Category: Today

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

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 tree report hoax. In the spirit of the day, Common Sense offers these “historic” events:

On April 1, 1787, James Madison, father of the Constitution, removed the General Welfare clause from his draft of the U.S. Constitution, telling friends that, “I fear future big-government-loving politicians will undoubtedly abuse the clause’s vague concept to drown the people in federal overreach.”

On April 1, 1918, Woodrow Wilson became the first and only President of the United States to be impeached and removed from office for lying about munitions being aboard the Lusitania in an effort to whip up war fever against Germany and push the nation into World War I.

On April 1, 2002, the U.S. Congress refused to grant President George W. Bush’s request for a declaration of war against Iraq.

On April 1, 2014, President Barack Obama admitted to being a Kenyan, er, Keynesian, but argued that the Constitution did not bar Keynesians from office.

As of April 1, 2017, President Donald Trump — often declared a fool or worse by the “Not My President” crowd — has proven himself foursquare for liberty, extolling the Freedom Caucus in Congress, and praising them from saving the nation from House Speaker Paul Ryan’s ObamaCare Lite plan.

Alas, only the first paragraph, above, is completely true.

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.

On March 29, 1990, the Czechoslovak parliament proved unable to reach an agreement on what to call the country after the “Velvet Revolution” — in which the Communist Party was booted from sole power. This sparked the “Hyphen War,” a tongue-in-cheek moniker for the dispute between Czechs and Slovaks about official recognition of the two nations’ equal status. (The Slovak representatives wanted to insert a hyphen into the name, to make the Slovak part stand out.) Eventually, the dispute was resolved with the “Velvet Divorce,” in which the two countries split up, on New Year’s Day, 1993.

On March 28, 1936, Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa was born. This recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature ran, in 1990, for the presidency of Peru, but lost to Alberto Fujimori. His novels include La casa verde (The Green House), La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World), La fiesta del chivo (The Feast of the Goat), and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, which was filmed as Tune in Tomorrow.

On the same date in 1970, Vince Vaughn, American actor, producer, and screenwriter, was born.

Vaughn is one of a small minority of non-left-leaning Hollywood stars; his ideas on politics and economic policy were greatly influenced by Ron Paul.

On March 27, 1915, Mary Mallon, popularly and scandalously known as “Typhoid Mary,” was put in quarantine, where she would remain for the rest of her life, over 23 years incarcerated.

Ms. Mallon was the first healthy carrier of disease ever identified in the United States. As an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid, she was a puzzle to science, and, once discovered, an apparent threat to those around her, with at least three deaths attributable to her presence. She did not co-operate with officials, and preferred to work as a cook, which paid higher wages than less dangerous-to-the-public occupations. She had been quarantined once before her final permanent quarantine in a hospital.

The civil liberties aspect to her incarceration loom large, and it is obvious that health officials of her time were not exactly any more respectful of her rights than she was with those of her clients and neighbors. The case was an obvious turning point in American legal practice, and can be categorized along with eugenics and “social hygiene” — along with prohibition regarding alcohol and recreational drugs — in the increasing illiberality of legal practice in America in the early part of the 20th century.

That being the case, Typhoid Mary was the very opposite of a heroine.

On March 26, 1991, local self-government in South Korea was restored after three decades of centralized control.

On March 25, 1965, civil rights activists led by Martin Luther King, Jr., successfully completed their four-day, 50-mile march from Selma to the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama.