Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 00:03:25 -0700
Subject: Daily Bleed: 4/11 JOHN O'HARA


Web version http://www.eskimo.com/~recall/bleed/0411.htm

Text excerpts:

APRIL 11

JOHN O'HARA
New York School novelist, bon vivant.

FESTIVAL OF UNMEDIATED PLAY.


1617 - Pocahontas, the daughter of Native American King
Powhatan, dies on a ship returning from England to
Virginia. She leaves an infant son.

School children are fed the romantic tale of Pocahontas'
encounter with Captain John Smith. But the truth is that
English settlers in Jamestown held her captive to force
concessions from her father. Then Colonist John Rolfe
married the captive Pocahontas, changed her name to
Rebecca Rolfe, dressed her in English finery, & took
her to England for Queen Elizabeth's amusement.

1722 - Christopher Smart, dooty Brit poet, lives,
Shipbourne, Kent. In & out of asylums, the poet is
finally released in 1763 & publishes his masterpiece,
“A Song to David.”

1812 - England: Attack on Rawfords Hill to destroy
machinery.

 Wroe & Duncliffs Mfg. set ablaze. 300 Luddites meet the
 first serious resistance & suffer their first defeat in this
 abortive attack. Yorkshire machine breaking  virtually at
 an end as Luddism acquires new patterns.

1895 - Cuba: José Martí & Máximo Gómez land at Playitas.

1898 - Beloved & Respected comrade Leader President Bill
McKinley declares Cuba independent of Spain & asks
Congress for a resolution authorizing him to use armed
forces in compelling the Spanish to "liberate" the island.
The resolution  passed & US warships were dispatched to
blockade all Cuban ports.

1905 - Attila József  lives. One of the great Hungarian
poets of the 20th century, who spent his short life in extreme
poverty. In 1925 expelled from the University
of Szeged for a revolutionary poem. Joined the illegal
Hungarian Communist Party & was expelled in 1933 by
Stalinists who attacked him as a fascist. Committed suicide
in 1937 by throwing himself under a freight train.

1914 - George Bernard Shaw's “Pygmalion” opens in London
with Mrs. Patrick Campbell as Eliza, on the eve of Shaw's
15th anniversary of corresponding with the actress.

1914 - "Explaining the term 'Anarchist-Communism'," appears
in “Min Sheng”, No. 5, April 11, 1914, pp.1-5.

Another significant article seeking to define anarchist
communism was written by Shih Fu in April, 1914. Since
both the terms "anarchism" & "communism" were new to
the Chinese language, many misunderstandings had resulted,
he stated. Anarchism advocated the complete freedom of
people, unrestrained by any controls, with all leaders &
organs of power eliminated.

THE CHINESE ANARCHIST MOVEMENT,
Scalapino, R. & Yu, G.T. (1961).
http://www.pitzer.edu/~dward/Anarchist_Archives/worldwidemovements/scalapino.html

1916 - Richard Harding Davis dies in Mount Kisco, New York.
Reporter, popular novelist, author of 25 plays.

1917 - Ragtime composer Scott Joplin dies, New York City.

1931 - Dorothy Parker steps down as drama critic for “The
New Yorker”, ending a self-described "Reign of Terror."

1938 - Bare Market?: Richard Whitney, five-term president
of the New York Stock Exchange, was sentenced to
5 to 10 years in prison for grand larceny.

1941 - US: Ford Motor Company signs first contract with
United Auto Workers (UAW).

1951 - Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Fade Away
General Douglas MacArthur is removed from his Korea
command for unauthorized policy statements. His idea
regards North Korea & China was to nuke 'em early &
often. WWIII an all that.

1961 - Bob Dylan makes his New York City stage debut at
Gerde's Folk City, a small Greenwich Village club, opening
for bluesman John Lee Hooker.

  "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

1968 - Attempted assassination of Rudi Dutschke, a well
known student anarchist activist, unleashes solidarity
demonstrations in his behalf in Paris, Rome, Vienna &
London.

1970 - John O'Hara, American novelist & short-story writer
whose sparingly styled fiction stands as a social history
of upwardly mobile Americans from the 1920s through
the 1940s, dies in Princeton, New Jersey. Many of his
best-selling novels were adapted for stage & screen,
including the popular “Butterfield 8” (1935; film, 1960)
& “From the Terrace” (1958; film, 1960).

1970 - Peter Green, founding member of Fleetwood Mac,
announces he will leave the band on May 25 to devote
himself to "what God would have me do." On May 26
he announced God would have him do the reunion tour.

1971 - 500 marchers in support Pepe Beunza reach Spanish
border; 100 beaten by Spain's finest.

1978 - 136 Zimbabweans killed in Rhodesia napalm bombing,
Solway Refugee Camp, Zambia.

1981 - Germany: 10,000 gather in West Berlin to protest
housing shortages. Some wore paint, some brought
instruments.
It was a celebration. The next night 500 went on a rampage,
smashing cars & store windows & battling cops.

1986 - US: 17 arrested on felony riot charges after police
tear-gas striking Hormel meatpacking workers in Austin,
Minn.

6,000 (in a city of 20,000) demonstrate the next day. The
Hormel strike, generally regarded as the first major grass
roots revolt against corporate downsizing, is eventually
suppressed by Hormel in cooperation with both the state &
the workers' own national union.

1987 - Novelist Erskine Caldwell dies in Paradise Valley,
Arizona. Wrote “Tobacco Road;  God's Little Acre”. Closely
involved with Margaret Bourke-White.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/caldwell.htm

1990 - First US cruise missiles removed from West Germany
to be destroyed in Arizona.

1991 - United Nations officially declares an end to the
Gulf War.

1996 - Egypt: Treaty of Pelindaba signed in Cairo, making
Africa a nuclear-free continent & at least in theory making
the entire southern hemisphere a nuclear-free zone.


Anti-CopyRite 2001
--

"Free thought, necessarily involving freedom of speech &
press, I may tersely define thus: no opinion a law --
no opinion a crime."

       ---Alexander Berkman