Today -100: January 20, 1923: I bow to the inviolate right of bayonets

The German government describes its Ruhr policy as “a course of non-aggressive but determined moral resistance”.  It’s always good when Germans are being non-aggressive and moral. The French arrest the region’s finance head, Dr. Schlutius, for refusing to hand over records. “I bow to the inviolate right of bayonets,” he says, as he is led away.

The element hafnium is discovered. Evidently it was in Denmark all this time.

The Justice Dept raids a meeting of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association in New Orleans, claiming to have uncovered a negro anarchist plot to overthrow the government. This follows the murder of a black preacher who was to be a witness against Garvey.

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Today -100: January 19, 1923: Of humanity, watches on the Rhine, sages, and the surprising origins of that Two Ronnies routine

The French Parliament votes to suspend the parliamentary immunity of Marcel Cachin (Communist) so he can be prosecuted for treason for articles in L’Humanité, of which he is editor, calling for a general strike against the Ruhr occupation. A major fight breaks out in the Chamber.

The Rhineland High Commission gives France (and Belgium, I guess) the power to seize customs in the Ruhr, as well as state forests, and to collect the coal tax and...  Given the (predictable) lack of cooperation (the Reichsbank just removed all its funds to Germany proper), France may just have to run the place. 

France will also court-martial 6 coal magnates (it isn’t saying which ones). Also, a German cop is arrested for not saluting a French officer. Also, the songs “The Watch on the Rhine” and “Deutschland über Alles” are banned. Which is pissing off the German miners, because you know how those guys love to sing. 

Adolf Hitler says he’ll review 200,000 armed Nazis ready to go to resist the French occupation.

William Jennings Bryan wants to be the “sage of the Democratic Party” at the 1924 Convention.

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Gosh, so they didn’t just sit in the dark, isn’t Egyptology fascinating?

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Today -100: January 18, 1923: In which is revealed what will end war forever

France threatens to drag Ruhr mine owners into court if they don’t obey its commands; Germany threatens to drag them into court if they do.

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The other 4 are Trotsky, Dzerzhinsky, Kamenev, and Rykov. Lenin is “resting” these days. 2 of the 5 will die of natural causes, 3 will die of Stalin.

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Today -100: January 17, 1923: Of occupations and dangers to American rights

French troops now occupy the whole of the Ruhr Basin. The French call together the heads of mining companies and order them to resume coal deliveries by tomorrow or else.

The Massachusetts House of Representatives unanimously passes a resolution calling the Ku Klux Klan “dangerous to American rights.”

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Today -100: January 16, 1923: Of engagements, occupations, memels, and executions

In its third announcement this month of a British royal getting engaged, the NYT actually gets it right! Prince Albert, the Grand Old Duke of York, is engaged to Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. Congrats, future King George VI & Queen Mum.

French soldiers shoot their first Germans of the occupation of the Ruhr, opening fire on some quarreling Communists & Nationalists, killing 1 and wounding 2, in Bochum, which they have just occupied as they extend beyond the initial seizure of Essen to the whole Ruhr. The German Coal Syndicate orders Ruhr coal owners not to deliver coal to the French even if they pay cash money. They seem to be daring the French to confiscate and run the mines.

France officially informs the US that its 45,000 soldiers occupying the Ruhr are all white.

Lithuanian “irregulars” seize Memel. Wait, the French surrender to just thirty (30) Lithuanians? They Lithuanians aren’t looking for Lithuania to annex the city, just the removal of the Germans it. I guess that explains the French white flag.

The Irish Free State executes 5 more people for possessing firearms.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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Today -100: January 3, 1923: Fall falls

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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

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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.

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“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.

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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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