January 29 is Freethinkers Day
Freethinkers Day commemorates the birth of Thomas Paine, a prominent thinker whose work and publications promoting a philosophy of Enlightenment heavily influenced the course of the American and French revolutions. Paine authored “Common Sense”, a pamphlet published in 1776 that provided inspiration to colonists still undecided about America’s break from Britain. Paine asserted a new nation, independent from Britain, might eventually become “…an asylum for mankind!”
He served in the Continental Army and observed the hardships of American troops fighting the world’s most powerful army. He then published The Crisis series pamphlets which began by stating, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” He refused to accept the profits from his writings and wound up destitute after the Revolution.
Today is a day for challenging the status quo, and constructing logical and reasonable arguments against ingrained behavior.
Today in history: January 29 – Prohibition begins
The 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (Prohibition Amendment) was ratified. For nearly 14 years, until December 5, 1933, the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages were illegal in the United States.
The Amendment was in response to the Temperance Movement, was dedicated to the complete abstinence of alcohol from public life. The movement began in the early 1800s within the church, and was very religiously motivated. The central areas the group was founded out of were in the Saratoga area of New York, as well as in Massachusetts. Churches were also highly influential in gaining new members and support, garnering 6,000 local societies in several different states.
A group that was inspired by the movement was the Anti-Saloon league, who at the turn of the 20th century began heavily lobbying for prohibition in the United States. The group was founded in 1893 in the state of Ohio, gaining massive support from Evangelical Protestants, to becoming a national organization in 1895. The group was successful in helping implement prohibition, through heavy lobbying and having a vast influence. The group following repeal of prohibition fell out of power and in 1950 merged with other groups forming the National Temperance League.
The Amendment had the unexpected result of causing enormous growth of organized crime which provided bootleg liquor to thirsty Americans. The rise of mass disobedience to prohibition laws took the amendment’s advocates by surprise. People who could afford the high price of smuggled liquor flocked to speakeasies and gin joints. These establishments could be quite glamorous. Whereas pre-Prohibition saloons had seldom welcomed women, the new world of nightclubs invited both the bob-haired “flapper” and her “sheik” to drink cocktails, smoke, and dance to jazz.
Working-class consumption largely moved from saloons into the home. “Bathtub gin” and moonshine took the place of mass-produced liquor, and hosts might use additives to turn grape juice into wine for their guests. Americans who sought to remain in the liquor business found ways to re-distill the alcohol in perfume, paint, and carpentry supplies. They continued redistilling even after learning that many of these products contained poisons meant to deter such transformations.
Ultimately, only a small percentage of liquor distributors found themselves arrested. But even this limited number of accused—there were approximately 65,000 federal criminal actions in the first two years of Prohibition—was enough to cripple the justice system. Prisons grew crowded, and judges tried to incentivize quick “guilty” pleas by promising very small fines. And if a liquor seller did wind up on trial, juries filled with liquor drinkers were often reluctant to find the defendants guilty; only about 60 percent of cases ended with a conviction.
Public sentiment turned against Prohibition by the late 1920s, and the start of the Great Depression only speeded its demise, as some argued that the ban on alcohol denied jobs to the unemployed and much-needed revenue to the government. The efforts of the nonpartisan group Americans Against Prohibition Association (AAPA) added to public disillusionment. In 1932, the platform of Democratic presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt included a plank for repealing the 18th Amendment, and his victory that November marked a certain end to Prohibition.
In February 1933, Congress adopted a resolution proposing the 21st Amendment to the Constitution, which repealed both the 18th Amendment. The resolution required state conventions, rather than the state legislatures, to approve the amendment, effectively reducing the process to a one-state, one-vote referendum rather than a popular vote contest. That December, Utah became the 36th state to ratify the amendment, achieving the necessary majority for repeal. A few states continued statewide prohibition after 1933, but by 1966 all of them had abandoned it. Since then, liquor control in the United States has largely been determined at the local level.
Weird Fact: The Eye of the Beholder, Literally.
Percival Lowell was a famed astronomer in the late 19th and early 20th century. He established the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, one of the most famous observatories in the world.
In the early 1900s, Lowell fueled speculation of life on Mars with his discovery of what he believed were a system of canals on the surface. Another observatory with a more powerful telescope took a look in 1909 and determined the canals were a result of natural geological formations, and not a people desperate to funnel water from it’s ice caps as the planet dried out, as Lowell had surmised. In the 1960s, the Mariner space probes definitively disproved the theory of canals as they orbited and photographed the Martian surface.
Not to be deterred, Lowell set his sights on Venus. The surface of Venus is obscured by a thick layer of opaque clouds, and until then no one had been able to see through them to the surface. Lowell not only claimed he could, but once again proclaimed the existence of possible canals, as he claimed to see spidery structures, radiating from a central point outward like spokes on a wheel.
As it turned out, Lowell was not seeing spokes or a canal system.. A faulty adjustment of his eyepiece caused him to actually see the shadow of his own eye’s blood vessels cast against his retina, which he believed were on the surface of the planet.
He also theorized the existence of Pluto, which was proven to exist after his death.