John Calvin [pictured above] returned to Geneva on September 13, 1541, after three years of exile. His subsequent work in church reform and theology became known as Calvinism, and profoundly influenced the course of European and (eventually) American civilization, including several concepts of servitude and liberty.
On the same date in 1989, Desmond Tutu led South Africa’s largest march aganst Apartheid.
On September 12, 1848, Switzerland became a unified federal state with a constitution limiting central government powers and providing decentralized state (canton) power patterned on the U.S. Constitution.
In 1880 on this date, H.L. Mencken was born. One of his earliest books was a debate with a socialist, The Men versus The Man (1910); his greatest lasting contribution was probably The American Language (1919) and its supplements (1945, 1948). His work has been collected in numerous anthologies, such as Alistair Cooke’s Vintage Mencken (1955) and the author’s own Mencken Chrestomathy.
On September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech about an “adversary that poses a serious threat to the United States of America.” Describing it as “one of the last bastions of central planning, governs by dictating five year plans,” and that “with brutal consistency it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas.”
The adversary? “The Pentagon bureaucracy — not the people, but the processes.” And he went on to state that the Pentagon could not account for more than $2.3 trillion.
The next day, September 11, “some people did something,” in the immortal words of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.),* and nearly everybody forgot about Rumsfeld’s alarm. The terrorist attacks on 9/11, in New York and at the Pentagon itself, along with a citizen-led resistance on United Flight 93, resulted in 2,977 fatalities, over 25,000 injuries, and substantial long-term health consequences.
The unaccounted-for spending and receipts of the Pentagon and the Department of Housing and Urban Development increased ten-fold in the next 19 years. It appears to balloon like the federal debt. But we almost never talk about it.
Rep. Omar said these words on March 23, 2019. They were not a hit.
On September 10, 1608, John Smith was elected council president of Jamestown, Virginia.
On September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech about an “adversary that poses a serious threat to the United States of America.” Describing it as “one of the last bastions of central planning, governs by dictating five year plans,” and that “with brutal consistency it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas.”
The adversary? “The Pentagon bureaucracy — not the people, but the processes.” And he went on to state that the Pentagon could not account for more than $2.3 trillion.
On September 9, 1828, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born. Known most commonly in the English-speaking world as Leo Tolstoy, he became the celebrated author of the novels Anna Karenina and War and Peace, as well as the novellas and short stories such as “Family Happiness,” “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” and “The Kreutzer Sonata.”
His political and religious ideas heavily influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Tolstoy died in 1910.
On September 8, 1264, Boleslaus the Pious, Duke of Greater Poland, promulgated the Statute of Kalisz, guaranteeing Jews safety and personal liberties and giving battei din jurisdiction over Jewish matters.
On the same date in 1883, former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant drove in the final “golden spike” completing the Northern Pacific Railway in a ceremony at Gold Creek, Montana.