Today -100: March 12, 1919: Of kaiser-hanging, king-drowning, and trillions

The Peace Conference is debating whether ex-kaiser Willy Hohenzollern can be put on trial for starting the war. The US thinks he can’t be. Others realize that war is not actually a crime under international law. They may still go after some of Germany’s wartime military and political leaders for war crimes.

The former King Wilhelm of Württemberg nearly drowns, the NYT exaggerates, probably, in a scuffle when some German sailors seize his yacht on Lake Constance to use as a fishing boat.

Postmaster General Albert Burleson tells the Senate committee investigating Bolshevism that the IWW is carrying on a widespread propaganda effort mostly through the foreign-language press. He also says the Wobblies are really all Bolshevists, as do other witnesses who don’t understand Bolshevism or anarchism but are happy to lump all their ideological enemies together. Not a lot of subtlety in a Red Scare.

The NYT on the peace terms being worked out (which seem to consist mostly of reducing, then reducing again the size military Germany is permitted and the things it’s allowed to have – no u-boats, tanks, airplanes, etc): “The consideration of reparations has introduced the word ‘trillion’ in recognizing money, probably for the first time in any single financial operation, for, although millions and billions often have been used in war finance, no sum has yet been reached touching a trillion.”

The evidently-famous novelist Amelia Barr dies at 87. She turned to novel-writing in her 50’s, churning out 80 of them, including Jan Vedder’s Wife, She Loved a Sailor, The Maid of Maiden Lane, and The Strawberry Handkerchief.

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Today -100: March 11, 1919: Of operettas, espionage, and quarters

NYC Mayor Hylan forces the Lexington Avenue Theatre to “indefinitely postpone” the performance of the German operetta Der Vogelhändler, by threatening the theater’s license if there’s disorder. The theater may now go bankrupt, having hired a lot of singers. Its president bitterly notes that Wilson often said that the war was not against the German people, but it was... against German opera, maybe? At intervals during the day groups of soldiers or sailors show up to stop the opera, then go away again when cops tell them it has been stopped, although one group moves on to another theater they hear is performing a German-language play but leave apologetically when they find out it’s actually Yiddish.

The Supreme Court affirms Eugene Debs’s 10-year sentence under the Espionage Act, Oliver Wendell Holmes claiming that the Act does not unconstitutionally interfere with the exercise of free speech, while affirming his Schenck majority opinion that “a person may be convicted of a conspiracy to obstruct recruiting by words of persuasion.”

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Atrocities that did not occur. So soldiers are just killing people on the streets of the capital now. Not that the Spartacists are non-violent, but are they throwing students into the river? cutting army officers’ hands off? killing 60 detectives? dropping bombs from airplanes? did a woman Spartacist really confess to killing 20 people? Or all the other things the German papers (including SPD ones) are claiming? As in 1914, fake atrocity propaganda is being used to justify real counter-atrocities.

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Today -100: March 10, 1919: An act of local madness

The US Secret Service claims to have discovered a wartime German-Bolshevik plot for Germany and Russia to attack Poland simultaneously.

France blocks a deal whereby Germany would give up merchant ships in exchange for food, because it doesn’t want any German funding going to food that could go toward reparations. France’s idea was that the US should send food to Germany but not get paid until after all Germany’s reparations are paid. Eventually they gave in to a less dickish plan, by which the ships will bring American soldiers back to the US and then bring US food to Germany on the return trip.

More protests against the performance of a German operetta, Carl Zeller’s inoffensive Der Vogelhändler, with soldiers and sailors threatening that if Mayor Hylan doesn’t stop it, they will do so by force. Gov. Al Smith has already informed them that he can’t help because there is no law against performances in German. An obvious oversight. Big-time actor John Drew (uncle of the Barrymores) says “This season of German operetta is either an act of local madness, or else the inspiration of the whining German Government, half imperial and entirely hypocritical.”

The North Dakota Legislature, both houses of which are controlled by the Non-Partisan League, passed laws for state control of utilities, a state bank, state grain elevators and flour mills, financed by fairly progressive taxation.

Article in today’s NYT by historian Erez Manela on how Wilson failed Egyptian and other colonial peoples.

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Today -100: March 9, 1919: They are getting away with this German opera stuff

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There have been growing protests over the scheduled performance of German opera – in German! – at the Lexington Avenue Theatre in New York. Der Rosenkavalier and the like. Now soldiers and sailors are threatening to wreck the theatre. Mayor Hylan refuses to intervene to prevent the opera. A marine says, “They told us not to fraternize with the Boches along the Rhine and here we get back to New York to find they are getting away with this German opera stuff.”

The Supreme War Council gives Herbert Hoover control of the railroads in all of the former Austrian Empire so he can get food relief through. Italy has been told to stop blockading food to Yugoslavia.

German troops crush the Spartacist strike in Berlin, using artillery, machine guns, gas and airplanes. You know, crowd control. Also, some of the unions have their demands met, so it’s very much carrots and artillery. Minister of Defense Gustav Noske issues an order for everyone caught fighting the government with a weapon to be immediately executed, responding to false rumors that Spartacists killed a bunch of cops.

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Today -100: March 8, 1919: Of mandates, ships, and pogroms

German government troops and Freikorps fight “reds” on the streets of Berlin, with many dead.

Albania, which is asking the Peace Conference for territories currently held by Greece, Serbia and Montenegro, says it’s willing for the United States to exercise a League of Nations mandate over the disputed territories for a year, I guess to organize plebiscites. There is zero chance of this happening.

“President Wilson is not in favor of taking the German Navy to sea and sinking it.” Meanwhile, negotiations break down over what to do with German merchant ships sequestered abroad during the war. The Allies suggest taking the ships in exchange for some food for Germany, which Germany rejects because it would only be a couple of weeks’ worth of food. France, you will be surprised to hear, is being particularly unhelpful in resolving the situation and allowing Germans to, you know, eat.

Reports of more pogroms of Jews in Eastern Galicia and the Ukraine.

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Today -100: March 7, 1919: Of leagues and machine guns

Senators William Borah, James Reed and Charles Thomas open their campaign against the League of Nations. Borah calls for a national plebiscite. He says the League would protect the territorial integrity even of countries that don’t, I guess, deserve it, including if “Trotsky brings Russia into the League.”

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Swell.

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Today -100: March 6, 1919: There are giants in the sky

Austrian Foreign Minister Otto Bauer is negotiating terms for the union of Austria and Germany.

The German government claims the Spartacists tried to seize Königsberg in order to clear a route for Soviet Russian armies coming to their aid, but were thwarted by government troops.

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The baseball team, not actual giants. They might travel on aeroplanes to Philadelphia to open the season.

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Today -100: March 5, 1919: His gluttony for the limelight is well known. Delicious, delicious limelight.

Giving a pro-League of Nations speech at the Met, Woodrow Wilson says criticism means nothing to him, because “there is no medium that will transmit them,” whatever that means. Demonstrating that spirit of flexibility and compromise for which he is known, Wilson wonders how the critics of the League “can live, and not live in the atmosphere of the world... and I cannot particularly imagine how they can be Americans and set up a doctrine of careful selfishness thought out in the last detail.” After being played onto the stage with “Over There,” he promises not to come back from France until the peace talks are over, over there.

The 65th Congress comes to an end, not having finished much of its business thanks to a filibuster by Senators Lawrence Sherman (R-Ill.), Joseph France (R-Maryland), and Robert La Follette (R-Wisc.). Lost bills include the General Deficiency Bill to pay old bills and fund the government’s control of the railroads; army and navy appropriations; repeal of daylight savings; a 4-year ban on immigration; prohibition enforcement; and a revised women’s suffrage constitutional amendment. Pres. Wilson says he won’t call a special session, because he’ll be back in France until June and “it is not in the interest of the right conduct of public affairs” for Congress to work while he’s not around to (cough) cooperate with them. Or, as Sen. George Moses (R-New Hampshire) puts it, “His gluttony for the limelight is well known” and his “dogged refusal to summon Congress, save when and as he pleases, is... due to his desire to monopolize the center of the international stage, and to close the only national forum available here for the voicing of opposition to the proposed constitution of the League of Nations.” It’s funny because it’s true.

Spartacists seize the police hq in Berlin. The general strike’s demands include recognition of workers’ and soldiers’ councils (or soviets, if you will), reversal of the re-establishment of the military hierarchy, disbandment of the Freikorps, the creation of a Red Guard under the soviets, the release of all political prisoners, and trial by revolutionary tribunal of various Hohenzollerns and generals and whatnot.

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A Jewish delegation meets Polish President Józef Piłsudski and Prime Minister Paderewski to ask them to stop the pogroms. They both decline to do anything. Piłsudski says the Jews are hostile to Poland. Asked for proof of this, he says there is none but that’s the general feeling.

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Today -100: March 4, 1919: A most fatal error for any people

British Prime Minister Lloyd George warns small nations (he doesn’t specify which small nations, but he has to have at least Belgium and Yugoslavia in mind) not to emulate the faults of large empires by annexing lands not their own: “This is a most fatal error for any people, great or small.”

Ignoring that advice, of course, is France. The current version of the Peace Conference’s map of the proposed French-German border is interesting. France will re-annex Alsace-Lorraine without the complication of asking its inhabitants their wishes. The Rhineland and the northern Saar region of Germany, important for coal and steel and, consequently, for providing raw material for the German military machine, are inconveniently too German in population for France to get away with annexing them, so it’s been suggested that they be made sort of neutral – “sterilized” is the word they’re using – with France taking their coal and steel while the inhabitants would be neither French nor German and would be represented in neither parliament but would also not be conscripted into either army.

37 Republican senators from the incoming Senate sign a resolution against the US joining the League of Nations unless certain changes are made. Signers include Henry Cabot Lodge, William Borah, Warren Harding, Hiram Johnson, and Reed Smoot. They didn’t ask Democratic senators to sign and indeed actively refused one or two who wanted to, so this is clearly more about the 1920 elections than the League. They also want a peace treaty signed before there is any consideration of the League. Considering the widespread belief that the continuance of the wartime blockade of Germany is starving that country into Bolshevism, this doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable.

British Secretary of War Winston Churchill asks Parliament to maintain an army of 2.5 million, since they might wind up having to occupy Germany if it doesn’t agree to the terms handed it.

The Supreme Court upholds (in Schenck v. United States) the convictions of socialists Charles Schenck and Elizabeth Baer under the Espionage Act for calling for resistance to conscription. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes writes that during wartime things that people might be permitted to speak “are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and no court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.” The NYT misses the famous line in the ruling that “the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger”.

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Today -100: March 3, 1919: Every strike brings us a step nearer to the abyss

The NYT reports “The possible fall of the German Government,” beset as it is by strikes and soviets and Spartacists. The government issues a manifesto: “Every strike brings us a step nearer to the abyss. Only work can save us.”

Woodrow Wilson meets American Zionist leaders and expresses support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

Peace talks between Poland and the Ukraine fail.

Former French Prime Minister René Viviani says Paris is too close to the border, and since they can’t move Paris, they should move the border, that’s just science.

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Today -100: March 2, 1919: Of republics, dynamiters, and statehoods

A Soviet republic is declared in Brunswick.

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No answer having been forthcoming to the request Puerto Rico’s Resident Commissioner Félix Córdova Dávila made to Congress last month to say whether Puerto Rico can ever become a state, the island’s Legislature repeats the question. Puerto Rico’s Union and Republican parties agree that if it isn’t, they should work for independence.

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Today -100: March 1, 1919: Of mobilizations, train accidents, and writing history books

The Netherlands is mobilizing its army to fight off any attempt by Belgium to annex Dutch territory.

In 1917, 9,567 people were killed on railroads and 70,970 injured.

At a White House dinner for members of the DNC, Woodrow Wilson says he’s looking forward to writing some history books after March 3, 1921. In other words, he’s not running for a 3rd term.

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Today -100: February 28, 1919: Of strikes, palmers and whipples, and feeble kaisers

German troops crush Spartacist strikes in the Ruhr coal region.

Woodrow Wilson nominates Alexander Mitchell Palmer, the Alien Property Custodian and a former congresscritter from Pennsylvania, to be attorney general. He beats out Sherman Whipple, which is surely the name of a cartoon character.

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Today -100: February 27, 1919: Of promiscuous shooting, rioting, and parks

Spartacist uprising in Saxony, with a general strike. And in Düsseldorf armed Spartacists seize the ballots for the city council elections and burn them, then engage in “a little promiscuous shooting,” as was the custom.

Socialist journalist John Reed goes on trial in Philadelphia for inciting to riot and rioting. Last May he tried to give a speech that the police didn’t want him to give, which seems to be the extent of his “rioting.” Also on trial is William Kogerman, who allegedly tried to bite a cop who was arresting him, which he denies. (They will be acquitted).

Among other legislation passed at the end of the 65th Congress’s term, but not mentioned in this article, is one establishing the Grand Canyon as a national park.

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Today -100: February 26, 1919: Repent! Repent!

Willy Hohenzollern thinks Germany “will soon repent of having overthrown the monarchy.” Spoiler Alert: Germany will not repent of having overthrown the monarchy.

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Today -100: February 25, 1919: Good morrow, my little soldiers

Boston police arrest 22 members of the National Woman’s Party who planned to burn Woodrow Wilson’s speeches on Boston Common during the welcome parade. The charge is loitering.

In his speech at Mechanics Hall, Boston, Wilson says abandoning the peace treaty would be breaking the promises the US made to new nations Poland, Armenia, Czechoslovakia etc. “I have no more doubt of the verdict of America in this matter than I have of the blood that is in me.” And about that blood: “I have fighting blood in me.”

Prince Leopold is arrested for possibly being behind the assassination of Bavarian PM Kurt Eisner. And they’re looking for the former Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. A bunch of aristos have also been arrested.

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“Good morrow, my little soldiers,” he addresses them. “Good morrow, comrade,” they reply.

Full-page ad on page 7:

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Today -100: February 24, 1919: Of non-lynchings, non-civil wars, fog, and money

The NYT reports the lynching by an angry Budapest mob of Communist leader Béla Kun. This is not true.

On his return home from the peace talks, Woodrow Wilson’s ship almost runs aground in the fog, in what is definitely not a metaphor of any kind. And the Secret Service raids a couple of places looking for two Spanish anarchists allegedly planning to assassinate Wilson and for the bomb they allegedly planned to throw at him. They arrest 14 men, which may or may not include the two they’re looking for, and find zero bombs.

German Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann told the National Assembly in Weimar that civil war has broken out in Munich. The government quickly disavows this.

Poland plans to introduce its own currency in a few months, pegged to the French franc.

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Today -100: February 23, 1919: 60% dead

The assassination of Bavarian Chancellor Kurt Eisner is followed, as was the custom, by an uprising in Munich and the declaration of a Bavarian Soviet Republic. AP says Eisner’s assassin has been lynched; he hasn’t. NYT: “It is predicted that the killing of Eisner will be avenged in a most frightful manner.”

A revolt breaks out in Budapest. Communists attack the Social Democratic Party’s official newspaper Népszava (People’s Word) and take over the telegraph office and train station. The NYT thinks that Germans and Russians are behind it.

Sing Sing prison had 106 cases of Spanish Flu, nearly 10% of the prison’s population, and 14 cases of flu-related pneumonia, but not a single death. They used quinine and “physic.”

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Today -100: February 22, 1919: Another day, another assassination

Kurt Eisner, the radical Bavarian Chancellor, who was actually on his way to the state Diet to resign, is shot dead by Count Anton von Arco auf Valley, who hated Eisner on political as well as anti-Semitic grounds despite his own Jewish heritage on his mother’s side. Arco-Valley shouts “Down with the revolution, long live the kaiser!” He will be tried before a sympathetic right-wing judge by a sympathetic right-wing prosecutor who will praise his “enthusiasm.” He will serve 5 years (some of it in a cell that Hitler got right after him) (right now he’s in the same cell Eisner occupied a year ago).

While announcing Eisner’s death to the Diet, Interior Minister Erhard Auer, a rightist, is himself shot and wounded by someone in the public gallery. Spartacists seize Munich police hq, but government forces recapture it.

The Central Federated Union of New York votes to strike on July 1 if beer is cut off on that date. No beer, no work.

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Today -100: February 21, 1919: They are exceedingly clumsy

The assassin’s bullet that hit French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau penetrated his lungs and is inoperable (nevertheless, he’s up and walking around and will live another decade). The Tiger says, “My adversaries are really poor shots.  They are exceedingly clumsy.”

Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton and some of his men are helping bring troops to Archangel, with reindeer and sledges and what not.

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Victor Berger, Socialist member of Congress from Wisconsin, and his fellow defendants are sentenced to 20 years for violation of the Espionage Act and obstructing the war.

The French province Champagne demands that the Peace Conference prevent the name of that eponymous beverage being used by bubbly originating from any other region. You know, along with peace and disarmament and the League of Nations. 

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