When I went to Peace buttons Monday night, their site was down, or something, so no P&J 4/1 morning. However, keep scrolling; it’ll be after 4/2! -A
April 2, 1917 Jeannette Rankin, a Republican from Montana, took her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. The first woman ever elected to Congress, she became the only member to vote against U.S. entry into both world wars. Rankin lost her seat in the next election but was re-elected twenty years later when she opposed entry into World War II. She again served just one term. Though American women weren’t guaranteed the right to vote for three more years with passage of the 19th amendment, women in Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Washington had full voting rights even before statehood. Rankin was instrumental in passing laws that made married women citizens in their own right. Jeannette Rankin biography |
| April 2, 1966 One hundred thousand Vietnamese demonstrated in DaNang against both the U.S. and their South Vietnamese governments. Civil unrest spread also to Hue and the capital, Saigon. |
| April 2, 1970 Massachusetts, in the midst of the Vietnam war, enacted a law which exempted its citizens from having to fight in an undeclared war. The U.S. Congress had never formally declared war on North Vietnam as required by Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. |
April 1, 1841  Brook Farm, perhaps history’s most well-known utopian community, was founded by George and Sophia Ripley near West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Its primary appeal was to young Bostonians who were uncomfortable with the materialism of American life, and the community was a refuge for dozens of transcendentalists, including authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Following four days of demonstrations against the Military Services Act that devolved into rioting in Quebec City, Canadian Prime Minister Robert Borden sent in troops from Ontario to stop the violence. Orders from the soldiers were read only in English to the mostly Francophone demonstrators, and when the they didn’t disperse, the troops fired, killing four and wounding 70. [see March 28, 1918]  A memorial in Quebec to those who died protesting conscription into World War I More about Brook Farm |
| April 1, 1932 500 schoolchildren, in the depth of the Depression, paraded through Chicago’s downtown section to the Board of Education offices, demanding that the school system provide them with food. |
| April 1, 1955 The African National Congress had called on parents to withdraw their children by this day from South African schools in resistance to the Bantu Education Act. That 1953 law transferred education of the Bantu (blacks) from religious missions to state-controlled schools. Mission education, argued then-Minister of Bantu Education Dr. H.F. Verwoerd, not only tended to create “false expectations” amongst the natives, but was also in direct conflict with South Africa’s racially separatist apartheid policies. Whites, who were in complete control of government and society, comprised only 14% of South Africa’s population. Verwoerd presented to Parliament: “When I have control of native education, I will reform it so that natives will be taught from childhood to realize that equality with Europeans is not for them. There is no place for him (the black child) in European society above the level of certain forms of labour…What is the use of teaching a Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice?” |
| April 1, 1983 Tens of thousands in the United Kingdom formed a “peace chain” 22.5 kilometers (14 miles) long to express their opposition to nuclear weapons. The chain started at the American airbase at Greenham Common, passed the Aldermaston nuclear research center, and ended at the ordnance factory in Burghfield.  At the same time 15,000 people took part in the first of a series of anti-nuclear marches in West Germany. They were protesting the siting of American cruise missiles on West German territory. Contemporaneous coverage of the Peace Chain |
| April 1, 1985 The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered an end to the dumping of sludge off the New Jersey coast into the Atlantic Ocean. 21st century sludge |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryapril.htm#april2
Scottie's Playtime 
Reading this history and then looking at how the worm has turned can be a debilitating and depressing experience. The right wing’s narrow minds and pinched vision, polluted with greed as it is, will soon deliver a primer to people about why the fuck we’d developed the laws, government, and agencies which we did. Cheers, M
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Cheers, indeed! And I agree; I hope the lesson will happen soon, before it becomes an unbearable lesson.
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