Today -100: January 7, 1923: I believe the men were most inhumanly tortured

The hearings in Bastrop, Louisiana on the murders of Watt Daniels & Thomas Richards is told that they were tortured with some sort of specially made device. The pathologist and the NYT spare no detail about the tortures the Klan mob inflicted on them, but I will. They were tortured to extract information about the supposed assassination attempt on former mayor/current goblin Bunnie McKoin. The other 3 men kidnapped that night, including the father of one of the murdered men, describe the ordeal.

Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover refuses Pres. Harding’s offer to take over as interior secretary. Which makes sense, since he’s turned Commerce into a kind of super-department with its tentacles in everyone’s business. Interior would be a step down.

Turkish delegate to the Lausanne Conference Riza Nur Bey walks out of a discussion of the Armenians. The Allies demand an apology.

The Senate votes 57-6 for a resolution calling for the withdrawal of US troops from the Rhine.

NY State Senator Robert Lacey (D-Buffalo) (or senator-elect, depending on when the NY Senate term starts) is indicted for dynamiting a train during a strike last August.

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Today -100: January 6, 1923: Of Rosewood, peyote, mercury, assassinations, and prisoners of war

The hearings in Bastrop, Louisiana investigating the murders of Watt Daniels & Thomas Richards begin. There are many avowed kluxers spectating. The judge calls on Morehouse Parish Sheriff Carpenter (also a klansman, natch) to prevent witnesses being intimidated, and has a recess so everyone can take their guns home.

A white mob is rampaging through the mostly black town of Rosewood, Florida, searching for Jesse Hunter, who escaped from a chain gang. He is suspected, because he is black, of assaulting a married white woman who claims she was attacked by a black man but is probably covering for her white lover. This shit has been going on for a few days (the NYT is just catching up), as white mobs kill black people and burn houses, churches, all of Rosewood really. Black residents are hiding in the swamps. Jesse Hunter will never be caught. The exact death toll of the Rosewood massacre remains unknown.

Wish I could say whether I recommend the movie Rosewood, but it’s been too long since I’ve seen it.

The Senate discusses a provision in the Interior Dept budget, $25,000 for the suppression of peyote use (which is legal) among Indians. Several senators have to have explained to them what peyote is.

Bellevue tries to cure a woman of mercury poisoning by grafting a sheep’s kidney into her body. She dies. Because the poisoning was too advanced and definitely not because the operation was a stupid idea, the doctors say.

The New Jersey Education Commissioner orders Hoboken to rehire Clara Nommensen, who they illegally fired when she got married.

Alois Rašín, Czechoslovakia’s finance minister, is assassinated by an anarchist (?) I guess because of his plan to reduce the wages of state employees. Rašín himself had been imprisoned as part of an Austro-Hungarian crackdown on Czech nationalists in 1894 and sentenced to death for treason against the Double Monarchy in 1916.

Right-wing members of the German Reichstag will ask the government to do something about Lothar Witzke, who’s evidently the last German prisoner of war still held by the United States. He was captured and interned after his ship was sunk during the Great War, escaped, and did sabotage work in the US and Mexico, including the Mare Island Naval Shipyard explosion in 1917 (maybe), until he was captured in Mexico. He’ll be pardoned in September, serve in the Abwehr during WW II and be elected to the Hamburg Parliament in 1949.

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Today -100: January 5, 1923: Of potential wars, engaging princes, lynchings, and cocos

Headline of the Day -100:  

At the Paris conference (always with the conferences, these people), France and Britain (and Belgium and Italy) aren’t agreeing on what to do about German reparations and France increasingly looks like, yes, invading Germany and occupying the resource-rich Ruhr.

Two days ago, the Daily News (London) reported that the Prince of Wales was engaged to an (unnamed) Italian princess, and the NYT repeated it on the front page. Now the News says, and the NYT repeats on the front page that he’s actually engaged to a “daughter of a well-known Scottish Peer,” which everyone understands to mean Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. Closer than the Italian princess story, but still wide of the mark: Ms Double-Barrel will actually marry the Prince of Wales’s brother Bertie in March. 

A convent in Quebec and a Catholic school in Winnipeg burn down. There’s been a wave of arson attacks at Catholic institutions in Canada in the last year.

Leslie Legett, a black man or possibly a “Spaniard,” is lynched in Shreveport, Louisiana for associating with white women. Police had been tailing him but were unable to obtain evidence of this “crime.” Sorry, I mean the associating-with-white-woman crime; obviously they haven’t managed to obtain evidence of the kidnapping and lynching.

The, I guess grand jury hearings, on the murders of Watt Daniels and Thomas Richards by a Klan mob in Mer Rouge, Louisiana begin. Now if only they can find anyone to sit on the grand jury who ISN’T a klansman. Attorney General Coco and Adj. Gen. Toombs are present, while former mayor/goblin Dr. Bunnie McKoin has given up resisting extradition from Maryland and will be back shortly. Coco, Toombs and Bunny sounds like the worst children’s book ever.

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Today -100: January 4, 1923: Of war widows, fatties, and deaths at sea

Pres. Harding vetoes a bill to increase the pensions of veterans of the Civil War and the Mexican-American War and of the widows of veterans of those wars as well as the War of 1812. He says the US has no obligation to women who marry Civil War vets 58 years after the war (the existing law provides only for women who married prior to 1905). He complains about the bill’s “heedlessness for the Government’s financial problems” (the government has no financial problems; Harding just wants to reduce the budget).

Ohio and the province of Alberta join other locales banning Fatty Arbuckle films.

The Ku Klux Klan warns the Wisconsin state prohibition dept that unless it acts against officials of a certain city (unidentified to the press) where booze is sold, it will.

Headline of the Day -100:  

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Today -100: January 3, 1923: Fall falls

Headline of the Day -100:  

Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall resigns, effective 2 months from now, citing the press of his private business concerns (his cattle business is doing badly, even with the infusion of all that Teapot Dome bribe money).

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Today -100: January 2, 1923: Splitters

The Indian National Congress splits after the “extremists,” as the NYT naturally calls them, adopt Gandhi’s policy of abstaining from elections to the weak Legislative Councils established by the British. President C.R. Das resigns to form a new group, the Congress-Khilafat Swaraj Party, which will stand in elections.

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Today -100: January 1, 1923: Every one appears to be smiling and happy in the streets

Headline of the Day -100:  

The Tuskegee Institute says there were 57 lynchings in the US in 1922, 51 black people & 6 white, with Texas in the lead with 18, followed by Georgia 11, Mississippi 9, Florida 5 etc. 10 lynchers were sent to jail.

Harold Teegeston, a witness in the Mer Rouge, Louisiana Klan murders, is kidnapped, as was the custom.

Totally Even-Handed Headline of the Day -100:  

“Mussolini has awakened Italy. People now go about their work in a cheerful and contented manner. The spirit of mutual courtesy and toleration exists in relations between one class and another. Every one appears to be smiling and happy in the streets.”

Germany proposes a no-war compact: the countries with interests in the Rhine would pledge not to go to war with each other for a generation without a referendum. Some neutral nation would be trustee of the pledge. France rejects the idea.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Footpads. How very 18th century.

Hungary bans the works of Walt Whitman, as well as those of Marx & Lenin and most Hungarian-language papers from abroad. Something about their “destructive tendency.”

Evidently under orders from Moscow, the French Communist paper L’Humanité fires most of its staff for excessive bouginess. The party will be purged, and 90% of parliamentary candidates will have to be workers. The intellectuals are upset by that.

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Today -100: December 31, 1922: Of people giving stuff away

With Al Smith due to take the NY governor’s office tomorrow, Tammany’s Boss Charles  Murphy takes a suite in the Hotel Ten Eyck in Albany so he can give out all the patronage jobs.

Henry Morgenthau, former US ambassador to Turkey, has a cunning plan: why not give Constantinople to Russia?

At the All-Union Congress of Soviets, Trotsky says after the forthcoming revolution in Europe, “America, that Babylonian tower of capitalism, will fall in ruins also.”

Looks like the NYT missed the news that the Congress created a new thing called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

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Today -100: December 30, 1922: I wouldn’t live long enough to smell the smoke

The Department of Agriculture is advertising for Americans to eat more meat. Lots and lots of meat. “Meat is the cornerstone of the diet in our Western civilization,” it says.

The Ku Klux Klan says it will investigate the Moorhouse County, Louisiana murders itself and “outlaw” any members found guilty. But that lynch mob wore black hoods and we wear white ones so it probably wasn’t us, they say. Meanwhile, former Mer Rouge mayor/cyclops Dr. Bunnie McKoin is resisting extradition from Maryland, saying “The sight of me would be the signal for the beginning of the greatest slaughter of human life this country has ever known. I wouldn’t live long enough to smell the smoke.” 

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Today -100: December 29, 1922: Of lynchings, guarantees, and Ulysses

2 confessions in Morehouse Parish, Louisiana implicate 45 people in the abduction and murder in August of Watt Daniels and Thomas Richards, the men whose bodies surfaced in Lake La Fourche showing evidence of having been tortured and mutilated (castrated, not that the NYT would ever use the word).

At the Lausanne Conference, the Allies & the US are demanding that the capitulations Turkey has abolished (treaties giving exemption from Turkish laws & taxes to foreigners) be replaced with “guarantees,” that is some form of special protection, such as foreigners only being tried by foreign judges, which for some reason Turkey claims would be an infringement of its sovereignty. Lord Curzon says Turkey’s legal system is based on Muslim law and its judges uneducated and lazy.

How have I missed until now that the British High Commissioner to Constantinople is named Sir Horace Rumbold? If you’re wondering about the name of his She Who Must Be Obeyed, it’s the scarily formidable Etheldred Constantia Fane.

James Joyce’s Ulysses is banned in the UK. It’s already banned in the US. It’ll be unbanned in the US in the ‘30s, not sure about UK.

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Today -100: December 28, 1922: Of dynamite, consulates, and Mosul

A 21-year-old Klansman, Wesley Holyoake, is arrested in Indiana with a couple of suitcases of dynamite. He says he used dynamite, although presumably not this dynamite, to attract attention to a cross-burning ceremony on Christmas Eve. As you do.

There are accusations that US District Attorney for western Louisiana P.H. Mecom has been interfering with the investigation into the Klan murder of those two guys whose bodies turned up in Lake La Fourche, threatening to arrest Justice Dept investigators, tipping off kluxers, etc.

Éamon de Valera aide Laurence Ginnell comes to New York and seizes the Irish Free State Consulate in the name of the Republic.

The Turkish position at the Lausanne Conference is now that if it doesn’t get Mosul (and its oil) (and its Kurds), it won’t sign a treaty about anything else it’s agreed to. Lord Curzon is more or less threatening war.

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Today -100: December 27, 1922: Of bunnies and wood

Dr. Bunnie McKoin, former mayor of Mer Rouge, Louisiana, is arrested at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore for whatever his role might be in the KKK killings of 2 men in August. He says people hated him because as mayor until 1920 he tried to stop “such evils” as gambling and white men associating with black women. He accuses the deceased of having been bootleggers, gunmen, and men who kept black concubines. (Incidentally, McKoin has been accused of murder before, in 1916. If I ever find out what that was about, you’ll be the first to know.)

The Allied Reparation Commission declares Germany in default on wood deliveries, Britain voting against.

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Today -100: December 26, 1922: Dry Christmas

The NYPD claim the city experienced its driest Christmas ever. Not a single person charged with intoxication. Oh, and 6 people died of wood alcohol poisoning. 

Christmas:

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Today -100: December 25, 1922: Of boycotts and nonagenarians

14 members of the New Britain, Connecticut police dept refuse to attend drill because they heard that their instructor (who also works for the YMCA) attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting, pardon, “klonkave.”

Ezra Meeker, who rode the Oregon Trail in an ox-cart and was the first mayor of Puyallup, Washington, will hold a dinner for his 92nd birthday in NYC, to which he’s inviting every man (just men?) over 90. He’s previously done this in Seattle. He’s serving possum soup, because of course he is. Attendees are invited to explain how they got so fucking old. Presumably a marsupial-heavy diet.

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Today -100: December 24, 1922: Of amnesties, bunnies, and bootleggers

Italy amnesties everyone convicted of political crimes through the time the Fascists seized power. I’m assuming it will not be interpreted to include Communists or Socialists. The Ministry of (ahem) Justice says the recent “manifestations” were not really hostile to the state but had the same aims as the state.

Those bodies recovered from Lake La Fourche, Louisiana show signs of flogging and broken bones. One T.J. Burnett, a former deputy sheriff (no explanation as yet as to why he’s former), is arrested for murder by the feds. The local KKK is denying any involvement and offering to assist law enforcement. All the violence started when Dr. Bunnie McKoin, the mayor of Mer Rouge and local Klan leader, a cyclops I believe, in a very Klan-ridden town, claimed that an attempt had been made to kill him. He says he was called out at night to a bogus house call and his car was shot up; the feds think he shot it up himself because evidence. So after this incident that may or may not have occurred last August, the Klan kidnapped and tortured people to get them to give up McKoin’s assailants, including the two found in the lake. After that, McKoin disappeared, claiming he was going to John Hopkins, which says they’ve never heard of him (actually he’ll be arrested there later this week).

Headline of the Day -100:  

Giant negro.

Sen. Charles Curtis, chairman of the Rules Committee, orders the police to arrest all bootleggers entering the Senate office building. There have been rumors about bootleggers operating in the congressional office buildings.

Having dropped its plans to serialize Lloyd George’s memoirs (if he ever gets around to writing them), the NYT chooses an obvious successor, Will Rogers, to write a weekly Sunday column.

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Today -100: December 23, 1922: We are not in the habit of giving Christmas presents

Howard Carter is doing escorted tours of King Tutanhkamen’s tomb, but the Egyptian government plans to seize the contents, with Carter and Lord Carnarvon not getting any of the loot.

At the Lausanne Conference, a French rep on the minorities sub-committee suggests to the Turkish rep, “At this Christmas time it would be most becoming for Turkey to give the Christian minorities the good results which would come from a less stern attitude on their part.” To which the Turk replied, “We are not in the habit of giving Christmas presents.”

The ACLU objects to NYC Mayor John Hylan’s request to Pres. Harding to suppress the Texas Klan newspaper Colonel Mayfield’s Weekly (by banning it from the mails).

A large and mysterious dynamite blast in Lake La Fourche, Louisiana, brings to the surface the bodies of 2 men seized by a bunch of kluxers on August 24 in Mer Rouge. White men, one might add. Presumably the dynamiters intended to destroy the bodies before the feds dredged the lake. Investigators sent by the state to Mer Rouge are being guarded by National Guards with machine guns.

Eleanor Boardman, an unknown actor in 1922 who will co-star in The Crowd (and marry King Vidor), is bitten by a camel on the set of... I dunno, none of the movies she made at this time sound especially camel-centric... and will probably lose her arm (pretty sure I’d have noticed if she was missing an arm in her later films).

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Today -100: December 22, 1922: Sometimes it is expedient that one man should be sacrificed for his group

The Blackshirts of Alessandria, northern Italy, decide to eliminate drunkenness by forcing any inebriated person they find to consume castor oil, and warning them that a second offense will meet with a cudgeling.

Politicians, club women, and Karens generally strongly disapprove any possible revival of Fatty Arbuckle’s career. The NYT, which thinks Fatty was “only the victim of a mischance,” nevertheless says Hays made a bad decision: “Sometimes it is expedient that one man should be sacrificed for his group.”

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Today -100: December 21, 1922: Of “militias,” peacemakers, and fatties

Mussolini will set up a volunteer militia operating alongside the regular army, under his personal control and recruited from the Blackshirts.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Former interior minister Stanisław Wojciechowski is voted the new president of Poland. A former exile who was deported from Poland by the Russians, he worked for independence (I’m assuming that’s the case for every current Polish politician).

Chief Film Censor Will Hays says it’s ok for Fatty Arbuckle to work in the film industry again because he’s promised Hays he will keep on going straight. The mayor of Indianapolis disagrees and will prevent any Fatty films appearing.

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Today -100: December 20, 1922: Of railroad-wreckers, duels, the spirit of Klan-kraft, and straitses

Former British Prime Minister Earl Balfour gives a lecture at Glasgow U. on telepathy.

Ireland executes 7 people for wrecking railroads in County Kildare. The IRA have been burning the houses of their enemies; the 7-year-old son of Deputy Sean McGarry dies of burns.

Belgium’s Minister of Colonies Louis Franck challenges former foreign minister Paul Hymans to a duel.

The Allied Patriotic Societies tries to get the NY Board of Alderman to ban anyone speaking foreign languages on public streets and squares. It dies in committee. 

Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans says the Klan will never unmask. Disdainful of Kansas Gov. Henry Allen, who he ran into yesterday in a Washington hotel, he says “The spirit of Klan-Kraft has enwrapped the United States in a mantle of love for country which designing and ambitious politicians cannot break, and in a few brief years the influence of the Klan will have so engulfed the thought of the country that we can expect intelligent legislation from the Congress of the United States which will drag down the white flag of inertia” etc etc.

At the Lausanne Conference, Lord Curzon tells Turkey it can accept the Allied position on the Straits or go fuck itself, and there is discussion of an Allied demand that Christian nations be allowed to remove Christian women from harems in Turkey if they don’t want to be in harems. Turkey says homes are sacred and anyway there are no women in harems who don’t wish to be there.

There’s a rumor in Germany that Henry Ford is financing Adolf Hitler’s movement. He’s certainly spending a suspiciously large amount of money. And Hitler has a picture of Ford on the wall next to his desk. (No, Ford did not subsidize Hitler).

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Today -100: December 19, 1922: That damned elusive pimpernel

Éamon de Valera attended morning mass in Dublin, presumably this past Sunday. A couple of ratfinks recognized him and went to the military, but he was gone by the time they arrived.

The idea of creating a Central American Union is officially over.

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