North America

Over its more than two centuries of history, the United States has seen its share of good and bad days. But there have been a few days that left Americans in fear for the future of the nation and for their own safety and well-being. Here, in chronological order, are eight of the scariest days in America.

British forces captured Washington DC and set the White House on fire

On August 24, 1814, during the War of 1812 between the United States and England, British troops enter Washington, D.C. and burn the White House in retaliation for the American attack on the city of York in Ontario, Canada, in June 1813.

When the British arrived at the White House, they found that President James Madison and his first lady Dolley had already fled to safety in Maryland. Soldiers reportedly sat down to eat a meal made of leftover food from the White House scullery using White House dishes and silver before ransacking the presidential mansion and setting it ablaze.

According to the White House Historical Society and Dolley’s personal letters, President James Madison had left the White House on August 22 to meet with his generals on the battlefield, just as British troops threatened to enter the capitol. Before leaving, he asked his wife Dolley if she had the “courage or firmness” to wait for his intended return the next day. He asked her to gather important state papers and be prepared to abandon the White House at any moment.

The next day, Dolley and a few servants scanned the horizon with spyglasses waiting for either Madison or the British army to show up. As British troops gathered in the distance, Dolley decided to abandon the couple’s personal belongings and instead saved a full-length portrait of former president George Washington from desecration. Dolley wrote to her sister on the night of August 23 of the difficulty involved in saving the painting. Since the portrait was screwed to the wall, she ordered the frame to be broken and the canvas pulled out and rolled up. Two unidentified “gentlemen from New York” hustled it away for safe-keeping. (Unbeknownst to Dolley the portrait was actually a copy of Gilbert Stuart’s original). The task complete, Dolley wrote “and now, dear sister, I must leave this house, or the retreating army will make me a prisoner in it by filling up the road I am directed to take.” Dolley left the White House and found her husband at their predetermined meeting place in the middle of a thunderstorm.
Although President Madison and his wife were able to return to Washington only three days later when British troops had moved on, they never again lived in the White House. Madison served the rest of his term residing at the city’s Octagon House. It was not until 1817 that newly elected president James Monroe moved back into the reconstructed building.

April 14, 1865: President Abraham Lincoln Assassinated

After the five dreadful years of the Civil War, Americans were depending on President Abraham Lincoln to maintain the peace, heal the wounds, and bring the nation together again. On April 14, 1865, just weeks after beginning his second term in office, President Lincoln was assassinated by embittered Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth.

With a single pistol shot, the peaceful restoration of America as a unified nation seemed to have come to an end. Abraham Lincoln, the president who often spoke forcefully for “letting the Rebels up easy” after the war, had been murdered. As Northerners blamed Southerners, all Americans feared that the Civil War might not really be over and that the atrocity of the legalized enslavement of people remained a possibility.

October 29, 1929: Black Tuesday, the Stock Market Crash

The end of World War I in 1918 ushered the United States into an unprecedented period of economic prosperity. The “Roaring 20s” were the good times; too good, in fact.

While American cities grew and prospered from rapid industrial growth, the nation’s farmers suffered widespread financial despair due to the overproduction of crops. At the same time, a still unregulated stock market, coupled with excessive wealth and spending based on post-war optimism, led many banks and individuals to make risky investments.

On October 29, 1929, the good times ended. On that “Black Tuesday” morning, stock prices, falsely inflated by speculative investments, plummeted across the board. As the panic spread from Wall Street to Main Street, almost every American who owned stock desperately began trying to sell it. Of course, since everyone was selling, nobody was buying and stock values continued in free fall.

Across the nation, banks that had invested unwisely folded, taking businesses and family savings with them. Within days, millions of Americans who had considered themselves “well off” before Black Tuesday found themselves standing in endless unemployment and bread lines.

Ultimately, the great stock market crash of 1929 led to the Great Depression, a 12-year period of poverty and economic turmoil that would be ended only by new jobs created through the New Deal programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the industrial ramping up to World War II.

December 7, 1941: Pearl Harbor Attack

In December 1941, Americans looked forward to Christmas secure in the belief that their government’s long-standing isolationist policies would keep their nation from becoming involved in the war spreading across Europe and Asia. But by the end of the day on December 7, 1941, they would know their belief had been an illusion.

Early in the morning, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt would soon call a “date that will live in infamy,” Japanese forces launched a surprise bombing attack on the U.S. Navy’s Pacific fleet based at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. By the end of the day, 2,345 U.S. military personnel and 57 civilians had been killed, with another 1,247 military personnel and 35 civilians wounded. In addition, the U.S. Pacific fleet had been decimated, with four battleships and two destroyers sunk and 188 aircraft destroyed.

As images of the attack covered newspapers across the nation on December 8, Americans realized that with the Pacific fleet decimated, a Japanese invasion of the U.S. West Coast had become a very real possibility. As the fear of an attack on the mainland grew, President Roosevelt ordered the internment of more than 117,000 Americans of Japanese descent. Like it or not, Americans knew for sure that they were a part of World War II.

October 22, 1962: The Cuban Missile Crisis

America’s long-held case of Cold War jitters turned to absolute fear on the evening of October 22, 1962, when President John F. Kennedy went on TV to confirm suspicions that the Soviet Union was placing nuclear missiles in Cuba, a mere 90 miles from the coast of Florida. Anybody looking for a real Halloween scare now had a big one.

Knowing that the missiles were capable of hitting targets anywhere in the continental United States, Kennedy warned that the launch of any Soviet nuclear missile from Cuba would be considered an act of war “requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”

As American school kids practiced hopelessly taking shelter under their tiny desks and were being warned, “Don’t look at the flash,” Kennedy and his closest advisers were undertaking the most dangerous game of atomic diplomacy in history.

While the Cuban Missile Crisis ended peacefully with the negotiated removal of the Soviet Missiles from Cuba, the fear of nuclear Armageddon lingers today.

November 22, 1963: John F. Kennedy Assassinated

A mere 13 months after resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while riding in a motorcade through downtown Dallas, Texas.

The brutal death of the popular and charismatic young president sent shockwaves across America and around the world. During the first chaotic hour after the shooting, fears were heightened by erroneous reports that Vice President Lyndon Johnson, riding two cars behind Kennedy in the same motorcade, had also been shot.

With Cold War tensions still running at a fever pitch, many people feared that Kennedy’s assassination was part of a larger enemy attack on the United States. These fears grew, as the investigation revealed that the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine, had renounced his American citizenship and attempted to defect to the Soviet Union in 1959.

The effects of the Kennedy assassination still reverberate today. As with the Pearl Harbor attack and the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, people still ask each other, “Where were you when you heard about the Kennedy assassination?”

April 4, 1968: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Assassinated

Just as his powerful words and tactics like boycotts, sit-ins, and protest marches were moving the American civil rights movement forward peacefully, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead by a sniper in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968.

The evening before his death, Dr. King had delivered his final sermon, famously and prophetically saying, “We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop… And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”

Within days of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s assassination, the civil rights movement went from non-violent to bloody, spiked by riots along with beatings, unjustified jailing, and murders of civil rights workers.

On June 8, the accused assassin James Earl Ray was arrested at a London, England airport. Ray later admitted that he had been trying to get to Rhodesia. Now called Zimbabwe, the country was at the time ruled by an oppressive South African apartheid, white minority-controlled government. Details revealed during the investigation led many Black Americans to fear that Ray had acted as a player in a secret U.S. government conspiracy targeting civil rights leaders.

The outpouring of grief and anger that followed King’s death focused America on the fight against segregation and sped the passage of important civil rights legislation, including the Fair Housing Act of 1968, enacted as part of the Great Society initiative of President Lyndon B. Johnson.

September 11, 2001: The September 11 Terror Attacks

Before this scary day, most Americans saw terrorism as a problem in the Middle East and were confident that, as in the past, two wide oceans and a mighty military would keep the United States safe from attack or invasion.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, that confidence was shattered forever when members of the radical Islamic group al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial airliners and used them to carry out suicide terrorist attacks on targets in the United States. Two of the planes were flown into and destroyed both towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, a third plane struck the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., and the fourth plane crashed in a field outside of Pittsburgh. By the end of the day, just 19 terrorists had killed nearly 3,000 people, injured more than 6,000 others, and inflicted over $10 billion in property damage.

Fearing that similar attacks were imminent, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration banned all commercial and private aviation until enhanced security measures could be put in place at U.S. airports. For weeks, Americans looked up in fear whenever a jet flew overhead. The airspace over North America was closed to civilian aircraft for several days.

The attacks triggered the War on Terror, including wars against terrorist groups and terror-harboring regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The attacks resulted in the passing of controversial laws like the Patriot Act of 2001, as well as strict and often intrusive security measures.

On November 10, 2001, President George W. Bush, addressing the General Assembly of the United Nations, said of the attacks, “Time is passing. Yet, for the United States of America, there will be no forgetting September the 11th. We will remember every rescuer who died in honor. We will remember every family that lives in grief. We will remember the fire and ash, the last phone calls, the funerals of the children.”

In the realm of truly life-changing events, the September 11 attacks join the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassination as days that spur Americans to ask each other, “Where were you when…?”

6 Presidents Who Never Served in Office Before the White House

President Donald Trump is the only modern president who had no political experience before entering the White House.

Herbert Hoover, who served during the beginning of The Great Depression, is the only president considered to have less experience in running for elected office.

Most presidents who lacked political experience had strong military backgrounds; they include Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Zachary Taylor. Trump and Hoover had neither political nor military experience.

No Experience Required

Political experience is not necessary, though, to make it to the White House. None of the requirements for being president set forth in the U.S. Constitution include having been elected to office before entering the White House.

Some voters favor candidates who have no political experience; those outsider candidates have not been subject to corrupting influences in Washington, D.C., such voters figure.

The 2016 presidential contest featured other candidates besides Trump who had never held elected office, including retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and former tech executive Carly Fiorina.

Still, the number of people who have served in the White House without having previously served in an elected office is small.

Even the most inexperienced presidents—Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and George H.W. Bush—held office before entering the White House.

The first six presidents in American history previously served as elected delegates to the Continental Congress. And since then most presidents have served as governors, U.S. senators or members of Congress—or all three.

Political Experience and the Presidency

Having held an elected position before serving in the White House certainly does not guarantee a president will perform well in the highest office in the land.

Consider James Buchanan, a skilled politician who consistently ranks as the worst president in history among many historians because of his failure to take a position on slavery or negotiate during the Secession Crisis.

Eisenhower, meantime, often performs well in surveys of American political scientists and historians even though he never held elected office before the White House. So, of course, does Abraham Lincoln, one of America’s greatest presidents but someone who had little previous experience.

Having no experience can be a benefit. In modern elections, some presidential candidates have scored points among a disaffected and angry electorate by portraying themselves as outsiders or novices.

Candidates who have intentionally distanced themselves from the so-called political “establishment” or elite include pizza-chain executive Herman Cain, wealthy magazine publisher Steve Forbes, and businessman Ross Perot, who ran one of the most successful independent campaigns in history. 

Most American presidents served in elected office before being elected president, though. Many presidents served as governors or U.S. senators first. A few were members of the U.S. House of Representatives before being elected president.

The first five presidents all served as elected delegates to the Continental Congress. Two of the delegates also went on to serve in the U.S. Senate before running for president.