February 4 Birthday
On February 4, 1789, the Electoral College unanimously elected George Washington as the first President of the United States. All 69 electors voted for Washington, making him the only president to receive 100% of the electoral vote. He had not campaigned. He had not wanted the job. He accepted it reluctantly, writing that his feelings were "not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution." The electoral votes were counted in the Senate chamber on April 6, and Washington was notified on April 14. He borrowed $500 from a neighbor to pay for his travel to New York, the temporary capital. He set out on April 16, keeping a diary that recorded the crowds that gathered at every town along the route. On February 4, 1974, Patricia Hearst, the nineteen-year-old granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped from her Berkeley apartment by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a tiny leftist group whose name meant "bringing together of different forms of life." The SLA demanded that Hearst's family distribute $70 worth of food to every poor person in California — an estimated $400 million. The family complied partially. Two months after the kidnapping, Hearst announced that she had joined the SLA voluntarily and taken the name "Tania." She participated in a bank robbery. She was captured in September 1975, tried, and convicted. Her sentence was commuted by Jimmy Carter and she was pardoned by Bill Clinton. The question of whether she was a victim or a willing participant has never been fully resolved. Thornton Wilder's Our Town premiered on February 4, 1938, at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey. The play has almost no scenery — the Stage Manager narrates and the actors mime. It depicts life in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, between 1901 and 1913. It is the most performed American play. Wilder wrote it in Zurich, in hotel rooms, while his lover was dying. The play's final scene, in which the dead Emily revisits her twelfth birthday and realizes how little the living appreciate being alive, is one of the great moments in American theater. "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? — every, every minute?" Charles Lindbergh, born this day in 1902, made the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight in 1927, flying 33.5 hours from Long Island to Paris. He was twenty-five. The flight made him the most famous person on earth. His infant son was kidnapped and murdered in 1932, in the "crime of the century." Lindbergh later became an isolationist and a Nazi sympathizer, receiving a medal from Hermann Göring. He had three secret families in Germany, fathering seven children with two German women, while married to Anne Morrow Lindbergh. People born on February 4 fall under the zodiac sign of Aquarius. The birthstone is Amethyst and the birth flower is Violet. Historical events on February 4 include 1789: George Washington unanimously elected first US President by Electoral College, 1938: Thornton Wilder's Our Town premieres on Broadway, 1974: Patty Hearst kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Famous people born on February 4 include Charles Lindbergh (1902), Dan Quayle (1947), Alice Cooper (1948).