Prof. Boerner's Explorations

by Gerald Boerner

Today we want to honor the early centers of education in America: the Colleges and Universities founded during our colonial era. The first of these is, of course, Harvard, but the chartering of the College of William and Mary was just as important to southerners. It was founded under a Royal Charter issued by King William III and Queen Mary II in 1693. It is now a highly-rated research university that regularly appears on the Forbes and U.S. News and Reports listings of top U.S. educational institutions. We need to be thankful that our founding fathers respected the need for the education of its citizens enough to provide such institutions.  GLB

“If you have a college degree you can be absolutely sure of one thing… you have a college degree.”
— Author Unknown

“If you feel that you have both feet planted on level ground, then the university has failed you.”
— Robert Goheen, Time, 23 June 1961

“It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.”
— Brooks Atkinson, Once Around the Sun, 1951

“The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth which it prevents you from achieving.”
— Russell Green

“A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in the students.”
— John Ciardi

“Academe, n.:  An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.  Academy, n.:  A modern school where football is taught.”
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

“Of course there’s a lot of knowledge in universities:  the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don’t take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates.”
— Abbott Lawrence Lowell

“A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.”
— Theodore Roosevelt

The College of William and Mary

The College of William & Mary in Virginia (colloquially known as The College of William & Mary, The College, William & Mary, or W&M) is a public research university located in Williamsburg, Virginia, United States. Founded in 1693 by a Royal Charter issued by King William III and Queen Mary II, it is the second-oldest institution of higher education in the United States after Harvard University and its undergraduate program is currently ranked as the ^#4 and ^#6 best public university in America, according to the 2009 Forbes and 2010 U.S. News & World Report rankings, respectively.

William & Mary educated U.S. Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and John Tyler as well as other key figures important to the development of the nation, including U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, Speaker of the House Henry Clay and 16 signers of the Declaration of Independence. W&M founded the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society in 1776 and was the first school of higher education in the United States to install an honor code of conduct for students. The establishment of graduate programs in law and medicine in 1779 make it one of the first universities in the United States. William & Mary is considered an original Public Ivy.

In 2008, the College enrolled 5,850 undergraduate students and 2,042 graduate and professional students in and granted 1,454 bachelors, 440 masters, and 209 professional degrees.

Colonial era: 1693–1776

Reverend Dr. James Blair,
founder of William & Mary

A school of higher education for both Native American young men and the sons of the colonists was one of the earliest goals of the leaders of the Virginia Colony. The College was founded on February 8, 1693, under a Royal Charter to "make, found and establish a certain Place of Universal Study, a perpetual College of Divinity, Philosophy, Languages, and the good arts and sciences…to be supported and maintained, in all time coming." Named in honor of the reigning monarchs King William III and Queen Mary II, the College was one of the original Colonial colleges. The Charter named James Blair as the College’s first president (a lifetime appointment which he held until his death in 1743). William & Mary was founded as an Anglican institution; governors were required to be members of the Church of England, and professors were required to declare adherence to the Thirty-Nine Articles.

The Royal Charter called for a center of higher education consisting of three schools. The Philosophy School instructed students in the advanced study of moral philosophy (logic, rhetoric, ethics) as well as natural philosophy (physics, metaphysics, and mathematics); upon completion of this coursework, the Divinity School prepared these young men for ordination into the Church of England. This curriculum made William & Mary the first American college with a full faculty.

In 1693, the College was given a seat in the House of Burgesses and it was determined that the College would be supported by tobacco taxes and export duties on furs and animal skins. The College acquired a 330 acres (1.3 km²) parcel for the new school, 8 miles (13 km) from Jamestown. In 1694, the new school opened in temporary buildings.

Williamsburg was granted a royal charter as a city in 1722 and served as the capital of Colonial Virginia from 1699 to 1780. During this time, the College served as a law center and lawmakers frequently used its buildings. It educated future U.S. Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and John Tyler.

Revolutionary period, making a transition

James Monroe, 5th President of US,
W&M alumnus

During the period of the American Revolution, freedom of religion was established in Virginia and the separation of church and state achieved, notably with the 1786 passage of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Future U.S. President James Madison was a key figure in the transition to religious freedom in Virginia, and Right Reverend James Madison, his cousin and Thomas Jefferson, who was on the Board of Visitors, helped The College of William & Mary to make the transition as well. The college became a university with the establishment of the graduate schools in law and medicine. As its President, Reverend Madison worked with the new leaders of Virginia, most notably Jefferson, on a reorganization and changes for the College which included the abolition of the Divinity School and the Indian School and the establishment of the first elective system of study and honor system.

The College of William and Mary is home to the nation’s first collegiate secret society, the F.H.C. Society, founded November 11, 1750. On December 5, 1776, students John Heath and William Short (Class of 1779) founded Phi Beta Kappa as a secret literary and philosophical society. It is today the nation’s premier academic honor society, with chapters at colleges and universities across the United States. Other secret societies known to currently exist at the College include: the 7 Society, 13 Club, Alpha Club, Bishop James Madison Society, Flat Hat Club, The Society, The Spades, W Society, and Wren Society.

In 1842, alumni of the College formed the Society of the Alumni which is now the sixth oldest alumni organization in the United States. In 1859, a great fire caused destruction to the College. The Alumni House is one of the few original antebellum structures remaining on campus; notable others include the Wren Building, the President’s House, and the Brafferton.

Civil War, Reconstruction, early 20th century

Wren Building circa 1859

At the outset of the American Civil War (1861-1865), enlistments in the Confederate Army depleted the student body and on May 10, 1861, the faculty voted to close the College for the duration of the conflict. The College Building was used as a Confederate barracks and later as a hospital, first by Confederate, and later Union forces. The Battle of Williamsburg was fought nearby during the Peninsula Campaign on May 5, 1862, and the city fell to the Union the next day. The Brafferton building of the College was used for a time as quarters for the commanding officer of the Union garrison occupying the town. On September 9, 1862, drunken soldiers of the 5th Pennsylvania Cavalry set fire to the College Building, purportedly in an attempt to prevent Confederate snipers from using it for cover. Much damage was done to the community during the Union occupation, which lasted until September 1865.

Following restoration of the Union, Virginia was destitute from the War. The College’s 16th president, Benjamin Stoddert Ewell, finally reopened the school in 1869 using his personal funds but the College closed in 1882 due to lack of funds. In 1888, William & Mary resumed operations under a substitute charter when the Commonwealth of Virginia passed an act appropriating $10,000 to support the College as a state teacher-training institution. Lyon Gardiner Tyler (son of US President and alumnus John Tyler) became the 17th president of the College following President Ewell’s retirement. Tyler, along with 18th president J.A.C. Chandler, expanded the College into a modern institution. In March 1906, the General Assembly passed an act taking over the grounds of the colonial institution, and it has remained publicly-supported ever since. In 1918, William & Mary preceded the University of Virginia to be one of the first universities in Virginia to admit women and become coeducational. During this time, enrollment increased from 104 students in 1889 to 1269 students by 1932.

Largely thanks to the vision of a William and Mary instructor, Reverend Dr. W.A.R. Goodwin, the Sir Christopher Wren Building, the President’s House and the Brafferton (the President’s office) were restored to their eighteenth century appearance between 1928 and 1932 with substantial financial support from John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and his wife, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. Together, they led the establishment and beginnings of Colonial Williamsburg.

1930–present

In 1930, William & Mary expanded its territorial range by establishing a branch in Norfolk, Virginia. This extension would eventually become the independent state-supported institution known as Old Dominion University.

Significant campus construction continued under the College’s nineteenth president, John Stewart Bryan. President Franklin D. Roosevelt received an honorary degree from the College on October 20, 1934. In 1935, the Sunken Garden was constructed, just west of the Wren Building. The sunken design is taken from a similar landscape feature at Chelsea Hospital in London, designed by Sir Christopher Wren.

Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh visited the College on October 16, 1957, where the Queen spoke to the College community from the balcony of the Wren Building. The Queen again visited the College on May 4, 2007.

In 1974, Jay Winston Johns willed Ash Lawn-Highland, the 535-acre (2.17 km²) historic Albemarle County, Virginia estate of alumnus and U.S. President James Monroe, to the College. The College restored this historic presidential home near Charlottesville and opened it to the public.

Academics

The College of William & Mary is a medium-sized, highly residential, public research university. The four-year, full-time undergraduate program comprises most of the university’s enrollment. The College has a strong undergraduate arts & sciences focus, with a select number of graduate programs in fields as diverse as colonial American history and marine science. The graduate programs are dominant in STEM fields and the university has a high level of research activity. For the 2007–08 school year, 1,454 undergraduate, 440 masters, 60 doctoral, and 209 professional degrees were conferred. William & Mary is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

William & Mary has produced six Rhodes Scholars since 1988 and 60 students have won Fulbright Scholarships, Truman, and Goldwater fellowships since 2000. According to the Institute of International Education, William & Mary enjoys the highest Fulbright Scholarship acceptance rate (46%) of any major research university in America. William & Mary offers exchange programs with 15 foreign schools, drawing more than 12% of its undergraduates into these programs, and receives U.S. State Department grants to further expand its foreign exchange programs. Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has called W&M International Studies Department "perhaps the finest in the nation."

Faculty

Numerous prominent academics have chosen to teach at William & Mary and its graduate schools. Distinguished faculty include the first professor of law in the United States, George Wythe; William Small (one of Jefferson’s faculty mentors), William and Thomas Dawson, who were both also William & Mary presidents; noted constitutional law expert William Van Alstyne; and Benjamin Bolger, who is the second most credentialed person in modern history behind Michael Nicholson.

Lawrence Wilkerson is the Harriman Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy and former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell. The founder and first president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, William Barton Rogers, also taught at William & Mary. Susan Wise Bauer is an author and founder of Peace Hill Press who teaches writing and American literature, and James Axtell teaches history and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as a Fellow in 2004. Several members of the socially elite and politically influential Tucker family also taught there, including Nathaniel Beverly, St. George and Henry St. George Tucker, Sr. (who penned the original honor code pledge for UVA which is still in use today).

Honor System

Thomas Jefferson

William & Mary’s Honor System was first established by alumnus Thomas Jefferson in 1779 and is widely believed to be the nation’s first. During the orientation week, nearly every entering student recites the Honor Pledge in the Great Hall of the Wren Building pledging:

As a Member of the William & Mary community I pledge, on my Honor, not to lie, cheat, or steal in either my academic or personal life. I understand that such acts violate the Honor Code and undermine the community of trust of which we are all stewards.

The basis of W&M’s Honor Pledge was written over 150 years ago by alumnus and law professor Henry St. George Tucker, Sr. While teaching law at the University of Virginia, Tucker proposed that students attach a pledge to all exams confirming that on their honor they did not receive any assistance. Tucker’s honor pledge was the early basis of the Honor System at the University of Virginia. At W&M, the Honor System stands as one of the College’s most important traditions; it remains student-administered through the Honor Council with the advice of the faculty and administration of the College. The College’s Honor System is codified such that students found guilty of cheating, stealing or lying are subject to sanctions ranging anywhere from a verbal warning up to expulsion.

Traditions

Crim Dell bridge in the
heart of W&M’s wooded
campus

William & Mary has a number of traditions, including the Yule Log Ceremony, at which the president dresses as Santa Claus and reads a rendition of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," the Vice-President of Student Affairs reads "Twas the Night Before Finals," and The Gentlemen of the College sing the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas".

Incoming freshmen participate in Opening Convocation, at which they pass through the entrance of the Wren Building and are officially welcomed as the newest members of the College. Freshmen also have the opportunity, during orientation week, to serenade the President of the College at his home with the Alma Mater song. The Senior Walk is similar, in that graduating seniors walk through the Wren Building in their "departure" from the College. On the last day of classes, Seniors are invited to ring the bell in the cupola of the Wren Building.

One unofficial tradition is the Triathlon, a set of three tasks to be completed by each student prior to graduation. These include jumping the wall of the Governor’s Palace in Colonial Williamsburg after hours (and if so inclined, running through the Boxwood Maze to the Palace itself), streaking through the Sunken Garden, and swimming in the Crim Dell pond.

Other Events on this Day

• In 1693…
  The College of William and Mary, second oldest college in the United States, is chartered.

• In 1870…
  The Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing voting rights regardless of race, is ratified.

• In 1910…
  The Boy Scouts of America is founded in Washington, D.C.

• In 1922…
  President Warren G. Harding has a radio installed in the White House.

• In 1971…
  The NASDAQ, the world’s first electronic stock market, begins operation.

• In 1978…
  Senate debates are broadcast on radio for the first time.

Dates and events based on:

William J. Bennett and John Cribb, (2008) The American Patriot’s Almanac Daily Readings on America. (Kindle Edition)

Background information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: The College of William and Mary… 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_and_Mary_College

The QuoteGarden: Quotations about College…
http://www.quotegarden.com/college.html

Web Site: William and Mary College…
http://www.wm.edu/

by Gerald Boerner

Many of us remember waiting for the weekly installment of the “Little House on the Prairie” program on TV. An earlier generation had followed similar stories on the radio featuring the famous actress, Helen Hays, in the feature role. We would come away from our weekly viewing experience with our spirits lifted by the moral of that week’s struggle against the elements, the frontier, and other real threats to a frontier family. We felt a relief each time this little, growing family overcame the latest challenge. It was, indeed, like having a sermon brought into our homes, with its teachings about depending on God, neighbors, and the God-given strength within each of us. Such was the power of the TV episodes and the books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  GLB

“Home is the nicest word there is.”
— Laura Ingalls Wilder

“Far worst of all, the fever had settled in Mary’s eyes, and Mary was blind.”
— Laura Ingalls Wilder

“If enough people think of a thing and work hard enough at it, I guess it’s pretty nearly bound to happen, wind and weather permitting.”
— Laura Ingalls Wilder

“In the long winter evenings he talked to Ma about the Western country. In the West the land was level, and there were no trees. The grass grew thick and high.”
— Laura Ingalls Wilder

“Pa did not like a country so old and worn out that the hunting was poor. He wanted to go west. For two years he had wanted to go west and take a homestead, but Ma did not want to leave the settled country.”
— Laura Ingalls Wilder

“Her blue eyes were still beautiful, but they did not know what was before them, and Mary herself could never look through them again to tell Laura what she was thinking without saying a word.”
— Laura Ingalls Wilder

“Everything from the little house was in the wagon, except the beds and tables and chairs. They did not need to take these, because Pa could always make new ones.”
— Laura Ingalls Wilder

“Every job is good if you do your best and work hard. A man who works hard stinks only to the ones that have nothing to do but smell.”
— Laura Ingalls Wilder

“But in the east the sky was pale and through the gray woods came lanterns with wagons and horses, bringing Grandpa and Grandma and aunts and uncles and cousins.”
— Laura Ingalls Wilder

“A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin.”
— Laura Ingalls Wilder

Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House on the Prairie

Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder (1867 – 1957) was an American author who wrote the Little House series of books based on her childhood in a pioneer family.

Laura Elizabeth Ingalls was born February 7, 1867, near the village of Pepin, in the "Big Woods" of Wisconsin, to Charles Phillip Ingalls and Caroline Lake (Quiner) Ingalls. She was the second of five children; her siblings were Mary Amelia, who went blind; Carrie Celestia, Charles Frederick, who died when nine months old, and Grace Pearl. Her birth site is commemorated by a period log cabin, the Little House Wayside.

Her paternal immigrant ancestor was Edmund Ingalls born 27 June 1586 in Skirbeck, Lincolnshire, England, and died 16 September 1648 in Lynn, Essex County, Massachusetts.

In Laura’s early childhood, her father settled on land not yet open for homesteading in what was then Indian Territory near Independence, Kansas–an experience that formed the basis of Ingalls’ novel Little House on the Prairie. Within a few years, her father’s restless spirit led them on various moves to a preemption claim in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, living with relatives near South Troy, Minnesota, and helping to run a hotel in Burr Oak, Iowa. After a move from Burr Oak back to Walnut Grove, where Charles Ingalls served as the town butcher and Justice of the Peace, Charles accepted a railroad job in the spring of 1879 which led him to eastern Dakota Territory, where he was joined by the family in the fall of 1879.

Over the winter of 1879-1880, Charles landed a homestead, and called DeSmet, South Dakota, home for the rest of his, Caroline, and Mary’s lives. After staying the cold winter of 1879–1880 in the Surveyor’s House, the Ingalls family watched the town of DeSmet rise up from the prairie in 1880. The following winter, 1880–1881, one of the most severe on record in the Dakotas, was later described by Wilder in her book, The Long Winter. Once the family was settled in DeSmet, she attended school, made many friends, and met homesteader Almanzo Wilder (1857–1949). This time in her life is well documented in the Little House Books.

At the age of 15, Laura accepted her first teaching position, teaching three terms in one-room schools, when not attending school herself in DeSmet. She later admitted that she did not particularly enjoy teaching, but felt the responsibility from a young age to help her family financially, and wage earning opportunities for females were limited. Laura stopped teaching when she married Almanzo Wilder on August 25, 1885. Wilder had achieved a degree of prosperity on his homestead claim, owing to favorable weather in the early 1880s, and the couple’s prospects seemed bright. She joined Almanzo in a new home on his claim north of DeSmet and agreed to help him make the claim succeed. On December 5, 1886, she gave birth to Rose Wilder (1886–1968) and later, an unnamed son, who died shortly after birth in 1889.

The first few years of marriage held many trials. Complications from a life-threatening bout of diphtheria left Almanzo partially paralyzed. While he eventually regained nearly full use of his legs, he needed a cane to walk for the remainder of his life. This setback, among many others, began a series of disastrous events that included the death of their unnamed newborn son, the destruction of their home and barn by fire, and several years of severe drought that left them in debt, physically ill, and unable to earn a living from their 320 acres (1.3 km²) of prairie land. The tales of their trials at farming can be found in The First Four Years, a manuscript that was discovered after Rose Wilder Lane’s death. Published in 1971, it detailed the hard-fought first four years of marriage on the Dakota prairies.

About 1890, the Wilders left South Dakota and spent about a year resting at Wilder’s parents’ prosperous Spring Valley Minnesota farm before moving briefly to Westville, Florida. They sought Florida’s climate to improve Wilder’s health, but being used to living on the dry plains, he wilted in the heat and Southern humidity. In 1892, they returned to DeSmet and bought a small house (although later accounts by Lane mistakenly indicated it was rented). The Wilders received special permission to start their precocious daughter in school early and took jobs (Almanzo as a day laborer, Laura as a seamstress at a dressmaker’s shop) to save enough money to once again start a farm.

 Rocky Ridge Farm

In 1894, the hard-pressed young couple moved a final time to Mansfield, Missouri, using their savings to make a down payment on a piece of undeveloped property just outside of town. They named the place Rocky Ridge Farm. What began as about 40 acres (0.2 km²) of thickly wooded, stone-covered hillside with a windowless log cabin, over the next 20 years evolved into a 200-acre (0.8 km²), relatively prosperous poultry, dairy, and fruit farm. The ramshackle log cabin was eventually replaced with an impressive 10-room farmhouse and outbuildings.

The couple’s climb to financial security was a slow process. Initially, the only income the farm produced was from wagonloads of firewood Almanzo sold for 50 cents in town, the result of the backbreaking work of clearing the trees and stones from land that slowly evolved into fertile fields and pastures. The apple trees did not begin to bear fruit for seven years. Barely able to eke out more than a subsistence living on the new farm, the Wilders decided to move into nearby Mansfield in the late 1890s and rent a small house. Almanzo found work as an oil salesman and general delivery man, while Laura took in boarders and served meals to local railroad workers. Recipes that she used are included in the biography, I Remember Laura, by Stephen W. Hines. Any spare time was spent improving the farm and planning for a better future.

Wilder’s parents visited around this time, and presented to the couple, as a gift, the deed to the house they had been renting in Mansfield. This was the economic jump start they needed; they eventually sold the house in town and using the proceeds from the sale, were able to move back to the farm permanently, and to complete Rocky Ridge.

Almanzo died in 1949 at the age of ninety-two, Laura died at the age of ninety on February 10, 1957, both on their Rocky Ridge Farm at Mansfield, Missouri.

Farm Diversification

By 1910, Rocky Ridge Farm was established to the point where the Wilders returned there to focus their efforts on increasing the farm’s productivity and output. The impressive 10-room farmhouse completed in 1912 stands as a testament to their labors and determination to carve a comfortable and attractive home from the land.

 Laura and Almanzo Wilder, 1885

Having learned a hard lesson from focusing solely on wheat farming in South Dakota, the Wilders’ Rocky Ridge Farm became a diversified poultry and dairy farm, with an abundant apple orchard. Wilder, always active in various clubs and an advocate for several regional farm associations, was recognized as an authority in poultry farming and rural living, which led to invitations to talk to groups around the region.

Following Rose Wilder Lane’s developing writing career also inspired Wilder to do some writing of her own. An invitation to submit an article to the Missouri Ruralist in 1911 led to a permanent position as a columnist and editor with that publication — a position she held until the mid-1920s. She also took a paid position with a Farm Loan Association, dispensing small loans to local farmers from her office in the farmhouse.

Her column in the Ruralist, "As a Farm Woman Thinks," introduced Mrs. A.J. Wilder to a loyal audience of rural Ozarkians, who enjoyed her regular columns, whose topics ranged from home and family to World War I and other world events, to the fascinating world travels of her daughter and her own thoughts on the increasing options offered to women during this era.

While the Wilders were never wealthy until the "Little House" series of books began to achieve popularity, the farming operation and Wilder’s income from writing and the Farm Loan Association provided a stable enough living for the Wilders to finally place themselves in Mansfield middle-class society.

Wilder’s fellow clubwomen were mostly the wives of business owners, doctors and lawyers, and her club activities took up much of the time that Lane encouraged her to use to develop a writing career for national magazines, as Lane had done. Wilder seemed unable or unwilling to make the leap from writing for the Missouri Ruralist to these higher-paying national markets. The few articles she was able to sell to national magazines were heavily edited by her daughter and placed solely through Lane’s established publishing connections.

Retirement

For much of the 1920s and 1930s, between long stints living abroad (including in her beloved adopted country of Albania), Lane lived with the Wilders at Rocky Ridge Farm. As her free-lance writing career flourished, she successfully invested in the booming stock market.

Her newfound financial freedom led her to increasingly assume responsibility for her aging parents’ support, as well as providing for the college educations of several young people she "adopted," both in Albania and Mansfield. Lane also took over the farmhouse her parents had built and had a beautiful, modern stone cottage constructed for them as a gift. However, when Lane left the farm for good a few years later, the Wilders, homesick for the house they had built with their own hands, moved back to it, and finished their lives there.

In 1930, Wilder asked her daughter’s opinion about a biographical manuscript she had written about her pioneering childhood. The Great Depression, coupled with the death of her mother in 1924 and her sister Mary in 1928, seem to have prompted her to preserve her memories in a "life story" called "Pioneer Girl." She had also renewed her interest in writing in the hope of generating some income. The first idea for the title of the first of the books was When Grandma was a Little Girl (later Little House in the Big Woods). After its success, Laura continued writing, given mental support and help in the form of sharing her own memories, by her sister Carrie.

Book Series Collaboration

Controversy surrounds Lane’s exact role in what became her mother’s famous "Little House" series of books. Some argue that Laura was an "untutored genius," relying on her daughter mainly for some early encouragement and her connections with publishers and literary agents. Others contend that Lane took each of her mother’s unpolished rough drafts in hand and completely (and silently) transformed them into the series of books we know today. The truth most likely lies somewhere between these two positions — Wilder’s writing career as a rural journalist and credible essayist began more than two decades before the "Little House" series, and Lane’s formidable skills as an editor and ghostwriter are well-documented. But Lane’s New York literary agent, George T. Bye, turned away the initial drafts, commenting that they lacked drama.

The existing evidence (including ongoing correspondence between the women concerning the development of the series, Lane’s extensive personal diaries and Wilder’s first person draft manuscripts) tends to reveal an ongoing joint collaboration. The conclusion can be drawn that Wilder’s strengths as a compelling storyteller and Lane’s considerable skills in dramatic pacing and literary structure contributed to an occasionally tense, but fruitful, collaboration between two talented and headstrong women.

Whatever the collaboration personally represented to the mother and daughter was never publicly discussed, however. Wilder’s first — and smallest — royalty check from Harper was for $500 — the equivalent of $7,300 in 2007 dollars. By the mid-1930s the royalties from the "Little House" books brought a steady and increasingly substantial income to the Wilders for the first time in their 50 years of marriage. Various honors, huge amounts of fan mail and other accolades were granted to Laura Ingalls Wilder. The novels and short stories of Rose Wilder Lane during the 1930s also represented her creative and literary peak. Her name received top billing on the magazine covers where her fiction and articles appeared. The Saturday Evening Post paid her $30,000 (approximately $400,000 in 2007 dollars) to serialize her best-selling novel Free Land, while Let the Hurricane Roar saw an increasing and steady sale, augmented by a radio dramatization starring Helen Hayes. The book remains in print today as Young Pioneers.

Celebrated Author

During these years, Wilder and her husband were frequently alone at Rocky Ridge Farm. Most of the surrounding area (including the property with the stone cottage Lane had built for them) had been sold off, but they still kept some farm animals, and tended their flower beds and vegetable gardens. Almost daily, carloads of fans would stop by, eager to meet "Laura" of the Little House books. The Wilders lived independently and without financial worries until Almanzo’s death in 1949, at the age of 92. Wilder was grieved, but determined to remain independent and stay on the farm, despite Lane’s requests that her mother come live with her permanently in Connecticut. For the next eight years, she lived alone, looked after by a circle of neighbors and friends who found it hard to believe their very own "Mrs. Wilder" was a world-famous author. She was a familiar figure in Mansfield, being brought into town regularly by her driver to run errands, attend church, or visit friends. She continued an active correspondence with her editors, many fans and friends during these years.

With Wilder’s death in 1957, use of the Rocky Ridge Farmhouse reverted to the farmer who had earlier bought the surrounding land. The local townsfolk put together a non-profit corporation to purchase the house and its grounds, for use as a museum. After some wariness at the notion of seeing the house rather than the books themselves be a shrine to her mother, Lane came to believe that making a museum of it would draw long-lasting attention to the books. She donated the money needed to purchase the house and make it a museum, agreed to make significant contributions each year for its upkeep and also gave many of the family’s belongings to help establish what became a popular museum that still draws thousands of visitors each year to Mansfield.

Lane inherited ownership of the "Little House" literary estate for her lifetime only, all rights reverting to the Mansfield library after her death, according to her mother’s will. After her death in 1968, Lane’s heir, Roger MacBride, gained control of the copyrights. MacBride was Lane’s informally-adopted grandson, as well as her business agent, attorney, and heir. All of MacBride’s actions carried Lane’s apparent approval. In fact, at Lane’s request, the copyrights to each of the "Little House" books, as well as those of Lane’s own literary works, had been renewed in MacBride’s name when the original copyrights expired during the decade between Wilder’s and Lane’s deaths.

The popularity of the "Little House" series of books has grown phenomenally over the years, spawning a multimillion-dollar franchise of mass merchandising, additional spinoff book series (some written by MacBride and his daughter), and the long-running television show, starring Michael Landon. Laura Ingalls Wilder has been portrayed by Melissa Gilbert (1974-1984), Meredith Monroe (1997, 1998) and Kyle Chavarria (2005) in television series.

Wilder once said the reason she wrote her books in the first place was to preserve the stories of her childhood for today’s children, to help them to understand how much America had changed during her lifetime.

Other Events on this Day

• In 1795…
  The Eleventh Amendment, which clarifies federal judicial powers, is ratified.

• In 1812…
  The last of the New Madrid earthquakes, a series of violent quakes that changes the course of the Mississippi River, occurs near New Madrid, Missouri.

• In 1867…
  Laura Ingalls Wilder is born near Pepin, Wisconsin.

• In 1964…
  The Beatles arrive in New York for their first U.S. tour and an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, touching off Beatlemania.

• In 1984…
  Space shuttle Challenger astronauts Bruce McCandless and Robert Stewart take the first untethered spacewalk.

Dates and events based on:

William J. Bennett and John Cribb, (2008) The American Patriot’s Almanac Daily Readings on America. (Kindle Edition)

Background information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: Laura Ingalls Wilder… 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Ingalls_Wilder

Web Sites and Blogs:

BrainyQuote: Laura Ingalls Wilder Quotes…
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/l/laura_ingalls_wilder.html

Beyond Little House Blog: Dedicated to the Life, Literature and Homes of Laura Ingalls Wilder…
http://beyondlittlehouse.com/

by Gerald Boerner

Today’s posting honors the birthdate of the fortieth president, Ronald Reagan. He was born in a small town in Illinois, grew up playing football, and became a “B-Rated” movie star. After years in the movie industry, including terms as president of the Screen Actor’s Guild, he turned conservative and entered politics.

He became more conservative and won the Governorship of California after a series of liberal governors. This led to his eventual campaigns for the presidency, which he lost in 1984 (in the primaries) but won in both 1980 and 1984. He will be remembered for his anti-communist position as well as his eventual relationship with Gorbachov and establishment of “détente”. Also under his presidency the fall of communism in Europe ended the Cold War.

We were all sadden when he announced that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease.  GLB

“A people free to choose will always choose peace.”
— Ronald Reagan

“A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?”
— Ronald Reagan

“All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk.”
— Ronald Reagan

“Before I refuse to take your questions, I have an opening statement.”
— Ronald Reagan

“But there are advantages to being elected President. The day after I was elected, I had my high school grades classified Top Secret.”
— Ronald Reagan

“Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so let’s not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards from man-made sources.”
— Ronald Reagan

“Each generation goes further than the generation preceding it because it stands on the shoulders of that generation. You will have opportunities beyond anything we’ve ever known.”
— Ronald Reagan

“Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today’s world do not have.”
— Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan Born in Illinois

Ronald Wilson Reagan (1911 – 2004) was the 40th President of the United States (1981–1989) and the 33rd Governor of California (1967–1975). Prior to his political career Reagan was also a famous motion picture actor and president of the Screen Actors Guild.

Born in Tampico, Illinois, Reagan moved to Los Angeles, California in the 1930s. He began a career as an actor, first in films and later television, appearing in 52 movie productions and gaining enough success to become a household name. Though often described as a B film actor, he starred in Knute Rockne, All American and Kings Row. Reagan served as president of the Screen Actors Guild, and later spokesman for General Electric (GE); his start in politics occurred during his work for GE. Originally a member of the Democratic Party, he switched to the Republican Party in 1962. After delivering a rousing speech in support of Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy in 1964, he was persuaded to seek the California governorship, winning two years later and again in 1970. He was defeated in his run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 as well as 1976, but won both the nomination and election in 1980.

 Reagan gives a televised address
from the Oval Office, outlining his
plan for Tax Reduction Legislation
in July 1981

As president, Reagan implemented sweeping new political and economic initiatives. His supply-side economic policies, dubbed "Reaganomics", advocated reduced business regulation, controlling inflation, reducing growth in government spending, and spurring economic growth through tax cuts. In his first term he survived an assassination attempt, took a hard line against labor unions, and ordered military actions in Grenada. He was reelected in a landslide in 1984, proclaiming it was "Morning in America". His second term was primarily marked by foreign matters, namely the ending of the Cold War, the bombing of Libya, and the revelation of the Iran-Contra affair. Publicly describing the Soviet Union as an "evil empire", he supported anti-Communist movements worldwide and spent his first term forgoing the strategy of détente by ordering a massive military buildup in an arms race with the USSR. Reagan negotiated with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, culminating in the INF Treaty and the decrease of both countries’ nuclear arsenals.

Reagan left office in 1989. In 1994, the former president disclosed that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease earlier in the year; he died ten years later at the age of 93. He ranks highly among former U.S. presidents in terms of approval rating, but has a more mixed perception in presidential surveys.

Governor of California, 1967–1975

Ronald and Nancy Reagan celebrate
Reagan’s gubernatorial victory at the
Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles.

California Republicans were impressed with Reagan’s political views and charisma after his "Time for Choosing" speech, and nominated him for Governor of California in 1966. In Reagan’s campaign, he emphasized two main themes: "to send the welfare bums back to work", and regarding burgeoning anti-war and anti-establishment student protests at the University of California at Berkeley, "to clean up the mess at Berkeley". He was elected, defeating two-term governor Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, and was sworn in on January 3, 1967. His swearing-in occurred at 9 minutes past midnight. Reagan explained in 1988 that this time was chosen because his predecessor, Edmund G. Brown, "had been filling up the ranks of appointments and judges" in the days before his term ended. Professor Marcello Truzzi, a sociologist at Eastern Michigan University who studied the Reagans’ interest in astrology, regarded this explanation as "preposterous", as the decision to be sworn in at that odd time of day was made six weeks earlier, and was based on advice from Reagan’s long-time friend, the astrologer Carroll Righter.

In his first term, he froze government hiring and approved tax hikes to balance the budget. Shortly after the beginning of his term, Reagan tested the presidential waters in 1968 as part of a "Stop Nixon" movement, hoping to cut into Nixon’s Southern support and be a compromise candidate if neither Nixon nor second-place Nelson Rockefeller received enough delegates to win on the first ballot at the Republican convention. However, by the time of the convention Nixon had 692 delegate votes, 25 more than he needed to secure the nomination, followed by Rockefeller with Reagan in third place.

The Reagans meeting with
then-President Richard Nixon
and First Lady Pat Nixon in
July 1970

Reagan was involved in high-profile conflicts with the protest movements of the era. On May 15, 1969, during the People’s Park protests at UC Berkeley, Reagan sent the California Highway Patrol and other officers to quell the protests, in an incident that became known as "Bloody Thursday". Reagan then called out 2,200 state National Guard troops to occupy the city of Berkeley for two weeks in order to crack down on the protesters. When the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst in Berkeley and demanded the distribution of food to the poor, Reagan joked, "It’s just too bad we can’t have an epidemic of botulism."

Early in 1967, the national debate on abortion was beginning. Democratic California state senator Anthony Beilenson introduced the "Therapeutic Abortion Act", in an effort to reduce the number of "back-room abortions" performed in California. The State Legislature sent the bill to Reagan’s desk where, after many days of indecision, he signed it. About two million abortions would be performed as a result, mostly because of a provision in the bill allowing abortions for the well-being of the mother. Reagan had been in office for only four months when he signed the bill, and stated that had he been more experienced as governor, it would not have been signed. After he recognized what he called the "consequences" of the bill, he announced that he was pro-life. He maintained that position later in his political career, writing extensively about abortion.

Despite an unsuccessful attempt to recall him in 1968, Reagan was re-elected in 1970, defeating "Big Daddy" Jesse M. Unruh. He chose not to seek a third term in the following election cycle. One of Reagan’s greatest frustrations in office concerned capital punishment, which he strongly supported. His efforts to enforce the state’s laws in this area were thwarted when the Supreme Court of California issued its People v. Anderson decision, which invalidated all death sentences issued in California prior to 1972, though the decision was later overturned by a constitutional amendment. The only execution during Reagan’s governorship was on April 12, 1967, when Aaron Mitchell’s sentence was carried out by the state in San Quentin’s gas chamber.

Reagan’s terms as governor helped to shape the policies he would pursue in his later political career as president. By campaigning on a platform of sending "the welfare bums back to work", he spoke out against the idea of the welfare state. He also strongly advocated the Republican ideal of less government regulation of the economy, including that of undue federal taxation.

The Presidency: First term, 1981–1985

The Reagans wave from the limousine
taking them down Pennsylvania Avenue
to the White House, right after the
president’s inauguration

To date, Reagan is the oldest man elected to the office of the presidency (at 69). In his first inaugural address on January 20, 1981, which Reagan himself wrote, he addressed the country’s economic malaise arguing: "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem."

The Reagan Presidency began in a dramatic manner; as Reagan was giving his inaugural address, 52 U.S. hostages, held by Iran for 444 days were set free.

During this term, the following were the prominent events:

• Assassination Attempt
• Air Traffic Controllers’ Strike
• “Reaganomics” and the Economy
• Lebanon and Grenada, 1983
• Escalation of the Cold War
• 1984 Presidential Campaign

The Presidency: Second term, 1985–1989

Reagan was sworn in as president for the second time on January 20, 1985, in a private ceremony at the White House. Because January 20 fell on a Sunday, a public celebration was not held but took place in the Capitol Rotunda the following day. January 21 was one of the coldest days on record in Washington, D.C.; due to poor weather, inaugural celebrations were held inside the Capitol.

Ronald Reagan is sworn in for a
second term as president in
the Capitol Rotunda

In 1985, Reagan visited a German military cemetery in Bitburg to lay a wreath with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. It was determined that the cemetery held the graves of 49 members of the Waffen-SS. Reagan issued a statement that called the Nazi soldiers buried in that cemetery "victims", which ignited a stir over whether he had equated the SS men to Holocaust victims; Pat Buchanan, Director of Communications under Reagan, argued that the notion was false. Now strongly urged to cancel the visit, the president responded that it would be wrong to back down on a promise he had made to Chancellor Kohl. He attended the ceremony where two military generals laid a wreath.

The disintegration of the Space Shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986 proved a pivotal moment in Reagan’s presidency. All seven astronauts aboard were killed. On the night of the disaster, Reagan delivered a speech written by Peggy Noonan in which he said:

The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave… We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ’slipped the surly bonds of Earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’

During this term, the following were the prominent events:

• War on Drugs
• Libya Bombing
• Immigration
• Iran-Contra Affair
• End of the Cold War
• Health and Well-Being
• Judiciary

Post-presidential years, 1989–2004

Ronald and Nancy Reagan in
Los Angeles after leaving the
White House, early 1990s

After leaving office in 1989, the Reagans purchased a home in Bel Air, Los Angeles in addition to the Reagan Ranch in Santa Barbara. They regularly attended Bel Air Presbyterian Church and occasionally made appearances on behalf of the Republican Party; Reagan delivered a well-received speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention. Previously on November 4, 1991, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library was dedicated and opened to the public. At the dedication ceremonies, five presidents were in attendance, as well as six first ladies, marking the first time five presidents were gathered in the same location. Reagan continued to publicly speak in favor of a line-item veto; a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget; and the repeal of the 22nd Amendment, which prohibits anyone from serving more than two terms as president. In 1992 Reagan established the Ronald Reagan Freedom Award with the newly formed Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. His final public speech was on February 3, 1994 during a tribute to him in Washington, D.C., and his last major public appearance was at the funeral of Richard Nixon on April 27, 1994.

Alzheimer’s disease

In August 1994, at the age of 83, Ronald Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, an incurable neurological disorder which destroys brain cells and ultimately causes death. In November he informed the nation through a handwritten letter, writing in part:

I have recently been told that I am one of the millions of Americans who will be afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease… At the moment I feel just fine. I intend to live the remainder of the years God gives me on this earth doing the things I have always done… I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead. Thank you, my friends. May God always bless you.

Other Events on this Day

• In 1788…
  Massachusetts becomes the sixth state to ratify the Constitution.

• In 1862…
  The Union wins its first major victory in the Civil War, with the capture of of Fort Hood on the Tennessee River.

• In 1899…
  The Senate ratifies the treaty ending the Spanish-American War.

• In 1911…
  Ronald Reagan, the fortieth U.S. president, is born in Tampico, Illinois.

• In 1971…
  Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard hits three golf balls on the moon.

Dates and events based on:

William J. Bennett and John Cribb, (2008) The American Patriot’s Almanac Daily Readings on America. (Kindle Edition)

Background information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: Ronald Reagan…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan

Web Sites and Blogs:

BrainyQuote.com: Ronald Reagan Quotes…
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/r/ronald_reagan.html

by Gerald Boerner

Many of us remember learning the Battle Hymn of the Republic in elementary school and sing it as a patriotic song. Little did we know of the actual background to that song at the time of the Civil War. It was meant to be uplifting to the spirits of those both on the battlefields and at home. We could do well to reexamine those words and thoughts. Long live the Republic.  GLB

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.”

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave,
Our God is marching on.

The Battle Hymn of the Republic

“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is an American abolitionist song. The lyrics were written by Julia Ward Howe in November 1861 and first published in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1862. It became popular during the American Civil War.

History

The tune was written around 1855 by William Steffe. The first known lyrics were called “Canaan’s Happy Shore” or “Brothers, Will You Meet Me?” and the song was sung as a campfire spiritual. The tune spread across the United States, taking on many sets of new lyrics.

Thomas Bishop, from Vermont, joined the Massachusetts Infantry before the outbreak of war and compiled a popular set of lyrics, circa 1860, titled “John Brown’s Body” which became one of his unit’s walking songs. According to writer Irwin Silber (who has written a book about Civil War folk songs), the original lyrics were only obliquely about John Brown, the famed abolitionist. More particularly the lyrics were about a Scotsman of the same name who was a member of the 12th Massachusetts Regiment, and the lyrics were composed to poke some good-natured fun at the runty, mild-mannered Scotsman who shared the same name as the much more famous and fearsome abolitionist.

Bishop’s battalion was dispatched to Washington, D.C. early in the Civil War, and Julia Ward Howe heard this song during a public review of the troops in Washington. Rufus R. Dawes, then in command of Company “K” of the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, stated in his memoirs that the man who started the singing was Sergeant John Ticknor of his company. By this time the association with the diminutive Scotsman John Brown was forgotten or unknown to most listeners, who heard only a rough and somewhat oddly-phrased marching song about John Brown the abolitionist. Howe’s companion at the review, the Reverend James Clarke, suggested to Howe that she write new words for the fighting men’s song.

Staying at the Willard Hotel in Washington on the night of November 18, 1861, Howe awoke with the words of the song in her mind and in near darkness wrote the verses to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”. Of the writing of the lyrics, Howe remembers, “I went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly. I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight; and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind. Having thought out all the stanzas, I said to myself, ‘I must get up and write these verses down, lest I fall asleep again and forget them.’ So, with a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen which I remembered to have used the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.”

Howe’s “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was first published on the front page of The Atlantic Monthly of February 1862. The sixth verse written by Howe, which is less commonly sung, was not published at that time. The song was also published as a broadside in 1863 by the Supervisory Committee for Recruiting Colored Regiments in Philadelphia.

“Canaan’s Happy Shore” has a verse and chorus of equal metrical length and both verse and chorus share an identical melody and rhythm. “John Brown’s Body” has more syllables in its verse and uses a more rhythmically active variation of the “Canaan” melody to accommodate the additional words in the verse. In Howe’s lyrics, the words of the verse are packed into a yet longer line, with even more syllables than John Brown’s Body. The verse still uses the same underlying melody as the refrain, but the addition of many dotted rhythms to the underlying melody allows for the more complex verse to fit the same melody as the comparatively short refrain.

Both “John Brown” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” were published in Father Kemp’s Old Folks Concert Tunes in 1874 and reprinted in 1889. Both songs had the same Chorus with an additional “Glory” in the second line: “Glory! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!”

Julia Ward Howe was the wife of Samuel Gridley Howe, the famed scholar in education of the blind. Samuel and Julia were also active leaders in anti-slavery politics and strong supporters of the Union.

Influence

The Battle Hymn of the Republic is usually heard at the national conventions of both the Republican Party and Democratic Party and is often sung at Presidential inaugurations. The tune has been used with alternative lyrics numerous times. The most famous variant is Solidarity Forever a marching song for organized labor in the 20th century. It was also the basis for the anthem of the American consumers’ cooperative movement, “The Battle Hymn of Cooperation”, written in 1932.

Words from the first verse (“He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored”) inspired John Steinbeck to title his 1939 masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath. John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies was also inspired by this song.

The US Army paratrooper song, Blood on the Risers, first sung in World War II, is set to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

The lyrics of the Battle Hymn of the Republic appear in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s sermons and speeches, most notably in his speech “How Long, Not Long” from the steps of the Montgomery, Alabama Courthouse on March 25, 1965 after the 3rd Selma March, and in his final sermon “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”, delivered in Memphis, Tennessee on the evening of April 3, 1968, the night before his assassination. In fact, the latter sermon, King’s last public words, ends with the first lyrics of the Battle Hymn, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

In 1960 the Mormon Tabernacle Choir won the Grammy Award for Best Performance by a Vocal Group or Chorus. The single record had reached #13 on Billboard’s Hot 100 the previous autumn.

A number of popular terrace songs (in football) are sung to the tune in England; renditions include Glory Glory Leeds United, Glory Glory Man United, and Glory Glory Tottenham Hotspur.

Various parodies have been written using the song. The Burning of the School is a well-known one.

The song is very similar to the popular song “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad”.

Other Events on this Day

• In 1846…
  The Oregon Spectator, the first newspaper on the Pacific Coast of the United States, is published in Oregon City.
• In 1883…
  The Southern Pacific Railroad opens a transcontinental “Sunset Route” from New Orleans to San Francisco.
• In 1901…
  Edwin Prescott patents a “loop-the-loop centrifugal railway” — better known as a roller coaster.
• In 1937…
  President Franklin Roosevelt proposes increasing the number of Supreme Court justices, leading critics to charge that he is trying to “pack” the court with justices to his liking.

Dates and events based on:

William J. Bennett and John Cribb, (2008) The American Patriot’s Almanac Daily Readings on America. (Kindle Edition)

Background information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: Battle Hymn of the Republic… 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Hymn_of_the_Republic

by Gerald Boerner

Frederick Douglass, orator, abolitionist, women’s suffragist advocate, and civil rights activist was a former slave. He was educated and read the scriptures to his fellow slaves on Sunday mornings until such gatherings were broken up by neighboring slaveholders. He trained as a lawyer and he became one of the leading advocates against slavery. He worked with Harriett Tubman and her Underground Railroad.

His early life saw many abuses. As a teenager, he was “loaned” out to a neighboring slave holder who was known for his abusive methods. Douglass was beaten frequently until, one day, he attacked his tormentor until he won. He was never beaten again. This was the strength of his character and is to be admired for it.  GLB

“At this moment — from whence came the spirit, I don’t know — I resoled to fight.”
— Frederick Douglass

“My long-crushed spirit rose… the day had passed forever when I could  be a slave.”
— Frederick Douglass

“I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.”
— Frederick Douglass

“No nation was ever called to the contemplation of a destiny more important than ours…”
— Frederick Douglass

“Right is of no Sex — Truth is of no Color — God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren.”
— Motto of the North Star

[He] spent his life working for an America that offered “justice for all men, justice now and always, justice without reservation of qualification except those suggested by mercy and love.”
— Frederick Douglass

“We were waiting and listening as for a bolt from the sky…we were watching…by the dim light of the stars for the dawn of a new day…we were longing for the answer to the agonizing prayers of centuries.”
— Frederick Douglass

“In this denial of the right to participate in government, not merely the degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice happens, but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world.”
— Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass: Fighting for Freedom

Frederick Douglass (Born: c. 1818 – 1895) was an American abolitionist, women’s suffragist, editor, orator, author, statesman and reformer. Called "The Sage of Anacostia" and "The Lion of Anacostia", Douglass is one of the most prominent figures in African American and United States history.

He was a firm believer in the equality of all people, whether black, female, Native American, or recent immigrant. He was fond of saying, "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong."

Life as a Slave

Frederick Douglass began his own story thus: "I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot county, Maryland.". Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, who later became known as Frederick Douglass, was born a slave in Talbot County, Maryland, between Hillsboro and Cordova, in a shack east of Tappers Corner and west of Tuckahoe Creek. He was separated from his mother, Harriet Bailey, when he was still an infant. She died when Douglass was about seven and Douglass lived with his maternal grandmother Betty Bailey. His mother’s ancestors likely had Native American heritage.

The identity of his father is obscure. Douglass originally stated that he was told his father was a white man, perhaps his owner Aaron Anthony. Later he said he knew nothing of his father’s identity. At age seven, Douglass was separated from his grandmother and moved to the Wye House plantation, where Anthony worked as overseer. When Anthony died, Douglass was given to Lucretia Auld, wife of Thomas Auld. She sent Douglass to serve Thomas’ brother Hugh Auld in Baltimore.

When Douglass was about twelve, Hugh Auld’s wife Sophia started teaching him the alphabet. She was breaking the law against teaching slaves to read. When Hugh Auld discovered this, he strongly disapproved, saying that if a slave learned to read, he would become dissatisfied with his condition and desire freedom. Douglass later referred to this statement as the "first decidedly antislavery lecture" he had ever heard. As detailed in his autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), Douglass succeeded in learning to read from white children in the neighborhood and by observing the writings of men with whom he worked.

As Douglass learned and began to read newspapers, political materials, and books of every description, he was exposed to a new realm of thought that led him to question and then condemn the institution of slavery. In later years, Douglass credited The Columbian Orator, which he discovered at about age twelve, with clarifying and defining his views on freedom and human rights.

When Douglass was hired out to William Freeland, he taught other slaves on the plantation how to read the New Testament at a weekly Sunday school. As word spread, the interest among slaves in learning to read was so great that in any week more than 40 slaves would attend lessons. For about six months, their study went relatively unnoticed. While Freeland was complacent about their activities, other plantation owners became incensed that their slaves were being educated. One Sunday they burst in on the gathering, armed with clubs and stones to disperse the congregation permanently.

In 1833, Thomas Auld took Douglass back from Hugh after a dispute ("[A]s a means of punishing Hugh," Douglass wrote). Dissatisfied with Douglass, Thomas Auld then sent him to work for Edward Covey, a poor farmer who had a reputation as a "slave-breaker." There Douglass was whipped regularly. The sixteen-year-old Douglass was indeed nearly broken psychologically by his ordeal under Covey, but he finally rebelled against the beatings and fought back. After losing a confrontation with Douglass, Covey never tried to beat him again.

In 1837, Douglass met Anna Murray, a free black in Baltimore. They married soon after he obtained his freedom.

From Slavery to Freedom

Douglass first unsuccessfully tried to escape from Mr. Freeland, who had hired him out from his owner Colonel Lloyd. In 1836, he tried to escape from his new owner Covey, but failed again.

On September 3, 1838, Douglass successfully escaped by boarding a train to Havre de Grace, Maryland. He was dressed in a sailor’s uniform and carried identification papers provided by a free black seaman. He crossed the Susquehanna River by ferry at Havre de Grace, then continued by train to Wilmington, Delaware. From there he went by steamboat to "Quaker City" — Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — and eventually reached New York; the whole journey took less than 24 hours.

Frederick Douglass later wrote of his arrival in New York City:

I have often been asked, how I felt when first I found myself on free soil. And my readers may share the same curiosity. There is scarcely anything in my experience about which I could not give a more satisfactory answer. A new world had opened upon me. If life is more than breath, and the "quick round of blood," I lived more in one day than in a year of my slave life. It was a time of joyous excitement which words can but tamely describe. In a letter written to a friend soon after reaching New York, I said: "I felt as one might feel upon escape from a den of hungry lions." Anguish and grief, like darkness and rain, may be depicted ; but gladness and joy, like the rainbow, defy the skill of pen or pencil.

Abolitionist Activities

Douglass continued traveling up to Massachusetts. There he joined various organizations in New Bedford, including a black church, and regularly attended abolitionist meetings. He subscribed to William Lloyd Garrison’s weekly journal The Liberator, and in 1841 heard Garrison speak at a meeting of the Bristol Anti-Slavery Society. At one of these meetings, Douglass was unexpectedly asked to speak.

The home and meetinghouse
of the Johnsons, where Douglass
lived in New Bedford

After he told his story, he was encouraged to become an anti-slavery lecturer. Douglass was inspired by Garrison and later stated that "no face and form ever impressed me with such sentiments [of the hatred of slavery] as did those of William Lloyd Garrison." Garrison was likewise impressed with Douglass and wrote of him in The Liberator. Several days later, Douglass delivered his first speech at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society’s annual convention in Nantucket. Then 23 years old, Douglass said later that his legs were shaking but he conquered his nervousness and gave an eloquent speech about his rough life as a slave.

In 1843, Douglass participated in the American Anti-Slavery Society’s Hundred Conventions project, a six-month tour of meeting halls throughout the Eastern and Midwestern United States. He participated in the Seneca Falls Convention, the birthplace of the American feminist movement, and signed its Declaration of Sentiments.

Autobiography

Douglass’ best-known work is his first autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, published in 1845. At the time, some skeptics attacked the book and questioned whether a black man could have produced such an eloquent piece of literature. The book received generally positive reviews and it became an immediate bestseller. Within three years of its publication, the autobiography had been reprinted nine times with 11,000 copies circulating in the United States; it was also translated into French and Dutch and published in Europe.

The book’s success had an unfortunate side effect: Douglass’ friends and mentors feared that the publicity would draw the attention of his ex-owner, Hugh Auld, who might try to get his "property" back. They encouraged Douglass to tour Ireland, as many other former slaves had done. Douglass set sail on the Cambria for Liverpool on August 16, 1845, and arrived in Ireland as the Irish Potato Famine was beginning.

Douglass published three versions of his autobiography during his lifetime (and revised the third of these), each time expanding on the previous one. The 1845 Narrative, which was his biggest seller, was followed by My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855. In 1881, after the Civil War, Douglass published Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, which he revised in 1892.

Travels to the United Kingdom

Mural featuring Frederick Douglass in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Starting in August 1845, Douglass spent two years in the United Kingdom, where he gave many lectures, mainly in Protestant churches or chapels. His draw was such that some facilities were "crowded to suffocation"; an example was his hugely popular London Reception Speech, which Douglass delivered at Alexander Fletcher’s Finsbury Chapel in May 1846. Douglass remarked that in England he was treated not "as a color, but as a man." He met and befriended the Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell.

It was during this trip that Douglass became officially free, when his freedom was purchased from his owner by British supporters. British sympathizers led by Ellen Richardson of Newcastle upon Tyne collected the money needed to purchase his freedom. Douglass roused tumultuous crowds with his speeches about slavery and his experiences, and he met with acclaim. In 1846 Douglass was able to meet with Thomas Clarkson, one of the last survivors of the abolitionists who had persuaded Parliament to abolish slavery in Great Britain and its colonies.

Frederick Douglass in 1856

After his return to the US, Douglass produced some regular abolitionist newspapers: The North Star, Frederick Douglass Weekly, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, Douglass’ Monthly and New National Era. The motto of The North Star was "Right is of no Sex — Truth is of no Color — God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren."

Douglass believed that education was key for African Americans to improve their lives. For this reason, he was an early advocate for desegregation of schools. In the 1850s, he was especially outspoken in New York. While the ratio of African American to white students there was 1 to 40, African Americans received education funding at a ratio of only 1 to 1,600. This meant that the facilities and instruction for African-American children were vastly inferior. Douglass criticized the situation and called for court action to open all schools to all children. He stated that inclusion within the educational system was a more pressing need for African Americans than political issues such as suffrage.

Douglass’ work spanned the years prior to and during the Civil War. He was acquainted with the radical abolitionist John Brown but disapproved of Brown’s plan to start an armed slave rebellion in the South. Brown visited Douglass’ home two months before he led the raid on the federal armory in Harpers Ferry. After the raid, Douglass fled for a time to Canada, fearing guilt by association and arrest as a co-conspirator. Douglass believed that the attack on federal property would enrage the American public. Douglass later shared a stage at a speaking engagement in Harpers Ferry with Andrew Hunter, the prosecutor who successfully convicted Brown.

Douglass conferred with President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 on the treatment of black soldiers, and with President Andrew Johnson on the subject of black suffrage. His early collaborators were the white abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. In the early 1850s, however, Douglass split with those who supported Garrison over the issue of interpretation of the United States Constitution. He believed it provided all that was necessary to gain the freedom of African Americans and guarantee their rights.

Before the Civil War

In 1851, Douglass merged the North Star with Gerrit Smith’s Liberty Party Paper to form Frederick Douglass’ Paper, which was published until 1860. Douglass came to agree with Smith and Lysander Spooner that the United States Constitution was an anti-slavery document. This reversed his earlier belief that it was pro-slavery.

At one time he had shared the views of William Lloyd Garrison, who was concerned that support for slavery was part of the fabric of the Constitution. Garrison had publicly expressed his opinion by burning copies of the document. Further contributing to their growing separation, Garrison was worried that the North Star competed with his own National Anti-Slavery Standard and Marius Robinson’s Anti-Slavery Bugle.

Douglass’ change of position on the Constitution was one of the most notable incidents of the division in the abolitionist movement after the publication of Spooner’s book The Unconstitutionality of Slavery in 1846. This shift in opinion, and other political differences, created a rift between Douglass and Garrison. Douglass further angered Garrison by saying that the Constitution could and should be used as an instrument in the fight against slavery. With this, Douglass began to assert his independence from Garrison and his supporters.

Frederick Douglass stood
up to speak in favor of
women’s right to vote.

In 1848, Douglass attended the first women’s rights convention, the Seneca Falls Convention, as the only African American. Elizabeth Cady Stanton asked the assembly to pass a resolution asking for women’s suffrage. Many of those present opposed the idea, including influential Quakers James and Lucretia Mott. Douglass stood and spoke eloquently in favor; he said that he could not accept the right to vote himself as a black man if woman could not also claim that right. Douglass projected that the world would be a better place if women were involved in the political sphere. "In this denial of the right to participate in government, not merely the degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice happens, but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world." Douglass’s powerful words rang true with enough attendees that the resolution passed.

In March 1860, Douglass’ youngest daughter Annie died in Rochester, New York, while he was still in England. Douglass returned from England the following month. He took a route through Canada to avoid detection.

By the time of the Civil War, Douglass was one of the most famous black men in the country, known for his orations on the condition of the black race and on other issues such as women’s rights. His eloquence gathered crowds at every location. His reception by leaders in England and Ireland added to his stature.

Fight for Emancipation

Douglass and the abolitionists argued that because the aim of the war was to end slavery, African Americans should be allowed to engage in the fight for their freedom. Douglass publicized this view in his newspapers and several speeches.

President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect on January 1, 1863, declared the freedom of all slaves in Confederate-held territory. Douglass described the spirit of those awaiting the proclamation: "We were waiting and listening as for a bolt from the sky…we were watching…by the dim light of the stars for the dawn of a new day…we were longing for the answer to the agonizing prayers of centuries."

With the North no longer obliged to return slaves to their owners in the South, Douglass fought for equality for his people. He made plans with Lincoln to move the liberated slaves out of the South. During the war, Douglass helped the Union by serving as a recruiter for the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. His son Frederick Douglass Jr. also served as a recruiter and his other son, Lewis Douglass, fought for the 54th Massachusetts Regiment at the Battle of Fort Wagner.

Slavery everywhere in the United States was outlawed by the post-war (1865) ratification of the 13th Amendment. The 14th Amendment provided for citizenship and equal protection under the law. The 15th Amendment protected all citizens from being discriminated against in voting because of race.

Reconstruction Era

After the Civil War, Douglass was appointed to several important political positions. He served as President of the Reconstruction-era Freedman’s Savings Bank; as marshal of the District of Columbia; as minister-resident and consul-general to the Republic of Haiti (1889–1891); and as chargé d’affaires for the Dominican Republic. After two years, he resigned from his ambassadorship because of disagreements with U.S. government policy. In 1872, he moved to Washington, D.C., after his house on South Avenue in Rochester, New York burned down; arson was suspected. Also lost was a complete issue of The North Star.

In 1868, Douglass supported the presidential campaign of Ulysses S. Grant. President Grant signed into law the Klan Act and the second and third Enforcement Acts. Grant used their provisions vigorously, suspending habeas corpus in South Carolina and sending troops there and into other states; under his leadership over 5,000 arrests were made and the Ku Klux Klan received a serious blow. Grant’s vigor in disrupting the Klan made him unpopular among many whites, but Frederick Douglass praised him. An associate of Douglass wrote of Grant that African Americans "will ever cherish a grateful remembrance of his name, fame and great services."

In 1872, Douglass became the first African American nominated for Vice President of the United States, as Victoria Woodhull’s running mate on the Equal Rights Party ticket. He was nominated without his knowledge. During the campaign, he neither campaigned for the ticket nor acknowledged that he had been nominated.

Douglass continued his speaking engagements. On the lecture circuit, he spoke at many colleges around the country during the Reconstruction era, including Bates College in Lewiston, Maine in 1873. He continued to emphasize the importance of voting rights and exercise of suffrage.

White insurgents had quickly arisen in the South after the war, organizing first as secret vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Through the years, armed insurgency took different forms, the last as powerful paramilitary groups such as the White League and the Red Shirts during the 1870s in the Deep South. They operated as "the military arm of the Democratic Party", turning out Republican officeholders and disrupting elections. Their power continued to grow in the South; more than 10 years after the end of the war, white Democrats regained political power in every state of the former Confederacy and began to reassert white supremacy. They enforced this by a combination of violence, late 19th c. laws imposing segregation and a concerted effort to disfranchise African Americans. From 1890-1908, white Democrats passed new constitutions and statutes in the South that created requirements for voter registration and voting that effectively disfranchised most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites. This disfranchisement and segregation were enforced for more than six decades into the 20th century.

Douglass’s stump speech for 25 years after the end of the Civil War was to emphasize work to counter the racism that was then prevalent in unions.

Other Events on this Day

• In 1789…
  The Electoral College chooses George Washington to be the first U.S. president.

• In 1826…
  The Last of the Mohicans by James Fennimore Cooper is published.

• In 1861…
  Six Southern states form the Confederate States of America.

• In 1932…
  The first Winter Olympics in the United States open in Lake Placid, New York.

• In 1945…
  Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin meet at Yalta in the Crimea to discuss the post-WWII world.

Dates and events based on:

William J. Bennett and John Cribb, (2008) The American Patriot’s Almanac Daily Readings on America. (Kindle Edition)

Background information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: Frederick Douglass…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Douglass

by Gerald Boerner

Today we recognize the self-sacrificial behavior of four chaplains during World War II. Their transport ship, the USST Dorchester, was hit be a German torpedo while in the vicinity of Sicily. These four chaplains handed out life preservers to the men; when they ran out, they took their own preservers off and gave them to the troops. This helped to save many men, but cost the lives of the four chaplains. They have been honored by a postage stamp and a number of memorials. War brings out the best of men and this is another example of that valor.  GLB

“…without a Respectable Navy, Alas America!”
— Captain John Paul Jones

“I have not yet begun to fight!”
— Captain John Paul Jones

“Don’t give up the ship!”
— Captain James Lawrence

“We have met the enemy and they are ours…”
— Oliver Hazard Perry

“Damn the torpedoes, Full speed ahead!”
— Admiral David Glasgow Farragut

“You may fire when you are ready Gridley.”
— Commodore George Dewey

“I wish to have no Connection with any Ship that does not Sail fast for I intend to go in harm’s way.”
— Captain John Paul Jones

“It follows than as certain as that night succeeds the day, that without a decisive naval force we can do nothing definitive, and with it, everything honorable and glorious.”
— President George Washington

The Four Chaplains of World War II

The Four Chaplains were four United States Army chaplains who gave their lives to save other soldiers during the sinking of the troop ship USAT Dorchester during World War II. They helped other soldiers board lifeboats and gave up their own life jackets when the supply ran out. The chaplains joined arms, said prayers, and sang hymns as they went down with the ship.

Sinking of the Dorchester

The chaplains, who all held the rank of lieutenant, were the Methodist Reverend George L. Fox, Rabbi Alexander D. Goode, the Roman Catholic Priest John P. Washington and the Reformed Church in America Reverend Clark V. Poling. They were sailing on the USAT Dorchester, a coastal liner that had been converted to a troop transport for World War II. On the night of February 3, 1943, the vessel, travelling in convoy, was torpedoed by the German submarine U-223 off Newfoundland in the North Atlantic.

The torpedo knocked out the Dorchester’s electrical system, leaving the ship dark. Panic set in among the men on board, many of them trapped below decks. The chaplains sought to calm the men and organize an orderly evacuation of the ship, and helped guide wounded men to safety. As life jackets were passed out to the men, the supply ran out before each man had one. The chaplains removed their own life jackets and gave them to others. They helped as many men as they could into lifeboats, and then linked arms and, saying prayers and singing hymns, went down with the ship.

As I swam away from the ship, I looked back. The flares had lighted everything. The bow came up high and she slid under. The last thing I saw, the Four Chaplains were up there praying for the safety of the men. They had done everything they could. I did not see them again. They themselves did not have a chance without their life jackets.
— Grady Clark, survivor

In all, 230 of the 904 men aboard the ship were rescued. Life jackets offered little protection from hypothermia which killed most men in the water. Water temperature was 34 °F (1 °C) and air temperature was 36 °F (2 °C). By the time additional rescue ships arrived "…hundreds of dead bodies were seen floating on the water, kept up by their life jackets."

The chaplains were also honored
with a stamp, issued in 1948
and by an act of Congress
designating February 3
as "Four Chaplains Day."

On December 19, 1944, all four chaplains were posthumously awarded the Purple Heart and the Distinguished Service Cross.. The Four Chaplains’ Medal was established by act of Congress on July 14, 1960, and was presented posthumously to their next of kin by Secretary of the Army Wilber M. Brucker at Ft. Myer, Virginia on January 18, 1961.

The Chaplains

George L. Fox… George L. Fox (March 15, 1900 – February 3, 1943) was a Methodist minister and a lieutenant in the United States Army. He was one of the Four Chaplains who gave their lives to save other soldiers during the sinking of the USAT Dorchester during World War II.

George L. Fox was born in Lewistown, Pennsylvania in 1900, one of five children. At 17 he ran away to join the army and served on the Western Front during World War I as a medical orderly, receiving the Silver Star, the Purple Heart and the Croix de Guerre for his meritorious service. Following the war, Fox completed high school and briefly worked for a Trust Company. Fox married in 1923 and his son, Wyatt Ray was born a year later. Fox studied at Moody Bible Institute and Illinois Wesleyan University, graduating in 1931. Following graduation, Fox became an itinerant Methodist preacher, holding posts in Downs, Illinois and Rye, New Hampshire before joining the Boston University School of Theology and becoming an ordained minister in 1934.

That same year, he took over the church in Waits River, Vermont, and his daughter, Mary Elizabeth, was born. He remained in Vermont, moving church twice and becoming the state chaplain and historian for the American Legion. Fox joined the army again in 1942. His son enlisted in the Marine Corps on the same day. Fox was united with the other Four Chaplains for his voyage to Europe later that year following a position in the chaplain’s school in Harvard, and departed with over 900 soldiers on the Dorchester in January 1943.

Alexander D. Goode… Alexander D. Goode (May 10, 1911 – February 3, 1943) was a rabbi and a lieutenant in the United States Army. He was one of the Four Chaplains who gave their lives to save other soldiers during the sinking of the USAT Dorchester during World War II

Born in 1911, one of four children to a Brooklyn rabbi, Goode excelled at sports at high school in Washington, D.C. He became a rabbi after graduating from the University of Cincinnati and in 1937 Hebrew Union College. In 1940 he received his Ph.D from Johns Hopkins University. He was married in 1935 to Teresa Flax, niece of Al Jolson, with whom he had one daughter, Rosalie.

Goode served as a rabbi in Marion, Indiana and York, Pennsylvania.

In 1941, he applied to become a Navy chaplain but was turned down. The following year he was accepted into the Army, being posted to Harvard where he studied at the chaplain’s school in preparation for deployment to Europe followed by brief service at an airbase in Goldsboro, North Carolina. In October 1942 he joined the other members of the Four Chaplains and was detailed to embark on the Dorchester a few months later.

John P. Washington… John P. Washington (18 July 1908 – 3 February 1943) was a Roman Catholic priest and a lieutenant in the United States Army. He was one of the Four Chaplains who gave their lives to save other soldiers during the sinking of the USAT Dorchester during World War II.

Born as one of seven children to Irish immigrants Frank and Mary Washington, John was a religious boy from a young age, rapidly becoming an altar boy at his local church in Newark, New Jersey, where he grew up. A talented sportsman and intelligent and hard-working child, he performed well at school and was accepted into Seton Hall Preparatory School, then located in South Orange, New Jersey, where he completed high school and took courses designed to prepare him for the priesthood. Following his graduation he moved to the Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology and took minor orders in 1933, being ordained a priest in 1935.

He served at several New Jersey parishes over the next six years, before joining the Army upon hearing of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. After brief periods in Indiana and Maryland, Washington was dispatched to Harvard University where he took a course preparing him for deployment for Europe and became acquainted with the others of the Four chaplains for the first time. In January 1943 he joined them on board the Dorchester for the trip to Europe via Greenland, and set off on the fatal journey.

Clark V. Poling… Clark V. Poling (August 7, 1910 – February 3, 1943) was a minister in the Reformed Church in America and a lieutenant in the United States Army. He was one of the Four Chaplains who gave their lives to save other soldiers during the sinking of the USAT Dorchester during World War II.

Poling was born in Columbus, Ohio to Daniel A. Poling, an Evangelical minister, and Susie Jane Vandersall. He was raised in Auburndale, Massachusetts where he attended Whitney Public School. His mother died in 1918; his father remarried in 1919 and converted to the Baptist faith, becoming an ordained minister. The family moved to Poughkeepsie, New York and Poling attended Oakwood High School where he excelled on the football team.

After graduation he attended Hope College in Michigan and then Rutgers University in New Jersey, graduating in 1933. He then attended Yale Divinity School, graduating in 1936. He then took up a position as pastor of the First Reformed Church in Schenectady, New York where he settled with his wife Betty and their son Corky. A daughter, Susan Elizabeth, was born three months after his death.

At the outbreak of war in 1941, Poling immediately volunteered for service as an Army chaplain in the footsteps of his father, who had served as a chaplain during World War I. He initially served in Mississippi with a transport regiment.

Other Events on this Day

• In 1690…
  Massachusetts authorizes the first paper currency issued in America.

• In 1913…
  The Sixteenth Amendment, authorizing a federal income tax, is ratified.

• In 1917…
  The United States breaks off diplomatic relations with Germany after a German submarine sinks the line Housatonic off the coast of Sicily.

• In 1943…
  The Army transport ship Dorchester sinks after being hit be a German torpedo.

• In 1949…
  Rock stars Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson are killed when their chartered plane crashes in Iowa.

Dates and events based on:

William J. Bennett and John Cribb, (2008) The American Patriot’s Almanac Daily Readings on America. (Kindle Edition)

Background information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: The Four Chaplains of World War II…  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Chaplains

Wikipedia: George L. Fox…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_L._Fox

Wikipedia: Alexander D. Goode…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_D._Goode

Wikipedia: John P. Washington…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P._Washington

Wikipedia: Clark V. Poling…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_V._Poling

Web Sites and Blogs:

History Navy Military: Famous Navy Quotes: Who Said Them…
http://www.history.navy.mil/trivia/trivia02.htm

by Gerald Boerner

The traditional weather forecaster will make his appearance today on National Television. He will be brought out of his warm, comfortable burrow to look for his proverbial shadow. Everyone will watch to see if there will be an early end to winter. It doesn’t matter whether it is accurate or not; it is an annual event that gives us a bright spot to look forward to this day at the beginning of February with snow outside. We will wait and watch.  GLB

“To shorten winter, borrow some money due in spring.”
— W.J. Vogel

“Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you.”
— Moari Proverb

“The trouble with weather forecasting is that it’s right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it.”
— Patrick Young

“To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.”
— George Santayana

“Don’t knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn’t start a conversation if it didn’t change once in a while.”
— Kin Hubbard

“Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush.”
— Doug Larson

“Wherever you go, no matter what the weather, always bring your own sunshine.”
— Anthony J. D’Angelo

“There’s one good thing about snow, it makes your lawn look as nice as your neighbor’s.”
— Clyde Moore

Groundhog Day

Groundhog Day is a holiday celebrated on February 2. It is held in the United States and Canada. According to folklore, if a groundhog emerging from its burrow on this day fails to see its shadow, it will leave the burrow, signifying that winter will soon end. If on the other hand, the groundhog sees its shadow, the groundhog will supposedly retreat into its burrow, and winter will continue for six more weeks.^[1] The holiday, which began as a Pennsylvania German custom in southeastern and central Pennsylvania in the 18th and 19th centuries, has its origins in ancient European weather lore, wherein a badger or sacred bear is the prognosticator as opposed to a groundhog. The holiday also bears some similarities to the medieval Catholic holiday of Candlemas. It also bears similarities to the Pagan festival of Imbolc, the seasonal turning point of the Celtic calendar, which is celebrated on February 2 and also involves weather prognostication.

February 4, 1841 — from Morgantown, Berks County (Pennsylvania) storekeeper James Morris’ diary…"Last Tuesday, the 2nd, was Candlemas day, the day on which, according to the Germans, the Groundhog peeps out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops back for another six weeks nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as the weather is to be moderate."

Modern customs of the holiday involve celebrations where early morning festivals are held to watch the groundhog emerging from its burrow. In southeastern Pennsylvania, Groundhog Lodges (Grundsow Lodges) celebrate the holiday with fersommlinge, social events in which food is served, speeches are made, and one or more g’spiel (plays or skits) are performed for entertainment. The Pennsylvania German dialect is the only language spoken at the event, and those who speak English pay a penalty, usually in the form of a nickel, dime or quarter, per word spoken, put into a bowl in the center of the table.

The largest Groundhog Day celebration is held in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, where crowds as high as 40,000 have gathered to celebrate the holiday since at least 1886. Other celebrations of note in Pennsylvania take place in Quarryville in Lancaster County, the Anthracite Region of Schuylkill County, the Sinnamahoning Valley and Bucks County. Outside of Pennsylvania, notable celebrations occur in the Frederick and Hagerstown areas of Maryland, the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, Woodstock, Illinois, and among the Amish populations of over twenty states and Canada. The University of Dallas in Irving,Texas has taken Groundhog Day as its official university holiday and organizes a large-scale celebration every year in honor of the Groundhog.

The name Punxsutawney comes from the Indian name for the location "ponksad-uteney" which means "the town of the sandflies." The name woodchuck comes from the Indian legend of "Wojak, the groundhog" considered by them to be their ancestral grandfather.

Groundhog Day received worldwide attention as a result of the 1993 film of the same name, Groundhog Day, which was set in Punxsutawney (though filmed primarily in Woodstock, Illinois) and featured Punxsutawney Phil.

Historical origins

The groundhog (Marmota monax) is
a rodent of the family Sciuridae,
belonging to the group of large
ground squirrels.

An early American reference to Groundhog Day can be found in a diary entry, dated February 5, 1841, of Berks County, Pennsylvania storekeeper James Morris:

"Last Tuesday, the 2nd, was Candlemas day, the day on which, according to the Germans, the Groundhog peeps out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops back for another six weeks nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as the weather is to be moderate."

In Scotland the tradition may also derive from an English poem:

As the light grows longer
The cold grows stronger
If Candlemas be fair and bright
Winter will have another flight
If Candlemas be cloud and snow
Winter will be gone and not come again
A farmer should on Candlemas day
Have half his corn and half his hay
On Candlemas day if thorns hang a drop
You can be sure of a good pea crop

This tradition also stems from similar beliefs associated with Candlemas Day and Groundhog Day. Candlemas, also known as the Purification of the Virgin or the Presentation, coincides with the earlier pagan observance Imbolc.

An Alternate Hypothesis of the Origins:
In western countries in the Northern Hemisphere the official first day of Spring is almost seven weeks (46–48 days) after Groundhog Day, on March 20 or March 21. About 1,000 years ago, before the adoption of the Gregorian calendar when the date of the equinox drifted in the Julian calendar, the spring equinox fell on March 16 instead. This is exactly six weeks after February 2. The custom could have been a folk embodiment of the confusion created by the collision of two calendrical systems. Some ancient traditions marked the change of season at cross-quarter days such as Imbolc when daylight first makes significant progress against the night. Other traditions held that Spring did not begin until the length of daylight overtook night at the Vernal Equinox. So an arbiter, the groundhog/hedgehog, was incorporated as a yearly custom to settle the two traditions. Sometimes Spring begins at Imbolc, and sometimes Winter lasts 6 more weeks until the equinox.

Similar customs

In Germany, June 27 is "Siebenschläfertag" (Seven Sleepers Day). If it rains that day, the rest of summer is supposedly going to be rainy. While it might seem to refer to the "Siebenschläfer" squirrel (Glis Glis), also known as the "edible dormouse", it actually commemorates the Seven Sleepers (the actual commemoration day is July 25).

In the United Kingdom, July 15 is known as St. Swithun’s day. It is claimed that at one time it was believed if it rained on that day, it would rain for the next 40 days and nights. However, since the probability of such a protracted period of continual rain is virtually nil it is more likely that the belief was simply that the ensuing summer would be wetter than average.

Other Events on this Day

• In 1653…
  New Amsterdam, later to become New York City, is incorporated.

• In 1848…
  The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ends the Mexican War.

• In 1876…
  Baseball’s National League is formed with eight teams.

• In 1887…
  The first official Groundhog Day is observed in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.

• In 1940…
  Frank Sinatra gets his big break when he debuts with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra in Indianapolis.

Dates and events based on:

William J. Bennett and John Cribb, (2008) The American Patriot’s Almanac Daily Readings on America. (Kindle Edition)

Background information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: Groundhog Day……
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day

Web Sites and Blogs:

Stormfax.com: Stormfax Weather Almanac…
http://www.stormfax.com/ghogday.htm

QuoteGarden.com: Quotations for Groundhog Day…
http://www.quotegarden.com/groundhog-day.html

by Gerald Boerner

February is Black History Month and we start out with an exploration of the civil disobedience associated with the quest for equal status in these United States for African-Americans. This group, more than other minority groups in this country, has suffered overt discrimination, especially in the southern states where discriminatory laws were known as “Jim Crow” laws. Segregation was open and blatant; the Civil Rights movement was targeted at bringing down these laws and winning true equality for the African-American population with the right to vote, use the same facilities as the whites, etc.  GLB

“We, who are the living, possess the past. Tomorrow is for our martyrs.”
— James Farmer

“There are those who say to you – we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are 172 years late.”
— Hubert H. Humphrey

“I’m the world’s original gradualist. I just think ninety-odd years is gradual enough.”
— Thurgood Marshall

“There are a million Negroes in Mississippi. I think they’ll take care of me.”
— James Meredith

“How could they say that my religion, Islam was a ‘race hate’ religion after all the plunder and enslavement and domination of my people by white Christians in the name of white supremacy?”
— Muhammad Ali

“The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.”
— Lyndon B. Johnson

“I am – Somebody. I may be poor, but I am – Somebody! I may be on welfare, but I am – Somebody! I may be uneducated, but I am – Somebody! I must be, I’m God’s child. I must be respected and protected. I am black and I am beautiful! I am – Somebody! Soul Power!”
— Jesse Jackson

“The Negro wants to be everything but himself… He wants to integrate with the white man, but he cannot integrate with himself or with his own kind. The Negro wants to lose his identity because he does not know his own identity.”
— Elijah Muhammad

“We are confronted primarily with a moral issue… whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.”
— John Fitzgerald Kennedy

“We don’t go for segregation. We go for separation. Separation is when you have your own. You control your own economy; you control your own politics; you control your own society; you control your own everything. You have yours and you control yours; we have ours and we control ours.”
— Malcolm X

Sit-Ins for Civil Rights

The African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968) refers to the reform movements in the United States aimed at outlawing racial discrimination against African Americans and restoring Suffrage in Southern states. This article covers the phase of the movement between 1954 and 1968, particularly in the South. By 1966, the emergence of the Black Power Movement, which lasted roughly from 1966 to 1975, enlarged the aims of the Civil Rights Movement to include racial dignity, economic and political self-sufficiency, and freedom from oppression by whites.

Many of those who were active in the Civil Rights Movement, with organizations such as NAACP, SNCC, CORE and SCLC, prefer the term "Southern Freedom Movement" because the struggle was about far more than just civil rights under law; it was also about fundamental issues of freedom, respect, dignity, and economic and social equality.

  Prominent figures of the African-
American Civil Rights Movement.
Top left: W. E. B. Du Bois; top right:
Malcolm X; bottom left:
Martin Luther King, Jr.;
bottom right: Rosa Parks.

During the period 1955–1968, acts of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience produced crisis situations between activists and government authorities. Federal, state, and local governments, businesses, educational institutions, and communities often had to respond immediately to crisis situations which highlighted the inequities faced by African Americans. Forms of protest and/or civil disobedience included boycotts such as the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956) in Alabama; "sit-ins" such as the influential Greensboro sit-in (1960) in North Carolina; marches, such as the Selma to Montgomery marches (1965) in Alabama; and a wide range of other nonviolent activities.

Noted legislative achievements during this phase of the Civil Rights Movement were passage of Civil Rights Act of 1964, that banned discrimination based on "race, color, religion, or national origin" in employment practices and public accommodations; the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that restored and protected voting rights; the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965, that dramatically opened entry to the U.S. to immigrants other than traditional European groups; and the Civil Rights Act of 1968, that banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. African Americans re-entered politics in the South, and across the country young people were inspired to action.

Background

After the disputed election of 1876 resulted in the end of Reconstruction, Whites in the South resumed political control of the region. Systematic disenfranchisement of African-Americans took place in Southern states from 1890 to 1908 and lasted until national civil rights legislation was passed in the mid-1960s. For more than 60 years, for example, blacks were not able to elect a single person in the South to represent their interests in Congress.

During this period, the white-dominated Democratic Party resumed political control over the South. The Republican Party—the "party of Lincoln"—which had been the party that most blacks belonged to, shrank to insignificance as black voter registration was suppressed. By the early 1900s, almost all elected officials in the South were Democrats.

At the same time as African-Americans were being disenfranchised, racial segregation was being imposed by law, and violence against blacks mushroomed. The system of overt, state-sanctioned racial discrimination and oppression that emerged out of the post-Reconstruction South became known as the "Jim Crow" system. It remained virtually intact into the early 1950s. Thus, the early 1900s is a period often referred to as the "nadir of American race relations." While problems and civil rights violations were most intense in the South, social tensions affected African Americans in other regions as well.

Characteristics of the post-Reconstruction period:

• Racial segregation. By law^[4], public facilities and government services such as education were divided into separate "white" and "colored" domains. Characteristically, those for colored were underfunded and of inferior quality.

• Disenfranchisement. When white Democrats regained power, they passed laws that made voter registration more inaccessible to blacks. Black voters were forced off the voting rolls. The number of African American voters dropped dramatically, and they no longer were able to elect representatives. From 1890 to 1908, Southern states of the former Confederacy created constitutions with provisions that disfranchised most African Americans and tens of thousands of poor white Americans.

• Exploitation. Increased economic oppression of blacks, Latinos, and Asians, denial of economic opportunities, and widespread employment discrimination.

• Violence. Individual, police, organizational, and mass racial violence against blacks (and Latinos in the Southwest and Asians in California).

African-Americans and other racial minorities rejected this regime. They resisted it in numerous ways and sought better opportunities through lawsuits, new organizations, political redress, and labor organizing (see the American Civil Rights Movement 1896–1954). The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in 1909. It fought to end race discrimination through litigation, education, and lobbying efforts. Its crowning achievement was its legal victory in the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that rejected separate white and colored school systems and by implication overturned the "separate but equal" doctrine established in Plessy v. Ferguson.

The situation for blacks outside the South was somewhat better (in most states they could vote and have their children educated, though they still faced discrimination in housing and jobs). From 1910 to 1970, African Americans sought better lives by migrating north and west. A total of nearly seven million blacks left the South in what was known as the Great Migration.

Invigorated by the victory of Brown and frustrated by the lack of immediate practical effect, private citizens increasingly rejected gradualist, legalistic approaches as the primary tool to bring about desegregation. They were faced with "massive resistance" in the South by proponents of racial segregation and voter suppression. In defiance, African Americans adopted a combined strategy of direct action with nonviolent resistance known as civil disobedience, giving rise to the African-American Civil Rights Movement of 1955–1968.

Mass Action Replacing Litigation

The strategy of public education, legislative lobbying, and litigation within the court system that typified the Civil Rights Movement in the first half of the 20th Century broadened after Brown to a strategy that emphasized "direct action"—primarily boycotts, sit-ins, freedom rides, marches and similar tactics that relied on mass mobilization, nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience. This mass action approach typified the movement from 1960 to 1968.

Churches, the centers of their communities, and local grassroots organizations mobilized volunteers to participate in broad-based actions. This was a more direct and potentially more rapid means of creating change than the traditional approach of mounting court challenges.

Troops from the 327th Regiment,
101st Airborne escorting the
Little Rock Nine up the steps of
Central High

The Montgomery Improvement Association—created to lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott managed to keep the boycott going for over a year until a federal court order required Montgomery to desegregate its buses. The success in Montgomery made its leader Dr. Martin Luther King a nationally known figure. It also inspired other bus boycotts, such as the highly successful Tallahassee, Florida, boycott of 1956–1957.

In 1957 Dr. King and Rev. John Duffy, the leaders of the Montgomery Improvement Association, joined with other church leaders who had led similar boycott efforts, such as Rev. C. K. Steele of Tallahassee and Rev. T. J. Jemison of Baton Rouge; and other activists such as Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Ella Baker, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levison, to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The SCLC, with its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, did not attempt to create a network of chapters as the NAACP did. It offered training and leadership assistance for local efforts to fight segregation. The headquarters organization raised funds, mostly from Northern sources, to support such campaigns. It made non-violence both its central tenet and its primary method of confronting racism.

In 1959, Septima Clarke, Bernice Robinson, and Esau Jenkins, with the help of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, began the first Citizenship Schools in South Carolina’s Sea Islands. They taught literacy to enable blacks to pass voting tests. The program was an enormous success and tripled the number of black voters on Johns Island. SCLC took over the program and duplicated its results elsewhere.

Sit-Ins, 1960

The Civil Rights Movement received an infusion of energy with a student sit-in at a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina. On February 1, 1960, four students Ezell A. Blair Jr. (now known as Jibreel Khazan), David Richmond, Joseph McNeil, and Franklin McCain from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College, an all-black college, sat down at the segregated lunch counter to protest Woolworth’s policy of excluding African Americans. These protesters were encouraged to dress professionally, to sit quietly, and to occupy every other stool so that potential white sympathizers could join in. The sit-in soon inspired other sit-ins in Richmond, Virginia; Nashville, Tennessee; and Atlanta, Georgia. As students across the south began to "sit-in" at the lunch counters of a few of their local stores, local authority figures sometimes used brute force to physically escort the demonstrators from the lunch facilities.

Click HERE for the Slideshow on the Greensboro Four
(http://www.sitins.com/photogallery.shtml)

The "sit-in" technique was not new—as far back as 1942, the Congress of Racial Equality sponsored sit-ins in Chicago, St. Louis in 1949 and Baltimore in 1952. In 1960 the technique succeeded in bringing national attention to the movement. The success of the Greensboro sit-in led to a rash of student campaigns throughout the South. Probably the best organized, most highly disciplined, the most immediately effective of these was in Nashville, Tennessee. By the end of 1960, the sit-ins had spread to every southern and border state and even to Nevada, Illinois, and Ohio.

Demonstrators focused not only on lunch counters but also on parks, beaches, libraries, theaters, museums, and other public places. Upon being arrested, student demonstrators made "jail-no-bail" pledges, to call attention to their cause and to reverse the cost of protest, thereby saddling their jailers with the financial burden of prison space and food.

In April, 1960 activists who had led these sit-ins held a conference at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina that led to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC took these tactics of nonviolent confrontation further, to the freedom rides.

Freedom Rides, 1961

Freedom Rides were journeys by Civil Rights activists on interstate buses into the segregated southern United States to test the United States Supreme Court decision Boynton v. Virginia, (1960) 364 U.S. that ended segregation for passengers engaged in inter-state travel. Organized by CORE, the first Freedom Ride of the 1960s left Washington D.C. on May 4, 1961, and was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans on May 17.

During the first and subsequent Freedom Rides, activists traveled through the Deep South to integrate seating patterns and desegregate bus terminals, including restrooms and water fountains. That proved to be a dangerous mission. In Anniston, Alabama, one bus was firebombed, forcing its passengers to flee for their lives. In Birmingham, Alabama, an FBI informant reported that Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor gave Ku Klux Klan members fifteen minutes to attack an incoming group of freedom riders before having police "protect" them. The riders were severely beaten "until it looked like a bulldog had got a hold of them." James Peck, a white activist, was beaten so hard he required fifty stitches to his head.

Mob violence in Anniston and Birmingham temporarily halted the rides, but SNCC activists from Nashville brought in new riders to continue the journey from Birmingham. In Montgomery, Alabama, at the Greyhound Bus Station, a mob charged another bus load of riders, knocking John Lewis unconscious with a crate and smashing Life photographer Don Urbrock in the face with his own camera. A dozen men surrounded Jim Zwerg, a white student from Fisk University, and beat him in the face with a suitcase, knocking out his teeth.

The freedom riders continued their rides into Jackson, Mississippi, where they were arrested for "breaching the peace" by using "white only" facilities. New freedom rides were organized by many different organizations. As riders arrived in Jackson, they were arrested. By the end of summer, more than 300 had been jailed in Mississippi.

President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Civil Rights
leaders Martin Luther King, Jr., Whitney Young,
James Farmer

The jailed freedom riders were treated harshly, crammed into tiny, filthy cells and sporadically beaten. In Jackson, Mississippi, some male prisoners were forced to do hard labor in 100-degree heat. Others were transferred to Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, where their food was deliberately oversalted and their mattresses were removed. Sometimes the men were suspended by "wrist breakers" from the walls. Typically, the windows of their cells were shut tight on hot days, making it hard for them to breathe.

Public sympathy and support for the freedom riders led the Kennedy administration to order the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to issue a new desegregation order. When the new ICC rule took effect on November 1, passengers were permitted to sit wherever they chose on the bus; "white" and "colored" signs came down in the terminals; separate drinking fountains, toilets, and waiting rooms were consolidated; and lunch counters began serving people regardless of skin color.

The student movement involved such celebrated figures as John Lewis, a single-minded activist; James Lawson, the revered "guru" of nonviolent theory and tactics; Diane Nash, an articulate and intrepid public champion of justice; Bob Moses, pioneer of voting registration in Mississippi; and James Bevel, a fiery preacher and charismatic organizer and facilitator. Other prominent student activists included Charles McDew, Bernard Lafayette, Charles Jones, Lonnie King, Julian Bond, Hosea Williams, and Stokely Carmichael.

Fraying of alliances

King reached the height of popular acclaim during his life in 1964, when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. His career after that point was filled with frustrating challenges. The liberal coalition that had gained passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 began to fray.

Alabama governor George Wallace
stands against desegregation at the
University of Alabama in 1963.

King was becoming more estranged from the Johnson Administration. In 1965 he broke with it by calling for peace negotiations and a halt to the bombing of Vietnam. He moved further left in the following years, speaking of the need for economic justice and thoroughgoing changes in American society. He believed change was needed beyond the civil rights gained by the movement.

King’s attempts to broaden the scope of the Civil Rights Movement were halting and largely unsuccessful, however. King made several efforts in 1965 to take the Movement north to address issues of employment and housing discrimination. SCLC’s campaign in Chicago publicly failed, as Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley marginalized SCLC’s campaign by promising to "study" the city’s problems. In 1966, white demonstrators holding "white power" signs in notoriously racist Cicero, a suburb of Chicago, threw stones at marchers demonstrating against housing segregation.

Race Riots, 1963–1970

By the end of World War II, more than half of the country’s black population lived in Northern and Western industrial cities rather than Southern rural areas. Migrating to those cities for better job opportunities, education and to escape legal segregation, African Americans often found segregation that existed in fact rather than in law.

While after the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was not prevalent, by the 1960s other problems prevailed in northern cities. Beginning in the 1950s, there had been deindustrialization and restructuring of major areas of the economies: railroads and meatpacking, steel industry and car industry. As the last population to enter the industrial job market, blacks were disadvantaged by its collapse. At the same time, investment in highways and private development of suburbs in the postwar years had drawn many ethnic whites out of the cities to newer housing in expanding suburbs. Urban blacks who did not follow the middle class out of the cities became concentrated in the older housing of inner-city neighborhoods, among the poorest in most major cities.

Because jobs in new service areas and parts of the economy were being created in suburbs, unemployment was much higher in many black than in white neighborhoods, and crime was frequent. African Americans rarely owned the stores or businesses where they lived. Many were limited to menial or blue-collar jobs, although union organizing in the 1930s and 1940s had opened up good working environments for some. African Americans often made only enough money to live in dilapidated tenements that were privately owned, or poorly maintained public housing. They also attended schools that were often the worst academically in the city and that had fewer white students than in the decades before WWII.

The racial makeup of the police departments, usually largely white, was a large factor. In black neighborhoods such as Harlem, the ratio was only one black officer for every six white officers, and in majority black cities such as Newark, New Jersey only 145 of the 1322 police officers were black. Police forces in Northern cities were largely composed of white ethnics, descendants of 19th century immigrants: mainly Irish, Italian, and Eastern European officers. They had established their own power bases in the police departments and in territories in cities. Some would routinely harass blacks with or without provocation.

One of the first major race riots took place in Harlem, New York, in the summer of 1964. A white Irish-American police officer, Thomas Gilligan, shot 15-year-old James Powell, who was black, for allegedly charging at him with a knife. In fact, Powell was unarmed. A group of black citizens demanded Gilligan’s suspension. Hundreds of young demonstrators marched peacefully to the 67th Street police station on July 17, 1964, the day after Powell’s death.

Gilligan was not suspended. Although this precinct had promoted the NYPD’s first black station commander, neighborhood residents were tired of the inequalities. They looted and burned anything that was not black-owned in the neighborhood. This unrest spread to Bedford-Stuyvesant, a major black neighborhood in Brooklyn. That summer, rioting also broke out in Philadelphia, for similar reasons.

In the aftermath of the riots of July 1964, the federal government funded a pilot program called Project Uplift, in which thousands of young people in Harlem were given jobs during the summer of 1965. The project was inspired by a report generated by HARYOU called Youth in the Ghetto. HARYOU was given a major role in organizing the project, together with the National Urban League and nearly 100 smaller community organizations. Permanent jobs at living wages, however, were still out of reach of many young black men.

In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, but the new law had no immediate effect on living conditions for blacks. A few days after the act became law, a riot broke out in the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. Like Harlem, Watts was an impoverished neighborhood with very high unemployment. Its residents had to endure patrols by a largely white police department. While arresting a young man for drunk driving, police officers argued with the suspect’s mother before onlookers. The conflict triggered a massive destruction of property through six days of rioting. Thirty-four people were killed and property valued at about $30 million was destroyed, making the Watts riot one of the worst in American history.

With black militancy on the rise, increased acts of anger were now directed at the police. Black residents growing tired of police brutality continued to riot. Some young people joined groups such as the Black Panthers, whose popularity was based in part on their reputation for confronting police officers.

Riots occurred in 1966 and 1967 in cities such as Atlanta, San Francisco, Oakland, Baltimore, Seattle, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Newark, Chicago, New York City (specifically in Brooklyn, Harlem and the Bronx), and worst of all in Detroit.

In Detroit, a comfortable black middle class had begun to develop among families of blacks who worked at well-paying jobs in the automotive industry. Blacks who had not moved upward were living in much worse conditions, subject to the same problems as blacks in Watts and Harlem. When white police officers shut down an illegal bar on a liquor raid and arrested a large group of patrons, furious residents rioted.

One significant effect of the Detroit riot was the acceleration of "white flight," the trend of white residents moving from inner-city neighborhoods to predominantly white suburbs. Detroit experienced "middle class black flight" as well. Cities such as Detroit, Newark, and Baltimore now have less than 40% white population as a result of these riots and other social changes. Changes in industry caused continued job losses, depopulation of middle classes, and concentrated poverty in such cities.

As a result of the riots, President Johnson created the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in 1967. The commission’s final report called for major reforms in employment and public assistance for black communities. It warned that the United States was moving toward separate white and black societies.

Fresh rioting broke out in April 1968 after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Riots erupted in many major cities at once, including Chicago, Cleveland, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., West Side Riots in Chicago, Illinois, 1968 New York City riot and Louisville riots of 1968.

Affirmative Action altered the hiring process of more black police officers in every major city. Blacks make up a proportional majority of the police departments in cities such as Baltimore, Washington, New Orleans, Atlanta, Newark, and Detroit. Civil rights laws have reduced employment discrimination. The conditions that led to frequent rioting in the late 1960s have receded, but not all the problems have been solved.

With industrial and economic restructuring, tens of thousands of industrial jobs disappeared since the later 1950s from the old industrial cities. Some moved South, as has much population, and others out of the US altogether. Civil unrest broke out in Miami in 1980, in Los Angeles in 1992, and in Cincinnati in 2001.

Other Events on this Day

• In 1790…
  The U.S. Supreme Court convenes for the first time, in New York City.

• In 1861…
  Texas secedes from the Union.

• In 1893…
  Thomas Edison comletes the world’s first movie studio in West Orange, New Jersey.

• In 1960…
  Four black college students begin a sit-in protest at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, where they’d been refused service.

• In 2003…
  The space shuttle Columbia disintegrates during reentry, killing all seven crew members.

Dates and events based on:

William J. Bennett and John Cribb, (2008) The American Patriot’s Almanac Daily Readings on America. (Kindle Edition)

Background information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968)…  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Civil_Rights_Movement_%281955%E2%80%931968%29

Wikipedia: Greensboro Sit-Ins…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_sit-ins

Web Sites and Blogs:

History Learning Site: Civil Rights Quotes…
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/civil%20rights%20quotes.htm

Sitins.com: Sit-In Photo Gallery…
http://www.sitins.com/photogallery.shtml

by Gerald Boerner

Today we examine the evolution of the dime since the founding of this country. It has undergone changes, but has remained as the smallest coin in the U.S. monetary system. It is worth 1/10th of a dollar, which made it one of the most used coins; it has changed its composition and image, but continues to reflect the general themes of peace (olive branches) and freedom (Lady Liberty or other figures associated with national independence, like FDR).  GLB

“A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”
— Yogi Berra

“I think I coulda landed on a dime. I really do.”
— Evel Knievel

“Good ideas are a dime a dozen, bad ones are free.”
— Douglas Horton

“I don’t have a dime left. I am dependent on my friends for food and a small old-age pension.”
— Bela Lugosi

“I don’t take a dime of their [lobbyist] money, and when I am president, they won’t find a job in my White House.”
— Barack Obama

“Coaches who can outline plays on a black board are a dime a dozen. The ones who win get inside their player and motivate.”
— Vince Lombardi

“Good actors are a dime a dozen, but I want actors that are gonna be part of my team and collaborative.”
— Joe Pantoliano

“I am supposed to owe the government something like $100 million. I couldn’t squeeze out a dime.”
— Dennis Kozlowski

“I don’t believe what the papers are saying They’re just out to capture my dime, Exaggerating this, exaggerating that.”
— Paul Simon

“From Kelsey, I have learned among many other things the value of turning on a dime and how you can have an extremely funny and extremely poignant moment with absolutely no separation in between… and sometimes in the same moment.”
— David Hyde Pierce

The Roosevelt Dime

The dime is a coin worth ten cents or one tenth of a United States dollar. The dime is the smallest in diameter and the thinnest of all U.S. coins currently minted for circulation. The 32nd President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, is featured on the obverse of the current design, while a torch, oak branch, and olive branch covering the motto E pluribus unum are featured on the reverse. The dime’s value is labeled as "one dime", since the term ‘dime’ also applies to a unit of currency worth 10 cents or 1/10 of a dollar.

The dime was commissioned by the Coinage Act of 1792, and production began in 1796. A feminine head representing Liberty was used on the front of the coin, and an eagle was used on the back. The front and back of the dime used these motifs for three different designs through 1837. The composition and diameter of the dime have changed throughout its mintage. Initially the dime was 0.75 inch (19 millimeters) wide, but it was changed to its present size of 0.705 inch (17.91 millimeters) in 1828. The composition (initially 89.24 percent silver and 10.76 percent copper) remained constant until 1837, when it was altered to 90 percent silver and 10 percent copper. Dimes with this composition were minted until 1966, although those minted in 1965 and 1966 bear the date 1964. Beginning in 1965, dimes also began to be minted with a clad composition of cupronickel; this composition is still in use today. The U.S. Mint began producing silver dimes again in 1992 for inclusion in the annual Silver Proof set.

The term dime comes from old French "di(s)me", meaning "tithe" or "tenth part", from the Latin decima [pars]. This term appeared on early pattern coins, but was not used on any dimes until 1837.

General history

The first known proposal for a decimal-based coinage system in the United States was made in 1783 by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and David Rittenhouse. Hamilton, the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, recommended the issuance of six such coins in 1791, in a report to Congress. Among the six was a silver coin, "which shall be, in weight and value, one tenth part of a silver unit or dollar." His suggested name for the new coin was a "tenth".

The Coinage Act of 1792, passed on April 2, 1792, authorized the mintage of a "disme", one-tenth the silver weight and value of a dollar. The composition of the disme was set at 89.24 percent silver and 10.76 percent copper. In 1792, a limited number of dismes were minted but never circulated. Some of these were struck in copper, indicating that the 1792 dismes were in fact pattern coins. The first dimes minted for circulation did not appear until 1796, due to a lack of demand for the coin and production problems at the United States Mint.

The original dime, now referred to as the Draped Bust dime, contained no markings to indicate the coin’s value. This continued until the issuance of the Capped Bust dime in 1809. The Capped Bust dime bore a "10 C." mark on its reverse. The mintage of the dime during the Draped Bust/Capped Bust period was not regular—the Draped Bust was not minted in 1799 or 1806, while in the period from 1809 to 1820, the Capped Bust was minted only in 1809, 1811, 1814, and 1820. The dime has been minted nearly every year since 1827, although some years have seen extremely limited mintage figures.

In 1837, the dime was altered to incorporate the Seated Liberty design, which had debuted the previous year with the dollar coin. In addition, changes to the dime’s diameter and silver content were made. The Seated Liberty dime was minted for 54 years, the longest stretch for any design until the Roosevelt dime reached its 55th year in 2001.

In 1892 the Barber dime debuted, and it lasted until 1916. Of the Barber dime series, the 1894-S is particularly notable; only 24 examples are known to have been struck, of which only nine are known to still exist. One such example sold for US$1.3 million at an auction on March 7, 2005, the most ever paid for a dime in auction.

The Barber dime design was replaced in 1916 by the Winged Liberty Head design, more commonly referred to as the Mercury dime. The figure on the coin’s obverse is often thought to be the Roman god Mercury, but is in fact a depiction of Liberty (all other dimes except the Roosevelt dime feature an image of Liberty as well). The Mercury dime is considered to be one of the most visually appealing of all U.S. coins, and is highly sought after by collectors.

The Mercury dime was replaced in 1946 by the Roosevelt dime, designed in honor of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who died in April 1945. Although other coins were eligible for an updated design (the design of any coin may be changed without Congressional approval after 25 years), the dime was chosen due to Roosevelt’s work in founding the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, even then unofficially known as the March of Dimes, a name it later officially adopted. Although the dime has not undergone any major design changes since its introduction, its composition changed significantly in 1965. The Coinage Act of 1965 removed the silver content from the dime (as well as the quarter and, in 1971, the half dollar), and replaced it with a clad composition of 75 percent copper and 25 percent nickel. Dimes with the silver composition were minted in 1965 and 1966 but bore the date 1964 to increase mintage figures and prevent hoarding of it. The clad Roosevelt dime is currently in circulation, and no major design changes are planned. An attempt was made by Congressional Republicans in 2003 to replace Roosevelt’s image with that of President Ronald Reagan, but this was short-lived.

The reeded edge on the modern dime is a holdover from earlier designs. The reeding was placed on gold and silver coins to discourage counterfeiting and fraudulent use, such as filing down the edges to collect the dust for profit. Currently, none of the coins produced for circulation contain precious metals. However, the continued use of reeded edges on current circulating coinage of larger denominations is useful to the visually impaired. The edge of a modern dime has 118 ridges.

Roosevelt (1946–present)

The plaque of Roosevelt at the
Recorder of Deeds Building in
Washington D.C.

Soon after the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945, legislation was introduced by Virginia Congressman Ralph H. Daughton that called for the replacement of the Mercury dime with one bearing Roosevelt’s image. The dime was chosen to honor Roosevelt partly due to his efforts in the founding of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (later renamed the March of Dimes), which originally raised money for polio research and to aid victims of the disease and their families. The public had been urged to send in a dime to the Foundation, and by Roosevelt’s death, the Foundation was already popularly known as the "March of Dimes."

Due to the limited amount of time available to design the new coin, the Roosevelt dime was the first regular-issue U.S. coin designed by a Mint employee in more than 40 years. Chief Engraver John R. Sinnock was chosen, as he had already designed a Mint presidential medal of Roosevelt. Sinnock’s first design, submitted on October 12, 1945, was rejected, but a subsequent one was accepted on January 6, 1946.

The dime was released to the public on January 30, 1946, which would have been Roosevelt’s 64th birthday. Sinnock’s design placed his initials ("JS") at the base of Roosevelt’s neck, on the coin’s obverse. His reverse design elements of a torch, olive branch, and oak branch symbolized, respectively, liberty, peace, and victory.

Controversy immediately ensued, as strong anti-Communist sentiment in the United States led to the circulation of rumors that the "JS" engraved on the coin was the initials of Joseph Stalin, placed there by a Soviet agent in the mint. The Mint quickly issued a statement refuting this, confirming that the initials were indeed Sinnock’s.

Another controversy surrounding Sinnock’s design involves his image of Roosevelt. Soon after the coin’s release, it was claimed that Sinnock borrowed his design of Roosevelt from a bas relief created by African American sculptor Selma Burke, unveiled at the Recorder of Deeds Building in Washington D.C. in September 1945. Sinnock denied this, claiming that he simply utilized his earlier design on the Roosevelt medal.

With the passage of the Coinage Act of 1965, the composition of the dime changed from 90 percent silver and 10 percent copper to a clad "sandwich" of copper between two layers of an alloy of 91.67 percent copper and 8.33 percent nickel. This composition was selected because it gave similar mass (now 2.27 grams instead of 2.5 grams) and electrical properties (important in vending machines)—and most importantly, because it contained no precious metal.

Soon after the change of composition, silver dimes (as well as silver quarters and half dollars) began to disappear from circulation, as people receiving them in change hoarded them (see Gresham’s law). Although now rare in circulation, silver dimes may occasionally turn up in customers’ change.

Starting in 1992, the US Mint re-introduced silver coins in its annual collectors sets. This included a 90 percent silver proof Roosevelt Dime, Washington Quarter(s) and Kennedy Half Dollar, a series that continues today.

Since 1946 the Roosevelt dime has been minted every year. Through 1955, all three mints, Philadelphia, Denver, and San Francisco produced circulating coinage; production at San Francisco ended in 1955, resuming in 1968 with proof coinage only. Through 1964 "D" and "S" mintmarks can be found to the left of the torch. From 1968, the mintmarks have appeared above the date. None were used in 1965–67, and Philadelphia did not show a mintmark until 1980 (in 1982, an error left the "P" off a small number of dimes, which are now valuable). To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the design, the 1996 mint sets included a "W" mintmarked dime made at the West Point Mint. A total of 1,457,000 dimes were issued in the sets.

In 2003, a group of conservative Republicans in Congress proposed removing Roosevelt’s image from the dime, and replacing it with that of President Ronald Reagan, although he was still alive. Legislation to this effect was introduced in November 2003 by Indiana Representative Mark Souder. Amongst the more notable opponents of the legislation was Nancy Reagan, who in December 2003 stated that, "When our country chooses to honor a great president such as Franklin Roosevelt by placing his likeness on our currency, it would be wrong to remove him." After President Reagan’s death in June 2004, the proposed legislation gained additional support. Souder, however, stated that he was not going to pursue the legislation any further.

Other Events on this Day

• In 1950…
  President Truman announces he has ordered development of the hydrogen bomb.

• In 1958…
  The United States enters the Space Age with the launch of its first satellite, Explorer I.

• In 1961…
  Ham the Chimp becomes the first chimpanzee in outer space when he blasts off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard a Project Mercury rocket.

• In 1990…
  McDonald’s opens its first fast-food restaurant in Moscow, symbolizing a triumph of capitalism over Communism following the end of the Cold War.

References:

Dates and events based on:

William J. Bennett and John Cribb, (2008) The American Patriot’s Almanac Daily Readings on America. (Kindle Edition)

Background information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: Dime (United States coin)…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dime_%28United_States_coin%29

Web Sites and Blogs:

BrainyQuote.com: The Dime…
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/dime.html

by Gerald Boerner

Today we look back, on the birthday of Franklin D. Roosevelt, on another time of challenges to our country and its economy. When  FDR was inaugurated as our 32nd president, we were in the midst of the Great Depression. People were out of work and out of hope. Even the rich and famous were suffering, so one can only imagine the plight of the common man. FDR came to office with great hope for the country, for himself, and all Americans. This hope was not abstract, it was rooted in his long struggle with polio and the upward battle that he fought to overcome its crippling effects. Let us all hold onto such hope in today’s trials and gribulations  GLB

“Remember you are just an extra in everyone else’s play.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Physical strength can never permanently withstand the impact of spiritual force.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

“No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves and the only way they could do this is by not voting.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Not only our future economic soundness but the very soundness of our democratic institutions depends on the determination of our government to give employment to idle men.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

“One thing is sure. We have to do something. We have to do the best we know how at the moment… If it doesn’t turn out right, we can modify it as we go along.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Our national determination to keep free of foreign wars and foreign entanglements cannot prevent us from feeling deep concern when ideals and principles that we have cherished are challenged.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Prosperous farmers mean more employment, more prosperity for the workers and the business men of every industrial area in the whole country.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

“The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Fear Itself”

The first inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt as the 32nd President of the United States was held on Saturday, March 4, 1933. The inauguration marked the commencement of the first four-year term of Franklin D. Roosevelt as President and John Nance Garner as Vice President. It was the last inauguration to be held on the prescribed date of March 4; under the terms of the Twentieth Amendment, all subsequent inaugurations have taken place on January 20. After being sworn-in, Roosevelt became the thirty-second President of the United States.

The inauguration took place in the wake of Democrat Roosevelt’s landslide victory over Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover in the 1932 presidential election. With the nation in the grips of the Great Depression, the new president’s inaugural speech was awaited with great anticipation. Broadcast nationwide on several radio networks, the speech was heard by tens of millions of Americans, and set the stage for Roosevelt’s urgent efforts to respond to the crisis.

Inauguration

Inauguration day was mostly cloudy with a few peaks of sun, and the estimated temperature at midday was 42 degrees Fahrenheit. That morning, Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor attended a 10:15 a.m. worship service at Washington’s St. John’s Episcopal Church, near the White House.

The swearing-in ceremony took place on the East Portico of the United States Capitol, with Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes administering the oath of office. Roosevelt wore a morning coat and striped trousers for the inauguration, and took the oath with his hand on his family Bible, open to I Corinthians 13. Published in 1686 in Dutch, it remains the oldest Bible ever used in an inaugural ceremony, as well as the only one not in English, and was used by Roosevelt for his 1929 and 1931 inaugurations as Governor of New York as well as for his subsequent presidential inaugurations.

Inaugural address

After taking the oath of office, Roosevelt proceeded to deliver his 1,880-word, 27 minute-long inaugural address, best known for his famously pointed reference to "fear itself" in one of its first lines:

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear… is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.

Addressing himself to the causes of the economic crisis and its moral dimensions, Roosevelt placed blame squarely on the greed and shortsightedness of bankers and businessmen, as seen in the following excerpts:

…rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing.

Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This Nation asks for action, and action now.

Roosevelt then turned, in the following excerpts, to the daunting issue of unemployment, which had reached a staggering 25 per cent when he assumed office:

…the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.

More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously.

There are many ways in which it can be helped, but it can never be helped merely by talking about it. We must act and act quickly.

After touching briefly on foreign relations — "the policy of the good neighbor — the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others" — Roosevelt turned again to the economic crisis, assuring his countrymen that he would act swiftly and with determination:

I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken Nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption.

But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis — broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

Aftermath

The day after his inauguration, Roosevelt assembled a special session of Congress to declare a four-day bank holiday, and on March 9 signed the Emergency Banking Act, which provided a mechanism for reopening. He continued on for what became his First Hundred Days of the New Deal.

Thinking about FDR

Notes on FDR:

FDR “entered politics because he was a man of ambition and because he wanted to serve his country. His plans were almost cut short while vacationing at Campobello Island in New Brunswick, Canada, in 1921 when he came down with what, at first, seemed to be a cold. He lost his appetite, his back began to ache, and his left leg went numb. A few days later, he couldn’t stand. At age thirty-nine Roosevelt was diagnosed with polio. Paralyzed from the waist down, he watched as the muscles of his legs began wasting away.

“Roosevelt was determined to beat the disease. For months he crawled from room to room in his house and dragged himself hand over hand up the stairs, gritting his teeth but never asking for help. Every day, he strapped steel braces onto his legs and tried hobbling on crutches to the end of his long driveway. Through rigorous exercise he developed tremendous upper body strength. ‘Maybe my legs aren’t so good,’ he said, ‘but look at those shoulders.’ Despite his efforts, he never again walked without aid.” — William Bennett and John Cribb

He overcame these obstacles to be elected as the 32nd president of the United States in 1932. So the speech above reflects this same outlook for our country in the middle of the Great Depression as he had viewed his own infirmities. He moved forward with hope and determination.

Other Events on this Day

• In 1798…
  A brawl eruupts in the U.S. House when Matthew Lyon of Vermont spits on Roger Griswold of Connecticut after an exchange of insults.

• In 1835…
  In the first presidential assassination attempt, Richard Lawrence, a mentally ill man, tries to shoot Andrew Jackson in the U.S. Capitol.

• In 1847…
  The California town of Yerba Buena is renamed San Francisco.

• In 1862…
  The Union ironclad USS Monitor is launched at Greenpoint, New York.

• In 1882…
  Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-second president, is born in Hyde Park, New York.

• In 1933…
  The first episode of the Lone Ranger is broadcast on radio station WXYZ in Detroit.

References:

Dates and events based on:

William J. Bennett and John Cribb, (2008) The American Patriot’s Almanac Daily Readings on America. (Kindle Edition)

Background information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: First Inaugural of Franklin D. Roosevelt… 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_inauguration_of_Franklin_D._Roosevelt

Wikisource: Franklin Roosevelt’s First Inaugural Address…
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Franklin_Roosevelt%27s_First_Inaugural_Address

Web Sites and Blogs:

BrainyQuote.com: Franklin D. Roosevelt…
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/f/franklin_d_roosevelt.html