On this day

1807 — The British Parliament abolishes the slave trade.1937 — Quaker Oats pays Babe Ruth $25,000 per year to ap-pear in advertisements.1947 — A coal mine explosion in Centralia kills 111 men. 1954 — RCA manufac-tures its first color TV set, featuring a 12½-inch screen. The price was $1,000.1965 — The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. leads 25,000 people to the state capitol in Mont-gomery, Ala.1967 —The Turtles’ “Happy Together” hits No. 1 on the pop music charts.

It would be quite a surprise today to see a depiction of the risen Jesus Christ on the front page of The State Jour-nal-Register or any other secular, mass-distributed media. But it was not un-common during much of the 20th century to mark Christian holy days such as Easter and Christmas this way.

To help us under-stand, William Siles, an assistant professor of history at the University of Illinois Springfield who teaches the history

of religion in America, explains that Easter is the most holy of days in the Christian church, worldwide.

“Easter affirms and re-affirms Christian faith and belief in salvation and an afterlife.

“So, in a region heavily Protestant and Catho-lic, and church-going, a graphic of a risen Christ in a newspaper was properly reflecting these beliefs held by numerous readers. It also placed the paper in alignment with these beliefs.”

Siles says cultural shifts toward “moral relativism,” or the belief that ethics and morals are personally defined, rather than the absolute belief that a god is the ultimate source of moral-ity, has changed what the public accepts. He adds that if that were not the case, we probably would continue to see these im-ages with others repre-senting different beliefs, when appropriate.

n Although the news-paper’s editors did not label it as such, they pub-lished what amounted to an opinion piece on the front page written by Re-publican Sen. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who drew on the “spirit of resurrection of Easter time” to call for a “correc-tion and cleansing of the soul of government.”

Smith gained national attention in 1949 when she became the first sen-ator to condemn fellow Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin for his anti-communist witch hunt.

In 1950, she delivered her “Declaration of Con-science,” a 15-minute speech from the Senate floor in which, without specifically naming McCarthy, she de-nounced his tactics and said he had reduced the body to a “forum of hate and character assassina-tion.”

“I don’t want to see the Republican party ride to victory on the four

horsemen of calumny: fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear,” she said.

In the piece published by the newspaper, she urged the public to “clean house politically at the polls” by exercising its right to vote.

n Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson said he did not believe President Harry Truman would run for re-election, predicting the Democratic party “will fare well in 1952.”

Stevenson went on to be the Democratic party’s nominee to run against Republican Dwight Eisenhower, but was no match for the war hero’s popularity. Eisenhower won the popular vote by 55 percent to Stevenson’s 45 percent.

— Rich SaalDownload this page at

www.sj-r.com.

Easter hope and cleaning house

FLASHBACK SPRINGFIELD — March 25, 1951

Monday, March 25, 2013 THE STATE JOURNAL-REGISTER PXX

Smith