Declaring in their People’s Constitution that “all political power and sovereignty are originally vested in, and of right belong to, the people,” the followers of Thomas Dorr elected their man governor of Rhode Island on April 18, in defiance of the state government in Providence. The move very nearly led to local civil war.

Dorr and his fellow reformers had been angered by their state’s outdated system of apportionment, which granted a town like Newport six representatives to Providence’s four, although the latter was now more than twice Newport’s size.

Dorr had begun his activist political life as a state representative in the Whig party. When the Whigs resisted his reforms, he jumped to the Democrats, and when they proved equally gutless in his eyes, he helped form the Rhode Island Suffrage Association in 1840.

Among the members’ demands was that the state government hold a new constitutional convention. The legislature obliged; the delegates, however, had to be qualified property holders in the state. Dorr and his Suffrage Association revolted and drafted their own constitution to put before the people, a “people’s constitution,” as opposed to the one eventually offered by the “landholders.” Zealous as they were about voting as a natural right, however, Dorr could not persuade the People’s delegates to extend suffrage to black men, most of whom lived in the underrepresented capital. Blacks with property, who had voted before in Rhode Island around the turn of the century, were infuriated by their exclusion from the People’s Constitution and were supported by visiting abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass.

Any white male who was over twenty-one, landholder or not, could vote for delegates to the People’s Convention. The Dorrites’ constitution separated the state government’s functions more along the lines of the federal model, while the official state constitution lumped these together into a general assembly. Also, the Dorrites’ apportionment scheme awarded more seats to the cities, which allowed their Yankee opponents to paint them as the party of Irish immigrants.

The charter government refused to recognize the People’s Constitution, although nearly fourteen thousand adult white males had voted for it. Realizing that he could spend the rest of his life in jail for treason, Dorr nevertheless called an election and declared his candidacy for governor. The People’s party slate received more than six thousand votes in April; the Landholders held their own election the next month and made Samuel Ward King their governor. With his rival chief executive seeking his arrest, Dorr fled to Washington, hoping to enlist President John Tyler in his cause. Tyler listened to his arguments but only cautioned Dorr against using violence to settle the constitutional feud.

Dorr ignored the President’s advice. On May 17 he approached the Providence arsenal backed by 234 supporters and two derelict cannon. Some 200 men waited inside the arsenal, braced for a fight, but the ancient cannon failed to fire. The stalemate ended in the early hours of the morning when a fog moved in, followed by the Providence militia. The Dorrites retreated; Dorr himself hid in Connecticut before returning to lead a second move on Providence. His force was met this time not only by militia but, ironically, by black volunteers. (For this act of bravery, all black males would be given the vote in November by the renamed Law and Order party.) Dorr’s group was again dispersed, and he once again escaped, to New Hampshire. He gave himself up the following year and was sentenced to life imprisonment but served only one year of hard labor. Nevertheless, that year broke him, and after seeing his treason conviction revoked, he died in 1854. He was forty-nine.

Four months after Pearl Harbor it turned out that Japan could be surprised too. On April 18 the world-renowned aviator Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle commanded a daring reprisal mission of sixteen B-25 bombers. The idea for the “Doolittle Raid” had grown out of a December letter by a Fort Worth newspaper publisher, recommending that five hundred American bombers strike Tokyo. A thirty-page Navy analysis of the idea had led to an audacious plan that relied on launching heavily modified Army bombers from the carrier Hornet while it was deep in Japanese-controlled waters but still eight hundred miles from Japan itself. There was no thought of returning to the carrier; the planes would drop their bombs, then fly on another one thousand miles to land in China.

Doolittle’s flight took off in the teeth of a forty-two-knot gale and bombed military and industrial targets in Tokyo, Yokohama, and other cities. One bomber went down inside the Soviet border, where its surviving crew was detained; three of eight Americans captured in Japanese territory were executed. The raid had caused little real damage, but it offered a gleam of triumph in a theater where the Allies had thus far known little but disaster. Its leader would be made a brigadier general the very next day.

In April the Art Institute of Chicago acquired Edward Hopper’s new canvas Nighthawks, showing an after-hours scene in a starkly lighted diner. People have wondered in the fifty years since about the picture’s sharp-faced man, the woman in the red dress, the soda jerk stooping presumably to wash up some dishes, and the unacknowledged patron at the counter’s edge. “The loneliness thing is overdone,” Hopper complained of the critics’ explanations of his work, but even without its muchspoofed urban characters, left with just its gleaming tureens and salt shakers, Nighthawks would remain an irreducibly lonely scene.

Hopper had grown up in Nyack, New York, close to the Hudson River, where as a boy he sailed and skated and hung around the shipyards. After high school he enrolled at the New York School of Art and then between 1906 and 1910 painted on and off in Europe. Hopper had yet to sell a canvas when he decided to enter the New York Armory Show of 1913. Among the less cataclysmic happenings at that exhibition was Edward Hopper’s first sale, of a work entitled The Sailboat. Twenty years later, when the Museum of Modern Art honored him with a one-man retrospective, the master American painter and etcher still had sold only two canvases.

After the Modern show, things considerably improved. He was much in demand by 1942 and in December 1944 was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He would paint his resonant American pictures for another twenty-three years. “I never tried to do the American Scene as Benton and Curry and the midwestern painters did,” he said as an old man. “I think the American Scene painters caricatured America. I always wanted to do myself.”