Today -100: September 9, 1919: Of pro-German elements, reservations, pershings, and home runs

In Sioux Falls, Woodrow Wilson warns that “the pro-German element in the United States has again lifted its head,” in the form of attempts to keep the US out of the League of Nations, which would somehow result in better peace terms for Germany. He says the US is the only real idealist among the nations of the world.

Romania wants to sign the Austrian peace treaty with reservations (like many US Republican senators), and is being told no. The provisions it objects to would require it to treat its Jews nicely, which it says would interfere with its sovereignty in its newly acquired territories. The Yugoslavs have similar objections to being made to be nice to their minorities.

Gen. Pershing is in town for parades and shit.

Babe Ruth hits his 26th home run of the season, which is a record.

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Today -100: September 8, 1919: Of corks, peaces founded on brute force, and lynchings

In County Cork, Sinn Féiners attack soldiers parading to church, evidently in an attempt to grab their weapons, but in the ensuing firefight they kill 1 soldier and wound 3 more and then escape scot free, despite 18 planes being deployed.

The Austrian National Assembly ratifies the Peace Treaty, 97-23, while protesting “a peace founded on brute force” and the “violation of Austria’s right of free disposal of herself,” saying Austria must join Germany.

A mob in Jacksonville, Florida breaks into the jail looking for a black man accused of assaulting a white girl/woman, but finding that he’d been removed, lynch two other black prisoners instead, shooting them and then dragging their bodies through the streets, as was the custom.

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Today -100: September 7, 1919: Do you not know that the world is all now one single whispering gallery?

In another of his League of Nations speeches, Woodrow Wilson in Des Moines says the world is waiting for our leadership. He also blames the internet wireless and telegraph – “Do you not know that the world is all now one single whispering gallery?” – for the spread of “the poison of disorder, the poison of revolt, the poison of chaos” beyond Russia to Eastern Europe and maybe even the US, “and so long as the disorder continues, so long as the world is kept waiting for the answer to the question of the kind of peace we are going to have and what kind of guarantees there are to be behind that peace, that poison will steadily spread, more and more rapidly until it may be that even this beloved land of ours will be distracted and distorted by it.”

The actors’ strike is over. Chorus girls also get a wage increase. Stage productions that have now opened or will shortly open include “Chu Chin Chow,” “The Scandals of 1919,” “She Would and She Did,” and “Monte Cristo, Junior.”

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Today -100: September 6, 1919: The supremacy will be ours

The Peace Conference  tells Germany that if it doesn’t annul the bit of its constitution allowing for Anschluß, the Allies will occupy the right bank of the Rhine. French Gen. Charles Mangin, in charge of troops in occupied Rhineland, orders German officials not to take the oath to the new constitution.

Mexican Gen. Salvador Alvarado issues an open letter to his boss Carranza, warning that Mexico is totes fucked up and the US will probably invade soon.

Woodrow Wilson reassures St. Louis that the US would be the “senior partner” in the League of Nations: “The supremacy will be ours.” The choice, he says, is between armed isolation and peaceful partnership. He says if the US doesn’t join the League it will be a “quitter.”

Women get the vote in Italy, the NYT reports, incorrectly.

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Today -100: September 5, 1919: Of remarriages, open and avowed enemies, and worthy subjects of the Emperor

The state of Lower Austria now allows divorced people to remarry. Which they proceed to do.

The NYT declares the new Communist Party “open and avowed enemies of the United States, its Government, its traditions, and its institutions.” It doesn’t know how things have come to this. It just doesn’t know.

The new Japanese governor-general of Korea, Baron Saito Makoto, tells the AP all about his new liberal policies for Korea, such as not crushing the Korean language and culture, abolishing gold braids and swords for officials, abolishing flogging, and developing the Korean people until the point where ultimately they might become “worthy subjects of the Emperor” and even have equal rights with Japanese, some day.

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Today -100: September 4, 1919: Of women’s suffrage, menaced Finlands, assassination attempts, and downed planes

The Virginia and Alabama legislatures reject the women’s suffrage Amendment.

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Korean nationalists, presumably, try to assassinate the new Japanese governor-general of Korea, Baron Saito Makoto, throwing a bomb at his railroad carriage.

Evidently the Mexican troops who shot down the US plane yesterday were cavalry who were pissed that the low-flying plane was scaring their horses. The US is claiming the plane was in the US (Texas), the Mexicans that it was in Mexican air-space.

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Today -100: September 3, 1919: Of deaf presidents, angry Frenchies, racial ascendancies and oppressions, workers of the world uniting, and sedition

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And yet they’re getting louder and louder.

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10 days ago, the Allies ordered Romania to stop looting Hungary, but Romanian troops are still running riot over the country, issuing demands (no one can wear a uniform except Romanians, etc), and have not bothered to respond to the note. But the Allies have proven unwilling so far to clamp down on Romania because Romania has oil.

The Peace Conference demands that Germany alter its new constitution to remove references to Austria possibly joining.

It also gives Austria the terms of its peace treaty, with 5 days to accept them. The terms include a ban on Austria becoming part of Germany. In a response to Austrian objections, the Conference rejects the idea that Austria should not be treated as a defeated enemy because that was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was, like, an entirely different country.  The Conference response says the Austrian people never attempted to cure militarism before the war or object to the start of the war, and anyway the Habsburg Empire was a system of “racial ascendancy and oppression” over the non-German/Magyar populations. Which is a little rich coming from the Allies, who are currently exercising their own racial ascendance & oppression over Indians and Indochinese and Kenyans and Algerians and Filipinos and Irish and... 

In Chicago, a Communist Labor Party of America is founded, with the motto “Workers of the World Unite.” And Dennis Batt, organizer and editor in, I think, a different communist faction, is arrested under the Illinois Sedition Act. In the hall during the meeting, contrary to what this article says.

Mexicans, possibly federal soldiers, shoot across the border, taking down a US military plane.

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Today -100: September 2, 1919: We’re for the Soviet all the while

Chicago police threaten to shut down a Communist convention if red flags are not removed and replaced by American flags. The NYT quotes a hymn sung at the convention:

Bolshevik, Bolshevik, Bolshevik - bang –
We are members of Gene Debs’s gang.
Are we rebels? We should smile;
We’re for the Soviet all the while.

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Today -100: September 1, 1919: Of the sincerity of Japan, spirits of aggression and cupidity, veeps, and lynchings

Japanese Prime Minister Hara Takashi says China completely misunderstands its intentions towards Shantung. “The day will arrive when China will come to comprehend the sincerity of Japan.”

Speaking of people who fail to comprehend the sincerity of Japan, which he accuses of a “spirit of aggression and cupidity toward Korea,” Syngman Rhee declares the Republic of Korea. He pointedly refers to the 14 Points and the US Declaration of Independence.

The traditional NYC Labor Day parade is cancelled due to the high cost of living, specifically the cost of costumes.

Woodrow Wilson celebrates Labor Day by asking unions not to strike because he’s pretty sure he’ll get inflation down any day now. And his vice president says that he can’t live within his salary and is considering striking. He does admit he is holding a job “which has so little labor connected with it,” but he worked hard in the past and so deserves a little breathing spell.

The race rioting (i.e., white people attacking black people) in Knoxville, Tennessee continues. Blacks break into pawn shops and hardware stores to acquire firearms and wind up in firefights with the National Guard, who have machine guns. And use them. Incidentally, during the initial incident yesterday, the mob not only tore the jail apart looking for a black man to lynch, they let all the white prisoners go.

A large mob in Boaglusa, Louisiana, lynch a black ex-soldier for allegedly attacking a white woman. His body is then dragged through the town tied to a car and burned.

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Today -100: August 31, 1919: Of race riots, sugar profiteers, wars on Jews, and dancing

“Lithuanian sources” (which seems to mean one railroad engineer, but if that isn’t a good enough source for a front page above the fold story, what is?) inform the NYT that an army of 40,000 Germans has assembled in Lithuania to invade Russia.

In Knoxville, Tennessee, a huge lynch mob is driven from the jail without seizing a black prisoner who’d been transferred to Chattanooga, so they go on a murderous rampage through the negro district, as was the custom, killing two.

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The American National Association of Masters of Dancing asks the Methodist Episcopal Church to lift its ban on dancing. The Masters stand for “decent” dancing and against jazz and “other music that tends to degrade or sensualize dancing.”

Now Playing: The Valley of the Giants, starring now-forgotten mega-star Wallace Reid, who was badly injured in a train wreck late in the filming, so the studio, Paramount, sent out a doctor to pump him with enough morphine to get him through it, as was the custom. Reid died a hopeless addict in 1923 at 31 years old. The film was lost for 90 years, when a print was discovered in Russia. It’s supposedly being restored by the Library of Congress.

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Today -100: August 30, 1919: Of anschlusses, treaties, and anxious Turks

The French are incensed that the new German constitution includes provisions for Austrian representation in the Reichstag, should it be annexed in the future.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee continues to gleefully mutilate the Peace Treaty, giving the US greater representation (equal to that of Britain plus its colonies and self-governing dominions – Canada, South Africa, India, etc), banning those colonies & dominions voting on disputes in which their mother country is involved, etc.

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Today -100: August 29, 1919: I am tired out and am going fishing

Monroe Trotter, “Boston negro” of the National Equal Rights League, appears before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and demands a racial equality amendment to the Peace Treaty. He warns that if the injustice and oppression in the US continues, “our own country may not be free from a menace to the world’s peace.” Joseph Thomas of the National Race Congress asks the Committee to ensure that the US rather than France gets the League of Nations mandate for Kamerun. American blacks would go to Kamerun as teachers, policemen, etc. The Democrats on the Committee seem to have boycotted this session, and the Republicans didn’t bother to ask any questions of the black witnesses.

A mob in Ocmulgee, Georgia shoot a black man, Eli Cooper, in a black church, which they then burn down, along with other nearby black churches. Cooper was alleged to have been the leader of a plot for negroes to rise out and wipe out the white population.

Ole Hanson, Seattle’s anti-labor mayor, resigns, issuing an official statement: “I am tired out and am going fishing.”

South African Prime Minister Louis Botha, who led the Boer forces against Britain during the Boer War, dies at 56 of a heart attack following a bout of Spanish Flu. He will be replaced by Jan Smuts.

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Today -100: August 28, 1919: Of informal warnings and tobacco riots

Rear Admiral Mark Bristol, commander of the US naval forces in Turkey, tells Turkey to stop massacring the Armenians. When Turkey complains to Britain and France about being threatened, the US explains that this was merely an “informal” warning. Clemenceau complains that the US should only deal with Turkey through the allies’ Supreme Council, and anyway the US was never at war with Turkey and has dragged its feet about taking or rejecting a League of Nations mandate over Armenia.

The French riot over tobacco shortages, because the French.

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Today -100: August 27, 1919: Of borders, draftees, strikes, listening lesters, and Houdini

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee votes on party lines to strip the peace treaty of US obligations to participate in European matters such as the commissions drawing up the German-Belgian and other borders.

Last week Pres. Wilson met a delegation of parents of US soldiers currently stationed in Siberia, who demanded that draftees be brought home since they had been drafted for a war against Germany not Russia. Wilson now orders the return of draftees. He will send new recruits to replace them, so no easing off of the undeclared war against Bolshevik Russia.

The railway unions reject Wilson’s request not to go on strike and will poll their memberships.

The Justice Dept claims that “Russian Soviet interests” are funding newspapers for negroes in order to stir up racial antagonism.

Theater is still iffy. The stage hands at the Atlantic City production of “Listen, Lester” ignore that injunction and go on strike – after the first act.

So why not go to the movies?

Harry Houdini’s second movie, this one features thrills, escapes (naturally), and that mid-air collision, which was... not intentional. But they caught it on film so rewrote the script to include it. Excerpts are on YouTube, including the dramatic scene below where Houdini – actually a stunt double, which is rather disappointing – lowers himself from one plane to another. The collision between the planes was... not intended, but they rewrote the script to include it. No one died or anything. This movie was believed lost for 96 years.

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Today -100: August 26, 1919: Of immigration bans and railroads

Woodrow Wilson asks Congress to extend the wartime control/ban on immigration for a year after the end of the war (whenever that might be), warning that foreigners “whose origin and affiliations make it inadvisable” that they enter the US are just waiting to swarm in. I’m not sure exactly what is meant by “origin.” Japanese? 

Wilson meets railroad unions to tell them that their demands for higher wages would just perpetuate inflation, so they should suck it. He denies that they even need a wage increase because of inflation, because inflation is just temporary and prices will come down, probably, just as soon as the Peace Treaty is ratified.

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Today -100: August 25, 1919: The war to end all hyphens

The 8th Cavalry leaves Mexico, the trail of the bandit-kidnappers washed out by rain. It’s now confirmed that they entered Mexico right after it was known that the captured aviators had been safely ransomed, so this was always a punitive expedition rather than a rescue mission, as it was originally portrayed.

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In the ongoing theatrical strike, the Apollo Theatre in Atlantic City gets an injunction against the stage employees union. The musical comedy “Listen, Lester” can now go on.

20 or more German prisoners of war escape the stockade in Camp Sherman in Ohio, where they are still being held because the war is still officially on. It was a tunnel job. 18 are quickly recaptured.

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Today -100: August 24, 1919: Of agitators, mutinies, shantungs, and hay

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Obviously Bolshevik Russia and the IWW are behind any move for self-determination by oppressed peoples, and negroes would be perfectly content in their subordinate position but for blah blah blah.

300 British soldiers are arrested in Southampton after refusing to board ships bound for France. They suspect they would be sent to fight in Russia.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is happily rewriting the peace treaty, deciding that Shantung will go to China rather than Japan. This would mean reopening the whole negotiation process, which they know won’t happen. Still, it’s a weird, obscure issue to use as a poison pill. 

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Today -100: August 23, 1919: Of reich presidents and Texas for Texans only

Friedrich Ebert is sworn in as German Reichspräsident under the new Weimar Constitution. He will be succeeded in that office by Field Marshal von Hindenburg on his death in 1925 and then, you know, Hitler.

John Shillady, the (white) secretary of the NAACP is beaten on the streets of Austin, Texas, in broad daylight, by county Judge Dave Pickle, Constable Charles Hamby and others, who are now proudly bragging about the felony, and ordered to leave Texas. Shillady was in town to investigate the Texas Rangers’ interference with the NAACP; the assistant adjutant general tells him that organizations teaching racial equality are causing troubles between the races. The night before the beating, Shillady was arrested/kidnapped and a secret “court of inquiry” was held, which may or may not have been a real court, although it was presided over by a real judge, and it’s Texas, so “real court” is a relative term. Gov. William Hobby will tell the NAACP that Shillady was “the only offender” in the incident and tells the organization to stay out of Texas. He will further defend the mob action: “I believe in Texas for Texans only, and just as strongly do I believe that Texans should say how the affairs of the state should be conducted and I believe in sending any narrow-brained, double-chinned reformer who comes here with the end in view of stirring up racial discontent back to the North where he came from, with a broken jaw if necessary.” Shillady will resign from the NAACP next year.

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Today -100: August 22, 1919: Well, everyone needs a hobby

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The US Cavalry troops in Mexico kill four bandits. The only casualty on the US side is a cactus-related injury. Carranza asks the US to remove its troops from his country, please and gracias.

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Sen. Albert Fall asked whether the US could just skip the whole peace treaty thing and go straight to declaring that a state of peace exists. 

A black man is lynched in Louisburg, North Carolina.

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Today -100: August 21, 1919: It ain’t over...

Japan will replace the military administration it has used to run Korea since conquering and annexing it with a civilian one and says it will treat Korea on the same footing as Japan itself... “in due course.” This is intended to shut up the independence movement but won’t. Even with the recent violent suppression of independence protesters, the rest of the world hasn’t much cared. When Korean exiles in the US, including future South Korean president Syngman Rhee, asked the State Dept for permission to travel to Paris to make their case to the Peace Conference, they were told to apply to Japan, since they were after all Japanese subjects now.

Congress overrides Wilson’s veto of the Daylight Saving repeal.

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To be fair, he was a music publisher and asked her to sing (Beethoven).

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