This Day in History

Aug 06, 2023 News

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August 6, 1890

First execution by electric chair

Kaieteur News – At Auburn Prison in New York, the first execution by electrocution in history is carried out against William Kemmler, who had been convicted of murdering his lover, Matilda Ziegler, with an axe.

Electrocution as a humane means of execution was first suggested in 1881 by Dr. Albert Southwick, a dentist. Southwick had witnessed an elderly drunkard “painlessly” killed after touching the terminals of an electrical generator in Buffalo, New York. In the prevalent form of execution at the time—death by hanging—the condemned were known to hang by their broken necks for up to 30 minutes before succumbing to asphyxiation.

In 1889, New York’s Electrical Execution Law, the first of its kind in the world, went into effect, and Edwin R. Davis, the Auburn Prison electrician, was commissioned to design an electric chair. Closely resembling the modern device, Davis’ chair was fitted with two electrodes, which were composed of metal disks held together with rubber and covered with a damp sponge. The electrodes were to be applied to the criminal’s head and back.

On August 6, 1890, William Kemmler became the first person to be sent to the chair. After he was strapped in, a charge of approximately 700 volts was delivered for only 17 seconds before the current failed. Although witnesses reported smelling burnt clothing and charred flesh, Kemmler was far from dead, and a second shock was prepared. The second charge was 1,030 volts and applied for about two minutes, whereupon smoke was observed coming from the head of Kemmler, who was clearly deceased. An autopsy showed that the electrode attached to his back had burned through to the spine.

August 6, 1902

Mobster Dutch Shultz is born

Arthur Flegenheimer, who will go on to become one of New York’s most feared criminals under the name “Dutch Schultz,” is born in the Bronx. Thirty-three years later, his life came to a violent and bloody conclusion when he was shot down in the men’s room of the Palace Chophouse in Newark, New Jersey.

After dropping out of grade school, Flegenheimer joined a local gang. He stole the nickname of another thug and from then on was known as either Dutch Schultz or “the Dutchman.” He soon became involved in bootlegging, bringing liquor down from Canada during the early Prohibition years, and making his own beer.

Within a few years, Dutch Schultz was one of the biggest gangsters in New York, employing as many as 100 gunmen to enforce his rackets—one of whom, Legs Diamond, split from Schultz and started his own operation. When Diamond’s gang began hijacking Schultz’s liquor shipments, a full-scale war broke out. On December 19, 1931, the war ended abruptly: Diamond was shot 17 times by one of Schultz’s hit men. Schultz reportedly quipped, “Just another punk caught with his hands in my pockets.” With Diamond’s competition eliminated, Schultz’s operation was clearing an estimated $20 million a year.

In 1933, prosecutors charged Schultz with tax evasion. After the trial was moved to a small upstate New York town, Schultz hired a public relations firm to change his image. He donated a lot of money to charity and briefly gave up his expensive wardrobe. The act worked: Schultz was acquitted. However, when he returned to New York City, the authorities were more determined than ever to bring him in.

In a meeting with several other major organized crime figures, Schultz demanded that they kill Thomas Dewey, the city’s special prosecutor. But, not wanting to draw any more attention to their own illegal operations, the other leaders decided to eliminate Schultz instead.

On October 23, 1935, Schultz was plotting to kill Dewey with his gang at the Palace Chophouse when Charlie “Bug” Workman walked into the restroom and shot him as he was washing his hands. Workman then proceeded to kill three others in the Schultz gang. But Schultz did not die instantly. He was delirious and rambled to police officers trying to identify the killer. Eventually, he slipped into a coma and died soon thereafter at the age of 33.

August 6, 1945

American bomber drops atomic bomb on Hiroshima

On August 6, 1945, the United States becomes the first and only nation to use atomic weaponry during wartime when it drops an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Approximately 80,000 people are killed as a direct result of the blast, and another 35,000 are injured. At least another 60,000 would be dead by the end of the year from the effects of the fallout.

On August 6, 1945, the American bomber Enola Gay dropped a five-ton bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. A blast equivalent to the power of 15,000 tons of TNT reduced four square miles of the city to ruins and immediately killed 80,000 people. Tens of thousands more died in the following weeks from wounds and radiation poisoning. Three days later, another bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, killing nearly 40,000 more people. A few days later, Japan announced its surrender.

In the years since the two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, a number of historians have suggested that the weapons had a two-pronged objective. First, of course, was to bring the war with Japan to a speedy end and spare American lives. It has been suggested that the second objective was to demonstrate the new weapon of mass destruction to the Soviet Union.

By August 1945, relations between the Soviet Union and the United States had deteriorated badly. The Potsdam Conference between U.S. President Harry S. Truman, Russian Leader, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill (before being replaced by Clement Attlee) ended just four days before the bombing of Hiroshima. The meeting was marked by recriminations and suspicion between the Americans and Soviets. Russian armies were occupying most of Eastern Europe. Truman and many of his advisers hoped that the U.S. atomic monopoly might offer diplomatic leverage with the Soviets. In this fashion, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan can be seen as the first shot of the Cold War.

 

August 6, 1965

President Johnson signs Voting Rights Act

On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act, guaranteeing African Americans the right to vote. The bill made it illegal to impose restrictions on federal, state and local elections that were designed to deny the vote to Black people.

Johnson assumed the presidency in November 1963 upon the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In the presidential race of 1964, Johnson was officially elected in a landslide victory and used this mandate to push for legislation he believed would improve the American way of life, which included stronger voting-rights laws. A recent march in Alabama in support of voting rights, during which Black people were beaten by state troops, shamed Congress and the president into passing the law, meant to enforce the 15th Amendment of the Constitution ratified by Congress in 1870.

Although the Voting Rights Act passed, state and local enforcement of the law was weak and it was often outright ignored, mainly in the South and in areas where the proportion of Black people in the population was high and their vote threatened the political status quo. Still, the Voting Rights Act gave African American voters the legal means to challenge voting restrictions and vastly improved voter turnout. In Mississippi alone, voter turnout among Black people increased from 6 percent in 1964 to 59 percent in 1969. In 1970, President Richard Nixon extended the provisions of the Voting Rights Act and lowered the eligible voting age for all voters to 18.

August 6, 1969

Green Berets are charged with murder

The U.S. Army announces that Colonel Robert B. Rheault, Commander of the Fifth Special Forces Group in Vietnam, and seven other Green Berets have been charged with premeditated murder and conspiracy to commit murder in the summary execution of a Vietnamese national, Thai Khac Chuyen, who had served as an agent for Detachment B-57. Chuyen was reportedly summarily executed for being a double agent who had compromised a secret mission. The case against the Green Berets was ultimately dismissed for reasons of national security when the Central Intelligence Agency refused to release highly classified information about the operations in which Detachment B-57 had been involved. Colonel Rheault subsequently retired from the Army.

 

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• and Winston Churchill, announced its surrender, another bomb was dropped, drops an atomic bomb, Joseph Stalin, Russian Leader, Truman

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