On August 5, 1861, the U.S. Army abolished flogging.
The same day 23 years later, Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor received the foundation stone for the Statue of Liberty (which was featured in the rousing conclusion to Alfred Hitchcock’s wartime picture, Saboteur). The island was renamed Liberty Island, in 1956.
President Ronald Reagan fired 11,359 striking air-traffic controllers (who had ignored his order for them to return to work) on August 5, 1981.
1 reply on “Flogged, Founded, Fired”
In the early years of the ’90s, I knew a man who had been an air-traffic controller in PATCO. He’d never got over the failure of the strike. Part of the odd mythology that he offered was that PATCO’s demand for greater compensation had merely been meant as a bargaining chip, that PATCO’s only real concern was for greater safety.
Of course, had that been their only real concern, then they could immediately have dropped the demand for greater compensation, and gone on a public-relations offensive that the mainstream of the media would have enthusiastically embraced and that would have caused the and many Republican politicians to rally to their side.
PATCO simply believed that it had the rest of the nation over a barrel; they were mistaken.