Category: Today

On April 4, 1841, William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia, becoming the first President of the United States to die in office and the one with the shortest term served (he died on his 32nd day as president). A renowned Indian killer (having risen to fame for his part in 1811’s Battle of Tippecanoe), a proponent of the expansion of slavery into Northwest Territories, and a Whig, Harrison won the presidency in part by turning the Democrats’ “log cabin and hard cider” aspersions on his character as the basic symbols of the campaign.

Though hardly a “limited government man,” some limited government history buffs proclaim him the Greatest President, on the ostensibly droll and possibly cynical grounds that he spent so little time in office.

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On a much sadder note, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated on this day in 1968.

On April 3, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech.

With the Acte de déchéance de l’Empereur (“Emperor’s Demise Act”) of April 2, 1814, France’s Sénat conservateur officially recognized the downfall of Napoléon I of France. The original resolution to remove the Emperor was moved on the legislative body’s floor, by Thomas Jefferson’s friend Destutt de Tracy (according to Tracy himself — official records do not name the member), and was drawn up by Charles Lambrechts. The final paragraph summarized the new reality concisely:

The Senate declares and decrees as follows: 1. Napoleon Buonaparte is cast down from the throne, and the right of succession in his family is abolished. 2. The French people and army are absolved from their oath of fidelity to him. 3. The present decree shall be transmitted to the departments and armies, and proclaimed immediately in all the quarters of the capital.

Nine days later, after attempting to put his son on the throne, Napoléon abdicated unconditionally. The Allies exiled him to Elba, which was to be the whole extent of this reign as “Emperor.”

This arrangement proved unstable, with Napoléon staging a comeback, eventually leading to more war, his defeat at Waterloo, and his exile to an island in the South Atlantic.

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American author, art critic, and commentator Camille Paglia was born April 2, 1947.

On April Fools’ Day, 1957, the BBC offered for viewers of the current affairs program “Panorama” the infamous spaghetti harvest report hoax. 

By sheer coincidence (?), one definition of “noodle” is “fool.”

On March 31, 1717, a sermon on “The Nature of the Kingdom of Christ,” by Benjamin Hoadly, the Bishop of Bangor, provoked the Bangorian Controversy.

The sermon’s text was John 18:36, “My kingdom is not of this world,” and from that Hoadly deduced — supposedly at the request of King George I himself, who was present in the assembly — that there was no Biblical justification for any church government. Hoadly identified the church with the kingdom of Heaven, noting that Christ had not delegated His authority to any representative.

King George’s preference for the Whig Party, and for latitudinarianism in ecclesiastical policy, is widely thought to have been a strategic maneuver to degrade church power in political government.

On March 30, 1864, German sociologist and economist Franz Oppenheimer was born. 

This sociologist is most famous for his 1908 book The State, in which he elaborated some consequences of two means for acquiring wealth, the “economic means,” by which he meant private production or by trade, and the “political means,” by which he meant forcible extraction from one group or person by another person or group. 

Oppenheimer taught in Palestine in the mid-​1930s, and fled the Nazis to the United States, via Japan in 1938. 

In 1941 he became a founder of The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, and died two years later.