Half-Century Elapsed Since JFK's Assassination

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

For those of us old enough to remember the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, it’s hard to believe that 50 years have passed since then.

But we can appreciate how far back that was if we go back to 1963 and see what the world looked like a half-century earlier.

In 1913, monarchs sat on the thrones of most European countries. Wilhelm II was the Emperor of Germany, Victor Emmanuel III was king of Italy, and Nicholas II was tsar of “all the Russias.” A Habsburg, Franz Joseph I, governed the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Sultan Mehmed V ruled the Ottoman Empire.

Countries like Czechoslovakia, Finland, Ireland, Poland, and the three Baltic states did not yet exist as sovereign entities. And of course almost all of Africa, and much of Asia, including India, were colonies of European powers.

Trouble was brewing in the Balkans, and two wars, in 1912 and 1913, among Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia and the Ottoman Empire, would help ignite the Great War that would begin a year later.

By the end of the First World War, the German Hohenzollerns, Austrian Habsburgs, Russian Romanovs, and the Ottoman Turkish dynasty would be no more. Austria-Hungary itself ceased to exist, divided into a number of successor states, and a Turkish republic replaced the Ottoman rulers, while Turkey’s Middle Eastern provinces were divided between Britain and France.

Women in most countries were still unable to vote in 1913. In Britain, suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst of the Women’s Social and Political Union was sentenced to three years in jail  in response to the organization’s campaign to destroy public and private property. In the United States, a Woman Suffrage Parade marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington that March.

It was the year Charlie Chaplin signed his first movie contract and famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman died.

It was only a half-century after the decisive 1863 Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War, and a gathering of 53,407 veterans of both the Confederate and Union armies commemorated the event.

The start of the Second World War was still 26 years away. Very few people had yet heard of Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin, Benito Mussolini, or Joseph Stalin. And John Kennedy himself had not yet been born.