizzie was a sweet-looking Christian woman and the jury took only 90 minutes to decide that she could never commit such a hideous crime.
Lizzie inherited a substantial sum after her father’s death, and moved from the murder site into a different home, where she lived until her death on June 1, 1927. Today, the house where the Borden murders occurred is a bed and breakfast. Despite Lizzie Borden’s acquittal, the cloud of suspicion that hung over her never disappeared. She is immortalized in a famous rhyme:
Lizzie Borden took an axe, And gave her mother forty whacks; When she saw what she had done, She gave her father forty-one.
Ignoring the taunts, Lizzie lived the high life until her death in 1927. She was buried in the family plot next to her parents.
Also on August 4, 1892 –
Dr. Wilfred T. Grenfell arrives in Labrador to work with colonists who have little medical attention, live in poverty, and are deeply in debt to company stores. The twenty-six-year-old English medical missionary will ply the Labrador shores in his mission boat or ski to where he is needed. Not only does he open hospitals and orphanages but he builds churches and teaches the people practical methods of management. He will work among them for forty-two years, raising funds and recruiting many other doctors, nurses and clergymen to join him.
August 4, 1888 – In a blinding rainstorm, Mary Slessor boarded the canoe of a friendly chief who took her up river to a new work among Nigeria’s people.
This was the day in 1901 when Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong was born.
August 4, 1910, The Philadelphia Athletics pitcher Jack Coombs and Chicago White Sox pitcher Ed Walsh pitched a 16 inning scoreless tie. There were no ballpark lights in 1910 so the game had to be called on account of darkness.
On August 4, 1914, as World War I erupted in Europe, President Woodrow Wilson formally proclaimed the neutrality of the United States, a position that a vast majority of Americans favored.
Wilson’s initial hope that America could be “impartial in thought as well as in action” was soon compromised by Germany’s attempted quarantine of the British Isles. Britain was one of America’s closest trading partners and tension arose between the United States and Germany when several U.S. ships traveling to Britain were damaged or sunk by German mines.
In February 1915, Germany announced unrestricted warfare against all ships, neutral or otherwise, that entered the war zone around Britain. One month later, Germany announced that a German cruiser had sunk the William P. Frye, a private American vessel that was transporting grain to England when it disappeared. President Wilson was outraged, but the German government apologized and called the attack an unfortunate mistake.
In early May 1915, several New York newspapers published a warning by the German embassy in Washington that Americans traveling on British or Allied ships in war zones did so at their own risk. The announcement was placed on the same page as an advertisement for the imminent sailing of the British-owned Lusitania ocean liner from New York to Liverpool. On May 7, the Lusitania was torpedoed without warning by a German submarine just off the coast of Ireland. Of the nearly 2,000 passengers, 1,201 were killed, including 128 Americans.
It was revealed that the Lusitania was carrying about 173 tons of war munitions for Britain, which the Germans cited as further justification for the attack. The United States eventually sent three notes to Berlin protesting the action, and Germany apologized and pledged to end unrestricted submarine warfare. In November, however, a U-boat sunk an Italian liner without warning, killing 272 people, including 27 Americans. Public opinion in the United States began to turn irrevocably against Germany.
In late March, Germany sunk four more U.S. merchant ships, and on April 2, President Wilson appeared before Congress and called for a declaration of war against Germany. On April 4, the Senate voted 82 to six to declare war against Germany. Two days later, the House of Representatives endorsed the declaration by a vote of 373 to 50, and America formally entered World War I.
On June 26, the first 14,000 U.S. infantry troops landed in France to begin training for combat. After four years of a bloody stalemate along the Western Front, the entrance of America’s well-supplied forces into the conflict was a major turning point in the war. By the time the war finally ended on November 11, 1918, more than 2 million American soldiers had served on the battlefields of Western Europe, and some 50,000 of these men had lost their lives.
The 4th of August 1925 US marines leave Nicaragua after 13-year occupation
Important this day in 1927 – the Peace Bridge between US & Canada opened for the very first time.
August 4, 1929-The Cleveland Indians, down to their last out, scored nine runs in the ninth inning for a 14-6 comeback victory over the New York Yankees.
Today in 1934 New York Giants Mel Ott set a record of 6 runs in one game and helped his Giants beat the Phillies 21-4
On August 4, 1936, American Jesse Owens made the Fuhrer furious. Owens won the gold in the long jump at the Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany. It was the second of four gold medals Owens won in Berlin, as he greatly angered and firmly dispelled German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler’s notion of the superiority of an Aryan “master race,” for all the world to see.
Jesse Owens first made his mark on the international stage at just 21 years old on May 25, 1935, while an undergrad at Ohio State University, by setting three world records and tying another at the Big Ten Championships in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “The Buckeye Bullet” started his afternoon by running the 100-meter dash in just 9.4 seconds to tie the world record.
Just 10 minutes later, Owens jumped 26’8 1/4″, setting a world record he would hold until 1951. And, ten minutes after that, Owens set another world record in the 220-yard dash with a time of 20.3 seconds. Finally, less than an hour after his afternoon of competition started, Owens ran the 220-yard hurdles in 22.6 seconds for his third outright world record of the day. Owens’ impressive performance caused a sensation across the United States, and the track world looked forward to following his progress at the upcoming 1936 Olympics.
Owens was openly derided by Nazi officials prior to his arrival in Berlin because he was a black American; some went so far as to call him and his fellow black athletes “non-humans.” Owens responded on August 3, when he edged out African-American Ralph Metcalfe to win the 100 meters in an impressive 10.3 seconds, a time that would have set the world record if had not been deemed by German officials “wind-aided.”
The next day, August 4, at the Reich Sports Field Stadium, 110,000 spectators watched Owens slam the door on Hitler’s racist theories. In the morning, after fouling on his first two qualifying jumps, Owens finally leaped his way into the final, where he met the young German Lutz Long. Long tied the heavily favored Owens on his second jump, but Owens answered the challenge with a mark of 26′ 5 ½”, the first jump over 26 feet in Olympic history, and an Olympic record that would stand for 24 years. As Owens and Lutz walked arm in arm around the track, the German crowd roared its approval. Hitler promptly left the stadium, missing the medal ceremony.
Owens would win his third gold medal and set his second Olympic record of the games in the 200 meters the next day. On August 9, he followed that up by helping his team set a new world record–39.8 seconds–in the 4 x 100 meter relay. Owens and Metcalfe replaced two American Jews, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, originally scheduled to run the relay that day. Later, the U.S. team was criticized for the move, which was thought to be an appeasement of Hitler and the Nazi party, who would likely have been even angrier to see Jews, already a frequent target of Nazi hate and harassment, bring home a medal.
In 1944 on this day, acting on a tip from a Dutch informer, the Nazi Gestapo captured a 15-year-old Jewish Anne Frank and her family in a sealed-off area of an Amsterdam warehouse.
In 1947, Anne’s diary was published by Otto in its original Dutch as Diary of a Young Girl. An instant best-seller and eventually translated into more than 50 languages, The Diary of Anne Frank has served as a literary testament to the nearly six million Jews, including Anne herself, who were silenced in the Holocaust.
The Frank family’s hideaway in Amsterdam opened as a museum in 1960. A new English translation of Anne’s diary in 1995 restored material that had been edited out of the original version, making the work nearly a third longer.
On the fourth of August 1948 a 5 day southern filibuster in the Senate succeeded in continuing a poll tax that cost every American a certain amount of money to be allowed to vote. The purpose of the poll tax was not only to raise revenue for state governments, but to keep the poor, especially the Blacks, from being able to vote. The 24th Amendment to the Constitution was created partially to stop the poll tax.
August 4, 1958 – The Billboard Hot 100 was published for the first time. The Billboard Hot 100 is the music industry standard record chart in the United States for singles, published weekly byBillboard magazine. Chart rankings are based on radio play, online streaming, and sales (physical and digital). At the top of the first Billboard Hot 100 on August 4, 1958, was Ricky Nelson singing “Poor Little Fool.”
August 4, 1952, Helicopters from the U.S. Air Force Air Rescue Service land in Germany, completing the first transatlantic flight by helicopter in 51 hours and 55 minutes of flight time.
August 4, 1979
President Jimmy Carter established the Department of Energy.
August 4, 1961
Born on this day he had to have his diapers changed like every other baby. He grew up wanting to change America. Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States of America was born August 4, 1961.
And on this day in 1964, the remains of three civil rights workers whose disappearance on June 21 garnered national attention were found buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi.
Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, both white New Yorkers, had traveled to heavily segregated Mississippi in 1964 to help organize civil rights efforts on behalf of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The third man, James Chaney, was a local African American man who had joined the Congress of Racial Equality in 1963. The disappearance of the three young men led to a massive FBI investigation that was code-named MIBURN, for “Mississippi Burning.”
Michael Schwerner, who arrived in Mississippi as a CORE field worker in January 1964, aroused the animosity of white supremacists after he organized a successful black boycott of a variety store in the city of Meridian and led voting registration efforts for African Americans. In May, Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, sent word that the 24-year-old Schwerner, nicknamed “Goatee” and “Jew-Boy” by the KKK, was to be eliminated. On the evening of June 16, two dozen armed Klansmen descended on Mt. Zion Methodist Church, an African American church in Neshoba County that Schwerner had arranged to use as a “Freedom School.” Schwerner was not there at the time, but the Klansmen beat several African Americans present and then torched the church.
On January 20, Schwerner returned from a civil rights training session in Ohio with 21-year-old James Chaney and 20-year-old Andrew Goodman, a new recruit to CORE. The next day–June 21–the three went to investigate the burning of the church in Neshoba.
While attempting to drive back to Meridian, they were stopped by Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price just inside the city limits of Philadelphia, the county seat. Price, a member of the KKK who had been looking out for Schwerner or other civil rights workers, threw them in the Neshoba County jail, allegedly under suspicion for church arson.
After seven hours in jail, during which the men were not allowed to make a phone call, Price released them on bail. After escorting them out of town, the deputy returned to Philadelphia to drop off an accompanying Philadelphia police officer. As soon as he was alone, he raced down the highway in pursuit of the three civil rights workers. He caught the men just inside county limits and loaded them into his car. Two other cars pulled up filled with Klansmen who had been alerted by Price of the capture of the CORE workers, and the three cars drove down an unmarked dirt road called Rock Cut Road. Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney were shot to death and their bodies buried in an earthen dam a few miles from the Mt. Zion Methodist Church.
The next day, the FBI began an investigation into the disappearance of the civil rights workers. On June 23, the case drew national headlines, and federal agents found the workers’ burned station wagon. Under pressure from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the FBI escalated the investigation, which eventually involved more than 200 FBI agents and scores of federal troops who combed the woods and swamps looking for the bodies. The incident provided the final impetus needed for the 1964 Civil Rights Act to pass Congress on July 2, and eight days later FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover came to Mississippi to open a new Bureau office. Eventually, Delmar Dennis, a Klansman and one of the participants in the murders, was paid $30,000 and offered immunity from prosecution in exchange for information. On August 4, the remains of the three young men were found. The culprits were identified, but the state of Mississippi made no arrests.
Finally, on December 4, nineteen men, including Deputy Price, were indicted by the U.S. Justice Department for violating the civil rights of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney (charging the suspects with civil rights violations was the only way to give the federal government jurisdiction in the case).
After nearly three years of legal wrangling, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately defended the indictments, the men went on trial in Jackson, Mississippi. The trial was presided over by an ardent segregationist, U.S. District Judge William Cox, but under pressure from federal authorities and fearing impeachment, he took the case seriously. On October 27, 1967, an all-white jury found seven of the men guilty, including Price and KKK Imperial Wizard Bowers. Nine were acquitted, and the jury deadlocked on three others. The mixed verdict was hailed as a major civil rights victory, as no one in Mississippi had ever before been convicted for actions taken against a civil rights worker.
In December, Judge Cox sentenced the men to prison terms ranging from three to 10 years. After sentencing, he said, “They killed one (he used the n word). One Jew, and a white man. I gave them what I thought they deserved.” None of the convicted men served more than six years behind bars.
On June 21, 2005, the forty-first anniversary of the three murders, Edgar Ray Killen, was found guilty of three counts of manslaughter. At eighty years of age and best known as an outspoken white supremacist and part-time Baptist minister, he was sentenced to 60 years in prison.
On August 4, 1971, the United States launched Apollo 15, the first satellite into lunar orbit from a manned spacecraft.
Floodwaters finally receded in Luzon, Philippines, on August 4, 1972, revealing devastation and hundreds dead. An torrential rainfall in July had caused rivers all over the large island to flood.
One storm after another battered Luzon in July 1972. Manila received nearly 70 inches of rain during the month. On July 13, a monsoon caused several dikes to fail and 32 people lost their lives in the resulting flood. Less than a week later, a typhoon dropped even more rain on the already saturated region. Dikes throughout the area broke down, flooding large swaths of land. Millions were left homeless and 142 people died. Nearly all major and minor roads were under water or mud.
The flooding continued until the rivers finally peaked on August 4. In addition to the thousands of people forced from their homes, the rice crop for the season was lost. Food riots broke out in several places and looting was rampant. Cholera and typhoid epidemics also resulted.
It was on that same day – August 4, 1972, that Arthur Bremer was sentenced to 63 years in prison for shooting Alabama governor George Wallace.
George Wallace stood behind an 800-pound bulletproof podium each time he delivered a speech. On the heels of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Wallace understood that he was a target. “Somebody’s going to get me one of these days,” he told the “Detroit News.” “I can just see a little guy out there that nobody’s paying any attention to. He reaches into his pocket and out comes the little gun, like that Sirhan guy that got [Robert] Kennedy.”
A few people had noticed the “little guy” in red, white, and blue who led the crowd in cheers at a Laurel, Maryland, campaign stop on May 15, 1972. Cameramen had seen him at other Wallace rallies, had even filmed him in Michigan. When the then-anonymous Arthur Bremer finally got the clear shot of Wallace he’d been waiting for, he fired five times at close range. The violent murder of a political figure that Bremer had sought to distinguish his otherwise unremarkable life didn’t happen.
During an outdoor rally in Laurel, Maryland, George Wallace, the governor of Alabama and a presidential candidate, was shot by 21-year-old Arthur Bremer. Three others were wounded, and Wallace was permanently paralyzed from the waist down. The next day, while fighting for his life in a hospital, he won major primary victories in Michigan and Maryland. However, Wallace remained in the hospital for several months, bringing his third presidential campaign to an irrevocable end.
Wallace, one of the most controversial politicians in U.S. history, was elected governor of Alabama in 1962 under an ultra-segregationist platform. In his 1963 inaugural address, Wallace promised his white followers: “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” However, the promise lasted only six months. In June 1963, under federal pressure, he was forced to end his blockade of the University of Alabama and allow the enrollment of African American students.
Despite his failures in slowing the accelerating civil rights movement in the South, Wallace became a national spokesman for resistance to racial change and in 1964 entered the race for the U.S. presidency. Although defeated in most Democratic presidential primaries he entered, his modest successes demonstrated the extent of popular backlash against integration. In 1968, he made another strong run as the candidate of the American Independent Party and managed to get on the ballot in all 50 states. On Election Day, he drew 10 million votes from across the country.
In 1972, Governor Wallace returned to the Democratic Party for his third presidential campaign and, under a slightly more moderate platform, was showing promising returns when Arthur Bremer shot him on May 15, 1972. After his recovery, he faded from national prominence and made a poor showing in his fourth and final presidential campaign in 1979.
During the 1980s, Wallace’s politics shifted dramatically, especially in regard to race. He contacted civil rights leaders he had so forcibly opposed in the past and asked their forgiveness. In time, he gained the political support of Alabama’s growing African American electorate and in 1983 was elected Alabama governor for the last time with their overwhelming support. During the next four years, the man who had promised segregation forever made more African American political appointments than any other figure in Alabama history.
He announced his retirement in 1986, telling the Alabama electorate in a tearful address that “I’ve climbed my last political mountain, but there are still some personal hills I must climb. But for now, I must pass the rope and the pick to another climber and say climb on, climb on to higher heights. Climb on ’til you reach the very peak. Then look back and wave at me. I, too, will still be climbing.” He died in 1998.
As for his intended assassinator Arthur Bremer, he was born in Milwaukee on August 21, 1950, one of four sons of Sylvia and William Bremer, an abusive, alcoholic couple. Early on, he escaped his ugly reality by pretending that he “‘was living with a television family and there was no yelling at home and no one hit me."” With an unremarkable academic career and no friends to speak of, Bremer found school intolerable. He wrote in the first half of his diary, unearthed in 1980 from its burial place in an excavated landfill (the second half was published, riddled with Bremer’s spelling errors, as “An Assassin’s Diary” in 1973), “‘No English or History test was ever as hard, no math final exam ever as difficult as waiting in a school lunch line alone, waiting to eat alone…while hundreds huddeled & gossiped & roared, & laughed & stared at me…"”
A complete break with his family in October 1971 intensified his isolation. With a bent toward pornography, guns and suicide, he began to frequent a shooting range after his demotion from busboy to kitchen help at the Milwaukee Athletic Club; patrons had complained that he talked to himself. An investigator assigned to the discrimination complaint Bremer filed described him “‘as bordering on paranoia."” Bremer did not accept the investigator’s assistance in arranging professional help; he bought a gun and headed to the Flintrop Arms Center instead.
His first attempts as a marksman proved disastrous. Anxious and inexperienced, Bremer shot holes in the ceiling instead of the target he was aiming at. An arrest followed when he was found asleep in his car, in front of a suburban synagogue, bullets scattered across the front seat. He underwent a rudimentary psychiatric evaluation, but was ultimately only charged with and fined for disorderly conduct.
A turning point for Bremer came around Thanksgiving 1971, when he met 15-year-old Joan Pemrich. Bremer became fixated on the girl; she may have been the first person to respond positively to him. But she broke off their relationship after only three dates because he acted, in her words, “goofy” and “weird.” His inappropriate behavior escalated after the break-up — at one point he shaved his head “to show her that inside I felt as empty as my shaved head” — and on January 13, the same day that George Wallace announced his candidacy for the 1972 presidential election, her mother intervened and told Bremer to leave her daughter alone.
It was March of 1972 when Bremer began his diary. Increasingly lonely, he dreamed of getting attention through assassination. “‘Now I start my diary of my personal plot to kill by pistol either Richard Nixon or George Wallace,"” he wrote in his first entry. Nixon was a divisive figure, and Wallace’s segregationist politics had engendered violence since his first Alabama gubernatorial campaign ten years earlier. But Bremer was not concerned with politics. His plot stemmed from his desire “‘to do SOMETHING BOLD AND DRAMATIC , FORCEFULL & DYNAMIC, A STATEMENT of my manhood for the world to see."”
As Bremer debated the merits of his targets — Nixon was more satisfying, Wallace more accessible — he recorded his feelings of self-loathing and delusions of grandeur. Although he hoped the assassination would culminate in his death, his lasting image was of grave importance to him. On the last page of this half of his diary, Bremer decided to call himself an “assassinator.” “Assissns, [sic]” he wrote, “‘is so ordinary."” Despite the name change, he had finally found a group to which he could belong, even elevating himself to the status of Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. The image, Bremer wrote, was as important as the act: “Got to think up something cute to shout out after I kill him [Nixon], like Booth did.”
Expecting it to be found and read worldwide after his death, Bremer buried his diary on April 3, the day before he flew to New York to put his plot against Nixon into action. If the intended result had not been so dire, what followed might have been a comedy of errors. Instead, the events of the trip were yet another example of the “awesome incompetence” that Bremer felt stymied by. Both his plans to rent a car to drive to Ottawa and to lose his virginity to a prostitute were foiled. He nearly shot himself after his gun went off accidentally in his hotel room; and finally, as he hid one of his guns in the trunk of his car in preparation for a trip across the border from Wisconsin, he wedged it in so far as to make it unrecoverable.
When Bremer reached Ottawa, security was tight; he feared getting close to Nixon would be impossible. Attending rallies where Nixon was speaking, he became furious with the protestors, who he felt conspired against him, attracting attention that was rightfully his. “A guy tapped me on the shoulder…. He goes in front of me & carefully photographs the speakers. What a dope! Those noise makers were all on news film! He should of photographed the quiet ones. He never pointed his camera at me.”
Bremer was doomed to anonymity again. As his frustration mounted, his diary entries became more explosive. ” I want something to happen,” he wrote on April 24, shortly after his failed trip to Ottawa. “I was supposed to be Dead a week & a day ago. Or at least infamous.” Always keeping an eye toward publication, he threatened to burn his diaries, believing there would be an audience to let down. “Burn all these papers…& no one would ever know 1/2 of it. But I want em all to know. I want a big shot & not a little fat noise… tired of writing about…about what I failed to do again and again.”
Bremer took a ten-day break from writing, apparently to rethink his path to notoriety. When he resumed on May 4, he had decided that “Wallace [would] have the honor” of being his victim. At times excruciating in its detail, the diary faithfully tracked Wallace’s campaign stops, but Bremer saw his latest pursuit as another symbol of his incompetence. “[T]o this man it seems only another failure.… I won’t even rate a T.V. interruption in Russia or Europe when the news breaks …. “I won’t get more than 3 minutes on network TV news. “Ask me why I did it & I’d say ‘I don’t know’, or ‘Nothing else to do’, or ‘Why not?’ or ‘I have to kill somebody."”
August 4, 1988
The United States Senate voted to give each living Japanese-American who was interned during WWII, $20,000 compensation and an apology.
In 2007
NASA launched the Phoenix spacecraft on a mission to Mars.
On August 4, 2012, in London, Oscar Pistorius of South Africa became the first amputee to compete at the Olympics by running in an opening heat of the men’s 400-meter. Pistorius finished second out of five runners and advanced to the semifinals, where he finished eighth out of eight runners. Nicknamed “Blade Runner” because of the J-shaped carbon fiber blades he wears to run, Pistorius inspired people around the world. His image would drastically change early the next year when the star athlete was arrested for the murder of his girlfriend.
Pistorius was born on November 22, 1986, without the fibula (a bone between the calf and ankle) in either of his legs. When he was 11 months old, the Johannesburg native’s legs were amputated below the knees. (Doctors had advised his parents it would be easier to have the procedure done before Pistorius learned to walk.) Growing up, he used prosthetic legs and participated in numerous sports. After injuring his knee playing rugby in high school, he started running track as a form of rehabilitation.
In 2004 Pistorius competed at the Summer Paralympics in Athens, Greece, where he won a gold medal in the 200-meter, with a record-setting time of 21.97 seconds. He also won bronze in the 100-meter. Pistorius soon began competing in meets against able-bodied athletes. However, in January 2008, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAFF), track and field’s governing organization, banned him from able-bodied competitions because it believed Pistorius’ blades, known as “Flex-Foot Cheetahs,” gave him an unfair advantage. The IAFF, which had conducted scientific tests with Pistorius, claimed his blades enabled him to use less energy than able-bodied athletes while covering the same distance, and therefore run faster. Pistorius appealed the IAFF’s ruling, and in May 2008 the Court of Arbitration struck down the IAFF’s decision and the ban was lifted.
Later that same year, at the Paralympics in Beijing, China, Pistorius won gold in the 100-, 200- and 400- meter events, and set a world record of 47.49 seconds in the 400-meter. Over the next few years, he continued to compete against able-bodied athletes. In 2011 he was part of the South African squad that won a silver medal in the 4×400-meter relay at the World Championships in Athletics in South Korea, and in June 2012 he clinched silver in the individual 400-meter at the African Athletics Championships in Benin. The following month, Pistorius was selected to compete for his homeland in the individual 400-meter and 4×400 relay at the Olympics Games in London.
Pistorius began his history-making appearance at the Olympics on August 4, 2012, by taking second place in his five-man preliminary heat in the 400-meter, with a time of 45.44 seconds. At the semifinals the next day, Pistorius finished in last place, with a time of 46.54 seconds, and failed to advance to the finals. On August 9, he was supposed to run the third leg of the 4×400 relay, but his teammate collided with a runner from Kenya before he was able to hand off the baton to Pistorius, and the South Africans did not finish the race. After filing a protest, South Africa was allowed to compete in the finals the next day; the team, anchored by Pistorius, finished in eighth place. At the London Paralympics in September, Pistorius won gold medals with record-setting times in the 400-meter and the 4×100 relay, along with a silver medal in the 200-meter.
Then, on February 14, 2013, Pistorius was arrested for the murder of his girlfriend, 29-year-old Reeva Steenkamp, whom he admitted to fatally shooting at his Pretoria, South Africa, home earlier that day. Pistorius claimed he mistook Steenkamp, a model and law graduate, for an intruder. He was charged with premeditated murder, to which he pleaded not guilty when his case went to trial in March 2014, amidst intense media coverage.
That September, Pistorius was found guilty of culpable homicide, the equivalent of manslaughter, but cleared of the more serious charge of murder. In October 2014, the 27-year-old former Olympian was sentenced to five years in prison.
And finally – Tuesday, August 4, 2015 – the top story to this hour……
Fox News has announced the line-up for the prime-time Republican presidential debate on television this Thursday, and here’s who qualified in order of their poll numbers:
#1 Real estate magnate Donald Trump;
#2 Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker;
#3 former Florida Governor Jeb Bush
#4 former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee;
#5 retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson;
#6 Texas Senator Ted Cruz;
#7 Florida Senator Marco Rubio;
#8 Kentucky Senator Rand Paul;
#9 New Jersey Governor Chris Christie;
and #10 Ohio Governor John Kasich.
The roster of 10 candidates was determined based on an average of the five most recent national polls from highly respected poll companies. The drama, rather, was at the edge of the top 10. Christie and Kasich, were hovering by that edge in recent polling and were able to qualify.
Kasich, who leads the state where the debate is being held, said in a statement, “As governor, I am glad to welcome my fellow debate participants to our great state and I look forward to discussing the issues facing our country with them on Thursday.”
But former Texas Governor Rick Perry who placed a very close 11th in the poll and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum who placed 12th and five others, will not be on the prime-time, Fox telecast at 9 p.m. However, the seven who did not make the top 10 have been invited to a separate 5 p.m. Eastern time debate. Aside from Perry and Santorum, this includes Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal; former Hewlett-Packard head Carly Fiorina; South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham; former New York Governor George Pataki; and former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore.
Today President Obama sent an email to everyone saying that he hoped we would watch the Fox debates. It is probable he believes that Thursday night debates will be a second shootout at the Okay Corral.
This is Ray Mossholder and that’s it for August 4. And unless the Lord comes within the next 24 hours, I’ll be back with August fifth tomorrow.
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