March 4 · This Day in America
On this day the experiment stops being a piece of paper and starts being a country. The Articles of Confederation are over; the Constitution takes effect, and the First Congress is supposed to convene at Federal Hall in New York. The handoff is almost comically humble — of eighty-one members, only a couple dozen show up. There is no quorum for a month. No fireworks, no army, no proclamation. Just a date the old Congress had picked, arriving on schedule, and a handful of men beginning the slow work of turning written promises into a working machine. Washington has not even been inaugurated yet. But the document the founders argued into existence is now the law of the land, and every American institution since traces its authority to this quiet, half-empty morning. The republic did not begin with a bang. It began with a roll call.
Source: www.senate.gov
Also on this day · 1933
Franklin Roosevelt is inaugurated as the nation reels — banks closing, a quarter of workers jobless, fear itself the most contagious thing in America. He does not soothe so much as summon. Within a hundred days the country is transformed. But on March 4, before any of it, there is just a man at a podium telling a frightened nation it has reason to hope, and meaning it.
Source: www.archives.gov
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, 1933