Category: Today

On October 7, 1691, the charter for the Province of Massachusetts Bay was issued.

Also on a seventh day of the tenth month, King George III issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which closed Indigenous lands in North America north and west of the Alleghenies to white settlements.

---

On October 7, 1792, George Mason — “The Father of the Bill of Rights” — died. He had drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776, and, at the time of the drafting and ratification of the Constitution, had insisted on the addition of articles to solidify state’s and individual rights within the new order.

George Mason (pictured) has been honored in numerous ways, including by the United States Postal Service with an 18¢ Great Americans series postage stamp; a bas-relief in the Chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives as one of 23 honoring great lawmakers; and with an annual award named for him presented to a person who has made significant, lasting contribution to the practice of journalism in the Commonwealth, awarded by the Society of Professional Journalists, Virginia Pro Chapter.

---

On October 7, 2003, California Governor Gray Davis was recalled and Arnold Schwarzenegger voted into Davis’s previous gubernatorial spot.

October 6 is the traditional date commemorating the martyrdom of William Tyndale, in 1536. Tyndale translated the New Testament and much of the Old into the English of his day, and in the process added more new words into the English language than any other single wordsmith, with the possible exception of Shakespeare. He also laid the ground for the later, and more famous, King James (“Authorized”) Edition of the Bible.

Among his memorable coinages and turns of phrase coined as translations from Hebrew and Greek into English include

• Passover (constructed from the Hebrew Pesach or Pesah)
• scapegoat
• a moment in time
• the powers that be
• the salt of the earth
• a law unto themselves
• it came to pass
• the signs of the times
• filthy lucre

On October 5, 1910, the Portuguese monarchy was overthrown and a republic declared.

On October 4, 2004, SpaceShipOne became the first private craft to fly into space, thereby winning the Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight.

On October 3, 1919, James M. Buchanan was born. Buchanan would develop the theory of “Public Choice,” and receiving the 1986 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work. His books include Cost and Choice, The Calculus of Consent (with Gordon Tullock), and The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan. Some of his most interesting research was into the realm of constitutional theory and practice.

He died January 9, 2013.

---

In 1925, on this date, Gore Vidal was born. Vidal would go on to become one of the leading post-WWII liberal essayists as well as a major novelist and screenwriter. His most famous novels include Burr, 1876, and Lincoln, installments in his American history series; his collection of essays, The United States, was one of his many bestsellers. Vidal was an elitist who expressed sympathy for populism and socialism, but also was a radical civil libertarian, and may occupy the extreme of the “liberal” quadrant in American political ideology: great on personal liberties but quite bad one market/property liberties.

He died on July 31, 2012.

On October 2, 1789, George Washington sent the proposed Constitutional amendments (the United States’ Constitution’s Bill of Rights) to the States for ratification.

On the same date in 1919, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke, leaving him partially paralyzed, preventing him from reacting to the economic downturn following the Great War in a Progressive fashion, making his response de facto laissez faire. One insider, and skeptic of Progressive hubris, cattily referred to Wilson’s incapacitation as “a stroke of luck.”

His successor in office, President Warren G. Harding, would go on to massively cut spending as well as taxes, and take on regulation as well. He also released Woodrow Wilson’s domestic war prisoners — ranging from journalists, ordinary folk to socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs — who had dissented from Wilson’s involvement in the war.

The Depression of the early 1920s, though as deep as the early 1930s, proved remarkably brief, thanks to Harding . . . and a “stroke of luck.”