The February Revolution

… began in Russia on this date in 1917.

The February Revolution was the first stage of the Russian Revolution. Mostly bloodless, it led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II. Ultimately, the regime begun in the February Revolution was replaced during the October (Bolshevik) Revolution.

[Russia was still using the Julian Calendar in 1917. Hence, March 8 elsewhere was February 23 in Russia; November 7 was October 25 .]

John McPhee

… the Pulitizer Prize winner is 75 today. The Writer’s Almanac has this:

It’s the birthday of writer John McPhee, born in Princeton, New Jersey (1931) and considered one of the greatest living literary journalists. He is known for the huge range of his subjects. He has written about canoes, geology, tennis, nuclear energy, and the Swiss army. He once researched his own family tree and traced it back to a Scotsman who moved to Ohio to become a coal miner. He said, “[That coal miner] has about a hundred and thirty descendants who have sprayed out into the American milieu, and they have included railroad engineers, railroad conductors, brakemen, firemen, steelworkers, teachers, football coaches, a chemist, a chemical engineer, a policeman, a grocer and salesmen.”

In his book Oranges (1967), about the orange-growing business, he wrote, “An orange grown in Florida usually has a thin and tightly fitting skin, and it is also heavy with juice. Californians say that if you want to eat a Florida orange you have to get into a bathtub first. California oranges are light in weight and have thick skins that break easily and come off in hunks. The flesh inside is marvelously sweet, and the segments almost separate themselves. In Florida, it is said that you can run over a California orange with a ten-ton truck and not even wet the pavement.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

… was born on this date in 1841. Three times wounded in the Civil War, Holmes survived to become a prominent legal scholar, Chief Judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, and Justice of the United States Supreme Court, 1902-1932. He is considered one of the greatest of the Supreme Court justices.

But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done…. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force…. The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Schenck v. United States, Baer v. United States, 249 U.S. 52 (1919).

But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, dissenting, Abrams et al. v. United States, 250 U.S. 630 (1919).