July 30
Beginning at 2:08 A.M. on this day 99 years ago, the New York metro area was rocked by a series of powerful explosions at a munitions depot near Ellis Island. With the force of the first blast roughly on par with a 5.5 magnitude earthquake, the Black Tom Island disaster took several lives, wounded hundreds more, and left property damage in excess of $20 million (about half a billion in today’s dollars). The Statue of Liberty alone sustained approximately $100,000 in damages, and the torch, previously accessible to the public, would permanently remain off-limits in future tours.
It took several years to determine that the culprits were German saboteurs retaliating against the U.S.—still “officially neutral” in the Great War — for supplying ammunition to the British. Many historians deem this as the first foreign terrorist attack on American soil.
Sources: Wikipedia entries for Black Tom explosion and Statue of Liberty; 2011 Smithsonian article; New Jersey City University article
On this day in 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower signed into the law the adoption of “In God We Trust” as the official motto of the United States. While the phrase was absent from paper currency until the following year, its appearance on U.S. coinage dates back to the days of the Civil War; the deeply devout Salmon Chase, then the Secretary of the Treasury, believed invoking the name of the Almighty in such a manner would bring His needed guidance at such a precarious time. Now, with the advent of godless Communism, the nation’s leaders were once again galvanized into affirming the country’s commitment to a higher power.
While the opposition of secularists to the motto has long been the subject of much attention, less well remembered are President Theodore Roosevelt’s objections to its use on currency; printing the name of Deity on filthy lucre, in his opinion, amounted to “sacrilege.”
Source: Wikipedia entry for In God we trust; article at treasury.gov
