Today -100: June 15, 1921: Figures he’d be against “too much fun”

The US occupation authorities in Santo Domingo say they’ll withdraw in 8 months – if the Dominican people cooperate. Also, independence doesn’t look very independent, with the Republic expected to take on a large loan, overseen by an American overseer, with a police overseen by American officers, all this ratified by a convention named by the US military...

Retired Gen. Karl Höfer and his German irregular forces in Upper Silesia flatly refuse Allied orders to leave, even after Polish forces obeyed.

Maj. Roy Haynes, the Federal Prohibition Commissioner (in the Treasury) asks for Prohibition enforcement to be given a fair chance “without having too much fun poked at them” by newspapers, movies, playwrights, etc. Anything other than strict observance of the stupid law “means chaos, means Bolshevism.”

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Today -100: June 14, 1921: Of privileged positions, zeppelins, scurrilous stories, and poker

Pope Benedict complains about “the privileged position enjoyed by the Jews in Palestine, which is dangerous for Christians.”

The House of Representatives votes 305-61 to end the state of war with Germany and Austria. This differs from the Senate version in not also repealing the 1917 declarations of war.

Headline of the Day -100:  

And yes, I do want it to blow up just so I can write “Oh the humanité.”

Col. John Russell, the commander of the Marines occupying Haiti, bans “scurrilous” articles or speeches attacking the Marines or the Haitian president or government. Offenders will be tried by US courts-martial because Russell says Haitian courts aren’t up to the job of prosecuting people for libel or inciting rebellion because the next revolution might bring those people to power, “where they would be in a position to take bloody vengeance upon the Judge and members of the court.”

Scotland Yard has been raiding clubs to stop poker-playing. Poker players object that it is not gambling but a game of skill and anyway private clubs are private.

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Today -100: June 13, 1921: Dirty arms and the man

No links today, NYT website screwup.

A lynch mob in Moorestown, New Jersey fails to find a black man suspected of murdering a 7-year-old girl. They do find another black man at the train station and beat him pretty severely until people who knew the suspect convince them they’ve got the wrong guy.

A production of Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man in Vienna is disrupted by Bulgarians who (correctly) think it insults Bulgarians (A quote: “Bulgarians of really good standing—people in OUR position—wash their hands nearly every day.”). Eventually the Viennese get them to shut up.

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Today -100: June 12, 1921: Of feet, rum raids, mail horses, and scarey squirrels

Lady Randolph Churchill, aka Jennie, Winston’s mother, has her right leg (not foot, as the article says) amputated after falling down, breaking her ankle, and getting blood poisoning. For some reason this is front-page news.

The House of Representatives adopts a rule allowing the resolution declaring peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary, when it is voted on Monday, to be adopted with no amendments. Democrats object to this as forcing wholesale acceptance of a resolution which was decided upon secretly by Republican members of the Foreign Affairs Committee. 

Headline of the Day -100:  

This is in New York County. That one conviction, by the way, was someone who first pled guilty, then realized everyone was being acquitted and changed his plea, but of course he’d already admitted his guilt in court.

An anti-prohibition parade in Greenpoint, led by the mayor, had banners and floats. “On one float was a blacksmith in a forlorn attitude beside a neglected sledge hammer and an empty glass. This was entitled ‘Thinking’ in large letters.”

The NAACP reveals that Col. John Russell, commander of the US Marines occupying Haiti, arrested two editors and bans newspapers reprinting US newspaper stories about complaints about Marines in Haiti.

A mob of “vigilantes” force 100 or so foreign-born coal miners out of Francisco, Indiana. Plus another hundred who were working on railroad construction near Oakland City.

The Post Office plans to bar the use of unfit horses to carry the mail after a ruling that the arrest of a mail wagon driver for animal cruelty does not constitute unlawfully obstructing the mail.

Headline of the Day -100:  

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Today -100: June 11, 1921: Of murders, banned bikes, and insolent Germans

Eva Kaber confesses to the murder of her husband Daniel Kaber in 1919 in Lakewood, Ohio. She is under indictment along with her daughter and her mother. She says he mistreated her, so she and a spiritualist concocted a plot to hire two men, who were under instructions not to kill him but to give him a shaking to drive out his ghosts – possibly while pretending to be ghosts themselves? – and convince him to be nicer to her. Instead, they stabbed him to death, 24 times. Eva had also been giving her (paralyzed) husband what she claims she was told was medicine but was in fact arsenic, provided by the medium. It’s all a bit complicated, including Pinkertons hired by Daniel’s father, one of the stabbers being tracked down and prosecuted in Italy, etc., but the three-generations-under-arrest thing is pretty impressive, in a Lifetime movie sort of way, although only Eva went to prison. The fortune teller was acquitted, but later went to jail for providing arsenic to another murderer.

The British are considering imposing martial law on Dublin. And banning bicycles, because they got nothin’.

Headline of the Day -100:  

This insolence consists of marrying women in Alsace-Lorraine, thereby acquiring French citizenship.

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Today -100: June 10, 1921: No Jew has succeeded in getting the better of Mr. Ford

Mexican Pres. Álvaro Obregón says any treaty with the US has to come after the US recognizes the Mexican government, not as a precondition.

Roderick McLean, who tried to shoot Queen Victoria in 1882, dies in Broadmoor Asylum, where he’s been ever since.

Henry Ford sends a letter to Ford officials denying rumors about the turbulence of the Ford Company earlier in the year and about why he hates Jews, denying that it’s because they refused him loans. “No Jew has succeeded in getting the better of Mr. Ford.” The letter says “There is no attack and no campaign against the Jews” because Jewish influence is strong enough to crush anyone who discusses the Jewish question, while “Jewish leaders have gone from one excess to another.”

The Coalition Government in Britain keeps losing by-elections. In Heywood and Radcliffe (Lancashire), a by-election called when the MP and former postmaster-general was made a peer is won, amusingly enough, by a farm worker employed by that peer, Walter Halls (Lab.). And in Westminster St. George’s, the coalition candidate is defeated by James Erskine of the Anti-Waste League, which was created in January by newspaper tycoon Lord Rothermere. The anti-waste thing is supposed to appeal to women voters.

The British government publishes what it claims is the text of a draft treaty from a year ago between Russia and the Irish Republic, which may or may not be real, but anyway never went anywhere.

D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love is finally published in the UK.

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Today -100: June 9, 1921: I didn’t murder her; I only shot her

Babe Ruth serves a one-day jail sentence for speeding (2nd offence), actually serving just 4½ hours and leaving in time to drive his “maroon, torpedo-shaped machine” to the Polo Grounds to join a game in the 6th inning. And yes, he was speeding to get his $500 a game fee (plus a rumored $500 per home run), but he isn’t caught this time.

The RNC reduces the number of delegates from the South in future National Republican Conventions by 40% from the 1912 convention, in line with their being so few actual Republican voters in the South. Southern delegates have often been black; one, Henry Lincoln Johnson of Georgia, suggests that instead of this, the party could demand its members of Congress actually enforce voting rights. What a kidder.

Utah’s cigarette ban goes into effect.

Oddly, two people were arrested this week in relation to the murder of Rosa Luxemburg in January 1919. One was caught Monday trying to sell her watch. The other, Otto Runge, who the NYT thinks was a fugitive but actually served some months for his part in the murder, the only person ever held responsible for the Leibknicht-Luxemburg murders, was recognized Wednesday when he tried to sign on at a labor bureau in Berlin under a false name. When accused of being the person who murdered Luxemburg he supposedly said “No, I didn’t murder her; I only shot her.” So that’s okay then.

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Today -100: June 8, 1921: Of bindings, uneasy hats, bathing costumes, and detention

Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes says recognition of Mexico would require it to sign a treaty “binding itself” to protect property rights, specifically US property rights, meaning oil.

The new Northern Ireland Parliament meets for the first time.  40 members, all Unionists, show up. The Sinn Féiners and Nationalists, of course, do not. “The members of Parliament wore new glossy silk hats, which made them appear uneasy.” There are two women members; “They took the oath with their hats on.”

Atlantic City politicians are worried about the increasingly strong opinions about bathing costumes: “The last thing the officials want to see is a definite line-up of the newly enfranchised women, with the younger women demanding more freedom on the beach, and the older, but more influential, insisting upon a continuation of the present rules.”

Oklahoma Attorney General S.P. Freeling files the first charges related to the Tulsa race war and wouldn’t you know it, all four charged are black. Also, all black people found on the streets of Tulsa without identification, starting tomorrow, will be put in the detention camp.

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Today -100: June 7, 1921: Of spectacles

Pueblo, Colorado conscripts all able-bodied men to dig the city out of the mud after that big ol’ flood.

Pres. Harding makes an unscheduled stop on his motoring trip at Lincoln University, a black college. He tells the graduating class that education is important for blacks, because the government isn’t going to do jack shit for them: “No government can wave a magical wand and take a race from bondage to citizenship in half a century.” Well not with that attitude, mister. “The colored race, in order to come into its own, must do the great work itself in preparing for that participation,” he says, accepting the premise that most black people are not already “prepared” for citizenship by the fact that they are, you know, citizens. He refers to Tulsa (for the first time) as “the unhappy and distressing spectacle that we saw the other day out in one of the Western States” and hopes that “God grant that, in the soberness, the fairness and the justice of this country, we shall never have another spectacle like it.” So that’s it. He can’t even name the state, much less the city, where racial atrocities occurred, and offers as the only protection against future such... spectacles... the soberness, fairness and justice that did sooooo much for the black population of Tulsa.

In Somers Point, New Jersey, Commodore William Tanguy, age 70, volunteers to be the town bathing suit censor. He says he doesn’t need glasses and will even do it free. Sounds legit.

The British colonial regime in Sierra Leone and independent Liberia ratify a convention by which Liberian wives can be purchased for a maximum price of £5.

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