Today -100: March 20, 1919: Of bourgeois disinfection, stiffness sickness, and enlightened rule from the outside

Russia Rumor of the Day -100: a Menshevik revolution in Petrograd.

Oh lord, here’s another one: typhoid fever is rampant in Petrograd, but the Bolsheviks forbid disinfection as “bourgeois.”

Starvation in Vienna has given rise to a “stiffness sickness.” Also, they’re eating their dogs.

A NYT editorial on the independence movements in Egypt and Korea says “Whether a people has the divine right to misgovern itself is a matter on which opinions will be held according to political theory; but in the present situation of a closely interrelated world a people which wants to rule itself may justifiably be asked to give some proof that it knows how to do it.” Of recently freed nations, the Czechs and the Poles seem to be able to run efficient governments, the Times says, but it’s less sure about the Ukrainians. And it’s pretty sure the Egyptian lower classes don’t want to be ruled by the Egyptian nationalists. Since self-rule  might lead to anarchy, the “world interest... may at present best be served by a continuance of enlightened rule from the outside, with gradual progress toward native self-government.”

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Today -100: March 19, 1919: Of plane trips and immoderate demands which cannot possibly be entertained

More pilots are hoping to be the first to cross the Atlantic and win a £10,000 prize offered by the Daily Mail. The excellently named Harry Hawker’s Sopwith is being shipped to Newfoundland for the flight. Hawker thinks the flight should take 19½ hours and his plane can stay in the air for 25 hours at 100 mph (and can theoretically float), so he should be fine.

There has been nationalist rioting in Egypt. Early in the year, some nationalist leaders asked to be allowed to go to London to make a case to the government for Egyptian autonomy. The Egyptian Prime Minister Hussein Rushdi Pasha and the education minister said they wanted to go too. The British told them no useful purpose would be served by nationalists coming to “advance immoderate demands which not possibly be entertained,” but the ministers could come. Instead, they resigned. Things escalated and the colonial authorities have exiled 4 nationalist leaders to Malta.

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Today -100: March 18, 1919: Of plane trips, covenants, pretzels, and dead trees

French Lt. Jean-Pierre Fontan will attempt the first trans-Atlantic flight, starting in Dakar, Senegal and heading for Brazil, 1,700 miles away, by way of the Cape Verde Islands and the St. Paul Rocks.

And two-way wireless telephonic communication between two airplanes has been made for I guess the first time.

The Peace Conference plans to ignore Japan’s call for a provision in the League of Nations Covenant against racial equality, even if this means Japan doesn’t join the League. In all the fuss over this, the provision on religious equality also gets dropped. Sorry, Jews.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Bit of a linguistic mistake, really. They just had a hankering for some pretzels.

The lower house of the West Virginia Legislature passes a resolution against the US joining the League of Nations.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Some of the logs are made into souvenirs to commemorate the momentous occasion.

False death reports in today’s paper: 

1) German Gen. Friedrich Sixt von Armin (1851-1936), supposedly beaten to death by peasants after he shot at them while they were gathering firewood on his property.

2) The last emperor of Korea (1874-1926), deposed by the Japanese, who supposedly committed suicide when the Japanese tried to marry off his son to a Japanese princess.

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Today -100: March 17, 1919: Of Zapatas and Spartacists

Mexican government troops push Zapata’s forces out of the state of Morelos.

The NYT, while still claiming without providing any evidence that Russia was behind the German Spartacist movement, notes that the atrocity stories spread about the Spartacists, which are now known to have been false and disseminated by knowingly the military, has caused a backlash in popular opinion against the military’s lethal reign of terror. Summary executions are still going on.

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Today -100: March 16, 1919: Of food

Germany has agreed to the take-it-or-leave-it offer by which it will receive food in exchange for giving up merchant ships as well as future production of potash, coal etc. While Britain still denies that its continuing blockade of Germany, preventing the importation of food, is somehow linked to starvation, the recent announcement that infant mortality has doubled has given rise to some embarrassment among the blockading countries, even France, a little.

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Today -100: March 15, 1919: Of disputed islands, garbled dispatches, lynchings, and trained dogs

The Peace Conference commission working on Italian-Greek border issues says the Dodecanese islands should properly go to Greece because their population is mostly Greek but that the 1915 treaty bribing Italy into the war still holds. US delegates objected that all such secret treaties became invalid when Wilson’s 14 Points were adopted.

The US delegation is also opposing German-Austrian Anschluss, which the NYT notes violates the US’s supposed commitment to national self-determination, but it adds that it was never clear if that principle was meant to apply to enemy nationalities.

The German military executes 220 rebels. With machine guns.

Japanese Ambassador to the US Viscount Ishii calls for the League of Nations constitution to include a ban on racial discrimination, although he does hasten to reassure the US that Japan will continue its agreement to restrict emigration. He doesn’t mention the current violent Japanese crackdown on Koreans who’d like to have their country back, and I doubt anyone bothers to ask him about it.

Richard Brenne, the editor of a German-language newspaper in Cleveland, is acquitted of the crime of garbling war dispatches.

A black man, Bud Johnson, is burned to death by a lynch mob in Castleberry, Florida for supposedly attacking a white woman.

The Belgian who during the occupation accepted Germany’s offer to be Chief Secretary of the Flemish Separatist Ministry is sentenced to 15 years hard labor.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Evidently when the Germans were occupying Belgium, they fined the owner of a fox terrier which was disrespectful to the Germans. Its owner, a hotelier, had taught it to crawl on its belly when asked what the Germans would have to do when the war is over.

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Today -100: March 14, 1919: This stolen property would burn in their hands

German troops continue to use artillery and mine-throwers against Spartacist positions in the capital city, and are summarily executing prisoners.

German newspapers are angry at the proposed peace terms, including the Rhineland buffer state and Danzig being given to Poland. Of the latter, the Lokal-Anzeiger says, “This stolen property would burn in their hands.”

Wireless signals are sent from Britain to Australia, without a relay, 12,000 miles.

Authorities claim that the raid in New York City on Russian anarchists/Bolsheviks/whatever proved that there are at least 6,000 Russians in the US “closely banded together and solemnly pledged to the destruction of all government.” 4 of the 164 arrested were released, but will be picked up again if courts determine that the possession of the Little Red Book is grounds for deportation, which the US is currently arguing it should be in another case.

The NY Senate passes a bill, unanimously, to ban display of “the red flag of anarchy.”

The Ringling Brothers’ Circus and Barnum & Bailey announce a merger. The Ringling Brothers have owned B & B since 1907, but have run them as separate shows up until now.

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Today -100: March 13, 1919: Of peasant workers, peace signings, and Beethoven

New York police raid the hq of the Union of Russian Peasant Workers of America and arrest 200 suspected radicals (164 or 187 according to later reports, which is a lot of peasant workers for, you know, New York City).

Whenever the peace treaty is to be signed, France will bar the German delegates from Paris, because that would mean providing protection for them, which France does not care to do.

The Society of Friends of Music cancels a concert tribute to the military after the secretaries of war and the navy withdraw their patronage because people objected to its inclusion of Beethoven, for fuck’s sake.

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Today -100: March 12, 1919: Of kaiser-hanging, king-drowning, and trillions

The Peace Conference is debating whether ex-kaiser Willy Hohenzollern can be put on trial for starting the war. The US thinks he can’t be. Others realize that war is not actually a crime under international law. They may still go after some of Germany’s wartime military and political leaders for war crimes.

The former King Wilhelm of Württemberg nearly drowns, the NYT exaggerates, probably, in a scuffle when some German sailors seize his yacht on Lake Constance to use as a fishing boat.

Postmaster General Albert Burleson tells the Senate committee investigating Bolshevism that the IWW is carrying on a widespread propaganda effort mostly through the foreign-language press. He also says the Wobblies are really all Bolshevists, as do other witnesses who don’t understand Bolshevism or anarchism but are happy to lump all their ideological enemies together. Not a lot of subtlety in a Red Scare.

The NYT on the peace terms being worked out (which seem to consist mostly of reducing, then reducing again the size military Germany is permitted and the things it’s allowed to have – no u-boats, tanks, airplanes, etc): “The consideration of reparations has introduced the word ‘trillion’ in recognizing money, probably for the first time in any single financial operation, for, although millions and billions often have been used in war finance, no sum has yet been reached touching a trillion.”

The evidently-famous novelist Amelia Barr dies at 87. She turned to novel-writing in her 50’s, churning out 80 of them, including Jan Vedder’s Wife, She Loved a Sailor, The Maid of Maiden Lane, and The Strawberry Handkerchief.

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