Tuesday
Nov. 2, 1999
Poem: "Rain" by Raymond Carver from All of Us: The Collected Poems published by Alfred A. Knopf.
It's the anniversary in 1783 of General George Washington's "FAREWELL ADDRESS TO THE ARMY" given near Princeton, New Jersey. The Revolutionary War had been over for two years, and Washington had spent most of that time urging Congress to pay his men. In November the last of the British soldiers finally left New York City, and in his farewell address Washington thanked God and praised the tenacity of the soldiers: "The unparalleled perseverance of the armies of the United States, through almost every possible suffering and discouragement for the space of eight long years, was little short of a standing miracle."
It was on this day in 1862 that MARY TODD LINCOLN wrote to her husband, PRESIDENT ABRAHAM LINCOLN, and speaking for thousands of Northerners who were frustrated with the passivity of Union General George McClellan, urged the President to fire him. Mrs. Lincoln wrote: "All the distinguished in the land would almost worship you if you would put a fighting general in the place of McClellan. Allowing this beautiful weather to pass away, is disheartening the North." Earlier that year, McClellan had defeated the Confederates at the Battle of Antietam, but didn't take advantage of his position to finish them off; later, he got within five miles of the Confederate capitol of Richmond, Virginia, but over-estimated the enemy's troop strength and waited for more of his own reserves to arrive. In both cases, his cautiousness gave the Confederates all the time they needed to re-group. Five days after getting Mrs. Lincoln's note, Lincoln fired McClellan and picked Ambrose Burnside to head the Army of the Potomac.
Radio station KDKA went on the air in Pittsburgh on this day in 1920 and became the world's first regular broadcast station. The programming began at 8 p.m. local time, and was a series of bulletins on the Harding presidential election.
It's the birthday of RICHARD TAYLOR, who won the 1990 Nobel Prize for Physics, born in Medicine Hat, Alberta, 1929. Working at Stanford University in the 1960s, Taylor proved the existence of quarks: subatomic particles which are unobservable, but generally thought to be the most basic building blocks of life.
It's the anniversary in 1948 of PRESIDENT HARRY S. TRUMAN's SURPRISE RE-ELECTION over New York governor Thomas Dewey. All the opinion polls had Dewey way out front of Truman, so the Chicago Daily Tribune editors printed the November 3rd issue early with what they assumed were the results"Dewey Defeats Truman." All fall, Dewey had run a lackluster campaign, while Truman fought off calls for resignation even from his own Democratic party and hit the road with his "give 'em hell" campaign and repeatedly denounced the "Republican do-nothing 80th Congress."
It was on this day in 1960 that a British jury acquitted Penguin Books of obscenity for publishing D.H. Lawrence's novel LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER. The book was published in a limited edition in 1928, and it wasn't until 1959, 31 years later, that Penguin brought out the first full edition of it. The court case centered around the novel's treatment of the affair that Constance Chatterley has with Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on her husband's estate.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®