January 4 in History

Charles I didn't come alone. He brought 400 soldiers into the House of Commons on January 4, 1642, looking for five members of Parliament he wanted arrested for treason. When he arrived, the chamber was empty. Speaker William Lenthall knelt on the floor and told the king he had no eyes to see, no ears to hear, no tongue to speak, except as Parliament directed. The five men had slipped out through a back door minutes earlier. Charles left having found nobody, looking like a bully who'd walked into the wrong room. His attempt to seize Parliament's leadership by force destroyed whatever remained of his authority. Within months, England was at war with itself. The Civil War lasted nearly a decade. Charles lost his crown — and eventually his head — on a scaffold outside the Banqueting House in 1649. The Parliament he'd tried to arrest outlived him.

Lyndon Johnson stood before Congress on January 4, 1965, and said the words Great Society in his State of the Union address. He'd first used the phrase at Ohio University eight months earlier, but this night it became a governing agenda. What followed was the most concentrated burst of domestic legislation since the New Deal: Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Immigration and Nationality Act — all in 1965 alone. Johnson understood he had a window. The 1964 landslide had given Democrats their biggest House majority since 1938, and he worked that majority relentlessly. His Chief of Staff recalled him once making 85 phone calls in a single evening. Vietnam eventually consumed his presidency. But Medicare still covers 65 million Americans. Medicaid covers 90 million more. The window opened on January 4 and Johnson ran through it.

He died in a car crash on January 4, 1960, on a road in Burgundy. Albert Camus was 46, at the peak of his reputation, with a Nobel Prize four years old and unfinished manuscripts in the briefcase that was found at the crash site. He had spent the 1950s writing about Algeria — the country where he was born and loved — as France tore itself apart over independence. He couldn't take a simple side. The Algerian left thought him a coward. The French right thought him a traitor. He died before it was resolved. He might have found the resolution unbearable either way.

He proposed a thought experiment in 1935 in which a cat was simultaneously alive and dead. Erwin Schrodinger meant it as a critique of quantum mechanics, not a celebration of it — he thought the Copenhagen interpretation led to absurdities. The cat became the most famous thought experiment in physics. He won the Nobel Prize in 1933 for the wave equation that bears his name, left Austria after the Anschluss, spent years at Oxford and Dublin, and wrote What Is Life?, a book that influenced the discovery of DNA. He died in Vienna in 1961 at 73.

Samuel Colt had already failed twice. Two factories. Two bankruptcies. His first revolver — the Paterson Colt — went bust in 1842 after the US Army passed on it, and Colt spent the next few years trying to sell an underwater telegraph cable just to stay solvent. Then a letter arrived from Captain Samuel Walker of the Texas Rangers. Walker wanted something that could fire six shots without reloading and survive combat against Comanche warriors on horseback. Colt built it. The Walker Colt came out weighing four and a half pounds — the most powerful handgun the 19th century would produce. On January 4, 1847, the government ordered 1,000 of them at $28 each. It saved the business. The Mexican-American War expanded it. By the Civil War, Colt revolvers were standard Union cavalry issue. Walker was shot dead in Mexico that October, eight months before his guns reached the troops.

Seoul fell for the second time in six months. Chinese and North Korean forces entered the city on January 4, 1951, after UN forces — led by the US Eighth Army — chose to abandon it rather than fight street by street. Three weeks earlier, 300,000 Chinese troops had crossed the Yalu River and shattered the American advance. The UN commander, General Matthew Ridgway, had taken over the Eighth Army after its previous commander died in a jeep accident on Christmas Day. Ridgway found an army that had stopped believing it could win. He relieved officers, walked the front lines, and pinned grenades to his chest so his soldiers could find him in a fight. The counteroffensive began in January. By March, Seoul was back in UN hands. It changed hands four times total. The city Seoulites live in today was built from rubble.

Henri Bergson died in Paris on January 4, 1941, at 81. He'd won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927 — unusual for a philosopher — for prose that, according to the committee, combined "brilliant imagery" with profound ideas about time and consciousness. When the Nazis occupied Paris in 1940, Bergson was exempt from anti-Jewish laws because the Vichy government offered him honorary Aryan status. He refused it. He stood in line with other Jewish Parisians to register, reportedly in the cold, in failing health. He died weeks later.

He said: "April is the cruellest month." T. S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land in 1922 while recovering from a nervous breakdown, partly in a sanatorium in Switzerland. It's 434 lines, full of quotations from five languages, and it changed English poetry. He was American and became British, a banker who became a publisher, a skeptic who became a committed Anglican. He was married twice — the first marriage was a disaster publicly documented in both their writings. He won the Nobel Prize in 1948. He died at 76, apparently content, finally.

Mae Questel provided the voice for Betty Boop beginning in 1931, at a time when talking cartoons were still new and studios were figuring out what animated women were supposed to sound like. She based the voice on Helen Kane, a real singer who sued the studio for it. The lawsuit failed when the studio produced a Black jazz singer named Baby Esther who'd been doing the baby voice years before Kane. Questel also voiced Olive Oyl in the Popeye cartoons for decades. She died on January 4, 1998, at 89. Her last major screen role was in Home Alone 3, the year before she died.