January 30 Birthday
January 30, 1948: Mahatma Gandhi was shot at point-blank range as he walked to a prayer meeting on the grounds of Birla House in New Delhi. The assassin, Nathuram Godse, was a Hindu nationalist who believed Gandhi had been too accommodating to Muslims and had betrayed the Hindu cause by allowing the partition of India. Godse bowed to Gandhi before shooting him three times in the chest. Gandhi's last words were "Hē Rāma." He was seventy-eight. India and Pakistan had been independent for less than six months. Gandhi had opposed partition to the end and had been fasting to stop the communal violence that followed it. His death briefly united the two new nations in grief, but the violence resumed. On the same date in 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor of Germany. Hitler's Nazi Party had won 37% of the vote in the July 1932 election, making it the largest party in the Reichstag but not a majority. Conservative politicians — Franz von Papen, Alfred Hugenberg, and others — convinced Hindenburg that they could control Hitler by giving him the chancellorship with a cabinet dominated by conservatives. They were wrong. Within a month, the Reichstag fire gave Hitler emergency powers. Within a year, Hindenburg was dead and Hitler had combined the offices of chancellor and president into "Führer." The conservative elites who installed Hitler believed they were using him. He used them, then discarded them. Charles I was beheaded on January 30, 1649, outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall. He had been king for twenty-four years and had fought a civil war against his own Parliament over the question of who held ultimate authority — the crown or the legislature. He lost. His trial was conducted by a special court created by Parliament, which had no legal precedent. Charles refused to enter a plea, arguing that the court had no jurisdiction over a king. He was convicted anyway. He wore two shirts to the scaffold so that the cold would not make him shiver and appear frightened. His last words were lost in the crowd, but witnesses reported he said he died "the martyr of the people." Franklin Roosevelt, born this day in 1882, was the only person to win four presidential elections. He was paralyzed from the waist down by polio at thirty-nine and never walked unaided again. The press corps cooperated in concealing his disability — he was never photographed in his wheelchair. He died at Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945, eighty-three days into his fourth term and twenty-six days before the German surrender. People born on January 30 fall under the zodiac sign of Aquarius. The birthstone is Garnet and the birth flower is Carnation. Historical events on January 30 include 1649: King Charles I of England beheaded outside Banqueting House, 1933: Adolf Hitler appointed Chancellor of Germany, 1948: Mahatma Gandhi assassinated in New Delhi. Famous people born on January 30 include Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882), Dick Cheney (1941), Phil Collins (1951).