A Woman Secretly Ran the United States Government for Eighteen Months and Almost Nobody Knows It

 On October 2, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke that left him severely incapacitated.

He could not perform the duties of the presidency. He could barely function. For weeks he was hidden from virtually everyone outside his immediate household.

What happened next has no real precedent in American presidential history.

His wife Edith Wilson took over.

What Edith Wilson Did

Edith Wilson became the sole gatekeeper between the President and everyone else. Cabinet members who needed presidential decisions were required to submit written requests to her. She decided what reached her husband and what did not. She decided what was important enough to disturb him and what could wait or be handled without him.

She later said she was acting merely as a steward passing information back and forth. Historians have looked at the record and concluded that her role was considerably more active than that. She made decisions about what information the President received. She managed the communications that shaped his responses. She determined the agenda of the executive branch for the better part of a year and a half.

The 25th Amendment, which provides a clear process for transferring presidential power when a president becomes incapacitated, did not exist yet. It was not ratified until 1967. In 1919 there was no legal mechanism that anyone was willing to use to declare Wilson unable to serve and transfer power to the Vice President.

So the power stayed with Wilson officially while Edith managed it practically.

What the Cabinet and Congress Did Not Know

The extent of Wilson's incapacity was hidden from the cabinet, from Congress, and from the American public. Visitors who did manage to see the President were given carefully managed brief encounters. His deteriorated condition was concealed as much as possible.

Some cabinet members suspected the truth. Senator Albert Fall of New Mexico, who later became famous for his role in the Teapot Dome scandal, visited Wilson in December 1919 and reported that Wilson seemed sharp. Wilson's daughter later admitted the visit had been meticulously staged to create that impression.

The nation was effectively without a functioning president for the last eighteen months of Wilson's term. An unelected woman with no official title or constitutional authority managed the most powerful executive office in the world.

Edith Wilson outlived her husband by 37 years. She died in 1961 and was largely credited in obituaries as a devoted wife. The scope of what she actually did during those eighteen months was not fully examined by historians for decades.

She was the closest thing to an unelected president the United States has ever had. And almost nobody knows her name.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

The Dance Marathons of the Great Depression Were Not Entertainment. They Were Survival.

 If you have ever seen photographs of 1930s dance marathons you might have assumed they were entertainment. Couples dancing on stage in front of audiences. Judges watching. Prizes for the winners.

The photographs do not show everything.

Dance marathons during the Great Depression were endurance contests where couples danced for days, weeks, and sometimes months without stopping. Partners took turns sleeping, one propped up and shuffling in place while the other dozed on their partner's shoulder. Both of them kept moving. You had to keep moving. If you stopped you were eliminated.

Why They Did It

The prize for winning a dance marathon was typically cash. But for many of the couples who entered, winning was not the only point. The real appeal was what happened while you were competing.

Organizers provided contestants with food, shelter, and medical attention while the contest was running. Couples who entered and stayed in the contest had a roof over their heads and meals provided for as long as they kept dancing.

During the worst years of the Depression when unemployment reached 25 percent and families were losing homes and going hungry, that arrangement was not entertainment. It was survival.

Young couples with no money and nowhere to go entered these contests and stayed in them as long as their bodies held out. Not for the prize. For the food and the floor to sleep on.

What the Contests Were Actually Like

Marathon dancing was brutal. Contestants danced up to 45 minutes of every hour with a 15 minute rest period. This continued 24 hours a day.

Contestants developed sores on their feet. Their legs swelled. They suffered from sleep deprivation so severe they hallucinated. Some contestants collapsed and had to be carried by their partners to stay in the contest.

Audiences paid admission to watch. The spectacle of exhausted human beings shuffling in circles and occasionally collapsing was apparently entertaining enough that the contests turned profits for their organizers.

Some contests ran for months. The record was reportedly over 4,000 hours of continuous dancing spread over more than five months.

States eventually began banning dance marathons on public health and safety grounds. By the late 1930s most had been shut down.

Why This Matters

Dance marathons are remembered, when they are remembered at all, as a quirky cultural artifact of the Depression era. A strange fad.

What they actually were is a window into how desperate conditions were for ordinary Americans during the Depression. How far people would go for food and shelter. What human beings will endure when they have no better options.

The couples who entered those contests are not in the history books. Their names are not recorded anywhere. But they were real people in real need who found the only solution available to them and used it.

That is a Depression story that deserves to be told alongside the breadlines and the Hoovervilles.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

The Plague of Justinian Killed Half the Population of the Byzantine Empire and History Barely Covers It

 Most people know about the Black Death. The plague that swept through Europe in the mid 14th century and killed somewhere between a third and half of the European population. It is one of the most covered events in medieval history.

What most people do not know is that a very similar pandemic hit the world eight centuries earlier and may have been just as deadly.

It is called the Plague of Justinian. And it is one of the most significant events in ancient history that almost nobody learns about.

What It Was

The Plague of Justinian was the first recorded pandemic caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, the same organism responsible for the Black Death. It began in 541 AD during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, from whom it takes its name.

The plague likely originated in central or east Africa and spread along trade routes through Egypt into the Byzantine Empire and beyond. It reached Constantinople in 541 and spread across the Mediterranean world.

At its peak in Constantinople the plague was reportedly killing 10,000 people per day. Emperor Justinian himself contracted the disease and survived but barely. By some estimates the city lost 40 percent of its population.

The pandemic spread throughout the Byzantine Empire, into Persia, across North Africa, into western Europe. It persisted in recurring waves for roughly two centuries, flaring up every few years until around 750 AD.

Total deaths are estimated at somewhere between 25 and 50 million people. In a world with a much smaller total population than today that represented an enormous fraction of all living humans.

What It Changed

Justinian had been on the verge of reuniting the old Roman Empire. He had already reconquered North Africa from the Vandals and was making significant progress in Italy and Spain. The Plague of Justinian killed the soldiers, the farmers, and the tax payers that made those campaigns possible.

The reconquest of the western Roman Empire was abandoned. The Byzantine Empire contracted. The power vacuum in the west allowed new kingdoms and peoples to establish themselves permanently.

The Arab expansion of the 7th century, which transformed the entire Mediterranean world, happened in part because the Byzantine and Persian empires had both been severely weakened by the plague. Populations that had been devastated were less able to resist conquest.

The Plague of Justinian is not just a historical curiosity. It fundamentally shaped the world that came after it. The reason Europe in the medieval period looked the way it did, the reason the Byzantine Empire was what it was, the reason the Arab expansion succeeded as quickly as it did, all trace back in part to the pandemic of 541 AD.

And it is barely in any history curriculum in the western world.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.