Hillary Clinton is elected to the U.S. Senate

Year
2000
Month Day
November 07

On November 7, 2000, Hillary Clinton is elected to represent New York in the U.S. Senate, becoming the first First Lady to win elected office.

Clinton’s resume was unique among First Ladies and among senators. After meeting her husband, Bill, at Yale Law School, she spent her early career as an advocate for children’s rights and was named to the board of the Legal Services Corporation. During Bill’s presidency, she took an active role in promoting the administration’s healthcare policy and used her position to bring attention to children’s rights and family law issues. Despite the fact that her husband was currently under impeachment for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, New York Democrats approached Clinton about running for senate near the end of his term. She announced her candidacy after purchasing property in Chappaqua, New York and waiting for the impeachment proceedings to end.

Clinton visited every county of New York in an effort to stave off the inevitable charge that she was a “carpetbagger.” Recruited to run in part because her “star power” could counteract that of her presumptive Republican opponent, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Clinton’s chances improved when Giuliani dropped out of the race due to health issues and controversies around the recent dissolution of his marriage. His replacement, Rick Lazio, raised tens of millions of dollars but ultimately garnered only 43 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 55.

Although the news was overshadowed nationally by the presidential election, which was too close to call and would not be decided until December, Clinton’s election received equal billing with the presidential saga on the front page of the New York Times. Though she had been a public, political figure for much of her life, winning a campaign for federal office marked an important moment in her career. After one term in the senate, she would vie for the Democratic nomination for president in 2008, fighting a hard but unsuccessful campaign against Barack Obama. She went on to serve as Obama’s Secretary of State and eventually win the nomination, becoming the first woman in a major party to do so, before winning the popular vote but losing the 2016 election to Donald Trump.

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Election results between Al Gore and George Bush too close to call

Year
2000
Month Day
November 07

This date in 2000 was a pivotal moment in U.S. history, as the presidential election results in a statistical tie between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George Bush. The results in Florida were unclear by the end of election night and resulted in a recount and a Supreme Court case, Bush v. Gore, which ended the dispute in favor of Bush a month later. The election exposed several flaws and controversial elements of the American electoral process and was the fourth of five U.S. presidential elections in which the winner lost the popular vote.

Gore was the sitting Vice President to then-president Bill Clinton, while Bush was the Governor of Texas and son of former president George H.W. Bush. In the national popular vote, Gore received 48.4 percent while Bush received 47.9, losing by over 540,000 votes. U.S. presidents, however, are chosen by the Electoral College, a system in which “electoral votes” are assigned to states based on their population and then awarded as a lump sum to the winner of the popular vote in that state—currently, it takes 270 electoral votes to win. By the end of Election Night, 2000, Gore’s tally stood at 250 and Bush’s stood at 246 with Oregon, Wisconsin and Florida too close to call.

READ MORE: Why Was the Electoral College Created?

Oregon and Wisconsin went to Gore in the following days, but Florida’s 25 electoral votes made it the key to victory for both candidates. The initial result there put Bush in front, but it was close enough to trigger an automatic recount. The ensuing saga involved multiple legal battles, recounts and calls for further recounts, and numerous debates about the methods used to record votes. On December 12, the Supreme Court ordered an end to the Florida recount and Gore conceded to Bush.

Many have suggested that the perceived partisan nature of Court’s decision—every justice who sided with Bush had been appointed by a Republican—damaged the public’s faith in the judicial system. The 2000 election was the first since the 1960 election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon that did not yield a clear result on election night or the following morning. It was the first time since 1888 that the winning candidate had lost the popular vote, although the next such election came only 16 years later when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. Both elections led to calls for the abolition of the Electoral College in favor of a simpler “one person, one vote” system, but there has been no serious push to enact such a reform.

READ MORE: How the 2000 Election Came Down to a Supreme Court Decision

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Two African American firsts in politics

Year
1989
Month Day
November 07

In New York, former Manhattan borough president David Dinkins, a Democrat, is elected New York City’s first African American mayor, while in Virginia, Lieutenant Governor Douglas Wilder, also a Democrat, becomes the first elected African American state governor in American history.

Although Wilder was the first African American to be popularly elected to the governor’s post, he was not the first African American to hold that office. That distinction goes to Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, a Reconstruction-era lieutenant general of Louisiana who became Louisiana state governor in December 1872. Pinchback served as acting governor for five weeks while impeachment proceedings were in progress against Governor Henry Clay Warmoth.

Wilder served as Virginia governor until 1993, whereupon he was forced to step down because Virginia law prohibits governors from serving two terms in succession. In 1993, Dinkins was defeated in his bid to win a second mayoral term by Republican challenger Rudolph Giuliani.

READ MORE: Black History Milestones: Timeline

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Canada’s transcontinental railway completed

Year
1885
Month Day
November 07

At a remote spot called Craigellachie in the mountains of British Columbia, the last spike is driven into Canada’s first transcontinental railway.

In 1880, the Canadian government contracted the Canadian Pacific Railroad to construct the first all-Canadian line to the West Coast. During the next five years, the company laid 4,600 kilometers of single track, uniting various smaller lines across Canada. Despite the logistical difficulties posed by areas such as the muskeg (bogs) region of northwestern Ontario and the high rugged mountains of British Columbia, the railway was completed six years ahead of schedule.

The transcontinental railway was instrumental in populating the vast western lands of Canada, providing supplies and commerce to new settlers. Many of western Canada’s great cities and towns grew up around Canadian Pacific Railway stations.

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Magic Johnson announces he is HIV-positive

Year
1991
Month Day
November 07

On November 7, 1991, basketball legend Earvin “Magic” Johnson stuns the world by announcing his sudden retirement from the Los Angeles Lakers, after testing positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. At the time, many Americans viewed AIDS as a gay white man’s disease. Johnson (1959- ), who is African American and heterosexual, was one of the first sports stars to go public about his HIV-positive status.

Revered as one of the greatest basketball players of all time, Johnson spent his entire 13-season NBA career with the Lakers, helping them to win five championships in the 1980s. The 6’9″ point guard, a native of Lansing, Michigan, was famous for his extraordinary passing skills, contagious smile and love of the game. In 1981, he signed a 25-year deal with the Lakers for $25 million, one of the NBA’s first over-the-top contracts.

Johnson, a three-time NBA “Most Valuable Player” and 12-time All-Star team member, didn’t completely hang up his basketball shoes after announcing his retirement in 1991. He was voted most valuable player of the 1992 NBA All-Star Game and played on the Olympic “Dream Team” (alongside Michael Jordan, Larry Bird and Patrick Ewing) that won gold for the U.S. in Barcelona that summer. He briefly returned to the Lakers for the 1993-94 season as head coach and made a short-lived comeback as a Lakers player in the 1995-96 season.

Today, Johnson is a prominent spokesman for AIDS awareness and a successful businessman, earning millions from a range of ventures, including movie theaters and restaurants. He serves as an example of how a variety of drug treatments have transformed AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable condition for many people in the U.S. and around the world. 

READ MORE: How AIDS Remained an Unspoken—But Deadly—Epidemic for Years

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Nixon re-elected president

Year
1972
Month Day
November 07

Richard Nixon defeats Senator George McGovern (D-South Dakota) and is re-elected President of the United States.

With only 55 percent of the electorate voting, the lowest turnout since 1948, Nixon carried all states but Massachusetts, taking 97 percent of the electoral votes. During the campaign, Nixon pledged to secure “peace with honor” in Vietnam. Aided by the potential for a peace agreement in the ongoing Paris negotiations and the upswing in the American economy, Nixon easily defeated McGovern, an outspoken peacenik whose party was divided over several issues, not the least of which was McGovern’s extreme views on the war. McGovern had said during the campaign, “If I were President, it would take me twenty-four hours and the stroke of a pen to terminate all military operations in Southeast Asia.” He said he would withdraw all American troops within 90 days of taking office, whether or not U.S. prisoners of war were released. To many Americans, including many Democrats, McGovern’s position was tantamount to total capitulation in Southeast Asia. Given this radical alternative, Nixon seemed a better choice to most voters.

In other races, the Democrats widened their majority in Congress, picking up two Senate seats. Almost unnoticed during the presidential campaign was the arrest of five men connected with Nixon’s re-election committee who had broken into the Democratic Party’s national headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex in Washington, D.C. The Watergate scandal ultimately proved to be Nixon’s undoing, and he resigned the presidency as a result of it in August 1974.

READ MORE: The Last Hours of the Nixon Presidency 

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FDR wins unprecedented fourth term

On November 7, 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is elected to an unprecedented fourth term in office. FDR remains the only president to have served more than two terms.

READ MORE: How FDR Became the First—And Only—President to Serve Four Terms

Roosevelt rose above personal and political challenges to emerge as one of the nation’s most revered and influential presidents. In 1921, at the age of 39, he contracted polio and thereafter was burdened with leg braces; eventually, he was confined to a wheelchair. From the time he was first elected to the presidency in 1932 to mid-1945, when he died while in office, Roosevelt presided over two of the biggest crises in U.S. history: the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II

FDR implemented drastic and oft-criticized legislation to help boost America out of the Great Depression. Although he initially tried to avoid direct U.S. involvement in World War II, which began in 1939, the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 thrust American headlong into the conflict.

By the time Roosevelt was elected to his fourth term, the war had taken a turn in favor of the Allies, but FDR’s health was already on the decline. His arteriosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) had been worsened by the stress of serving as a war-time president. In April 1945, seven months before the war finally ended in an Allied victory, FDR died of a stroke at his vacation home in Warm Springs, Georgia.

In 1947, with President Harry Truman, Roosevelt’s vice president, in office, Congress proposed a law that would limit presidents to two consecutive terms. Up to that time, presidents had either voluntarily followed George Washington’s example of serving a maximum of two terms, or were unsuccessful in winning a third. (In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt ran for a third non-consecutive term, but lost.) In 1951, the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution was passed, officially limiting a president’s tenure in office to two terms of four years each.

READ MORE: 7 Firsts in US Presidential Election History

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Jeannette Rankin becomes first U.S. congresswoman

Year
1916
Month Day
November 07

On November 7, 1916, Montana suffragist Jeannette Rankin is elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. She is the first woman in the history of the nation to win a seat in the federal Congress.

Born and raised on a ranch near Missoula, Montana, Rankin was the daughter of progressive parents who encouraged her to think beyond the narrow sphere of opportunities generally permitted to women of the early 20th century. After graduating from the University of Montana and the New York School of Philanthropy, Rankin worked briefly as a social worker before becoming active in the national effort to win women the vote. In 1914, her efforts brought her back to Montana, where she believed pioneer conditions had created greater respect for women’s work and abilities, making it somewhat easier to convince men to grant them the right to vote. Indeed, other western states like Wyoming and Colorado had already approved women’s suffrage years before, and Rankin’s leadership helped Montana join them in 1914.

READ MORE: 7 Things You May Not Know About Jeannette Rankin

With the vote for women secured, Rankin put Montana’s new political dynamics to the test. She ran for one of Montana’s two seats in Congress as a Progressive Republican in 1916. With strong support from women and men alike, Rankin became the first woman in history elected to that body. When she traveled to Washington, D.C., the next year, the eyes of the nation watched to see if a woman could handle the responsibilities of high office. Rankin soon proved she could, but she also demonstrated that she would not betray her own strongly held convictions for political expediency. A dedicated pacifist, Rankin’s first vote as a U.S. congresswoman was against U.S. entry into World War I. Many supported her courageous stand, though others claimed her vote showed that women were incapable of shouldering the difficult burdens of national leadership—despite the fact that 55 men had also voted against the war.

Rankin’s vote against WWI contributed to her defeat in her 1918 reelection bid. For the next 20 years, she continued to work for the cause of peace. Ironically, she again won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1940, just as the nation was about to enter World War II. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, Rankin became the only person in the history of Congress to vote against U.S. entry into both world wars. This time, though, the principled pacifist from Montana cast the sole dissenting vote.

READ MORE: Women’s History Milestones: A Timeline

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Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell is born

Year
1943
Month Day
November 07

“The moment I began to write, my music was not folk music.” Performing solo with her acoustic guitar and long, straight, blond hair, the woman born Roberta Joan Anderson in Fort MacLeod, Alberta, Canada, on November 7, 1943, may have looked the part, but in truth the only category that fits the groundbreaking singer-songwriter better known as Joni Mitchell is Duke Ellington’s famous superlative: “beyond category.”

Even as a child taking piano lessons, Joni Mitchell showed more interest in composing her own melodies than in playing the pieces her teacher assigned her. “My teacher rapped my knuckles with a ruler and said, ‘Why would you want to compose when you could have the greats under your fingers?’” she recalled in an interview some 40 years later. When the folk-music revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s came to Saskatoon—the college town in which she spent most of her childhood—Mitchell resolved to learn the guitar in order to become a competent accompanist at sing-alongs. When her mother refused to chip in, citing Joni’s earlier abandonment of the piano, the woman Rolling Stone would later name the greatest female guitarist of all time saved up and purchased a baritone ukulele.  

A bout with polio as a child had left Mitchell unable to form the chords with her left hand that her ear wanted to hear, so early on she began experimenting with non-standard guitar tunings that would later become part of her signature sound. It was not as performer, however, but as a songwriter that Mitchell would initially make her name. Even many of her biggest fans first heard Joni Mitchell’s music as interpreted by Judy Collins, who made a hit out of “Both Sides Now” (1967) fully two years before Mitchell released her own recording of that song herself. In later years, Crosby, Stills and Nash would score a bigger hit with the Mitchell-penned “Woodstock” than Mitchell herself would, as would hard-rockers Nazareth with their 1973 cover version of “This Flight Tonight,” from Mitchell’s landmark album, Blue

Blue (1971) marked the beginning of Mitchell’s period of greatest popularity, and her commercial success peaked three years later with 1974’s Court and Spark. But even though she would never sell as many records in the subsequent decades as she did in the early 1970s, her creativity only increased as she experimented and collaborated with jazz greats like Charles Mingus and Herbie Hancock. In a judgment that history has already recorded as very sound, David Geffen of Geffen Records, Mitchell’s label from 1982 to 1993, said in 1994, “Even though we lost money on every one of her records, we always treated Joni as one of the most important artists in the world.”

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“King of Cool” Steve McQueen dies

Year
1980
Month Day
November 07

On November 7, 1980, the actor Steve McQueen, one of Hollywood’s leading men of the 1960s and 1970s and the star of such action thrillers as Bullitt and The Towering Inferno, dies at the age of 50 in Mexico, where he was undergoing an experimental treatment for cancer. In 1979, McQueen had been diagnosed with mesothelioma, a type of cancer often related to asbestos exposure. It was later believed that the ruggedly handsome actor, who had an affinity for fast cars and motorcycles, might have been exposed to asbestos by wearing racing suits.

Terrence Steven McQueen was born on March 24, 1930, in Beech Grove, Indiana. After a troubled youth that included time in reform school, McQueen served in the U.S. Marine Corps in the late 1940s. He then studied acting and began competing in motorcycle races. He made his big-screen debut with a tiny role in 1956’s Somebody Up There Likes Me, starring Paul Newman. McQueen went on to appear in the camp classic The Blob (1958) and gained fame playing a bounty hunter in the TV series Wanted: Dead or Alive, which originally aired on CBS from 1958 to 1961.

During the 1960s, McQueen built a reputation for playing cool, loner heroes in a list of films that included the Western The Magnificent Seven (1960), which was directed by John Sturges and also featured Yul Brynner and Charles Bronson; The Great Escape (1963), in which McQueen played a U.S. solider in World War II who makes a daring motorcycle escape from a German prison camp; and The Sand Pebbles (1966), a war epic for which he received a Best Actor Oscar nomination. McQueen played a detective in one of his most popular movies, 1968’s Bullitt, which featured a spectacular car chase through the streets of San Francisco. That same year, the actor portrayed an elegant thief in The Thomas Crown Affair.

In the 1970s, McQueen was one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actors and starred in hit films such as director Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway (1972) with Ali MacGraw, to whom McQueen was married from 1973 to 1978; Papillon (1973), with Dustin Hoffman; and The Towering Inferno (1974), with Paul Newman, William Holden and Faye Dunaway.

In the summer of 1980, McQueen traveled to Rosarito Beach, Mexico, where he underwent an unorthodox cancer treatment that involved, among other things, coffee enemas and a therapy derived from apricot pits. On November 6, 1980, he had surgery to remove cancerous masses from his body; he died the following day. His final films were Tom Horn and The Hunter, both of which were released in 1980.

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