This Week in History – March 28-April 3
March 28, 1885 – The Salvation Army is officially organized in the USA. 5 years earlier Commissioner George Scott Railton and seven female Salvation Army officers arrived in NYC to begin expanding the organization in America. Though they were initially met with hostility and occasional violence, by 1883 the Army had expanded into 12 states.
March 28, 1936 – Birth of Bill Gaither, contemporary Gospel songwriter and vocal artist. Together with his wife Gloria, he wrote some of the most popular Christian songs of the 1960s-1970s, including “Because He Lives,” “The King is Coming,” and “The Longer I Serve Him.”
March 28, 1937 – Billy Graham gets his first opportunity to preach when his teacher John Minder unexpectedly assigns him the Easter evening sermon. Graham tried to get out of it, saying he was unprepared, but Minder persisted. Desperately nervous, Graham raced through four memorized sermons—originally 45 minutes each—in eight minutes, total.
March 28, 2013 – Democrat President Barack Hussein Obama issues an executive order establishing the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. All nine members–including the chair and co-chair–were appointed by Obama and contained many of the revisions in technology, voter rolls and poll books, and “absentee” voting policies that left future elections more vulnerable to fraud. The order also stipulated that the commission would terminate 30 days after its report to Obama.
March 28, 2017 – President Donald Trump signs Energy Independence executive order, which resulted in lower gasoline prices and energy costs for Americans and, for the first time in decades, returned the U.S. to being an energy exporter instead of importer.
March 29, 1945 – Famed actor James Stewart, the first Hollywood star in uniform in WWII, is promoted to full colonel in the Army Air Corps (now the U.S. Air Force), one of the few Americans to rise from private to colonel in four years. Stewart earned two Distinguished Service Crosses. Before his promotion, Stewart also earned a Bronze Oak Leaf Cluster for serving as Air Commander in many missions into enemy-occupied territory during WWII. Stewart guided his formations to heavily defended targets in deep penetrations to destroy vital enemy installations.
March 29, 1951 – American citizens Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are convicted and sentenced to death for espionage on behalf of the communist Soviet Union.
March 30, 1858 – Episcopal minister Dudley Tyne, burdened for the salvation of husbands and fathers, speaks to a rally of 5,000 men in Philadelphia. “I would rather this right arm were amputated at the trunk than that I should come short of my duty to you in delivering God’s message,” he said. Over 1,000 men were converted. Two weeks later, Tyne lost his right arm in a farming accident, and he died soon after. His last words, “Stand up for Jesus, father, and tell my brethren of the ministry to stand up for Jesus,” inspired the hymn “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus.”
March 30, 1858 – Pencil with attached eraser is patented by Hyman L Lipman of Philadelphia.
March 30, 1930 – Aviator James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle, touring with his Shell Oil Company plane, visits St. Paul. In 1942, Lieutenant Colonel Doolittle of the U.S. Army Air Corps would command the first air attack on Japan during World War II, leading sixteen B-25 bombers, which had been prepped in St. Paul, from the deck of the aircraft carrier Hornet.
March 30, 1981 – Newly elected President Ronald Reagan was shot in the chest while walking toward his limousine in Washington, D.C., following a speech inside a hotel. The president was then rushed into surgery to remove a 22-caliber bullet from his left lung. “I should have ducked,” Reagan joked. Three others were also hit including Reagan’s Press Secretary, James Brady, who was shot in the forehead but survived. The president soon recovered from the surgery and returned to his duties.
March 31, 1933 – Roald Amundsen, the famed Norwegian polar explorer who had discovered the South Pole in 1911, addresses a large audience in Duluth about the on-going battle of World War I.
March 31, 1933 – The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was founded. Unemployed men and youths were organized into quasi-military formations and worked outdoors in national parks and forests.
March 31, 1968 – President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek re-election as a result of his initiation, build-up, and expansion of the Vietnam conflict (Congress never declared war on Vietnam). Vice President Hubert Humphrey was later chosen as the Democrat Party’s nominee, who lost the national election to Republican Richard Nixon, whose administration ended U.S. involvement in Vietnam. On the same date, Johnson authorized a troop surge in Vietnam, bringing the total number of U.S. soldiers to a peak of 549,500.
April 1, 1745 – David Brainerd begins missionary work among Native Americans in New Jersey, having previously worked in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. The New Jersey natives showed more interest than most, but Brainerd died of tuberculosis only two years into his work there. Still, his diary, published by Jonathan Edwards, became a major force in promoting missions work, inspiring missionaries like William Carey, Henry Martyn, and Thomas Coke.
April 1, 1778 – New Orleans businessman Oliver Pollock creates the “$” symbol.
April 1, 1860 – Jonathan Goble, a Baptist missionary, arrives with his wife at Kanagawa, Japan. Eleven years later, Mrs. Goble becomes ill and Jonathan determines to provide her with “gentle, outdoor exercise.” Rather than have her carried by four men, he designs a two-wheeled cart with long shafts to pull her in. His plans are stolen and soon rickshaws are in use throughout the entire Far East, providing work for thousands of men.
April 1, 1866 – The Republican-dominated Congress overrides Democrat President Andrew Johnson’s veto, enacting the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1866, which gave protection to slaves freed in the aftermath of the Civil War and negated the so-called Black Codes in the South, which undermined the end of slavery.
April 1, 1866 – National Socialist (Nazi) Germany begins their persecution of Jews by boycotting Jewish businesses.
April 1, 1976 – Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs found Apple Computer in the garage of Jobs’ parents house in Cupertino, CA.
April 1, 1986 – When President Ronald Reagan removed price controls on oil shortly after his inauguration, the price of gasoline dipped below $1 per gallon mark for the first time since the disastrous Jimmy Carter years. On this date, it sank below 90 cents. As an economic historian noted in Forbes, after Reagan’s energy, monetary, and tax cut policies were in full swing in early 1983, “the whole energy crisis was on the cusp of vanishing from the scene.” The inflation rate dipped to 1.1%, the smallest increase in the consumer price index since 1961. Democrat economists feared inflation would increase.
April 2, 1513 – Spanish explorer Juan Ponce De Leon sighted Florida and claimed it for the Spanish Crown after landing at the site of present day St. Augustine, now the oldest city in the continental U.S.
April 2, 1792 – Congress established the first U.S. Mint at Philadelphia.
April 2, 1805 – Fairy tale author Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense, Denmark. He created 168 fairy tales for children.
April 2, 1840 – French writer Emile Zola was born in Paris. His works included a series of 20 books known as the Rougon-Macquart Novels. In his later years, he became involved in resolving the Dreyfus affair, a political-military scandal in which Captain Alfred Dreyfus, wrongly accused of selling military secrets to the Germans, was sent to Devil’s Island.
April 2, 1877 – Baptist evangelist Mordecai Ham is born in Allen County, KY. At the end of his ministry, he claimed one million converts—including Billy Graham, who made a declaration of faith at a 1934 meeting in Charlotte, NC.
April 3, 1860 – In the American West, Pony Express service began as the first rider departed St. Joseph, MO. For $5 an ounce, letters were delivered 2,000 miles to California within ten days. Express riders each rode from 75 to 100 miles before handing the letters off to the next rider. A total of 190 way stations were located 15 miles apart. The service lasted less than 2 years, ending at the completion of the overland telegraph.
April 3, 1783 – American writer Washington Irving was born in NYC. His works include; Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,and historical biographies such as the Life of Washington.
April 3, 1897: German pianist and composer Johannes Brahms dies at age 63. Though not employed in a official ecclesiastic position, the devout Lutheran wrote extensively for the church. His German Requiem (1868) is considered by some to be the greatest major sacred choral work of his century.