Napoleon, Brown, Ford, Fermi, McCarthy, Castro

There are some days when nothing happens, but December 2nd isn't one of them.

On this day in 1804, Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of France. He was 35. France hadn't had an emperor since Charlemagne a thousand years earlier.

On December 2nd, 1859, the abolitionist John Brown was hanged for his violent attack on the military arsenal at Harper's Ferry. He was 59. If you've seen the famous painting of him, he looked a lot like God. The federal troops that captured Brown and retook the arsenal were under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee.

On this day in 1927 Henry Ford replaced the famously reliable Model T with the Model A. Ford was 64 and still innovating. The Model T had been in production for the previous 19 years and came in a variety of colors, all of them black. That was the joke, anyway.

It was on this day in 1942 that Enrico Fermi initiated the first sustained nuclear reaction, the first step toward the production of an atomic weapon. It took place in a secret laboratory under the bleachers of a university football stadium. On the same day the State Department announced the deaths of 2 million Jews at the hands of the Nazis. Fermi was 41, and a recent immigrant from fascist Italy.

Fifty five years ago today the Senate voted to censure Joe McCarthy for "conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute." He was 46. He was still in office when he died two years later.

On December 2nd, 1956 Castro, Ché Guevara and 80 other members of his July 26th Movement landed in Cuba to begin their revolution. On December 2nd, 1961, his revolution completed, Castro announced in a nationwide radio address that he was a Marxist. He was 35.

All of these stories, and hundreds of others, appear in A Book of Ages. Monarchs, revolutionaries, soldiers, scientists, authors, painters, inventors, demagogues, tycoons; what they did, and how old they were when they did it.

McCarthyism

This day in 1954 saw the beginning of the end of the witch-hunting era named after Senator Joe McCarthy. On June 9th, it was Joseph Welch, a mild-mannered Army lawyer, whose famous rebuke seemed to waken America from a bad dream. "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

Joe McCarthy, the failed chicken farmer and upstate Wisconsin judge, had been elected to the U.S. Senate in 1946, where he served in obscurity. Then in February 1950 he held up a sheet of paper and said it held a list of State Department employees who were working for the Soviets. He had no such list, but his reputation was made. He was 41. Joe McCarthy appears three times in A Book of Ages. Today fewer people remember the man than remember the era named for him, and many confuse him with the wry, poetic, anti-war Senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, who ran against LBJ in 1968, beating him in the New Hampshire primary and convincing him not to seek re-election, but it would be hard to imagine two less similar people.