Today -100: March 14, 1920: Not a hand must move

Wolfgang Kapp (not von Kapp, NYT) declares himself chancellor of Germany and Gen. Baron Walther von Lüttwitz Defense Minister and dissolves the Reichstag as troops join his coup attempt and enter Berlin.

The Kapp regime announces that “The overthrow of the Government must not be taken as reactionary. On the contrary, it is a progressive measure of patriotic Germans of all parties, with a view to re-establishing law, order, discipline and honest government in Germany.” So that’s okay then. Kapp tells the foreign press that his coup is not monarchist (he knows that nothing will bring foreign military intervention faster than trying to put a Hollenzollern back on a restored throne) and that Germany will enforce the peace treaty... well, the “just” provisions of the peace treaty.

Various German state governments denounce the putsch, which for now seems to be confined to Berlin. President Friedrich Ebert and various cabinet members flee Berlin (some have been arrested), going to Dresden or somewhere. Ebert and the Social Democratic Party call for a general strike. The Social Democratic Party says “We did not make the revolution in order to recognize again today the bloody government of mercenaries [meaning the Freikorps].” “Paralyze all economic life. Not a hand must move. No proletariat shall help the military dictatorship.”

I would imagine the designation of these events as the “Kapp Putsch” was retrospective, but a word about that word: the German “putsch,” meaning roughly the same thing as coup d’etat, with an emphasis on suddenness, entered the English language with the Kapp Putsch. The German word originated in Swiss German, entering German German through reports of Swiss uprisings in the 1830s.

Woodrow Wilson sends the Allies a plan to resume trade with Russia without recognizing its government.

William Jennings Bryan says he’d accept the nomination for president if it was demanded of him, although he doesn’t think that will happen. He does want to go to the Convention as a delegate, to oppose “the reactionaries and friends of the saloon.”

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