November 5 · This Day in America
On November 5, 1872, Susan B. Anthony walks into a Rochester, New York polling place with fourteen other women and votes in the presidential election. It is against the law. She knows it. That is the point. She has argued that the Fourteenth Amendment, which says no state may abridge the privileges of citizens, already makes her a voter — and she intends to make the country prove otherwise in open court. Two weeks later a federal marshal arrives to arrest her. "Is that the way you arrest men?" she asks. At trial the judge orders the jury to convict without leaving the box and fines her one hundred dollars. She never pays a cent. She does not live to vote legally. But the amendment that finally enfranchised American women, ratified forty-eight years later, carries her name.
Source: visit.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1940
On November 5, 1940, with war consuming Europe, Franklin Roosevelt breaks the unwritten two-term limit George Washington set and is elected to a third term as president. No one had ever done it; only one person ever would again. The decision so unsettled the country that within years it amended the Constitution to make sure it could never happen a third time — a republic deciding, in the end, that no one is indispensable.
Source: www.fdrlibrary.org
“Is that the way you arrest men?”Susan B. Anthony, 1872