May 28: One Article, A Global Movement; Washington's First Battle; The Number That Divided a Nation

Some of history's most consequential moments arrive in the most modest packaging — a newspaper article, a skirmish in a Pennsylvania forest, a baseball arcing into the left-field stands. May 28 offers three of them: a British lawyer who wrote a piece for a Sunday paper and accidentally founded one of the most influential human rights organizations in history; a twenty-two-year-old George Washington who fired the first shots of a conflict that would eventually reshape two continents; and a baseball player whose 715th home run was cheered and doubted in equal measure, dropping into a debate about achievement and integrity that the sport has never fully resolved. Three different scales of action, three different kinds of consequence — and the same stubborn truth that the smallest initiating event can set the largest things in motion.

The Forgotten Prisoners

On May 28, 1961, the British newspaper The Observer published an article by London lawyer Peter Benenson titled "The Forgotten Prisoners," which described the cases of six men imprisoned in various countries for peacefully expressing their political beliefs — a Portuguese student jailed for raising a toast to freedom, a Hungarian cardinal imprisoned since 1948, an American author held in a Soviet labor camp. Benenson had been moved to write after reading about two Portuguese students sentenced to seven years in prison by the Salazar regime for raising glasses to freedom in a Lisbon café. He had, he later said, felt the familiar surge of frustration that political injustice produces and then, rather than letting it subside, decided to do something about it. His article called for a coordinated international campaign of letter-writing to pressure governments on behalf of political prisoners — people he called "prisoners of conscience," a phrase he coined for the occasion that has remained in use ever since.

The response to "The Forgotten Prisoners" was immediate and international: letters poured into Benenson's office, volunteers organized in multiple countries, and what had been conceived as a one-year "Appeal for Amnesty" became a permanent organization. Amnesty International was formally established in 1961 and has since grown into one of the world's largest and most respected human rights organizations, with more than ten million members and supporters in over 150 countries. It has campaigned for the release of thousands of prisoners of conscience, documented torture and extrajudicial killing across the globe, and used the unglamorous but effective tool of public attention — letters, reports, press releases — to pressure governments who would prefer to operate in obscurity. Amnesty has received the Nobel Peace Prize and the United Nations Human Rights Prize. Peter Benenson, who died in 2005, is credited with demonstrating that organized citizen advocacy across national borders could hold governments accountable for how they treated their own people. He wrote a newspaper article. The world is still writing the letters it inspired.

Jumonville Glen

On May 28, 1754, a twenty-two-year-old Virginia militia colonel named George Washington led a force of approximately forty men in a surprise attack on a French scouting party encamped at a wooded ravine called Jumonville Glen in present-day southwestern Pennsylvania. The French commander, Ensign Joseph Coulon de Jumonville, was killed in the engagement — almost certainly while attempting to surrender, though Washington's account and the French account of the event differ sharply on this point. Ten French soldiers were killed, one escaped to carry the news to Fort Duquesne, and twenty-one were taken prisoner. The skirmish lasted perhaps fifteen minutes. It was George Washington's first military engagement and, arguably, the opening shots of the Seven Years' War — a conflict that would eventually involve the major powers of Europe and spread to five continents.

Voltaire later wrote that Washington's volley at Jumonville Glen had kindled a fire that set the world ablaze — a claim that historians have debated but that captures something true about how local conflicts, when they involve the right combination of competing imperial interests, can scale beyond anything their participants imagined. Washington retreated after the skirmish to a hastily constructed stockade called Fort Necessity, where he surrendered to a larger French force on July 4, 1754 — the only surrender of his military career — and was allowed to return to Virginia with his troops. The experience at Jumonville Glen and Fort Necessity, humbling as it was, gave Washington his first lessons in military command, frontier logistics, and the gap between the plans a young officer makes and the reality a Pennsylvania forest delivers. Twenty-two years later, the lessons were applied to rather larger purposes.

715

On May 28, 2006, Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants hit a fastball from Colorado Rockies pitcher Byung-Hyun Kim into the left-field stands at AT&T Park and reached 715 career home runs — one more than Babe Ruth, second only to Hank Aaron's 755 on the all-time list. The crowd's reaction was a compressed version of the divided sentiment that had followed Bonds throughout the twilight of his career: genuine admiration for an athletic achievement of extraordinary magnitude, genuine uncertainty about how much of that achievement to trust. Bonds had been at the center of the BALCO scandal — a federal investigation into a Bay Area laboratory that had supplied performance-enhancing drugs to numerous professional athletes — and though he had never failed an officially administered drug test, his physical transformation across his late thirties and the extraordinary statistical spike in his production during those years had made him the most contested figure in baseball.

The Bonds debate — still unresolved — is in many ways the central argument of what baseball calls the Steroid Era, the period from the late 1980s through the early 2000s during which performance-enhancing drug use was widespread, largely unsanctioned, and commercially convenient for a sport that had been damaged by a labor strike in 1994 and was grateful for the home run totals that were refilling its stadiums. The question Bonds's 715th home run placed before the record books is genuinely difficult: how do you evaluate athletic achievement when the conditions that produced it were not those that governed the competition? The Baseball Writers' Association of America answered by declining to elect Bonds to the Hall of Fame in any of his ten years of eligibility, a verdict that remains contested. Hank Aaron, who held the all-time record that Bonds was approaching, chose not to attend the ceremony when Bonds eventually broke it in August 2007. The number 715, on May 28, 2006, landed in the stands and left a question that baseball has not finished arguing about. It may never finish.