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Highlights for March 7
1876 Alexander Graham Bell patents telephone
On March 7, 1876, twenty-nine-year-old Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for the telephone, which he invented as a result of his work with the deaf. Three days after receiving the patent, issued for "improvements to the telegraph," Bell made the first successful telephone call, to another floor in his house. The following fall, he completed the first call over outdoor wires, from Boston to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Bell's patent was hotly contested by several lawsuits, but the courts ultimately upheld Bell's claims. He continued to improve the telephone and also invented a number of other devices, including the graphophone, an early voice recording device, in 1887; the photophone, which transmitted sound using light beams, in 1880; and various hydrofoils and other aviation devices. He founded the Bell Telephone Company in 1877.
The Communist Party of America organized the "March on Hunger"; the procession traveled from downtown Detroit to the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant in order to protest the company’s labor record. When police and firemen were unable to disperse the thousands gathered at River Rouge, Ford strongman Harry Bennet, notorious for his mob tactics of labor management, ordered his "servicemen" to quell the crowd with fire hoses. Defying the freezing temperatures and icy water, the crowd refused to give up its protest. Bennet, who ruled Ford’s enterprise with nothing short of terrorist tactics, confronted the crowd, ordering them to disperse once and for all. The determined crowd, unaware that they were faced with their nemesis, began to shout, "We want Bennet. And he’s in that building." Bennett corrected their mistake and for his trouble he was showered with bricks and slag pieces. He was struck in the head during the barrage. Before he fell to the ground, the combat-ready Bennett pulled Joseph York, a Young Communist League organizer, to the ground on top of him. Seeing Bennett bleeding profusely from his head the police opened fire on the unarmed protesters. York and three other protesters were killed. Ford’s trouble with labor unions came to a head five years later when Roosevelt’s New Deal guaranteed the workers the right to join a union. Again Bennett would be at the center of a violent confrontation at the River Rouge complex.
1936 Hitler reoccupies the Rhineland
Nazi leader Adolf Hitler violates the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact by sending German military forces into the Rhineland, a demilitarized zone along the Rhine River in western Germany.
The Treaty of Versailles, signed in July 1919--eight months after the guns fell silent in World War I--called for stiff war reparation payments and other punishing peace terms for defeated Germany. Having been forced to sign the treaty, the German delegation to the peace conference indicated its attitude by breaking the ceremonial pen. As dictated by the Treaty of Versailles, Germany's military forces were reduced to insignificance and the Rhineland was to be demilitarized.
In 1925, at the conclusion of a European peace conference held in Switzerland, the Locarno Pact was signed, reaffirming the national boundaries decided by the Treaty of Versailles and approving the German entry into the League of Nations. The so-called "spirit of Locarno" symbolized hopes for an era of European peace and goodwill, and by 1930 German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann had negotiated the removal of the last Allied troops in the demilitarized Rhineland.
However, just four years later, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party seized full power in Germany, promising vengeance against the Allied nations that had forced the Treaty of Versailles on the German people. In 1935, Hitler unilaterally canceled the military clauses of the treaty and in March 1936 denounced the Locarno Pact and began remilitarizing of the Rhineland. Two years later, Nazi Germany burst out of its territories, absorbing Austria and portions of Czechoslovakia. In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, leading to the outbreak of World War II in Europe.
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