Today -100: February 6, 1921: Of armies, smoking, and bad luck

The House votes 271-16 to override Wilson’s veto of the joint resolution instructing the War Department to end army recruiting until its size is reduced to 175,000 from its current 280,000. The War Dept wanted 500,000.

Kitty O’Shea, widow of Charles Stewart Parnell, dies.

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The Senate kills a measure to ban smoking in all executive branch offices. There is some discussion first about whether chewing tobacco should be included.

What to Watch: French comedian Max Linder’s Seven Years Bad Luck.

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Today -100: February 5, 1921: Of strongholds, the battle of the Dimitrioses, mandates, and disarmament

Poet/playwright/fantasy author Lord Dunsany is court-martialed for possessing shotguns and ammunition, and is fined £25. Dunsany claims to be loyal to the Crown, having fought in the Boer and Great wars, and Dunsany Castle “was built as a stronghold to safeguard the power of the Crown.”

Dimitrios Rallis resigns as Greek prime minister after a fight with his Minister of War Dimitrios Gounaris over which one would go to the London conference, that argument being a proxy for the larger one over whether to go to war with the Turkish Nationalists.

Mary Ellen Smith, a suffragist who won her dead husband’s seat in the British Columbia Legislative Assembly in 1918 (slogan: “Women and Children First”), is given what may be the first appointment of a woman to cabinet office in the world, certainly the first in the British Empire, as minister without portfolio.

The League of Nations finally makes public the terms for the British mandate over Palestine, 2 months after they’re submitted. The British government “view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” while safeguarding the civil and religious rights of everybody. Aaaaannd...

Harding will call an international disarmament conference.  Meanwhile admirals and generals are talking up the importance of battleships, oh and they’d like some aircraft carriers too, please and thank you.

There is unrest in Japanese-occupied Formosa. Taiwanese nationalist Rin Kendo, which sounds like a Star Wars name, says Formosans have come to the conclusion that Japan is attempting to enslave them.

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Today -100: February 4, 1921: Who’s a special session? YOU’RE a special session

Pres. Wilson calls a special session of the Senate, at Harding’s request, for inauguration day, to start approving Harding’s nominees.

The IRA claims to have sunk a British submarine two weeks ago, with a loss of 57 hands, using an “electrically controlled projectile.” Actually the K class was a pretty crappy sub, and it probably just sank. It was never recovered.

500 or so IRAers ambush Crown forces near Rosscarberry, County Cork. The latter seem to have gotten the better of it.

Police and army trucks now carry chained hostages.

Attacks on police in Dublin have become very frequent.

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Today -100: February 3, 1921: Why does Europe make all this fuss over an outlaw?

The Coolidges will spend his veepship living in a hotel, the same one Vice President Whatsisname currently uses.

Scientific American’s $5,000 Will Someone Please Explain Einstein’s Theory to US? prize is won by one L. Bolton of the British Patent Office.

The Clonfin Ambush: in County Longford, Ireland, the IRA explodes a mine – this is considered for some reason to be more or less the first ever “IED” – under two military trucks crossing a bridge. They ten fire on the trucks, starting a two-hour firefight before the cops surrender. The IRA fighters escape with a shit-ton of weapons and ammo, but only after tending to the British wounded.

The Austrian government is demanding that former Emperor Carl return the crown jewels. He’s refusing.

King Constantine of Greece says there will be no negotiations with the Turkish Nationalists: “I do not recognize Mustapha Kemal [Atatürk] as a person worthy to be dealt with. Why does Europe make all this fuss over an outlaw? Mustapha Kemal is only a big bluff – a big bubble – and we could blow him off the map as we would blow a fly off a table.” SPOILER ALERT: No they can’t. Connie says the Greek army has beaten the Turks every time they’ve fought, which is not the case.

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Today -100: February 2, 1921: Of nights at the theatre, pardons, finite universes, and the 20th degree of North Latitude

Woodrow Wilson goes to the theatre for the first time since what the NYT calls his “breakdown,” because evidently we’re just ignoring that everyone knows it was a stroke. What drew him to the theatre? John Drinkwater’s “Abraham Lincoln,” and yes that’s kind of weird.

Hearing that Wilson has refused to pardon him, Eugene Debs says it’s Wilson, not he, who needs a pardon.

Albert Einstein thinks the universe is finite.

The German government says it will reject the Entente’s reparations terms as going beyond the terms of the Versailles Treaty.

Former Louisiana Governor Ruffin Pleasant has a suggestion for the upcoming state Constitutional Convention: deny suffrage rights to anyone coming from south of the 20th degree of North Latitude, an area which “is credited with none of the civilization of the world.”

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Today -100: February 1, 1921: Of pardons, plots, and rejuvenated women

Woodrow Wilson rejects Attorney Gen. Palmer’s recommendation to pardon Eugene Debs.

Nationalists (fascists?) in Florence, Italy claim to have uncovered, while they were looting a newspaper office before burning it, proof of a Communist plan for a national uprising on Feb. 3rd.

The Communists are alleged, as was the custom, to be planning a general European rising on May Day.

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Today -100: January 31, 1921: Of loans, dictatorships, and suicides

The Allies keep adding burdens to Germany which are not covered by the peace treaty. Now it’s a ban on German governments at any level getting foreign loans without permission.

Lenin says dictatorship may be necessary in Russia for 40 years because the peasants are reactionary and won’t give up agricultural products without getting paid.

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Today -100: January 30, 1921: Oops

The French Supreme Court rules that 6 soldiers shot for cowardice in 1914 were innocent and orders pensions for their widows and children. At their court-martial, a lieutenant denied that he panicked and gave a retreat order, which he did.

Obit of the Day: Prince Kropotkin, anarchist extraordinaire (although the NYT calls him a nihilist). I’m not sure if this makes him a good anarchist/nihilist, but he’s not actually dead.

A father and his two daughters, unbeknownst to each other, all elope and marry within 24 hours of each other.

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Today -100: January 29, 1921: Of kaiserinnen, obedience, and reparations

The former Mrs Kaiser of Germany is dying (although she’s not as close to death as everyone thinks). She will be buried in Germany, but if Wilhelm attends the funeral, the Netherlands says, he won’t be allowed back in.

The Anglicans are revising the Book of Common Prayer for the first time since 1662, but are not removing “obey” from the female version of the marriage vows.

The Allies agree to extract from Germany reparations of 2 to 6 billion gold marks a year for 42 years (probably at 2 billion for 5 years, then 4 billion for 5, then 6), and a 12½ tax on its exports. The last bit, unlike the rest, can’t be simply imposed on Germany, since it wasn’t mentioned in the peace treaty.

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Today -100: January 28, 1921: Of reparations, women voters, papal states, and helicopters

French President Alexandre Millerand intervenes in the Interallied talks to overrule his government and reduce the French demand for reparations from Germany to 100 billion gold marks, paid over 42 years with interest bringing the total to 250 billion gold marks, which is the equivalent of some money. Lloyd George had made it clear that he would never agree to France’s earlier maximalist demands.

New governor of New York Nathan Miller, addressing the League of Women Voters’ New York convention, mansplains that the League has no reason to be in existence. He says political parties are good but groups trying to exercise political power are bad and a menace to the institutions of the republic. He complains about the League’s attempt in the last election to defeat Sen. James Wadsworth, who for many years led the charge against women’s suffrage in NY. Miller also objects to their support of various social welfare measures, saying that provision for old age, illness, and unemployment should be left to the thrift and foresight of the individual. “For the most part his speech was received in dead silence, with here and there a burst of derisive laughter”. Carrie Chapman Catt responds with a defense of pressure groups, noting that no great reform (abolition, prohibition, women’s suffrage) came from a political party, and “No political party will ever take up an idea until that idea has grown so strong that unless it takes it up it will lose votes.” (Republican members of the League will issue a reply to the governor).

500 new Klansman are initiated at the Alabama State Fair Grounds, much of which was underwater.

The Allies decide to recognize Estonia and Latvia as independent states, ignoring Woodrow Wilson’s position that they shouldn’t take advantage of Russia’s current weak state to try to dismember it. There’s also a worry that Japan will take advantage of this precedent to annex Siberia.

The Austrian Christian Socialist party wants Austria to become a papal state (the Vatican is not a country at this time).

France buys Raúl Pateras Pescara’s helicopter.

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Today -100: January 27, 1921: Of reparations, lynchings, home duties, and castles

France suggests that German reparations should be 200 billion marks gold, which is the equivalent of some money, plus interest, which would double that amount. Lloyd George is sceptical that Germany could pay this.

A lynch mob drives 100 miles in six cars to grab a black man, Henry Lowery, who was being brought in by train from Texas, where he had fled after killing two people while drunk. The mob takes them from deputies in Sardis, Mississippi, where they had arrived early, “made no secret of their intentions and calmly waited at the hotel.” They then drive Lowery back to Nodena, Arkansas, and ask him if he has anything to say. He says he’s hungry, so they give him a “hearty meal” (details not provided), and burn him at the stake, which takes 40 minutes. “Repeatedly he was turned over and more oil poured on the flames to hasten the burning.” Gov. Thomas McRae calls the lynching the most disreputable act ever committed in Arkansas. He wants any cop who didn’t prevent it fired.

Anna Lee Worley (D) is elected to the Tennessee State Senate. The first woman in the state Legislature, Worley is filling the vacancy left by the death earlier this month of her husband, James Parks Worley. He was an anti-suffragist who claimed to represent the women who “were at home tending to their home duties.” In March, she will successfully sponsor a bill to allow women to hold public office. Suck it, dead husband!

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Fantasy author, poet and playwright Lord Dunsany is arrested after ammunition is found in Dunsany Castle in a search under martial law, then released when it is found to be obsolete ammunition.

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Today -100: January 26, 1921: Some of them may not be married, and it is a terrible thing for them

Socialists and Fascists are killing each other in Modena and elsewhere in Italy. All gun-carry permits are revoked in the provinces of Modena and Bologna.

The Dept of Labor reports that between February 1919 and the end of 1920 it deported 505 “anarchists.”

A divorce case in London is heard, for the first time, by a jury of 6 men and 6 women, but one of the lawyers is upset that women see all the evidence: “Some of them may not be married, and it is a terrible thing for them.” So the document (a letter, I guess) is only shown to the male jurors.

A court martial begins in the requisitioned Dublin City Hall of two men for the murder on “Bloody Sunday” last November of a lieutenant who “for good and sufficient reasons” was living in Dublin under an assumed name.

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Today -100: January 25, 1921: Of reparations, dead Lenins, mad mullahs, and universal robots

The Interallied Conference discusses German reparations. “The difference arises from a divergence in the fundamental conception of Germany’s position. England sees Germany in the light of a bankrupt who owes more than he can pay, but who is entitled to be given an opportunity to settle on a basis on which the creditors can agree. France regards Germany as a criminal who should be sentenced to thirty years’ hard labor to repair the damage of his crime.”

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The graphic descriptions in such stories (front page, above the fold) continue to startle me.

British planes bomb the shit out of the Somali strongholds of the Mad Mullah, which is not going to make him less mad (actually, he died a month ago of influenza).

Russia denies rumors that Lenin is dead. Again.

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Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) premieres in Prague. The US premiere in 1922, with 22-year-old Spencer Tracy and Pat O’Brien, both in their Broadway debuts, will introduce the word “robot” into the English language.

If you’re going to read Čapek, and you should, you’re better with his short stories or his novel The War with the Newts.

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Today -100: January 24, 1921: Of reapportionment, lynchings, and helicopters

States which would lose seats in Congress after reapportionment if membership were kept at 435 are uniting to fight that plan.

A race riot in Warrenton, North Carolina which developed from “a quarrel over a trade involving some apples”, is followed by the lynching of two black men.

Argentinian inventor Raúl Pateras Pescara claims to have invented a helicopter, which is good because that word was coined 60 years ago and it’s just been waiting all that time to be applied to something in the real world. He’s planning to sell it to the French military, if it works. He’s gotten it (literally) off the ground, but is still working on hovering and, you know, flying (it will take him two or three years to make one with a powerful enough engine to do those things).

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Today -100: January 23, 1921: As popular as baseball

Snow falls in Hollywood. The end of the world is nigh.

Woodrow Wilson proposes to the League of Nations that the great powers pledge to guarantee Russia from attack, putting to the test Russia’s claim “that they are afraid to demobilize because they fear new attacks.” This idea will gain just about as little traction among the Powers as you’d expect.

New French Prime Minister Aristide Briand’s plan on German reparations is not to set a fixed amount until the German economy has recovered, but in the meantime to demand 3 billion gold marks, which is the equivalent of some money, for each of the next 5 years. And then, presumably, the sky’s the limit, for decades to come.

Ireland Secretary Sir Hamar Greenwood inspects the Black and Tans, and tells them they are the custodians of civilized government in defeating the Sinn Féin “conspiracy.”

The new business manager of the Chicago Opera Association says “We intend to make opera as popular as baseball.” Men will even be allowed wear overalls instead of tuxedos. Hell, it’s Chicago, overalls are probably mandatory.

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Today -100: January 22, 1921: Splitters

The left-wing faction of the Italian Socialist Party, failing to get the party to join the Third Internationale, splits and forms a Communist Party.

Poet-Aviator d’Annunzio is gone from Fiume, but the legionaries he left behind attempt a coup.

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Today -100: January 21, 1921: Of retaliation, car accidents, franklins, kids and passion

British forces blow up more houses in Cork in retaliation for sniping at police.

Maj. Gen. Strickland, in charge of troops in Ireland, complains that women are hiding guns in their dresses. He wants “vigilance committees” formed to snitch on the IRA. And he opposes indiscriminate retaliation but supports official retaliation, presumably like that in the previous item, but prefers that it be called “punishment.”

El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Costa Rica will sign a compact Monday to merge their nations. Nicaragua is staying out, and the plan will go nowhere.

The car of King Albert of Belgium, in which the king was a passenger, runs over and kills a 5-year-old girl and injures her 7-year-old brother. The king is said to have been quite distressed.

Franklin Bache Huntington, an architect and also the great-great-great grandson of Benjamin Franklin, will be given a tour of New York dressed as his ancestor, who expressed a desire to see what the US would look like in a 100 years. I don’t think that’s what he had in mind.

What to Watch: premiering at Carnegie Hall in a charity screening is The Kid, the sentimental Charlie Chaplin feature film (his first) that shows how, with the right homeless adoptive father, a child can grow up to become Uncle Fester. Also on the bill, Pola Negri in Ernst Lubitsch’s Passion, which is an odd double bill.

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Today -100: January 20, 1921: Of daily stars, reapportionment, and independence in any form whatever

Harding will escape the pressures over his Cabinet appointments by going on a 12-day cruise. And he’ll announce the whole Cabinet at the same time, rather than naming Charles Evans Hughes secretary of state early as he’d planned. He says it will be a Republican Cabinet. He resigns as president of the Harding Publishing Company. The Marion Daily Star will just have to get along without him.

The House of Representatives decides not to increase its size to 483 members for reapportionment after all. Where that plan (and districts of 218,979 people) would not have reduced the size any state’s delegation, keeping membership at 435 (242,267 people each) would reduce the delegation of 11 states and increase that of 8 states. Rep. George Tinkham (R-Mass.) proposes to cut representation for the Southern states as called for in a never-used clause of the 14th Amendment because of their suppression of black voting rights This is ruled non-germane although it is totally fucking germane.

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Says Manuel Quezon, president of the Philippines Senate.

Speaking of independence in any form whatever, the Philippines Territorial Legislature drops a bill to require men to wear trousers.

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Today -100: January 19, 1921: Of roots, needful repose, constitutional kings, and prosecutors

Republican senators are pressuring Harding not to name Charles Evans Hughes secretary of state, threatening not to work with him. They’d prefer Elihu Root, mostly because they like saying his name out loud over and over – try it, it’s fun – but to be honest they don’t much like him either.

Poet-Aviator-Looooooser Gabriele d’Annunzio leaves Fiume, anticlimactically, in a simple automobile. He is going to Switzerland for “desired solitude and needful repose”. Italy’s blockade of Fiume has been lifted.

Charles, the former emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is willing to accept a demotion to constitutional king of Hungary, although he seems to be conditioning that on his being (re-)coronated between June and September, which is crowning season, I guess.

Cook County (Illinois) State’s Attorney Robert Crowe says in future all women tried in the county will be prosecuted by women deputy prosecutors.

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Today -100: January 18, 1921: Of crown princes, trademark infringements, chefs, and black runners

Congress votes a resolution to reduce the Army to 175,000 (yes, it was supposed to be 150,000 last week) and asks Secretary of War Newton Baker to stop recruiting until it gets down to that level.

Supposedly the Netherlands asks former kaiser Wilhelm and all his family to leave the country, since the crown prince, the Don Jr. of the Hohenzollerns, has been violating the terms of asylum by plotting a coup in Germany. (This will be denied by the Dutch government tomorrow).

Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard William Simmons offers a $100 reward for anyone using the KKK name “in an unlawful manner or in connection with any purpose or movement not sanctioned by law.”

Sing Sing Prison chef Jim Blanche, himself a prisoner, although one with only 3 weeks left in his sentence, quits as death row chef because the inmates just kept complaining (and not tipping)(are they really expected to tip, or was this a joke?), in part because their food always arrives cold from the distant kitchen.

Senate Republicans decide to refuse to convene in any executive session called by Wilson so they don’t have to confirm any nominations he makes. There are thousands pending (I think mostly post office jobs).

Winston Churchill is moved from his post as war minister to colonial secretary. Oddly, he’ll still be Air Minister. I’m not sure why he’s being demoted.

The Harvard varsity track team cancels its planned trip through the South after the University of Virginia and Annapolis cancel meets because the Harvard team has two negroes.

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