Today -100: May 7, 1923: Of train kidnappings, home sweet home, and broken treaties

France and Belgium reject Germany’s reparations proposals. They decide not to issue a joint reply with Britain. Not surprisingly, they want more money than Germany offered. They say there will be no talks until passive resistance ends, denying Germany’s claim that passive resistance is a spontaneous act of the people of the Ruhr instead of ordered by the German government, and say they won’t end the occupation until Germany pays up.

Lucy Aldrich, daughter of a former and sister-in-law of John D. Rockefeller Jr., is kidnapped by bandits in China, along with 150 other train passengers, during an attack on the Shanghai-Peking Express. Or 300 passengers according to a different AP dispatch printed right below the first one. The bandits derail the train, shoot it up, and steal everything they can before marching their captives
 off into the night in their nightclothes.

The song “Home Sweet Home” (you know, “Be it ever so humble etc”) is 100 years old, and at least 15,000 people gather in Prospect Park to commemorate the occasion with a sing-song, because that’s what life was like before the internet.

8 Sioux tribes will sue the US for $700,000,000 for treaty violations. Stolen land, some containing extensive gold deposits, slaughtered game, the usual.

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