Today -100: June 6, 1921: Of loop-the-crashes and flashing limbs

Laura Bromwell, aviator who held the world record for most loop-the-loops (199), dies. Guess what she was doing at the time.

As previously mentioned, Somers Point, New Jersey invited beach-goers who didn’t wish to subject themselves to Atlantic City’s bathing suit censors and did wish to wear one-piece bathing suits and nothing – dear god, nothing! – on their legs. And yesterday, Sunday, many “turned the bay front into a scene of flashing limbs and display of shapely forms.” Men (presumably) watched the beach from the bridge and from trees, “and there was a shortage of men at church services.”

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Today -100: June 5, 1921: Entire populations will take the chance of never awakening when they go bed at night

Pueblo, Colorado floods. I mean, really floods. A militia captain orders all looters shot, as was the custom.

The British are evidently threatening that if the southern Irish don’t agree to a settlement within a month, military repression will be intensified, the number of soldiers will be doubled, and 100,000 will be interned in concentration camps.

Somers Point, New Jersey invites bathers to come to its beaches to escape its rival Atlantic City’s puritanical rules. At Somers Point women can wear one-piece bathing suits and show bare legs (as opposed to hosiery) and everything.

The Army has a new poison gas, actually a liquid, 3 drops of which on someone’s skin will kill them within 30 seconds, according to Capt. L.D. Hutson, speaking at the Pennsylvania Military College. “Imagine what will happen to a city,” he says, drooling slightly, “when air squadrons begin spraying it with that terrible substance. In the next war machine guns and artillery will be out of date – the weapons will be gases and chemicals, and the humblest non-combatant will be exposed to attack. Entire populations will take the chance of never awakening when they go bed at night. It will truly,” he says with a visible erection, “be a war of extermination.”

The African Blood Brotherhood formally denies having started the Tulsa race riot, but head Cyril Briggs says at least it would show white people that blacks are not cowards and will fight back. 30 white Tulsans have been arrested for looting the burned-out negro district. One black hotel porter tells his manager that he’s feeling weak; turns out he was shot the day before but was afraid to mention it to anyone because he might be mistaken for a rioter and summarily executed.

The German war crimes court in Leipzig acquits a U-boat commander on charges of sinking a British hospital ship, because he was just, you know, following orders.

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Today -100: June 4, 1921: Of vagrants, ghost mommy’s victory, shells, and unpopular prohibition

Martial law is lifted in Tulsa. Some black people in the town – some rich guy, sheriff’s deputy Barney Cleaver, who seems to be something of an asshole – are saying that black agitators planned trouble for some time, and there’s supposedly proof that the African Blood Brotherhood set up a secret chapter in Tulsa. Mayor Thaddeus Evans issues an order for “all men... to either get a job and go to work” or be arrested as vagrants. The NAACP asks Harding to make a statement about the massacre already.

The British High Commissioner in Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel, interprets the Balfour Declaration as saying Palestine will accept Jewish immigration only to the capacity of the area to absorb them, which at present isn’t very great. Also, no Bolshevik immigrants.

Soghomon Tehlirian is acquitted by a Berlin court for assassinating former Ottoman Grand Vizier Talaat Pasha in March. I guess that “my mother’s ghost told me to do it” defense works. There was also evidence introduced of Talaat’s part in the Armenian Genocide, and if there’s one thing Germans hate, it’s genocide. Tehlirian will die in San Francisco in 1960.

The House of Representatives would like the Senate’s proposal for naval disarmament talks to also include talks to reduce the size of armies.

The IRA close off a section of central Dublin and go house to house looking for three bank robbers. They don’t find them.

The IRA also set fire to the National Shell Factory in Dublin. Seems a dangerous place for the British to put a shell factory, if you ask me.

The Brooklyn Grand Jury dismisses another 82 Prohibition cases out of 90, for a total of 480 of the last 543.

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Today -100: June 3, 1921: Of white man’s countries, and ghost mommies

French forces, with tanks, intervene in the fight in Upper Silesia between Germans and Poles. Intervene against the Germans, obviously.

Authorities in Tulsa are claiming just 30 dead in the massacre. The emerging official narrative largely blames Tulsa police for losing control of the situation and not dispersing or shooting the black people who converged on the court house to prevent a lynching. That’s the crux of an address to a mass meeting – which I’m gonna guess was entirely white – by Adj. Gen. Charles Barrett, who’s in charge of martial law in the city. Barrett has banned funerals for those killed in the riot. Insurance companies are claiming that their policies don’t cover mob violence.

The NYT explains the racial “friction” in Oklahoma: “During the war Southern negroes flocked to the border State and found profitable employment. There has not been so much for them to do of late, and many of them are loafing on the streets. Not only the idle, shiftless and disorderly have worn out their welcome. It has become a common saying that ‘Oklahoma is a white man’s country.’” Presumably the NYT agrees with this, since it is evidently up to white people to decide when black people are “welcome” and up to black people to vanish back where they came from when the economy has less use for them. To continue: “When they had plenty of money to spend the negroes bought automobiles, lived high and claimed social privileges that the whites were not inclined to allow them. Drafted for service in France and praised for their patriotism, they naturally had a better opinion of themselves. All these things contributed to fan the flame of racial antagonism. .. the rough element among the whites was ripe for a rising to teach the negroes their place.” That “rising” was an attempt by blacks to organize to prevent a fucking lynching. And again, it is up to the white people to decide the “place” of black people; the only “racial antagonism” on evidence is white resentment of black people claiming social privileges (otherwise known as equal rights) and having a better opinion of themselves than white people have of them.

Soghomon Tehlirian, the Armenian on trial in Berlin for assassinating former Ottoman Grand Vizier Talaat Pasha in March, says he dreamed of the ghost of his mother ordering him to kill Pasha in retribution for the Armenian genocide, in which she and the rest of his family was killed.

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Today -100: June 2, 1921: Tulsa

The Greenwood/Tulsa Race Massacre. The whites of Tulsa, Oklahoma burn out the negro section, destroying 30 blocks of the city and shooting blacks trying to escape their burning houses. It started, as so many of these things do, with an accusation of assault by a black man, Dick Rowland, against a white woman – he tripped in an elevator and grabbed the arm of the elevator operator for balance, that’s it. He’s arrested; a white mob, spurred by headlines like “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator,” gathers at the court house; armed blacks show up to save Rowland from lynching; someone fires a shot, and away we go. Incidentally, the elevator operator will refuse to press charges and Rowland will leave town (along with many other black Tulsahoovians) and disappear from history. As of this first NYT story, the “race riot” is over, and 6,000 blacks are being held in makeshift detention camps. Tulsa police say racial animosity has been stirred up for months by the Wobblies.

Chief Secretary for Ireland Sir Hamar Greenwood tells Parliament that there just hadn’t been enough soldiers in Ireland to guard important buildings like the now smoldering Dublin Custom House. He says that reprisals can’t be ordered by any officer below Brigade Commander; I’m not sure when they stopped denying that reprisals were official policy.

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Today -100: June 1, 1921: Rum and paper do not mix

In addition to the almost daily reports of mistakes in the War Dept’s list of alleged WW I draft deserters, many cases have had to be dropped in federal court when it turns out the men had actually served or were too infirm to have passed a medical. Not that this will stop the War Dept from putting out error-ridden lists.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Sometime this month Booth Tarkington’s novel Alice Adams is published. It’s like a Jane Austen marriage plot novel set in a 1920s small town. ... Okay I’ve tried out that take on it and it doesn’t really work. Anyway, it’s short, so the Katharine Hepburn 1935 movie doesn’t cut anything out and is remarkably faithful right up to the last few minutes, where it has brighter conclusions to all the plot threads.

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Today -100: May 31, 1921: In which is revealed what would disgrace a Hottentot

Headline of the Day -100:  

Somehow I doubt the accuracy of this report.

Well, that Upper Silesia armistice didn’t last long. Each side blames the other for starting up again.

The prime minister of Bavaria, Gustav Ritter von Kahr, says he just can’t disarm the Bavarian population, specifically the paramilitary Einwohnenerwehr, as the federal government agreed with the Entente would happen.

Headline of the Day -100:  

“Nearly solid for German fusion” sounds like a particularly unpleasant sex act, but this is in fact a referendum, held by local authorities against the orders of the Austrian government, for Austria to merge with Germany. Close to unanimous.

The German war crimes court in Leipzig convicts its second war criminal, a captain who made POWs work even when they were sick, and who rode his horse into groups of prisoners. Sentenced to 6 months. The British are complaining that the terms aren’t long enough - “An outrage on decency,” howls the Daily Mail, which says Capt. Müller’s crimes “would disgrace a Hottentot”.

Tonight on PBS (check local listings): “Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten” on the massacre this day -100.

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Today -100: May 30, 1921: Of armistices and ticket choppers

An armistice is negotiated between Polish and German forces in Upper Silesia.

Horace Porter, the last living wartime aide to General Ulysses Grant, who witnessed Lee’s surrender, dies at 84. He was a general at 27, assistant secretary of war under Sec. Grant, personal secretary to Pres. Grant, then a railroad executive who invented the ticket chopper (which is what it sounds like, destroys used tickets so they can’t be re-used), then ambassador to France under McKinley & Roosevelt.

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Today -100: May 29, 1921: In which is revealed which is the only government that cares about art and children and who are the most care-free men in the South

Whites in southwestern Utah are worried about an Indian (Ute) uprising.

The French education minister orders the firing of all teachers who encourage Communist ideas.

Isadora Duncan accepts an offer from Russia to open a dancing academy in Moscow. “The Soviet is the only government that cared about art nowadays and children,” she says.

Charles Ortner was sentenced to 2 to 4 years for assault in 1917 and sent to Sing Sing. He liked it so much that he refused to apply for release on good behavior after 1½ years or parole when that was available at 2 years, although he was a model prisoner to whom it would certainly have been granted. They’ve finally thrown him out.

An article in the NYT Sunday Magazine explains the Southern peonage system to silly northerners who think the black peons are badly treated. The author, one James Young, explains that black farm workers are in constant debt to white farmers, and hence are never paid by them, because “The negro is not thrifty by inclination. He lives for the day and lets the next one care for itself. This is a reflection of his really childish and often happy nature. It would be difficult to find a more care-free man than the negro field worker of the South.” Meanwhile, the hapless white farmers are gouged by bankers and stores and are “the real economic slaves of the cotton field.”

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Today -100: May 28, 1921: What the well-dressed woman wears

Unionists decisively win the Northern Irish Parliament elections, winning 40 seats out of 52. Sinn Féiners who won include Éamon de Valera, Michael Collins, and Arthur Griffiths, but the party wound up with far fewer seats than expected, in part because the proportional representation voting system disfavored them, so they won’t have the numbers to cripple the parliament through abstention.

Buster Keaton and actress Natalie Talmadge are going to marry.

Headline of the Day -100:  

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Today -100: May 27, 1921: Of riots, war crimes, and battlers

Ada Dozier wins a lawsuit against the city of Chicago for the death of her husband in the summer 1919 race riots. She’s awarded $2,300.

One provision of the Versailles Treaty required Germany to hold war crimes trials. The first, of a sergeant who beat up British POWs, results in a 10-month sentence.

Racist Headline of the Day -100:  

“Many critics have openly declared that Wills is the best big negro in the ring today.”

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Today -100: May 26, 1921: Of customs, polygamous cohabitation, and winey tennis players

The IRA burn the Dublin Custom House, as was the custom. The building has been used by the Local Government Board (rather than customs) and other government bodies for some time, and lots of important records are gone. Also the dome fell in. Reading the account, it sounds like they may just have intended to burn records but the fire got out of hand, forcing IRAers to flee the building, where they were taken prisoner.

House Speaker Frederick Gillett introduces a proposal for an Amendment to the Constitution banning polygamy and “polygamous cohabitation.” It’s aimed at.... Connecticut, evidently.

The Senate unanimously adopts an amendment to the Navy budget asking Harding to to hold a naval disarmament conference with Britain and Japan.

The German government is cracking down on Freikorps groups recruiting men to fight in Silesia.

French tennis players refuse to come to the US for the Davis Cup unless they receive assurances that they will be able to have wine.

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Today -100: May 25, 1921: Thoughtless aspersion is the worst kind

The Senate rejects the House proposal to reduce the size of the Navy to 100,000.

Navy Secretary Edwin Denby names a new military governor for Santo Domingo (the Dominican Republic), Rear Admiral Samuel Robison.

The elections are held in Northern Ireland.  “In some districts revolver firing was indulged in, but not with serious results.” A lot of children voted, including a 2½-year-old who voted for one Thomas Moles, probably because he thought the name was funny.

French Prime Minister Aristide Briand tells the Chamber of Deputies that Germany is fulfilling its promises. On Silesia, he says that it’s never really been German in spite of being part of Germany for 200 years.

The Presbyterian General Assembly calls for prohibition to be imposed on the Philippines, and for federal movie censorship and marriage & divorce laws in the US.

The Women’s City and Country Club adopts a resolution, offered by Eleanor Roosevelt no less, condemning remarks (“thoughtless aspersion”) by Vice President Coolidge, I guess in an article in The New Republic which I can’t find in which he complains that women’s colleges are full of radicals and attacks Vassar drama professor Winifred Smith in particular. The NYT renders her name Finifred Smith; Wikipedia had no results under that name so it showed results for “fingered smith” instead, which was not what I had in mind at all.

There are reports/wishful thinking that the former kaiser Wilhelm has committed suicide. He hasn’t. 

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Today -100: May 24, 1921: Tears of a clown

France tells Germany that sending troops into Upper Silesia, as Germany is doing, would be regarded as an act of war. PM Briand does not say what he regards Poland’s sending troops into Upper Silesia as being. In making this threat, France is acting independently of Britain and Italy.

Headline of the Day -100:  

37 are killed in riots in Alexandria in British-occupied Egypt. It seems to have been started by Greeks. The Times of London claims it was the work of paid agents, because of course it does. The NYT isn’t sure if the riots are anti-foreign or an internal squabble among nationalists, who “could not be expected long to maintain their solidarity. Only in their hatred of English rule and their desire to get Egypt into their own hands, to do with it they know not what, are they at one.”

The NYT supports the new restrictive immigration law, saying “The great menace of the new immigration of recent years is that, by introducing large numbers of varied races whose languages and traditions are alien, the nation may lose unity and solidarity. Already the processes of Americanization have been severely checked, standards of living have been lowered and highly inflammable material has been afforded for radical agitators.” And this bit is not at all telling: “Scandinavians, though foreign to us in language, are racially and politically close kindred.”

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Today -100: May 23, 1921: Of recognitions, and aristocracies of thought action

The US still hasn’t recognized the Obregón government in Mexico and is demanding as a condition of recognition that Obregón sign an agreement to safeguard American interests, change the Constitution to reverse the nationalization of subsoil rights, etc., with demands down to shit like exempting US ministers from laws that apply to Mexican priests. Obregón for some reason thinks this would be a humiliation for a sovereign nation.

German troops defeat Poles in Silesia.

Mussolini says the newly elected Fascist members of the Chamber of Deputies, of which he is one, won’t attend the opening because the king will be there. He predicts, “Our comportment in the Chamber will be correct, as the Fascisti represent the aristocracy of thought action. ... We shall set a good example of discipline and order, of dignity and good-will” unless of course the Socialists shout at them, in which case “we shall immediately bring into Chamber our system of fighting and we will spare no one.” But he thinks they can work with the Socialists on the 8-hour day if the Socialists aren’t assholes about it.

And that was the second time the NYT ever mentioned Mussolini.

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Today -100: May 22, 1921: A collar leads to a collar

Poet-Aviator Gabriele d’Annunzio’s former followers in Fiume have evidently formed hit squads and are assassinating Autonomists who won last month’s election.

Fugitive former Florida Gov. Sidney Catts is arrested on those peonage and bribery charges when an eagle-eyed clothing store clerk in Albany, Georgia notices the initials SJC in a customer’s discarded collar and calls the police. While being escorted by those police, Catts reaches in his pocket for a lead-filled billy (a truncheon-type thing). He says it’s a valued gift from a friend and he certainly wasn’t thinking of slugging a cop and going on the lam.

A London bootmaker’s shop is using an x-ray machine you stick your feet into to determine how well a shoe fits. The store claims the device uses too little radiation to make your foot actually fall off. This (unnamed in the article) store may be the first to have done this stupid thing, but the practice continued for decades.

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Today -100: May 21, 1921: Of mingos, radium, and beer

French Prime Minister Aristide Briand has been making excuses to refuse Lloyd George’s request for a meeting to discuss various German issues (occupation of the Ruhr, Upper Silesia), because he’s afraid that LG will insist that Allied decisions be made by majority rule (Britain + Italy outvoting France) instead of unanimously.

Mingo County, West Virginia (in which Matewan is located) is declared to be in a state of insurrection in an attempt to put down the violent coal strike which has been going on forever. The proclamation of martial law bans the carrying of arms by anyone other than the authorities (presumably that won’t be enforced against the coal companies’ thugs, just guessing). However the coalfield extends into Kentucky, where there is no such ban...

Northern Ireland prepares for elections (on the 24th) with a massive show of military force.

In the White House, Warren G. Harding ceremonially presents Dr. Marie Curie with a vial of radium as was, I assume, the custom.

Pure-food expert Dr. Harvey Wiley testifies to the House Judiciary Committee that beer is not a medicine.

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Today -100: May 20, 1921: Panned

Obit of the Day -100:  

Michael Llewelyn Davies, actually one of four brothers J.M. Barrie adopted after their parents’ deaths, drowns in the Thames along with his possible boyfriend and fellow Oxford student Rupert Buxton, possibly in a suicide pact. He was 20, and the cousin of Daphne du Maurier (who is 14 years old).

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Today -100: May 19, 1921: Of dead justice, guvs on the run, and matters of European concern

Supreme Court Chief Justice Edward Douglass White is dead. White was appointed as associate justice in 1894 by Cleveland and chief justice in 1910 by Taft. His father was a member of Congress and governor of Louisiana. He was a Confederate soldier, and prisoner of war (although the facts are oddly murky and contradictory), during the Civil War. If you’re wondering, two other ex-Confederate vets served on the Supreme Court.  White was the second Catholic justice, after Roger Taney.

Former Florida Governor Sidney Catts is indicted in federal district court for peonage of two black prisoners who he had delivered to his plantation. This isn’t his first indictment this month, the first being for selling pardons, but he hasn’t been found to be arrested yet; in other words, he’s currently a fugitive from justice, which I believe is the custom for former governors of Florida. He’s a minister, because of course he is.

The Polish government asks the US for help on the Upper Silesia question. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes responds that it’s just “a matter of European concern, in which, in accord with the traditional policy of the United States, this Government should not become involved.”

Rumor of the Day -100:  Trotsky has cancer!

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Today -100: May 18, 1921: Of dying justice, national coalitions, and what does Einstein know anyway?

Supreme Court Chief Justice Edward Douglass White’s doctor says he’ll probably be dead by morning.

The French Communist Party conference decides that the party’s MPs can keep their salaries instead of handing them over to the party and being given a worker’s pay.

The “National Coalition Party” of Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti wins a small majority in the Italian general elections (221 seats in the Chamber of Deputies), so he should continue in office. The Socialists and Communists lose some seats, to 125 and 15 respectively), Fascists have 28, one of them Mussolini. There are also 4 German and 5 Slav deputies representing territories acquired from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. 40+ people are killed in election violence (later figure: 63). An editorial says “the verdict of the election is strongly against the subversive elements,” by which the NYT means the left wing, not the Fascists.

Albert Einstein, visiting Boston, is asked some of the questions on Thomas Edison’s test. Einstein does NOT know the speed of sound off the top of his head.

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