Saturday, July 24, 2021

Today -100: July 24, 1921: Let me get at that dirty flag-hating —


At a Congressional committee investigating the escape of convicted draft evader Grover Cleveland Bergdoll and whether he’d bribed an Army major, Rep. Ben Johnson (D-Ky) pulls a gun and threatens to shoot a witness, Bergdoll’s brother, who accused Johnson of lying when he said that he was lying. Johnson is restrained by his wife and others. “Let me get at that dirty flag-hating —” Johnson bellowed.

The Yugoslav minister of interior is assassinated, and authorities round up 600 of the usual Communist suspects.

The Ku Klux Klan finally takes responsibility for two of the recent rash of tar-and-featherings, sending a manifesto to the two Beaumont, Texas newspapers. The NYT doesn’t recount their explanations for targeting these two men, one of them a doctor, the other a Marine Corps veteran, but it does reproduce their quotation from Josiah Gilbert Holland’s poem God Give Us Men.

A white man, Casey Jones, is lynched in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He’d been convicted of murder and was sentenced to hang, but his case was under appeal. A mob had tried to lynch him the day after the murder but were thwarted by a preacher with a gun.

The Calcutta board of film censors complains that imported films mostly have all-white casts, and therefore feature white bad guys, drunks, etc., which “does not tend to uplift the prestige of the British race in India.”

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