set sail for the New World.
It was at sea for ten weeks, putting in near Cape Cod on November 11, 1620.
1810 Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costillo and several hundred of
his parishioners seized the prison at Dolores, Mexico marking the beginning of the first significant Mexican rebellion against Spain.
1811 The Astorians renamed Seeds-Kee-Dee-Agie (Praire Hen River) the Spanish River. It would later be renamed the Green River.
1875 J. C. Penney Jr, founder of J. C. Penny's, which first opened its doors in Kemmerer, born in Hamilton Missouri.
1920 While it didn't occur in Wyoming, and event which impacted the entire nation:
September 16, 1920. The Wall Street Bombing.
On this day, at 12:01 p.m., terrorist widely believed to be Galleanist anarchists, set off a bomb in New York's Wall Street district which killed thirty-eight people and injured hundreds more.
The bomb, designed to deploy shrapnel, killed mostly young workers in the district at a time at which young workers were very young. It was left in a horse drawn wagon, with horse still attached, and went off at the busy noon hour.
The direct perpetrators of the act were never discovered.
On the same day, a Polish artillery regiment was destroyed, with some prisoners and wounded, by a Red Army cavalry unit that outnumbered it after it expended all of its ammunition during the Battle of Dytiatyn. The Red Army unit was itself destroyed by Polish forces a few days latter.
The battle became a famous one for the Poles who established a military cemetery there. That was later destroyed by the Soviets following World War Two and the location is now inside of Ukraine.
1924 A coal mine explosion at Kemmerer kills 55.
1940 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Selective
Training and Service Act, which set up the first peacetime military
draft in U.S. history.
1940 President Franklin Roosevelt
orders the Army to begin mobilizing the entire National Guard for one
year’s training. The National Guard's horsed cavalry regiments, would go
into Federal service for the last time. Horse mechanized units, such as Wyoming's 115th Cavalry Regiment (Horse-Mechanized) would
go into service for the first and last time.
More on the last two items:
Today In Wyoming's History: September 16, 1940. Conscription starts and the National Guard mobilized.
Some of those conscripted men in 1945.
On this day in 1940, a couple of monumental events occurred in the history of the US and the state. These were:
Today In Wyoming's History: September 16: 1940 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Selective Training and Service Act, which set up the first peacetime military draft in U.S. history.
1940 President Franklin Roosevelt orders the Army to begin mobilizing the entire National Guard for one year’s training. The National Guard's horsed cavalry regiments, would go into Federal service for the last time. Horse mechanized units, such as Wyoming's 115th Cavalry Regiment (Horse-Mechanized) would go into service for the first and last time.
But Federal conscription itself was an anomaly and had only existed twice before, once during the Civil War and then again during World War One. It had never been in existence in peacetime. And for that matter, hardly any Americans in 1940 had a living memory of mandatory militia duty, although there would have been those had been alive when it still existed.
Also of huge significance was the mobilization of the National Guard.
The mobilization of the Guard in 1940 is well known, but underappreciated. The U.S. Army would have been incapable of fighting World War One or World War Two without the National Guard. During the Great War the reorganized Guard, reorganized as its state determined peacetime branches did not all comport with the Army's needs for a largescale European war, constituted a large percentage of the actual fighting force throughout the war. It's peacetime establishment was reorganized again in the 1920s to match needs upon mobilization and accordingly many of the Army units that fought in the Army's early campaigns, all the way into 1943, were made up of Guard units. Indeed, to at least some extent the Army simply used up Guard units until it could deploy newly trained men.
The significant story of the National Guard in both world wars was downplayed by the Army as, in spite of its absolute reliance on the Guard, the Regular Army always looked down on it in this period and tended to ignore its contributions. Those contributions were enormous, and the Army's treatment of the National Guard's history unfair, and the wartime treatment of its officers shameful.
Conscription would soon start a labor shortly and ultimately start a series of social crises, conflicts and changes that permanently changed the United States and its culture. One year of service, as had originally been passed into law, would not have done that, but when that service extended into years and ultimately into the largest war fought in modern times, it certainly did. World War One, coming in an era of more privative transpiration, even though it was only twenty years prior, had not resulted in the transcontinental mixing of races and cultures the way World War Two did, and of course the Great War was shorter. Those conflicts certain arose, but many of them arose afterwards, as reflected in the Red Summer of 1919. The Great War changed the country as well but those changes really bloomed during World War Two, for lasting good and lasting ill. The Civil Rights movement that started with the integration of the Armed Forces in 1948 really had its roots in the war during which there was a lot of dissatisfaction on the part of segregated blacks in regard to segregation, both in the military and in society itself. By wars end that segregation was going to be on the way out, even if that wasn't appreciated at the time.
The war also started the process of dismantling the strong ethnic neighborhoods in the country's majority white population and to at least some degree turned the temperature up on the melting pot. At the same time, the war encouraged a period of loose morals that would begin to reflect back on the country after the war, really starting off when Hugh Hefner took the wartime image of the town girl that had adorned American bomber after bomber and put her in glossy centerfolds. Much of what the war brought is still being sorted out, and the full impact of it will likely take another half century or more to really appreciate.
And that process, for the United States, began today, eighty years ago.
1947 BB-32, the USS Wyoming, stricken from the Navy rolls.
1950 War Memorial Stadium opened. Attribution: On This Day.
1988 Casper native Tom Browning, Cincinnati Reds pitcher, pitched a perfect game against the Los Angeles Dodgers. Attribution: Wyoming State Historical Society.
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