Today -100: July 20, 1922: Of domestic peace and shylocks

Italian PM Luigi Facta loses a vote of confidence in the Chamber of Deputies when the Catholic party turns against him. Evidently he’s failed to secure domestic peace. Mostly because he hasn’t tried.

Russian delegate to the Hague Conference Maxim Litvinov tells an AP reporter between acts of a gala performance put on for the conference of “Shylock,” which... yeah, that Russia won’t attend any more conferences.

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Today -100: July 19, 1922: We die for our ideals

Two of the 3 assassins of German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau (the other is in custody) are cornered by police in the tower of a ruined castle – I’m telling you, silent films are really documentaries – after being spotted by two clerks on a walking holiday. They shoot themselves, yelling “We die for our ideals!”

They also shout “Long live Ehrhardt,” a leader of the Kapp Putsch. Although himself on the run, Hermann Ehrhardt takes the time to deny any involvement in the assassination by Organization C, which he explains has been dissolved, and which only existed to combat Bolshevism, international Socialism, and – of course – the Jews.

A black man is lynched at Lake Jennie Jewel, Florida.

Things have more or less calmed down in Cremona, Italy, as the Fascists who invaded the town have taken their rampages on the road. It’s unclear if Luigi Facta’s government will survive the current political turmoil. In his newspaper, Benito Mussolini complains that Socialists use the Chamber of Deputies to spread “the most infamous propaganda, aiming to rouse passions and keep up hatred.” And if there’s one thing Mussolini hates, it’s rousing passions and keeping up hatred.

Russia officially denies that Lenin was poisoned on a train a couple of weeks ago and his body thrown into the Don River, and that he is now being impersonated etc etc.

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Today -100: July 18, 1922: I therefore invite you to return to your mine properties and resume operation

The coal strike in West Virginia leads, as was the custom, to a battle that left the sheriff of Brooke County and some others dead.

Pres. Harding meets coal company owners at the White House and explains to them that coal is jolly important to the country and “I therefore invite you to return to your mine properties and resume operation.” Who knew it could be so simple? He doesn’t seem to ask them not to cut miners’ pay. Probably slipped his mind.

The British Parliament debates how honors, peerages etc are awarded, which is that Lloyd George sells them, and pretty openly too. The MP introducing a motion for a joint committee to investigate is named Godfrey Loocker-Lampson, which is a name to conjure with (Update: dammit, that’s a NYT typo, he’s actually called Godfrey Locker-Lampson, which is about a third as funny).

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Today -100: July 17, 1922: Of dealers in air

Lenin is supposedly slowly resuming his leadership tasks. Or they’re lying. One or the other.

Pravda says the Soviet delegation to the Hague Conference arrived with concrete proposals, but the allies are “merely dealers in air.”

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Today -100: July 16, 1922: Of overbearing attitudes, Edison Bucks, and ukelele riots

Italian Fascist bands occupy several towns, including Viterbo, Cremona, and Alatri, complaining of the Communists’ “overbearing attitude” in those places. And if there’s one thing followers of Mussolini hate, it’s an overbearing attitude.

Thomas Edison suggests an alternative form of money based on products held in a government warehouse, or something. Because “tech guy endorses a new type of currency” always works out so well.

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I feel like this story is missing a few steps. A Jeremiah Goldringer is seen by railroad cops in the Penn. Railroad Yards in Chicago, carrying the ukelele. Naturally they chase him, and send him to the loony bin for examination.

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Today -100: July 15, 1922: My voice is too feeble to be heard, so I used the gun

Another day etc.: At the Bastille Day military review in Paris, Gustave Bouvet – “a pale, emaciated youth of the type so common among militant anarchists” – takes a couple of shots at President Alexandre Millerand’s carriage. Well, the carriage he thought was carrying President Alexandre Millerand. It was actually the police prefect’s carriage, but the assassin missed him too. One bystander’s arm was slightly burned. Bouvet, who is subdued by the crowd, first admits trying to kill Millerand, then says he wasn’t really trying to kill anyone, just to “make a demonstration that would attract attention to the condition of the proletariat.” “My voice is too feeble to be heard, so I used the gun.” He’ll be sentenced to 5 years in prison plus 10 years’ banishment, but will only serve 25 months, released partially paralyzed. He will die in 1984.

Armed men on horseback invade Radin/Radun in Poland (now Belarus), round up the Jews, flog and rob them. It’s a famously Jewish town, at least for the next 20 years; now it has no Jews.

The Hague Conference ends (give or take a few more recriminations) with a failure of the Western powers and Russia to come to any agreement. Russia refuses to restore nationalized foreign-owned property and everyone else refuses to offer credits to Russia.

H.G. Wells will accept an invitation to run for Parliament as a Labour candidate for the University of London seat (voted for by graduates of the university).

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Today -100: July 14, 1922: Of crowns and bowler hats

No one wants to be king of Albania. The crown’s been offered to a Bonaparte, to an Italian duke, and to a Bulgarian prince. Now they’re thinking about finding some rich American.

Making front-page news, King George wears a bowler hat to the races rather than the traditional top hat. The 1920s have fully arrived.

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Today -100: July 13, 1922: Of reparations, dropping gas, and seltzer

Germany, facing a financial crisis, as was the custom, asks for a halt to cash reparations payments through 1924.

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Same.

Actually, the US Army will no longer produce poison gas. Well, except for “research” and for developing defenses against poison gas.

The negroes of Harlem, increasingly annoyed about being excluded from Republican Party decision-making in the district, say they will run a black candidate against sitting Republican US Rep. Martin Ansorge, who has actually been working quite hard on the doomed anti-lynching legislation and who took a lot of shit for nominating a black man to Annapolis. They haven’t chosen their black challenger yet, maybe William Ferris, editor of Negro World and author of Typical Negro Traits.

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Sadly not one of those times where silent comedies are revealed as documentaries, with a court case degenerating into a seltzer fight. Rather, publisher Thomas Seltzer is being sued by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice for putting out D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, Arthur Schnitzler’s Casanova’s Homecoming, and A Young Girl’s Diary, anonymously published by Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, an Austrian Freudian psychoanalyst who performed some sort of psychoanalytic experiments on her nephew, who murdered her in 1924.

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Today -100: July 12, 1922: Of railroad strikes

Pres. Harding issues a Proclamation demanding that railway workers accept the reduced wages decreed for them by the Railroad Labor Board, and he “directs” everyone to refrain from interfering with interstate transportation and the carrying of mail.

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Today -100: July 11, 1922: We have no room for invisible government in this State

Alfred E. Smith’s name will be put before the NY Democratic Convention as candidate for governor despite his increasingly non-credible protestations that he just wants to be left alone to do whatever it is he does with trucks.

Nelson Rockefeller, son of John F. Rockefeller Jr., spent his 14th birthday in the hospital after shooting himself in the foot with an air rifle a few days before. And if that doesn’t qualify him to be Gerald Ford’s vice president, I don’t know what does.

Gov. Thomas Hardwick of Georgia says if members of the Ku Klux Klan don’t unmask he will sponsor legislation to make mask-wearing in public illegal. “We have no room for invisible government in this State,” he says.

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Today -100: July 10, 1922: The Ku Klux Klan is going to make this a white country

Communist Party circulars call on railwaymen to strike, ignoring injunctions and the, you know, US Army.

At a speech before the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Marcus Garvey says “The Ku Klux Klan is going to make this a white country,” he says, so negroes should go back to, you know, Africa.

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Today -100: July 9, 1922: Of assassinations and asparagus

German authorities are confident that the attempted assassination of editor Maximilian Harden was ordered by the Deutschvölkische Partei, which is big among Bavarian monarchists and in whose newspaper, “extinction of Jews, distinguished Republicans and members of the Entente commissions is preached with impartiality.” Anti-Semitic publisher Albert Grenz has admitted acting as go-between to hire the two assassins.

The Harding Admin has been pushing the idea of allowing members of the Cabinet to sit in Congress as non-voting members.

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Today -100: July 8, 1922: Of indices, ectoplasm, immigrants, and breaches of promises

The Vatican puts all of Anatole France’s works on the Index.

Experiments at the Sorbonne, conducted with three actual Sorbonne professors and a medium Eva (they may mean spirit guide), fail to detect ectoplasm during seances.

The start of the immigrant-quota year on July 1st saw a race of ships from Europe, as last year. The annual Greek quota has already been filled. Indeed, of the 165 arriving on the Acropolis, only 60 will be admitted. This is a monumentally stupid system.

Conservatives do well in the elections for the Dutch upper house, the first in which women can vote. 7 women are elected (no, I don’t know of how many who ran, or how many seats there are, and don’t feel like looking it up). The paper says the majority of women didn’t vote the same way as their husbands – how do they know that? is there no secret ballot?

Cathal Brugha (aka Charles Burgess), the Irish minister for defence from 1919 until January 1922, who commanded rebel forces in O’Connell Street, is killed whilst failing to surrender.

Mary Sterner wins $250 in a breach of promise suit against actor John Pauls. 6 years after they met, he said he’d marry her in Vienna. She sailed, he didn’t, and when she came back she found that he’d married someone else. Which led me to wonder when breach of promise suits stopped being a thing in law. Evidently they’re still a thing in half the states and do occasionally wind up in court (I think mostly to recover costs of weddings that didn’t happen).

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Today -100: July 7, 1922: Of horse bridges, metropolitans, and naughty newsreels

The Irish Free State calls on young men to join the army, which has up until now consisted almost entirely of IRA men.

From now on, the Brooklyn Bridge will be reserved for the exclusive use of horse-drawn traffic and the Manhattan Bridge for motor-drawn traffic. The Brooklyn Bridge will be horse-only until 1950. And get a bike lane in 2021.

Russia sentences 11 people, including the Metropolitan of Petrograd and various bishops and archbishops, to death for interfering with the seizure of church treasures. 

The NY Supreme Court’s appellate division rules that the State Motion Picture Commission can censor newsreels. Evidently Pathé showed a girl/woman in a bathing suit in Atlantic City.

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Today -100: July 6, 1922: Of flags, extraditions, and overly exciting sports

A. Bruce Bielaski, the former head of the Dept of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation, who escaped kidnappers in Mexico after 3 days, is ordered arrested. Newspapers have been claiming he connived at his own kidnapping to discredit the Obregón government. 

The last rebel stronghold in Dublin surrenders. The Free State is now in charge of what remains of Dublin. Let the executions begin! 

No one knows where Éamon de Valera is.

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In Germany, tensions are high over the recent assassinations. In Saxony, a bunch of republican workers demand Count Gneisenau remove the imperial flag from his chateau. The graf’s lackeys respond with fatal rifle and machine gun fire. The workers then raid a sharpshooters’ association and return to the battle, with more deaths on both sides. The next day a bunch of Communist miners arrive, heavily armed, and get that damned flag down. There are a bunch of other violent incidents scattered throughout Germany, but this was the most entertaining. The Wirth government is working on a bill to increase powers to Defend the Republic, but will need Communist votes in the Reichstag.

Gov. Harry Davis (R) of Ohio refuses to extradite a black man to Georgia to face murder charges, saying he’d be lynched.

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Today -100: July 5, 1922: Of fancied senses of personal liberty and popcorn time at the Sorbonne

The Irish Free State forces are bombarding rebel-occupied hotels on O’Connell Street in Dublin. And they’re getting 3 planes from England for use tomorrow to bomb Dublin if Éamon de Valera refuses to surrender.

Polish authorities prohibit an anti-Semitic lecture in Vilna (Vilnius), resulting in a riot in which a cop is killed.

Pres. Harding gives a speech at Marion, Ohio for July 4th. He mentions Prohibition, which he almost never does, saying it’s the will of America, so it must be “sustained by the Government and public opinion” against a minority denied “a fancied sense of personal liberty.” He also talks about the “right to work,” by which he means the government will help corporations which hire strikebreakers.

In Paris, surgeon Jean Louis Faure films an operation he performs, the removal of a fibroma from a stomach, and shows it in a class at the Sorbonne. Which reminds me of an obscure fact I happen to know: the first autopsy shown on British tv was performed by Jonathan Miller of Beyond the Fringe.

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Today -100: July 4, 1922: Outlaw strikes are the coolest kind of strikes

11 railroad companies centered in New York say strikers will be fired, and re-employed only with loss of seniority, while the new strikebreakers will be retained. This after the Railroad Labor Road declares the strike an “outlaw strike.”

The NYT correspondent in Dublin reports that the Free State forces have nearly won, that many of the republicans are boys or “mere roughs,” that the Army is restraining itself in a “clean, humane fashion” and.... yeah, the story was passed by the army censor, although one could be forgiven for thinking it was actually written by the army censor.

I missed a phrase used by British Prime Minister David Lloyd George at the Hague Conference: he warned against “hungry Russia armed by angry Germany.”

Another day, another assassination, this time a failed attempt to kill Maximilian Harden, editor of Die Zunkuft. Two men stab him on the street. One is captured; he’s carrying a membership card in the Association of National-Minded Soldiers, a reactionary anti-Semitic group (Harden is Jewish).

Forcibly retired kaiser Wilhelm still hasn’t denounced the assassination of Walther Rathenau.

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Today -100: July 3, 1922: Of civil wars and orphan pity

Irish Free State troops bombard rebel strongholds in Dublin.

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Today -100: July 2, 1922: Of thankless jobs, snipers, lynchings, opium, and aluminum

The fall of the Four Courts is not the end of it. Anti-Treaty IRAers are occupying 40 or so buildings, from which they’re merrily sniping, as was the custom.

Two black men, James Harvey and Joe Jordan, are seized from a deputy sheriff by a mob and lynched in, ahem, Liberty County, Georgia. Surprisingly, 4 of the lynch mob will be convicted of murder.

As Alien Property Custodian during the war, Francis Garvan gave a bunch of German patents to the Chemical Foundation of New York, which is headed by... Francis Garvan. Pres. Harding demands the Foundation give up the patents.

In 1912 the US and other countries created the Hague opium convention to cut down the illegal drug trade. That has since been superceded by the League of Nations, which has been trying to get information from the US about why it’s importing so many drugs, but the US has been pretending that the League of Nations doesn’t exist and the Hague convention still does. Finally, someone got the Dutch government to ask the US the same questions the League has been asking, and this time the US answered, and the Netherlands turned over the information to the League. 

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Today -100: July 1, 1922: Zero courts?

The rebels occupying the Four Courts in Dublin surrender after explosions, either deliberately set by the rebels or from their explosives store blowing up accidentally, destroy the  building and most of the national archives.

Churchill, naturally, blames a mine laid by the rebels.

400,000 railroad workers go on strike. They want to reverse a wage cut ordered by the Railroad Labor Board, as well as rules ending overtime pay, etc.

John Vitelle, the former Exalted Cyclops (that’s the best kind of cyclops) of the Taft, California Ku Klux Klan, is convicted of assaulting a doctor as part of a Klan mob. Don’t know what they had against the doc.

The Tuskegee Institute says 12 of the 30 lynchings in the US from January to June of 1922 were in Texas, 7 in Mississippi, and 4 in Georgia. 2 of the victims were white, 28 black.

At the Hague Conf, Russia ups its demand for credits to $1.6 billion, in exchange for paying its Romanov debts, eventually.

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