Today -100: March 26, 1920: Of red armies, Berlin herself, preserving industrial peace at the point of the bayonet, and furtive excitements

The NYT repeats the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant’s story that Russian Red Army officers are controlling the Spartacists in Germany and planning to capture Germany by July.

The Ebert government has been requesting the Allies’ permission to send troops into the Ruhr to fight the workers on strike. France has been... sceptical.

Headline of the Day -100: 

At the inquest into the assassination of the Lord Mayor of Cork, Tomás Mac Curtain/Thomas MacGurin, a witness says he saw 8 men carrying rifles, but not in uniform, enter the police barracks. Yup, that’s the assassins, all right.

By the way, the Black and Tans are arriving in Ireland about now.

Remember Stewart McMullin, the federal prohibition agent who shot a bootlegging cabby during an arrest or... something? Well, since the local judge refused to give him bail, the feds show up with a writ of habeas corpus, the first time in New York City history in which the feds have tried to override local authorities on a murder case. The feds say McMullin was acting as a federal agent, the locals say that since he never announced himself as such he was not a federal official at the time. They’re pretty convinced McMullin was actually conducting a holdup. You say potato...

James Cox, Democratic governor of Ohio, says Republicans plan to win the White House by raising huge sums from industry to elect a president who “will preserve industrial peace at the point of the bayonet.” He says he’s kept the peace in Ohio for years without a shot fired. He complains that both the wets and the drys think he’s on the other side, and he thinks that the Volstead Act will be amended to allow for beer and light wines.

Lady Cynthia Curzon is engaged to Lt. Oswald Mosley, MP. This seems to be the first time the future fascist leader is mentioned in the NYT.

F. Scott Fizgerald’s This Side of Paradise is published. The newness of the ‘20s is set out against the Olde Times:

All in all Beatrice O’Hara absorbed the sort of education that will be quite impossible ever again; a tutelage measured by the number of things and people one could be contemptuous of and charming about; a culture rich in all arts and traditions, barren of all ideas, in the last of those days when the great gardener clipped the inferior roses to produce one perfect bud.

Amory saw girls doing things that even in his memory would have been impossible: eating three-o’clock, after-dance suppers in impossible cafes, talking of every side of life with an air half of earnestness, half of mockery, yet with a furtive excitement that Amory considered stood for a real moral let-down.

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