Today -100: February 10, 1921: Dog bites finger

US Marines raid a newspaper in Nicaragua that said some bad things about marines (we are not informed what those bad things were), and destroy its presses.

NYC Special Assistant District Attorney Charles Whitman (presumably not the former DA and governor of that name)(a later article says it is that Charles Whitman, but I’m not sure) is investigating whether the NYPD is covering up murders. There were 679 murders in 1920 in NY County, for which there were 78 indictments and one (1) conviction for first-degree murder (plus 7 for second-degree and 28, if I’m reading the blurred numbers correctly, for manslaughter). Some of the 679 were suicides. Poor police work led to a lot of murder cases being plead out, one for a conviction for assault. Also, only 9 car thieves were sent to jail. And some cops are filling booze orders for restaurants and saloons.

France says it has no remaining black troops occupying the Rhine, though Germans have been whining about them endlessly. There are some Moroccans, who the NYT carefully explains “are not black men but are Moors” and “As a rule they are very well behaved.” There are also some Malagasy, who are used as officers’ servants because colonialism.

In Munich, the Nationalist Party and the Nationalist Labor Party (which is the NYT’s translation of Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, Nazi for short) are refusing to comply with the Entente demand for disarmament. The NYT describes the Nationalist Labor Party as consisting “mainly of former officers, students disguised as workmen and unemployed who are hired with money furnished by royalists. They wear large red badges emblazoned with the swastika, which has become the emblem of anti-foreign sentiment”. They recently disrupted a performance of Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen (La Ronde) since “theatre audiences are thought to consist largely of war profiteers and other drones” and they think the play is immoral.

President Harding will have a pet alligator. No word yet on its name. Or gender. I’m thinking Daisy in either case.

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