Milestones: March 12, 2024

March 12, 2024 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

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FIRESIDE CHATS — President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not waste any time in giving his first “Fireside Chat,” a nationwide radio address, to the American people, on March 12, 1933, just eight days after his first inauguration. During this chat, which would become a beloved tradition during his Presidency, he explained the bank holiday he had just ordered to stop a surge in mass withdrawals and reorganize the banking system. He also thanked Americans for their “fortitude and good temper” during this “banking holiday.” Roosevelt used his later chats, over the course of his next three full terms (he died 3 months into his fourth term) to build popular support for his innovative New Deal policies that helped bring the nation out of the Great Depression. Speaking directly to the American people over the radio, Roosevelt bucked opposition from some in Congress and the business community to the New Deal. In later Fireside Chats, Roosevelt kept the nation updated on his wartime policies.

Roosevelt received millions of letters from Americans from all walks of life and economic groups who thanked him for the sense that he had joined them in their homes and spoken directly to them.

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‘HUMANE LADIES’ — LOCAL NEWSPAPERS IN BALTIMORE, MARYLAND ON March 12, 1776, ran a public notice recognizing the sacrifices that women made for the patriots’ revolution, less than four months before the Declaration of Independence was signed. The notice read, in part “The necessity of taking all imaginable care of those who may happen to be wounded in the country’s cause, urges us to address our humane ladies, to lend us their kind assistance in furnishing us with linen rags and old sheeting, for bandages.” However, the colonial women were doing much more than that; early on, they organized protests against various British taxation policies, and their work helped the cause. They also spun their own cloth to boycott British fabrics.

Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, much of whose love life was expressed through back-and-forth letters, demanded recognition and further asked that the ladies be remembered in the drafting of the U.S. Constitution.

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MADE THEIR OWN SALT — Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi began the boldest act of defiance against British rule when he, on March 12, 1930, protested Britain’s Salt Acts, which prohibited Indians from collecting or selling this vital staple of their diet. Britain not only enforced a monopoly on being the only legal vendor of salt, but it also exacted a steep tax on the mineral. Gandhi made defiance of the salt laws into a unifying cause for satyagraha, or civil disobedience. Marching more than 240 miles to the coastal town of Dandi on the Arabian Sea, Gandhi and his followers made their own salt from the seawater, with others soon joining him. The police tried to crush this endeavor, but it was too easy to find salt clumps in the sand, and thus Gandhi circumvented the need to do business with the British.

Britain’s response was to arrest Gandhi, but the satyagraha, already grown into a huge movement, was able to continue without him.

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‘BOYCOTT’ WAS ONCE A PERSON — BOYCOTTS, SUCH AS OF BRITISH SALT, was already an established act, and the word’s origins date back to the late 19th century. In fact, “Boycott” was originally the surname of a man born on March 12, 1832. That man, Charles Cunningham Boycott, born in Norfolk, England, became a major estate agent in County Mayo, Ireland by the late 1800s. The Tenants’ “Land League” in 1880 asked Boycott to reduce their rents as people were struggling financially. Boycott’s cruel response was to serve eviction notices. So the tenants retaliated by refusing to conduct any business with Boycott at all, thus ostracizing him. Boycott’s name thus became both a noun and a verb.

The leader of the tenants’ cause was Charles Stewart Parnell, at the time president of the National Land League.

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BRITAIN’S FIRST WOMEN PRIESTS — MARCH 12, 2024 MARKS THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND’S FIRST ORDINATION OF WOMEN PRIESTS. Bristol Cathedral was the setting on March 12, 1994, when 32 women were ordained to the priesthood, but hundreds of clergymen and thousands of laypeople protested by threatening to leave Britain’s established church and join the Roman Catholic Church, which also had its say in the matter. The Roman Catholic prelates lamented that the ordination “constitutes a profound obstacle to every hope of reunion between the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion.” The March 12 ordination was not the first for the Anglican Communion, as 1,380 women priests had been ordained outside of Great Britain earlier in 1994.

In the United States, the Episcopal Church had beaten the Anglican Communion by another 30 years. The Philadelphia Eleven were the first women ordained “irregularly” as priests in the Episcopal Church on July 29, 1974, two years before the Episcopal Church’s General Convention officially allowed women priests.

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GIRL SCOUTING FOUNDED — JULIETTE GORDON LOW — ALSO KNOWN WIDELY BY HER NICKNAME, “DAISY” — started Girl Scouts ON MARCH 12, 1912, in her hometown of Savannah, Georgia. The first troop meeting with Low was composed of 18 girls with a sense of adventure and duty, even before women were granted the vote some eight years later. Girl Scouts pledged duty to the country, and earned badges in civics and other activities ranging from housekeeping to camping and the arts, with the goal of unlocking and realizing their full potential as citizens. In fact, Girl Scouts were active in the wartime efforts during both World Wars I and II, meeting with President Theodore Roosevelt.

Almost three decades later, Girl Scouts present President Franklin Delano Roosevelt with a checklist documenting service hours, March 12, 1944, exactly 11 years after his first Fireside Chat. The United States thus had a new generation of “humane ladies.”

See previous milestones, here.