Today -100: September 4, 1921: Of miners, cigars, and protocols

400 armed striking miners in West Virginia surrender to federal troops. One of the army’s bomber planes crashes.

Cuba is rushing 20,000 lady cigars to London for fashionable London lady smokers. They’re also taking up pipes, supposedly.

The London Times published last month, and the NYT reprints, evidence from the former’s Constantinople correspondent that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is not only fake, but that it’s a rip-off of a very obscure 1864 French-language book published, possibly, in Geneva. I’m unpersuaded by the correspondent’s claim that he heard this from an unnamed expatriate Russian who found the book among some books he bought off an Okhrana officer who had fled to Turkey and he was struck by the similarities to the Protocols, but the book’s title page is missing so it can’t be identified... I mean it is true that “Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu” is a real 1864 book that was the basis for much of the Protocols, with “the Jews” replacing members of Napoleon III’s administration, but the story of how this fact reached the Times is very implausible.

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