A week with war … and peace
• September 14, 1901
Eight days after being shot by a delusional anarchist at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, President McKinley finally dies – of gangrene, the infection having set in after doctors were unable to find the bullet that was lodged in his spine.
Leon Czolgosz was found guilty of McKinley’s murder and sentenced to death.
McKinley’s claims to fame included moving the United States’ currency onto the gold standard as well as making the United States a colonial power with the annexation of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, ironically, after aiding Cuba in that country’s bid for independence from Spain.
• September 14, 1964
Two years after winning the 1962 Nobel Peace Prize for Literature, American author John Steinbeck is presented with the United States Medal of Freedom.
• September 16, 1620
The Mayflower sets sail for the New World.
Originally aiming for Virginia, stormy weather blew the ship 500 miles off course, a pattern that plagued their early settlement as nearly half of the settlers died from disease that first winter.
Landing first at what is now Provincetown, Massachusetts, they moved but a month later to what is now known as Plymouth. The Pilgrims were strict religious fundamentalists who left England because of its lack of tolerance towards their ways. It also is true that they, themselves, were not especially tolerant of other religions, thus introducing religious intolerance into the New World.
On the plus side, the Pilgrims created the Mayflower Contract, an agreement in which they organized themselves into their own society, a society that recognized majority rule.
• September 16, 1932
Mahatma Gandhi begins a “fast unto death” in an attempt to persuade the British government to improve official treatment of India’s lowest caste, “the untouchables” or, as Ghandi calls them, “God’s children.”
Gandhi used fasting as a political weapon. In 1922, after 17 police died at the hands of 2,000 protesters, he started a 5-day fast “as penance” (International Herald Tribune).
Lord Viceroy Linlithgow considered Gandhi’s 1943 fast while being detained at the Palace of the Aga Khan pure “political blackmail” (Time Magazine). If Gandhi died, the British government would be blamed but if the British government capitulated, well, governments don’t like to do that.
Gandhi’s 1932 fast lasted 6 days before the British government made concessions on the treatment of the “untouchables.”
In addition to fasting, Gandhi, originally a lawyer by trade, walked. His 165-mile trek to the ocean (and his making salt from sea water) was in protest of the British monopoly on salt production.
• September 16, 1974
In acknowledgement of the profound civic protests to the Vietnam War, President Gerald Ford offers amnesty (conditional amnesty: deserters were not included) to Vietnam War draft dodgers.
