MAY 8 –1806 Robert Morris, financer of the Revolution, dies in debt; 1952 Happy Birthday Mad Magazine
MAY 8
1945-Happy VE Day WWII allies!
German General Jodl signed the unconditional surrender, and shortly thereafter Winston Churchill was informed of the official end of WWII, just days after Adolf Hitler got married and committed suicide. Russian Leader Josef Stalin didn’t like the terms of the surrender, but who cares.
From Moscow to Piccadilly Circus to Los Angeles, people took to the streets and celebrated. From Times Square to Trafalgar Square the party was on. And what a tremendous way for Give Em Hell Harry to celebrate his 61st birthday. Naturally, President Harry Truman dedicated this day to FDR who had suddenly died a month earlier
. Speaking of Truman, now it’s his turn.
1884-Happy birthday number 33.
Haberdasher Harry was born in Lamar, Missouri in 1884. He met his wife Bess in Sunday school when he was 6 years old. He made a lousy farmer and business man, since the men’s clothing store he co-owned went bankrupt. Good thing he quit his day job.
In 1934 he was elected Senator in the Democratic Party, and headed the war investigating committee, checking into waste and corruption and saving perhaps as much as $15B, according to whitehouse.gov. He was playing poker when he found out he was the new President of the United States.
After VE Day Truman decided to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thus ending our conflict with Japan.
In other Harry fun facts, he played the piano every morning for two hours. He also witnessed the signing of the charter of the United Nations, presented to Congress a 21-point program, proposing the expansion of Social Security, a full-employment program, a permanent Fair Employment Practices Act, and public housing and slum clearance. This was known as the Fair Deal.
He developed the Truman doctrine with helped Greece and Turkey through Soviet threats, and created an airlift to help out Berlin eat some food despite the Russians attempting to block it.
The newspapers thought that Governor Thomas Dewey would be the next president, and as such printed headlines saying that. Hence the famous picture of Harry holding up a paper that says Dewey Defeats Truman, as Truman won through an incredible come-from-behind victory. He actually had a goat that he named after Dewey.
He had a limited war against Korea, not wanting to engage China and Russia. After his presidency he retired and died at age 88 on December 26, 1972. He came up with the saying, the buck stops here. And another great quote, if you can’t convince them, confuse them.
1806 Robert Morris, America’s founding capitakust and financier of the Revolution, dies in debt.
Born in London, England, , January 20 1734, Morris moved to North America in 1947 to be with his father in Maryland, then the ultimate entrepreneur teenager moved again and worked as an apprentice at a huge shipping firm in Philly. He quickly jumped to part owner of the firm at a very non-typical young age in a city like Philly where age meant rank.
Along with his partner Thomas Willing, toe global capitalist Morris’s firm was on Front St., near the waterfront, where his hustling included rolling kegs of rum and molasses, meeting with vendors and merchants, and doing deals at taverns.
Overseas shipping was a risky business. If you wanted to check up on why it’s taking so long to get your money back, it wasn’t like you could just make a phone call or send an email. Yet Morris did business with the West Indies, the Middle East, Spain and Italy.
Soon enough he got into the insurance and banking business: loans, bills of exchange, and credit lines. He would drink some of the rum in evenings, laughing it up with others back at the taverns until late in the night, and start over in the morning. At age 35 he married 20-year old Mary Write from Maryland, with whom they had seven children and stayed in one of Morris’s houses across the Schuylkill River.
The British meanwhile continued raising taxes and squeezing the entrepreneurs of the colonies of North America, and when it came time to sign the Declaration of Independence, Morris initially said no thanks. Not because he was from London and was a Loyalist, he hated the taxes more than most of the founding fathers present during the signing. He just didn’t think the colonies could assemble a military strong enough to beat the British army, but he crumbled upon peer pressure and signed it right next to John Hancock’s.
Morris was the financier of the Revolution, which I cover in detail April 7th ep, but basically he fed the troops just in time before they either deserted or downright mutinied against General George Washington. Without Robert Morris, chances are the American rebellion would’ve been soundly squished, and Washington hanged.
So you would think that Congress would appreciate that during the 1780s, but his fellow founding fathers felt that Morris was only looking out for himself.
While Morris was borrowing the money from the French to get Washington and the French army to Yorktown to deliver the final blow to the British, he was using his own personal credit since he couldn’t liquidate all that wonderful credit of his. That’s when he created the Bank of North America, using Morrisnotes to finance the rest of the war. Of course he made a profit on this, but that doesn’t mean that entrepreneurs are evil people.
He also had an arms deal with France to smuggle weapons right past British lines, and worked with a secret committee to organize an arms trade with other European agents. After the Revolution he continued to be a statesman, remaining America’s superintendent of finance before recommending the job of Treasury to Alexander Hamilton, and served in the Pennsylvania state assembly.
Meanwhile he dabbled in canal companies, steam engines, the first iron polling mills, and tried to corner the tobacco market. Then he got into real estate, buying some one million odd acres from New York to Georgia in hopes that Europeans would flock to America and the price would skyrocket.
Well, Europeans would immigrate to America but it would take about a hundred years, and Morris lost it all, which is how he wound up in debtor’s prison. He stayed there for three years and nobody helped him out. The bankruptcy act of 1800 gave Morris a break, while his wife was able to sell some land and live comfortably, R
obert Morris died on this day in 1806.
His biographer Charles Rappleye writes that Morris was “too rich to be a folk hero, and the ultimate failure of the personal fortune robbed him of any Midas-like mystique.”
Rest in peace, Robert!
1952- What me worry?
…Happy birthday to Alfred E. Newman, and MAD magazine debuts. Created by editor Harvey Kurtzman and publisher William Gaines, it remains to be utterly hysterical to this day. Yeah, pick one up. They still got it. Cheap! If you’ve never picked one up, do so and check out the fold-ins, the Lighter Side of…Spy Vs Spy, Don Martin Gaggs, A Mad Look at and Drawn-out Dramas, and movie and TV show parodies, it’s by far the funniest magazine I have ever read.