0:00 Looking out at the creek this evening, the mist is rising off the water just like smoke off a damp brake shoe, and it reminds me how every generation thinks they can predict where the track leads.0:15 On November sixth, across five different centuries, folks cast ballots, surrendered ships, and patented contraptions believing they were concluding an argument once and for all, while in truth they were barely clearing the depot switch.0:33 Yesterday, in episode two hundred twenty-four, we tracked Susan B.0:38 Anthony demanding her vote and Guy Fawkes lighting fuses under Parliament.0:44 Today, November sixth picks up that exact ember, because twenty-two years before Anthony marched to the polls, this very date set a fuse that tore the continent in two.0:57 Well, you take November sixth, eighteen sixty.1:00 Most voters walking into the polling booths on that Tuesday figured they were just choosing between four names for president, maybe settling an ugly tariff dispute or cooling tempers down in Congress.1:16 Abraham Lincoln won forty percent of the popular vote, carrying eighteen Northern states.1:23 What looked like a routine political reshuffling from the ballot box looked, from ten years down the line, like the opening whistle of a locomotive barreling toward a washed-out trestle.1:37 Down South, folks convinced themselves secession would be peaceful and bloodless.1:43 Lincoln himself hoped common sense might calm the waters before inauguration day.1:50 Neither side saw four years of trenches, half a million dead, and a nation remade from the roots up.1:57 And that wasn't the only time November sixth put an end to that bloody business in a way nobody expected.2:05 Now, stay with me on this one, because you could fish this creek for fifty years and never snag a stranger yarn.2:14 Five years later, on November sixth, eighteen sixty-five, the American Civil War finally ended, not in Virginia, not in Georgia, but in the Mersey River off Liverpool, England.2:28 Swear on my tackle box, that is the honest truth.2:31 A Confederate raider called the C.S.S.2:34 Shenandoah had been out in the Pacific burning Union whaling vessels.2:40 Captain James Waddell didn't get word that Lee surrendered in April, so he just kept on blasting away at sea until August, when a British merchantman handed him a newspaper.2:53 Waddell realized if he landed in Boston, his whole crew would hang for piracy.2:59 So, what did he do?3:01 Well, he took down his cannons, sailed seventeen thousand miles around Cape Horn without touching port, and pulled into Liverpool on this very morning to surrender his flag to Her Majesty's government.3:16 Six months AFTER the war was dead and buried, the last Confederate combat command folded its canvas in British fog.3:25 Look, that is how history loves to work on this calendar square.3:30 It is full of men building things with their bare hands, completely oblivious to what those toys would become.3:39 Take November sixth, eighteen sixty-one, up in Ontario.3:43 That was the day James Naismith was born.3:46 Now, when James grew up and went to teach physical education at a Springfield Y.M.C.A.3:53 in eighteen ninety-one, he wasn't trying to build a multi-billion-dollar global empire with sneaker deals and television networks.4:03 No, sir.4:03 He had a bunch of unruly boys stuck indoors during a Massachusetts blizzard, so he nailed two peach baskets to a running track ten feet high and handed them a soccer ball.4:17 He wrote thirteen rules on a piece of paper, and every time someone scored, the janitor had to climb a ladder to fetch the ball out.4:27 If you had told Naismith that a century later folks across the globe would watch giants leap for that basket, he would have thought you were out of your mind.4:39 The old-timers always used to say you don't know the value of a tree until the timber is cut.4:46 On this same date in eighteen fourteen, over in Belgium, another fellow came into the world: Adolphe Sax.4:54 Now that poor boy had the worst luck in Christendom.4:58 He fell down three flights of stairs, swallowed a needle, drank a bowl of diluted copper sulfate thinking it was milk, burned himself in a gunpowder blast, and got hit on the head with a cobblestone.5:14 His neighbors called him the ghost child.5:17 But he lived, and he went to work soldering brass and woodwind keys together, fixing to make an instrument that could balance the strings in an orchestra.5:29 When he patented the saxophone, the classical composers mostly sniffed at it and turned their backs.5:36 Adolphe died in poverty in Paris.5:39 He never lived to hear John Coltrane or Charlie Parker turn a smokey alleyway inside out with that twisted brass pipe.5:48 He thought his invention was for military parade marches and symphonies.5:54 You see, he had no idea he was building the voice of the twentieth century.6:00 And, well, the trail just keeps winding.6:03 In eighteen fifty-one, November sixth gave us Charles Dow.6:07 He started out as a farm boy in Connecticut who wanted to report the news.6:13 Later on, he and his partner Edward Jones figured ordinary merchants needed a quick way to know if commerce was picking up or drying out.6:23 So, Dow picked eleven railroad and industrial stocks, averaged their closing prices, and printed them on a two-page letter called the Customer's Afternoon Letter.6:36 That little list turned into the Dow Jones Industrial Average and The Wall Street Journal.6:43 Dow figured he was just giving shippers a handy ruler for rail freight.6:48 He could not have dreamed of computer terminals blinking twenty-four hours a day, trading trillions on the fraction of a second based on his evening tally.7:00 Now, you stay with me here, because the hinge of history swings on the quietest decisions.7:07 Think back to fifteen twenty-eight.7:10 Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca washed ashore on Galveston Island, Texas, on November sixth.7:17 He wasn't a conqueror riding high; he was a shipwrecked castaway with nothing to his name, shivering in the Gulf wind.7:26 If he had perished in the surf like most of his expedition, the Spanish might not have spent decades hunting for the mythical Seven Cities of Gold across the American Southwest.7:40 A single wave decided whether Cabeza de Vaca lived to walk three thousand miles barefoot across North America, mapping paths that defined borders four hundred years later.7:53 Or look at nineteen thirteen.7:55 Over in Newcastle, South Africa, a young lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi was arrested on November sixth for leading over two thousand Indian miners across the Transvaal border.8:08 At the time, the local magistrates treated it like a nuisance labor strike, a minor breach of immigration law to be settled with a jail sentence.8:20 What they didn't understand, and what the British Empire would learn twenty years later, was that Gandhi was field-testing satyagraha, nonviolent resistance, learning how passive defiance could grind imperial machinery to a dead stop.8:38 Even on television, November sixth has a way of hiding the future in plain sight.8:44 In nineteen forty-seven, a little program called Meet the Press aired its very first broadcast on N.B.C.8:52 It wasn't even meant to be a permanent television series.8:57 It began as a radio show to promote a magazine, and when they moved it to the small screen, critics considered television a passing carnival novelty.9:08 The cameras were hot, the studio was cramped, and yet that broadcast invented the Sunday morning political interrogation that politicians still prepare for all week long.9:21 That brings us right up onto this porch, looking at where we stand today.9:27 When you lay all those November sixths side by side, the lesson isn't that the old folks were foolish.9:35 Not at all.9:36 The lesson is that we are living inside the very same fog they were.9:41 Right now, today, people are casting ballots, signing company mergers, and tinkering with computer code in basements, absolutely convinced they know what the outcome will be.9:54 We measure our days by the noise of the headlines, just like folks in eighteen sixty thought the election was about a few tariff laws, or Waddell thought his ship was defending an empire that had already vanished under the grass.10:12 Looking back from ten years down the line, what will we say this present moment actually was?10:19 We will probably look back at some little invention we dismissed as a toy, or some regional election we thought was settled, and realize that was the switchback that rerouted the whole train.10:34 History doesn't show its hand while you're holding the cards.10:39 It waits until you've played them, walked out of the depot, and turned down the road.10:45 The past isn't a dead iron rail bolted into the ground.10:50 It is moving right along under our feet, humming with the weight of every choice we make before the whistle blows.10:58 And that, friend, is why you check the record.11:02 Well.11:02 That is about the size of it.
