A very special day

Of course everyone knows what today is. On this day every year we celebrate the anniversary of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Here is a link to an excellent article in Wikipedia about the event.

For those too lazy to point and click here in an excerpt:

The St. Valentine's Day Massacre is the name given to the shooting of seven people as part of a Prohibition Era conflict between two powerful criminal gangs in Chicago, Illinois in the winter of 1929: the South Side Italian gang led by Al
"Scarface" Capone and the North Side Irish/German gang led by George 'Bugs' Moran.

On the morning of Thursday, February 14, St. Valentine's Day, seven members of George 'Bugs' Moran's gang were lined up against the rear inside wall of the garage of the S-M-C Cartage Company in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago's North Side. They were then shot and killed by five members of Al
Capone's gang (two of whom were dressed as police officers). When one of the dying men, Frank "Tight Lips" Gusenberg, was asked who shot him, he replied, "Nobody shot me." Capone himself had arranged to be on vacation in Florida at the time.

The police were hampered in their investigation by the fact that investigating detectives were unable to believe that the two murderers dressed as police officers were not actually police officers, this was Chicago after all.

The brutality of the murders shocked the sensibilities not only of Chicago but of the entire nation. This led to the decision by congress two years later to "purge out the stain upon the day", as freshman Senator Charles Byrd (D-WVA) phrased it on the Senate Floor (the Senator then made a four hour long rambling speech which eventually lapsed into a conversation with his dog "Billy", the Senator vocalizing both sides of the conversation), by turning the day into a commemoration of romantic love.

The floral and greeting card industries lobbied hard for passage and so on Feb. 14, 1931 President Rutherford B Hayes signed the bill into law in a Rose Garden ceremony.