Saturday, November 16, 2019

Today -100: November 16, 1919: The breath of life will never be put in it again


Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer sends the Senate a draft of a proposed anti-sedition law aimed at the IWW, communists, etc. He sorrowfully reports that at present “the preaching of anarchy and sedition is not a crime under the general criminal statutes of the United States,” nor is “openly advocating the unlawful obstruction of industry”.

18 miles from Centralia, Washington, two American Legion posses exchange shots with IWWers, killing one of the former. The article has a long quotation from a “confession” by one Wobbly, which said the IWW planned the Centralia clash 3 weeks in advance, although it actually sounds like he said they planned to defend the IWW hall if it was attacked.

The San Francisco police order all IWW members to leave the city.

Senate Republicans adopt 10 more reservations to the peace treaty. Some exempt the US from various activities of the League of Nations, others reserve to Congress decisions on accepting mandates or paying League dues. Democrats promise to vote down ratification of the treaty so amended, after which, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge (R-Mass.) says, “the treaty may be considered as dead. It may lie in the Senate inert, but the breath of life will never be put in it again.”

Ludwig Martens of the Russian Soviet Government Bureau, the self-proclaimed embassy of Soviet Russia in New York, rejects a subpoena from the Lusk Committee of the NY Legislature.

Gabriele D’Annunzio invades Zara (aka Zadar), the capital of (Yugoslav) Dalmatia, evidently in order to revive Italian enthusiasm for his little Fiume adventure ahead of Italian parliamentary elections. Yugoslavia, afraid of an all-out war, is not putting up resistance.


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