The Gad About Town

Jackie Gleason (above) was born 100 years ago today.

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Four hundred years ago today, astronomer Galileo Galilei was ordered by Cardinal Bellarmine—under the orders of Pope Paul V—”to abandon completely … the opinion that the sun stands still at the center of the world and the earth moves, and henceforth not to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing.” Galileo was allowed to consider the idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun as a philosophical idea, a metaphysical “what-if,” but he was prohibited from teaching it or writing anything that argued for its physical truth.

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Mutual Film Corporation and Charlie Chaplin signed a contract that would pay him $10,000 a week on this date 100 years ago.
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“Comrades! We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all.”—Nikita Khrushchev, February 25, 1956

After ten days of meetings, the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union came to a conclusion on February 24, 1956, when party officials were informed that at midnight on February 25, an unannounced “closed” session would begin. Only those with special invitations could attend. Sixty years ago tonight, at midnight, General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev (pictured above) began speaking. For the next four hours, he read from a prepared text titled “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” in which he denounced his late predecessor, Joseph Stalin, and outlined his many crimes against the Soviet people and the Communist Party. The speech itself was not made public until 1989, but its existence was a widely discussed rumor within months of Krushchev’s reading of it. As rumored speeches go, it was effective: the Stalinist Era was over.
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