Today -100: December 20, 1921: I broke my oath of allegiance to the republic because I believed it to be the lesser evil

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Someone sent an anonymous note, so lots of people gathered to see the possible explosion, because they hadn’t invented Netflix yet. This comes just after the arrest in Warsaw of a suspect in the September 1920 Wall Street bombing (who didn’t do it).

There’s a revolution in Portugal, as was the custom.

The Dáil finally debates the Anglo-Irish Treaty not behind closed doors. Arthur Griffith defends the treaty as “good enough.” Éamon de Valera accuses him and Collins of “subverting the republic.” Erskine Childers points out that the Irish Constitution would depend on an act of the British Parliament and that the king could veto Irish legislation. Robert Barton says he and Gavan Duffy, members of the delegation, only signed because Lloyd George threatened war unless every member signed and recommended passage by the Dáil; “I broke my oath of allegiance to the republic because I believed it to be the lesser evil.” Michael Collins denies having been bluffed into signing by the British.

Southern Democratic congresscritters filibuster a rule to limit debate on the anti-lynching bill. They claim the bill violates states’ police powers and would actually increase lynching and assault. James Aswell (D-Louisiana) says “The bill will protect the assaulters of women from the mob. ... It will encourage the criminal by making him think the danger of speedy death is removed.” More than one speaker uses the phrase “black beasts.”

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Today -100: December 19, 1921: I’m just gonna leave this one right here

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Today -100: December 18, 1921: Of pugsleys, kings, certain amendments, freer and more indulgent conduct, and a bigamy fat joke that’s just sitting there

Alliterative high school student Pearl Pugsley of Knobel, Arkansas sues the school board over its ban on cosmetics.

The Albanian commissioner to the US denies having asked Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte to become king of Albania.

The Dáil Éireann is debating the Anglo-Irish treaty behind closed doors. So we hear that Éamon de Valera has “suggested certain amendments” without hearing what they are.

NY Archbishop Patrick Hayes, the guy who sicced the cops on Margaret Sanger last month, issues a Christmas pastoral to be read at all 300 Catholic churches in New York denouncing birth control and “the freer and more indulgent conduct, more particularly amongst the younger members of the female sex.” Particularly. Pagan philosophy blah blah Herod blah blah unclean abomination blah blah. He also doesn’t like divorce, and says women should measure their lives by the number of their offspring, not the number of husbands.

A long letter to the NYT from Eugene O’Neill responds to complaints about the happy ending of Anna Christie. But are there really ever endings? he asks.

A possible explanation for why Bambina Maude Delmont, who swore out the initial complaint against Fatty Arbuckle, wasn’t a witness at his trial: she has now plead guilty on a charge of bigamy, and received a year’s probation.

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Today -100: December 17, 1921: Of ratios, crowns, twangs, fake gold, peelers, and old old old lawsuits

France wants more warships than the 5:5:3:3:3 ratio would give it, 3.5 say. It doesn’t have nearly that many ships now, and isn’t in financial shape to build them, but it might be able to in the future and it doesn’t want a lower limit than Japan has (it might also be using this as leverage for it to keep submarines, which it considers the little guy’s weapon of defense; Britain wants to ban submarines altogether). Also, it has all these colonies all over the world and needs a bunch of ships to keep them in line. Italy of course wants whatever France gets. And Britain says if France and Italy get more ships, it wants more ships.

Albania tentatively offers Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, great-grand-nephew of Napoleon I, who lives in New York, the Albanian crown. He’s unsure whether he wants it, because Albania is kind of a mess.

VP Coolidge has an operation on his nose to relieve his breathing, and it has removed his Yankee “twang.”

The Houses of Commons and Lords easily approve the Anglo-Irish treaty.

Prof. Irving Fisher of Yale, an economist, thinks Germany might pay off reparations by having its chemists make artificial gold out of baser metals. So.... alchemy?

19 Klansmen, some of them prominent Austin, Texas businessmen, are arrested for murder of one Peeler Clayton, stockman. It’s unclear what they had against Ol’ Peeler.

The court of Nancy, France, settles a lawsuit between the towns of Charcillat and Meussia over ownership of a wood, dividing it between them. The lawsuit began in 1230.

Composer Camille Saint-Saëns, dies at 86.

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Today -100: December 16, 1921: Of treaties, chains of circumstance that spell ruin, and prohibition

Éamon de Valera wants the treaty to go to a referendum, which treaty supporters do not want.

Rep. John Elston (R-California) commits suicide, drowning himself in the Potomac. He left a note saying “I am in a chain of circumstances that spell ruin, although my offense was innocently made in the beginning.” Don’t know what that all means, although his friends will claim it really read “although my offer was unconditionally made” and that his suicide was because of depression after failing to get Congress to authorize a naval base for Alameda.

Chicago Police Chief Charles Fitzmorris orders the police to enforce Prohibition, you know, really enforce it this time.

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Today -100: December 15, 1921: Of treaties, ratios, and lynching trees

Éamon de Valera explains that the Irish negotiators of the treaty failed to submit it to the Dáil before signing it, as their instructions required. I’m still not hearing his specific objections to the treaty.

René Maran, from French Martinique, wins the Prix Goncourt for his novel Batouala, set in French Equatorial Africa. Maran is the first black person to win the award. Its criticism of French colonialism will lead to it being banned, as was the custom. And the NYT spells his name wrong, as was the custom.

Japan accepts the 5:5:3 naval ratio, after some fiddling to allow it to keep the destroyer Matsu, which the Japanese are very fond of for some reason.

Tarrant County, Texas orders the “lynching tree” near the county jail in Forth Worth cut down following two lynchings in the last year in which people were hanged from it.

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Today -100: December 14, 1921: Of bad government, wildcats, juries, and censuses

Former Boston Mayor James Curley is elected mayor again, defeating the “good government” candidate. Curley is the corrupt government candidate.

A white man who attacked an 8-year-old girl is lynched in Waco, Texas.

Marshal Foch really is taking that wildcat he was given by the Montana branch of the American Legion back to France with him. Her name is Theodora, which is a delightful name for a wildcat.

The Iowa Supreme Court upholds women’s right to serve on juries. (The one-sentence story doesn’t make clear if that means they’ll be obligated to serve on the same terms as men. In New York, for instance, women could volunteer but could not be forced onto juries until the 1970s, which explains Twelve Angry Men.)

Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover approves the idea of a new census in 1925, saying 1920’s census reflected an “abnormal” population shift into cities, affecting reapportionment, which he claims is now reversing itself. Don’t know how a new census would change that. Also, the census didn’t affect reapportionment because there hasn’t been a reapportionment, and won’t be.

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Today -100: December 13, 1921: Of borahs, ratios, and citizenship

Sen. William Borah (R-Idaho) starts a debate in the Senate over the not-yet-signed Four Power treaty on the Pacific, claiming that even though it doesn’t require the four imperial powers to come to each other’s aid militarily in case of aggression, the US would be bound “morally” to do so, and that’s not okay with him. Borah will also oppose the naval reduction treaty if it doesn’t ban submarines and poison gas.

The Washington Conference adds France and Italy to the naval limitation thingy. So the ratio is now 5:5:3:3:3.

Despite mass arrests of anyone who might mar the Prince of Wales’s tour of India, almost everyone (natives anyway) boycotts his parade/procession/whatever in Allahabad.

Pres. Harding refuses to see the delegation which came from Porto Rico to demand the recall of Gov. E. Mont Reily.

In 1918 Congress extended to Asians the practice of granting citizenship to members of the military. Now, the Harding Administration, looking for a test case, cancels the citizenship of a Japanese Coast Guard steward who has served for 8 years.

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Today -100: December 12, 1921: Of disarmed nations, lynchings, and male and female degenerates

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Yay! Germany will never be a military threat again!

G.A. Rau, the Columbia student reported missing after he went to a KKK meeting, turns up, claiming that four men in masks tied him to a tree and whipped him. He displays some torn clothing but not the actual alleged injuries.

Prof. Lawrence Morris of the Allegheny Vocational School for veterans is found dead, shot in the chest with, mysteriously, a filled-in application form for the KKK in his pocket.

A black strikebreaker in the San Antonio stockyards who shot two striking picketers last week and was then beaten up by strikers, is seized by a mob from the hospital and lynched.

The new Archbishop of Baltimore, Michael Curley, has some shit to say (at a confirmation, no less) about birth control, and while Catholic officials a hundred years later still oppose birth control, do they call its advocates “male and female degenerates who would fly in the face of God the Creator and make life one great sin and orgy of passion”?

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Today -100: December 11, 1921: Communism’s loss...

The League of Nations mints its own coin. Just one of them, a gold franc, the monetary unit on which the League’s budget is based. So a totally notional non-currency currency, but for some reason they needed one (1) real-world coin. It’s worth about 2¢ US.

G.A. Rau, a Columbia U. student, went to a KKK meeting in Brooklyn intending to denounce Imperial Kleagle E.Y. Clarke, to his face, and then... vanished. Police thinks it’s a publicity stunt, but he is reported as a missing person by his Delta Phi frat brother Chester A. Arthur III, who is also a Klansman and, yes, grandson of the president. Over his life, Chester 3 (he called himself Gavin) founded a commune, prospected for gold, hawked newspapers, taught at San Quentin, and was an astrologist, a sexologist, an astrological sexologist, and a gay rights activist (he was bi, married 3 times).

In addition to the 4-power treaty on the Pacific coming out of the Washington Conference and the 5-power naval limitation treaty, there will be a 9-power treaty dealing with China, respecting its territorial integrity and neutrality.

Anatole France isn’t a Communist anymore.

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Today -100: December 10, 1921: I don’t want to become bald like most Canadian statesmen

Britain releases some of its IRA internees. As a trainload of them reach Thurles station, some bombs are thrown, injuring 3 of the internees and some people on the platform. This may have been intended as a greeting, gone a bit wrong.

The committee investigating American history textbooks for the NYC Board of Education finds that they’re prejudiced in favor of the British point of view. A member of a local school board complains that her son was taught that John Hancock was a smuggler (John Hancock was totally a smuggler).

During the Senate investigation of charges made by Thomas Watson (D-Georgia) that there were dozens of executions of US soldiers without courts-martial during the Great War, Watson complains, loudly, that Gen. George Cocheu was looking at him funny. He calls the general a “lantern-jawed dog” and a “bull-jawed brute” and threatens to slap him.

Canadian MPs normally wear hats in Parliament, doffing them when rising to address the chair. The newly elected first woman MP, Agnes Macphail (whose name the NYT still hasn’t figured out how to spell), for whom that would be a more difficult procedure, says she’ll simply do without a hat. “I don’t want to become bald like most Canadian statesmen.”

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Today -100: December 9, 1921: Dead again

The guy who commanded the U-boat that sank the Lusitania is reported to have been killed by the crew of a Paraguayan warship he was in command of, mutinying because of his Prussian ways. This is nonsense: Walter Schwieger was killed in action in 1917.

Éamon de Valera comes out against the Anglo-Irish treaty, along with 2 other Cabinet members (that’s 3 out of 7). He does not explain his problems with the treaty.

The US, Britain, France and Japan form a compact not to attack each other’s colonies in the Pacific, and to mediate before going to war. This will officially end the Anglo-Japanese alliance that made the US so nervous. And the agreement not to attack without warning will reassure Japan, allowing it to assent to the 10:10:6 naval ratio with Britain and the US, which are stubbornly refusing Japan’s proposed 10:10:7.

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Today -100: December 8, 1921: Of strikes, coups, and sheep glands

There’s a strike at Chicago meat-packing houses against a 10% wage reduction, and rioting of supposedly 100,000 people. The “women folk” of the strikers place themselves between the strikers and the mounted police. They use pepper against the cops and their horses, and children scatter tacks ahead of the motorcycle cops. Cops shoot into the crowd, as was the custom. A black scab is thrown into the grossly named sewage stream Bubbly Creek and paving blocks are thrown at him until he drowns.

There’s a military coup in Guatemala. The deposed president, Carlos Herrera, himself in power as the result of a 1920 coup, completely voluntarily (while imprisoned) surrenders his powers to a 3-general junta.

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Today -100: December 7, 1921: Of free states, states of the unions, and poisonous viruses of foreign propaganda

The British and Sinn Féin come to a deal, or at least the latter concede after Lloyd George threatens behind closed doors to unleash the army on Ireland. Ireland will become the “Irish Free State,” a term we haven’t heard before. It’s the same as the dominion status, like that of Canada or Australia or South Africa, that Lloyd George has been offering, but it’s not called dominion status because that sounds to the Irish like it implies subordination. “Free state” and “republic” are evidently the same word in Gaelic, saor statt, or there is no word for republic, or something. The Free State even gets its own military. The oath of members of the Dáil will be to the Constitution of the Free State, and to be “faithful” to the king, whatever that means. Neither the Free State nor Northern Ireland are allowed to establish a religion, or discriminate against a religion.

The State of the Union Address. Harding says “there are growing assurances of the permanency of the peace which we so deeply cherish.” So that’s good. He wants flexible tariffs, cooperative agricultural marketing to prevent the demographic drift to urban areas, irrigating arid lands for veterans, etc. He supports workers’ rights to organize, but wants to eliminate strikes, lockouts, boycotts, or anything else that would make that organizing effective.

In Canadian national elections, the Liberals, led by Mackenzie King, defeat the Conservatives, knocking them into 3rd place behind the Progressives. Prime Minister Arthur Meighen loses his parliamentary seat, as do ten other cabinet members. The election was largely fought on the issue of tariffs. Agnes Macphail (Progressive-Ontario) is elected the first woman MP in Canada (women have been eligible since 1919).

NYC Mayor John Hylan demands an investigation of new history textbooks: “The school children of this city must not be inoculated with the poisonous virus of foreign propaganda which seeks to belittle illustrious American patriots.”

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Today -100: December 6, 1921: Of deals, commencements, and lynchings

British Prime Minister David Lloyd George has come to some sort of agreement  with Sinn Féin.

Oakland High School students threaten to boycott commencement because a Japanese student, Yuki Furuta, will be a speaker, having received higher scores than any student in the school’s history.

Two black men are lynched in Oconee County, Georgia, for supposedly helping a man try to escape a posse.

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Today -100: December 5, 1921: Of oaths, hung juries, kleagle koups, international Jews, and crashes

Sinn Féin rejects the British government’s latest proposal because of its continuation of partition and insistence on Dáil members taking an oath to the king (they’d accept an oath to the Dáil itself, which would collectively acknowledge the king as head of the Empire, but without an individual oath to the king).

The Fatty Arbuckle jury deadlocks 10-2 in favor of acquittal and is dismissed. Jury foreman August Fritze says that juror Helen Hubbard refused to consider the evidence; the other guilty vote wavered throughout deliberations. Fritze says the prosecution case was “an insult to the intelligence of the jury,” calling on the jury to substitute guesses for evidence.

More than 50 Ku Klux Klan kleagles, which is the official title for “people unembarrassed to call themselves ‘kleagle,’” meet in Philadelphia to discuss forming a breakaway Klan.

Henry Ford explains that it was actually a couple of Jews on his Peace Ship in 1915 who convinced him that “the International Jew” was behind the war. He says the Dearborn Independent will continue exposing the Jews, who were also behind the Civil War.

The Berlin and other German stock exchanges crash.

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Today -100: December 4, 1921: Of goblins and tomatoes

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The ongoing power struggle in the KKK.

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CSI: Astoria

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Today -100: December 3, 1921: I can’t recall all the names

The Dutch parliament passes women’s suffrage 68-16.

The Louisiana Legislature wipes out many of the laws discriminating against women, allowing them to take public offices on an equal basis, to serve as executors, notaries public, arbitrators, etc etc. Husbands now have to get their wife’s consent before selling or mortgaging the family home. Many forms of legal discrimination (property rights, guardianship of children, jury service) remain.

Helen Ferguson Drexler, 22, confesses to having married 16 men, all in the military, for their spousal benefits. “I can’t recall all the names,” she says.

First successful flight of a dirigible (a US Navy craft) using helium, which is less blow-y-up-y than hydrogen.

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Today -100: December 2, 1921: Of food riots, nickels, and candy

Riots in Vienna. Fancy hotels are raided and the guests, including Americans!, robbed. Also stores, cafés, etc. The police are blaming Communists, but the riots seem to be entirely a reaction to the skyrocketing price of food.

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The trial of Fatty Arbuckle today was as wild as a Fatty Arbuckle party. The ADA says Arbuckle should be convicted just for failing to call the doctor after Virginia Rappe’s “injury.” Fatty’s lawyer attacks the prosecution for holding witnesses in custody and terrorizing one who refused to testify that Rappe had said “He killed me.” And defense witness Irene Morgan has supposedly been poisoned by a man who gave her candy – twice. She got sick both times.

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Today -100: December 1, 1921: Of bluebeards, prohibition, and lynchings

Henri Landru is found guilty of 11 counts of murder and sentenced to die by guillotine. Landru’s lawyer had suggested that any of those people might show up anytime, since missing people can’t be declared legally dead until 30 years have passed. He even suggests that they’re alive because Landru sold them into white slavery.

The Prohibition Party decides not to dissolve itself despite, you know, Prohibition. It adds to its agenda demands for the expulsion of foreigners who violate prohibition and the disfranchisement of citizens who do so.

A mob in Ballinger, Texas lynches a 15-year-old negro.

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