On this day in History - March 4 ... On this day in 1861, Abraham Lincoln becomes the 16th president of the United States. In his inauguration speech Lincoln extended an olive branch to the South, but also made it clear that he intended to enforce federal laws in the states that seceded. Since Lincolns election in November 1860, seven states had left the Union. Worried that the election of a Republican would threaten their rights, especially slavery, the lower South seceded and formed the Confederate States of America. In the process, some of those states seized federal properties such as armories and forts. By the time Lincoln arrived in Washington, D.C., for his inauguration, the threat of war hung heavy in the air. Lincoln took a cautious approach in his remarks, and made no specific threats against the Southern states. As a result, he had some flexibility in trying to keep the states of the upper South--North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware--in the Union. --- 1913 - With trouble brewing between the great nations of Europe, Thomas Woodrow Wilson takes office as the 28th president of the United States on this day in 1913, in Washington, D.C. The Virginia-born son of a Presbyterian minister, Wilson became president of Princeton University in 1902; he resigned the post in 1910 to run successfully for the governorship of New Jersey. Two years later, he won a tight race for the Democratic nomination for president, aided by a split in the Republican Party and the third-party candidacy of former president Theodore Roosevelt. After a vigorous campaign on a reformist platform dubbed New Freedom, Wilson outpolled both Roosevelt and the Republican incumbent, William Howard Taft, though he failed to capture a majority of the popular vote. --- On March 4, 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is inaugurated as the 32nd president of the United States. In his famous inaugural address, delivered outside the east wing of the U.S. Capitol, Roosevelt outlined his New Deal--an expansion of the federal government as an instrument of employment opportunity and welfare--and told Americans that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Although it was a rainy day in Washington, and gusts of rain blew over Roosevelt as he spoke, he delivered a speech that radiated optimism and competence, and a broad majority of Americans united behind their new president and his radical economic proposals to lead the nation out of the Great Depression. Born into an upper-class family in Hyde Park, New York, in 1882, Roosevelt was the fifth cousin of Theodore Roosevelt, who served as the 26th U.S. president from 1901 to 1909. In 1905, Franklin Roosevelt, who was at the time a student at Columbia University Law School, married Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, the niece of Theodore Roosevelt. After three years as a lawyer, he decided to follow his cousin Theodores lead and sought public office, winning election to the New York State Senate in 1910 as a Democrat. He soon won a reputation as a charismatic politician dedicated to social and economic reform. --- On this day in 1952, Ernest Hemingway completes his short novel The Old Man and the Sea. He wrote his publisher the same day, saying he had finished the book and that it was the best writing he had ever done. The critics agreed: The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and became one of his bestselling works. The novella, which was first published in Life magazine, was an allegory referring to the writers own struggles to preserve his art in the face of fame and attention. Hemingway had become a cult figure whose four marriages and adventurous exploits in big-game hunting and fishing were widely covered in the press. But despite his fame, he had not produced a major literary work in a decade before he wrote The Old Man and the Sea. The book would be his last significant work of fiction before his suicide in 1961. --- Also on this day in 1952, actor and future President Ronald Reagan marries his second wife, actress Nancy Davis. The couple wed in Los Angeles at the Little Brown Church in the Valley. Nancy Davis, whose real name is Anne Frances Robbins, met her husband in 1951. (MGM Studios signed her to a contract and billed her as Nancy Davis for her first screen role in the film Shadow on the Wall). The two met in 1951, while Reagan was serving as president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and Nancy was embroiled in an effort to remove her name from the notorious McCarthy-era Hollywood blacklist of possible communist sympathizers. The list actually referred to another actress of the same name, but it was preventing Davis from finding work, so the future first lady contacted Reagan to see if he, as SAG president, could help clear up the confusion. The two fell in love and were married a year later. Their first child, Patricia, was born 7 months after the wedding. In 1957, the couple appeared together in Hellcats of the Navy, but after their son Ron was born the following year, Nancy left acting to become a full-time wife and mother. Meanwhile, her husbands political career took off and he became governor of California in 1967, a position he held until 1975. In 1980, he became president, serving for two terms. For her part, Nancy embraced the role of governors wife and later, first lady. --- On this day in 1966 and in n England, no one took much notice of the John Lennon quotation that later set off a media frenzy in America. Chalk it up to a fundamental difference in religious outlook between Britain and America, or to a fundamental difference in sense of humor. Whatever the reason, it was only after the American press got hold of his words some five months later that the John Lennon comment that first appeared in the London Evening Standard on March 4, 1966, erupted into the Bigger than Jesus scandal that brought a semi-official end to the giddy phenomenon known as Beatlemania. In their original context, Lennons remarks were clearly meant not as a boast, but as a sardonic commentary on the waning importance of religion. Christianity will go, Lennon said. It will vanish and shrink....Were more popular than Jesus now. It was only one comment in an interview that covered such wide-ranging topics as gorilla suits and car phones, but it was this comment alone that made its way into the American teenybopper magazine DATEbook several months later, boiled down to the straightforward line, Were more popular than Jesus.
Posted on: Tue, 04 Mar 2014 11:29:58 +0000
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