Today -100: November 30, 1921: Of re-starts and buckleys

Northern Irish PM Sir James Craig orders Lloyd George to come up with a whole new proposal, not including an All-Ireland Parliament, by next week or the Irish negotiations will be over. It’s almost like LG gave Ulster all the cards when he pledged not to “coerce” it. Presumably the British would have to coerce Sinn Féin into accepting this new proposal, and indeed the complete division of Ireland, before offering it to the North.

William F. Buckley, the future father of right-wing “intellectual” William F. Buckley, Jr., is expelled from Mexico for criticizing the government (presumably over oil).

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Today -100: November 29, 1921: The Charlie Chaplin of the cinema of crime

Henri Landru’s prosecutor warns the jury against regarding him as a comic figure, “the Charlie Chaplin of the cinema of crime”. Chaplin will of course play a version of Landru in Monsieur Verdoux.

Fatty Arbuckle, who only wishes someone would compare him to Charlie Chaplin, testifies in his defense at his trial. Virginia Rappe was already sick when he found her on the bathroom floor, he says.

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Today -100: November 28, 1921: Of bores

Sen. William Borah (R-Idaho) says Harding’s plan for annual international conferences is just a League of Nations under another name, and therefore requires Senate approval.

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Today -100: November 27, 1921: Of harsh words

Fascisti and others riot in Turin and Naples against France after (false?) reports that PM Aristide Briand used “harsh words” against the Italian delegation to the Washington Conference. 

Witnesses at Fatty Arbuckle’s trial say that Virginia Rappe was prone to attacks of a medical nature and frequently tore her clothes when in pain, as she did on the night she died. The prosecution’s case is looking weaker and weaker.

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Today -100: November 26, 1921: Of regents, teeth, low-down dives, pigs, and five Wellesley girls who don’t believe the Bible

Harding plans to follow up the Washington Conference with annual conferences of world leaders to set the world right, because I guess no one told him that the League of Nations already exists. 

Japanese Crown Prince Hirohito, 20, is named Prince Regent of Japan due to Emperor Yoshihito’s continued infirmity.

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More riotous scenes in the Prussian Landtag. They began a day ago when the Communists were outraged to discover that rightist deputies were cheating in voting on new parliamentary rules. Today leftist deputies (landtaggers?) deploy sneezing powder, whistles and stink bombs to express their displeasure. Communists offer a resolution to permit smoking in the chamber, since smoking is permitted “in all other low-down dives.” After it’s voted down, they light up anyway.

A bomb is thrown through the window of Lithuania’s finance minister (and former prime minister) Ernestas Galvanauskas, who is wounded.

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Not sure what the French marshal is supposed to do with these gifts. Bring them back to France? I mean, after his menagerie is reduced to one extremely fat wildcat.

Speaking at Carnegie Hall, William Jennings Bryan accuses US colleges of churning out “infidels, atheists, agnostics, higher critics and other varieties of skeptics.” Why, there’s a professor at Bryn Mawr who’s an unbeliever, he says, and “in the last nine months I have found five Wellesley girls who don’t believe the Bible.”

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Today -100: November 25, 1921: The Stove of Doom

It’s Exhibits Day at the Henri Landru trial. The famous stove, in which the authorities think Landru disposed of so many bodies, is shown off, as are the remnants of women’s clothing and, presumably, women, found in it. Landru says that when he’s acquitted, he’d like to start a new life in America.

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Today -100: November 24, 1921: Of undersea flora, tunnels, poor stranglers, and naval spectacles

Asked about Britain’s belief that the largish submarine fleet France is demanding it be allowed to keep is aimed at Britain, Prime Minister Aristide Briand points out that Britain wants an awful lot of capital ships considering it’s a friend of the US, allied with Japan, and its possible enemies, Germany and Russia, have no fleets at all. “Perhaps the English want their capital ships to fish for sardines. Well, we want submarines to study the flora at the bottom of the sea for the benefit of our botanical societies.”

D.W. Griffith, being D.W. Griffith, proposes to Navy Secretary Edwin Denby that before ships are scrapped in line with the Washington Conference agreement, they be “used for a few weeks in arranging a naval spectacle for a motion-picture drama, in which the activity of the fleet serves as a powerful climax of a drama which has for its theme the closer brotherhood of all mankind, also illustrating the futility and the stupid and terrible uselessness of war?”

44 Sinn Féin prisoners tunnel out of Kilkenny Prison.

Britain and Afghanistan sign a treaty to prevent Russia opening consulates on the Afghan border.

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Today -100: November 23, 1921: It will burn anything

At Henri Landru’s trial, a woman who lived with him for some months in his villa in Gambais and lived to tell the tale says he once pointed to the famous stove in which he is charged with burning the bodies of his victims and said “The draught is excellent, it will burn anything.” She says Landru was loving and attentive. Three psychiatrists testify that Landru is perfectly insane. One of the shrinks addresses the theory going around that Landru somehow hypnotized his victims into some sort of amnesia so that they’re currently wandering around France unaware of their former names; yeah, that’s not a thing, he says.

Bomb-throwing in Belfast.

39 of the 58 members of the Porto Rican Assembly sign a request to Pres. Harding to remove Gov. E. Mont.

The German government denies French PM Aristide Briand’s charge that the German military and police are retaining the officers of the old army as a nucleus around which to rapidly build a future German army while keeping, for now, within the limits of the Versailles Treaty. Briand is not wrong.

At the Washington Conference, everyone agrees that Manchuria is part of China.

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Today -100: November 22, 1921: Of dead POWs and moral isolation

64 of 100 Indian insurgent prisoners (Moplahs) being transported in a closed railway carriage in the Madras district suffocate to death. The official story will be that the ventilation panels had been painted over and no one noticed.

At the Washington Conference, French Prime Minister Aristide Briand announces that France will reduce mandatory military service from 3 years to 18 months. He asks France’s allies not to leave it in “moral isolation.” Britain’s Arthur Balfour & US Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes say they won’t, probably.

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Today -100: November 21, 1921: Of hunger strikes, fiery fruit, and shimmies

Gandhi says participants in Bombay riots (still ongoing, although the Prince of Wales’s tour has moved on) should go home, repent, and implore God for forgiveness. And he’ll be fasting until peace is restored. It’s always fun when Gandhi hunger strikes against other Indians.

The Atlantic Fruit ship Tanamo arrives at port in NYC, on fire. E. Mont Reily is on board, and the arson is believed to have been aimed at the unpopular Puerto Rican governor.

Henri Landru was just a plucky underdog serial killer of women to the French public until it also turned out that he killed the dogs of one of them, and Paris doesn’t like him anymore.

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Today -100: November 20, 1921: Psych 101 (or however many women he killed)

Henri Landru, asked why he pretended to be a suitor for marriage to soooooo many women when he was already married, says “Perhaps I wanted to have an opportunity of a study in psychology.”

Gandhi is upset at the rioting on the occasion of the visit of the Prince of Wales to Bombay, and will undertake a weekly 24-hour fast as penance.

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Today -100: November 19, 1921: Of beer, birth control, borders, and lynchings

The Senate votes 56-22 to ban medical prescriptions for beer, eliminating that loophole in Prohibition. Attempts to stop dry agents raiding private residences were watered down, and will now require a warrant.

The birth control meeting shut down by the NYPD on the Catholic bishop’s say-so and rescheduled by Margaret Sanger is held, this time guarded by the cops.

After being dragged before the League of Nations Council, Yugoslavia and Albania solemnly pledge to stop fighting over the border that the League set for them without bothering to consult either party.

A black man charged with assault on a white woman is lynched in Helena, Arkansas.

Henri Landru gives the address of one of the women he’s alleged to have murdered. Well, it’s actually her address in 1915, but after he was supposed to have murdered her, at the Hotel Du Mans, whose guest registers no longer exist and whose owner is dead.

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Today -100: November 18, 1921: Of ships and spontaneous, whole-hearted welcomes

Britain won’t agree to the proposed limitations on British, Japanese & US ships until limits are also set for those of France and Italy. France wants to keep all its ships because of course it does. Also, Japan wants 70% of the number of capital ships Britain and the US will be allowed rather than the proposed 60%. And there’s a lot of talk about submarines.

The Prince of Wales arrives in Bombay (Mumbai) with a procession, as was the custom, and a riot, although in a different part of the city. The NYT correspondent Percival Landon (I believe actually reporting for the London Times) says Princey (this is the future Edward VIII) is greeted with “real and universal enthusiasm” and that while Gandhi arrived in the city “determined to challenge the spontaneous, whole-hearted welcome of the Indians of every race, religion, caste and color”, Bombay “has completely and contemptuously ignored him and all his works.”

Henri Landru dramatically claims that tomorrow he will produce one of the women he is accused of killing, or at least give her address. He doesn’t say which one. Since the prosecution has no physical evidence, much less a dead body, if he can disprove just one of the 11 murder charges – which really he can’t because he totally killed all of them and a whole lot more – the whole trial would likely fall apart.

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Today -100: November 17, 1921: Of cannibals, circumstantial evidence, and beauty pageants

The Senate committee investigating the US occupation of Haiti hears from P.M. Pilkington, a manager of the American Developing Company, that Haitian bandits ate a Marine.

At the Landru trial, prosecutors admit that they’re basing their case for a conviction and capital punishment on the 11 murder charges entirely on circumstantial evidence, but a shitload of a lot of it.

Colorado Gov. Oliver Shoup declares martial law in Huerfano County to deal with a strike against the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, which announced a 30% wage cut in 13 coal mines on one day’s notice. The company says it won’t employ strikebreakers and hire guards, making me suspicious that they intended to provoke a shutdown for reasons of their own. This is the company responsible for the Ludlow Massacre in 1914.

British forces claim to have killed 700 Moplah rebels who attacked a garrison post. Er, that’s in India.

18-year-old Anna Niebel is suing congresscritter Manuel Herrick (R-OK) for breach of promise. She says he approached her when she was a beauty pageant contestant and offered to marry her. He wrote to the other 47 contestants as well, promising that if they married him they’d be First Lady within 8 years. Herrick claims he was only doing research for a bill he introduced banning newspaper beauty contests. In an interview next month, he will claim to have received hundreds of marriage proposals and he’ll compare women to smallpox, saying that “beautiful girls are a curse” and homely girls are “wholesome,” and that he wouldn’t give two cents for women, “they’re silly, giddy, and empty headed.”

Herrick was elected almost accidentally: incumbent Dick Morgan died on the day of the filing deadline, leaving Herrick, who had run against him in 1918 receiving 56 votes, as the only Republican on the ballot during the 1829 Harding/Republican landslide. He will lose in the 1922 primary – and in 1924, 1926, 1928, 1930 and in California in 1948. As a teenager he tried to rob a train and was committed to a lunatic asylum, not for the last time (he thought he was Jesus reborn, like his mother always told him he was) (and thought Jesus was a train robber, or something???).

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Today -100: November 16, 1921: Of formulae, armistices, and ink

At the Washington Conference, Britain and Japan agree – in principle – to Harding’s formula (5:5:3) for naval reduction (although Britain has some thoughts about submarines).

Benito Mussolini tears up the armistice between the Fascists and the Reds signed in August.

In court, French serial killer Henri Landru complains that the Washington Conference is getting more play in the press than he is.

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Today -100: November 15, 1921: Of submarines, mutts and jeffs, Americans and other white people, music hall turns, and smiles

At the Washington Conference, Britain wants submarines outlawed. Or at least sharply limited.

The Supreme Court rules that syndicated cartoonist Bud Fisher rather than the Hearst newspaper chain’s publishers owns the characters Mutt and Jeff.

Gen. Eli Cole of the Marine Corps tells a Senate committee how in 1917 the Marines coerced the Haitian president into dissolving the Constituent Assembly. He says martial law will be necessary as long as the US is occupying Haiti (Spoiler Alert: until 1934) because “venal” Haitian courts would allow Haitians to kill “Americans and other white people” with impunity.

French serial killer Henri Landru, now in the second week of his trial, has signed a contract to give monologues in a music hall (if acquitted, of course) for 2,500 francs a week, which is the equivalent of some money. A reporter covering the trial for a Toulouse newspaper left the courtroom, saying it was driving him crazy, and then shot himself.

The Cherokee are suing Texas in the US Supreme Court, claiming 1 million acres in East Texas acknowledged to be theirs by the 1822 treaty with the Republic of Texas.

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Today -100: November 14, 1921: Of birth control, mutineers, and Fascists

NY police halt Margaret Sanger’s birth control meeting and arrest her, along with Mary Winsor. The order to ban the meeting came from a police commissioner before a single word was spoken. The subject of the meeting: “Birth Control: Is It Moral?” Sanger says she believes the “influence of the Catholic Church” was behind the ban. And she’s right. The archbishop called the cops on her. The charges will be dismissed tomorrow.

Paris’s 20th Arrondissement votes a plurality for Monsieur Badina, currently serving a prison sentence for the 1919 Black Sea mutiny, to the municipal council. This is the second Black Sea mutineer in a row elected to the council (André Marty’s election was annulled). There will have to be a run-off since he fell shy of an outright majority.

The Italian government seems to be persuading delegates to the Fascist congress to leave Rome, which is still under more or less general strike.

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Today -100: November 13, 1921: We have no sordid ends to serve

The Washington Conference begins. Harding welcomes the delegates “with unselfish hands.” His hands, not theirs: “We harbor no fears, we have no sordid ends to serve. We suspect no enemy. We contemplate or apprehend no conquest.”

The US puts forward proposals for the disarmament conference: a 10-year pause in navy ship-building, with the US immediately scrapping 30 capital ships, Britain 19, and Japan 17, leaving them with 18, 22 and 10 respectively. New capital ships in the future to be limited in size (which certainly has nothing to do with US ships having to be small enough to go through the Panama Canal, perish the thought). The US would have to get rid of quite a few destroyers, presumably selling them off, so the naval arms race would might not be stopped so much as transferred to, say, South America. There’s no provision for naval aircraft, since commercial aircraft can fairly easily be converted to military use. 

Walther Nernst wins the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on thermochemistry – not for his work on poison gas during the war.

Japanese Finance Minister Baron Takahashi Korekiyo is named prime minister following the assassination of Hara Takashi last week.

Margaret Sanger announces the opening this Wednesday of a birth control clinic in NYC, the first such clinic in the US.

Russian Minister of War Leon Trotsky says Poland is preparing to attack Russia again.

The Landru trial: Henri Desiré Landru is questioned about entries in his notebook showing that when he took one of his many fiances to the country – the last time she was ever seen – he bought a round-trip ticket for himself but a one-way ticket for her. There’s nothing worse than a cheap-ass serial killer.

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Today -100: November 12, 1921: #CancelCulture1921

Gandhi calls for a meeting in Lahore to remove the statue of 1860s Viceroy Lord Lawrence. 

The Northern Irish government rejects Lloyd George’s proposals, especially the idea of an All-Ireland Parliament, and refuses to even discuss them with the British government. They’ll be putting forward their own proposal. Lloyd George has prorogued Parliament so that he doesn’t have to answer any questions about Ireland. The speaker of the Ulster Senate, the Marquess of Dufferin, says “Ulstermen would hang on to Ulster with their teeth, hands and toes; they owe this duty to the dead.”

In Baltimore, veterans drop out of an Armistice Day parade before it reaches the reviewing stand, and later turn their backs on Mayor William Broening, to protest his refusal to ban a disarmament meeting.

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Today -100: November 11, 1921: People’s private lives are no concern, either of justice or the police

They do the Unknown Soldier thing in the Capitol.

The NYT thinks Northern Ireland can’t possibly refuse to help the British government come to a deal on Ireland. Man, they do not know Ulster at all, do they?

Henri Landru, French serial killer extraordinaire, refuses to relate to the court his no doubt perfectly reasonable account of his relations with all those women who mysteriously disappeared. “I had business dealings with these women. Beyond that their affairs do not concern me. People’s private lives are no concern, either of justice or the police.” He does give the court a lesson on feminine psychology, explaining why all those women whose furniture he sold after they disappeared had told people that they were going off to marry him: they didn’t want to admit that they were selling their furniture because of financial difficulties, so they just told people they were engaged to him.

Anatole France is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. I will admit to never having read anything by him.

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Today -100: November 10, 1921: Of socialists, anti-fascist strikes, various phases of birth control, and overstuffed leather chairs

Socialists did badly in the NY elections, losing all their seats in the state Assembly and the NYC Board of Aldermen.

Railway and electrical light workers in Rome go on strike to protest a Fascist convention being held in the city, although some smartass asked how the Fascists are supposed to leave with no trains running.

The American Birth Control League is formed, with Margaret Sanger president. There will be a free public meeting, at which “various phases of birth control will be discussed,” according to an ad in the NYT. Sanger has a new book, Woman and the New Race, whose contents, the ad says, “cannot be fully described here.”

Congress cheaped out on funding for the Washington disarmament conference ($200,000), so “There will be no overstuffed leather chairs or mahogany desks and bookcases.”

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Today -100: November 9, 1921: Of mayors, pacifist bombs, and bluebeards

NYC elections: Mayor John Hylan is easily re-elected, and other Tammany candidates sweep almost every local and state election. Hylan spends most of his victory speech complaining about newspapers that opposed him, as is the custom. He even names the papers he claims violated “the standards of honest journalism, the ordinary standards of decency and a proper regard for the fair name of the city,” and ranks nine of them by the order of the degree to which they violated those standards, starting with the New York Tribune. The NYT is #6. He blames the New York World for his wife’s nervous indigestion.

On NY state ballot measures, voters rejected hiring preferences in the civil service for veterans and increasing legislators’ salaries, while establishing children’s courts and courts of domestic relations, and imposing a literacy test for voting.

Kentucky election results: at least 10 dead.

A Senate resolution asks that the Washington Conference on disarmament be open to the press.

Another gunfight between Fascists and Communists in Italy, near Novi. A Communist Deputy, Francesco Misiano, is shot twice.

Unclear on the Concept: 

Serial killer Henri Landru defends himself in court. Asked why he repeatedly advertised for a wife, he says it was to meet the class of person who might have furniture to sell.

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Today -100: November 8, 1921: Of monuments and mistaken executions

The French village of Varangéville returns a war monument they’d ordered after spotting the words “Made in Germany.”

A former Marine lieutenant explains to a Senate Committee that a black prisoner in Haiti was executed by mistake following orders from a now conveniently dead captain. How does such a mistake happen? Well, the unnamed Haitian was black, if that’s any help.

I hadn’t realized the US Marines had the authority to execute Haitians.

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Today -100: November 7, 1921: As few as is necessary

The Bishop of Exeter says “I pray and hope that as few Irish as is necessary will be killed to uphold the British Empire.”

The All-India Congress Committee adopts Gandhi’s resolution for civil disobedience, including complete non-cooperation and tax resistance.

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Another in the ongoing award-winning series Everything in Russia is Fucked, Probably. See also (a few days ago), Russian Children Living Feral in the Woods.

The Hungarian National Assembly votes to dethrone Charles and the Hapsburg dynasty. All participants in his königputsch, except the leaders, are pardoned.

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Today -100: November 6, 1921: Of orgies of corruption, exiles, and bluebeards

The Senate is working on a tax bill. It rejects 38-28 a proposal to keep the excess-profits tax and use it for a veterans’ bonus.

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This is the NYC mayoral race. Lawyer Samuel Untermyer warns that if John Hylan is re-elected, the brakes will come off, leading to the aforementioned orgies of corruption. Also public transit fares will increase. He accuses Hylan and his minions of smearing Republican/Coalition candidate Henry Curran as a friend of Henry Ford and an anti-semite.

A Macy’s ad says the store will be closed until noon on election day so its employees can vote. And Saks will open a less generous hour and a half late.

As former emperor/king Charles & consort Zita head into exile, we hear, I think for the first time, that Zita is pregnant with their 8th child.

The trial of Henri Landru for the murders of 11 women (11 of, no doubt, many) begins tomorrow and France is very excited; “vaudevilles and cabarets resounded with Landru jokes and songs.” Sadly, we are not given examples of these serial-killer jokes.

The government of Bermuda decides to retain its ban on automobiles.

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Today -100: November 5, 1921: What did Lafayette ever do to you?

Japan’s Prime Minister (since 1918) Hara Takashi is stabbed to death with a sword, no less, at Tokyo Station by someone misidentified by the NYT as a Korean “fanatic.” In fact he’s not Korean but a right-wing Japanese fanatic. Hara was a Christian. And a commoner, the first commoner PM.

The Senate votes to create that committee to investigate the charge by Thomas Watson (D-Georgia) that lots of soldiers were executed during the war without trial, and his other claims. Watson says he won’t cooperate, in a speech in which he defies the Senate to expel him and insults the Marquis de Lafayette (you know, from the Revolutionary War) for some reason.

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Today -100: November 4, 1921: No use crying

All sorts of mayhem in the strike by New York City milk drivers against the distributers’ attempt to break their union; trucks attacked, trucks hijacked, scabs beaten. The streets run white with milk.

Foreigners have been rushing in to Germany to buy shit at dirt-cheap prices thanks to the collapse of the mark, and Germans are not best pleased at the resulting shortages in shops. German customs officials have been ordered to seize these exchange-rate bargains for evading export rules.

Two Socialists who were elected to the NYC Board of Aldermen in 1919, Algernon Leo and Edward Cassidy, are finally permitted to take their seats. Timothy Sullivan, who has been sitting in Cassidy’s seat for nearly two years, voted to unseat himself and will donate the salary he’s been drawing to a charity of Cassidy’s choosing.

The Hungarian government submits a bill removing the Hapsburg dynasty’s rights to the Hungarian throne and postponing the election of a new king. The Little Entente are not happy with the idea of an election, since Hungarians might vote for a Hapsburg. The Allies are making arrangements to exile Charles and Zita to the Portuguese colony of Madeira in the North Atlantic.

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Today -100: November 3, 1921: Of glowworms, plebiscites, and Asian exclusion

Former Austro-Hungarian Emperor Charles is on his way out of Hungary, prisoner on the British gunboat Glowworm, which will take him down the Danube to the Black Sea and then... er, the Allies are still working that out.

The British Cabinet reportedly has sent a letter to Northern Irish PM Sir James Craig asking him to allow a plebiscite in the counties of Tyrone and Fermanagh over whether they’d like to join the South.

The British Columbia Legislature passes a resolution calling for a complete ban on Asian immigration.

Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow is published sometime this month. Oh well, everyone’s first novel can’t be great.

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Today -100: November 2, 1921: Insolence?

Lloyd George, who has had to cancel his trip to the Washington Conference to deal with Ireland, thinks the Irish conference could be saved if the Northern Ireland administration graciously gives up Catholic-majority counties Tyrone and Fermanagh. Like that’s a thing that could happen.

Italy and Russia sign a trade agreement.

The Senate creates a special committee to investigate allegations made by Sen. Thomas Watson (D-Georgia) yesterday that lots of US soldiers, white ones he hastens to clarify, were executed by the Army during the Great War without court-martial and that officers often shot enlisted men for “insolence.” James Wadsworth (R-NY) challenges Watson to prove his claims – what we’ve got so far is that Watson has a photo of a gallows which he claims was taken in France and people have told him at least 21 soldiers were hanged on (from?) it in a single day – but Watson refuses to do so before the Military Affairs Committee, thus the special committee. During this back and forth, Watson adds new claims to those he made yesterday: officers “made courtesans of too many of the nurses,” soldiers had no shoes, wounded soldiers were left to die in ditches, etc. Secretary of War John Weeks says the War Department is only “aware” of 10 American soldiers hanged in France (6 for rape, 1 for murder & intent to commit rape, 3 for murder and rape).

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This is another protest against the convictions of Sacco and Vanzetti, according to a note left at the scene. Also, it was probably a grenade rather than a bomb and the consul, I guess, nudged it with his foot and walked on before it went off, so this wasn’t the action-movie sequence the headline suggests.

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Today -100: November 1, 1921: That’s how you lost America

The British Parliament gives a vote of confidence in Lloyd George’s Irish policy, by a vote of 439-43. The vote of censure was proposed by Unionist “die hards.” Rupert Gwynne  (C-Eastbourne), seconding, declaimed “Our empire was built on considering justice and right, not on considering the opinion of other people,” to which T.P. O’Connor interjected, “That’s how you lost America.” Of course the vote is about a conference (currently between sessions) whose doings are mostly unknown to the members of Parliament, you know, the people about to vote about those doings. Lloyd George says closed-door conferences are the only ones in which you can do business. He says yes, he’s negotiating with killers and, worse, people who are not loyal to the king, but that’s who the Irish people elected. He says the issue in this vote is whether Britain should drop the negotiations, crush the rebellion, and impose terms. But it is “a question of cost.” Winning a guerilla war is tough, he says, reminding the House of the Boer War.

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