Author: Redactor

On July 17, 1938, pioneer aviator Donald Corrigan took off from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn — New York City’s first municipal airport — with a flight plan for a return trip to his previous disembarkation point, Long Beach, California. His official story was that he got confused after ten (or 26) hours in flight, and wound up the next day in Ireland. Most folks judged his “error” as deliberate, but he never publicly admitted to anything but error. He was nicknamed “‘Wrong Way’ Corrigan,” an affectionate moniker, and received a 14-day suspension of his pilot’s license as punishment for his breaking of many, many regulations.

One occasionally hears the epithet “Wrong Way Corrigan” applied to anyone who similarly takes a slight liberty, skirting official rules or practices — or simply goes the wrong direction.

July 17, 1975, had a very different kind of aviation event, one well-planned: Apollo 18 and Soyuz 19 made the first US/USSR linkup in space.

On July 15, 1976, Jimmy Carter accepted the nomination of the Democratic Party to run for the presidency.

Three years later, as president, he gave his infamous “malaise” speech, in which he focused on energy but did not mention the one thing that actually helped turn the 1970s’ energy crisis around: the phased deregulation of oil prices that had started three months earlier, under his own directive. Instead of touting this deregulatory effort, Carter did the politic thing, promising a number of new government programs while extensively grinding a “crisis of confidence” message and vaguely speaking of a spiritual challenge.

The deregulation was startlingly effective, in the long run — though the immediate effect was a rocketing of prices. These high prices presented profit opportunities, and (lo and behold!) domestic production greatly increased, allowing for many, many years of lower prices. Those high prices would have worked better as market signals had not Carter and Congress also established “windfall profits” taxes, to take away those temporary gains to existing business.

Had Carter deregulated prices earlier, he would probably have been re-elected president. Had he emphasized deregulation, he probably would have beat back Ronald Reagan’s free market rhetoric — with actual action.

The price controls had been put in place earlier in the decade by the Republican president at the time, Richard M. Nixon, with the great help of his aides Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

On July 14, 1789, Paris citizens stormed the Bastille.

The word “storm” in its various forms is almost invariably paired with “Bastille” in discussions of the event. It is one of the great clichés of historical chitchat.

On the same date nine years later, in America, the Sedition Act was signed into law, prohibiting the writing, publishing, or speaking false or malicious statements about the United States government.

The passage of this repressive law spurred the formation of the first opposition party in the United States, with Thomas Jefferson as its leader and figurehead.