Wednesday, March 24, 2021

Today -100: March 24, 1921: A minor state of siege


Violence in Ireland is ramping up. In various attacks on police in retaliation for executions, the IRA mostly lose, but a bunch of cops die too. The government plans to continue with the executions. And with elections in May for the two parliaments in North and South Ireland.

Germany defaults on the payment of 1 billion marks gold, which is equivalent to some money, saying it can’t pay and it disputes the Allied valuation of reparations already paid in goods.

There’s a Communist uprising in Hamburg, Dresden, Leipzig, etc. The Senate (whether state or federal is unclear) declares a “minor state of siege.”

Greece has probably gone to war with Turkey.

The Chicago police ban the sale of Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent on the streets, following a petition from a Jewish Republican group. There’s a similar ban in Toledo, imposed after a newsboy selling it was beaten up.

A group representing movie theatres in California bans the film Fate, starring Clara Smith Hamon, because it would “unduly and improperly put a premium on violence.” Let’s go back a bit. Jake Hamon was an Oklahoma oil man who took Clara as a mistress when she was 16 and he was 40. He paid his nephew to 1) marry her, and 2) leave the state immediately afer the marriage, so that Jake and Clara would have the same last name and could stay in hotels without awkward questions. Last summer Hamon went to the Republican convention to buy himself a candidate, any candidate, and wound up backing Harding in exchange for being named secretary of interior so that he could have access to the oil reserve at Tea Pot Dome. But it turned out that Florence Harding was distantly related to Hamon’s abandoned wife, and she insisted that Hamon return to his wife and children before being nominated. When Hamon told Clara that he was doing so last November, she shot him, and while he insisted before dying that he had accidentally shot himself while cleaning his gun, no one believed him and she was arrested and tried, though acquitted. And now she’s starring in a film, playing herself, although I can’t find any details about the exact plot of the film, which was never shown anywhere because of this sort of moral hissy fit.

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