March 12 in History

Mahatma Gandhi and 78 followers departed his Sabarmati Ashram on March 12, 1930, beginning a 240-mile march to the coastal village of Dandi to protest the British salt monopoly. The Salt Tax, which required all Indians to buy salt exclusively from the government at inflated prices, affected every person in the country regardless of wealth. Gandhi chose salt as his target precisely because it was a universal necessity. The march took 24 days, with Gandhi walking roughly ten miles per day while thousands of supporters joined along the route. On April 6, he scooped up a handful of natural salt from the seashore, symbolically breaking the law. Within weeks, millions of Indians were making or buying illegal salt, and over 60,000 were arrested. The British response, including a violent police assault on peaceful protesters at the Dharasana Salt Works, was captured by American journalist Webb Miller and published worldwide, permanently damaging Britain's moral authority to govern India.

Mahatma Gandhi set out on a 240-mile march to the Arabian Sea to protest Britain's salt monopoly, picking up thousands of followers along the way. When he scooped salt from the shore at Dandi twenty-four days later, the simple act of defiance galvanized millions and made nonviolent civil disobedience the defining strategy of the Indian independence movement.

Franklin Roosevelt sat before a microphone in the White House on March 12, 1933, eight days after his inauguration, and spoke directly to the American people for the first time in what became known as a 'fireside chat.' The banking system had collapsed: 4,000 banks had failed, depositors had lost over million, and panic withdrawals were accelerating the crisis. Roosevelt explained in plain language what the government had done during the bank holiday, why the banks that reopened could be trusted, and what citizens should do. 'It is safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than under the mattress,' he said. The effect was immediate and extraordinary. When the banks reopened on Monday morning, deposits exceeded withdrawals for the first time in weeks. Roosevelt had talked the nation out of a bank run. He would deliver thirty fireside chats over the next twelve years, using radio to build a personal relationship with millions of Americans that no previous president had achieved.

Pedro de Valdivia's force of roughly 200 Spanish soldiers and several thousand indigenous allies defeated a large Mapuche army at the Battle of Penco on March 12, 1550, in what is now the Biobio Region of Chile. The Mapuche, who had been resisting Spanish expansion for years, attacked with overwhelming numbers but were repelled by Spanish cavalry, steel weapons, and the tactical advantage of fighting from a fortified position. Valdivia founded the city of Concepcion nearby shortly after the battle. His victory did not end Mapuche resistance. The Araucanians, as the Spanish called them, fought continuously for over 300 years, making the Arauco War the longest sustained military conflict in the Americas. Valdivia himself was captured and killed by Mapuche forces under the toqui Lautaro in 1553, just three years after Penco. The Mapuche were never fully conquered and maintained effective independence south of the Biobio River until Chile's military subjugation campaigns of the 1880s.

Joseph Biedenharn, a candy store owner in Vicksburg, Mississippi, bottled Coca-Cola for the first time in 1894, filling Hutchinson glass bottles with the syrup-and-soda-water mixture and shipping cases downriver by steamboat to test whether the drink could sell outside a soda fountain. The experiment worked. Biedenharn sent a case to Coca-Cola's Atlanta headquarters, but Asa Candler, the company's president, showed little interest in the bottling idea, believing the soda fountain was the drink's natural home. The real bottling revolution came in 1899 when Candler sold exclusive bottling rights for most of the country to two Chattanooga lawyers for one dollar. They subfranchised to hundreds of independent bottlers, creating the network that distributed Coca-Cola to every corner of America. Biedenharn's original bottling operation in Vicksburg is now a museum. The decision to bottle rather than just dispense turned a regional fountain drink into the world's most recognized brand, eventually reaching over 200 countries.

A charter aircraft carrying 80 passengers, most of them Welsh rugby supporters returning from an international match in Paris, crashed during its approach to Llandow airfield near Cowbridge, Glamorgan, on March 12, 1950. The Avro Tudor V stalled at low altitude and slammed into a field, killing 80 of 83 people aboard. It was the deadliest aviation disaster in the world at that time. The victims came from the tight-knit mining and rugby communities of the South Wales valleys, and the loss devastated entire towns. The Board of Trade investigation found that the aircraft had been overloaded and that the crew had allowed airspeed to drop below safe limits during the approach. The Tudor V, a derivative of the wartime Lancaster bomber, had a troubled safety record and was withdrawn from passenger service shortly after the crash. A memorial at Sigingstone commemorates the victims, and the disaster remains one of the darkest days in Welsh sporting history.

Sun Yat-sen spent most of his radical career in exile, raising money from overseas Chinese communities to overthrow the Qing dynasty from abroad. He was in Denver raising funds when the 1911 revolution actually succeeded without him. He returned, was elected provisional president, then almost immediately handed power to Yuan Shikai to prevent civil war. The plan failed — Yuan tried to make himself emperor. Sun spent years afterward trying to unify China, allying with Soviet advisors when Western powers wouldn't help. He died in Beijing in 1925, with the country still fragmented. Both the Nationalists and the Communists claim him as their founding father. Born March 12, 1866.