April 14: A Shot in the Dark, A Pitch for the Ages, The Day the Sky Turned Black

April 14 has a way of arriving with force. It is the date on which a president went to the theater and did not come home, the date on which another president threw a baseball and started a tradition that has outlasted both of them, and the date on which the Great Plains sky turned the color of midnight at midday and a generation of Americans understood, viscerally and permanently, that the land they had broken could break them back. Three stories, three very different registers — tragedy, ceremony, catastrophe — bound together by the essential American question: what do we do when the ground shifts beneath us?

The Night That Changed Everything

On the evening of April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln arrived at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., to watch a performance of Our American Cousin. He had been persuaded to attend despite misgivings — he had reportedly dreamed of his own death only days before — and his presence had been advertised in the Washington papers, a fact that would prove fatal. The Civil War was, for all practical purposes, over: Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox just five days earlier, and Lincoln had spent the week navigating the enormous, delicate question of how to bring the defeated Southern states back into the Union without retribution. He was, by every account of those who saw him in those final days, relieved and exhausted and cautiously hopeful. At approximately 10:15 p.m., as the audience laughed at a line in the third act, John Wilkes Booth — a well-known actor, a Confederate sympathizer, and the organizer of a conspiracy that also targeted Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward that same night — entered the presidential box and fired a single .44-caliber derringer shot into the back of Lincoln's head.

Lincoln was carried to the Petersen House across the street, where he died the following morning at 7:22 a.m. without regaining consciousness. He was fifty-six years old. The grief that swept the country was unlike anything the nation had experienced — crowds gathered in the streets of Northern cities weeping openly; church bells tolled for days; his funeral train, which carried his body back to Springfield, Illinois, over twelve days and nearly seventeen hundred miles, was witnessed by an estimated seven million people along the route. The political consequences were immense. Lincoln had envisioned a Reconstruction built on reconciliation — "with malice toward none, with charity for all," as he had said in his second inaugural address just six weeks earlier. His death handed power to Andrew Johnson, whose hostility to Black civil rights and indifference to the freedmen's welfare would help ensure that the promise of Reconstruction was broken before it could be fulfilled. The shot fired at Ford's Theatre did not merely kill a president. It altered the entire trajectory of American racial history for generations to come.

Play Ball, Mr. President

Forty-five years later, on April 14, 1910, President William Howard Taft arrived at National Park in Washington, D.C., for Opening Day of the American League season between the Washington Senators and the Philadelphia Athletics. At the start of the game, Taft stood up from his seat and threw the first pitch to Senators pitcher Walter Johnson — who kept the ball and treasured it for the rest of his life — and in doing so inaugurated one of the most enduring ceremonial traditions in American public life. The gesture was, on its surface, simple: a large man in a suit throwing a baseball. But it captured something genuine about the relationship between the presidency and the national pastime, a sport that by 1910 had become so deeply embedded in American culture that a president's participation in its opening ritual carried real symbolic weight.

Taft repeated the tradition the following two seasons, and it was taken up by nearly every president who followed him. Woodrow Wilson threw out first pitches at both the American and National League openers in Washington. Franklin Roosevelt threw out the first pitch at eight consecutive seasons. The tradition has been observed, with rare exceptions, ever since — surviving wars, recessions, and the relocation of Washington's baseball franchise — and has spread to other sports and other countries as a model of the intersection between political leadership and popular culture. Taft himself is more often remembered today for the perhaps apocryphal story of getting stuck in a White House bathtub than for his considerable legal and administrative accomplishments. But the throw he made on a spring afternoon in 1910, on a day that also marks Lincoln's assassination and the Black Sunday dust storm, offers a welcome reminder that history does not only deal in catastrophe — sometimes it deals in a baseball, cleanly tossed, on a clear April day.

Black Sunday

On April 14, 1935, a wall of dust estimated at two miles high and two hundred miles wide swept across the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, turning the afternoon sky so completely black that livestock suffocated in their pens, cars were buried to their rooflines, and families huddled in their homes packing wet rags into windowsills and around door frames to keep the dirt from choking them as they breathed. The storm, which reached Amarillo, Texas, at approximately 7:20 p.m. local time, became the defining image of the Dust Bowl — the decade-long environmental and agricultural catastrophe that had been building across the southern Great Plains since the early 1930s, driven by a combination of severe drought, extreme heat, and the deep plowing of native grasslands that had held the soil together for millennia. Black Sunday was not an anomaly. It was the culmination of a crisis that had been years in the making.

The human toll of the Dust Bowl extended far beyond April 14. Over the course of the decade, an estimated 3.5 million people were displaced from the Great Plains — the largest internal migration in American history to that point — most of them heading west to California in the desperate search for agricultural work that John Steinbeck would immortalize in The Grapes of Wrath. The ecological lesson was painfully clear: the shortgrass prairie that settlers had been plowing under since the late nineteenth century had not been farmland waiting to be discovered. It had been a functioning ecosystem, stabilized by deep-rooted grasses that had evolved over thousands of years to hold the soil against exactly the winds that now stripped it away. Black Sunday accelerated the federal government's investment in soil conservation programs and led to the establishment of the Soil Conservation Service later in 1935. The native grasses, painstakingly replanted over subsequent decades, have slowly returned to portions of the Great Plains — a reminder that the land can recover, given enough time and enough humility from the people who work it.