American Federalist politician, diplomat, and Constitutional delegate Rufus King was born on March 24, 1755.
American economist Robert Heilbroner was born on this date in 1919. Heilbroner was a career-long socialist who, after the fall of the Soviet Union, admitted that “Mises was right” about the unworkability of socialism.
Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was also born on the same day as Heilbroner.
On March 21, 1921, the Soviet Union’s Bolshevik Party implemented the New Economic Policy (NEP) in response to the economic failure of War Communism.
Economist Ludwig von Mises and many other observers would go on to note that this slight liberalization of socialist policy — the re-introduction of money, for example — was a frank admission of the inability of bureaucrats and politicians to run an industrial economy from a central board. That is, in a socialist commonwealth, it is impossible to calculate and plan for the needs of society.
Vladimir Lenin called the NEP “state capitalism.”
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was published on March 20, 1952. Exactly two years later the Republican Party was organized in Ripon, Wisconsin.
On March 19, 1918, the U.S. Congress established time zones and approved daylight saving time. Arguably the first is a classic example of beneficial legislation under the Constitution, and the second a classic over-step.
Two years later the U.S. Senate rejected, for the second time, the Treaty of Versailles.
March 19, 1979, was the first day the United States House of Representatives began broadcasting its day-to-day business via the cable television network C-SPAN.
This day marks the 423rd anniversary of the birth of William Bradford, English settler in the New World, politician, and chronicler of his people’s struggles.
On March 18, 1992, South Africans voted against the color bar by electing a new government. “Today we have closed the book on apartheid,” Mr de Klerk said in Cape Town as he also celebrated his 56th birthday.
White electors had not only voted by a 2-1 majority to abolish the racial exclusion policies and double standard, but also to lose their own power.
On March 17, 1780, George Washington granted the Continental Army a holiday “as an act of solidarity with the Irish in their fight for independence.”
On March 16, 1751, James Madison was born. He went on to architect the Constitution of the United States, wrote as “Publius” in The Federalist Papers, and served as the fourth President of the United States, where his administration’s record was marred by the war with Great Britain, in which Washington, DC, suffered conquest and conflagration.
According to the Roman calendar, today is the Ides of March. Toga parties on this date? Not advised.
On March 15, 1820, Maine became the 23rd U.S. state.
In 1990 on this date, Mikhail Gorbachev was elected as the first President of the Soviet Union, a position he did not long hold — the government was pulled out from under him in late 1991.
On March 14, 1900, the Gold Standard Act was ratified, placing United States currency on a gold standard. Thus ended the country’s weird experiments in bimetallism, established in 1792 when Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton urged Congress to fix the ratio of gold and silver at 15:1.
The gold standard itself ended on April 25, 1933, and its last vestiges were scrapped when President Richard Nixon closed the foreign gold exchange window in 1971, thereby ending the Bretton-Woods international monetary system.
On March 13, 1868, the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson began in the United States Senate. It is the first impeachment of a U.S. president in the nation’s history.
“Uncle Sam” made his debut as a cartoon character, sixteen years earlier, in the New York Lantern.