Today -100: October 18, 1920: Of expulsions, hunger strikers, hunger strikes, and how the history of the world is never changed

So what’s Woodrow Wilson been doing since his stroke a year ago? Netflix and chillin’. That is, he’s been watching one movie a day in the White House. He used to like vaudeville, which he discovered pretty late in life. He’s also been reading French historical novels and romances.

The German government orders Grigory Zinoviev and Lisowsky, who have been part of the Halle conference that split the German Independent Socialists, out of the country. Both factions are claiming the party’s name (and resources), but the real question is how to name a splinter of a party whose name already denotes splinteriness: the German Super-Independent Socialists? The pro-Moscow group claims 21 of the party’s 81 Reichstag deputies.

The first of the Irish hunger-strikers, Michael Fitzgerald, one of the prisoners in Cork jail, dies after 68 days not eating. Lloyd George blames his having been in prison 13 months without a trial on the failure of jurors to show and then Fitzgerald’s hunger strike.

British Secretary for War Winston Churchill says if Ireland became independent, there would be a civil war with Ulster and Sinn Féin would be joined by Americans and staffed by German officers and it might lead to conflict with the US. He also says Britain won’t surrender to foul play and that assassination has never changed the history of the world. Er, how did the Great War begin, just remind us?

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