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1936 – The first SSB (Social Security Board) office opened in Austin, TX. From this point, the Board’s local office took over the assigning of Social Security Numbers. 


The importance of the field office was known from the earliest days of social security. On December 2nd, 1935, the social security board appointed a field office committee to determine optimal locations for offices to provide direct public service. E.J. McCormick chairman for the field office committee stated that regardless of the construction of the act, there remains the obvious fact that its administration, particularly in the field, will either make or defeat the entire program.

In selecting sites for the field offices, the committee considered such factors as ease in administration, convenience to the public, and uniformity in the distribution of the workloads. The committee studied population and population densities, it addressed questions of accessibility in different geographical areas, and considered trading zones, and shopping areas that people frequently traveled. It also considered the number of wage earners living in that area, transportation facilities available, nature of employment and the availability of space and costs. In January 1936, the committee presented a plan to the SSB calling for the establishment of 89 district offices and 517 branch offices. However, due to budget constraints the total number was reduced from 606 to 397 offices. Each of the 397 offices were assigned to one of 12 geographic regions that made up the field organization. The first field offices were the 12 regional offices. These would service command centers across the U.S. With the task of sharing the workload of enrollment so that the SSB administrative headquarters in Washington, D.C. Would not be overwhelmed. By the end of 1936, 12 regional offices were open in Boston, New York, Washington, Cleveland, Chicago, Birmingham, Minneapolis, Kansas City, San Antonio, Denver, and San Francisco. There were also two territorial offices. One in Honolulu Hawaii and the other in Juneau, Alaska.

The first field office properly known as a district office opened in Austin, Texas on October 14th, 1936. Why Austin Texas? To understand this decision we need to go back to august 1935. Following the passage of the social security act, the budget appropriation bill was filibustered in the senate by senator Huey Long, a democrat from Louisiana. Long was a staunch opponent of president Roosevelt and the social security act. Congress adjourned without approving a budget for social security. As soon as the new session of congress convened in January 1936, house appropriations committee chairman, James Buchanan, a democrat from Texas, raised questions regarding the social security board’s budget estimates. SSB chairman John Winant met with congressman Buchanan; and much to his surprise, learned that the representative wanted to cut the SSB’s budget by 25%. Toward the end of the meeting, Buchanan raised the issue of the placement of the SSB’s 12 regional offices. Chairman Buchanan informed Winant that he wanted one of the regional offices to be placed in the chairman’s hometown of Austin, Texas. The congressman made it clear that if Winant wanted his help on the SSB’s budget request that this was the quid pro quo that he had in mind. This presented a problem for Winant since the board had already selected San Antonio as the regional office for the southwest and had made a hiring commitment to the individual who would serve as the regional director. Eventually, SSB executive director Frank Bane stepped in and negotiated a compromise. The deal agreed upon was that Buchanan would stop his insistence that a regional office be located in Austin in exchange for the placement of the first field office in Austin. The final social security appropriation passed and was reduced by slightly less than 20%. Former foreign service employee Fred Rogers completed his training in Washington, D.C. And was named district manager for Austin. When Fred turned the key to the old post office building on October 14, 1936 he found a musty interior and equipment that consisted solely of dilapidated desks and chairs left behind by the post office. Three people visited the Austin office on opening day, including two reporters and congressman, James Buchanan. Fred spent more than a month as the sole employee before a staff of 50 was eventually hired.

For the complete article

ssa.gov

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1792 – The cornerstone of the Executive Mansion was laid in Washington, DC. The building became known as the White House in 1818.

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White House, drawing by James Hoban

White House, drawing by James Hoban

Drawing of the elevation of the White House by James Hoban, 1792; in the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore.Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore

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1899 African-American inventor Issac R. Johnson patents the bicycle frame


For an African American, it was a challenge to patent an invention, especially in the late 1800s.  However, Isaac R. Johnson succeeded in this challenge when he patent the bicycle frame on October 10, 1899.[1]

Isaac R. Johnson was born in New York sometime during 1812.  While he was not the first person to invent the bicycle frame, he was the first African American to invent and patent the bicycle frame, especially a frame which could be folded or taken apart for easy storage.

In fact, Isaac Johnson’s version of the bicycle frame is similar to the version we ride today as the bicycles we use today have the same pattern, they just do not fold up.  Johnson’s version was a frame which could be folded and stored in small places, it was often used while traveling and on vacation.[2]

Isaac R. Johnson originally filed for the patent in April of 1899 and it was given the publication number: US634823 A. The only information we really have about Isaac R. Johnson is from the information he filled out when he filed his patent.

Through this paperwork, we know that he lived in Manhattan, New York.  The paperwork also states that this bicycle frame is an improved version from any previous bicycle frames due to its ability to be taken apart and placed in a truck or other small storage area.

The bicycle also came with instructions, which would describe each piece of the bicycle frame, such as figure 1 was a side elevation of a bicycle of vehicle and figure 2 was the sectional side elevation of figure 1.[3]

urbanintellectuals.com

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Lincoln-Douglas Debates Slavery ~ October ~ Galesburg,Quincy, Alton


by John A. Corry, and The Long Pursuit: Abraham Lincoln’s Thirty-Year Struggle with Stephen Douglas for the Heart and Soul of America, by Roy Morris Jr.
 
by ROBERT D. SAMPSON

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Volume 30, Issue 1, Winter 2009, pp. 71-73

John A. Corry. The First Lincoln-Douglas Debates, October 1854. Philadelphia.: Xlibris, 2008. Pp. 219.
Roy Morris Jr. The Long Pursuit: Abraham Lincoln’s Thirty-Year Struggle with Stephen Douglas for the Heart and Soul of America. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2008. Pp. xiv, 220.

1858        Oct 7, Lincoln and Douglas held their 5th debate in Galesburg, Ill., on the Knox College campus.
(SFEM, 10/29/00, p.8)(ON, 4/08, p.2)

Although interest in the topic has never waned, the sesquicentennial of the 1858 debates between Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln will certainly increase attention to the best-known formal exchange in American political history. Already plans have been announced to commemorate the debates at the original locations fourteen years after C-SPAN offered national coverage for its reenactments. Allen C. Guezlo’s Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America, published this year, is seen by some as the topic’s definitive treatment.

The historical context for the debates is further aided by the publication of two other books. Roy Morris Jr.’s The Long Pursuit, by focusing on the three-decade competition between the debaters, includes a serious examination of the 1858 meetings. John A. Corry’s The First Lincoln-Douglas Debates does not, instead highlighting what he argues is the prequel, a series of speeches both gave in the fall of 1854. In that campaign, Lincoln worked to succeed James Shields, the incumbent U.S. senator. Douglas fought to rally voters behind his Kansas-Nebraska Act and save Shields’s seat.

Corry’s book largely focuses on recounting and analyzing Lincoln’s remarks in the abbreviated debate series of 1854, though he credits location of a Douglas campaign speech as completing the sources he needed for the book. He is not above arguing with Douglas in his footnotes, as he does on page 80 when discussing Douglas’s October 3, 1854, speech in the Illinois state capitol.

Some counterfactual history comes into play during the last pages as Corry poses a scenario in which Lincoln—rather than Lyman Trumbull—succeeds Shields and joins Douglas in the Senate. Without the 1858 debates, would Lincoln still have emerged as a national figure? Corry answers yes, citing Lincoln’s debating skills and ability to hold his own against stiff competition.

The Long Pursuit, however, does a much better job of demonstrating the competition that produced a man able to best the national political figures he brought into his administration. Morris does so by treating Douglas seriously and demonstrating instances where Lincoln was, perhaps, not quite the pedestal-perching figure some assume him to be. Morris wastes no time in outlining his thesis—”Had it not been for Douglas, Lincoln would have remained merely a good trial lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, known locally for his droll sense of humor, bad jokes, and slightly nutty wife” (xi–xii).

The thirty-year struggle between the two men was largely one-sided until the last six, as Douglas achieved national prominence and Lincoln’s ambition, the “little engine that knew no rest,” in William Herndon’s words, sputtered in frustration and disappointment. Not surprisingly, at times such feelings may have led Lincoln to say things he knew not to be true. Morris provides an example from Lincoln’s famed “Lost Speech” in Bloomington on May 29, 1856. Lincoln erroneously alleged that Douglas supported Southern fireater George Fitzhugh’s assertion that slavery was such a good idea it ought to be extended to white laborers. “Old habits die hard and Lincoln could not resist whacking ‘Judge Douglas’ whenever he got the chance” (87).

And what of old John Brown, who Lincoln described as a man of “great courage and rare unselfishness” after his ill-fated raid on Harper’s Ferry while at the same time trying to absolve himself and the Republican Party of any responsibility for the fiasco. Yet, Morris notes, Lincoln’s rhetoric decried a “house divided” and the evil of slavery. “When an extremist such as Brown took such warnings seriously and set out to redress the evil in the best way he knew how … neither Lincoln nor any other northern leader could convincingly plead complete innocence” (128).

It would be a serious mistake to view Morris’s volume as an “anti-Lincoln” work. He clearly demonstrates Lincoln’s better understanding of the fundamental changes sweeping American politics in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. And while Douglas and Lincoln were clearly rivals—and intense ones—Morris also provides examples of mutual respect and friendship, such as when, at Lincoln’s request, Douglas wrote a personal letter to the president of Harvard, “immeasurably” aiding Robert Lincoln’s admission (135).

Morris grasps a basic fact. To really understand Lincoln and his greatness, one must deal with Douglas. The melodramatic role as “villain” in the Lincoln story sometimes assigned Douglas undermines rather than enhances the sixteenth president’s remarkable story. Building upon earlier scholars such as Robert W. Johannsen (whom he acknowledges), Morris gives us a more realistic—and therefore more useful—picture of the politics that produced two remarkable men.

Morris provides not only a readable book but a valuable one to historians. He provides a clear explanation of why the famed 1858 debates still capture our imaginations and why, amid all the obscure squabbling about who said what and where contained in the exchanges, they still speak to us. And how, in their own time, the competition between two migrants to the Prairie State, “helped define and determine the course of American politics during its most convulsive era” (xiv).

Why do historians as well as readers in general continue to revisit the well-trod ground of those 1858 debates? Anyone who has read the debates soon realizes that the classic image of the confrontations is leavened by petty disputations, things all-too-familiar to our own politics. Amid all the obscure accusations and counter-charges, however, are some timeless exchanges. It is those that draw us back.

The Douglas-Lincoln disagreement, most markedly illustrated in 1858 but spilling beyond that year in both directions, was fundamentally about the nature of democracy.

Douglas, Morris argues, believed in the supremacy of majority rule, Lincoln in the right of the individual. “One way or another, it is a debate that still reverberates in American society” (xiii).

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THE COUSHATTA MASSACRE OF 1874


POSTED BY M. SWIFT – OCTOBER 5, 2021 – BLACK POLITICS, RACISM, RECONSTRUCTION

The Coushatta Massacre took place in August 1874 where the White League targeted Republican politicians presiding over Red River Parish and freedmen in the area. It would be the arrival of carpetbagger and Union vet Marshall H. Twitchell, his relationship with the freed Black community, and his position of power that ignited the league’s terror campaign in the parish.

Tensions in Coushatta

At this time, Black people of note and carpetbaggers are now in state legislature. They also hold office in a number of town offices throughout the south. One of them was Marshall H. Twitchell, a white captain for the U.S. Army’s Company H, the 109th Colored Infantry. He was originally a provost marshal of the Red River branch of the Freedman Bureau.

While in Red River, he married a local Black woman named Adele Coleman. To provide for his family, the Vermont-born Twitchell learns to farm cotton after being taught by the Coleman family. The tensions began as this northern-born Union veteran began to accumulate land and influence in political power. He is elected to the Louisiana Senate as a Republican and put his brothers and brothers-in-law in positions of power.

For the complete article

blackthen.com

Reference
–http://www.knowlouisiana.org/entry/coushatta-massacre

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