1930
Gandhi's Salt March
Mohandas Gandhi, sixty years old and thin as a reed, walked 240 miles from Sabarmati to the Gujarat coast and scooped up a handful of salt in defiance of the British salt tax. Eighty thousand Indians were arrested in the civil disobedience that followed. The act was absurd, theatrical, and devastating. The Raj never fully recovered its moral authority.
Smoot-Hawley Tariff signed
Herbert Hoover signed a protectionist tariff bill that raised duties on thousands of imported goods. Other countries retaliated. World trade collapsed by two-thirds over the next three years, deepening the Great Depression. Economists had warned him; Hoover signed anyway. The law became a textbook lesson in how to make a slump worse.
Ras Tafari crowned Haile Selassie
In a twelve-hour Addis Ababa ceremony laced with Biblical pageantry, Ras Tafari Makonnen was crowned emperor of Ethiopia and took the name Haile Selassie, Power of the Trinity. Half a world away in Jamaica, poor dockworkers read the news as prophecy and founded a new religion centered on the Lion of Judah.
Gandhi begins the Salt March
With eighty followers and a wooden staff, a sixty-year-old barrister set off from his ashram toward the sea, walking two hundred and forty miles in twenty-four days. At Dandi he scooped up a lump of salt, breaking the British monopoly. Tens of thousands imitated him. The empire had met something it did not know how to arrest.
Pluto discovered from Arizona
A twenty-four-year-old farm boy named Clyde Tombaugh, staring through a blink comparator at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, noticed a faint dot that had moved between photographs taken on consecutive nights. The ninth planet had been found, or so everyone said. Seventy-six years later astronomers would quietly demote it to dwarf-planet status. Tombaugh's widow was annoyed.
Grant Wood paints American Gothic
An Iowa artist painted his dentist and his sister posing in front of a small white farmhouse, a pitchfork in the man's hand, and submitted the result to the Art Institute of Chicago. The dour couple, unmoored from irony, became an immediate American icon. The image would be parodied for the rest of the century.
Daylight saving time becomes federal
After years of patchwork local observance, daylight saving time became a consistent practice in the United States. Originally justified as energy savings during World War I, it had stuck around. Farmers hated it; city workers loved the longer evenings. It would be regulated, unregulated, and endlessly debated for the rest of the century.
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Frequently asked
What happened in the year 1930?
Saeculum lists 7 curated events from 1930. The most significant is Gandhi's Salt March: Mohandas Gandhi, sixty years old and thin as a reed, walked 240 miles from Sabarmati to the Gujarat coast and scooped up a handful of salt in defiance…
What era was 1930 part of?
1930 falls within the Modern Era (1901-2000). World wars, cold war, and the splitting of the atom.
Which regions saw notable events in 1930?
The curated events from 1930 span South Asia, North America and Africa.