FDR orders “enemy aliens” to register


Year
1942
Month Day
January 14

On January 14, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issues Presidential Proclamation No. 2537, requiring aliens from World War II-enemy countries—Italy, Germany and Japan—to register with the United States Department of Justice. Registered persons were then issued a Certificate of Identification for Aliens of Enemy Nationality. A follow-up to the Alien Registration Act of 1940, Proclamation No. 2537 facilitated the beginning of full-scale internment of Japanese Americans the following month.

While most Americans expected the U.S. to enter the war, presumably in Europe or the Philippines, the nation was shocked to hear of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In the wake of the bombing, the West Coast appeared particularly vulnerable to another Japanese military offensive. A large population of Japanese Americans inhabited the western states and American military analysts feared some would conduct acts of sabotage on west-coast defense and agricultural industries.

Official relations between the governments of Japan and the United States had soured in the 1930s when Japan began its military conquest of Chinese territory. China, weakened by a civil war between nationalists and communists, represented an important strategic relationship for both the U.S. and Japan. Japan desperately needed China’s raw materials in order to continue its program of modernization. The U.S. needed a democratic Chinese government to counter both Japanese military expansion in the Pacific and the spread of communism in Asia. Liberal Japanese resented American anti-Japanese policies, particularly in California, where exclusionary laws were passed to prevent Japanese Americans from competing with U.S. citizens in the agricultural industry. In spite of these tensions, a 1941 federal report requested by Roosevelt indicated that more than 90 percent of Japanese Americans were considered loyal citizens. Nevertheless, under increasing pressure from agricultural associations, military advisors and influential California politicians, Roosevelt agreed to begin the necessary steps for possible internment of the Japanese-American population.

Ostensibly issued in the interest of national security, Proclamation No. 2537 permitted the arrest, detention and internment of enemy aliens who violated restricted areas, such as ports, water treatment plants or even areas prone to brush fires, for the duration of the war. A month later, a reluctant but resigned Roosevelt signed the War Department’s blanket Executive Order 9066, which authorized the physical removal of all Japanese Americans into internment camps.

READ MORE: Life in WWII Japanese Internment Camps

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President Nixon refuses to hand over tapes


Updated:
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Year
1974
Month Day
January 04

President Richard Nixon refuses to hand over tape recordings and documents that had been subpoenaed by the Senate Watergate Committee. Marking the beginning of the end of his Presidency, Nixon would resign from office in disgrace eight months later.

READ MORE: 7 Revealing Nixon Quotes From His Secret Tapes

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President Harrison welcomes Alice Sanger as first female staffer


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Year
1890
Month Day
January 02

President Benjamin Harrison welcomes Alice Sanger as the first female White House staffer on January 2, 1890.

During an otherwise uneventful presidency remarkable only for allowing Congress a free-for-all in spending public funds, Alice Sanger’s appointment may have been an olive branch to the growing women’s suffrage movement that had gathered momentum during Harrison’s presidency. 

In 1890, two of the most influential organizations involved in the women’s suffrage movement, the American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Woman Suffrage Association, combined forces and became the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). NAWSA represented a coalition of women’s suffrage activists, social reformers and temperance advocates. Their demands included stronger female property rights, employment and educational opportunities for women, improved divorce and child custody laws and reproductive freedom.

Whether or not Sanger actively supported women’s suffrage has been lost in the historical record, however, Harrison’s appointment of Sanger indicated a cautious step toward strengthening female representation in government.

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George Washington dies


Updated:
Original:
Year
1799
Month Day
December 14

George Washington, the American revolutionary leader and first president of the United States, dies of acute laryngitis at his estate in Mount Vernon, Virginia. He was 67 years old.

George Washington was born in 1732 to a farm family in Westmoreland County, Virginia. His first direct military experience came as a lieutenant colonel in the Virginia colonial militia in 1754, when he led a small expedition against the French in the Ohio River valley on behalf of the governor of Virginia. Two years later, Washington took command of the defenses of the western Virginian frontier during the French and Indian War. After the war’s fighting moved elsewhere, he resigned from his military post, returned to a planter’s life, and took a seat in Virginia’s House of Burgesses.

During the next two decades, Washington openly opposed the escalating British taxation and repression of the American colonies. In 1774, he represented Virginia at the Continental Congress. After the American Revolution erupted in 1775, Washington was nominated to be commander in chief of the newly established Continental Army. Some in the Continental Congress opposed his appointment, thinking other candidates were better equipped for the post, but he was ultimately chosen because as a Virginian his leadership helped bind the Southern colonies more closely to the rebellion in New England.

With his inexperienced and poorly equipped army of civilian soldiers, General Washington led an effective war of harassment against British forces in America while encouraging the intervention of the French into the conflict on behalf of the colonists. On October 19, 1781, with the surrender of British General Charles Lord Cornwallis’ massive British army at Yorktown, Virginia, General Washington had defeated one of the most powerful nations on earth.

After the war, the victorious general retired to his estate at Mount Vernon, but in 1787 he heeded his nation’s call and returned to politics to preside over the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The drafters created the office of president with him in mind, and in February 1789 Washington was unanimously elected the first president of the United States.

As president, Washington sought to unite the nation and protect the interests of the new republic at home and abroad. Of his presidency, he said, “I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn in precedent.” He successfully implemented executive authority, making good use of brilliant politicians such as Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson in his cabinet, and quieted fears of presidential tyranny. In 1792, he was unanimously reelected but four years later refused a third term.

In 1797, he finally began a long-awaited retirement at his estate in Virginia. He died two years later. His friend Henry Lee provided a famous eulogy for the father of the United States: “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”

READ MORE: George Washington’s Final Years—And Sudden, Agonizing Death 

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Donald Trump is inaugurated


Year
2017
Month Day
January 20

In the culmination of his extraordinary rise to power over a tumultuous election year, Donald John Trump is inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States in Washington, D.C.

From the time he kicked off his presidential campaign in June 2015 at his namesake Trump Tower in New York City, Trump seemed an unlikely candidate for the nation’s highest office.

But with his brash promises to crack down on immigration, bring back jobs for working class Americans and overturn the political establishment, the endlessly controversial real estate mogul and reality TV personality triumphed amid a crowded Republican primary field. He then pulled off an upset victory over his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, in the general election in November 2016.

On a rainy Inauguration Day, a crowd of supporters—many of them wearing Trump’s distinctive red “Make America Great Again” caps—gathered to watch the inaugural ceremonies, held on the West Front of the Capitol Building.

Though crowd experts estimated that between 300,000 and 600,000 people attended Trump’s inauguration (around a third of the crowd on hand for the 2009 inauguration of his immediate predecessor, Barack Obama), the White House and Trump himself disputed that assessment, claiming the media deliberately underestimated the crowd total.

After Associate Justice Clarence Thomas swore in Vice President-elect Mike Pence and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performed “America the Beautiful,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. administered the presidential oath of office to Trump.

For his swearing-in, Trump placed his hand on two Bibles held by his wife, Melania Trump, a Slovenian native who became the first foreign-born U.S. first lady since Louisa Adams, the British-born wife of John Quincy Adams. One was Trump’s personal Bible, which his mother had given him when he was a child; the other was the Bible used by Abraham Lincoln at his first inauguration in 1861, and again by Obama in 2009 and 2013.

At 70, Trump became the oldest man to assume the presidency, and the first to have no previous record of government or military experience. In his inaugural address, which at some 16 minutes was the shortest since Jimmy Carter’s in 1977, he stuck close to the dark, ominous message he relied on during the campaign, referring to grim images of inner-city poverty and “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones” across the national landscape. “The American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” he intoned, in one of the most striking lines of the 1,433-word address.

Calling himself the protector of the “forgotten men and women” in America, Trump struck a clear populist note in his speech, reportedly drawing inspiration from the inaugural address given by Andrew Jackson in 1829. Like Trump, Jackson had triumphed thanks to a populist movement among Americans who embraced his anti-establishment, anti-elite message.

Trump also sounded a nationalistic tone in his address, repeatedly using the term “America first” to refer to the economic policies his administration planned to implement. Worried observers of the speech noted that “America First” was also the name of the movement founded by Charles Lindbergh in the 1940s, which worked to keep the United States from going to war against Nazi Germany.

After the inaugural ceremony, President Trump attended a traditional inaugural luncheon held in National Statuary Hall in the Capitol, then followed the inaugural parade route down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. The new president and first lady ended their evening by attending three official inaugural balls.

On the following day, hundreds of thousands of people flooded the nation’s capital and cities around the country for the Women’s March, a mass protest—believed to be the largest in U.S. history—of the Trump administration. In all, more than 2.5 million people reportedly joined the protest. 

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Barack Obama is inaugurated


Year
2009
Month Day
January 20

On a freezing day in Washington, D.C., Barack Hussein Obama is sworn in as the 44th U.S. president. The son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas, Obama had become the first African American to win election to the nation’s highest office the previous November.

As the junior U.S. senator from Illinois, he won a tight Democratic primary battle over Senator Hillary Clinton of New York before triumphing over Arizona Senator John McCain, the Republican candidate, in the general election. Against a backdrop of the nation’s devastating economic collapse during the start of the Great Recession, Obama’s message of hope and optimism—as embodied by his campaign slogan, “Yes We Can”—struck an inspirational chord with a nation seeking change.

As Inauguration Day dawned, crowds of people thronged the National Mall, stretching from the Capitol Building to beyond the Washington Monument. According to an official estimate made later by the District of Columbia, some 1.8 million people witnessed Obama’s inauguration, surpassing the previous record of 1.2 million, set by the inaugural crowd of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965.

The ceremonies ran behind schedule, and it wasn’t until just before noon that Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. administered the presidential oath of office to the president-elect. While being sworn in, Obama placed his hand on a Bible held by his wife, Michelle—the same Bible used by President Abraham Lincoln at his first inaugural.

Obama opened his inaugural address, which lasted some 20 minutes, by recognizing the challenges facing the nation at the outset of his administration—the worsening economic crisis, ongoing war against radical extremism and terrorism, costly health care, failing schools and a general loss of confidence in America’s promise.

In the face of these obstacles, he offered a message of cautious yet confident optimism. “The challenges we face are real,” Obama declared. “They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America, they will be met.”

Obama referred only briefly to the historic nature of his presidency in his speech, saying near the end that part of America’s greatness was the fact that “a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.”

Instead, he emphasized the theme of civic responsibility that another youthful Democratic president—John F. Kennedy—used to such great effect nearly 50 years earlier, calling on the American people to embrace the challenges they faced in such a difficult period: “What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility, a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize grandly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task. That is the price and promise of citizenship.”

After the inauguration, Obama attended the traditional inaugural luncheon in Statuary Hall, the original chamber of the House of Representatives. He and Michelle then traveled down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House as part of the 15,000-person inaugural parade, and would attend no fewer than 10 official inaugural balls that evening.

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Barack Obama elected as America’s first Black president

Year
2008
Month Day
November 04

On November 4, 2008, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois defeats Senator John McCain of Arizona to become the 44th U.S. president, and the first African American elected to the White House. The 47-year-old Democrat garnered 365 electoral votes and nearly 53 percent of the popular vote, while his 72-year-old Republican challenger captured 173 electoral votes and more than 45 percent of the popular vote. Obama’s vice-presidential running mate was Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, while McCain’s running mate was Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, the first female Republican ever nominated for the vice presidency.

Obama, who was born in 1961 in Hawaii to a white woman from Kansas and a Black man from Kenya, graduated from Harvard Law School and was a law professor at the University of Chicago before launching his political career in 1996, when he was elected to the Illinois State Senate. He was re-elected to that post in 1998 and 2000. In March 2004, he shot to national prominence by winning the U.S. Senate Democratic primary in Illinois, and that July he gained further exposure when he delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, which included his eloquent call for unity among “red” (Republican) and “blue” (Democratic) states. That November, Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate in a landslide.

On February 10, 2007, in Springfield, Illinois, Obama officially announced his candidacy for president. A victory in the Iowa caucuses in January 2008 made him a viable challenger to the early frontrunner, Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, whom he outlasted in a grueling primary campaign to claim the Democratic nomination in early June 2008.

During the general-election campaign, as in the primaries, Obama’s team worked to build a following at the grassroots level and used what his supporters viewed as the candidate’s natural charisma, unique life story and inspiring message of hope and change to draw large crowds to his public appearances, both in the United States and on a campaign trip abroad. His team also worked to bring new voters—many of them young or Black, both demographics they believed favored Obama—to become involved in the election. Additionally, the campaign was notable for its unprecedented use of the Internet for organizing constituents and fundraising. According to The Washington Post: “3 million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations online adding up to more than $500 million. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less.”

In terms of campaign issues, Obama pledged to get the United States out of the war in Iraq and expand health care, among other promises. A crushing national financial crisis in the months leading up to the election shifted the country’s focus to the economy, and Obama and McCain each attempted to show he had the best plan for economic improvement.

On November 4, more than 69.4 million Americans cast their vote for Obama, while some 59.9 million voters chose McCain. (Obama was the first sitting U.S. senator to win the White House since John F. Kennedy in 1960.) Obama captured some traditional Republican strongholds (Virginia, Indiana) and key battleground states (Florida, Ohio) that had been won by Republicans in recent elections. Late that night, the president-elect appeared before a huge crowd of supporters in Chicago’s Grant Park and delivered a speech in he which acknowledged the historic nature of his victory (which came 143 years after the end of the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery): “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer…It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment, change has come to America.”

Obama was inaugurated on January 20, 2009. On November 6, 2012, he defeated Republican challenger Mitt Romney to win a second term in the White House. He left office in January, 2017. 

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Calvin Coolidge takes oath of office after Warren G. Harding’s death

Year
1923
Month Day
August 03

On August 3, 1923, Calvin Coolidge is sworn in as the 30th president of the United States, hours after the death of President Warren G. Harding.

Born July 4, 1872, in Plymouth, Vermont, Coolidge was the son of a village storekeeper. He graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts and worked his way up in the political ranks in that state as a Republican, from city councilman in Northampton in 1898 to governor in 1918. Coolidge made it onto the Republican ticket in 1920 as Harding’s running mate, and they won a decisive victory over a Democratic pairing of James Cox and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In 1923, Harding’s administration was tainted by the emergence of corruption scandals involving Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty and other high government officials, a group known as the Ohio Gang. A distraught Harding sought refuge from Washington during a summer vacation but died suddenly in San Francisco late on August 2, after suffering a heart attack or stroke. Coolidge got the news of Harding’s death early the next morning, while visiting family in Vermont. He took the oath of office by the light of a kerosene lamp; his father, a notary public, administered it using the family’s Bible.

Coolidge immediately began working to rehabilitate the tarnished image of the government’s executive branch, projecting an image of old-fashioned New England values and Puritan austerity that reassured a troubled public. A man of few words—he was known as “Silent Cal”—Coolidge became an extremely popular president, winning more than 54 percent of the popular vote when he was elected in 1924. His time in the White House coincided with an era of unprecedented material prosperity and technological advances, with consumers snapping up widely available new products such as automobiles, radios and household appliances like vacuum cleaners and washing machines.

Strongly conservative, Coolidge believed the government should do little to interfere with business and industry, whether it was to check the growing power of big corporations or to aid struggling industries such as agriculture. He supported tax cuts for businesses and high tariffs to protect U.S. goods, but vetoed aid to farmers as well as a plan to produce electric power cheaply on the Tennessee River. Taking office just five years after the First World War ended, Coolidge favored isolationism in foreign policy, and opposed American membership in the League of Nations.

Though he almost certainly would have won reelection in 1928, Coolidge decided not to run, retiring from politics before the stock market disaster of November 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression that crippled the country. He died of a heart attack in January 1933. Though remembered fondly for restoring dignity to the White House, the Coolidge era also went down in history as a time of governmental complacency in the face of impending economic disaster.

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Bill Clinton is born

Year
1946
Month Day
August 19

On August 19, 1946, William Jefferson Blythe III is born in Hope, Arkansas. His father died in a car accident before he was born, and young Bill later took the last name of his stepfather, Roger Clinton. In 1992, Bill Clinton would be elected as the 42nd president of the United States.

By his own account, Clinton was inspired to enter politics after meeting President John F. Kennedy at the White House as a high school student. He attended Georgetown University and won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford in 1968, then received a law degree from Yale. In 1974, Clinton lost a bid for Congress in Arkansas’ Third District. He married fellow Yale Law graduate Hillary Rodham the following year; their daughter Chelsea was born in 1980.

Clinton was elected Arkansas attorney general in 1976. In 1978, at the age of 32, he became the youngest governor to be elected in the United States in four decades. Though he lost his first reelection campaign in 1980, he regained the office four years later and was reelected comfortably three more times. In 1992, he won the Democratic nomination for president. In a campaign that revolved largely around economic issues, Clinton’s youth and the promise of change won over many voters, propelling him to victory over the incumbent George H.W. Bush and upstart third-party candidate Ross Perot.

Issues that arose during the first two years of his administration—including an ethics investigation into the Clintons’ involvement with the Whitewater housing development in Arkansas and a bitter debate in Congress over Clinton’s health care initiative—helped fuel a Republican takeover of the Senate and the House of Representatives in the midterm elections of 1994. Nevertheless, the improving economic climate during Clinton’s presidency resulted in a low unemployment and inflation rate and a balanced budget (even a budget surplus), and in 1996 he became the first Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win a second term in office.

In 1998, scandal erupted over Clinton’s alleged involvement with a young female White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. On the basis of an investigation by independent counsel Kenneth Starr, Clinton was accused of perjury and obstruction of justice over his repeated denials of the affair; he eventually apologized to his family and to the American public for his dishonesty. He became only the second U.S. president to be impeached by the House of Representatives, but was acquitted of the charges by the Senate in 1999.

Even throughout the tumult surrounding the Lewinsky affair, Clinton enjoyed high approval ratings at home. He was also popular on the world stage, confronting foreign policy challenges including war in Bosnia and Herzegovina; continuing hostility between Israelis and Palestinians; and Iraq’s refusal to comply with United Nations weapons inspections. He was praised for his peacemaking efforts in Ireland and Northern Ireland, and became the first U.S. president to visit Vietnam since the end of the Vietnam War.

After leaving the White House, Clinton remained active in global affairs and as a public speaker. He heads up the William J. Clinton Foundation, a philanthropic organization that has addressed issues such as HIV/AIDS and the environment. Meanwhile, his wife launched her own political career, winning election to the U.S. Senate from New York in 2000 and running her own presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2016. She served as secretary of state in the administration of Barack Obama.

READ MORE: Bill Clinton: His Life and Legacy

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Reagan signs Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA)

Year
1981
Month Day
August 13

On August 13, 1981, at his California home Rancho del Cielo, Ronald Reagan signs the Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA), a historic package of tax and budget reductions that set the tone for his administration’s overall economic policy.

During his campaign for the White House in 1980, Reagan argued on behalf of “supply-side economics,” the theory of using tax cuts as incentives for individuals and businesses to work and produce goods (supply) rather than as an incentive for consumers to buy goods (demand). In Congress, Representative Jack Kemp, Republican of New York, and Senator Bill Roth, Republican of Delaware, had long supported the supply-side principles behind the ERTA, which would also be known as the Kemp-Roth act. The bill, which received broad bipartisan support in Congress, represented a significant change in the course of federal income tax policy, which until then was believed by most people to work best when used to affect demand during times of recession.

The ERTA included a 25 percent reduction in marginal tax rates for individuals, phased in over three years, and indexed for inflation from that point on. The marginal tax rate, or the tax rate on the last dollar earned, was considered more important to economic activity than the average tax rate (total tax paid as a percentage of income earned), as it affected income earned through “extra” activities such as education, entrepreneurship or investment. Reducing marginal tax rates, the theory went, would help the economy grow faster through such extra efforts by individuals and businesses. The 1981 act, combined with another major tax reform act in 1986, cut marginal tax rates on high-income taxpayers from 70 percent to around 30 percent, and would be the defining economic legacy of Reagan’s presidency.

Reagan’s tax cuts were designed to put maximum emphasis on encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship and creating incentives for the development of venture capital and greater investment in human capital through training and education. The cuts particularly benefited “idea” industries such as software or financial services; fittingly, Reagan’s first term saw the advent of the information revolution, including IBM’s introduction of its first personal computer (PC) and the rise or launch of such tech companies as Intel, Microsoft, Dell, Sun Microsystems, Compaq and Cisco Systems.

Economists have argued to what degree Reagan’s economic policy drove the boom of the 1990s, but his tax program undoubtedly set in motion powerful forces of change that would result in both short- and long-term economic gains. On the other hand, critics of so-called “Reaganomics” point out that his tax cuts and the effects of steady economic growth disproportionately benefitted the wealthy, and increased the gap between the nation’s rich and poor.

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