On July 24, 1823, Chile abolished slavery.
On this day in 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court told President Richard Nixon that he lacked constitutional authority to withhold the infamous “Nixon Tapes” from Congress.
July 24 is Pioneer Day in Utah and Simón Bolívar Day in Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela.
On July 24, 1487, citizens in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, went on strike against a ban on foreign beer.
On the same day of 1823’s calendar, slavery was abolished in Chile.
The United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled, on July 24, 1974, that President Richard Nixon did not have the authority to withhold subpoenaed White House tapes in the developing Watergate scandal.
Lapel cameras on police: another police shooting of a . . . non-suspect offered, here, as evidence. Click on over to Townhall. Then come back here.
On this day in 1929, American William Austin Burt patents the “typographer” — a precursor to the typewriter.
Herbert Spencer, Principles of Ethics, Vol. 2, Part V: “Negative Beneficence” (see this page for the complete passage).
A form of selfishness occasionally displayed, and rightly condemned, is that of men who display without bounds their remarkable conversational powers. . . . One who monopolizes conversation loses more by moral reprobation than he gains by intellectual approbation.
The eruption of mob violence and ideological bullying and hooliganism on the Evergreen College campus near Washington State’s capitol is now under review. The man who unknowingly “started” it all by resisting a weirdly racist and segregationist demand from the “equity movement” students and faculty here summarizes the highlights:
https://youtu.be/qW1qR8TVOaE
Here is the full hearing:
https://youtu.be/tht3PfaP9UU
At another hearing on the matter, a rather awkward moment was reached when the interrogations got to security. This is a highly slanted editorial video with animation, comedy and satire thrown in, and may be NSFW. Still…
In no obvious sense was the American Revolution undertaken as a social revolution.
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Chapter VI, THE CONTAGION OF LIBERTY, p. 302.
On July 22, 1937, the U.S. Senate voted down Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s court packing scheme.
Herbert Spencer, Principles of Ethics, Vol. 2, Part IV: “Justice” (1891), Chapter 5, “The Idea of Justice.”
Sympathy which, a generation ago, was taking the shape of justice, is relapsing into the shape of generosity; and the generosity is exercised by inflicting injustice. Daily legislation betrays little anxiety that each shall have that which belongs to him, but great anxiety that he shall have that which belongs to somebody else. For while no energy is expended in so reforming our judicial administration that everyone may obtain and enjoy all he has earned, great energy is shown in providing for him and others benefits which they have not earned. Along with that miserable laissez-faire which calmly looks on while men ruin themselves in trying to enforce by law their equitable claims, there goes activity in supplying them, at other men’s cost, with gratis novel-reading!
On July 21, 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee, high school biology teacher John T. Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution in a public school classroom, and fined $100. The ambiguous legacy of the trial would continue — for decades, even to the present — to reveal the tensions inherent within a school system run by government and funded by taxpayers.
Pictured above, publicity for Inherit the Wind, a 1960 movie about the trial, but with the names changed, fictionalized. The movie starred Spencer Tracy in the Clarence Darrow (lawyer for the defense) role; Frederic March in the prosecutorial part, “Matthew Harrison Brady,” the pseudonymous name for politician William Jennings Bryan; Dick York as the defendant, Mr. Scopes; and Gene Kelly as the Baltimore journalist, a stand-in for H. L. Mencken, whose infamous coverage of the story shocked the nation almost as much as the trial itself.
At the end of the movie (spoiler) the famous prosecutor dies in the courtroom. In the historical case, Bryan died five days after the verdict. The movie was based on the 1955 play of the same name, written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, directed by Stanley Kramer. The script was adapted by Nedrick Young (originally as Nathan E. Douglas) and Harold Jacob Smith.