Common Sense with Paul Jacob

On April 10, 1778, Commander John Paul Jones and his crew aboard the USS Ranger set sail from Brest, France, headed toward the Irish Sea to raid British warships, the first mission of its kind during the Revolutionary War. Jones is remembered as a “Father of the American Navy.”

On April 10, 1942, the day after the surrender of the main Philippine island of Luzon to the Japanese, the 75,000 Filipino and American troops captured on the Bataan Peninsula began a forced march to a prison camp near Cabanatuan. During this infamous trek, known as the “Bataan Death March,” the prisoners marched 85 miles in six days, with only one meal of rice during the entire journey. By the end of the march, which was punctuated with atrocities committed by the Japanese guards, hundreds of Americans and many more Filipinos had died.

On April 9, 1969, the “Chicago Eight,” indicted on federal charges of conspiracy to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, pled not guilty. The eight antiwar activists were David Dellinger of the National Mobilization Committee (NMC); Rennie Davis and Thomas Hayden of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, founders of the Youth International Party (“Yippies”); Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers; and two lesser known activists, Lee Weiner and John Froines. The defendants were ultimately found not guilty of conspiracy, but the jury convicted all but Froines and Weiner of intent to riot. Though the others were each sentenced to five years in prison and fined $5,000, none of the defendants served time because in 1972 a Court of Appeals overturned the criminal convictions.

On April 8, 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized almost $5 million to implement work-relief programs, hoping to lift the nation out of the Great Depression, after Congress allowed the president to use the funds at his discretion. FDR created the Works Progress Administration from the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, one of several New Deal programs he hoped would relieve massive unemployment. (Like recent efforts, it didn’t work.) After 1935, FDR lobbied Congress annually to continue funding the ERA Act. In total, the act allocated approximately $880 million in federal funds.

On April 8, 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt froze wages and prices, prohibited workers from changing jobs unless required by the war effort, and barred rate increases by common carriers and public utilities to check inflation.

On April 8, 1952, President Harry Truman called for the seizure of all domestic steel mills to prevent a nationwide strike.

On April 8, 1953, Mau Mau leader Jomo Kenyatta was convicted by Kenya’s British rulers and sentenced to seven years imprisonment with hard labor and indefinite restriction thereafter.

On April 7, 1931, Daniel Ellsberg, an American military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers and whose office was broken into by burglars hired by the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), was born in Chicago. The break-in would lead to the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Richard Nixon

On April 7, 1969, the Internet was born with Steve Crocker’s invention of Request For Comments (RFC) documents to help record unofficial notes on the development of the ARPANET, the world’s first operational packet switching network and the core network that would become the global Internet. RFCs have since become the official record for Internet specifications, protocols, procedures, and events.

On April 7, 1994, civil war erupted in Rwanda with Hutu extremists attacking the minority Tutsis after President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down. It is not known whether the attack was carried out by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi military organization, or by Hutu extremists trying to instigate the mass killing. But in roughly three months, the Hutu Interahamwe brutally murdered as many as a million innocent civilian Tutsis (and moderate Hutus) in the worst ethnic genocide since World War II.