Today -100: January 12, 1923: Of klantowns, ruhrs, dorms, and dead kings

The Mer Rouge hearings hear from current mayor R.L. Dade, who says he resigned from the Klan after just 2 meetings and denounced it (but is unable to remember the name of a single kluxer he saw at those meetings; whatever turns that mer rouge seems to induce face-blindness). Dade says the town is in violent chaos because of the Klan. He says former mayor Bunnie McKoin faked the attack on himself. Elsewhere in the hearings was this delightful exchange:

French PM Raymond Poincaré wins the approval of the National Assembly for occupying the Ruhr, 478-86. The opposition seems to be led by one Léon Blum, the first NYT mention I’ve spotted of the future prime minister. France insists this isn’t a military occupation because all those soldiers are just there to protect engineers and officials. With machine guns and tanks.

At Lausanne, the Allies give up their demand that Christians in Turkey be exempt from conscription.

Harvard’s freshman dorms are compulsory, because democracy and shit. Black students are, of course, excluded from them. Which has been especially embarrassing when incoming students Harvard hadn’t realized were black turn out to be black.

Twice-deposed Greek king Constantine dies in exile in Palermo.

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Today -100: January 11, 1923: Ku Klux got daddy

French troops move into the Ruhr, occupying Essen. Now, why did they need to do that at 4:45 a.m.? Britain, which opposed this move, nevertheless permits French troops to travel through its Rhineland occupation zone. The German Coal Syndicate moves its hq to Hamburg from Essen, so France might have to figure out how to run the Ruhr coal mines on its own. “We do not propose to become the slaves of Poincaré,” says one of the mine operators.

Harding ends the US occupation of its zone of the Rhineland and calls the troops home, like immediately. He’s not saying this is a rebuke of the French move, but it’s not exactly subtle. Those troops are bummed at the end of a super-cushy berth. The Germans worry that if Britain follows suit, they’ll be even more at the mercy of French occupiers.

At the Mer Rouge hearings, the widow of one of the victims, Thomas Richards, testifies about the first time the Klan kidnapped him, a few days before they came back and killed him (first mention I think I’ve seen of him leaving behind two children, by the way; when they kidnapped him the first time his 4-year-old daughter was left by herself; “Ku Klux got daddy,” she reported). Mrs Richards names names. Other witnesses, including a girl who the Klan ordered to leave town, identify local kluxers involved in various kidnappings and the sheriff who just watched one of them happen. That sheriff is in the court in his official, um, sitting-in-court capacity, which is one reason, along with a general atmosphere of intimidation, that witnesses seem to be revealing less than they know.

The Lausanne Conference accepts Turkey’s proposal for a forcible exchange of populations, with 600,000 Greeks to be expelled from Turkey and 450,000 Turks from Greece. Turkey would have been happy for it to be “voluntary” but the Greeks insisted it be compulsory and the Allies sided with them. The Greeks in Constantinople (200,000 or so) are exempted, as are 300,000 Turks in Western Thrace. In practice this will be more a religious cleansing than an ethnic one, with Greece choosing Muslims as expellees. The Allies also give up their demand that minorities in Turkey only be brought before special courts with judges appointed by outside countries and their demand for an Armenian homeland.

172 Indians are sentenced to death for the riots in Lucknow last February, when 17 native police were killed at Chauri-Chaura.

United Artists offers child actor Jackie Coogan (The Kid, The Addams Family), age 8, $500,000 + 60% of the profits to appear in 4 films. His mother will steal most of that money, as he’ll find when he turns 21. (Update: Metro will outbid UA.)

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Today -100: January 10, 1923: Of coal defaults, race massacres, and caliphates

The Reparations Commission, as expected, declares Germany in voluntary default of coal reparations deliveries (16% shy of the demands), with France, Belgium & Italy voting against Britain. Roland Boyden, the American observer, says Germany defaulted because the commission and indeed the Treaty of Versailles put an impossible burden on it.

The Supreme Court is hearing cases brought by the NAACP about the death sentences on 12 black men for the race conflicts in Elaine, Arkansas in 1919, when a meeting in a church about farm conditions (i.e., peonage) was shot up by a white “posse.” The state has been claiming that the posse thwarted a plot to massacre white people, ginned up by one man purely to make money, who “played upon the ignorance and superstition of a race of children”. The NAACP notes that the men were railroaded, tortured into false confessions, and subjected to one-hour trials before being sentenced to death.

The All-India Caliphate Conference threatens that if the Lausanne Conference breaks down and Britain goes to war with Turkey, Muslims in Indian will back the latter and launch a civil disobedience campaign.

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Today -100: January 9, 1923: They will all have white faces

France is preparing 25,000 troops to occupy the Ruhr whenever Germany is declared in default of its coal reparations and, says Le Matin’s foreign editor, “they will all have white faces, so as to give the least offence to the United States Senate.”

The German government will call for passive resistance and will say that the occupation tears up the Versailles Treaty and therefore Germany doesn’t have to pay any more reparations.

Headline of the Day -100:  

The Young Communists end a demo in Red Square with a “burning of all gods.”

Chicago’s Methodist ministers condemn the city’s chief justice for barring KKK members from juries. They say it virtually deprives klansmen of their rights of citizenship.

Kodak will start selling a home movie camera.

The Irish Free State executes 5 soldiers who deserted to the rebels.

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Today -100: January 8, 1923: Ethnic cleansing: accomplished.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Without comment:

Lenin is reported to be about to die, as was the custom.

Harding would really prefer to keep Congress in recess from March to December, even if it means failing to get some of his legislative agenda, like the ship subsidies bill.

Headline of the Day -100:  

I bet he will, I bet he will.

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Today -100: January 7, 1923: I believe the men were most inhumanly tortured

The hearings in Bastrop, Louisiana on the murders of Watt Daniels & Thomas Richards is told that they were tortured with some sort of specially made device. The pathologist and the NYT spare no detail about the tortures the Klan mob inflicted on them, but I will. They were tortured to extract information about the supposed assassination attempt on former mayor/current goblin Bunnie McKoin. The other 3 men kidnapped that night, including the father of one of the murdered men, describe the ordeal.

Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover refuses Pres. Harding’s offer to take over as interior secretary. Which makes sense, since he’s turned Commerce into a kind of super-department with its tentacles in everyone’s business. Interior would be a step down.

Turkish delegate to the Lausanne Conference Riza Nur Bey walks out of a discussion of the Armenians. The Allies demand an apology.

The Senate votes 57-6 for a resolution calling for the withdrawal of US troops from the Rhine.

NY State Senator Robert Lacey (D-Buffalo) (or senator-elect, depending on when the NY Senate term starts) is indicted for dynamiting a train during a strike last August.

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Today -100: January 6, 1923: Of Rosewood, peyote, mercury, assassinations, and prisoners of war

The hearings in Bastrop, Louisiana investigating the murders of Watt Daniels & Thomas Richards begin. There are many avowed kluxers spectating. The judge calls on Morehouse Parish Sheriff Carpenter (also a klansman, natch) to prevent witnesses being intimidated, and has a recess so everyone can take their guns home.

A white mob is rampaging through the mostly black town of Rosewood, Florida, searching for Jesse Hunter, who escaped from a chain gang. He is suspected, because he is black, of assaulting a married white woman who claims she was attacked by a black man but is probably covering for her white lover. This shit has been going on for a few days (the NYT is just catching up), as white mobs kill black people and burn houses, churches, all of Rosewood really. Black residents are hiding in the swamps. Jesse Hunter will never be caught. The exact death toll of the Rosewood massacre remains unknown.

Wish I could say whether I recommend the movie Rosewood, but it’s been too long since I’ve seen it.

The Senate discusses a provision in the Interior Dept budget, $25,000 for the suppression of peyote use (which is legal) among Indians. Several senators have to have explained to them what peyote is.

Bellevue tries to cure a woman of mercury poisoning by grafting a sheep’s kidney into her body. She dies. Because the poisoning was too advanced and definitely not because the operation was a stupid idea, the doctors say.

The New Jersey Education Commissioner orders Hoboken to rehire Clara Nommensen, who they illegally fired when she got married.

Alois Rašín, Czechoslovakia’s finance minister, is assassinated by an anarchist (?) I guess because of his plan to reduce the wages of state employees. Rašín himself had been imprisoned as part of an Austro-Hungarian crackdown on Czech nationalists in 1894 and sentenced to death for treason against the Double Monarchy in 1916.

Right-wing members of the German Reichstag will ask the government to do something about Lothar Witzke, who’s evidently the last German prisoner of war still held by the United States. He was captured and interned after his ship was sunk during the Great War, escaped, and did sabotage work in the US and Mexico, including the Mare Island Naval Shipyard explosion in 1917 (maybe), until he was captured in Mexico. He’ll be pardoned in September, serve in the Abwehr during WW II and be elected to the Hamburg Parliament in 1949.

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Today -100: January 5, 1923: Of potential wars, engaging princes, lynchings, and cocos

Headline of the Day -100:  

At the Paris conference (always with the conferences, these people), France and Britain (and Belgium and Italy) aren’t agreeing on what to do about German reparations and France increasingly looks like, yes, invading Germany and occupying the resource-rich Ruhr.

Two days ago, the Daily News (London) reported that the Prince of Wales was engaged to an (unnamed) Italian princess, and the NYT repeated it on the front page. Now the News says, and the NYT repeats on the front page that he’s actually engaged to a “daughter of a well-known Scottish Peer,” which everyone understands to mean Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. Closer than the Italian princess story, but still wide of the mark: Ms Double-Barrel will actually marry the Prince of Wales’s brother Bertie in March. 

A convent in Quebec and a Catholic school in Winnipeg burn down. There’s been a wave of arson attacks at Catholic institutions in Canada in the last year.

Leslie Legett, a black man or possibly a “Spaniard,” is lynched in Shreveport, Louisiana for associating with white women. Police had been tailing him but were unable to obtain evidence of this “crime.” Sorry, I mean the associating-with-white-woman crime; obviously they haven’t managed to obtain evidence of the kidnapping and lynching.

The, I guess grand jury hearings, on the murders of Watt Daniels and Thomas Richards by a Klan mob in Mer Rouge, Louisiana begin. Now if only they can find anyone to sit on the grand jury who ISN’T a klansman. Attorney General Coco and Adj. Gen. Toombs are present, while former mayor/goblin Dr. Bunnie McKoin has given up resisting extradition from Maryland and will be back shortly. Coco, Toombs and Bunny sounds like the worst children’s book ever.

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Today -100: January 4, 1923: Of war widows, fatties, and deaths at sea

Pres. Harding vetoes a bill to increase the pensions of veterans of the Civil War and the Mexican-American War and of the widows of veterans of those wars as well as the War of 1812. He says the US has no obligation to women who marry Civil War vets 58 years after the war (the existing law provides only for women who married prior to 1905). He complains about the bill’s “heedlessness for the Government’s financial problems” (the government has no financial problems; Harding just wants to reduce the budget).

Ohio and the province of Alberta join other locales banning Fatty Arbuckle films.

The Ku Klux Klan warns the Wisconsin state prohibition dept that unless it acts against officials of a certain city (unidentified to the press) where booze is sold, it will.

Headline of the Day -100:  

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Today -100: January 3, 1923: Fall falls

Headline of the Day -100:  

Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall resigns, effective 2 months from now, citing the press of his private business concerns (his cattle business is doing badly, even with the infusion of all that Teapot Dome bribe money).

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Today -100: January 2, 1923: Splitters

The Indian National Congress splits after the “extremists,” as the NYT naturally calls them, adopt Gandhi’s policy of abstaining from elections to the weak Legislative Councils established by the British. President C.R. Das resigns to form a new group, the Congress-Khilafat Swaraj Party, which will stand in elections.

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Today -100: January 1, 1923: Every one appears to be smiling and happy in the streets

Headline of the Day -100:  

The Tuskegee Institute says there were 57 lynchings in the US in 1922, 51 black people & 6 white, with Texas in the lead with 18, followed by Georgia 11, Mississippi 9, Florida 5 etc. 10 lynchers were sent to jail.

Harold Teegeston, a witness in the Mer Rouge, Louisiana Klan murders, is kidnapped, as was the custom.

Totally Even-Handed Headline of the Day -100:  

“Mussolini has awakened Italy. People now go about their work in a cheerful and contented manner. The spirit of mutual courtesy and toleration exists in relations between one class and another. Every one appears to be smiling and happy in the streets.”

Germany proposes a no-war compact: the countries with interests in the Rhine would pledge not to go to war with each other for a generation without a referendum. Some neutral nation would be trustee of the pledge. France rejects the idea.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Footpads. How very 18th century.

Hungary bans the works of Walt Whitman, as well as those of Marx & Lenin and most Hungarian-language papers from abroad. Something about their “destructive tendency.”

Evidently under orders from Moscow, the French Communist paper L’Humanité fires most of its staff for excessive bouginess. The party will be purged, and 90% of parliamentary candidates will have to be workers. The intellectuals are upset by that.

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Today -100: December 31, 1922: Of people giving stuff away

With Al Smith due to take the NY governor’s office tomorrow, Tammany’s Boss Charles  Murphy takes a suite in the Hotel Ten Eyck in Albany so he can give out all the patronage jobs.

Henry Morgenthau, former US ambassador to Turkey, has a cunning plan: why not give Constantinople to Russia?

At the All-Union Congress of Soviets, Trotsky says after the forthcoming revolution in Europe, “America, that Babylonian tower of capitalism, will fall in ruins also.”

Looks like the NYT missed the news that the Congress created a new thing called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

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Today -100: December 30, 1922: I wouldn’t live long enough to smell the smoke

The Department of Agriculture is advertising for Americans to eat more meat. Lots and lots of meat. “Meat is the cornerstone of the diet in our Western civilization,” it says.

The Ku Klux Klan says it will investigate the Moorhouse County, Louisiana murders itself and “outlaw” any members found guilty. But that lynch mob wore black hoods and we wear white ones so it probably wasn’t us, they say. Meanwhile, former Mer Rouge mayor/cyclops Dr. Bunnie McKoin is resisting extradition from Maryland, saying “The sight of me would be the signal for the beginning of the greatest slaughter of human life this country has ever known. I wouldn’t live long enough to smell the smoke.” 

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Today -100: December 29, 1922: Of lynchings, guarantees, and Ulysses

2 confessions in Morehouse Parish, Louisiana implicate 45 people in the abduction and murder in August of Watt Daniels and Thomas Richards, the men whose bodies surfaced in Lake La Fourche showing evidence of having been tortured and mutilated (castrated, not that the NYT would ever use the word).

At the Lausanne Conference, the Allies & the US are demanding that the capitulations Turkey has abolished (treaties giving exemption from Turkish laws & taxes to foreigners) be replaced with “guarantees,” that is some form of special protection, such as foreigners only being tried by foreign judges, which for some reason Turkey claims would be an infringement of its sovereignty. Lord Curzon says Turkey’s legal system is based on Muslim law and its judges uneducated and lazy.

How have I missed until now that the British High Commissioner to Constantinople is named Sir Horace Rumbold? If you’re wondering about the name of his She Who Must Be Obeyed, it’s the scarily formidable Etheldred Constantia Fane.

James Joyce’s Ulysses is banned in the UK. It’s already banned in the US. It’ll be unbanned in the US in the ‘30s, not sure about UK.

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Today -100: December 28, 1922: Of dynamite, consulates, and Mosul

A 21-year-old Klansman, Wesley Holyoake, is arrested in Indiana with a couple of suitcases of dynamite. He says he used dynamite, although presumably not this dynamite, to attract attention to a cross-burning ceremony on Christmas Eve. As you do.

There are accusations that US District Attorney for western Louisiana P.H. Mecom has been interfering with the investigation into the Klan murder of those two guys whose bodies turned up in Lake La Fourche, threatening to arrest Justice Dept investigators, tipping off kluxers, etc.

Éamon de Valera aide Laurence Ginnell comes to New York and seizes the Irish Free State Consulate in the name of the Republic.

The Turkish position at the Lausanne Conference is now that if it doesn’t get Mosul (and its oil) (and its Kurds), it won’t sign a treaty about anything else it’s agreed to. Lord Curzon is more or less threatening war.

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Today -100: December 27, 1922: Of bunnies and wood

Dr. Bunnie McKoin, former mayor of Mer Rouge, Louisiana, is arrested at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore for whatever his role might be in the KKK killings of 2 men in August. He says people hated him because as mayor until 1920 he tried to stop “such evils” as gambling and white men associating with black women. He accuses the deceased of having been bootleggers, gunmen, and men who kept black concubines. (Incidentally, McKoin has been accused of murder before, in 1916. If I ever find out what that was about, you’ll be the first to know.)

The Allied Reparation Commission declares Germany in default on wood deliveries, Britain voting against.

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Today -100: December 26, 1922: Dry Christmas

The NYPD claim the city experienced its driest Christmas ever. Not a single person charged with intoxication. Oh, and 6 people died of wood alcohol poisoning. 

Christmas:

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Today -100: December 25, 1922: Of boycotts and nonagenarians

14 members of the New Britain, Connecticut police dept refuse to attend drill because they heard that their instructor (who also works for the YMCA) attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting, pardon, “klonkave.”

Ezra Meeker, who rode the Oregon Trail in an ox-cart and was the first mayor of Puyallup, Washington, will hold a dinner for his 92nd birthday in NYC, to which he’s inviting every man (just men?) over 90. He’s previously done this in Seattle. He’s serving possum soup, because of course he is. Attendees are invited to explain how they got so fucking old. Presumably a marsupial-heavy diet.

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Today -100: December 24, 1922: Of amnesties, bunnies, and bootleggers

Italy amnesties everyone convicted of political crimes through the time the Fascists seized power. I’m assuming it will not be interpreted to include Communists or Socialists. The Ministry of (ahem) Justice says the recent “manifestations” were not really hostile to the state but had the same aims as the state.

Those bodies recovered from Lake La Fourche, Louisiana show signs of flogging and broken bones. One T.J. Burnett, a former deputy sheriff (no explanation as yet as to why he’s former), is arrested for murder by the feds. The local KKK is denying any involvement and offering to assist law enforcement. All the violence started when Dr. Bunnie McKoin, the mayor of Mer Rouge and local Klan leader, a cyclops I believe, in a very Klan-ridden town, claimed that an attempt had been made to kill him. He says he was called out at night to a bogus house call and his car was shot up; the feds think he shot it up himself because evidence. So after this incident that may or may not have occurred last August, the Klan kidnapped and tortured people to get them to give up McKoin’s assailants, including the two found in the lake. After that, McKoin disappeared, claiming he was going to John Hopkins, which says they’ve never heard of him (actually he’ll be arrested there later this week).

Headline of the Day -100:  

Giant negro.

Sen. Charles Curtis, chairman of the Rules Committee, orders the police to arrest all bootleggers entering the Senate office building. There have been rumors about bootleggers operating in the congressional office buildings.

Having dropped its plans to serialize Lloyd George’s memoirs (if he ever gets around to writing them), the NYT chooses an obvious successor, Will Rogers, to write a weekly Sunday column.

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Today -100: December 23, 1922: We are not in the habit of giving Christmas presents

Howard Carter is doing escorted tours of King Tutanhkamen’s tomb, but the Egyptian government plans to seize the contents, with Carter and Lord Carnarvon not getting any of the loot.

At the Lausanne Conference, a French rep on the minorities sub-committee suggests to the Turkish rep, “At this Christmas time it would be most becoming for Turkey to give the Christian minorities the good results which would come from a less stern attitude on their part.” To which the Turk replied, “We are not in the habit of giving Christmas presents.”

The ACLU objects to NYC Mayor John Hylan’s request to Pres. Harding to suppress the Texas Klan newspaper Colonel Mayfield’s Weekly (by banning it from the mails).

A large and mysterious dynamite blast in Lake La Fourche, Louisiana, brings to the surface the bodies of 2 men seized by a bunch of kluxers on August 24 in Mer Rouge. White men, one might add. Presumably the dynamiters intended to destroy the bodies before the feds dredged the lake. Investigators sent by the state to Mer Rouge are being guarded by National Guards with machine guns.

Eleanor Boardman, an unknown actor in 1922 who will co-star in The Crowd (and marry King Vidor), is bitten by a camel on the set of... I dunno, none of the movies she made at this time sound especially camel-centric... and will probably lose her arm (pretty sure I’d have noticed if she was missing an arm in her later films).

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Today -100: December 22, 1922: Sometimes it is expedient that one man should be sacrificed for his group

The Blackshirts of Alessandria, northern Italy, decide to eliminate drunkenness by forcing any inebriated person they find to consume castor oil, and warning them that a second offense will meet with a cudgeling.

Politicians, club women, and Karens generally strongly disapprove any possible revival of Fatty Arbuckle’s career. The NYT, which thinks Fatty was “only the victim of a mischance,” nevertheless says Hays made a bad decision: “Sometimes it is expedient that one man should be sacrificed for his group.”

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Today -100: December 21, 1922: Of “militias,” peacemakers, and fatties

Mussolini will set up a volunteer militia operating alongside the regular army, under his personal control and recruited from the Blackshirts.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Former interior minister Stanisław Wojciechowski is voted the new president of Poland. A former exile who was deported from Poland by the Russians, he worked for independence (I’m assuming that’s the case for every current Polish politician).

Chief Film Censor Will Hays says it’s ok for Fatty Arbuckle to work in the film industry again because he’s promised Hays he will keep on going straight. The mayor of Indianapolis disagrees and will prevent any Fatty films appearing.

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Today -100: December 20, 1922: Of railroad-wreckers, duels, the spirit of Klan-kraft, and straitses

Former British Prime Minister Earl Balfour gives a lecture at Glasgow U. on telepathy.

Ireland executes 7 people for wrecking railroads in County Kildare. The IRA have been burning the houses of their enemies; the 7-year-old son of Deputy Sean McGarry dies of burns.

Belgium’s Minister of Colonies Louis Franck challenges former foreign minister Paul Hymans to a duel.

The Allied Patriotic Societies tries to get the NY Board of Alderman to ban anyone speaking foreign languages on public streets and squares. It dies in committee. 

Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans says the Klan will never unmask. Disdainful of Kansas Gov. Henry Allen, who he ran into yesterday in a Washington hotel, he says “The spirit of Klan-Kraft has enwrapped the United States in a mantle of love for country which designing and ambitious politicians cannot break, and in a few brief years the influence of the Klan will have so engulfed the thought of the country that we can expect intelligent legislation from the Congress of the United States which will drag down the white flag of inertia” etc etc.

At the Lausanne Conference, Lord Curzon tells Turkey it can accept the Allied position on the Straits or go fuck itself, and there is discussion of an Allied demand that Christian nations be allowed to remove Christian women from harems in Turkey if they don’t want to be in harems. Turkey says homes are sacred and anyway there are no women in harems who don’t wish to be there.

There’s a rumor in Germany that Henry Ford is financing Adolf Hitler’s movement. He’s certainly spending a suspiciously large amount of money. And Hitler has a picture of Ford on the wall next to his desk. (No, Ford did not subsidize Hitler).

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Today -100: December 19, 1922: That damned elusive pimpernel

Éamon de Valera attended morning mass in Dublin, presumably this past Sunday. A couple of ratfinks recognized him and went to the military, but he was gone by the time they arrived.

The idea of creating a Central American Union is officially over.

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Today -100: December 18, 1922: Why thank you, we won’t let the door hit us in the ass, thank you for what I’m sure is a quaint Irish expression of cordiality!

All the remaining British troops leave southern Ireland. Col. Commandant Tanner views the joyous Dublin crowds waving as his soldiers depart as a sign of great “cordiality toward us,” which seems like a misinterpretation, but a very British one.

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Today -100: December 17, 1922: Yeah, but is it art?

Polish President Gabriel Narutowicz is assassinated, 5 days after assuming office, by artist Eligiusz Niewiadomski at an art gallery. Niewiadomski is a nationalist with a reputation for looniness since a 1918 car accident which required trepanning. Narutowicz was chatting with the British ambassador, who congratulated him on being elected president. “Condolences, you should say,” Narutowicz responded aaaaaand then he was shot 3 times in the back.

Poland has never had a president, king, prince, anything, assassinated before; they were quite proud/smug about that. But how many assassinations have happened in art galleries? Google tells me the Russian ambassador to Turkey was assassinated in one in 2016. There were photos. There were memes (no link because Jesus, people). I don’t remember this at all.

Speaker of the House of Deputies Maciej Rataj, now acting president until the House elects a new president, asks Gen. Władysław Sikorski to serve as prime minister.

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Today -100: December 16, 1922: Pembroke is another matter entirely

Headline of the Day -100:  

The NYT admits this story may not be true but puts it on the front page anyway. The Borneo chieftain supposedly tells the missionaries, “Of course no Balliol man could think of eating a fellow Balliol man.”

At the Lausanne Conference, Britain and Turkey are arguing over who gets Mosul and the region’s oil. Turkey thinks the area should be part of Turkey, Britain says Irak is part of their Mesopotamia League of Nations mandate. Turkey also says no to an Armenian homeland and that “Kurds” are not a separate race.

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Today -100: December 15, 1922: I was defeated by the Ku Klux Klan of Oklahoma

Headline of the Day -100:  

They aim to wipe out all holidays of “decadent religions.” And no angel decorations: “Angels are symbols used to enslave the child’s mind.” But there will still be celebrations: Moscow children will be treated, if that is the word, to satirical plays on such subjects as the Lausanne Conference and the Kerensky regime.

At the Lausanne Conference, Turkey responds to British Foreign Minister Lord Curzon’s imperious threat to break up the conference if Turkey doesn’t provide guarantees to its Christian minorities. Turkey says it will join the League of Nations so that the League (rather than the special commission of Allied nations Curzon is demanding) would oversee the treatment of minorities as it does for Central European countries, to which the Jewish populations of Romania, Austria etc are doubtless saying, “Er, yeah, about that...”

Rep. Alice Robertson (R-OK) blames her re-election defeat on the Klan, accusing the winner, William Hastings of being a klansman.

Two Communist members of the French National Assembly, Marcel Cachin (editor of L’Humanité) and Paul Vaillant-Coururier, are sentenced to 6 months for articles inciting mutiny in French troops, presumably related to the possible occupation of the Ruhr. Not that it matters because they have parliamentary immunity.

Two black accused horse thieves are kidnapped from jail in Pilot Point, Texas and... we don’t know. The same thing happened a few months ago and those black men were never seen again, an incident that didn’t lead to the authorities actually guarding the jail at night. A note left at the local newspaper says, “Both negroes got what they had coming. Let this be a warning to all negro loafers. Negroes get a job or leave town.”

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Today -100: December 14, 1922: Of duels, state presidents, bodyguards, and rights of correction

Uruguayan President Baltasar Brum challenges political opponent Luis Alberto Herrera to a duel, which is legal if the duel is first approved by a tribunal of honor. They fight in front of hundreds of government officials, firing two shots each. No one is hit.

Bavaria’s reactionary monarchists are trying to create an office of state president of Bavaria, which would sooner or later be occupied by Crown Prince Ruprecht. They’re encouraging Hitler to stir up the Bavarian youth, á la Mussolini, “but the reactionary chiefs do not take him seriously.”

Hitler now has a “bodyguard” of 10,000 uniformed men, and has been visiting states beyond Bavaria, although Württemberg police did stop a planned meeting in Goeppingen.

A judge in Paris rules that a husband has the legal right to hit his wife, the “right of correction.”

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Today -100: December 13, 1922: Sigh

Following the riots attending Gabriel Narutowicz’s swearing-in as president of Poland, the interior minister and the Warsaw chief of police resign, and the latter will be prosecuted. There’s a general strike in protest of the right-wing violence and the power is off in Warsaw. The Nationalists are organizing an economic boycott of Jews.

The rector of the University of Vienna bars Jews from professorships.

Labor Secretary James Davis talks about the need to “educate” foreign-born people, both aliens and naturalized citizens, to “eradicat[e] the false doctrines of radicalism”. He proposes requiring every alien to enroll in government-run “training” on the glories of American democracy, with the added benefit that enrolment would bring to government notice those who “actively resist organized government or are disposed to treat lightly the institutions of law and order.” And of course these people, with all their resisting and treating lightly, would all be deported.

“Elections” are held in Italian cities where Blackshirts forced left-wing council members to resign. You can guess who wins.

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Today -100: December 12, 1922: Of inaugurations, occupations, seductions, scolds, lynchings, and double jeopardies

Gabriel Narutowicz is sworn in as Poland’s new (and indeed the republic’s first) president. The inauguration is marked by right-wing riots (they think Narutowicz is too supportive of the Jews) in which 4 people are killed, as was the custom. Still, I’m sure this won’t mar a long and successful presidency.

British PM Bonar Law tells France that if it occupies the Ruhr, it will do so alone.

A Jewish deputation complains to King Ferdinand of Romania about students (high school? college? I don’t know what “higher schools” means) attacking Jews and Jewish shops in the major cities.

Mississippi Governor Lee M. Russell prevails in the lawsuit brought against him by Frances Birkhead for seduction and impairment of health (he forced her to get an abortion, leaving her sterile). The jury is all male and all married.

A Trenton, New Jersey jury (including 4 women) finds Mrs Marie Sarmosky guilty of being a common scold (that’s the worst kind of scold). She uses bad language and throws water at people, which just sounds like Trenton to me.

George Gay, a black man, is lynched in Streetman, Texas. He’d been arrested for an attack on a white woman, who was unable to identify him as the attacker.

The Supreme Court rules that people can be prosecuted for the same offense under both federal and state Prohibition laws without violating the 5th Amendment ban on double jeopardy.

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Today -100: December 11, 1922: Of hostages, kkkhurches, stantungs, and retaliations

Adolf Hitler is reported to have said that Jews in Bavaria should be taken hostage in large numbers to... influence... business and international finance in favor of Germany.

In defiance of NYC Mayor John Hylan’s order to the police to get rid of the Klan in the city, a masked kluxer gives an advertised talk at the Washington Ave. Baptist Church in Brooklyn. Cops are there but don’t do anything. He speaks about the history of the Klan, White and Protestant supremacy, etc. The pastor then endorses his remarks, but denies being a member himself. (Update: the pastor will admit that this was a stunt and the guy wasn’t an actual klansman).

Japan gives Shantung back to China which, lacking a proper military to maintain order, will give local bandits $100,000 not to make trouble.

The IRA retaliates for the execution of its 4 leaders, which was in retaliation for etc, by burning the homes of the postmaster general, a prison governor, and another government official.

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Today -100: December 10, 1922: Of kluxers, shady dancing, and Barrymores

NYC Commissioner of Accounts David Hirshfield says any city employee found to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan will be fired.

The NYT thinks 75 or so members of the next Congress owe their election to the Ku Klux Klan, although it points out that since the Klan keeps its membership lists secret we don’t know how many of them are themselves actual kluxers (a lot of them have question marks to this day).

Other things NYC doesn’t like: “shady” dance steps. The NYPD call together dance hall owners to voluntarily agree to stop them – or else. Everyone agrees that the “Chicago” and “balconading” are bad. Also any slow dances. And “parking,” which is just a couple standing on the dance floor but not dancing.

Play of the Day -100:

Looks super-intense, huh?

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Today -100: December 9, 1922: Of contempt for law, reprisals, sopranos, and Cubist plays

Harding gives the State of the Union Address (still not so called), on something like an hour’s notice. Fightin’ Bob La Follette fails to applaud him.

Harding says he will call a governors’ conference to discuss enforcement of the 18th Amendment, which he calls a “nationwide scandal,” “the most demoralizing factor in our public life,” and says that “easy contempt for the Prohibition law... breed[s] a contempt for law which will ultimately destroy the Republic.”

He calls for constitutional amendments to ban child labor and something about tax-exempt securities.

And registration of aliens.

And he wants to prevent forest fires.

Really, it’s a long list of proposals for which there is no time in the remainder of the lame-duck 67th Congress.

One day after the assassination of Dáil deputy Sean Hales and wounding of Deputy Speaker Pádraic Ó Máille, four IRA leaders, including Commandant Rory O’Connor, who led the takeover of the Four Courts in April, are executed in reprisal – the government uses the actual word – after a hasty court-martial held the night of the assassination. A proclamation says anyone found with a bomb, firearm, or ammunition may be summarily executed on the signature of any 2 members of the Army Council.

Assholes are still going after German singers. The American League is protesting a Johanna Gadski concert in L.A.

A Parisian audience riots at Raymond Roussel’s Cubist play (whatever that might mean) “Locus Solus.” The play is about playing music for earthworms. Whatever. After this one performance, the theatre cancels subsequent ones, claiming equipment malfunction.

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Today -100: December 8, 1922: It has been shown that Greeks and Turks cannot live side by side

Dáil deputy Sean Hales is killed and Deputy Speaker Pádraic Ó Máille (1st day in the job) wounded by presumed IRA assassins (who will never be caught) in Dublin in retaliation for the execution of IRA members.

The Allies (and the US) tell Turkey that the 200,000 Greeks in Constantinople should not be expelled or, you know, massacred. The Turkish delegate at Lausanne says “It has been shown that Greeks and Turks cannot live side by side, and the only solution is for the Greeks to go.”

Grady Rutledge, secretary of the American Unity League, an anti-Klan, mostly Catholic group responsible for Spotlight, which has been publishing the names of Chicago members of the KKK, comes to New York to start the same sort of activity there, with plans to go nation-wide. I believe the naming & shaming method only ever really happened in Chicago, and while very successful there in dissuading people joining, it ended badly after they got sloppy with their intel-gathering and named some people who weren’t actually kluxers, including a member of the Wrigley family...

Not content with passing the referendum to ban parochial schools in Oregon, kluxers start a fight at a Portland School Board meeting because the contract for a new building went to a Catholic architectural firm.

New Zealand voters defeat prohibition.

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Today -100: December 7, 1922: Mussolini fully approves

The local Fascist organization in Alessandria province in northern Italy issued a threat to criminals that they would be sent to the hospital and, if they continued their evil ways, to the morgue. Mussolini telegrams them, “I fully approve your new methods of punishing criminals.”

Gov. Lee Russell of Mississippi is being sued by Frances Birkhead, a stenographer who used to work for him for seduction and breach of promise of marriage (he said he’d divorce his wife, allegedly). She also seems to be saying he forced her to get an abortion. She’s asking $100,000.

Headline of the Day -100:  

He says she committed fraud when she told him she was capable of managing their household finances. She says she does too know math, he doesn’t, and he (a widower with 6 children, by the way) is using this as an excuse to get rid of her because he fell in love with someone else.

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Today -100: December 6, 1922: Of school religion and ice

The Youngstown, Ohio Board of Education is considering a request by the local Ku Klux Klan to summon representatives of the Knights of Columbus, the B’nai Brith and, of course, the Klan to work out the introduction of religious instruction into the public schools.

Maine bans ice in drinks.

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Today -100: December 5, 1922: Of budgets, constitutions, and klans

Harding sends Congress his 1923-4 budget. He’s aiming to eliminate the deficit altogether, but not quite yet.

The Irish Constitution passes both houses of the Westminster Parliament. Tim Healy, a longtime on & off Irish nationalist MP and occasional lawyer for Sinn Féiners, will be governor-general, a title replacing lord lieutenant.

I think this is a first: the Irish Free State bombs and machine-guns IRA irregulars by aeroplane. Near Cork.

The special session of Congress ends without confirming Pierce Butler to the Supreme Court. He’ll need to be re-nominated. Some of the La Follette wing think he has a temperament problem and dislike his background as a corporate lawyer.

Congress passes a bill allowing Supreme Court Justice Mahlon Pitney, who is in bad health, to retire and collect a pension before reaching retirement age.

Attorney General Harry Daugherty says any illegal acts by the Ku Klux Klan do not come under the jurisdiction of the federal government. 

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Today -100: December 4, 1922: Public authority, before demanding obedience, must itself obey

Threats from the Ku Klux Klan against Harvard sophomore Hubert Clay cause him to flee the university. He’s an apostate former member they consider too “indiscreet.”

Rep. George Tinkham (R-Mass.) writes to Pres. Harding, who is expected to chastise disrespect for the law, specifically for prohibition law, pointing out that nothing is being done about enforcing the provision of the 14th Amendment calling for states that restrict the black vote to lose some of their representation: “Public authority, before demanding obedience, must itself obey.” How quaint.

Liam Lynch, the Chief of Staff of the Irish Republican Army, threatens, in public letters to the speaker of the Dáil and others, “drastic measures” in response to the government executions of 8 (so far) IRA members after courts-martial. In private he issues “orders of frightfulness” authorizing assassination of government officials involved in the executions and Dáil members who voted for the courts-martial.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Australian PM Billy Hughes is stabbed! Um, with a hat pin during an election meeting in Melbourne.

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Today -100: December 3, 1922: Of filibusters, banishments, and capitulations

The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill has been filibustered to death in the Senate. Sen. Lee Overman (D-NC) used up most of the last day of the filibuster, making these charges against the bill: 1) It was written by a (gasp, horror) negro, 2) It was purely intended to support the negro Republican vote in the North, 3) Ignorant Southern negroes would take it as permission from the federal government to rape white women, 4) Good Southern negroes don’t need the law (because lynch mobs only murder guilty black people).

Greece: Prince Andrew is sentenced to perpetual banishment by a court-martial for his role in the war with Turkey, in which he was a major-general. He admits having disobeyed orders to bring his troops to support another general, who then lost a major battle; Andrew says things would have gone worse if he’d obeyed. He might well have been executed like those former prime ministers if other countries (and the pope) hadn’t put major pressure on Greece (he’s related to the royal families of Britain and Spain and is also a prince of Denmark). The banishment will be rescinded in the ‘30s, but in a couple of days he will leave Greece with, among other family members, his 1½-year-old son Philip, the future consort of Queen Elizabeth II, who will have a son also named Prince Andrew who has not been sentenced to perpetual banishment as of the time of writing.

After attacks in the Bavarian towns of Passau and Ingolstadt on French and British officers of the Allied Commission of Control, the Allies demand an apology from Bavaria and the removal of the towns’ mayors and police chiefs, and impose a fine of 500,000 gold marks, which is the equivalent of some money, on each town. The Bavarian people, to say nothing of “Bavaria’s Mussolini, Hitler,” are very upset with this Allied high-handedness.

At the Lausanne Conference, Turkey is adamant that capitulations – old treaty clauses whereby foreigners are basically exempt from Turkish laws and taxes – are abolished, while everyone else says nah nah.

House Immigration Committee chair Albert Johnson (R-Wash.) rejects the idea of raising the immigration cap for Greece to take some of the refugees fleeing/banished from Turkey.

The Prince of Wales falls off a horse, as was the custom.

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Today -100: December 2, 1922: Of giants, banishments, progressives, and pyramid garage sale

Obit of the Day -100:  Captain George Auger, the Cardiff Giant, something like 7½ feet, although the circuses he worked for claimed he was 8 foot 4. A former cop in Cardiff and London, he supposedly got the “captain” nickname from Queen Victoria, who he sometimes escorted. He worked for both Barnum and Bailey and Ringling Brothers, and starred in a production of Jack the Giant Killer which he wrote.

At the time of his death of “indigestion” at 39, he was in talks to act in “Why Worry?” with Harold Lloyd (that’s them, with Princess Wee Wee and Francesco Lentini the Three-Legged Man)(who really did have 3 legs)(and 4 feet).

At the Lausanne Conference, Turkey announces an order that the 1 million Greeks who haven’t already fled Eastern Thrace and elsewhere in Turkey are banished. They have until December 15 to skedaddle. 

33 members of the House and Senate form a “progressive” bloc under Robert La Follette. They vehemently deny that it’s a third party, but rather a bunch of like-minded Republican, Democrats and one Farm-Laborite aiming to “drive special privilege out of control of Government.” Hiram Johnson is their likely 1924 candidate for president. They will suggest a constitutional amendment to eliminate the Electoral College.

The Third Internationale resolves that the Communist campaign to free all the negroes of the world should focus first on the US.

Someone has already put a value on the contents of King Tut’s tomb: £3 million.

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Today -100: December 1, 1922: Helllp meee!

Science! of the Day -100:  

Mexico City has been without water (completely? unclear) for 8 days after a water plant fails. Police shoot up a protest against the situation with machine guns, killing maybe 50 people.

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