Ernest Gruening Quotes

The Chief Secretary, Lord Castleregh, had put forward a resolution to bring about the unification of Great Britain and Ireland under the single British Parliament at Westminster. He and his allies had bribed a number of the Irish MPs to support the union. With Union some Irish MPs would then be able to win seats representing Ireland in the British Parliament. Although Grattan and most of the Orangemen opposed the Union, 4 months later, the bill passed comfortably. Ironically, Grattan was one of the Irish MPs whose popularity won a seat in the unified British Parliament.

In 1937 the U. S. Treasury Department commissioned a pair of large murals to decorate the lobby or the Ariel Rios Federal Building in Washington DC. On the mural was depicted a U. S. Mail Service from Alaska to Puerto Rico. It showed four Puerto Rican women reading a letter in the Inuit dialect presumably delivered from Alaska. The authorities loved the mural until they discovered the translation of the Inuit letter. This was a direct reference to the Puerto Rican Nationalist Independence Movement. That year 18 Puerto Rican Nationalists were killed and over 100 wounded when police fired into a crowd of demonstrators on March 21. Kent, a famous artist, planted a newspaper story with the translation and soon media all over the company were drawing attention to the Puerto Rican movement, just as Kent had intended.

In Philadelphia, the state delegates had just started to vote for independence. The majority of each state delegation determined the vote for the state. Delaware had three delagates, but only two were in Philadelphia. Rodney, the third delegate from Delaware, had been attending a meeting in Dover when he received word that the other two Delaware delagates Thomas McKean and George Read were split—McKean for and Read against independence. Rodney immediately left for Philadelphia late on July 1. He rode all night in a thunderstorm to traverse the 80 miles to Philadelphia. He arrived in his spurs and riding boots and cast his famous vote and thus Delaware voted for Independence. After the vote, the next 2 days were spent drafting the Declaration of Independence and Rodney signed it on July 4. After Rodney returned to Delaware, he was ousted in the next election by conservative loyalists who felt that Rodney had betrayed them and England.

The Ottoman Turks, at war with Russia, exterminated a large proportion of the Armenian population of the then Turkish Empire. Some of the ethnic Armenians were working with Armenians in greater Russia and thus were a risk to the Turks. However, they starved, shot, beat, hung, and bayoneted hundreds of thousands of ethnic Armenians, wiping out entire villages and towns. Despite the fact that women and little children were all killed, Modern Turkey even into the 21st century refused to admit that this was a genocide even though there was ample documentation to prove it was not spontaneous but government ordered by the “Young Turks” then controlling Turkey. See {620603} and {612638} for examples. The modern Turks maintain the view expressed during the genocide that Armenians were a threat to Turkish Independence.