Vichy leader executed for treason

Year
1945
Month Day
October 15

Pierre Laval, the puppet leader of Nazi-occupied Vichy France, is executed by firing squad for treason against France.

Laval, originally a deputy and senator of pacifist tendencies, shifted to the right in the 1930s while serving as minister of foreign affairs and twice as the French premier. A staunch anti-communist, he delayed the Soviet-Franco pact of 1935 and sought to align France with Fascist Italy. Hostile to the declaration of war against Germany in 1939, Laval encouraged the antiwar faction in the French government, and with the German invasion in 1940 he used his political influence to force an armistice with Germany. Henri Pétain took over the new Vichy state, and Laval served as minister of state. Laval was dismissed by Pétain in December 1940 for negotiating privately with Germany.

By 1942, Laval had won the trust of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, and the elderly Pétain became merely a figurehead in the Vichy regime. As the premier of Vichy France, Laval collaborated with the Nazi programs of oppression and genocide, and increasingly became a puppet of Hitler. After the Allied liberation of France, he was forced to flee east for German protection. With the defeat of Germany in May 1945, he escaped to Spain but was expelled and went into hiding in Austria, where he finally surrendered to American authorities in late July. Extradited to France, Laval was convicted of treason by the High Court of Justice in a sensational trial. Condemned to death, he attempted suicide by poison but was nursed back to health in time for his execution, on October 15, 1945.

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Clarence Thomas confirmed to the Supreme Court

Year
1991
Month Day
October 15

After a bitter confirmation hearing, the U.S. Senate votes 52 to 48 to confirm Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In July 1991, Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to sit on the Supreme Court, announced his retirement after 34 years. President George Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, a 43-year-old African American judge known for his conservative beliefs, to fill the seat. Thomas had been chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) during the Reagan administration, and in 1990 Bush had appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals. As the confirmation hearings for Thomas’ Supreme Court nomination got underway, he evaded controversy over his conservative views on issues such as abortion by refusing to state a clear political position. He seemed headed for an easy confirmation until Anita Hill, a former aide, stepped forward and accused him of sexual harassment.

READ MORE: Controversial Supreme Court Nominations Through History 

Hill, who had served as an aide to Thomas at the Department of Education and the EEOC during the 1980s, alleged that the Supreme Court nominee had repeatedly made sexually offensive comments to her. Beginning on October 11, 1991, the Senate Judiciary Committee held four days of televised hearings on Hill’s charges. Americans were shocked by both the frankness of Hill’s testimony and the unsympathetic response of the all-male committee, some of whom were openly antagonistic toward Hill. Thomas, meanwhile, denied the charges, and some witnesses called on his behalf cast doubt on Hill’s character and mental stability. On October 15, the Senate narrowly voted to approve Thomas’ confirmation.

Although the hearings left the Senate and the nation deeply divided, the episode served to foster a greater public awareness of the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace. In taking over the seat of the liberal Thurgood Marshall, Thomas contributed significantly to the conservative character of the nation’s highest court in the 1990s and after the turn of the century.

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“Funeral coaches” exempted from car-seat law

Year
2004
Month Day
October 15

On October 15, 2004, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration rules that hearse manufacturers no longer have to install anchors for child-safety seats in their vehicles. In 1999, to prevent parents from incorrectly installing the seats using only their cars’ seat belts, the agency had required all carmakers to put the standardized anchors on every passenger seat in every vehicle they built. Though it seemed rather odd, most hearse-builders complied with the rule and many thousands of their vehicles incorporated baby-seat latches on their front and back passenger seats.

However, the year after the agency issued the rule, one of the largest “funeral coach” manufacturers in the United States petitioned for an exemption. “Since a funeral coach is a single-purpose vehicle, transporting body and casket,” the petition said, “children do not ride in the front seat.” In fact, typically that seat is empty—after all, most people do try to avoid riding in hearses. On October 15, the agency agreed: All funeral coaches (now officially defined as “a vehicle that contains only one row of occupant seats, is designed exclusively for transporting a body and casket and that is equipped with features to secure a casket in place during the operation of the vehicle”) were permanently exempt from all child-safety provisions. According to this formulation, those rare hearses that do have rear seats are not technically funeral coaches; therefore, they are subject to the same child-restraint rules as every other carmaker.

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Exotic dancer and spy Mata Hari is executed

Year
1917
Month Day
October 15

Mata Hari, the archetype of the seductive female spy, is executed for espionage by a French firing squad at Vincennes outside of Paris.

She first came to Paris in 1905 and found fame as a performer of Asian-inspired dances. She soon began touring all over Europe, telling the story of how she was born in a sacred Indian temple and taught ancient dances by a priestess who gave her the name Mata Hari, meaning “eye of the day” in Malay. In reality, Mata Hari was born in a small town in northern Holland in 1876, and her real name was Margaretha Geertruida Zelle. She acquired her superficial knowledge of Indian and Javanese dances when she lived for several years in Malaysia with her former husband, who was a Scot in the Dutch colonial army. Regardless of her authenticity, she packed dance halls and opera houses from Russia to France, mostly because her show consisted of her slowly stripping nude.

READ MORE: The Exotic Dancer Who Became WWI’s Most Notorious Spy

She became a famous courtesan, and with the outbreak of World War I her catalog of lovers began to include high-ranking military officers of various nationalities. In February 1917, French authorities arrested her for espionage and imprisoned her at St. Lazare Prison in Paris. In a military trial conducted in July, she was accused of revealing details of the Allies’ new weapon, the tank, resulting in the deaths of thousands of soldiers. She was convicted and sentenced to death, and on October 15 she refused a blindfold and was shot to death by a firing squad at Vincennes.

There is some evidence that Mata Hari acted as a German spy, and for a time as a double agent for the French, but the Germans had written her off as an ineffective agent whose pillow talk had produced little intelligence of value. Her military trial was riddled with bias and circumstantial evidence, and it is probable that French authorities trumped her up as “the greatest woman spy of the century” as a distraction for the huge losses the French army was suffering on the western front. 

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Draft card burning demonstrations staged across the country

Year
1965
Month Day
October 15

In a demonstration staged by the student-run National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam, some of the first public burnings of draft cards in the United States takes place.

These demonstrations drew 100,000 people in 40 cities across the country. In New York, David Miller, a young Catholic pacifist, burned his draft card in direct violation of a recently passed law forbidding such acts. Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation later arrested him; he was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to two years imprisonment.

READ MORE: Vietnam War Protests

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Wayne Gretzky breaks NHL points record

Year
1989
Month Day
October 15

On October 15, 1989, Los Angeles King Wayne Gretzky breaks Gordie Howe’s points record (1,850) in the final period of a game against the Edmonton Oilers. Gretzky’s record-setting goal tied the game; in overtime he scored another, and the Kings won 5-4.

Gretzky had entered the game with 1,849 points. About five minutes into the first period, he tied Howe’s record by earning an assist on the game’s first goal. After that, he didn’t do much, and “almost didn’t play the third period,” Gretzky told reporters after the game, because “I got my bell rung a few times.” But when he came off the bench with three minutes to go in the game, his team down 3-4, he meant business. With 61 seconds left on the clock, defender Steve Duchesne shot the puck toward the corner of the goal. It bounced off winger Dave Taylor’s knee and slid across the front of the goal. Gretzky, who had set up behind the net (a part of the ice that many fans called “Gretzky’s office”), skated around and backhanded the puck past Oilers goaltender Bill Ranford and under the crossbar. The game was tied; the record was broken.

Gretzky had played in Edmonton for nine seasons and helped the team win four Stanley Cups, so the city’s Northland Coliseum was packed with fans. When he scored his goal, the sellout crowd erupted into a thunderous ovation that lasted for more than two minutes. The league stopped the game for a ceremony at center ice. Gordie Howe made a speech, and there were gifts: a 1.851-carat diamond bracelet (with diamonds spelling out “1,851” across its face) from his old teammates, a crystal hologram engraved with his picture from the Kings and a carved silver tea tray from the league. Then Gretzky himself took the microphone. He thanked the Edmonton fans, his parents and his wife, and he added: “Gordie is still the greatest, in my mind, and the greatest in everyone’s mind.”

Howe, who was 61, returned the younger player’s affection. “If it was, pardon the expression, some clown” who’d broken his record, he said, “it would have bothered me. But not Wayne.” By the time Gretzky retired at the end of the 1998-99 season, he held or shared 61 NHL records. In all, he scored 894 goals and tallied 1,963 assists for 2,857 points in 1,487 games. 

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Gerald Ford marries Elizabeth Bloomer

Year
1948
Month Day
October 15

On October 15, 1948, future President Gerald Ford marries Elizabeth Anne (“Betty”) Bloomer.

The handsome, blonde, blue-eyed Ford grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and went on to play football at the University of Michigan, where he was voted the team’s most valuable player in his senior year. He then worked as an assistant coach for Yale University’s football program while pursuing his law degree. After graduation in 1941, Ford earned extra money as a model. The next year, just after joining the Navy, Ford appeared on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine in his uniform, but was not officially credited with posing. It was during one of his modeling jobs that he met his future wife, Elizabeth Anne Bloomer, who was called Betty.

Ford went on to serve in World War II from 1942 until the war ended in 1945.

Following the war, he began a law practice and became involved in Republican politics. His passion for football was so keen that during his honeymoon in 1948, Ford took his new bride to a Michigan State University Rose Bowl playoff game against Northwestern University. That same year, he was elected to Congress; his career included service on the Warren Commission that investigated President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. In December 1973, President Richard Nixon chose Ford as his vice president after Spiro Agnew resigned following charges of tax evasion. In 1974, Nixon himself resigned in the face of impeachment by Congress over the Watergate scandal. Ford took the oath of office on August 9, 1974.

Betty tried to keep a low profile during Ford’s presidency. However, in 1974, during Ford’s last days in office, she went public with the announcement that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, helping to develop greater public awareness of the deadly disease and inspiring women to seek early detection and treatment. After Ford left office, Betty publicly shared another personal struggle—her battle with addiction to alcohol and painkillers. In 1982, she opened the now-famous Betty Ford Center, an addiction-treatment clinic at the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, California. In 2005, her husband presented her with the Gerald R. Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service.

Gerald Ford died on December 26, 2006, at the age of 93. Betty died on July 8, 2011, also at age 93.

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Chiricahua Apache leader Victorio is killed south of El Paso, Texas

Year
1880
Month Day
October 15

The warrior Victorio, one of the greatest Apache military strategists of all time, dies on October 15, 1880, in the Tres Castillos Mountains south of El Paso, Texas.

Born in New Mexico around 1809, Victorio grew up during a period of intense hostility between the native Apache Native Americans of the southwest and encroaching Mexican and American settlers. Determined to resist the loss of his homeland, Victorio began leading his small band of warriors on a long series of devastating raids against Mexican and American settlers and their communities in the 1850s.

After more than a decade of evading the best efforts of the Mexican and American armies to capture him, the U.S. Army managed to convince Victorio to accept resettlement of his people on an inhospitable patch of sunburnt land near San Carlos, Arizona, in 1869. But with summer temperatures reaching 110 degrees on the San Carlos reservation (an area also known as Hell’s Forty Acres) and farming nearly impossible, Victorio decided the new reservation was unacceptable and moved his followers to more pleasant grounds at Ojo Caliente (Warm Springs), thus again becoming an outlaw in the eyes of the United States. In 1878, the U.S. Army attempted to force the Apaches back to the San Carlos reservation, but Victorio eluded capture, disappearing into the desert with 150 braves. Surviving by raiding the towns and farms of Chihuahua, Mexico, Victorio and his men began to ambush U.S. troops as well as Mexican or American sheepherders.

In 1880, a combined force of U.S. and Mexican troops finally succeeded in tracking down Apache and his warriors, surrounding them in the Tres Castillos Mountains of Mexico, just south of El Paso, Texas. Having sent the American troops away, the Mexican soldiers proceeded to kill all but 17 of the trapped Apaches, though the exact manner of Victorio’s death remains unclear. Some claimed a Native American scout employed by the Mexican army killed the famous warrior. But according to the Apache, Victorio took his own life rather than surrender to the Mexicans. Regardless of how it happened, Victorio’s death made him a martyr to the Apache people and strengthened the resolve of other warriors to continue the fight. The last of the great Apache warriors, Geronimo, would not surrender until 1886.

READ MORE: How Geronimo Eluded Death and Capture for 25 Years

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A murderous husband is executed

Year
1948
Month Day
October 15

Arthur Eggers, who was convicted of killing his wife, Dorothy, because of her alleged promiscuity, is executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin Prison. He probably would have gotten away with the crime had the investigators not received a few lucky breaks.

In January 1946, hikers came across a woman’s body, wrapped in a blanket, in a very remote area of the San Bernardino Mountains in California. The head and hands had been chopped off—making identification very difficult—but the body had only been lying there for less than a day, so there was still hope.

When investigators noticed that Dorothy Eggers had been reported missing by her husband around the time that the corpse was found, they decided to follow through on the lead, despite the fact that the initial report described her as being thinner and taller than the unidentified body. Upon talking with her doctors, detectives discovered that Eggers had been treated for a bunion on her foot, which matched the one on the body.

Although investigators knew the identity of the body and had good reason to be suspicious of Arthur Eggers, they had no evidence to connect him to the crime. But when Eggers happened to sell his car to a police officer, the cop noticed that there were spots of dried blood in the trunk, and, in 1946, Eggers was arrested. A subsequent search turned up pieces of his wife’s flesh, a gun and a handsaw in Eggers’ home. Pieces of tissue, bone and fat were found on the gun.

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Mikhail Gorbachev wins Nobel Peace Prize

Year
1990
Month Day
October 15

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev wins the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in ending Cold War tensions. Since coming to power in 1985, Gorbachev had undertaken to concentrate more effort and funds on his domestic reform plans by going to extraordinary lengths to reach foreign policy understandings with the noncommunist world.

Some of his accomplishments include four summits with President Ronald Reagan, including a 1987 meeting at which an agreement was reached to dismantle the U.S. and USSR intermediate-range missiles in Europe. He also began to remove Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1988 and exerted diplomatic pressure on Cuba and Vietnam to remove their forces from Angola and Kampuchea (Cambodia), respectively. In a 1989 meeting with President George Bush, Gorbachev declared that the Cold War was over.

Gorbachev also earned the respect of many in the West through his policy of non-intervention in the political upheavals that shook the Eastern European “satellite” nations during the late-1980s and early-1990s. When Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, and other Iron Curtain countries began to move toward more democratic political systems and free market economies, Gorbachev kept Soviet intervention in check. (This policy did not extend to the Soviet republics; similar efforts by Lithuania and other republics were met with stern warnings and force to keep the Soviet Socialist Republics together.)

READ MORE: Was the Soviet Union’s Collapse Inevitable?

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