Today -100: January 15, 1923: Of ruhrs and plagues

Germany informs the Reparation Commission that reparations to France and Belgium are suspended in protest. France is considering extending its occupation further into the Ruhr. Russia opposes French actions in the Ruhr and thinks a war might be coming.

France didn’t have a single case of plague last year.

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Today -100: January 14, 1923: Of squigginses, coal, memels, and helicopters

Georgia Attorney Gen. Napier will respond to the request of one Abner Squiggins of Massachusetts to redeem his $500 Confederate war bond – plus interest – by sending him $800 in Confederate money. And yes, Abner Squiggins is the most New England name it is possible to have.

France is ostensibly occupying the Ruhr to ensure reparations-in-kind delivery of coal, but Germany is refusing to pay for that coal so long as France occupies its territory. France may pay miners in scrip that stores in the Ruhr will be forced to accept and which Germany will be expected at some point to redeem for real money (or as real as the German mark has been lately).

The German Reichstag votes 283-12 to support the government’s resistance to the French and Belgians. The 12 are Communists.

Lithuanian irregular troops fire on French troops at Memel, an area detached from Germany under the Treaty of Versailles and made its own thing. Lithuania is taking advantage of French preoccupation with the Ruhr to grab and annex Memel.

A helicopter invented by George de Bothezaal flies at the Army Air Service base at McCook Field, Ohio, rising 6 feet from the ground and staying aloft for 1 minute, 40 seconds.

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Today -100: January 13, 1923: Ruhhhhhhhr

France had planned to tax coal output in the Ruhr at 20%, but with all the coal executives gone, they’ll have to take coal instead of cash. They’re warning coal execs not to take any orders from Berlin. It looks to me like their plan foresaw complete cooperation from the Germans, because they don’t have the capability of running all those mines and steel mills themselves, and they’re beginning to realize they aren’t going to get that cooperation. France declares a state of siege in the Ruhr, but it’s not clear what that means, beyond press censorship. German law will continue in operation. All schools are closed, because the French are using them as barracks.

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Today -100: January 12, 1923: Of klantowns, ruhrs, dorms, and dead kings

The Mer Rouge hearings hear from current mayor R.L. Dade, who says he resigned from the Klan after just 2 meetings and denounced it (but is unable to remember the name of a single kluxer he saw at those meetings; whatever turns that mer rouge seems to induce face-blindness). Dade says the town is in violent chaos because of the Klan. He says former mayor Bunnie McKoin faked the attack on himself. Elsewhere in the hearings was this delightful exchange:

French PM Raymond Poincaré wins the approval of the National Assembly for occupying the Ruhr, 478-86. The opposition seems to be led by one Léon Blum, the first NYT mention I’ve spotted of the future prime minister. France insists this isn’t a military occupation because all those soldiers are just there to protect engineers and officials. With machine guns and tanks.

At Lausanne, the Allies give up their demand that Christians in Turkey be exempt from conscription.

Harvard’s freshman dorms are compulsory, because democracy and shit. Black students are, of course, excluded from them. Which has been especially embarrassing when incoming students Harvard hadn’t realized were black turn out to be black.

Twice-deposed Greek king Constantine dies in exile in Palermo.

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Today -100: January 11, 1923: Ku Klux got daddy

French troops move into the Ruhr, occupying Essen. Now, why did they need to do that at 4:45 a.m.? Britain, which opposed this move, nevertheless permits French troops to travel through its Rhineland occupation zone. The German Coal Syndicate moves its hq to Hamburg from Essen, so France might have to figure out how to run the Ruhr coal mines on its own. “We do not propose to become the slaves of Poincaré,” says one of the mine operators.

Harding ends the US occupation of its zone of the Rhineland and calls the troops home, like immediately. He’s not saying this is a rebuke of the French move, but it’s not exactly subtle. Those troops are bummed at the end of a super-cushy berth. The Germans worry that if Britain follows suit, they’ll be even more at the mercy of French occupiers.

At the Mer Rouge hearings, the widow of one of the victims, Thomas Richards, testifies about the first time the Klan kidnapped him, a few days before they came back and killed him (first mention I think I’ve seen of him leaving behind two children, by the way; when they kidnapped him the first time his 4-year-old daughter was left by herself; “Ku Klux got daddy,” she reported). Mrs Richards names names. Other witnesses, including a girl who the Klan ordered to leave town, identify local kluxers involved in various kidnappings and the sheriff who just watched one of them happen. That sheriff is in the court in his official, um, sitting-in-court capacity, which is one reason, along with a general atmosphere of intimidation, that witnesses seem to be revealing less than they know.

The Lausanne Conference accepts Turkey’s proposal for a forcible exchange of populations, with 600,000 Greeks to be expelled from Turkey and 450,000 Turks from Greece. Turkey would have been happy for it to be “voluntary” but the Greeks insisted it be compulsory and the Allies sided with them. The Greeks in Constantinople (200,000 or so) are exempted, as are 300,000 Turks in Western Thrace. In practice this will be more a religious cleansing than an ethnic one, with Greece choosing Muslims as expellees. The Allies also give up their demand that minorities in Turkey only be brought before special courts with judges appointed by outside countries and their demand for an Armenian homeland.

172 Indians are sentenced to death for the riots in Lucknow last February, when 17 native police were killed at Chauri-Chaura.

United Artists offers child actor Jackie Coogan (The Kid, The Addams Family), age 8, $500,000 + 60% of the profits to appear in 4 films. His mother will steal most of that money, as he’ll find when he turns 21. (Update: Metro will outbid UA.)

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Today -100: January 10, 1923: Of coal defaults, race massacres, and caliphates

The Reparations Commission, as expected, declares Germany in voluntary default of coal reparations deliveries (16% shy of the demands), with France, Belgium & Italy voting against Britain. Roland Boyden, the American observer, says Germany defaulted because the commission and indeed the Treaty of Versailles put an impossible burden on it.

The Supreme Court is hearing cases brought by the NAACP about the death sentences on 12 black men for the race conflicts in Elaine, Arkansas in 1919, when a meeting in a church about farm conditions (i.e., peonage) was shot up by a white “posse.” The state has been claiming that the posse thwarted a plot to massacre white people, ginned up by one man purely to make money, who “played upon the ignorance and superstition of a race of children”. The NAACP notes that the men were railroaded, tortured into false confessions, and subjected to one-hour trials before being sentenced to death.

The All-India Caliphate Conference threatens that if the Lausanne Conference breaks down and Britain goes to war with Turkey, Muslims in Indian will back the latter and launch a civil disobedience campaign.

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Today -100: January 9, 1923: They will all have white faces

France is preparing 25,000 troops to occupy the Ruhr whenever Germany is declared in default of its coal reparations and, says Le Matin’s foreign editor, “they will all have white faces, so as to give the least offence to the United States Senate.”

The German government will call for passive resistance and will say that the occupation tears up the Versailles Treaty and therefore Germany doesn’t have to pay any more reparations.

Headline of the Day -100:  

The Young Communists end a demo in Red Square with a “burning of all gods.”

Chicago’s Methodist ministers condemn the city’s chief justice for barring KKK members from juries. They say it virtually deprives klansmen of their rights of citizenship.

Kodak will start selling a home movie camera.

The Irish Free State executes 5 soldiers who deserted to the rebels.

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Today -100: January 8, 1923: Ethnic cleansing: accomplished.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Without comment:

Lenin is reported to be about to die, as was the custom.

Harding would really prefer to keep Congress in recess from March to December, even if it means failing to get some of his legislative agenda, like the ship subsidies bill.

Headline of the Day -100:  

I bet he will, I bet he will.

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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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