July 21 in History

Spectators from Washington packed picnic baskets and rode carriages to the hills above Manassas Junction, expecting to watch the Union army crush the rebellion in an afternoon. What they witnessed instead was a rout that sent soldiers and civilians alike stampeding back toward the capital in a tangled mass of abandoned wagons and shattered confidence. Union General Irvin McDowell led roughly 35,000 poorly trained volunteers against a Confederate force of similar size commanded by Generals Beauregard and Johnston near a small Virginia creek called Bull Run. Both armies were green, their officers largely untested, and the battle plan relied on coordination that raw troops simply could not execute. McDowell initially pushed the Confederates back on the left flank, but reinforcements arrived by rail from the Shenandoah Valley throughout the day. The turning point came on Henry House Hill, where Brigadier General Thomas Jackson held his Virginia brigade in a rigid defensive line while other Confederate units rallied around him. General Bee, trying to steady his own retreating men, pointed toward Jackson and reportedly shouted that he stood "like a stone wall," giving Jackson the nickname he would carry through the war. A fierce counterattack drove the Union troops off the hill, and what began as an orderly withdrawal became a panicked flight when a destroyed bridge created a bottleneck on the road to Washington. The battle killed roughly 900 men on both sides and wounded thousands more. Northern newspapers that had printed triumphant headlines the morning before now demanded answers. The fantasy of a quick war dissolved overnight. Congress authorized the enlistment of one million volunteers, and Lincoln replaced McDowell with George McClellan, beginning the long and bloody search for a general who could win. Bull Run taught both nations the same brutal lesson: this war would not end with a single afternoon of fighting.

A loose rail and a length of rope were all it took to invent a new American crime. The James-Younger Gang pulled a spike from the tracks near Adair, Iowa, tied a rope to the loosened rail, and waited in the darkness for the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad train to round the bend. When the locomotive hit the gap, it derailed and toppled into a ditch, killing the engineer instantly. Jesse James was twenty-five years old, a former Confederate guerrilla who had spent the Civil War riding with the notorious William Quantrill and "Bloody Bill" Anderson. He and his brother Frank, along with Cole Younger and several other ex-bushwhackers, had been robbing banks since 1866, but this was their first train job. The method was crude and violent, but it worked. The gang forced open the express car safe and made off with roughly two thousand dollars in cash and gold. Train robbery was not entirely new in concept, but the James Gang turned it into a repeatable criminal enterprise across the American frontier. Over the next decade, they would hit trains, banks, and stagecoaches from Missouri to Minnesota, generating newspaper coverage that transformed Jesse into either a Robin Hood figure or a cold-blooded killer depending on which editor was writing. Sympathetic coverage in the Kansas City Times, where editor John Newman Edwards romanticized the gang as Confederate avengers, built a mythology that outlived the crimes. The Adair robbery also changed how railroads operated. Express companies began hiring armed guards, reinforcing safes, and eventually funding the Pinkerton Detective Agency to hunt the gang. The railroad industry, suddenly aware of its vulnerability, invested heavily in security measures that reshaped American law enforcement. Jesse James survived another nine years before a member of his own gang shot him in the back for reward money.

Eleven billion dollars in fraudulent accounting entries collapsed one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world and wiped out the retirement savings of thousands of employees who had been encouraged to invest their pensions in company stock. WorldCom filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection with $107 billion in listed assets, surpassing Enron to become the largest corporate failure in American history at that time. WorldCom had grown from a small Mississippi long-distance reseller into a telecom giant through an aggressive acquisition strategy orchestrated by CEO Bernard Ebbers. The company completed over sixty acquisitions in the 1990s, including the $37 billion purchase of MCI Communications in 1998, creating a network that carried roughly half of all American internet traffic. Wall Street rewarded the growth with a stock price that peaked above $60 per share, making Ebbers a billionaire on paper. The fraud was straightforward in method if staggering in scale. Chief Financial Officer Scott Sullivan directed accountants to reclassify billions in ordinary operating expenses as capital expenditures, inflating profits and hiding the fact that the company was hemorrhaging cash. Internal auditor Cynthia Cooper discovered the discrepancies in June 2002 while investigating suspicious entries, and her team traced the manipulation through multiple quarters of financial statements. Sullivan pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors. Ebbers maintained he knew nothing about the accounting fraud, but a jury convicted him of securities fraud and conspiracy in March 2005. He received a twenty-five year sentence. The collapse cost investors roughly $180 billion in market value and eliminated 20,000 jobs. WorldCom, along with Enron, directly triggered the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which imposed the most extensive corporate governance reforms since the Securities Acts of the 1930s.

A man whose name the ancient world tried to erase succeeded in becoming immortal anyway. Herostratus, an otherwise unremarkable citizen of Ephesus, set fire to the Temple of Artemis on the night Alexander the Great was reportedly born, destroying one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World for the sole purpose of ensuring that history would remember him. The Temple of Artemis stood as the largest marble structure in the Greek world, roughly four times the size of the Parthenon in Athens. Built over 120 years and funded partly by King Croesus of Lydia, the temple featured 127 Ionic columns standing sixty feet high, elaborate sculptural friezes, and a cult statue of the goddess Artemis that drew pilgrims from across the Mediterranean. Ephesus derived enormous economic and political prestige from the sanctuary, which also functioned as a bank, a marketplace, and a place of asylum. Herostratus confessed under torture that he had no grievance with the temple or its priests. He simply wanted to be famous. The Ephesian authorities executed him and passed a decree forbidding anyone from speaking his name, a punishment the Greeks called damnatio memoriae. The historian Theopompus recorded the name anyway, and so did Valerius Maximus centuries later, ensuring that the very act of prohibition preserved what it sought to destroy. The Ephesians rebuilt the temple on an even grander scale, completing the new structure around 323 BC. This second temple endured for nearly six hundred years before the Goths damaged it in 262 AD and early Christians eventually dismantled what remained. Archaeological excavations in the nineteenth century uncovered fragments of both versions, now housed in the British Museum. The paradox Herostratus created has never been resolved: punishing attention-seekers by erasing their names only guarantees the story gets told.

Nine minutes of deliberation ended the most publicized trial in American history, but the verdict was almost beside the point. A Dayton, Tennessee, jury found high school teacher John Scopes guilty of violating state law by teaching evolution, imposing a fine of one hundred dollars. The real battle had been fought in the national press and in the courtroom exchanges between two of the most famous orators in the country. Tennessee had passed the Butler Act in March 1925, making it illegal to teach any theory that denied the biblical account of creation. The American Civil Liberties Union advertised for a volunteer to test the law, and Dayton civic leaders recruited Scopes, a twenty-four-year-old football coach and substitute biology teacher, partly to bring attention and commerce to their small town. The strategy worked beyond anyone's expectations. William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate and champion of rural evangelical Christianity, agreed to prosecute. Clarence Darrow, the nation's most famous defense attorney and an avowed agnostic, led the defense. More than two hundred reporters descended on Dayton, and WGN radio broadcast the proceedings live to millions of listeners, making it the first trial ever covered by national radio. The town installed extra telephone lines and built a platform for newsreel cameras. Darrow's most devastating moment came when he called Bryan himself to the witness stand as an expert on the Bible. Over two hours of questioning, Darrow pressed Bryan on whether the days of creation were literal twenty-four-hour periods, whether Jonah was literally swallowed by a whale, and whether the Earth was truly created in 4004 BC. Bryan stumbled repeatedly, and the exchange humiliated him in the national press. He died five days after the trial ended. The conviction was later overturned on a technicality, but the Butler Act remained on Tennessee's books until 1967.