March 19

March 19 is the 19^th day in March.

Events

624 BCE — Prophet Muhammed proclaims the "Day of Deliverance".

721 BCE — First recorded eclipse is observed by the Babylonians. Source: 'Calendar Riots'

1820 — France: Ferdinand Gambon lives, in Bourges. Lawyer, magistrate, initially a moderate republican, Gambon became a socialist, anarchist and pacifist revolutionary. Elected a member of the Paris Commune. Defense lawyer for the Lyons anarchists in the 1883 trials. Ferdinand Gambon now has a street named for him in Nevers. He is the author of Le cri du peuple and coined the famous pacifist slogan, "War Against War!"

1821 — Richard F. Burton lives, in an English family settled in Ireland. Explorer and translator of the Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra. Adventurer, translator, frotting omnisexual and discoverer of the source of the Nile. Born in Ireland — or was it Torquay? Upon his death, in 1890, his wife Isabel, thinking all his unpublished manuscripts obscene, burns them.

1831 — United States of America: First bank robbery in America. City Bank of New York was opened with duplicate keys and robbed of $245,000. Edward Smith was later convicted and got 5 years at Sing Sing.

1834 — England: The six framed Tolpuddle Martyrs are sentenced to seven years transportation; five Martyrs are shipped in appalling conditions to New South Wales. George Loveless, delayed by illness, later went in chains to Tasmania. (They fought the decline of agricultural workerʼs wages.) [see0308]. [1] Source=Robert Braunwart

1842 — Honore de Balzacʼs publicity stunt for his play Les Ressources de Quinola, a rumor that tickets were sold out, backfires when most of his public believes it and stays home. [2]

1848 — United States of America: Western gunman, crook and sometime lawman Wyatt Earp lives.

1856 — Australia: Sydney stonemasons achieve the 8-hour work day. Source=Robert Braunwart

1866 — England: Immigrant ship "Monarch of the Seas" leaves Liverpool for NY; its 738 passengers and crew are never heard from again. Source=Robert Braunwart

1869 — During this month, Mihail Bakunin begins his notorious collaboration with Nechayev. Bakuinin was for a long period quite taken with Nechaev, but ultimately repudiated him. "To begin with, my views are different in that they do not acknowledge the usefulness, or even the possibility, of any revolution except a spontaneous or a peopleʼs social revolution. I am deeply convinced that any other revolution is dishonest, harmful, and spells death to liberty and the people…"

1884 — Creator of the Finnish national epic Kalevala Elias Lönnrot dies in Sammatti, Russian Finland. [3]

1885 — Canada: Louis Riel returns to Canada, seizes hostages, and proclaims a provisional government of Saskatchewan; the NW Rebellion begins. Source=Robert Braunwart

1899 — Aksel Sandemose (1899 — 1965) lives. Danish-born Norwegian novelist, who mixed in his works a tormented Strindberg and the self-aggrandizing Jack London. A self-revelatory explorer of the psyche. [4]

1907 — Australia: Floodwaters trap miner Modesto Vareschetti in a mine at Bonnievale for nine days; he is rescued by fellow worker Frank Hughes after being repeatedly brought food by Hughes in a diving suit. Source=Robert Braunwart

1912 — England: Tom Mann, British Syndicalist leader, is arrested for inciting soldiers to mutiny. Source=Robert Braunwart

1920 — United States of America: Senate refuses to ratify League of Nations covenant for a 2nd time (maintaining its isolation policy).

1921 — Mongolia: Communists set up a provisional government (see March 13). Source=Robert Braunwart

1923 — Elmer Rice play "The Adding Machine" opens in NY. Source=Robert Braunwart

1928 — United States of America: 'Amos and Andy' debut on radio.

1930 — Jazz musician Ornette Coleman lives. [5]

1930 — United States of America: 1,100 men standing in a breadline in New York seize two truckloads of bread and rolls as they are being delivered to a nearby hotel. "All evidences indicate that the worst effects of the crash upon unemployment will have been passed during the next sixty days." — Herbert Hoover

1933 — Philip Roth (Goodbye, Columbus; Portnoy's Complaint; I Married a Communist) lives, Newark, New Jersey. [6] [7]

1935 — United States of America: Harlem Uprising. Over 100 injured and $2 million worth of white property destroyed as riots break out in Harlem after a black manʼs eye was gouged out by policemen. Mayor La Guardia later refused to release a study which blamed the violence on police brutality.

1935 — Canada: Emma Goldman delivers a series (March 19 — April 9) of four lectures at Torontoʼs Hygeia Hall. The series is organized by a group of young anarchists. Emma speaks on "The Element of Sex in Life," "Youth in Revolt," "The Tragedy of the Modern Woman," and "Crime and Punishment." Emma Goldman Papers

1936 — England: Emma Goldmanʼs lecture in Hammersmith, London, on "Anarchism (What It Really Stands For)" is sparsely attended.

1937 — Singer Clarence "Frogman" Henry lives.

1938 — England: March 19—20, Emma Goldman speaks at a well-attended fund-raising meeting in Leicester for the SIA (International Antifascist Solidarity); also shows the Louis Frank film, "Fury over Spain." [8]

1945 — High Seas: Kamikaze attacks USS Franklin off Japan. In a maneuver heralded as one of the greatest feats in naval history, the light cruiser USS Santa Fe bellied up alongside the flaming Franklin and rescued over 800 sailors while still being stalked by Japanese fighter pilots. You are just like Gods, free from human desires … [9] [10]

1950 — France: Charles Benoît dies, in Paris. Revolutionary socialist, then an anarchist.

1950 — Vietnam: 100,000 demonstrate against the presence of US war vessels, Saigon. Source=Robert Braunwart

1951 — Herman Woukʼs Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Caine Mutiny, is published.

1954 — Wilhelm Reich, author of The Mass Psychology of Fascism and other works. [11] [12] [13]

1962 — United States of America: In effort to block massive layoffs and end a strike, New York City moves to condemn and seize Fifth Avenue Coach, largest privately owned bus company in the World.

1963 — United States of America: 50 Greenwich Village folk artists protest Pete Seegerʼs blacklisting from the television show "Hootenanny." But, then, we all know there was no Blacklist (William F. Buckley, Jr., various conservatives, et al.). [14] [15]

1963 — United States of America: 49 arrested in New York City for protesting Chase Manhattan Bank loans to South Africa.

1965 — United States of America: Governor George Wallace tells President Johnson that Alabama can not afford the expense of calling out the National Guard to protect civil rights marchers during a Selma-to-Montgomery march. Oddly, there never seemed to be a budget problem when business or state property was thought to be 'threatened'.

1966 — Big Brother and the Holding Company appear at the Fire House in Frisco. Sgt. Barry Sadler, who was to entertain, could not attend.

1968 — France: A convention at Amiens attempts to sketch a design for educational reforms. Too little, too late. The 'Events of May 1968' in France begins in November 1996 with students who were demanding the 'internationale situationniste,' taking control of the leadership of the association of students in Strasbourg. In February an anti-Vietnam committee organizes a counter-demonstration against supporters of US Vietnam policy, resulting in violent exchanges with the police. Also incidents at universities throughout France by students demanding freedom of speech and movement and late in the month the Minister of Education announces a limited liberalization of access to universities. Too little, too late. Three days from now, on March 22, at Nanterre University, the administrative tower is occupied by 150 students, who say they are anarchists. Courses are suspended until April 1. By May the country is in the throes of revolution, led by students and workers, and the government totters on the brink of collapse.

1968 — United States of America: Presidential advisers advise getting out of the Vietnam War.

1968 — United States of America: Howard University students seize the administration building (-3/21). Source=Robert Braunwart

1969 — Anguilla: British paratroopers, Marines and Bobbies invade. This obscure island is invaded by Great Britain in a pre-dawn military exercise involving over 300 paratroopers and Marines, plus two frigates, several helicopters and 50 London policmen. The artillery on the island consisted of four aging rifles. The invasion, under the code name Operation Sheepskin gave opportunity to a memeber of Parliament to call PM Harold Wilson "A sheep in sheepʼs clothing". Nobody was killed but many embarassed. It is said the reason the sun never sets on the British Empire is that God doesn’t trust the English alone in the dark. See Donald Westlakeʼs Under an English Heaven (NY: 1972).

1969 — United States of America: Chicago 8 indicted in aftermath of Chicago Demo. convention (see March 20). Source=Robert Braunwart

1970 — United States of America: 200 women seize the New York offices of "Ladies Home Journal," demanding what they call a "Womenʼs Liberated Journal." Led by author Susan Brownmiller, the group includes members of the National Organization for Women (NOW), Redstockings, New York Radical Feminists and the Older Women's League. Their press release says the magazine "deals superficially, unrealistically, or not at all with the real problems of todayʼs women. . .Though one out of every three adult women in America is single, divorced, or widowed, the Journal depicts no lifestyle alternative for the American woman, aside from marriage and family." The sit-in lasted into the evening. Eventually publisher John Mack Carter agreed to include a collectively written eight-page feminist supplement in the August 1970 issue.

1973 — United States of America: CREEPʼs chief of security, James McCord, "eats the cheese" and writes a letter to Judge Sirica detailing high crimes about the Watergate break-in. Beginning of the end for "The Trickster", President Dick M Nixon.

1978 — Nederlands: 50,000 march in Amsterdam to protest US deployment of the neutron bomb in Europe.

1980 — Elvis Presleyʼs autopsy is subpoenaed in the "Dr. Nick" drug case. "Dr. Nick" is Dr. George Nichopoulous, Presleyʼs personal physician who is soon found guilty of over-prescribing drugs to Presley and others, including Jerry Lee Lewis. "My nameʼs got 'evils' and 'lives.' Itʼs probably better not to wonder too much about it." — Elvis Presley

1986 — Reagan and Canadaʼs Mulroney finally agree on acid rain actions.

1987 — United States of America: At his first press conference in 4 months, President Reagan assures the public he wonʼt be forgetting any more important things because "we now have quite a system installed of people taking notes, you know, at all our meetings and all our doings." [Jeanne Dixon?] As for his shattered credibility, he declares that heʼs "not going to tell falsehoods to the American people. I'll leave that to others." [16]

1989 — Cyprus: 4,500 join Women's Walk Home nonviolent crossing of Green Line partition.

1989 — Beginning of Robin Cook novel Mutation. Source=Robert Braunwart

1992 — Rene Vienet’s “Can Dialectics Break Bricks?”

1996 — Odysseus Elytis, Greek poet and winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize, dies in Athens. [17]

1997 — United States of America: After heated public opposition, Seattle School Board reluctantly votes to rescind a new policy soliciting corporate advertising in schools.

1997 — Algeria: Islamic terrorists murder 32 civilians, including 16 women. Source=Robert Braunwart

2003 — Canada: Liberal Minister Herb Dhaliwal expresses disappointment that George Dubya Bush is not a statesman. Source=Robert Braunwart

2005 — Global Days of Action (today and tomorrow) protests Americaʼs war in Iraq. [18] [19]

External link

• The Daily Bleed: Anarchist Calendar]http://www.eskimo.com/~recall/bleed/0319.htm The Daily Bleed: Anarchist Calendar]