Today -100: June 9, 1919: Of treaties, shimmies, and cranky conductors

The NYT prints excerpts from the leaked draft peace treaty across pages 1 to 6 of today’s paper. That’s the treaty the Wilson Administration is stubbornly refusing to provide to the Senate.

Costa Rica, having crushed a revolt, is threatening to invade Nicaragua, which it says aided that revolt. Nicaragua asks the US to land Marines to protect it from Costa Rica.

Police in Coney Island ban “modern” dances and are now patrolling dance halls, expelling anyone dancing the “shimmy.” You can find examples of that dance on YouTube, but be sure you have a fainting couch handy.

In other cultural news, Arturo Toscanini beats up his second violinist during a concert in Turin, hitting him with his baton and then with his fist. The performance was a Beethoven symphony. Which symphony is not stated; No. 6, the Pastoral, would be funniest.  (Update: the 9th, which is the 2nd funniest).

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Today -100: June 8, 1919: Of pogroms, princely canines, driver’s licenses, and monkey speech

The US’s acting ambassador to Poland Hugh Gibson says the stories of pogroms against Jews have been exaggerated, and anyway the feeling against certain classes of Jews is more economic than religious. So that’s okay then.

Headline of the Day -100:

Yeah, some random German lieutenant totally sold Major Thatcher “the crown prince’s dog.”

When the NY Legislature decided to add a test for driver’s licenses (in New York City only), I kind of assumed it’d be about traffic laws and suchlike. Instead, the 24 questions will include: “Are you crippled in any manner?” “Have you ever been confined in an asylum or institution for the insane or for other mental affections?” Also, drug & alcohol use, vision or hearing impairment, epilepsy, fainting spells...

Prof. Charles  Aschemeier, Smithsonian-funded African explorer, denies Prof. Richard Lynch Garner’s claim to have captured the Missing Link, saying he himself did that. He also denies that Garner, author of The Speech of Monkeys, can in fact speak with monkeys. Aschemeier says even African jungle natives, themselves barely more intelligent than apes, can’t speak with monkeys.

He said that, not me.

Ecuador abolishes debt peonage.

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Today -100: June 7, 1919: Of Rhinelands, certain interests, and air records

French officers send pro-Rhineland-independence posters to the US occupation authorities in Coblenz, but the Americans refuse to put them up. The Americans have also ordered the president of the Rhine Province to ignore orders from Berlin transferring him.

The US Senate votes to ask the US delegation at the peace talks to get a hearing for the Irish nationalists.

The Senate also calls on Secretary of State Lansing to give them the full text of the treaty, noting that copies have already leaked to “certain interests” in New York (i.e., bankers). Also, a German publisher is selling copies throughout Europe and helpfully sent copies addressed to every member of the US Congress, but these have been held up in the post, mysteriously. Anyway, the Senate would like an investigation of the leak.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Evidently aviation records are His and Hers (also, it was more than 15,000 feet). Raymonde de Laroche was the first woman to get a pilot’s license (1910) and probably the first woman to fly a plane (1909).

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Today -100: June 6, 1919: Of French wallets and mine explosions

The German delegation to the peace talks protests against France’s machinations in support of the independence movement in the Rhineland. I don’t know how much support there really is for independence among the Rhenish, but there’s no question France is supporting this to achieve the division of Germany which it couldn’t persuade the rest of the Allies to agree to (but France only occupies one zone in the Rhineland, the US & Britain having their own zones).

The city of Winnipeg holds a rally of war veterans who it wants to volunteer to be special constables to crush the strike movement.

The cops think the man who died trying to bomb Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s house is European because his wallet was.... French.

A coal mine fire in the Delaware and Hudson Coal Company’s Baltimore Mine in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania kills 92 miners. An underground train was carrying both miners and explosives. The state has a safety code that covers the storage of explosives but not its transportation, so the company won’t be held legally responsible.

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Today -100: June 5, 1919: The modern stage is set for hell

The Senate passes the Susan B. Anthony amendment to the Constitution for women’s suffrage, 56-25. It now goes to the states for ratification.

Would anybody like to hear the opinions of clergymen on the state of the theater? Of course you would!  The Rev. William Burgess of Chicago, the director of the Illinois Vigilance Association, tells the Conference of Social Work in Atlantic City, “The modern stage is set for hell,” what with its “moral filth and sensual exhibits which might make devils blush.” And the Rev. H.R.L. Sheppard of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields in London, where I once attended a rather nice concert, calls for the Christian church to establish its own theatres so audiences can avoid “bedroom scenes” which are “an insult to their intelligence.”

The reaction to the anarchist bombings goes about how you’d expect:

Those lists, which we are hearing about for the first time, are the Justice Department’s file cards on alleged radicals. The 20,000 is for NYC alone.

NY Governor Alfred E. Smith comes from Albany to NYC to speak with the state attorney general Charles Newton and give him authorization to go medieval on the reds’ asses, only to find that Newton had left for Buffalo.

That’s Cleveland Mayor Harry Davis, whose house was bombed, who wants to deport all immigrants who fail to become US citizens or, as he refers to them, “the cancer which is gnawing at [the US’s] political life.”

The Austrian government doesn’t like the peace terms presented to it. Austria’s borders were decided by different committees dealing with the Italian-Austrian border, the Yugoslav-Austrian border, the Czech-Austrian border, etc without consulting each other, so the total picture is actually harsher for Austria than the Allies had intended.

Leaflets appear in Rhineland cities denouncing the Rhenish Republic as a Catholic plot and calling for a 24-hour general strike.

Today -100: June 4, 1919: Of bomb attacks, promises, and breakaway states

Headline of the Day -100: 

Just ask Mrs. Palmer. A. Mitchell appoints William Flynn, former head of the Secret Service, as chief of the Bureau of Investigation (the future FBI), with carte blanche to go after the bombers. In a couple of months, Flynn will put a kid named John Edgar Hoover in charge of the General Intelligence Division.

The Times prints another rumor that Petrograd has been captured, this time by Estonians and Finns.

Headline of the Day -100:  

So that’s okay then.

A strike at the Willys-Overland auto plant in Toledo, Ohio turns to rioting. Mayor Cornell Schreiber is driven from his home by threats, or so he says, and wires Gov. Cox asking for troops. Guards for the plant shoot strikers.

The German delegation to the peace talks protests French support for the declaration of independence in the Rhine. The provisional president of the new state, Hans Dorten, has asked the French for protection. He also asks the US for recognition. The NYT is finally spelling his name right, if that’s any help.

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Today -100: June 3, 1919: We will kill, because it is necessary

8 bombs explode in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and D.C., at the homes of Cleveland Mayor Harry Davis (presumably for his actions during the May Day riots), Massachusetts Justice Albert Hayden, who sentenced rioters, Mass. State Rep. Leland Powers, NY judge Charles Cooper Nott, Jr. (who never had Reds in his court, but may have been mistaken for judge John Knox), Bureau of Immigration Chief Inspector W.W. Sibray, an official of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, VPs of two coal companies and a train dispatcher, and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The bombs were pretty big, but all the intended targets escaped death (some were not in their homes, some were sleeping upstairs). There are two deaths, at the Knott and Palmer bombings, believed at this time to be the bomb-planters. One was actually a night watchman investigating the mysterious package, but the other was indeed a bomber, Carlo Valdinoci. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt walked by the Palmer home (they live across the street) 3 minutes before the explosion. Their windows are blown in and some (unidentified) body part of Signor Valdinoci lands on their doorstep. Another body part goes through a window (whether open or closed is not clear) of the Norwegian ambassador, landing near a baby, like a Keystone comedy on acid. Sen. Claude Swanson also finds a bit of Valdinoci in front of his house. The police will have to jigsaw-puzzle the parts together to see if they’ve got one body or two.

Police suspect, correctly, that the perpetrators are the same people responsible for the spate of letter-bombs in April, which were also pretty ineffective at killing their intended targets, which also included the attorney general.

The bombers are in fact followers of Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani (Galleanists), who do this sort of thing. Flyers are planted at each bomb target:

The powers that be make no secret of their will to stop here in America the worldwide spread of revolution. The powers that be must reckon that they will have to accept the fight they have provoked. ... Do not say we are acting cowardly because we keep in hiding; do not say it is abominable; it is war, class war, and you were the first to wage it under the cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws, behind the guns of your bone-headed slaves. ... There will have to be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.

They’re signed The Anarchist Fighters. Galleani is actually already in federal custody awaiting deportation, but the Justice Dept won’t figure out his relation to the bombings before he goes. They’re convinced that Bolsheviks are behind it rather than, I guess, anarchist fighters. Probably why they’ll never catch anyone for these bombings.

Strikes break out against the declaration of the Palatinate Republic. The independence statements say that the republic will be pacific, unlike those fucking Prussians.

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Today -100: June 2, 1919: A matter of pure Bolshevism

An “Independent Rhenish Republic” or “Palatinate Republic” is proclaimed in Wiesbaden by Hans Adam Dorten. The new separatist state will include (in Dorten’s mind, anyway) the Rhineland Province plus bits of Bavaria and Hesse.

Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau, head of the German peace delegation, is trying to resign because it would be too humiliating to have to sign the peace treaty.

Ignace Jan Paderewski, the Polish prime minister, again denies to a reporter that there are pogroms, although he admits there are lots and lots of murders because Poland is pure anarchy right now. What about the execution of those 37 Jews in Pinsk in April? That was “a matter of pure Bolshevism,” he says. After Bolsheviks killed a bunch of Polish soldiers, Poles responded by executing those responsible who, by a bizarre coincidence, all happened to be Jewish. Oh, and some of them weren’t guilty of anything, but war is hell. (Actually, the meeting was probably about how to distribute food aid from American Jewish organizations. Or how to distribute Bolshevism, who really knows). Paderewski whatabouts: “Many Christians were also killed by mistake.” So that’s okay then. Paderewski also thinks Poland is getting blame for a pogrom which actually occurred across the border in Russia.

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Today -100: June 1, 1919: Of kings, mountain girls, souvenirs, and new horrors

Hungary has supposedly asked Crown Prince Alexander of Serbia if he’d like to be their king.

British planes bomb Kabul and Jalalabad.

Sgt York’s girlfriend, “mountain girl” Gracie Williams, says yes! The US Army didn’t turn individual soldiers into heroes during the war, but they’ve really been mythologizing ol’ Alvin since April.

Congress will leave it to governors to distribute souvenirs of the war to communities in their respective states – 4,000 German cannon and 20,000 machine guns are available, way less than the demand.

Headline of the Day -100: 

A German newspaper claims the treaty includes a provision forcing prohibition on Germany. (It doesn’t)

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Today -100: May 31, 1919: If you don’t do so at Versailles, you shall do so in Berlin

Lloyd George: “We say to the Germans: ‘Gentlemen, you must sign. If you don’t do so at Versailles, you shall do so in Berlin.’”

The Yugoslavs are set to attack Austrian troops who are on the wrong side of the demarcation line.

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Today -100: May 30, 1919: Of lindies, Americanization, and unnecessary heroin

New York hotelier Raymond Orteig offers a $25,000 prize for the first non-stop New York-Paris by an aviator from an Allied nation. It will go to Charles Lindbergh in 1927.

The Socialist Party (US) expels 25,000 Slavs it accuses of being Bolsheviks.

Headline of the Day -100: 

The NY State Reconstruction Commission’s Educational Committee recommends, among other things, compulsory English classes for people over 18 who are illiterate in English. “Americanization,” a term frequently bandied about these days -100, is often used synonymously with teaching the English language.

The NYC Mayor’s Committee on Public Welfare discusses drugs. District Attorney Edward Swann says he’s been informed that there is no need for heroin and that only a small amount of cocaine is medically necessary.

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Today -100: May 29, 1919: Of escapes, crown jewels, fight-less motors, aptonyms, mad ex-kings, pogroms, and disgusting Magyars

Earlier this month, rigged courts-martial in Germany convicted Lt. Kurt Vogel, one of the soldiers involved in the murders of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, a sacrificial lamb to give an appearance of fairness to a system that let off everyone else involved. Vogel, who was sentenced to 2 years for “failure of discipline and abuse of power,” escapes with the aid of a “Lt. Lindemann,” who presents Moabit Prison with fake transfer papers. Lindemann is actually Wilhelm Canaris, later Hitler’s spy-master, later still executed after conspiring to assassinate Hitler. Vogel flees to the Netherlands. He will later be pardoned by Hitler.

An inventory of the former Austrian emperor’s imperial jewels finds that many have been substituted with fakes.

At a dinner in London in honor of Harry Hawker, whose trans-Atlantic flight attempt failed, he makes fun of the successful American flight, noting it had ships stationed “every twenty yards,” which just “shows you have no fight in your motor.” The Royal Navy has gotten criticism for not giving him the sort of support the Americans got, but he says a chain of ships would have shown a lack of faith in the airplane. You know, the airplane that crapped out in the middle of the Atlantic.

Ads throughout today’s paper from manufacturers of the spark plugs, oil, varnish, etc used in the NC-4.

Germany’s counter-proposal to the peace terms includes a demand that any loss of territories should only follow referenda in those territories and that Germany be allowed to join the League and run its old colonies as mandates. Oh, and other things that they know will never happen. The Allies are preparing to re-establish the naval blockade of Germany if it refuses to sign.

Democrats are increasingly saying that if the Republican Senate rejects the League of Nations, Wilson will have to run for a third term.

The former King Ludwig III of Bavaria is going mad, like pretty much every previous Mad King of Bavaria. He fled the country in February, scared that the Hungarian Revolution would spread to Bavaria, but now believes Bavaria won the war, so naturally he wants to return in triumph.

Ignace Jan Paderewski, the Polish prime minister, lies that there hasn’t been a single pogrom in Poland. He blames all reports of pogroms on Germany, which he says is preparing to invade.

Headline of the Day -100: 

“The Hungarian revolution has deeply disappointed Russia, for which Béla Kun is most of all to blame,” Lenin says. Also, Moscow is the only center of world revolution and everybody should obey it.

In Lamar, Missouri, one Jay Lych is lynched. Lynch was white and had just been sentenced to life for killing a sheriff and his son.

Five black churches, 2 black schools, and a lodge hall are simultaneously set on fire in Putnam County, Georgia by the Ku Klux Klan. Which is about to be a thing again.

Former president Taft responds to Sen. James Reed’s claim that the League of Nations would be a “colored League.” In fact, Taft says, the white races would always have unquestioned ascendancy. After all, India and South Africa’s representation will be determined by whites...

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Today -100: May 28, 1919: We are safely on the other side of the pond

The US Navy seaplane NC-4, piloted by Lt. Commander Albert Cushing Read, makes the first trans-Atlantic flight, arriving in Portugal, hurrah. It took more than 3 weeks, with several stops along the way (including waiting in the Azores for storms to pass), which disqualifies it from the Daily Mail’s £10,000 prize. The plane radios back “We are safely on the other side of the pond.” (When did people start referring to the Atlantic as “the pond”?)

Petrograd has supposedly been captured by “Chinese, Lett and Finnish Reds,” according to a report that is contradicted by another one right below it, like a choose-your-own-adventure.

For the second time this month a mob, largely consisting of former soldiers & sailors, attacks the Yale University campus, whose gates are locked, in reprisal for some remarks about soldiers (or possibly about the 102 Regiment Brass Band) allegedly made by students in a dorm overlooking a parade.

Headline of the Day -100:  

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Today -100: May 27, 1919: A mere scrap of paper will never bear my signature

Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau, head of the German peace delegation, says the peace terms would mean “perpetual famine and unemployment.” He calls them “a sentence of death.” Dude, it’s either death or perpetual, it can’t be both, that’s just science.

There are pogroms against Jews in Ukraine now as well as Poland.

Sen. James Reed (D-Missouri) denounces the League of Nations as a “colored league” in which the white races would be out-voted. How, he asks, can senators from Southern states which stripped black people of the vote support a League in which Liberia and Haiti would sit as equals with the United States? Indeed, how can senators from Western states which support bans on Asiatic immigration? Reed’s speech lasts three long hours.

A volcano in central Java erupts, killing or injuring 16,000.

The Tarrant Trabor, a triplane designed during the war as a bomber, now gets its first test flight. This six-engine, 20-ton monstrosity is the largest plane in the world.

But not for long.

Both pilots die as a result of the crash.

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Today -100: May 26, 1919: Of unknown fats and unnecessary parades

NYT Index Typo of the Day:

Rude. Hawker and Grieve are found. Their plane was forced into a water landing mid-Atlantic, and they were rescued 90 minutes later by a Danish steamer without a wireless. Eight destroyers were out looking for them. The Daily Mail will give them a £5,000 consolation prize.

The Fifth Avenue (NY) Association and the Merchants’ Association combine to fight the scourge of “unnecessary parades” on their fair boulevard.

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Today -100: May 25, 1919: Of Sopwiths, Dews of Death, and hotbeds of Bolshevik agitation

Hawker & Grieve’s plane is still missing. Did it go down in a cyclone?

At the very end of the war, the US had developed (we are now told) a poison gas called Lewisite, aka The Dew of Death. 10 planes dropping the stuff could have wiped out all life in Berlin, animal and vegetable, supposedly, but the war ended before it could be tried.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Stoopid epidemic.

I haven’t really been following the Lawrence, Massachusetts strike that just ended after 3 months, but the Sunday NYT has a long article of it and how Lawrence was “plunged into a hotbed of Bolshevik agitation” even though mill-owners would have happily given wage increases voluntarily, even without a strike.

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Today -100: May 24, 1919: A hybrid between a French Revolution and an oriental despotism

Hawker & Grieve’s plane is still missing.

The California Legislature votes to turn the Los Angeles Normal School into the second branch of the University of California (Berkeley’s the first). It will open in downtown in the next academic year, later moving to Westwood (chosen over the Palos Verdes Peninsula, which later got a Trump golf course as consolation prize).

Prohibition is due to begin July 1st. Not the prohibition mandated by the 18th Amendment, the wartime one enacted for wartime agricultural needs when they thought the war would still be going on in 1919. But a federal judge grants an injunction against the ban including beer under 2.75% alcohol, which the brewers claim is not intoxicating. The government says it is.

The Allies respond to German complaints about the peace terms, saying everybody has it bad so why should you get off lightly, especially since the war was all your fault.

Headline of the Day -100: 

The debate is on a resolution demanding the State Dept release the full text of the treaty. Hiram Johnson (R-Cal.) thinks they’re trying to conceal something. Gilbert Hitchcock (D-Neb.) points out that the treaty is still being negotiated and hasn’t been signed yet. Lawrence Sherman (R-Ill.) says the League would reduce the US to a vassal state and accuses Wilson’s administration of being full of socialists and being “a hybrid between a French Revolution and an oriental despotism. History would forget the reign of Caligula in the excesses and follies of the American Government operated under the League of Nations interpreted by President Wilson and Colonel House.”


For the first time, at least in the US, a dirigible lands on a rooftop, in Cleveland. Only takes seven tries.

Headline of the Day -100: 

The Mexican state, not a dog. Probably.

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Today -100: May 23, 1919: Of Sopwiths, locksmiths, pogroms, and behaviourists

Hawker & Grieve’s plane is still missing.

Irish Sinn Féin leaders inform the Peace Conference that Ireland will not be bound by the signatures of the British delegation.

The NYT claims the Budapest Reds are executing dozens of counter-revolutionaries under sentences passed by a revolutionary tribunal headed by a 22-year-old former locksmith.

Polish organizations in the US deny that there are pogroms back home. Maybe some Bolsheviks were put up against a wall and shot, and maybe the Bolsheviks all happened to be Jews, but...

A Dr. John B. Watson, chair of the psych department at Johns Hopkins, addresses the International Kindergarten Union, saying “The mother who cuddles and kisses her child when he cries should be punishable by law.” Watson, who will be fired by Johns Hopkins next year for cuddling and kissing one of his students, will raise his own children according to his behaviorist precepts. Three of them will attempt suicide, one successfully.

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Today -100: May 22, 1919: Live and Never Die

Hawker & Grieve’s plane is still missing.

Jews in New York hold parades and a meeting at Madison Square Garden, many in the audience being Jewish members of the military in uniform, calling for an end to pogroms in Poland and for Poland to be banned from the League of Nations if it doesn’t knock it off.

23 members of a negro cult called Live and Never Die, about which I haven’t been able to find out much of anything, are on hunger strike in jail and are refusing to discuss the murder of one of its members, apparently in a fight for control of the cult. Fortunately, the hunger strike, now in its 4th day, isn’t dangerous because they can never die, apparently, it’s right there in the name. Two years from now Live and Never Die’s leader D.D. Murphy will be shot dead by police, which is just confusing.

The House of Representatives passes the women’s suffrage amendment to the Constitution 304-89, the opposition consisting of New England Republicans, Southern Democrats, and douchebags.

The Allies promise Admiral Kolchak

that they will recognize his regime as the sole legitimate Russian government when he has established stability with an elected Assembly, free speech, etc. In other words, never.

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Today -100: May 21, 1919: The butler did it

Hawker & Grieve’s plane is still missing.

Woodrow Wilson sends his State of the Union Address (I think that’s what this is; they didn’t call them that yet) to Congress by cable, which is a first. An uninteresting first, but a first. Nothing particularly interesting in the address, either, although his sojourn in Europe does seem to have him spelling labour with a u.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Richard von Krebs, who killed a New Jersey farmer and his wife in 1914, was committed as criminally insane, and escaped in 1917. Since then he has been working for prominent New Yorkers including a lawyer, who says he’s an excellent butler. Krebs was evidently once Theodore Roosevelt’s father’s butler and, when young, an under-servant in Kaiser Wilhelm’s household. And he once gave testimony that convicted two men of a murder they did not commit (which was discovered before they could be executed). Anyway, they’ve re-captured him.

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