Category: Today

On September 19, 1778, the Continental Congress passed the first budget of the United States.

Congress last passed a budget in 1997.

On September 18, 1793, George Washington laid the cornerstone of the Capitol building.

On September 18, 1838, Richard Cobden established the Anti-Corn Law League, which eventually brought free trade to Britain.

On September 16, 1945, the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong came to an end.

September 15, 1789, the United States “Department of Foreign Affairs,” established by law in July, was renamed the Department of State and assigned a variety of domestic duties. Thomas Jefferson was the the department’s first secretary.

On September 14, 1901, U.S. President William McKinley died after suffering eight days from a gunshot wound. Anarchist Leon Czolgosz, the shooter, was executed on October 29 of that year. McKinley’s successor was his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, sworn in on the day of McKinley’s death, September Fourteenth.

John Calvin 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 culture, 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 — known by endonyms Schweizerische Eidgenoßenschaft (German), Confédération suisse (French), Confederazione Svizzera (Italian), Confederaziun svizra (Romansh), Confoederatio helvetica (Latin) — became a unified federal state with a constitution limiting central government powers and providing decentralized state (canton) power patterned on the U.S. Constitution.

On September 11, 1789, Alexander Hamilton was appointed the first United States Secretary of the Treasury.

The date marks quite a few other, perhaps more memorable, events, too. But few Cabinet selections were more consequential to United States history than President George Washington’s appointment of Hamilton.

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,” he said it “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, the twin towers of the World Trade Center fell, along with Building No. 7 of that complex, after those two major towers were hit with commandeered jet airliners. And the Pentagon was also hit with a major explosion. It just so happened that Rumsfeld’s big news was drowned out by the story of terrorism.