Historical Shorts

It’s hard to believe that libertine Massachusetts, the home of high taxes, gay marriage and Romneycare, was once a theocratic state – but it was.  The only thing more pressing to the Puritans than the dispossessed, warring Indian tribes were their religious scruples.  The most vivid and dramatic example was the Salem Witch Trials; but there were other, consequential episodes.  Three hundred and seventy-six years ago, in 1637, a woman named Anne Hutchinson and her followers were banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  Her crime?  Heresy. (And perhaps, being an independent woman.)  The theological underpinnings are too complex and intricate to recite here, but basically Hutchinson embraced a “covenant of grace” as opposed to the Puritan leaders’ “covenant of works” (ironically most traditional protestants now embrace some variation of Hutchinson’s doctrine.)  Hutchinson and her followers first went to Rhode Island, but religious friction followed her there, and she, and a smaller band of adherents moved to “New Netherland” (now a part of the Bronx) in 1642.  The local native tribes, viewing the interlopers with a wary eye and having no inclination to theological debate, massacred Hutchinson and all but one of her party in 1643.

Some Presidential Election Shorts….

Being the beginning of November is the election season, there have been a bunch of presidential elections on this date.  A sampling:

On this date in 1820, James Monroe was elected the 5^th President of the United States.  The last of the Revolutionary War generation to be elected president, Monroe still wore knee-breeches in the White House, while the rest of the country had long graduated to long pants.  Monroe’s term was so tranquil and free of partisan divide that it was known as the “Era of Good Feelings”  (the last time in America to be so benevolently named.)

On this date in 1848, Zachary Taylor was elected 12^th President of the United States.  A hero of the Mexican War (his nickname was “Old Rough and Ready”), Taylor served less than a year and a half in office before dying.  Taylor attended holiday ceremonies (including a fund-raiser for the Washington Monument) on July 4, 1850, where he supposedly drank some bad milk and developed a severe digestive complaint.  He died five days later.  In one of the first whacko presidential conspiracy theories, the story persisted through the decades that Taylor had been poisoned by pro-slavery democrats (Taylor, a Whig, did not support the spread of slavery into the territories.)  In 1991, a slightly addlepated professor got Taylor’s nearest surviving relative to agree to exhume Taylor’s remains and prove that he was poisoned.  Turns out it was the milk after all.

One of the most controversial presidential elections in the history of America took place on this date in 1876, between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes (who?) and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden (who?).  Tilden won the popular vote, but as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Al Gore found out, that doesn’t automatically make you president.  The electoral votes in Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina were in dispute.  An electoral commission was appointed, but most historians now accept the theory that the election was given to Hayes in return for the end of Federal Reconstruction in the South.  Hayes won the vote of the electoral commission, 8-7; and President Hayes ended Reconstruction.  His other notable achievement as president:  he had the first phone installed in the White House.

On this date in 1916, Woodrow Wilson was elected President on the slogan, “He kept us out of war.”  Less than five months after his re-election, Wilson took the United States into World War I, beginning the democratic trend of shameless lying to insure re-election that continues to this very day.

 

Twelve years later, on this date in 1928, Hebert Hoover was elected the 31^st President.  Hoover came into office almost universally admired, not only for his work as Secretary of Commerce, but as the primary organizer of international relief in the devastation and disease that followed World War I.  Hoover would leave office four years later, almost universally denounced for his inability to effectively deal with the Great Depression that followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929.  Although Hoover performed some of the same humanitarian efforts following  World War II, and lived into his 90s, his reputation never recovered.

The most hotly contested presidential election of all time took place on this date in 2000. Only it didn’t end on November 7^th – for over a month, the candidates contested over Florida’s vote (remember hanging chads?)  On December 12^th, the case reached the Supreme Court.  Although democrat Al Gore had won the popular vote, republican George Bush had narrowly won Florida and thus, the electoral college.  Although the Supreme Court ruling ended the election, Gore partisans continued to protest (although eventually the exhaustive recount proved that Bush had won Florida.)  Bush went on to two highly controversial presidential terms and Gore went on to look for ManBearPig.

Some Bonus Election Shorts….

A Nixon Double-Header

First, on this date in 1962, Richard Nixon, who had been defeated in a bid for Governor of California (two years after losing the presidential election to John F. Kennedy), gave a press conference, in which he remarkably lost his cool and excoriated the press, ending with the observation that they wouldn’t “have Nixon to kick around anymore……….because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”  Six years later, in 1968, Nixon was elected President; and on this same date in 1972 was re-elected in a landslide.  The press conferences of his second term (which almost all centered on a pesky thing called Watergate) didn’t go much better than the one in 1962, and Nixon resigned the Presidency in disgrace in 1974.

On this date in 1874, political cartoonist, Thomas Nast published the first cartoon to portray the elephant as the symbol of the Republican Party.  Nast also popularized the donkey as the symbol of the Democratic Party.  Wonder which one he favored?

And finally, on a positive note, on this date in 1916, Jeanette Rankin, a Republican from Montana, became the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.  Rankin was a life-long pacifist; one of her first acts upon arriving in Congress was to be one of only fifty representatives to vote against America’s entry into World War I.  That vote, and redistricting, caused her to lose her seat after a single term.  She remained active in politics and pacifist causes.  Riding the wave of ant-war sentiment, she was again elected to Congress in 1940.  In 1941, she became the only member in both houses of Congress to vote against American entry into World War II, following the attack on Pearl Harbor.  Once again, she lost her seat.  In the late 1960s and 70s, her reputation revived as opposition to the Vietnam War intensified.  Although in her 90s, she was contemplating another run for Congress as a protest against the Vietnam War when she died in 1973.