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[TDIH] March 26th
**1720** - England: In the 29th political killing of the year, a magistrate is dragged from his carriage & killed. **1790** - US: Congress, through the act of 1790, decrees that "any alien, being a free white person who shall have resided within the limits & under the jurisdiction of the United States for a term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof." The phrase "free white person" remains intact until 1873 when "persons of African nativity or descent" was added. This act is used to deny citizenship to Japanese & other Asian immigrants until the mid-20th Century. **1804** - First official notice to Indians from US government that all Indians must move west of the Mississippi River. **1827** - German classical composer Ludwig von Beethoven begins decomposing, Vienna, Austria. **1850** - Looking Backwards utopianist, novelist Edward Bellamy lives. Also wrote Equality (1897). **1859** - A. E. (Alfred Edward) Housman lives, Fockbury, Worcestershire. >"I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat." **1871** - France: Paris Commune elects members. **1871** - France: Insurrectionary movement in Creusot, in sympathy with Saint Etienne & Paris, where a Commune is proclaimed. **1872** - Émile Armand (pseudonym of Ernest-Lucien Juin; 1872-1962), individualist, free love activist, lives. Wrote l'Initiation individualiste anarchiste" (1923) & La révolution sexuelle et la camaraderie amoureuse (1934). **1874** - American poet Robert Frost lives, Frisco, California. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize four times, Frost became the most read poet in America. >"Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation." **1879** - France: Georges Cochon (1879-1959) lives, Chartres, France. Tapestry maker, anarchist & very popular secretary of the "Federation of Tenants" (ancestor of the DAL). **1885** - France: Louis Montgon lives (1885-1972), Lorlanges (Haute-Loire). Militant et propagandiste anarchiste et syndicaliste. **1889** - Ukraine: Jacques Doubinsky (Iakov Dubinsky) lives (1889-1959). As a young labor radical he joined the Ukrainian peasant uprising in 1918, fighting with the famed anarchist insurrectionary Makhnovist army. Involved in many publishing enterprises & assisting Bulgarian refugees. When betrayed by the Bolsheviks, Doubinsky went to Bulgaria, where he was arrested & tortured for his anarchist activities.... **1890** - Raymond Callemin, (aka Raymond-la-Science) member of the anarchist/illegalist Bonnot Gang, lives. Callemin was guillotined in 1913 **1892** - Great American poet Walt Whitman mows no more, age 72, Camden, New Jersey. Constantly revising & augmenting his Leaves of Grass, he receives the final, ninth, edition on his deathbed. Walt was an unwashed iconoclast, a rebel who loved to offend polite society, an in-your-face sensualist homosexual back when nobody had the nerve to come out in public. He was so offensive, even Ralph Waldo Emerson balked at inviting him over for dinner ? though it was Emerson's endorsement of Leaves of Grass which made Whitman a famous poet. **1897** - Oscar Wilde's wife writes about her husband's arrest & imprisonment: >"I think his fate is rather like Humpty Dumpty's, quite as tragic & quite as impossible to put right." **1903** - Algeria: Albert Guigui-Theral lives (1903-1982), Algiers. French militant anarchist, syndicalist & WWII partisan. **1904** - Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) lives. American writer on mythology & comparative religion. >'The truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names.' **1910** - US: Congress bars paupers, anarchists, criminals, & the diseased from the country; Immigration Act of 1907 amended. **1911** - Tennessee Williams lives, Columbus, Mississippi. **1912** - US: Mine disaster at Jed, West Virginia, kills 83 workers. **1915** - Switzerland: International Women's Socialist Conference held, Berne. **1915** - Virginia Woolf suffers a nervous breakdown following publication of her first novel, The Voyage Out. **1918** - US: An anarchist draft resister, Philip Grosser, reports from Alcatraz Prison that he & other opponents of World War I are being tortured. Meanwhile Minneapolis is the scene of the first so-called "Slacker Raid," a dragnet of men without draft cards. During WWI, the raids seize more than 40,000 non-registrants across the country. (On July 15th, 1919, the War Department announces it has classified more than 337,000 American men as "draft dodgers" from the War That Ended All Wars waged by Woodrow Wilson.) **1922** - US: The New York World publishes a series of controversial articles, (March 26-April 4) by Emma Goldman, exposing the harsh political & economic conditions in Russia. **1923** - Bulgaria: In Yambol, during an anarchist protest against the government decision to disarm the people, the army shoots into the crowd, wounding the speaker Atanas Stoitchev & massacre others. About 30 are murdered here (Todor Darzev, Pani Botchkov, Dimitar Vassilev, Cyrille Kehaiov, Spiro Obretenov, Pétar Kassapina, Rousko Nanine, Pétar Glavtchev, etc.), including others executed at the Yambol barracks tomorrow. Still others are executed on April 24, & with the coup d'etat of June 9th, the remaining activists are forced underground. **1930** - American poet & leading member of the Beats, Gregory Corso, lives, New York. Convicted of theft at 17, he discovers literature in prison & later meets Allen Ginsberg & publishes his first book, The Vestal Lady on Brattle in 1955. You too can support a prison literature program, nurture some reader or writer; Seattle's own Books to Prisoners: http://www.bookstoprisoners.net/ **1939** - France: Emma Goldman travels to Paris to meet refugee Spanish anarchists (from the aftermath of the Spanish Revolution) who are demoralized & fraught with misery & internal recriminations & suspicion. **1949** - US: Intellectually, the Cold War begins in earnest today, in New York City at the Waldorf Hotel. A conference organized by, among others, Lillian Hellman brought communist cultural celebrities together to defend the U.S.S.R. Those bolting from the Stalinist-dominated conference started the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, which included liberals, democratic socialists & even anarchists... **1958** - Four pacifists set sail, intending to cross restricted zone around US pacific weapons testing site. **1959** - Brazil: Anarchist Congress convenes at Nossa Chácara in São Paulo (March 26-29th). Large gathering of militants from all parts of the country, including Spanish & Italian exiles. Ten items are debated & approved, including the refounding of Centros de Cultura Social & reviving the publishing house Editora Mundo Livre, in Rio De Janeiro. **1966** - US: Over 50,000 march in Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade in New York City. **1967** - US: New York City Central Park Love-In, 10,000 show up. **1967** - US: Easter Sunday Hippie Uprising on Haight Street. With Digger provocation & spontaneous group action fueling the situation, hundreds of hippies take over Haight Street & tie up traffic for three hours in Frisco, California. **1968** - US: Yippies submit application for demonstrations to Chicago Parks Department. **1969** - México: Anarchist novelist B. Traven dies. Wrote one of the great travel ship novels, The Death Ship. Makes the Titanic blush... Hal Croves, the man purporting to be B. Traven's "literary agent" & widely believed to be Traven himself, dies in México City: >"I am but the product of an era with the heartfelt wish to disappear again back into the continuum, with the same anonymity with which I must today shout out my words before you ..." **1972** - US: Dita Beard tells Senate Judiciary Committee members visiting her hospital room she was under the influence of "barbiturates, alcohol & hysteria" when she allegedly revealed the contents of her ITT memo. Later in the session, she was suddenly overcome by a "seizure" & stopped testifying. **1978** - Switzerland: 500 fast against construction of nuclear reactors. **1979** - US: Camp David Accords signed by Israel & Egypt. **1986** - US: Supreme Court upholds a ruling that an Oklahoma law permitting the dismissal of teachers for speaking out on gay rights is unconstitutional. **1993** - Outer Space: Soviet cosmonaut Serge Krikalev returns to the planet's surface after over 300 days in orbit. While he was away, the USSR dissolved. **1995** - Burundi: More than 3,000 people flee ethnic violence in this Africa country. **1996** - Germany: During the Squatter's Movement, which comes under heavy government attack for the next two years, The Palisadenstrasse 49 is evicted. **1998** - US: Microradio movement news accounts on the struggle to free the airwaves: FCC busts KMAD, 90.5FM, in Jersey City; FCC VISITS STEAL THIS RADIO 88.7, in the Big Apple. **2000** - Alex Comfort dies. British physician, sexologist, anarchist, poet, novelist, etc. >"You have only to speak for once ? they will melt like the dust: you have only to spit in their faces ? they will go howling like devils to swindle somebody else but if you choose to obey, we shall not blame you for every lesson is new. We will make room for you in the cold hall were every cause is just. Perhaps you'll go with us to frosty windows putting the same choice as the years go round or sit debating 'When will they disobey?' wrapped in our coats against the impartial cold." All this I think the buried me would say, clutching their white ribs & their rusted helmets nationless bones, under the still ground. ? Alex Comfort (1920-2000), excerpt from "The Soldiers" **2005** - Antonio Téllez (1921-2005) dies. Anarchist, guerrilla, historian. Author of, among other works, Sabaté, guérilla urbaine en Espagne 1945-1960, (translated into English by Stuart Christie). more