Milestones: December 11, 2023

December 11, 2023 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

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THE MAN WHO WOULDN’T BE KING — IT WAS ON DEC. 11, 1936, THAT KING EDWARD VIII, WHO HAD ASCENDED THE THRONE LESS THAN A YEAR BEFOREHAND, ABDICATED THE MONARCHY in favor of the woman he loved. Less than 11 months earlier, Edward had become king upon the death of his father, King George V, on January 20, 1936. At the time a bachelor who enjoyed the royal amenities of a monarchy more than its duties, Edward became smitten with an American divorcee named Wallis Simpson, who was ready to divorce her second husband to win the king’s hand in marriage. However, being the titular head of the Church of England that forbade divorce, Edward was on the verge of creating a constitutional crisis by marrying a divorcee and making her queen. The British government condemned Edward VIII’s choice of Mrs. Simpson as a wife, and he voluntarily abdicated with the famous radio address, “I have found it impossible to carry on the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge the duties of king, as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love.”

Edward’s abdication rendered his younger brother Albert, Duke of York, as king, who chose the name George VI and would lead the British people in resisting the Nazis. Edward and Wallis, both of them suspected of having Nazi sympathies after a scandalous tour of Nazi Germany, were sent off to the Bahamas, where, now as the Duke of Windsor, Edward was appointed as governor.

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MINUS U.S. RATIFICATION — THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY ON DEC. 11, 1946 VOTED TO ESTABLISH THE UNITED NATIONS INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN’S EMERGENCY FUND. This relief organization, with the acronym UNICEF, gave humanitarian aid and support to children in war-devastated nations. UNICEF over time advocated for children’s rights and helped draft the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which became the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history. Notwithstanding its role as one of the original signatories to this convention and New York’s being the U.N. world headquarters, the United States has never ratified the treaty on children’s rights, in large part because of its fear of international treaties harming national sovereignty.

The U.S. also took 37 years to ratify the U.N.’s treaty to end genocide.

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FIRST BLACK NOBEL PEACE PRIZE WINNER — ONE KEY UNITED NATIONS AIDE, RALPH JOSEPH BUNCHE, ON DEC. 11, 1950, RECEIVED THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE IN OSLO, becoming the first African American to win the award. Bunche, who began his diplomacy career during the 1940s when he served the U.S. State Department and the Office of Strategic Services, was appointed to the U.N. Palestine Commission. He mediated a cease-fire in the wake of the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, and had already been working on resolving the crisis over Israel’s push toward independence. Following the 1949 assassination of Chief U.N. mediator Folke Bernadotte of Sweden by a member of the extremist “Stern Gang,” Bunche had to take up the lead role. He was instrumental in the successful negotiation of a cease-fire, according to the Nobel Peace Center’s website.

Bunche’s selection as Nobel Peace Laureate sent “a message to millions of coloured people throughout the world,” wrote a Norwegian newspaper. However, he still faced overt racism back in the States. Bunche died on Dec. 9, 1971, in New York, a day before the 21st anniversary of winning the Peace Prize.

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DECRIED WESTERN MORALS — PUBLIC NUDITY, AS SHOWCASED IN A POPULAR BRITISH WEST END PLAY, WAS DENOUNCED AS A SIGN OF DECADENCE IN WESTERD CULTURE, ON DEC. 11, 1969. Sergei Mikhailov, a popular children’s book author in Russia and author of the Moscow writer’s union, lamented the decline in Western morals and that the trend was spreading to Russian youth. The brainchild of British theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, “Oh! Calcutta!” was composed of a set of vignettes about sex-related topics, and the only costumes were the players’ bare skin. “Oh! Calcutta!” was popular Off-Broadway in New York and in London’s West End. Mikhailov lamented that Russian youth understood more about “the theater of the absurd and the novel without a hero and all kinds of modern bourgeois reactionary tendencies in the literature and art of the West” than with “the past and present of the literature of their fatherland.”

Mikhailov, who was addressing a conference of Soviet intellectuals, also threw contempt on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who criticized the Soviet police state and thus became its enemy.

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FIORELLO OF MANY TALENTS — NEW YORK CITY’S OWN ‘LITTLE FLOWER,’ FIORELLO H. LAGUARDIA, WAS BORN ON DEC. 11, 1882. LaGuardia hailed from an interfaith family, his parents having emigrated from Trieste, a region that both Italy and Slovenia claimed. His father was Catholic and his mother was an observant Jew, thus making young Fiorello officially Jewish. LaGuardia was a progressive Republican who served in Congress and then ran for mayor on the Fusion ticket. When campaigning for re-election to Congress, LaGuardia once bested a Jewish rival who had accused him of anti-Semitism by challenging the rival to debate entirely in Yiddish, a language in which LaGuardia was fluent but the opponent was not. During his time as mayor of New York City, LaGuardia became popular for reading the comics over the radio during a newspaper strike.

LaGuardia’s nickname, “Little Flower” was the English translation of his first name. A Broadway musical titled “Fiorello!,” which chronicled Fiorello’s life and career, won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize in Drama.

See previous milestones, here.