Common Sense with Paul Jacob

On Jan. 3, 1968, Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-Minnesota) announced he would challenge incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson for the Democratic presidential nomination. In March, spurred by public opposition to Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War, McCarthy came within a few hundred votes of beating Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. At the end of March, Johnson withdrew from the race.

On Jan. 3, 1777, General George Washington evaded the numerically superior forces of British General Cornwallis dispatched to trap him in Trenton and went north to rout the British rear guard in the Battle of Princeton.

On Jan. 2, 1962, The Weavers, a folk music quartet, were banned from appearing on “The Jack Paar Show” by NBC, after the performers each refused to sign a political loyalty oath. One of the most significant popular-music groups of the postwar era, The Weavers career was nearly destroyed during the Red Scare of the 1950s, when Pete Seeger and Lee Hays were denounced as Communist Party members by an FBI informant (who later recanted). The entire group was placed under FBI surveillance and not allowed to perform on radio or television until the late 1950s. In 1955, both Hays and Seeger were called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, where Hays took the Fifth Amendment, while Seeger refused to answer on First Amendment grounds – the first person to do so after the Hollywood Ten were convicted in 1950. Seeger was found guilty of contempt and placed under restrictions by the court pending appeal, but in 1961 his conviction was overturned on constitutional grounds. Seeger, who left the group in 1958, didn’t appear on television again until 1968 on the Smothers Brothers show.

On Jan. 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the final Emancipation Proclamation, which ended slavery in the rebelling states. A preliminary proclamation had been issued in September 1862, following the Union victory at the Battle of Antietam. As the proclamation freed slaves only in rebellious areas, it actually freed no one, since these were areas not yet under Union control. Yet, the act signaled an important shift in the Union’s Civil War aims, expanding the goal of the war from reunification to include the eradication of slavery.

On Dec. 31, 1879, Thomas Alva Edison lit up a street in Menlo Park, New Jersey, the first public demonstration of his incandescent lightbulb. Although the first incandescent lamp had been produced 40 years earlier, no inventor had been able to come up with a practical design until Edison embraced the challenge in the late 1870s.