https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Dylan_controversy



Electric Dylan controversy
By 1965, Bob Dylan was the leading songwriter of the American folk music revival. The response to his albums The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan and The Times They Are a-Changin' led the media to label him the "spokesman of a generation".

In March 1965, Dylan released his fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home. Side one features Dylan backed by an electric band; side two features Dylan accompanying himself on acoustic guitar. On July 20, 1965, Dylan released his single "Like a Rolling Stone", featuring a rock sound. On July 25, 1965, Dylan performed his first electric concert at the Newport Folk Festival, joined by guitarist Mike Bloomfield and Barry Goldberg of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Some sections of the audience booed Dylan's performance, leading members of the folk movement, including Irwin Silber and Ewan MacColl, to criticize Dylan for moving away from political songwriting and for performing with an electric band instead.

Newport 1965 set
At the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan had been received enthusiastically when he performed "Blowin' in the Wind" with Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, and other Festival performers. At the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan performed "With God on Our Side" and "Mr Tambourine Man". Positive reviews of Dylan's 1964 performance were accompanied by criticisms of Dylan's antics and dismissive nature; one critic wrote that "being stoned had rarely prevented his giving winning performances, but he was clearly out of control".


Fans were used to seeing Dylan perform alone, with acoustic guitar and harmonica (1963)

On Saturday, July 24, 1965, Dylan performed three acoustic songs, "All I Really Want to Do", "If You Gotta Go, Go Now", and "Love Minus Zero/No Limit", at a Newport workshop. According to Jonathan Taplin, a roadie at Newport (and later a road manager for the acts of Dylan's manager Albert Grossman), Dylan made a spontaneous decision on the Saturday that he would challenge the Festival by performing with a fully amplified band. Taplin said that Dylan had been irritated by what he considered condescending remarks which festival organiser Alan Lomax had made about the Paul Butterfield Blues Band when Lomax introduced them for an earlier set at a festival workshop. Dylan's attitude, according to Taplin, was, "Well, fuck them if they think they can keep electricity out of here, I'll do it. On a whim, he said he wanted to play electric." Dylan assembled a band and rehearsed that night at a mansion being used by festival organizer George Wein.

On the night of Sunday, July 25, Dylan's appearance was between Cousin Emmy and the Sea Island singers, two traditional acts. Dylan's band included two musicians who had played on his recently released single "Like a Rolling Stone": Mike Bloomfield on lead guitar and Al Kooper on organ. Two of Bloomfield's bandmates from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, bassist Jerome Arnold and drummer Sam Lay, also appeared at Newport, as well as Barry Goldberg on piano.

Footage of the Newport performance appears in the documentary films Festival (1967), No Direction Home (2005) and The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival 1963–1965 (2007). The footage begins with Dylan being introduced by Master of Ceremonies Peter Yarrow: "Ladies and gentlemen, the person that's going to come up now has a limited amount of time ... His name is Bob Dylan." In the documentary footage, both boos and cheers are heard a few bars into Dylan's first song, "Maggie's Farm", and continue throughout his second, "Like a Rolling Stone". Dylan and his band then performed "Phantom Engineer", an early version of "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry". Dylan was said to have "electrified one half of his audience, and electrocuted the other".

After "Phantom Engineer", Dylan and the band left the stage. Booing and clapping are in the background. When Peter Yarrow returned to the microphone, he begged Dylan to continue performing. According to Robert Shelton, when Dylan returned to the stage, he discovered he did not have the right harmonica and said to Yarrow, "What are you doing to me?" Dylan then asked the audience for "an E harmonica". Within a few moments, a clatter of harmonicas hit the stage. Dylan performed two songs on acoustic guitar for the audience: "Mr. Tambourine Man", and then, as his farewell to Newport, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue". The crowd exploded with applause, calling for more. Dylan did not return to the Newport festival for 37 years. In an enigmatic gesture, Dylan performed at Newport in 2002, sporting a wig and fake beard.

Reasons for the crowd's reaction
Filmmaker Murray Lerner and others present at Newport argued that the boos were from outraged folk fans who disliked Dylan playing an electric guitar. Others present, including musician Al Kooper, disagreed, arguing that the audience were upset by poor sound quality and the short duration of the set.

Poor sound quality was the reason musician Pete Seeger, who was backstage, gave for disliking the performance: he says he told the audio technicians, "Get that distortion out of his voice ... It's terrible. If I had an axe, I'd chop the microphone cable right now." Seeger has also said, however, that he only wanted to cut the cables because he wanted the audience to hear Dylan's lyrics properly because he thought they were important. Rumors that Seeger actually had an axe, or that a festival board member pulled or wanted to pull out the entire electrical wiring system are apocryphal. In the film No Direction Home, John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers, who is Pete Seeger's brother-in-law, states that Seeger wanted to lower the volume of the band because the noise was upsetting his elderly father Charles, who wore a hearing aid. In the same film, Dylan claimed that Seeger's unenthusiastic response to his set was like a "dagger in his heart" and made him "want to go out and get drunk".

According to jazz historian John Szwed, the legend about Pete Seeger cutting the cable or pulling the cords of the acoustic system may have arisen from an actual incident from earlier that afternoon. Szwed writes that Festival organizer Alan Lomax had asked Texas folklorist Mack McCormick, discoverer of Lightnin' Hopkins, to find a Texas prison gang to bring up to Newport to sing work songs, but the Texas Attorney General would not allow it, so McCormick had rounded up a group of ex-convicts. Since they had never performed together in front of an audience, much less a microphone, McCormick wanted to accustom them to the stage before the concert. "But Bob Dylan's electric band had been rehearsing for some time and refused to leave. 'I was trying to tell Dylan, we need the stage', McCormick said. 'He continued to ignore me. So I went over to the junction box and pulled out the cords. Then he listened'."

Bruce Jackson, another director of the Newport Folk Festival, called the incident "the myth of Newport". Jackson was present at Dylan's 1965 performance and in 2002 reviewed an audio tape of it. Jackson contends that the booing was directed at Peter Yarrow (also a member of the Festival's Board), who upset the crowd when he attempted to keep Dylan's spot to its proper length; Jackson maintains there's nothing to indicate the crowd disliked Dylan's music, electrified or not.

Al Kooper has argued that the boos were brought on by the short duration of Dylan's set, not the fact that Dylan had gone electric. He said: "The reason they booed is that he only played for fifteen minutes when everybody else played for forty-five minutes or an hour. They were feeling ripped off. Wouldn't you? They didn't give a shit about us being electric. They just wanted more." (In fact, the standard set length that night was 15 minutes, and by the end of his electric segment Dylan had already been on stage longer than most of the performers who preceded him, but much of his time had been devoted to tuning and band members switching instruments, so he had only played the three songs.) According to performers Ian & Sylvia Tyson, it was "an angry, startled reaction" but that "it was a hostile audience" that year for other performers also.

Joe Boyd, responsible for the sound mixing at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, said in an interview with Richie Unterberger in 2007: "I think there were a lot of people who were upset about the rock band, but I think it was pretty split. I think probably more people liked it than didn't. But there was certainly a lot of shouting and a lot of arguing, and a sound which, you can hear in a lot of ballparks. You used to get this confusion when Bill Skowron used to come up to the plate for the Yankees, 'cause his nickname was Moose. And everybody used to go, "MOOSE!" And it sounded like they were booing him. Because you don't get the articulation of the consonant, so that a crowd shouting "more, more, more" at the end of Dylan's three songs sounded very much like booing. I've heard recently a recording of that night, and it doesn't sound to me like booing so much as a roar, just a kind of general hubbub between songs, and during Yarrow's attempt to get Dylan back on stage... I really wouldn't be prepared to say it was 50–50, or two thirds/one third, or whatever. But I think that there was a segment of the audience, somewhere between a quarter and a half, that was dismayed or horrified or varying degrees of unhappy about what he was doing."

In 2007, documentary director Murray Lerner released on DVD his complete footage of Dylan's three appearances at Newport: The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival 1963–1965. When interviewed by Mojo magazine, Lerner was asked: "There’s been a lot of debate over the years as to who exactly was doing the booing and who were they booing? Dylan? The organizers? The shortness of the set?" Lerner replied: "It's a good question. When we showed the film at The New York Film Festival [in October 2007] one kid gets up and says, 'About this booing... I was sitting right in front of the stage, there was no booing in the audience whatsoever. There was booing from the performers'. So I said, Well, I don't think you're right. Then another kid gets up and says 'I was a little further back and it was the press section that was booing, not the audience', and I said, Well, I don't think you're right. A third guy gets up and says 'I was there, and there was no question, it was the audience that was booing and there was no booing from the stage'. It was fascinating. People remember hearing what they thought they should hear. I think they were definitely booing Dylan and a little bit Pete Yarrow because he was so flustered. He was not expecting that audience's reaction and he was concerned about Bob’s image since they were part of the same family of artists through Al Grossman. But I absolutely think that they were booing Dylan going electric.

Dylan appears to have believed the booing represented disapproval of his new sound. Interviewed in San Francisco, on December 3, 1965, Dylan was asked whether he was "surprised the first time the boos came?" He responded: "That was at Newport. Well, I did this very crazy thing, I didn't know what was going to happen, but they certainly booed, I'll tell you that. You could hear it all over the place.... I mean, they must be pretty rich, to be able to go some place and boo. I couldn't afford it if I was in their shoes."

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Nixon

United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683 (1974), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case that resulted in a unanimous decision against President Richard Nixon, ordering him to deliver tape recordings and other subpoenaed materials to a federal district court. Issued on July 24, 1974, the decision was important to the late stages of the Watergate scandal, when there was an ongoing impeachment process against Richard Nixon. United States v. Nixon is considered a crucial precedent limiting the power of any U.S. president to claim executive privilege.

Chief Justice Warren E. Burger wrote the opinion for a unanimous court, joined by Justices William O. Douglas, William J. Brennan, Potter Stewart, Byron White, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun and Lewis F. Powell. Burger, Blackmun, and Powell were appointed to the Court by Nixon during his first term. Associate Justice William Rehnquist recused himself as he had previously served in the Nixon administration as an Assistant Attorney General.

Summary
The case arose out of the Watergate scandal, which began during the 1972 Presidential campaign between Democratic Senator George McGovern of South Dakota and President Nixon. On June 17, 1972, about five months before the general election, five burglars broke into Democratic headquarters located in the Watergate building complex in Washington, D.C.

In May 1973, Nixon's Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, appointed Archibald Cox to the position of special prosecutor, charged with investigating the break-in. In October 1973, Nixon arranged to have Cox fired in the Saturday Night Massacre. Nonetheless, public outrage forced Nixon to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, who was charged with conducting the Watergate investigation for the government.

In April 1974, Jaworski obtained a subpoena ordering Nixon to release certain tapes and papers related to specific meetings between the President and those indicted by the grand jury. Those tapes and the conversations they revealed were believed to contain damaging evidence involving the indicted men and perhaps the President himself.

Hoping that Jaworski and the public would be satisfied, Nixon turned over edited transcripts of 43 conversations, including portions of 20 conversations demanded by the subpoena. James D. St. Clair, Nixon's attorney, then requested Judge John Sirica of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to quash the subpoena. While arguing before Sirica, St. Clair stated that:

The President wants me to argue that he is as powerful a monarch as Louis XIV, only four years at a time, and is not subject to the processes of any court in the land except the court of impeachment.

Sirica denied Nixon's motion and ordered the President to turn the tapes over by May 31. Both Nixon and Jaworski appealed directly to the Supreme Court, which heard arguments on July 8. Nixon's attorney argued the matter should not be subject to "judicial resolution" since the matter was a dispute within the executive branch and the branch should resolve the dispute itself. Also, he claimed Special Prosecutor Jaworski had not proven the requested materials were absolutely necessary for the trial of the seven men. Besides, he claimed Nixon had an absolute executive privilege to protect communications between "high Government officials and those who advise and assist them in carrying out their duties."

Decision
Less than three weeks after oral arguments, the Court issued its decision.

Within the court, there was never much doubt about the general outcome, July 9, the day following oral arguments, all eight justices (Justice William H. Rehnquist recused himself due to his close association with several Watergate conspirators, including Attorneys General John Mitchell and Richard Kleindienst, prior to his appointment to the Court) indicated to each other that they would rule against the president. The justices struggled to settle on an opinion that all eight could agree to, however, with the major issue being how much of a constitutional standard could be established for what executive privilege did mean.

Burger's first draft was deemed problematic and insufficient by the rest of the court, leading the other Justices to criticize and re-write major parts of the draft. The final draft would eventually heavily incorporate Justice Blackmun's re-writing of Facts of the Case, Justice Douglas' appealability section, Justice Brennan's thoughts on standing, Justice White's standards on admissibility and relevance, and Justices Powell and Stewart's interpretation of the executive privilege.

The stakes were so high, in that the tapes most likely contained evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the President and his men, that they wanted no dissent. Despite the Chief Justice's hostility to allowing the other Justices to participate in the drafting of the opinion, the final version was agreed to on July 23, the day before the decision was announced, and would contain the work of all the Justices. Chief Justice Burger delivered the decision from the bench and the very fact that he was doing so meant that knowledgeable onlookers realized the decision must be unanimous.

The Court's opinion found that the courts could indeed intervene on the matter and that Special Counsel Jaworski had proven a "sufficient likelihood that each of the tapes contains conversations relevant to the offenses charged in the indictment". While the Court acknowledged that the principle of executive privilege did exist, the Court would also directly reject President Nixon's claim to an "absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances."

The Court held that a claim of Presidential privilege as to materials subpoenaed for use in a criminal trial cannot override the needs of the judicial process if that claim is based, not on the ground that military or diplomatic secrets are implicated, but merely on the ground of a generalized interest in confidentiality. Nixon was then ordered to deliver the subpoenaed materials to the District Court.

Nixon resigned sixteen days later, on August 9, 1974.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_Debate


Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and United States Vice President Richard Nixon debate the merits of communism versus capitalism in a model American kitchen at the American National Exhibition in Moscow (July 1959)

The Kitchen Debate (Russian: Кухонные дебаты, romanized: Kukhonnye debaty) was a series of impromptu exchanges (through interpreters) between the U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev at the opening of the American National Exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow on July 24, 1959. For the exhibition, an entire house was built that the American exhibitors claimed anyone in America could afford. It was filled with labor-saving and recreational devices meant to represent the fruits of the capitalist American consumer market. The debate was recorded on color videotape and Nixon made reference to this fact; it was subsequently rebroadcast in both countries.

History
In 1959, the Soviets and Americans had agreed to hold exhibits in each other's countries as a cultural exchange to promote understanding. This was a result of the 1958 U.S.–Soviet Cultural Agreement. The Soviet exhibit in New York opened in June 1959, and the following month Vice President Nixon was on hand to open the US exhibit in Moscow. Nixon took Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev on a tour of the exhibit. There were multiple displays and consumer goods provided by over 450 American companies. A centerpiece of the exhibit was a geodesic dome, which housed scientific and technical experiments in a 30,000 square foot facility. This was later purchased by the Soviets at the end of the Moscow exhibition. As recounted by William Safire who was present as the exhibitor's press agent, the Kitchen debate took place in a number of locations at the exhibition but primarily in the kitchen of a suburban model house, cut in half for easy viewing. This was only one of a series of four meetings that occurred between Nixon and Khrushchev during the 1959 exhibition. Nixon was accompanied by President Eisenhower's younger brother, Milton S. Eisenhower, former president of Johns Hopkins University.

During the first meeting, in the Kremlin, Khrushchev surprised Nixon when he protested the Captive Nations Resolution passed by the US Congress that condemned the Soviet Union for its "control" over the "captive" peoples of Eastern Europe and called upon Americans to pray for those people. After protesting the actions of the US Congress, he dismissed the new technology of the US and declared that the Soviets would have all of the same things in a few years and then say "Bye bye" as they surpassed the U.S. He satirically asked if there was a machine that "puts food into the mouth and pushes it down". Nixon responded by saying at least the competition was technological, rather than military. Both men agreed that the United States and the Soviet Union should seek areas of agreement. The second visit occurred in a television studio inside the American exhibit. At the end, Khrushchev stated that everything he had said in their debate should be translated into English and broadcast in the US. Nixon responded "Certainly it will, and everything I say is to be translated into Russian and broadcast across the Soviet Union. That's a fair bargain." To this proposal, Khrushchev shook hands vigorously.

The exchange between Khrushchev and Nixon is interesting because while they were discussing which country was superior, they did not compare nuclear weapons, political influence, or control of territories. ["The World Transformed: 1945 to the Present"] They were using the technological innovations set up in the exhibit to compete with one another. Nixon argued that the Americans built to take advantage of new techniques, while Khrushchev argued that the Soviets built for future generations. Khrushchev states, "This is what America is capable of, and how long has she existed? 300 years? 150 years of independence and this is her level. We haven’t quite reached 42 years, and in another 7 years, we’ll be at the level of America, and after that we’ll go farther."

Leonid Brezhnev, future General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, is reported to have been present and acting to obstruct photos of the event by Safire.

The third visit occurred inside the kitchen on a cutaway model home. The model home in which the debate took place was furnished with a dishwasher, refrigerator, and range. It was designed to represent a $14,000 home that a typical American worker could afford. The fourth meeting was a debate that lasted for five hours at Khrushchev's dacha. This meeting was not recorded.

The Kitchen Debate was the first high-level meeting between Soviet and U.S. leaders since the Geneva Summit in 1955.

Television broadcast and American reaction
In the US, three major television networks broadcast the kitchen debate on July 25. The Soviets subsequently protested, as Nixon and Khrushchev had agreed that the debate should be broadcast simultaneously in America and the Soviet Union, with the Soviets threatening to withhold the tape until they were ready to broadcast. The American networks, however, had felt that delay would cause the news to lose its immediacy. Two days later, on July 27, the debate was broadcast on Moscow television, albeit late at night and with Nixon's remarks only partially translated.

American reaction was initially mixed, with The New York Times calling it "an exchange that emphasized the gulf between east and west but had little bearing on the substantive issue" and portrayed it as a political stunt. The newspaper also declared that public opinion seemed divided after the debates. On the other hand, Time, also covering the exhibition, praised Nixon, saying he "managed in a unique way to personify a national character proud of peaceful accomplishment, sure of its way of life, confident of its power under threat."

Because of the informal nature of the exchange, Nixon gained popularity, improving upon the lukewarm reception he previously had with the U.S. public. He also impressed Mr. Khrushchev. Said reporter William Safire, present at the confrontation:

The shrewd Khrushchev came away from his personal duel of words with Nixon persuaded that the advocate of capitalism was not just tough-minded but strong-willed.

Khrushchev claimed that following his confrontation with Nixon he did all he could to bring about Nixon's defeat in his 1960 presidential campaign. The trip raised Nixon's profile as a public statesman, greatly improving his chances for receiving the Republican presidential nomination the following year.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Eastland


SS Eastland docked in Cleveland before the disaster

The SS Eastland was a passenger ship based in Chicago and used for tours. On July 24, 1915, the ship rolled over onto her side while tied to a dock in the Chicago River. A total of 844 passengers and crew were killed in what was the largest loss of life from a single shipwreck on the Great Lakes.

After the disaster, Eastland was salvaged and sold to the United States Navy. After restorations and modifications, Eastland was designated a gunboat and renamed USS Wilmette. She was used primarily as a training vessel on the Great Lakes, and was scrapped after World War II.

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The Eastland disaster
On July 24, 1915, Eastland and four other Great Lakes passenger steamers, Theodore Roosevelt, Petoskey, Racine, and Rochester, were chartered to take employees from Western Electric Company's Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois, to a picnic in Michigan City, Indiana. This was a major event in the lives of the workers, many of whom could not take holidays. Many of the passengers on Eastland were Czech immigrants from Cicero; of the Czech passengers, 220 of them perished.

During 1915, the new federal Seamen's Act had been passed because of the RMS Titanic disaster three years earlier. The law required retrofitting of a complete set of lifeboats on Eastland, as on many other passenger vessels. This additional weight may have made Eastland more dangerous by making it even more top-heavy. Some argued that other Great Lakes ships would suffer from the same problem. Nonetheless, it was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson. Eastland was already so top-heavy that it had special restrictions concerning the number of passengers that could be carried. Prior to that, during June 1914, Eastland had again changed ownership, this time bought by the St. Joseph and Chicago Steamship Company, with Captain Harry Pedersen appointed the ship's master.

On the morning of July 24, passengers began boarding Eastland on the south bank of the Chicago River between Clark and LaSalle Streets about 6:30 am, and by 7:10 am, the ship had reached its capacity of 2,572 passengers. The ship was packed, with many passengers standing on the open upper decks, and began to list slightly to the port side (away from the wharf). The crew attempted to stabilize the ship by admitting water to its ballast tanks, but to little avail. Sometime during the next 15 minutes, a number of passengers rushed to the port side, and at 7:28 am, Eastland lurched sharply to port, and then rolled completely onto its port side, coming to rest on the river bottom, which was only 20 feet (6.1 m) below the surface. Many other passengers had already moved below decks on this relatively cool and damp morning to warm before the departure. Consequently, hundreds of people were trapped inside by the water and the sudden rollover; some were crushed by heavy furniture, including pianos, bookcases, and tables. Although the ship was only 20 feet (6.1 meters) from the wharf, and in spite of the quick response by the crew of a nearby vessel, Kenosha, which came alongside the hull to allow those stranded on the capsized vessel to leap to safety, a total of 844 passengers and four crew members died in the disaster.


Passengers being rescued from the hull of the Eastland by a tugboat.

The bodies of the victims were taken to various temporary morgues established in the area for identification; by afternoon, the remaining unidentified bodies were consolidated in the Armory of the 2nd Regiment, on the site which was later transformed into Harpo Studios, but has since been demolished to make room for a new McDonald's corporation headquarters.

In the aftermath, the Western Electric Company provided $100,000 to relief and recovery efforts of family members of the victims of the disaster.


Victim recovered from the Eastland

One of the people who were scheduled to be on Eastland was 20-year-old George Halas, an American football player, who was delayed leaving for the dock, and arrived after the ship had overturned. His name was listed on the list of deceased in newspapers, but when fraternity brothers visited his home to send their condolences, he was revealed to be unharmed. Halas would go on to become coach and owner of the Chicago Bears and a founding member of the National Football League. His friend and future Bears executive Ralph Brizzolara and his brother were on the Eastland when it capsized, though they escaped through portholes. Despite stories to the contrary, no reliable evidence indicates Jack Benny was aboard Eastland or scheduled to be on the excursion; possibly the basis for this report was that Eastland was a training vessel during World War I and Benny received his training in the Great Lakes naval base, where Eastland was stationed.


View of Eastland from fire tug

The first known film footage taken of the recovery efforts was discovered and then released during early 2015 by a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Marion Eichholz, the last known survivor of the capsizing, died on November 24, 2014, at the age of 102.

Eastland disaster and the media
Writer Jack Woodford witnessed the disaster and gave a first-hand account to the Herald and Examiner, a Chicago newspaper. In his autobiography, Woodford writes:

And then movement caught my eye. I looked across the river. As I watched in disoriented stupefaction a steamer large as an ocean liner slowly turned over on its side as though it were a whale going to take a nap. I didn't believe a huge steamer had done this before my eyes, lashed to a dock, in perfectly calm water, in excellent weather, with no explosion, no fire, nothing. I thought I had gone crazy.

Newspapers played a significant part in not only publicizing the Eastland disaster, but also creating the public memory of the catastrophe. The newspapers’ purpose, audience, and political and business associations influenced the newspapers to publish articles emphasizing who was to blame and why Eastland capsized. Consequently, the articles influenced how the court cases proceeded, and contributed to a dispute between Western Electric Company and some of its workers regarding how the company responded to the catastrophe.

Carl Sandburg, then known better as a journalist than a poet, wrote an angry account accusing regulators of ignoring safety issues and claimed that many of the workers were there on company orders for a staged picnic. Sandburg also wrote a poem, "The Eastland", that contrasts the disaster with the mistreatment and poor health of the lower classes at the time. After first listing the quick, murderous horrors of the disaster, then surveying the slow, murderous horrors of extreme poverty, Sandburg concludes by comparing the two: "I see a dozen Eastlands/Every morning on my way to work/And a dozen more going home at night." The poem was too harsh for publication when written but was eventually released as part of a collection of poems during 1993.

The Eastland disaster was incorporated into the 1999 series premiere of the Disney Channel original series So Weird. In the episode, teenaged paranormal enthusiast Fiona Phillips (actress Cara DeLizia) encounters the ghost of a young boy who drowned during the capsizing while exploring a nightclub near the Chicago River, and attempts to learn why he has contacted her.

During 2012, Chicago's Lookingglass Theatre produced an original musical about the disaster entitled Eastland: A New Musical and written by Andy White. The Eastland disaster is also pivotal to the story of one family told in the play/musical Failure: A Love Story, written by Philip Dawkins, which premiered in Chicago in 2012. Its Los Angeles production, directed by Michael Matthews, and produced by Couerage Theater Company, premiered on July 24, 2015 – the 100th anniversary of the Eastland tragedy.

Inquiry and indictments
A grand jury indicted the president and three other officers of the steamship company for manslaughter, and the ship's captain and engineer for criminal carelessness, and found that the disaster was caused by "conditions of instability" caused by any or all of overloading of passengers, mishandling of water ballast, or the construction of the ship.

Federal extradition hearings were held to compel the six indicted men to come from Michigan to Illinois for trial. During the hearings, principal witness Sidney Jenks, president of the shipbuilding company that built Eastland, testified that her first owners wanted a fast ship to transport fruit, and he designed one capable of making 20 mph (32 km/h) and carrying 500 passengers. Defense counsel Clarence Darrow asked whether he had ever worried about the conversion of the ship into a passenger steamer with a capacity of 2,500 or more passengers. Jenks replied, "I had no way of knowing the quantity of its business after it left our yards... No, I did not worry about the Eastland." Jenks testified that an actual stability test of the ship never occurred, and stated that after tilting to an angle of 45° at launching, "it righted itself as straight as a church, satisfactorily demonstrating its stability."

The court refused extradition, holding the evidence was too weak, with "barely a scintilla of proof" to establish probable cause to find the six guilty. The court reasoned that the four company officers were not aboard the ship, and that every act charged against the captain and engineer was done in the ordinary course of business, "more consistent with innocence than with guilt." The court also reasoned that Eastland "was operated for years and carried thousands safely", and that for this reason no one could say that the accused parties were unjustified in believing the ship seaworthy.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_Zone_accident


A UH-1B similar to the accident helicopter

On July 23, 1982, a Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopter crashed at Indian Dunes in Valencia, Santa Clarita, California, during the making of Twilight Zone: The Movie. The crash killed three people on the ground (actor Vic Morrow and child actors Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen) and injured the six helicopter passengers. The incident led to years of civil and criminal action and was responsible for the introduction of new procedures and safety standards in the filmmaking industry.

Background
The film featured four sequences, one of which was based on the 1961 Twilight Zone episode "A Quality of Mercy". In the script, character Bill Connor (Morrow) is transported back in time to the midst of the Vietnam War, where he has become a Vietnamese man protecting two children from American troops.

Director John Landis violated California's child labor laws by hiring seven year-old Myca Dinh Le and six year-old Renee Shin-Yi Chen without the required permits. Landis and several other staff members were also responsible for a number of labor violations connected with other people involved in the accident, which came to light after the incident.

Le and Chen were being paid under the table to circumvent California's child labor laws, which did not permit children to work at night. Landis opted not to seek a special waiver, either because he did not think that he would get permission for such a late hour or because he knew that he would not get approval to have young children in a scene with a large number of explosives. The casting agents were unaware that the children would be involved in the scene. Associate producer George Folsey Jr. told the children's parents not to tell any firefighters on the set that the children were part of the scene, and hid them from a fire safety officer who also worked as a welfare worker. A fire safety officer was concerned that the blasts would cause a crash, but he did not tell Landis of his concerns. Morrow's friend and former Combat! co-star Dick Peabody wrote that Morrow's last words a few minutes before the accident were "I've got to be crazy to do this shot. I should've asked for a double."

Accident
The filming location was the ranch Indian Dunes that was used through the 1980s in films and television shows, including The Color Purple, Escape From New York, MacGyver, and China Beach. The location was within the 30-mile zone, its wide-open area permitted more pyrotechnic effects, and it was possible to shoot night scenes without city lights visible in the background. Indian Dunes' 600 acres (2.4 km2) also featured a wide topography of green hills, dry desert, dense woods, and jungle-like riverbeds along the Santa Clara River which made it suitable to double for locations around the world, including Afghanistan, Myanmar, Brazil, and Vietnam.

The night scene called for Morrow's character to carry the two children out of a deserted village and across a shallow river while being pursued by American soldiers in a hovering helicopter. The helicopter was piloted by Vietnam War veteran Dorcey Wingo. During the filming, Wingo stationed his helicopter 25 feet (7.6 m) from the ground, while hovering near a large mortar effect; he then turned the aircraft 180 degrees to the left for the next camera shot. The effect was detonated while the helicopter's tail-rotor was still above it, causing the rotor to fail and detach from the tail. The low-flying helicopter spun out of control. At the same time, Morrow dropped Chen into the water. He was reaching out to grab her when the helicopter fell on top of him and the two children. Morrow and Le were decapitated by the helicopter's main rotor blades, while Chen was crushed to death by the helicopter's right landing skid; all three died instantaneously.

At the trial, the defense claimed that the explosions were detonated at the wrong time. Randall Robinson was an assistant cameraman on board the helicopter, and he testified that production manager Dan Allingham told Wingo, "That's too much. Let's get out of here," when the explosions were detonated, but Landis shouted over the radio: "Get lower... lower! Get over [lower]!" Robinson said that Wingo tried to leave the area, but that "we lost our control and regained it and then I could feel something let go and we began spinning around in circles." Stephen Lydecker, also a camera operator on board, testified that Landis had earlier "shrugged off" warnings about the stunt with the comment "we may lose the helicopter." Lydecker acknowledged that Landis might have been joking when he made the remark, but he said: "I learned not to take anything the man said as a joke. It was his attitude. He didn't have time for suggestions from anybody."

Investigation
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had just instituted regulations in March of that year to define how aircraft were to be regulated during film and television productions. The new regulations, however, only covered fixed-wing aircraft and not helicopters. As a result of the fatal accident, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommended that the terms be extended to apply to all types of aircraft.

Aftermath
The accident led to civil and criminal action against the filmmakers which lasted nearly a decade. Le's father Daniel Lee testified that he heard Landis instructing the helicopter to fly lower. All four parents testified that they were never told that there would be helicopters or explosives on set, and they had been reassured that there would be no danger, only noise. Lee survived the Vietnam War and emigrated with his wife to the United States, and he was horrified when the explosions began on the Vietnamese village set, bringing back memories of the war.

Landis, Folsey, Wingo, production manager Allingham, and explosives specialist Paul Stewart were tried and acquitted on charges of manslaughter in a nine-month trial in 1986 and 1987. Morrow's family settled within a year; the children's families collected millions of dollars from several civil lawsuits.

As a result of the accident, second assistant director Andy House had his name removed from the credits and replaced with the pseudonym "Alan Smithee." It was the first time that a director was charged due to a fatality on a set. The trial was described as "long, controversial and bitterly divisive".

Screen Actors Guild spokesman Mark Locher said at the conclusion of the trial: "The entire ordeal has shaken the industry from top to bottom." Warner Bros. set up dedicated safety committees to establish acceptable standards "for every aspect of filmmaking, from gunfire to fixed-wing aircraft to smoke and pyrotechnics." The standards are regularly issued as safety bulletins and published as the Injury and Illness Prevention Program (IIPP) Safety Manual for Television & Feature Production. The IIPP manual is "a general outline of safe work practices to be used as a guideline for productions to provide a safe work environment" and is distributed to all studio employees.

The Directors Guild of America's safety committee began publishing regular safety bulletins for its members and established a telephone hotline to "enable directors to get quick answers to safety questions." The guild also began to discipline its members for violations of its safety procedures on sets, which it had not done prior to the crash. The Screen Actors Guild introduced a 24-hour hotline and safety team for its members and "encouraged members to use the right of refusal guaranteed in contracts if they believe a scene is unsafe." Filming accidents fell by 69.6-percent between 1982 and 1986, although there were still six deaths on sets.

Landis spoke about the accident in a 1996 interview: "There was absolutely no good aspect about this whole story. The tragedy, which I think about every day, had an enormous impact on my career, from which it may possibly never recover." Filmmaker Steven Spielberg co-produced the film with Landis, but he broke off their friendship following the accident. Spielberg said that the crash "made me grow up a little more" and left everyone who worked on the movie "sick to the center of our souls". He added: "No movie is worth dying for. I think people are standing up much more now than ever before to producers and directors who ask too much. If something isn't safe, it's the right and responsibility of every actor or crew member to yell, 'Cut!'"

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/us/neil-armstrong-wrongful-death-settlement.html



By Scott Shane and Sarah Kliff
July 23, 2019

When Neil Armstrong died in a Cincinnati hospital two weeks after undergoing heart surgery in 2012, his family released a touching tribute addressing the astronaut’s millions of admirers around the globe.

“Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty,” they wrote, telling fans of the first man to walk on the moon that “the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink.”

But in private, the family’s reaction to his death at 82 was far stormier. His two sons contended that incompetent post-surgical care at Mercy Health – Fairfield Hospital had cost Mr. Armstrong his life, and even one expert retained by the hospital would find serious problems with his treatment.

The hospital defended the care, but paid the family $6 million to settle the matter privately and avoid devastating publicity, documents show. The hospital insisted on keeping the complaints and the settlement secret.

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https://twitter.com/BetteMidler/status/1153731733734481921
Bette Midler ✔ @BetteMidler

#KingRat will rant on those four women of color for the next year. It's bullshit. Everyone knows he's paddling as fast as he can to distract us from the fact that he was a MAJOR PARTICIPANT in the #JeffreyEpstein drama, the unfolding of which is going to prove SEVERE.

2:20 PM - Jul 23, 2019

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/immigration/2019/07/22/dallas-born-citizen-picked-border-patrol-detained-three-weeks



An 18-year-old Dallas-born U.S. citizen has been in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement for more than three weeks, his attorney says.

Now his family fears he may be deported.

Francisco Erwin Galicia was detained at a CBP checkpoint in Falfurrias on June 27, said Claudia Galan, his attorney.

Galicia was traveling with his 17-year-old brother Marlon Galicia and a group of friends from Edinburg where they live to Ranger College in North Texas for a soccer scouting event when they came upon a CBP checkpoint, said Sanjuana Galicia, his mother.

It was about 8 p.m. Marlon, who was born in Mexico and lacked legal status, had only been through a border checkpoint on school trips and had never been pressed to provide travel documents.

But this time was different, Marlon said. He had only a school ID. His brother was carrying only his Texas ID, which can only be obtained with a Social Security number.

“We were confident that we’d be able to pass. We were going to do something good for our futures,” he said. “I didn’t imagine this could happen and now I’m so sad that I’m not with my family,” Marlon said by phone from Reynosa, Mexico, where he is staying with his grandmother.

After two days in detention, Marlon signed a voluntary deportation form.

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