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March 6
March 6' is the 6th day in March.
Events
1619 — Cyrano de Bergerac (1619—1655) lives. French satirist/dramatist & the basis of many romantic but unhistorical legends. The real Bergerac gave up his military career to publish plays & write science-fiction stories of imaginary journeys to the Moon & Sun. [1]
1806 — Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806—1861) lives, Coxhoe Hall, Durham, England. Sonnets from the Portuguese, published in 1850, includes the one that starts, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways."
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1831 — Edgar Allen Poe expelled from West Point. [3]
1836 — United States of America: Battle of the Alamo is fought (it falls). Among the casualties is Davy Crockett. Mexican troops defend their countryʼs abolitionist constitution, & defeat foreign (US) slaveholders in San Antonio, Texass. [4]
1857 — United States of America: Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court opens federal territory to slavery & denies citizenship to blacks. Dred Scott Decision. Supreme Court rules blacks are not US citizens &, as such, are not entitled to protection under the law. The "unhappy Black Race," wrote Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney in his opinion, had never possessed "rights which the white man was bound to respect."
1870 — Eugene Humbert, French anarchist militant & companion of Jeanne Humbert, lives, in Metz. Also a pacifist and néo-Malthusian. Humbert was killed in prison during World War II Allied bombing, the day before his scheduled release. Jeanne Humbert wrote a biography of their lives.
1879 — Italy: The trial of 29-year-old anarchist Giovanni Passannante [sometimes spelled Passanante], who attempted to kill Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader King Humbert I, is held today & tomorrow. The trial is a judicial sham & the most elementary procedures are trampled underfoot with brazen cynicism. Leopoldo Tarantini, appointed to defend the accused, travelled to Rome before accepting the task, to kneel before the king & apologise for the task that he would, as a professional duty, have to perform. Condemned to death, Passannanteʼs sentence was commuted.
1884 — United States of America: Susan B. Anthony & more than 100 other suffragists present President Chester Arthur with a demand that he support womenʼs right to vote. They fail, but the two womenʼs suffrage groups — the National Woman Suffrage Association & the American Woman Suffrage Association — soon merge & work for the next 36 years toward passage of the 19th Amendment, achieved in 1920.
1885 — Ring Lardner, Sr. — "Jupiter on tiptoes" to [[Ernest Hemingway] — lives, Niles, Michigan. Known for his comic writing, the author of Gullibleʼs Travels. [5] [6]
1888 — Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, dies in Boston — overcome with grief after returning just a few hours earlier from her fatherʼs funeral.
1900 — France: Henri Jeanson lives (d.1970). [7]
1909 — Shohei Ooka lives, Tokyo. Japanese novelist famous for his depiction of the fate of Japanese soldiers during World War II. Profoundly influenced by Stendhal, whom he translated into Japanese. [8]
1911 — United States of America: Emma Goldman — "the most dangerous woman in America" — lectures in Belleville, Ill., Milwaukee, & Madison, March 6-12.
1913 — United States of America: Joe Hillʼs song "There is Power in a Union" first appears in the IWWʼs Little Red Song Book.
1920 — Russia: This month Emma Goldman & Alexander Berkman travel to Moscow where they meet with Bolshevik leaders, including Alexandra Kollontai, Commissar for Public Welfare; Anatoly Lunacharsky, Commissar for Education; Angelica Balabanoff, Secretary of the Third International; & Grigory Chicherin, Assistant Commissar for Foreign Affairs. They meet with Lenin on the 8th. Source: Emma Goldman Papers
1921 — Russia: Kamenev & Snowball (aka, Leon Trotsky) issue an ultimatum to rebelling soldiers & sailors in Kronstadt.alt: Cronstadt [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14]
1921 — United States of America: Police in Sanbury, Pa. call halt to rising skirts issuing edict requiring skirts to be at least four inches below the knee. ’Source: VanessaCollection’
1925 — Canada: Cape Breton mine workers strike the British Empire Steel Corporation (BESCO). [15]
1928 — Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez, Latin-American journalist, novelist & short story writer, lives, Aracataca, Colombia.
1930 — France (?): During this month Emma Goldman is presented with an expulsion order dating from March 1901. Red Emma is taken immediately to police headquarters. She demands & receives a stay of 10 days; lawyer Henri Torres ultimately succeeds in overturning the expulsion order. Meanwhile, in the US, Mencken petitions the US Department of State to revoke Goldmanʼs deportation & grant her a visitorʼs visa, & requests the Department of Justice return her personal papers seized in the 1917 raid on the Mother Earth office.
1930 — United States of America: 100,000 demonstrate for jobs in New York City. Demonstrations by unemployed workers demanding unemployment insurance occur in virtually every major city in the country. Police attack a crowd of 35,000 in NY City, & 10,000 people engaged in a melee with police in Cleveland. A Communist Party-sponsored unemployment demonstration brought out more than 50,000 in Detroit, with thousands more taking to the streets in Toledo, Flint & Pontiac. Republican congressman Hamilton Fish, with the support of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), also introduces a measure in Congress to create a committee to investigate radical activities. This is the beginning of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
1930 — United States of America: A National Trade-Union Unity League council in Madison, Wisconsin, marches around the Capitol Square. During the march, a crowd of University of Wisconsin students attack council leader Lottie Blumenthal, throwing her to the ground, manhandling other demonstrators, & destroying banners & pamphlets. Police arrest five university athletes who led the attack. One of the arrested athletes says (quote): "We are getting so damned many radical Jews here that something must be done." Three weeks ago, Blumenthal & the Young Communist League marched into Madisonʼs city hall & confronted Mayor Albert G. Schmedeman. After Blumenthal inquired about the cityʼs plans for 3,000 local jobless workers, Schmedeman replied he did not know there were so many & that he had no power to create work.
1930 — Russia: Under the pressure of workers' & peasants' back-peddling & absenteeism, the Soviet Government Commission of the Council of Labor & Defence on the Transition of Enterprises & Offices to a Continuous Production Week is forced to accede requests for self-synchronisation of days off. Source: 'Calendar Riots'
1930 — United States of America: Police kill four workers in Detroit who demand jobs. 35,000 jobless workers marched down Woodward in a national protest against unemployment & hunger. In the early 1930s thousands joined together & walked to the Ford Motor Co.ʼs employment office in Dearborn. Henry Ford, whose plants had laid off more than one-third of his employees, declared that anyone "who wanted a job could find one." The marchers intended to take old Henry up on his statement. Violence erupted between the unemployed & police who joined Ford security forces. Shots were fired into the crowd, killing four protesters. [16]
1933 — United States of America: Pres. Roosevelt closes all banks.
1938 — Scotland: Emma Goldman lectures, March 6-13, on Spain three times in Glasgow & once in Edinburgh; her topics include "The Betrayal of the Spanish People" & "The Constructive Achievements of the CNT-FAI," but the meetings are not well attended.
1941 — Gutzon Borglum, Mt Rushmoreʼs sculptor, slated for removal, dies at 73. Said the hardest part about Rushmore was, "some folks take my work for granite." [17] [18]
1951 — During this month John Clellon Holmes shows Beatster Jack Kerouac his completed draft of his novel about the Beat Generation (published asGo.)
1956 — West Germany: Constitutional amendment adopted permitting military conscription.
1961 — England: Premier issue of the monthly "Anarchy." "A Journal of Anarchist Ideas", long-running review of contemporary concerns & issues, published by Freedom Press. Its hundreds of contributors include Paul Goodman, Nicolas Walter, Albert Meltzer, etc.
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1964 — Elijah Muhammad renames Cassius Clay, Muhammad Ali.
1964 — United States of America: Protest against Sheraton Palace Hotelʼs discrimination in hiring, Frisco, California.
1965 — United States of America: Civil rights demonstrators begin a march from Selma to Montgomery to protest the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson & to demand voting rights for blacks. They are brutally beaten by police officers while crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. 67 are injured. The attack becomes known as "Bloody Sunday."
1965 — Vietnam: First American soldier "officially" sets foot on the battlefields.
1968 — Germany: Incendiary bomb goes off, Criminal Hearing, West Berlin. [21]
1969 — United States of America: 9,000 march at University of Washington to protest Vietnam War.
1970 — United States of America: Three Weathermen blow themselves up in Greenwich Village (house of Cathy Wilkersonʼs father). "On March 6, 1970, Diana Oughton died with two young men [Terry Robbins & Ted Gold] in the basement of a Greenwich Village townhouse occupied by the Weathermen. She was killed by a nail-studded bomb, probably of her own making." — Thomas Powers, Diana: The Making of a Terrorist (NY: 1971).
1970 — United States of America: Police respond violently to a peaceful student protest at Roosevelt High in East Los Angeles, arresting 37 students; many other students are injured.
1971 — United States of America: First Annual Meeting of Nebraskans for Peace.
1971 — England: First national womenʼs liberation demonstration held.
1972 — United States of America: Wildcat strike at Lordstown, Ohio GM plant where workers were not expected to resist work discipline (according to company calculations). The company & the union got a big surprise. “Each of them [parties, unions, groupscles] organizes repression against those who are not organized, or who are not organized according to their particular methods. The difference between these organizations is measured by the amount of repression they are prepared to exercise.†— Jacques Camatte, Against Domestication [22]
1972 — United States of America: Supreme Court rules that Squamish Indian tribal courts do not have jurisdiction over crimes committed by non-Indians on reservations, a major blow to protection of inherent sovereignty.
1973 — United States of America: Former Equity Funding Corporation official accuses the company of perpetuating a $120 million swindle involving 60,000 fictitious life insurance policies. But hey, as the esteemed Nobel-winning economist Milton Friedman has put, corporations have no ethical obligations & are obliged only to produce profit.
1974 — Today in 1974, at West Point, Ayn Rand is asked how she reconciles her view of America with "the cultural genocide of native Americans." Her answer, in part: As to the Indians, "[t]hey didnʼt have any rights to the land & there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived & were not using… What was it they were fighting for, if they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their "right" to keep part of the earth untouched, unused & not even as property, just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or maybe a few caves above it. Any white person who brought the element of civilization had the right to take over this continent."
1975 — India: Nonviolent march demanding the return of democracy, Delhi.
1980 — Forceps removed from Elaine Mezichʼs stomach — left there during an operation five years earlier.
1982 — Cultist Ayn Rand, 77, author of The Fountainhead dies in New York. Also wrote I, the Jury, low-brow pot-boiler introducing vigilante Mike Hammer.
1982 — Susan Birmingham makes loudest recorded human shout (120 dB).
1984 — England: One-year coal strike begins.
1986 — United States of America: Anne Braden dies. orange diamond dingbat; new entry, remove 2007 "The Subversive Southerner." American Civil Rights pioneer.
1987 — Worst peacetime Channel accident: crew of British Channel ferry Herald of Free Enterprise fails to close the bow doors after leaving Zeebrugge, Belgium for Dover; the ferry quickly capsizes, drowning 188.
1987 — TV evangelist Tammy Faye Bakker announces she is undergoing treatment for her 17-year prescription addiction. Claims she didnʼt know her problem until she noticed people & cats on the wing of her airplane.
1992 — Léo Campion (1905-1992) dies.
1996 — Palestine: Hundreds demonstrate for an end to all violence.
2000 — United States of America: Miriam Patchen 86, a longtime Palo Alto resident & peace activist, dies, peacefully, at her home in Palo Alto, California. Her life was dedicated to peace & justice & to the writing & art of her husband, fellow anarchist & poet, Kenneth Patchen.
2002 — Artist Ralph Rumney dies. Rumney was a founding member of the Situationist International, & the first to be expelled by Guy Debord.
2007 — France: Jean Baudrillard disappears, his simulacrum departs at the age of 77. Philosopher, sociologist, anarchiste.
