Today -100: August 2, 1919: Of race riots, internationalists, hammersteins, and breaches of promises

Headline of the Day -100: 

Race rioting has “practically ceased” in Chicago. Soldiers patrol the streets and “all places where men congregate for other than religious purposes” have been ordered closed. The army bought up every issue of a black newspaper, the Chicago Whip, because of incendiary material. Gov. Frank Lowden (R) plans to create a committee of 5 whites and 5 blacks who aren’t in politics to draw up a code of ethics for interracial relations, meaning an agreement on separate beaches, stores, parks, residential areas, etc. So Lowden’s solution to racial tensions, in the absence of legal segregation, is to implement it informally.

Woodrow Wilson tells Sen. James Watson (R-Indiana), in one of those one-on-sessions that seem to have convinced not a single senator to support Wilson’s position, that if the Senate insists on putting reservations on the ratification of the Peace Treaty, it will take longer to set up the League of Nations and in the meantime Europe will descend into chaos. Then he & Watson get into a fight over whether he’s an internationalist. Wilson says he is not an internationalist.

Oscar Hammerstein, who built many theaters and opera houses and was to a large extent responsible for the creation of Times Square as a theater district, dies at 73. The Metropolitan once paid him a rumored $2 million to get out of the opera business, since the competition with his Manhattan Opera House was ruining both of them, but that agreement was due to expire in 1920.

Hermann Otto Boehme, a manufacturer of electrical appliances in NYC, is arrested in a suit by Elfrieda Arntz for breach of promise of marriage. She wants $100,000 for his failure to marry her, and he was about to skedaddle for Germany. She says the non-marriage has left her in a mental condition where she can no longer continue her employment as governess. She works as governess to the children of a Dr. Edward Cowles, whose wife named his closeness with Arntz when she sued him for divorce a few years ago. Cowles, we are informed for some reason, is a cousin of Theodore Roosevelt’s brother-in-law. Anyway, I didn’t know you could actually be arrested for breach of promise.

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