20 Times History’s Underdogs Outsmarted The Powerful

Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian glazier who had previously worked on a maintenance project at the Louvre, entered the museum on August 21, 1911, dressed in a simple white worker’s smock. He removed Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa from its frame, wrapped it in his smock, and left. Yes, he simply walked out of the Louvre with what would become the world’s most famous painting tucked under his clothes. He kept it in a chest with a false bottom for 28 months as police questioned and even arrested suspects, including the painter Pablo Picasso. No one suspected the museum’s own former worker.

A disinherited Irish officer named Thomas Blood, posing as a priest, ingratiated himself with the then-77-year-old Jewel Keeper Talbot Edwards at the Tower of London. In May 1671, he bound the old man to his chair, flattened the crown with a mallet, and sawed the scepter in half. When Blood was caught trying to make off with his spoils, he demanded to see the King, Charles II. He was completely pardoned and even granted a yearly pension.

In October 1906, a 57-year-old ex-convict named Wilhelm Voigt, a cobbler by trade, bought a secondhand Prussian captain’s uniform in Berlin. Voigt stopped ten soldiers on the street, commanded them to march with him to Köpenick, took the town mayor into custody, and extracted 4,002 marks from the town treasury, issuing a proper receipt for the transaction. Even while robbing the treasury, paperwork had to be done. He hopped a train out of town, but was rounded up 10 days later. Voigt became a folk hero. In 1908, he was pardoned by Kaiser Wilhelm II, the German emperor.

Robert Smalls was only 23 and enslaved when he commandeered the Confederate transport ship CSS Planter in 1862, having waited for the white officers to go ashore, then picking up nine family members from a wharf along with his seven enslaved crewmen. Using the captain’s hat and the ship’s own signal codes, he bluffed his way through two Confederate checkpoints and Fort Sumter, all with no shots being fired. Then he raised a white flag and surrendered to the Union blockade.

In 1726, Mary Toft, a 23-year-old peasant woman from Godalming, England, told doctors she had given birth to animal parts following a miscarriage. The court surgeon Nathanael St. André examined her and announced that her claims were true. Then, a porter who caught her sneaking in a dead rabbit exposed her hoax. Toft admitted she inserted 17 pre-cut pieces of dead rabbits into herself to gain attention and money, and St. André’s reputation was ruined.

While working as a dial painter at U.S. Radium, Grace Fryer and other women were instructed to point their brushes with their lips, thus ingesting radium. Some developed jaw necrosis, or the death of jawbone tissue, and radiation poisoning; the company was later accused of paying doctors to blame syphilis instead. It took Grace Fryer two years to find a lawyer willing to sue on her behalf. She and four other women filed suit in 1927. Public outcry compelled U.S. Radium to settle in 1928 by offering each woman $10,000 and medical care, even before a jury had ruled.

In 1887, Elizabeth Cochrane, a 23-year-old reporter for the New York World newspaper, who wrote under the pen name Nellie Bly, was admitted to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island after feigning amnesia and insanity. During her 10 days in the asylum, she documented cold baths, expired food, and physical mistreatment. The asylum released her, as scheduled, upon the request of her newspaper’s lawyer. Her exposé of conditions at the asylum led to a grand jury investigation and an $850,000 increase in the budget for the care of asylum patients.

On January 15, 1919, a steel tank containing 2.3 million gallons of molasses blew up in Boston’s North End, killing 21 people. The tank’s owner, the U.S. Industrial Alcohol Company, spent six years insisting that Italian anarchists had planted a bomb. More than 100 working-class survivors decided to sue instead, and after a year of testimony from 920 witnesses, in 1925, a court auditor, Hugh W. Ogden, wrote off the bomb theory and ordered U.S. Industrial Alcohol to cough up $628,000 for the cheap, poorly constructed tank.

In County Mayo, Ireland, Captain Charles Boycott was a retired army officer, hired as the agent for an absentee landowner, meaning the man who owned the estate lived elsewhere. In the autumn of 1880, he refused to cut rents for his tenants and tried to evict them. The new Irish National Land League decided to ostracize him: nobody would work for him, nobody would sell anything to him, and no mail would be delivered. It took about 900 policemen and soldiers to guard a group of imported laborers to harvest his crops. Boycott was ruined, and left for England in December 1880. From that time on, English has had another verb: to boycott.

Self-taught scientist Michael Faraday, son of a blacksmith, dropped several torn white paper cards into the squalid River Thames in 1855, observing that they vanished from sight within less than an inch of the surface. He then sent a public letter to The Times newspaper. It fell on deaf ears in Parliament until an 1858 heatwave, dubbed the Great Stink, stank up Parliament’s curtains. Faraday’s letter, long since forgotten, surfaced again in the press, and politicians quickly agreed to fund the construction of a new sewer system.

In 1904, Cuban postal worker Felix Carbajal lost all of his money gambling before he could reach the Olympics. As a result, he had to run the marathon in the middle of a St. Louis summer with only street shoes and pants he cut into shorts. In 90-degree weather, he pulled over during the 40-kilometer race to eat green apples from an orchard. Then he developed stomach cramps and napped for 15 minutes along the roadside before getting up and finishing in fourth place. So much for the importance of proper race preparation.

In December 1817, William Hone, a penniless and self-educated London bookseller, was charged with blasphemous libel on three different counts for his political parodies. Without legal training, Hone represented himself and argued that satire had historical precedent. And three juries found him not guilty by unanimous vote in three days. Lord Chief Justice Ellenborough, one of England’s most senior judges, presided over the third trial himself to secure a conviction. But he couldn’t get one, and he resigned the following year, dying not long after.

When Mary Anning, the daughter of a working-class cabinetmaker in the seaside town of Lyme Regis, England, discovered the first complete Ichthyosaur skeleton at age 12 in 1811, and later the first complete Plesiosaurus in 1823, the French anatomist Georges Cuvier declared publicly that the Plesiosaurus was a fake. The Geological Society of London examined the fossil and concluded that Cuvier was mistaken. However, Anning, who was neither male nor upper-class, remained excluded from membership in the society.

John Peter Zenger, a German immigrant printer, published articles exposing corruption by New York’s royal governor, William Cosby, in his newspaper The New-York Weekly Journal. Arrested for seditious libel — the crime of publishing material considered damaging to the government — in 1734, Zenger stood trial the next year, where his lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, argued that truth should be a defense despite what English law said at the time. The jury found him not guilty in minutes.

In 1826, Isabella Van Wagenen, better known today as Sojourner Truth, fled slavery in New York with her baby daughter. Her young son Peter was still legally bound by the state’s gradual emancipation law, which meant he couldn’t be sold out of state. When Peter was sold illegally to an enslaver in Alabama, Isabella Van Wagenen filed a habeas corpus petition in 1828, with Quaker assistance, asking the court to challenge his unlawful detention. The court returned Peter to her.

In 1670, a London jury led by Edward Bushell refused to convict William Penn and William Mead of “unlawful assembly” for being Quakers, members of a Christian movement that faced persecution in England at the time. The judge, Sir Samuel Starling, had kept them up for two nights without food or fire. Starling jailed the jurors for refusing to pay the fines he imposed; then Bushell challenged that sentence and won a ruling that judges could not punish jurors simply for the verdict they returned.

In 1913, Sarah Rector, an 11-year-old descendant of Creek Freedmen who had received a plot of tribal land in Oklahoma, became wealthy when oil was struck on her allotment, generating royalties worth more than $300 a day. The white land grabbers and local politicians who coveted her windfall had to be fought off by none other than prominent Black leaders Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. Some newspapers began referring to the child as “white,” ostensibly to exempt her from segregationist policies (like rules governing which seats she could occupy on a train), though such a claim carried no legal weight.

In January 1912, 20,000 mostly young immigrant women who worked in the textile mills of Lawrence, Mass., joined union organizers Joseph Ettor and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn in a strike over wage cuts. In order to win the hearts and minds of the American people, the strikers sent their hungry children to stay with sympathetic families in New York. When police clubbed mothers and children at the train station in Lawrence in February, newspaper accounts prompted demands for congressional hearings. The mill owners agreed to an increase of as much as 11% in March.

In 1859, Joshua Abraham Norton, a bankrupt merchant in San Francisco, proclaimed himself “Emperor of the United States.” The citizens were kind to him and accepted him and his money. In 1867, a police officer took him into custody on the charge that he needed “treatment for mental illness.” There was a great outcry. The police chief, Patrick Crowley, ordered Norton released, apologized publicly, and instructed his men to give the Emperor a salute in the street. Norton pardoned the officer.

On April 24, 1932, some 400 working-class ramblers, or recreational hikers, followed 20-year-old unemployed mechanic Benny Rothman onto the Kinder Scout moorland in England’s Peak District to protest against wealthy landowners restricting public access to the land. Scuffles erupted with the armed gamekeepers. A largely landed jury sentenced five ramblers, including Rothman, to up to six months in jail. The sentences sparked outrage that would fuel a multi-decade struggle to secure freedom of access to the land.

This content was created with the help of AI.