Today -100: May 25, 1923: We went to the Ruhr to get paid

Chinese government troops attack the Shantung bandits holding those train passengers.

Supposedly, the bandits got the idea for the train derailment from the movies.

Communists seize and burn the Gelsenkirchen (Ruhr) police hq and fight the citizens’... militia? neighborhood watch? and firemen. 8 dead. They propose a group of 400 workers – 100 Socialist, 100 Communist, 200 trade union – to take over the policing of the town, since the French fired all the security police in February. In the meantime, they enforce food price reductions. And then the looting begins, which is definitely a price reduction. French troops move into the town and... watch. As was the custom, when Germans were fighting Germans.

French PM Raymond Poincaré and his cabinet resign because the Senate refused his demand that it try Deputy Marcel Cachin and other Communists for sedition and/or treason. The deputies opposed the occupation of the Ruhr, but the Senate (in its role as high court) decides it’s not its job to try the cases – there are courts, you know. Pres. Millerand refuses to accept the resignations and Poincaré agrees to stay, although he had argued “we cannot allow these Communist conspiracies.”

Earlier in the day PM P told the National Assembly he would do to Germany what Germany did to France in 1871. He said the occupation of the Ruhr is succeeding in getting coal to France so “we are in no hurry and can wait as long as necessary for Germany to come to her senses.” No comment. “We went to the Ruhr to get paid.”

The new British prime minister’s 24-year-old son, Oliver Baldwin is.... DUM DUM DUM... a socialist. In fact, in 1929 he’ll be elected a Labour member of Parliament, embarrasing daddy no end. He’s already been a prisoner of both Armenian Bolsheviks and then, on his way home, Turkey, which held him 6 months as a suspected Russian spy, or something.

Newly elected Chicago Mayor William Dever says he found the city’s treasury is empty, indeed in deficit, and the municipal government may have to stop operating soon.

William Burns, director of the Bureau of Investigation, tells the Kiwanis Club in Atlantic City that if Congress passes two bills (dunno which ones), he will “drive every radical out of the country and bring the parlor Bolsheviks to their senses.” Every big strike in the US, he says, is caused by Soviet influence and propaganda.

The Connecticut Legislature bans flogging in prisons.

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. gets a contract to act in motion pictures at $1,000 a week. He is 13 years old. Doug Senior knew nothing about this (Jr. lives with his mother).

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