March 2

March 2' is the 2^nd day in March.

Events

1789 — United States of America: Pennsylvania law prohibiting theatrical performances repealed.

1797 — The gay Horace Walpole, fourth Earl of Oxford dies. Wrote the gothic novel The Castle of Otranto, architect who began neo-Gothic trend. [1]

1807 — United States of America: Importing of slaves prohibited. The first American slave ship, named Desire, sailed from Marblehead, Massachussetts, in 1637. Since then, nearly 15 million blacks have been transported as slaves to the Americas. The African continent, meanwhile, has lost 50 million human beings to slavery & related deaths. But todayʼs Congressional prohibition will go unenforced due to the huge profits it would curtail. Another 250,000 slaves are be imported illegally before the Civil War.

1820 — Multatuli lives. Pseudonym of Eduard Douwes Dekker, (Multatuli — in Latin "I have suffered much"). One of Netherlands´ greatest writers & an anarchist.

1836 — United States of America: Texas declares itself an independent republic. Where, in the spirit of Judge Roy Bean, they still execute 'em faster than they can sentence 'em.

1859 — Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem (Solomon, or Shalom, Rabinowitz) lives, Kiev, Russia.

1867 — United States of America: U.S. Congress passes first of Reconstruction Acts.

1876 — Switzerland: Meeting of the Jura Federation in Lausanne. Elisée Reclus provides an early explication of anarcho-communist ideas here. By summer leading Italian anarchists (Malatesta, Cafiero, Covelli & Costa) had decided to abandon collectivism & to persuade delegates at the forthcoming Congress of the Italian Federation to make a declaration for libertarian communism. There was no strong sympathy for this movement amongst mainstream European anarchists, but by 1883 Kropotkin began to emerge as a major exponent of anarcho-communism.

1877 — United States of America: Despite an apparent Democratic victory at the polls, the Electoral College, swayed by Republican bribery, selects Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, as President. Supporters of Democrat Samuel Tilden claim a stolen election.

1882 — England: Robert Maclean attempts to assassinate Queen Victoria at Windsor. Source: 'Calendar Riots'

1883 — Responding to the criticism that his poetry lacks meter, H. G. Wells declares:
"Meters are used for gas,
not the outpourings
of the human heart." [2]

1899 — United States of America: Congress allows railroad companies blanket approval for rights-of-way through Indian lands.

1899 — United States of America: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President McKinley signs a bill creating Mt. Tahoma National Park (fifth in the US). [3] [4]

1900 — Radical composer Kurt Weill lives, Dessau, Germany. [5]

1901 — United States of America: Platt Amendment is passed by Congress. The amendment informs Cuba that troops will not be withdrawn. Cuba unofficially becomes a "protectorate" of the US.

1904 — United States of America: Kidʼs anarchist Dr. Seuss lives, Springfield, Massachusetts. Art Speigelman, author of Maus, the acclaimed cartoon strip novel of his familyʼs experience of the Holocaust, credits Dr. Seuss for "the fire of honest indignation & anger that fuels all real political art" — an element, he says, that is missing from most other American editorial pages of the period. [WWII]. See the Dr. Seuss Went to War site, [6]

1912 — United States of America: Aroused by the experience of hearing Emma Goldman lecture, Almeda Sperry begins a passionate correspondence with Emma. 'Emma Goldman Papers'

1915 — United States of America: Frank Abarno & Carmine Carbone, members of the Italian anarchist Gruppo Gaetano Bresci, are arrested.

1917 — Puerto Rico: Peace Loving Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader US President Woodrow Wilson thwarts Puerto Rican independence, takes over the island, & control of its economic & fiscal aspects of government. Wilson signs a compulsory military service act into law & 20,000 islanders are drafted into World War I.

1919 — USSR: Founding of the Third International, front group founded & dominated by the Russian Bolsheviks who also took on the title of Communist Party. "We claim that there is an internal contradiction in the term 'revolutionary party.' Such a party cannot be revolutionary. It is no more revolutionary than the creators of the Third Reich." — Anton Pannekoek, 1941, Ultra Left Council communist & Marxist [7]

1921 — Russia: The Kronstadt Provisional Revolutionary Committee forms (see yesterday & February 28). The Kronstadt Soviet was due to be renewed, & 16,000 workers showed up. The mass assembly adopted the Petropavlovsk resolution — opposed only by two Bolsheviks, Kalinin & Kouzmin, who voted against it. Women & men of Kronstadt armed "Kronstadt is of great historic significance. It sounded the death knell of Bolshevism with its Party dictatorship, mad centralisation, Tcheka terrorism & bureaucratic castes. It struck into the very heart of Communist autocracy. At the same time it shocked the intelligent & honest minds of Europe & America into a critical examination of Bolshevik theories & practices. It exploded the Bolshevik myth of the Communist State being the "Workers' & Peasants' Government." — Alexander Berkman, The Kronstadt Rebellion (Berlin: Der Syndikalist, 1922), pp. 41-42.

1927 — United States of America: Babe Ruth becomes the highest paid baseball player ($70,000 per year). King of Swat, indeed!

1930 — D. H. Lawrence dies of tuberculosis, age 45, Venice, Italy.

1930 — Gandhi begins 200-mile march to protest salt tax.

1937 — US Steel (now USX) begins to bargain with the CIO labor union.

1942 — Novelist John Irving (The World According to Garp) lives, Exeter, New Hampshire. [8]

1942 — United States of America: Acting under Executive Order 9066 (see February 19), Lt. General John DeWitt proclaims all Japanese-Americans will be required to move away from the West Coast, & recommends, for "their own good," they should do so voluntarily. For various reasons, voluntary resettlement is doomed to failure & effectively called off on March 27 after fewer than 5,000 people (out of over 110,000) had left the area. Other, more devastating measures, are taken against American Japanese this month. [9] [10]

1943 — Italy: During this month, Alcuni scioperi nelle fabbriche del nord d'Italia (Milano,Torino) scatenano un vasta repressione, con l'arresto di oltre 2000 persone. [Source: Crimini e Misfatti]

1944 — Lou Reed lives! [11] [12]

1944 — Italy: Fumes from locomotive stalled in a tunnel suffocates 521 people.

1950 — Aspiring novelist Jack Kerouacʼs The Town & the City is published. In May Kerouac takes a book publicity trip to Denver where he stays with Ed White & romances Beverly Burford. In June Neal Cassady shows up & they both drive off to Mexico where they visit Bill & Joan Burroughs. Kerouac is now a frequent user of marijuana & Benzedrine. While in Mexico, Kerouac gets dysentery & in July hitchhikes back to his motherʼs apartment in Richmond Hill (New York).

1955 — United States of America: Months before Rosa Parks, teenager Claudette Colvin is arrested in Montgomery, Alabama for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person.

1962 — Wilt "The Stilt" Chamberlain scores an incredible 100 points in an basketball game. [13]

1964 — United States of America: Actor Marlon Brando & Bob Satiacum are arrested at a "fish-in" at Frankʼs Landing, Washington, in support of Native American fishing rights. There is little popular white support, not even progressives or leftists who supported Negro civil rights. Later, another celebrity, comedian Dick Gregory, joins this Native American struggle. [14]

1971 — United States of America: Oriental Student Union protesters occupy Seattle Central Community College (Washington State).

1972 — Germany: Attack on Anarchist Black Cross continues, where Tommy Weisbecker is killed in Augsburg; Georg Von Rauch was earlier shot dead by armed political police in West Berlin (1971 December 4). Source: Chronology in Albert Meltzerʼs I Couldnʼt Paint Golden Angels [15] [16]

1974 — Spain: Salvador Puig Antich, 24, dies, executed at Model de Barcelone despite international protests. A young anarchist militant in the guerilla MIL (Iberian Liberation Movement), fighting the yoke of Francoism.
Campanades a morts
per les tres boques closes,
ai d'aquell trobador
que oblidés les tres notes!
— excerpt, "Campanades a morts," by songster/poet Lluis Llach [17]

1975 — United States of America: After pulling over a late-model Lincoln Continental for allegedly running a red light, the Los Angeles Police detect the smell of marijuana & arrest Linda McCartney for having six to eight ounces of the drug in her pocketbook. Paul is driving but is not charged with personal possession, unlike Linda. She gets 23 years — to life. [18] [19]

1982 — Philip K. Dick dies, Santa Ana, California, American science fiction writer par excellence. Author of Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, Crack in Space, Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Time Out of Joint, etc. "The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." — Philip K.Dick [20] [21]

1983 — Nicaragua: A massive crowd chants & heckles Pope John Paul II, forcing him to abandon his outdoor address. Source: 'Calendar Riots'

1989 — Over 1,000 of Salman Rushdieʼs fellow writers around the world signed a statement appearing today in 62 newspapers & journals in 22 countries. They unequivocally support Salman Rushdieʼs right to freedom of expression & repudiate the death threat by rightwing religious quacks. In the past year after the death threat issued by the late Ayatollah Khomeini, Rushdie was forced into hiding, his publisher subjected to a campaign of intimidation, & at least a dozen bookshops have been attacked. [22]

1991 — Serge Gainsbourg (1928-1991) dies. French poet, singer-songwriter, actor & director. Composer of existential malaise, angst, love; sleazy, dissolute dirty mouth of pop music. Daily Bleed Saint, April 2. [23]

1992 — Bosnia: Rally against ethnic barricades, Sarajevo.

1995 — United States of America: Proposal to reinstate death penalty loses in Iowa State.

1995 — Somalia: Last United Nations "peacekeepers" leave.

1997 — United States of America: Earth First! activist Judi Bari (b. 1949) dies. Ecological activist, fiddler, Wobbly organizer, Earth-First warrior. udiʼs estate received a $4.4 million in a false-arrest lawsuit, against Oakland police & the FBI for trying to frame them (they were arrested for bombing their own car while they were in it…), after a federal jury unanimously finds FBI & OPD defendants framed her & Darryl Cherney in an effort to crush Earth First! [24] [25]

1999 — United States of America: Microradio movement news accounts on the struggle to free the airwaves: FCC & Marshals Bust Canyon Lake, Texass Microstation. [Source: Pirate Radio Kisok] [26]

2003 — Anarchist collage; source www.markleighton.freeserve.co.uk/_derived Concord, contra costa county: anarchist chess in the park. Playing chess, general socializing & talking politics in todos santos park in concord. 2pm. Five minute walk from the downtown concord BART station. Look for the revolutionary types playing chess on the benches. Excellent place to find a soul mate. 1. e4-g6! … Matey! After carefully considering the Battambang Opening, Black Bartʼs Booty, Borg Defence, Dresden (Firestorm) Variation, Chicago Gambit (aka Irish Gambit Accepted, Haymarket Variation), Kingʼs Head Variation (Off With It!), Paris Opening (Commune Variation) Polish Opening (No Joke!), Rousseau Gambit, & the Gothic Defence …..Black(&Red) refuses to resign

External link

• The Daily Bleed: Anarchist Calendar