Today -100: August 9, 1919: Of unconscionable profits, deserters, heroin, and Zorro

Woodrow Wilson, speaking before Congress, offers a plan to deal with the high cost of living: continuing the wartime Food Control Act, licensing all corporations engaged in interstate commerce to prevent “unconscionable profits,” penalties for profiteering, etc. He also asks unions (i.e., railway unions) to “think and act like true Americans,” by which he means not go on strike to get pay increases matching inflation. Good luck with that.

The Netherlands is kicking 7,000 German army deserters who sought asylum there during the war out of the country, since Germany has declared an amnesty.

The Association of Pharmaceutical Chemists annual meeting (in June) says doctors should stop prescribing heroin.

What To Read: “The Curse of Capistrano” by Johnston McCulley, serialized from today in All-Story Weekly. It’s the first Zorro story.

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Today -100: August 8, 1919: Of strikes, regents, and things which are verboten in Lorraine

Brooklyn Rapid Transit and Broadway actors are both on strike, so I’m not expecting much else from the NYT today.

Gyula Peidl, who succeeded Béla Kun as prime minister of Hungary earlier this week, is ousted by Archduke Joseph (acting as regent rather than something more, you know, monarchical), who appoints right-winger István Friedrich as PM.

When France reacquired Lorraine, it banned the speaking of German after 10:00 pm and on trains. This has now been lifted, since it turns out many Alsace-Lorrainihoovians don’t speak French very well.

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Today -100: August 7, 1919: Of hoarders, occupations, and peace terms

The Wilson administration is planning to tackle the high cost of living by pretending it’s entirely the fault of “hoarders.” So the Justice Dept will charge meat-packing companies under anti-trust laws.

Romania, ignoring Allied orders to remove its troops from Hungary now that Béla Kun has been ousted, issues demands on Hungary – reduction of its army to 15,000, giving up half its railroad supplies and 30% of its harvest animals, etc etc.

Austria responds to the Peace Conference’s terms, complaining about the loss of so much territory, especially the Tyrol district and southern Bohemia, and to being saddled with 2/3 of the debt of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.

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Today -100: August 6, 1919: Of shantungs and detestable Prussian systems

Japan formally declares its intention not to hold Shantung, the Chinese territory it grabbed from Germany during the war. We’ll see.

The National Guard Association objects to the idea of universal military service, “that detestable Prussian system which is abhorrent to the American people.”

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Today -100: August 5, 1919: Of mediation, occupations, and conscription

The British government will stop mediating labor disputes, as it was forced to do during the war.

Despite the ouster of Béla Kun and the Entente telling them not to, Romanian troops occupy Budapest. Romania has its own agenda. The Allies also order Hungary to cease relations with Russia.

The War Dept. wants compulsory three months’ military training for 19-year-olds, who would then remain in the reserves for 2 years.

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Today -100: August 4, 1919: Of hooliganism and prohibition

“Liverpool is in the grip of hooliganism,” the NYT says as if that were news. There’s a police strike, hence looting.

The Anti-Saloon League denies it will try to ban tobacco next. Rather, it will focus on enforcement of prohibition in the US and spreading prohibition throughout the world.

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Today -100: August 3, 1919: I made the best fight I could

Congress is working on returning railroads to private ownership. The big four railroad unions, representing 2 million RR employees, demand that this not happen. They’re also demanding higher wages.

The Association Opposed to National Prohibitions claims that the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, having succeeded in enacting prohibition, will go after tobacco next.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Postal relations between the US and Germany having been restored, Germans in the US are sending sausages to their relatives in Germany (and lard and ham and butter). Postage is 12¢ a pound.

A Phoebe Williams of Brooklyn has been under 24-hour police guard in hospital since jumping from her 3rd-story apartment nearly 2 years ago. The charge of attempting suicide has just been dropped.

300 cars are stolen every year in New York City.

Chicago: arson destroys the houses of Stock Yards workers, evidently blacks burning white workers’ homes. So blacks will be banned from working at the Stock Yards, because nothing solves racial tensions like firing a bunch of people on the basis of race.

There’s an article in today’s NYT Sunday Magazine section that ascribes Chicago’s racial strife to the influx of blacks during the war and the consequent expansion of the Black Belt into formerly all-white neighborhoods. The blacks demanded, and got, representation on the city council, with the connivance, as the writer sees it, of Mayor Big Bill Thompson, who let gambling saloons and cabarets develop freely in the Black Belt in exchange for votes: “Jazz bands filled the air with syncopated sound, while in the cabarets whites and blacks intermingled in carousal. It was here that the ‘shimmy’ dance is said to have originated.” So I guess the theory is that black people experienced so little policing that they thought they could get away with anything. Like responding when a white man killed one of them with stones?

You will have noted the pro-segregation agenda behind the phrase “intermingled in carousal”.

Allied threats and Romanian military incursions force the resignation of Béla Kun as head of the Hungarian government. He will go into exile (and internment) in Austria. Sez Kun, “If you demand it, I must resign. I made the best fight I could.”

Last October, conscientious objector Priv. Lester Ott was sentenced to death for refusing to clean up Fort Riley. Pres. Wilson commutes that to 6 years in prison.

There are reports of pogroms in Odessa.

What to Read: Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, reviewed today. I’ve, um, seen the movie version.

Nebraska ratifies the women’s suffrage Amendment. 14 down, 22 to go.

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Today -100: August 2, 1919: Of race riots, internationalists, hammersteins, and breaches of promises

Headline of the Day -100: 

Race rioting has “practically ceased” in Chicago. Soldiers patrol the streets and “all places where men congregate for other than religious purposes” have been ordered closed. The army bought up every issue of a black newspaper, the Chicago Whip, because of incendiary material. Gov. Frank Lowden (R) plans to create a committee of 5 whites and 5 blacks who aren’t in politics to draw up a code of ethics for interracial relations, meaning an agreement on separate beaches, stores, parks, residential areas, etc. So Lowden’s solution to racial tensions, in the absence of legal segregation, is to implement it informally.

Woodrow Wilson tells Sen. James Watson (R-Indiana), in one of those one-on-sessions that seem to have convinced not a single senator to support Wilson’s position, that if the Senate insists on putting reservations on the ratification of the Peace Treaty, it will take longer to set up the League of Nations and in the meantime Europe will descend into chaos. Then he & Watson get into a fight over whether he’s an internationalist. Wilson says he is not an internationalist.

Oscar Hammerstein, who built many theaters and opera houses and was to a large extent responsible for the creation of Times Square as a theater district, dies at 73. The Metropolitan once paid him a rumored $2 million to get out of the opera business, since the competition with his Manhattan Opera House was ruining both of them, but that agreement was due to expire in 1920.

Hermann Otto Boehme, a manufacturer of electrical appliances in NYC, is arrested in a suit by Elfrieda Arntz for breach of promise of marriage. She wants $100,000 for his failure to marry her, and he was about to skedaddle for Germany. She says the non-marriage has left her in a mental condition where she can no longer continue her employment as governess. She works as governess to the children of a Dr. Edward Cowles, whose wife named his closeness with Arntz when she sued him for divorce a few years ago. Cowles, we are informed for some reason, is a cousin of Theodore Roosevelt’s brother-in-law. Anyway, I didn’t know you could actually be arrested for breach of promise.

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Today -100: August 1, 1919: Of race riots & dusenberries

Chicago race riots, Day Five. The Black Belt on the South Side is now patrolled by soldiers, lots of soldiers, so things are a bit calmer, just the one murder & some arson. The arson now seems to be more deliberate, a concerted plan to drive blacks out. Food is finally getting to the Black Belt in trucks driven by white drivers up to the “dead line,” then taken over by black drivers. The soldiers have mounted machine guns but haven’t used them.

John Clinton of Beacon, New York, age 91, marries his housekeeper, a Miss Sadie Dusenberry, 35. I’m just saying: if a 35-year-old housekeeper was going to marry her 91-year-old employer in 1919, she would definitely have been named Sadie Dusenberry.

Gen. “Black Jack” Pershing says he’d prefer the bodies of dead American soldiers not be brought home from France.

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Today -100: July 31, 1919: Of race riots, surplus food, and women’s suffrage

Chicago race riots, Day Four. At least 5 more dead, a lot of arson, mostly in the Black Belt of the South Side, which is running out of food. Gov. Frank Lowden (R) is in town and could actually observe a white mob chasing two black men in front of his hotel. Mayor Thompson finally asks the governor for troops. 15,000 rifles are removed from high schools, which are evidently really well armed (for cadet drills). US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer says the race riots in Chicago and D.C. are from local causes, not Bolshevik propaganda.

The War Department starts selling off its surplus food, through the post offices. Postmasters and mail carriers will work as salesmen.

Montana ratifies the women’s suffrage Amendment, with just one legislator dissenting. 13 down, 23 to go.

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Today -100: July 30, 1919: Germany is not dead

Third day of the Chicago race riots. 28 dead so far, 500 injured. Okay, I’m gonna say what the NYT seems unwilling to say: most of the whites actively participating in this, invading the Black Belt of Chicago in groups looking for a fight, that sort of thing, are Irish (including, very probably, future mayor Richard Daley). About as many whites are getting killed as blacks, because this is not the South. The cop who at the start of all this refused to arrest the white man/youth who threw the stones at the black kids’ raft, resulting in the drowning of one of them, is suspended. For some reason we still have no name for that black kid.

The trans-Atlantic steamship Chicago leaves Bordeaux for Chicago 4 days late because the French crew was on strike for better wine (they get a quart a day).

Italian Prime Minister Franceso Nitti, noting out that France is looking for alliances with the distant United States and with England, “which has not ceased to be an island,” but not with Italy, begs for such an alliance. “Germany is not dead,” he points out.

France is still refusing to allow the US to repatriate the bodies of dead soldiers, because it might lead to an epidemic and because they’re not letting French families retrieve their war dead.

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Today -100: July 29, 1919: The present race riots are no surprise to me

The race riots in Chicago continue. 14 known dead today, 9 of them white. Knives, guns, stones. State’s Attorney Maclay Hoyne says “The present race riots are no surprise to me... The police department is so demoralized by politicians, both black and white, on the South Side that the police are afraid to arrest men who are supposed to have political backing.” He says “a certain white politician” has been distributing guns to “vicious colored persons who would be likely to engage in race rioting.” Hoyne is running for mayor.

The Arkansas Legislature ratifies the women’s suffrage Amendment. 12 down, 24 to go.

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Today -100: July 28, 1919: Furious race riots are the worst kind

Headline of the Day -100:

The precipitating factor: some blacks on a raft drifted into the white section of the 29th Street beach (the unofficial white section; there is no legal segregation in Illinois). White beach-goers attacked them with stones, killing a black on a raft and a white swimmer. It escalated from there after a white cop refused to arrest the white man who threw the rock that killed Eugene Williams, l17, eading to street brawls, shooting, and I think arson. This is Day One. There was a good article in the Chicago Tribune earlier this month.

Washington DC’s race riots seem to be over, and the troops brought in last week have been removed. The state of Maryland is demanding the extradition of a black man accused of assaulting a white woman, but the DC police are refusing because they believe his alibi and that he’d be lynched as soon as he was handed over.

The NYT accuses “Reds” – defined as the IWW, Socialists, and Bolsheviks – of conducting a “vicious and apparently well financed propaganda” to “stir up discontent” among negroes. It quotes one of these vicious publications, shown to it by an unnamed federal official, calling viciously for “a new society – a society of equals, without class, race, caste, or religious distinctions.” Vicious.

And in an editorial, the Times darkly asserts, “It is rather hard to believe that in such widely separated cities as Washington and Chicago there could be an outbreak of violent racial animosity within a certain number of days, and all without influence or suggestion from any outside source.” It goes on to suggest that the IWW propaganda among the negroes follows the German-pacifist propaganda early in the Great War. It doesn’t explain how the IWW got a white racist to throw rocks at black kids on a raft. It warns: “the worst enemies of the negro race are those who may have incited them to stir up a dormant feeling which cannot result in anything but injury to them.”

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Today -100: July 27, 1919: Of aerial marriage, broken men, and food blackmail

At an event for the (NYC) Police Pension Fund, Army Aviation Corps Lt. Alexander Wouters is married to Emily Schaeffer while both are up in a plane. The clergyman is in another plane, conducting the service over radio telephone, broadcast through megaphones to the crowd. As you do.

Headline of the Day -100: 

The Peace Conference will offer Hungary food relief and a lifting of the blockade... if it overthrows the Béla Kun government. 

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Today -100: July 26, 1919: At such a time as this to indulge in faction for the sake of faction would, indeed, be a criminal enterprise

Pres. Wilson says US troops will remain in Siberia to keep the Siberian Railroad going and certainly not to interfere in Russian affairs, perish the thought.

The French Chamber of Deputies discusses the mistreatment of non-white French soldiers by US military police in French ports. We don’t get details because the French government really doesn’t want them discussed, but reading between the lines it sounds like the MPs were trying to keep soldiers from the French overseas territories & colonies away from white women.

Pres. Wilson tightens the restrictions on sales of guns to Mexico.

British Secretary of War Winston Churchill denies that he intends to form a Centre Party, as previously reported, he just wants to prevent British politics going back to the old party system. In these times, everything should be national national national. “What a time to play such a game in now that our country has arrived at the supreme pinnacle of splendor and of power... At such a time as this to indulge in faction for the sake of faction would, indeed, be a criminal enterprise.”

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Today -100: July 25, 1919: Doomed jazz is the best kind

Republican senators are curious about why Pres. Wilson has failed to submit (or even show them) the treaty in which the US & Britain agreed to defend France.

A black man accused of assaulting a white woman is lynched in Gilmer, Texas.

There was also a lynching two months ago in Milan, Georgia, of a 72-year-old black man who killed a white man “in defense of a negro woman.”  Milan officials succeeded in keeping the story secret until now because, they said, it would help them track down and arrest the lynchers. Which of course they have not done. In a couple of days, Gov. Hugh Dorsey will offer a $1,000 reward, to which a local doctor adds $500.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Doomed, doomed I tell you!  In other news, there’s an “Imperial Society of Dancing Teachers.”

The Georgia state legislature rejects the women’s suffrage amendment. Both houses, wasn’t even close. Some of them are upset that Woodrow Wilson dared to ask them to pass it.

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Today -100: July 24, 1919: Of interpretations

Lenin has supposedly offered to cede Bessarabia to Romania if it prevents Ukrainians and Adm. Kolchak’s forces crossing through Romania.

William Howard Taft offers some “interpretations” of the League of Nations Covenant that he thinks will make it acceptable to the Senate, including no ban on war, the US being able to impose tariffs or racist immigration bans, the Monroe Doctrine, etc. Taft proposes these interpretations in a letter to Will Hays, chairman of the RNC, suggesting that the former president’s name be kept out of it, since some R. senators don’t like him. Taft thinks Wilson would accept the reservations, which is not the impression Wilson is giving to the senators he’s meeting.

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Today -100: July 23, 1919: Of invasions and race riots

An army of soldiers from Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Italy, and the French colonies is preparing to invade Hungary.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, voting on party lines, rejects Wilson’s request that they approve a provisional appointment of a US representative on the Reparations Committee.

More race rioting in DC, with a couple more dead. Soldiers are patrolling the streets (hopefully not the same soldiers who were rampaging a few days ago). Machine guns are deployed but not used.

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Today -100: July 22, 1919: Of blazing blimps, carnivals of inquisitions, race riots, and cows

Headline of the Day -100: 

Extra points for “Blazing Blimp,” NYT headline writer. It’s a Goodyear Blimp, by the way. Most of the dead (which will reach 13) are bank employees; the crew escaped the falling, blazing blimp by parachute, except for a mechanic whose parachute caught fire. $50,000 in government bonds are burned up (or so the bank says). Chicago will bring in new rules about blimps flying over the city.

(from the Chicago Tribune)

The prohibition enforcement bill (the future Volstead Act) continues to steamroller through Congress. One amendment allows people to serve liquor to “bona fide guests” in their house. An amendment that possession of alcohol should be taken as prima facie evidence of intent to distribute fails. Rep. Nicholas Longworth (R-Ohio) notes that the 18th Amendment says nothing about possession and calls proposals such as the one to make people declare how much booze they have at home “a hodge-podge of all sorts of liberty-crushing legislation... it provides regulations which it will take an army to enforce.” Sacramental wine will be permitted (there will be a lot of sacraments performed over the next 14 years). Rep. Thomas Crago (R-PA) says the American people will reject the “carnival of inquisition” the bill will bring in.

Race riots continue in DC with 4 more dead. The local blacks are now organizing retaliation attacks against cops and random white people. The white soldiers and sailors who started all this were today confined to their camps.

The presumably white colonel in command of the negro 10th Cavalry denies that his men started a riot in Bisbee, Arizona earlier this month. He says local officials deliberately provoked the soldiers with various assaults, hoping for an excuse for the cops to shoot them down. He says the IWW has something to do with the plot, which makes no sense at all.

Pres. Wilson asks the Senate to approve an interim appointment of a US rep on the Reparations Committee, so the US can have some say on the committee even before the treaty is ratified, which Wilson is totally sure it will be. Republicans naturally think he’s trying to trick them into recognizing the treaty.

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Today -100: July 21, 1919: Of prohibition, treaties, independence, and dickmen

The US Senate is debating whether the prohibition enforcement law should include a ban on people keeping alcohol in their own homes (i.e., stocking up before prohibition comes in). The strict prohibitionists have been winning on every provision, including enforcing prohibition through temporary injunctions so that violators would be charged with contempt of court and imprisoned without any jury trial. It’s almost like they don’t believe prohibition will be popular.

The Peace Conference finishes the Austrian treaty. Austria will get Odenburg, which Hungary wants, and can which it could just take, since Austria’s army will be restricted to 30,000 men (without conscription). Big reparations, some of which are to be paid by countries like Hungary, Czechoslovakia etc that got Austrian territory, but those countries won’t be responsible for any of Austria’s war debt. Austria will have to give up cows (4,000 and 50 bulls to Italy, 1,000 to Serbia & Romania, etc). Also sheep and draft horses.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Filipinos were told by the Wilson Administration to expect independence soon. Congressional Republicans decide nah.

Dirty-Sounding Headline of the Day -100:  

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