Spring
by Linda Pastan

Just as we lose hope
she ambles in,
a late guest
dragging her hem
of wildflowers,
her torn
veil of mist,
of light rain,
blowing
her dandelion
breath
in our ears;
and we forgive her,
turning from
chilly winter
ways,
we throw off
our faithful
sweaters
and open
our arms.

“Spring” from Heroes in Disguise: Poems by Linda Pastan. Copyright © 1991 by Linda Pastan. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. (buy now)

It was on this day in 1919 that the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, giving women the right to vote, was passed by the United States Congress. Women across America voted in their first national election in November of 1920.

And it’s the anniversary of two crucial battles in World War II. In 1940, the British forces completed their evacuation from Dunkirk, and on this day in 1942, the Battle of Midway took place.

Winston Churchill, who’d become prime minister that spring, had sent British forces to Belgium to try to stop the advance of the Nazi invasion, but the British soldiers were unprepared for the superior German army. They were completely overwhelmed. They were bottled up in the little coastal town of Dunkirk. They had abandoned equipment on the way, leaving the road to Dunkirk littered with empty vehicles and piles of gear.

The Nazi tanks had been in close pursuit, but when the British troops reached the coast, Hitler gave a personal order to stop the invasion. The Nazi commander was infuriated. He knew that he could probably wipe out the British in a single battle, and that the war for western Europe could be finished in a few days. One of Hitler’s associates at the time wrote in his diary: "The Führer is terribly nervous. Frightened by his own success, he’s afraid to take any chance and would rather pull the reins on us."

The British estimated that they had about two days to evacuate, but when the British ships showed up to carry the troops across the channel, they found the harbor too shallow for most of the ships to reach the shore. Almost 500,000 men were stranded on the beach, and Nazi bombers began to attack from the air. The British government sent out a request for all persons with seaworthy vessels to help in the evacuation, and a great flotilla of fishing boats, lifeboats, paddle steamers, and yachts came across the English Channel and saved the British army.

When the soldiers arrived in Britain, they were given a hero’s welcome, with parades and cheering crowds. One solider said, "We might have been the heroes of some great victory instead of a beaten army returning home, having lost most of its equipment."

The Battle of Midway took place in the Central Pacific Ocean — Midway Island, the last American outpost in the Pacific. The Japanese navy hoped to take control of it and use it to stage an invasion of Hawaii, but a squadron of American bombers, which had wandered off course, accidentally found the Japanese fleet while most of planes were refueling. Fuel lines on the Japanese carriers caught fire, munitions exploded, and hundreds of Japanese sailors died in an instant. The battle went on for three more days, but the Japanese never fully recovered from that first attack, and never won another decisive naval battle for the rest of the war. 

The first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded on this day in 1917. Laura Richards and Maude Elliott won the prize for biography, with their book about the 19th-century writer and suffragist Julia Ward Howe. Jean Jules Jusserand, the French ambassador to the United States from 1902 to 1925, won the prize for history: With Americans of Past and Present Days. Herbert B. Swope of the New York World won the prize for journalism, and when he picked up his award, said: “I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula of failure — which is try to please everybody.”

On this day in 1962, William Faulkner’s The Reivers was published. It was the last novel he published before his death. The provisional title was “The Stealers,” but Faulkner changed it to “The Reavers,” using an old word for thieves. Then he wrote his publisher to say that he wanted to spell Reavers the old, Scottish way, E-I, instead of E-A.

On this day in 1940, Carson McCullers’ novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter first appeared (books by this author). She was 23 and the only thing she had published before was a short story. The novel, about a group of outcasts all drawn to the same deaf man, was a magnificent success. She wrote later: “For a whole year I worked on The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter without understanding it at all. Each character was talking to a central character, but why, I didn’t know. I’d almost decided that the book was no novel, that I should chop it up into short stories. But I could feel the mutilation in my body when I had that idea, and I was in despair. Suddenly it occurred me that Harry Minowitz, the character all the other characters were talking to, was a different man, a deaf mute, and immediately the name was changed to John Singer. The whole focus of the novel was fixed and I was for the first time committed with my whole soul to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.”

It was on this day in 1989 that Chinese troops stormed Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to crack down on students conducting pro-democracy demonstrations. The demonstrations had begun months earlier, after the government accused them of planning a coup d’état. They drew thousands of supporters from three dozen universities and staged hunger strikes and sit-ins. The Chinese government declared martial law, and troops approached the square with tanks in the late evening of June 3.

Ordinary workers had gathered along the nearby roads. They had been demonstrating in support of the students for weeks, and they crowded into the streets to block the advance of the tanks toward the square. Though the event would come to be called the Tiananmen Square massacre, almost all the people killed were the ordinary people in the streets outside the square. Violence broke out around midnight on this day in 1989, with some people throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at the troops, and the troops responding with gunfire.

Students inside the square could hear gunfire in the distance, and they assumed that they were about to be massacred. Many of them began to write out their wills. Troops entered Tiananmen Square around 1:00 a.m. A loudspeaker announced that a serious counterrevolutionary rebellion had broken out and everyone was ordered to leave the square immediately. The darkness was filled with the sound of breaking glass and gunfire, and the light of red flares rising and falling in the air.

Soldiers had surrounded the perimeter of the square, and the students expected that they would kill everyone at the center. Around 4:00 a.m., all the lights went out, and it got quiet. The students debated whether or not they should surrender. They heard the engines of the tanks start up, and finally they made the decision to evacuate. At that time, there were only a few journalists left in the square, and erroneous stories were later reported that the students had all been killed. In fact, almost all the students survived.

One of the few journalists who witnessed the evacuation said: “Many [of the students] had tears rolling down their cheeks. All looked shaken; many were trembling or unsteady on their feet. But all looked proud and unbeaten. One group shouted, ‘Down with the Communist Party!’ [It was] the first time I had ever heard this openly said in China.” The students left a message written on the wall behind them that said, “On June 4, 1989, the Chinese people shed their blood and died for democracy.”

The violence continued in and around the square for the rest of the day. The famous photograph of a student staring down a tank was taken by an American Associated Press photographer named Jeff Widener. He went to the top of a hotel near the square and began to take pictures of the tanks clearing the last remnants of people from the streets. Then he saw one man walk up to a tank and stand in its path, refusing to move. He took several photographs and then the man was grabbed by bystanders and pulled out of the tank’s path. Widener asked another journalist to hide the film in his underwear to smuggle it out of the country.

The identity of the protester in the photograph is not known with any certainty. We don’t know if he’s alive or dead, in prison or free, but he’s been called one of the most influential revolutionaries of the 20th century

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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