1969--Man Oh Man on the Moon

The world was transfixed by the grainy video from a camera attached to the Lunar Module as Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon.

As Americans and countless others around the world stayed glued to their televisions, Astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the face of the Moon on July 20, 1969, 57 years ago today. Armstrong, the commander of the Apollo 11 mission climbed down a ladder from the Lunar Module Eagle to the surface in the Sea of Tranquility at 10:56 p.m. Eastern Day Light Time. 

As he climbed down, he repeated a carefully constructed statement on what he knew would be a historic occasion.  Viewers at home heard him say, “That’s one small step for man, one giant step for mankind.”  Armstrong would later insist that he said, “one small step for a man” and that the article had simply not been picked up by the microphone.  It is indicative of Armstrong’s notoriously detailed mind and insistence on precision that this misquote bothered him for years. 

The mission famously made good on President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 pledge, made at the height of the Space Race with the Soviet Union that the U.S. would go to the Moon within a decade.  

The crew of Apollo 11--Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin in their NASA publicity photo.

Like Armstrong, the other two members of the Apollo 11 crew were already veteran astronauts.  Pilot Michael Collins stayed in the main Command Module, Columbia still in orbit while Armstrong and Lunar Module pilot Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin descended to the surface, a tense trip marked by an alarming shortage of fuel for the rockets that adjusted the attitude of the craft and brought it to a landing.  Less than 11 seconds of fuel were left on touchdown. 

The business-like Armstrong had been calling off markers on the way down to Mission Control in Houston.  Finally, he radioed, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”  It took two hours to prepare to depart the lunar module.  Armstrong was soon joined on the surface by Aldrin. The men were on the surface for a little over two and a half hours. 

They shot still photographs, made a panoramic video of the surroundings then set up the camera on a tripod to observe their activities.  They tested various means of moving about on the surface and settled on kind of a lope. The two planted an American Flag stiffened with wire to stay unfurled in the Moon’s windless zero gravity.  They collected rock and soil samples, but everything was taking longer than expected and Aldrin tried to speed up the pace of his assignments before being warned that his pulse rate was climbing.  The pair was given a 15-minute extension of planned EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity) to complete their tasks.  

On the Moon with the Eagle Lunar Module and the American flag of conquest.

Aldrin re-boarded Eagle first and had some difficulty getting a bulky box of mineral samples up the ladder.  After a night’s sleep, the Eagle lifted off to return to Columbia.  Aldrin and Armstrong were on the Moon for just over 21 hours.  They left behind the flag, the landing craft stairs with a special plaque commemorating the event, and discarded items from their EVA including their backpacks, lunar overshoes, and a Hasselblad camera.  There was also a small bag of mementos carried by Aldrin in a suit pocket. 

After Columbia splashed down in the Pacific near Wake Island the capsule and astronauts were carried by helicopter to the deck of the USS Hornet, a famous aircraft carrier from World War II, where they were personally greeted by President Richard Nixon.  

President Richard Nixon with the Apollo 11 crew in isolation on the USS Hornet.

With the war in Vietnam still raging, dissent rife at home, and urban riots exploding in Black communities, Nixon—and the nation—craved some good news. 

The occasion of the landing has become beyond iconic.  Many historians now regard it as the pinnacle of the American Century.  Unsuspected by most people at the time, the county was on the verge of a long, slow slide. 

Crisis after crisis from the OPEC oil embargo of the ‘70s, terrorism, through endless wars, rapid de-industrialization, competition from rising economies, climate change-fueled natural disasters, a global pandemic, to today’s crisis of democracy and a starkly divided population have hammered the country. 

After the last Space Shuttle retired, NASA no longer had the capacity to launch astronauts into space and had to hitch rides from the Russians and other nations to the International Space Station and its successors.  The hardware part of space exploration was handed willy-nilly over to private corporations and billionaire vanity projects who squandered their investments in space tourism schemes.  Their rockets to launch satellites have proved unreliable.  Troubled Boing stranded two astronauts in orbit on a test run of its newest spaceship, Starliner.  Instead, a series of leaks and malfunctions have caused NASA to delay the duo’s return for months.  

The image of Armstrong on the Moon is a melancholy reminder that once we were a nation that could do things, big things.

In his first term Resident Trump aiming to cast himself in the image of JFK ordered NASA to return men to the Moon within five years but gave the gutted agency scant resources to complete the mission.  In celebration of capitalism and scorn for government accomplishments, hope is pinned on two competing privately owned corporations to build re-usable rocket systems to first transport astronauts and equipment to the International Space Station from which a new mission to the Moon might be launched.

 

Buzz Aldrin's, (second from the right) skeptical, shocked mugging during Donald Trump's unintelligible blathering about space became a social media sensation.

Neil Armstrong died in 2012 and Michael Collins in 2021. But 96-year-old Buzz Aldrin is still with us.  Aldrin enjoys his celebrity status and makes frequent public appearances including a memorable stint on Dancing With the Stars.  He is a strong proponent of the space program and an advocate for manned space exploration and a return to the Moon.  In 2017 he accepted an invitation from the Grifter-in-chief to attend a White House speech on the space program.  He became a viral social media sensation for the contorted faces he made as his host spouted literal gibberish.  Way to go, Buzz!

Despite, or perhaps because of all this, Americans commemorated the golden anniversary of the nation’s crowning achievement in 2019 with enthusiasm tempered by nostalgia.  The film First Man focused on Neil Armstrong played by Ryan Gosling.  The documentary Apollo 11 enjoyed a well-reviewed theatrical release.  PBS aired multiple documentaries and less prestigious cable outlets like The History Channel and The Sci-Fi Channel had offerings of their own.  Broadcast TV networks all had special programing.  Apollo Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston was meticulously restored and opened to the public.

The movie Fly Me to the Moon starting Scarlet Johansson and Channing Tatum was more about the orchestrated hype of manned space flight by NASA and a conspiracy theory fake than either scientific achievement or astronaut heroism.

Five years later there was far less ballyhoo.  Commemoration of the event was swamped by the attempted Trump assassination, President Joe Biden’s political free fall, and a breathtakingly divisive election in November.  The biggest cultural acknowledgement that year was Fly Me to the Moon.  The flick stared Scarlett Johansson as a savvy flack hired by the government to help swing public opinion back in favor of space exploration.  Included in her arsenal was a faked first man walk on the Moon “just in case something goes wrong up there.”  That played to a popular conspiracy theory that the whole mission was faked by Stanley Kubrick.

The bloom was off the rose. 

Artemis II, a high-flying step to the return to the Moon.

This year NASA visited the neighborhood of the Moon in the U.S. manned missions flight beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972.  Artemis II with a crew of five blasted on Artemis II Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion spacecraft Integrity on a mission to fly by the Moon and enter Moon orbit.  In the process the capsule and crew reached the furthest from the Earth by a manned mission, broadcast and recorded detailed images of the so-called Dark Side of the Moon, and oohed and awed Earthrise over the Lunar horizon.  The crew landed safely and cleared the way for the  Artemis IV mission to actually return to the Moon's surface scheduled for 2028.  That is if the technical difficulties the private built launch system that plagued development before don't return.

Trump, course, took credit for the whole thing even if it will take more than twice as long as his original goal due in no small part to starving NASA with slashed personnel, arbitrary slashes to research and development and actual productions, and anti-science hectoring.  It was made possible by Joe Biden's recommitment to the program during the window of his four years in office.

Most folks paid little attention to all of that background noise.  They were excited and there was a feverish run for the five plucky astronauts to shake hands, wave to crowds, and make stirring mini-speeches.  Then the Aremiss II bloom was off the rose again as the next big thing--the FIFA World Cup, grabbed all the attention.  

Corky Siegel at the Woodstock Opera House--Murfin Verse

Corky Siegel at the Woodstock Opera House 

July 18, 2026 

        The crowd was mostly well over sixty

            and just south of death

            in assorted sizes and shapes 

            and conditions of decrepitude.

                pot bellies and bald heads, razor cut perfection, 

                casual neglect and stray ponytails,

                baseball caps here and there bills forward,

                beards wispy and well tended,

                golf course tans, and ashen pallor,

                Hawaiian shirts, commemorative T's,

                no faux hippie tie dye in sight,

                Shorts, jeans, and what might be pajama bottoms.

            Ladies as slender as runway models 

                and plump as babushkas,

                hair dyed and coifed or left defiantly gray,

                simple print sun dresses, night out to the nines,    

                and any old thing at all.

            All paired up in unexpected combinations

                or lonely lurkers in the crowd.

        Once we were all young and beautiful,

                bopping out in smokey dive bars,

                at sun drenched street festivals,

                in cavernous old ballrooms,

                or benefits at the Wobbly Hall.

        As Corky got down and wailed on the mouth harp,,        

                we closed our eyes and for a moment

                were once again.

--Patrick Murfin

This Could Be the Start of Something Big--Women Siting Down to Tea in Seneca Falls Were Present at Creation

    

 Mrs. Stanton reads the draft of the resolution.

Note:  This celebration of the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention has been noted here several times before.  And it deserves to be.  It is also a reminder of how powerful just a handful standing up to all of the norms and expectations of their society can spark kindling that over time becomes a roaring bonfire.  Change is possible—even deep, fundamental, and revolutionary change.  The actions of a few, sustained over time and adversity, can lead to the paradigm shifts that seem to transform societies overnight.  Our own lonely collaborations around kitchen tables and in church basement meeting rooms may at this very moment be igniting that change.

1848 was the year of revolution in Europe.  On this side of the pond another kind of revolution, one that continues to this day, had its beginnings in a hastily called meeting in a small industrial town in Upstate New York. 

The Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention which was called to order on July 19, 1848, was hastily arranged by a group of ladies who came together over tea at the home of Jane Hunt to meet a visiting celebrity.  Lucretia Mott was a leading anti-slavery advocate and noted public speaker from Boston.  Attending the tea were Mary Ann McClintock; Martha Coffin Wright, Mott’s sister; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a young mother and veteran anti-slavery advocate, and Hunt.

Except for Stanton, the women were all members of the Society of Friends—the Quakers. Stanton was a Freethinker, although it was unlikely that her friends then understood how radical her religious views were.

 

                                                            A young Elizabeth Cady Stanton about the time of the convention.

Stanton recalled meeting Mott in 1840 at the International Anti-Slavery Convention in London where women in the American delegation were denied recognition seating.  She then, according to her account many years later, went on a diatribe about the general condition of women and their lack of economic and political rights.  Mott was impressed and the two began a friendship by correspondence when they returned to the U.S.

 

Quaker Lucretia Mott was already a senior activist in the Anti-Slavery movement.  Seen here with her supportive husband James in 1842.  James took the chair for the second day of the convention. 

In Hunt’s parlor, the discussion begun in London was shared.  The women eagerly added their own accounts and grievances.  It is unclear if Stanton, Mott or both came to the gathering with a plan or if it arose spontaneously.  In either event the women decided to call a convention to discuss advancing the status of women.  But it had to be done quickly before Mott, the major draw to such an event, left the area.  McClintock, only 27 years old, and Stanton were given the principal assignment of making the arrangements.  The local Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, the frequent site for anti-slavery, temperance, and other reform cause meetings, was secured as a venue for a meeting scheduled only eight days after the tea.  A brief call to the meeting was placed in the local Seneca County Courier which was picked up by Frederick Douglass’ North Star and other reform publications. 

Meanwhile Stanton was given the task of drawing up a Declaration and a set of resolutions.  Shrewdly, she drew from Thomas Jefferson’s soaring rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence.  She wrote that “all men and women had been created equal” and went on to list eighteen “injuries and usurpations,” the same number of charges leveled against the King in the original document, “on the part of man toward woman.”

She also drafted eleven resolutions, most of them dealing with the rights of women to own property, conduct business in their own name, and other legal and economic reforms.  Ten had been broadly agreed to at the tea.  On her own authority, Stanton added another, which she placed in the ninth spot which read, “Resolved:  That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.”  

The addition even shocked Mott, who was afraid the inclusion of a demand for the right to vote would be so radical that it would discredit the whole document.  By Stanton’s later account Mott exclaimed, “Why, Lizzie, thee will make us ridiculous.”  But all agreed to submit it to a vote of the convention. 

On such short notice the meeting was hardly a national event.  Many prominent women and reformers from Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City were unable to attend—indeed were likely completely ignorant it was taking place.  Attendees were drawn from the immediate area around Seneca Falls.

Luckily for the organizers the Finger Lakes Region was populated by some of the most progressive and reformed-minded people in the U.S.  Heavily populated by progressive Quakers, reform minded Methodists, Universalists and other religious groups, it was a hot bed of early Abolitionism and of other reform movements, especially Temperance, the mother cause for many first-generation feminists.  

 

Abolitionist Fredrick Douglass helped publicize the Convention in his newspaper the North Star and spoke forcefully in support of the Declaration and Resolution, helping to sway the support of most men in attendance.   He and Stanton became life long friends and collaborators, each supporting the others work.  In today's movement lingo the recognized intersectionality. 

The call went out not just to women, but to sympathetic men, of whom there were several, including Lucretia’s husband James, a leading anti-slavery crusader and Fredrick Douglass from Rochester.  Stanton’s husband Henry was a lawyer who advised her on points of law while she was drafting the resolutions.  But he had political ambitions and was frightened by the call for the vote for women so he arranged to be out of town during the convention so his name would not be associated with it.

The convention started in the middle of a rare blistering heat wave.  Temperatures would reach the 90’s both days.  A sizeable crowd, including 40 men, was outside the Methodist church waiting for admittance at 10 A.M.  Unfortunately, in the press of events, no one remembered to ask the Sexton to unlock the building.  Stanton’s young nephew had to be boosted through an open window to unbar the door.

Soon the crowd filled the main floor and overflowed into the balcony.  Men had been asked to attend only the second day, but seeing so many there, they were admitted but asked to refrain from speaking until the next day.  McClintock was appointed secretary. 

 

The Wesleyan Chapel as it appears today, its exterior restored by the National Park Service. 

The first day was largely taken up by speeches by Mott and Stanton, a humorous reading, and a first reading of the Declaration and Resolutions.  To conduct business the next day, no woman would step forward to claim the chair.  It was considered unseemly for a woman to preside over men.  James Mott was called onto chair the morning session where the Declaration and resolutions were debated.  All of the resolutions passed unanimously except the motion on suffrage, which experienced significant resistance.

Then Fredrick Douglass took the platform and delivered an eloquent plea of support for the resolution:

In this denial of the right to participate in government, not merely the degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice happens, but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world.

His argument swayed the attendees who voted heavily in favor, although not unanimously, and there were some walk-outs. It would not be the last time Douglass and other prominent Black Abolitionists came to the aid of early Feminism.

Emboldened by the radical turn of events Mott offered a twelfth resolution, although she must have known that it would cause the loss of support for the cause from several clergy present:

Resolved: For the overthrowing of the monopoly of the pulpit, and for the securing to woman equal participation with men in the various trades, professions and commerce.

The assembly, made up largely of Quakers, a faith without ordained clergy but which allowed women like Mott to be recognized as lay preachers, easily passed the addition.  Predictably some of the clergy in attendance, although never offering objection at the meeting, went back to their churches to denounce the meeting and its document.

Out of an estimated three hundred in attendance one hundred women and men signed the Seneca Falls Declaration, although subsequent criticism caused some of them to remove their names.  There were separate columns for the endorsements of women and men. 

The organizers considered the meeting a success.  Douglass prevailed upon Mott to stay in New York long enough for a second convention to be held two weeks later in Rochester.  Over the next two years similar local or state conventions were held in Ohio—where Sojourner Truth made her famous Ain’t I a Woman speech—Indiana, and Pennsylvania.

The novelty of the event and its radical declaration drew considerable press notice, some of it supportive, but most of it either ridiculing or reviling the meeting and its organizers.  Most of the reformist press was more or less positive.  Horace Greely offered tepid support in the New York Tribune.  But rival James Gordon Bennett derisively printed the entire Declaration in the New York Herald expecting that the document was so outrageous that it would self-destruct. 

Stanton had another opinion:

Just what I wanted…  Imagine the publicity given to our ideas by thus appearing in a widely circulated sheet like the Herald. It will start women thinking and men too; and when men and women think about a new question, the first step in progress is taken.

Despite the publicity at the time many participants did not think of the Seneca Falls Convention as foundational.  Mott regarded it as just one of many meetings she attended or addressed and as just a part of an on-going process.

Others would look to the 1850 National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts as the true beginning of an organized movement.  By that time Stanton had become the ally of another rising feminist, Susan B. Anthony and women’s suffrage took center stage as the main demand instead of being a controversial add-on. 

 

Stanton's position with her partner Susan B. Anthony as the most important senior leaders of the Suffrage Movement was endangered by her open avowal of radical Free Thought.  Her 1876  history of the Women's movement helped establish the Seneca Falls Convention the foundational moment of the movement and remind readers of her pivotal role. 

It wasn’t until 1876 when the now gray Stanton published the first volume of History of Woman Suffrage that she celebrated the Seneca Falls meeting as foundational, “the greatest movement for human liberty recorded on the pages of history—a demand for freedom to one-half the entire race.”  Despite the derision of rival Lucy Stone, Stanton’s late assessment became enshrined as the central act in a creation story. 

By the time that book was issued, Stanton had been marginalized in the movement.  Even her closest ally, Anthony, sometimes kept her at arms distance because of her scandalous Freethinking views on religion.  Many leaders believed the support of church women was essential to furthering the cause and Stanton was a red flag in the eyes of many of them. 

Some historians now believe that Stanton may have inflated the importance of the Seneca Falls meeting in the book to regain her place as central to the movement’s history.  But then again many of those same historians are as uncomfortable with Stanton’s apostasy as were the likes of Lucy Stone.  

 

First Wave sculpture group by Lloyd Lillie depicting 20 Seneca Falls convention attendees including Mary Ann and Thomas McClintock, Lucretia and James Mott, Jane and Richard Hunt, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Martha Wright and 11 anonymous participants representing men and women who attended the Convention.

Discounting the myths that have grown up around the event—it was not a national convention, men were not only in attendance but played leading roles, and suffrage was not the main focus—the contemporary press accounts of the event and the energy that it gave to ongoing efforts, not the least of which was launching Stanton’s career, make it clear that to be at Seneca Falls was to be present at creation.

 

The Far off Siege of Cuddalore Could be Last Battle of the American Revolution

British Regulars engage forces of the Sultan of Mysore during the Siege of Cuddalore.

What might be considered the last battle of the American Revolution came to an end on July 25, 1783 when the combatants got preliminary notice that a Peace Treaty had been signed.  The British forces including Hessian mercenaries and native units lifted their 48-day siege of the strong point citadel of Cuddalore or Gondelour to the French and defended by a recently reinforced French garrison and their native allies.  You scholars scrambling to find the fortress on a map of North America or even a map of the New World will be frustrated. Cuddalore was a port on the far southeast coast of India.

Huh!?!  Let me explain.

The French renewed an old feud with England when they became allies of the struggling and infant United States of America in February 1778 and an active belligerent by Declaration of War a month later.  Like the Seven Years War (the French and Indian War in North America) it quickly became a world war between empires fought not only in the former Colonies but on the high seas around the globe, on Caribbean islands, in Europe, West Africa, India, and the Philippines.  Britain’s allies included Prussia, Portugal, and a small gaggle of German principalities.  Fighting with the French in addition to the Continentals were the Holy Roman Empire (Austria, Saxony, and Bavaria), Spain, Russia, and the Indian Mughal Empire.

Both nations had ambitions and interests on the sub-continent and fought there in the previous 1754-63 conflict where East India Company under Robert Clive mounted its own private army.  The French Mughal allies were crushed and French enclaves and strong points including Cuddalore fell to the British virtually ending their presence in India.

French Admiral Pierre André de Suffren de Saint Tropez, also known as the Bailli de Suffren gestures to the Citadel of Cuddalore in this 1785 portrait by Pompeo Batoni.

By 1782 with British forces heavily committed in North America and the Antilles, French Vice Admiral Pierre André de Suffren Saint-Tropez, who had already defeated a Royal Navy Squadron off the Cape Verde Islands in the South Atlantic preventing the British from taking Cape of Good Hope, sailed to Southern India and allied with the Nawab of Mysore in his war against the East India Company.  Mysore troops already seized some old French strong holds including Cuddalore, which the French reinforced with 2500 European troops and 2000 Sepoys (native Indian troops) under the command of the Marquis de Bussy  to join the 5800 Musorians in the city and citadel.

As Suffren cruised Indian Ocean fighting a series of hard fought, desperate naval battles with a fleet under English Admiral Sir Edward Hughes, British troops under the command of Major-General James Stuart arrived outside Cuddalore on June 7, 1783.   Hughes’s army consisted of the 73rd and 78th Highlanders, the 101st Regiment—Regulars rather than East India Company troops—and a large body of Sepoys.  It was reinforced by a detachment of two Hanover mercenary regiments under Colonel Christoph August von Wangenheim.  The siege was on.

A French map showing the dispositions of forces during the Siege of Cuddalore.  The British lines are to the left and the fortress is in the lower right.

On June 15 Stuart launched a surprise pre-dawn attack which after hours of desperate fighting dislodged the allies from a key redoubt in front of the main citadel.  The defenders were forced back into the Fort and city as Stuart tightened his lines and waited for reinforcements from the sea.  But it was a costly victory.  His forces lost more than 900 killed and wounded while the allies lost more than 500 of their much larger force.  Stuart’s badly beat up force, especially the Europeans in their wool uniforms also suffered badly from the intense summer heat and disease which swept their encampments.

In the naval Battle of Cuddalore, Suffren's inferior fleet decisively defeated the Royal Navy driving it back to Madras.

Then on June 20 Stuart’s hopes for reinforcements were dashed when Suffren’s fleet arrived offshore and engaged the British flotilla for the final time, this time decisively defeating Hughes and sending him reeling back to Madras.  Suffren was then able to land 2500 marines who got inside the allied lines, significantly tipping the balance of power.

On June 25 DeBussy launched several sorties against the British lines but despite his superiority in numbers, badly botched the attacks.  The well-entrenched British lost only 25 men while the attackers lost 450 killed and wounded with another 150 taken prisoner including the field commander of the assault, the Chevalier de Dumas and several other officers.  The French lost the advantage they had gained by the reinforcements.

The siege dragged on for another five days with both sides taking casualties and suffering from losses to the heat and camp sickness, likely dysentery.  DeBussy was trying to get his depleted forces read for another sortie when a British ship arrived with news that France and Britain had tentatively agreed on peace.

On July 25 both exhausted European armies agreed on a local end of hostilities.   When the terms of the Treaty of Paris became known, the French had to surrender Cuddalore to the British.  In exchange they got back their important trading posts at Pondicherry north of Cuddalore and Mahé across the tip of the subcontinent on the western shore.

Thus ended the Indian part of the world war sparked by the American Revolution.  Historians refer to actions in that war outside of the New World as the Anglo-French War.  Although peace was restored between the powers, the war between Britain and the Mysoreans continued until the Treaty of Mangalore was signed in March 1784.  The Second Anglo-Mysore War ended with a British humiliation and the beginning of the end of the British East India Company.  Eventually the India Act made British possessions in India direct colonies with a Royal Governor General, and a vast colonial bureaucracy.

The French held on to their small enclave at Mahé and a few other points surrounded by British India.  After Indian independence, they were finally ceded by France in 1954.  

There is some small irony that it was heavily taxed East India Company tea that helped spark the American Revolution when Patriots dumped it into Boston Harbor.  And it was the last battle of that war that led to the collapse of the Company.