Raymond Wagstaff (1919 - 1979)

Refresh this page to see various historical events that occurred during Raymond's lifetime.

In 1919, in the year that Raymond Wagstaff was born, in the summer and early autumn, race riots erupted in 26 U.S. cities, resulting in hundreds of deaths and even more people being badly hurt. In most cases, African-Americans were the victims. It was called the "Red Summer". Men who were returning from World War I needed jobs and there was competition for those jobs among the races. Tension was heightened by the use by many companies of blacks as strikebreakers.

In 1924, Raymond was just 5 years old when J. Edgar Hoover, at the age of 29, was appointed the sixth director of the Bureau of Investigation by Calvin Coolidge (which later became the Federal Bureau of Investigation). The Bureau had approximately 650 employees, including 441 Special Agents. A former employee of the Justice Department, Hoover accepted his new position on the proviso that the bureau was to be completely divorced from politics and that the director report only to the attorney general.

In 1941, when he was 22 years old, in his State of the Union address on January 6th, President Roosevelt detailed the "four freedoms" that everyone in the world should have: Freedom of speech, Freedom of worship, Freedom from want, and Freedom from fear. In the same speech, he outlined the benefits of democracy which he said were economic opportunity, employment, social security, and the promise of "adequate health care".

In 1962, by the time he was 43 years old, lasting from October 16th - 28th, the Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest that the United States and the Soviet Union came to nuclear war. The Soviet Union had been installing a nuclear missile base in Cuba. The United States established a blockade to stop the base from being completed. Through secret negotiations, war was averted: the Soviet Union agreed to dismantle their weapons in Cuba and the United States agreed to never invade Cuba and to dismantle weapons in Turkey and Italy.

In 1979, in the year of Raymond Wagstaff's passing, on November 4th, Iranian militant students seized the US embassy in Teheran and held 52 American citizens and diplomats hostage for 444 days. They were released at the end of the inauguration speech of the newly elected Ronald Reagan.