Today -100: May 31, 1920: Of fools and socks

Ahead of its general election, Germany is rife with rumors of coups by nationalists, communists, or both. Chancellor Hermann Müller says Germany must show “that she has had enough of war for all eternity, and that no fool, crowned or uncrowned, shall drag Germany into a war of revenge.”

Coney Island bathing suit censors, out in force this Memorial Day weekend, go after women wearing socks and men wearing one-piece bathing suits, because too sexy for 1920, I guess.

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Today -100: May 30, 1920: What the Well-Dressed Opera-Goer and Presidential Candidate Are Wearing

US Attorney Annette Adams is nominated to be assistant attorney general. She will be the first woman assistant attorney general, the highest federal office occupied by a woman so far.

The House of Representatives passes a bonus bill for veterans through an extraordinary suspension of the rules to limit debate, so much of the argument was about that. Robert Evans (R-Neb.) says “It is an outrage that 425 members are only eunuchs in the harem of the Steering and Rules Committee.” Most of the funding would come through various taxes on Wall Street and tobacco. Vets could choose one of the following: cash, or a 20-year bond, or vocational training, or farm or loan aid, or land settlement. The cash would be $1.25 per day of service overseas or $1 at home, to a max of $625. The bill is expected to die in the Senate.

Pres. Wilson commutes the sentence of Kate Richards O’Hare, who was convicted under the Espionage Act for opposing the war.

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Tomas Masaryk is chosen as president of Czechoslovakia by the country’s first elected parliament. During the proceedings, ethnic German deputies (think Sudetenland) complain that the Speaker spoke Czech rather than German. They later storm out.

The Indian National Congress has its own commission on the Amritsar Massacre, including Gandhi, which issues its own report. It suggests that the actions of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, Lt. Gov. of the Punjab, invited violence to justify a violent crackdown. It distances the actions of the Indian mob from Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement. It describes the massacre as “a calculated piece of inhumanity unparalleled in its ferocity.”

The NYT continues to push John W. Davis for the Democratic nomination for president. It thinks he’d be a really strong candidate. Ambassador Davis will have a chance to prove them woefully wrong, but not just yet. The Times also suggests that the Republicans, who “boast that they are the party of intelligence” (cough), not nominate Hiram Johnson; it does not suggest an alternative candidate.

News that Hungary will sign the peace treaty has supposedly led to many suicides being fished out of the Danube. And the army may refuse to evacuate territories as required by the treaty.

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Today -100: May 29, 1920: Of sentimental idealism, women’s suffrage, and Willy’s new suit

The House fails to override Pres. Wilson’s veto of the Knox Resolution to end the war. Stephen Porter (R-Penn.), chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, accuses Wilson of attempting , in his veto message, to lead the American people “into the underbrush of sentimental idealism, which is beautiful and attractive in theory, but is extremely dangerous in these days.” D’s point out that if the R’s were really so concerned with repealing wartime regulations, they could just do that.

Women’s suffrage Amendment ratification dies in the Delaware Legislature.

Former czar Wilhelm II has taken up tailoring as a hobby, because why not.

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Today -100: May 28, 1920: Of ineffacable stains

Pres. Wilson vetoes the Knox resolution to end the war. He says it would ignore the moral obligations which the US assumed when it went to war and would “place ineffacable stains on the gallantry and honor of the United States.” He says “The resolution seeks to establish peace with the German Empire without exacting from the German Government any action by way of setting right the infinite wrongs which it did to the peoples whom it attacked,” nor would it reduce armaments or establish freedom of the seas. The US would be announcing its unwillingness to assume “responsibilities with regard to the freedom of nations or the sacredness of international obligation or the safety of independent peoples.” “Have we sacrificed the lives of more than 100,000 Americans and ruined the lives of thousands of others and brought upon thousands of American families an unhappiness that can never end for purposes which we do not now care to sate or take further steps to attain?” I think that’s a trick question.

Rep. Nicholas Longworth (R-Ohio) points out an interview during the war in which Wilson was unconcerned with the freedom of the seas. Longworth asks “did the same man who gave the interview write the message?”, which I take to be suggesting not so subtly that someone else wrote the veto message. And while someone else (Mrs Wilson comes to mind) might easily have done so, it sounds very much like Wilson’s sentiments.

Canada puts in a rather belated claim for reparations from Germany of $1,871,000,000. Evidently it expects Germany to pay the whole cost of the war against it as well as $30 million for the explosion of a munitions ship in Halifax harbor in 1917 after it bumped another ship, which Canada is still pretending was a German plot of some kind.

Republican party leaders intend to keep the issue of prohibition out of the national convention.

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Today -100: May 27, 1920: Of generals and minimum wages

Rodolfo Herrera, the Mexican general in charge of the siege of Carranza’s camp, is arrested for questioning about the latter’s death. Herrera insists Carranza committed suicide.

The Senate kills a bill for a $3 a day minimum wage for government employees.

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Today -100: May 26, 1920: Of Jim Crow conventions, massacres, 2.75% beer, married teachers, and general soreness

300 black delegates to the Texas Republican Convention quit it and hold their own convention after some are refused credentials by, you know, racists. So yet another state will send two competing delegations to the national convention in Chicago, although both will evidently support Gen. Wood. Oh, and the black delegates are led by a banker from Fort Worth known as “Gooseneck” Bill McDonald, the first black millionaire in Texas.

The commission led by Lord Hunter into “unrest” in India, including last year’s Amritsar Massacre, issues two reports, one from the 5 British members, one from the 3 Indian members. The two reports disagree on whether the anti-European attitude of the natives developed before or after the massacre, but agree that the soldiers needed to shoot into the crowd, though maybe not for quite that long. They also differ over whether the protests constituted “open rebellion” and whether martial law was necessary. Even the British members think Dyer’s order for Indians to crawl if they wanted to cross a particular street where a British woman had been assaulted was a bad move.

The feds say they will ignore the NY law authorizing 2.75% beer and prosecute those who sell it.

The New York Board of Education rescinds the 1903 rule barring married women teachers being hired or promoted.

French President Paul Deschanel is recovering from falling out of his train. According to his doctors, “There is general soreness, but no nervousness.”

Same.

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Today -100: May 25, 1920: It may surprise you, but I am Deschanel, president of the Republic

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To be fair to that railroad trackwalker, Paul Deschanel may well have been crazy. So the president of France falls out of the window of the moving presidential train. He walks, in his pj’s, to the nearest town, coming across that sceptical trackwalker along the way. He claims to have fallen out of the window of his carriage when trying to open it, but there are... questions. PM Millerand tells the NYT correspondent that Deschanel is “sound physically and mentally.” That he felt impelled to add that “and mentally” is not a good sign.

Pres. Wilson asks Congress to give him the power to accept the mandate over Armenia. He doesn’t actually think this might happen, does he?

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The New York Legislature passes a bill for 2.75% beer, which it defines as non-intoxicating, and Gov. Al Smith signs it. The beer can be drunk in restaurants but only with meals.

A Swiss newspaper reports that various Russian nobles and officers say the Czar and his family escaped and are living quietly in Japan.

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Today -100: May 24, 1920: Of non-wars, wiping out unrest, and putschists

Sir Nevil Macready, Commander-in-Chief of British troops in Ireland, says there is not a state of war in Ireland, as he floods the country with soldiers, who he says are just there to support the police, like the Irish people are not doing because of terrorism.

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It turns out it’s: cooperation and harmonization of capital and labor. Gosh, why did no one think of this before?

A bunch of German officers, including former head of the Admiralty Adm. von Trotha, are fired because of their participation in the Kapp Putsch. Shouldn’t that have happened, like, two months ago? 

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Today -100: May 23, 1920: Of dead Carranzas, borders, and mahogany commodes

Mexican President-On-The-Lam Venustiano Carranza is dead. To this day we don’t know whether he was killed or killed himself. Either way, his camp was surrounded and he was done. Obregón, who would have preferred to see Carranza either on trial or in exile, will attempt to blame the general in command of the forces besieging Carranza for not bringing him in alive.

Pres. Wilson accepts the San Remo conference’s request that he arbitrate the Turkey-Armenia border. He was also asked to accept the League of Nations mandate for Armenia, but hasn’t answered one way or the other.

The Anderson Galleries of New York City auction off a bunch of the former kaiser Wilhelm’s shit – chairs, clocks, draperies, cigarette boxes, and so on – seized from his many palaces by his many creditors. The gallery says the goods went for about 50% more than if they’d come from some rando. A mahogany commode that presumably once touched the emperor’s actual pale bottom fetched $1,100. I wonder where it is today.

The governor of Georgia and the mayor of Atlanta invite the NAACP to hold its convention in that city. Is it a trap? It’s probably a trap.

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Today -100: May 22, 1920: Of ending wars, acts of savagery, cabinets, and the world’s enigma

The House of Representatives passes the Knox Resolution declaring the war over, unchanged from the Senate version already passed, in order to get it vetoed in time for the Republican Convention. The R’s have shifted their rationale a bit, saying this is needed to end all those wartime measures, especially the ones giving unusual powers to the executive branch. D’s retort that they could have just repealed those measures if they didn’t also want an election issue.

German Foreign Minister Adolph Koestler tells the Reichstag that Germany will complain to the League of Nations about the alleged acts of “savagery” by black French soldiers in the Ruhr.

In Italy, Francesco Nitti forms a new cabinet, his third in the last year, another attempt at a broad coalition with Catholics and liberals and whatnot. The government is trying to demobilize the army, but officers are refusing to be demobilized. I didn’t know it worked like that.

The Dearborn Independent publishes the first of owner Henry Ford’s series of editorials “The International Jew: The World’s Problem,” a loose adaptation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. “The Jew is the world’s enigma. Poor in his masses, he yet controls the world’s finances. Scattered abroad without country or government, he yet presents a unity of race continuity which no other people has achieved. Living under legal disabilities in almost every land, he has become the power behind many a throne. There are ancient prophecies to the effect that the Jew will return to his own land and from that center rule the world, though not until he has undergone an assault by the united nations of mankind.”

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Today -100: May 21, 1920: Of anti-imperialism, hostage-taking, and dabbling in politics

Sir Edward Carson tells Parliament that the disorders in Ireland are being directed from New York by people who aren’t really interested in Ireland but in destroying the British Empire.

Dock workers in Dublin are refusing to unload munitions being sent for the military, and dock workers in London are now refusing to load them.

Hearing that Russia is detaining Americans, the US asks Austria to hold on to communists who fled Hungary after the fall of Béla Kun.

Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore warns women: “You rule the home, the husband and the children, and should not attempt to dabble in politics. If you try to rule over two kingdoms, you will surely lose both of them.”

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Today -100: May 20, 1920: Of Matewan massacres, ignored hoovers, and dear old pals of mine

12 men are killed on the streets of Matewan, West Virginia in a gun battle between coal miners and the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, whose “detectives” arrived to evict strikers them from their company homes and tried to arrest Police Chief Sid Hatfield with a fake warrant. Shooting started, by whom is not clear. 7 detectives are dead, and Mayor Cabell Testerman. For further details, I refer you to John Sayles’s movie Matewan.

NY Gov. Alfred E. Smith vetoes several anti-Socialist bills, including ones establishing loyalty tests for teachers, barring socialists from the ballot and from appointive state offices, and creating a secret police bureau to investigate criminal anarchy.

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Rude.

The first entertainment radio broadcast, on Marconi-owned station XWA (Experimental Wireless Apparatus) in Montreal, plays records (“Dear Old Pal of Mine”) and has live singing by Dorothy Lutton (“Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms” and “Merrily Shall I Live” and others. It can barely be heard in Montreal, but reaches the meeting of the Royal Society of Canada in Ottawa. Ottawa broadcasts some ditties back to Montreal.

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Today -100: May 19, 1920: Of senates and coups

The British Parliament discusses Irish Home Rule. The idea now is for the two Irish parliaments to also have senates. Sir Edward Carson would prefer Northern Ireland have no parliament at all but instead continue to be ruled from Westminster. Which would also allow Britain to use Ulster as a “jumping-off place” in case it needs to go to war with “Sinn Féin Ireland.” Carson also suggests that the US butt out.

The London Daily Telegraph is pretty sure that Lenin et al have been displaced by Gen. Aleksei Brusilov after a military coup.

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Today -100: May 18, 1920: Of dry rulings, sending in soldiers, and proxy votes

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Britain sends another couple of thousand troops to Ireland, which surely just makes the case for independence clearer. Other Irish news: more street fighting in Derry, more police barracks burned down, most tax records seized and destroyed.

170 French deputies will introduce a measure to give votes to every man, woman and child, the latter to be exercised by the father, or by the mother if the father is dead. The deputy responsible for the bill notes that many families do not have male heads thanks to the war, and those families now go unrepresented.

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Today -100: May 17, 1920: Of oil, crossbows, and saints

The director of the Bureau of Mines says at the present rate, the US will run out of oil in 20 years.

Switzerland votes to join the League of Nations. The referendum was fairly close, with the French-speaking cantons voting to join and the German-speaking ones voting against. The NYT correspondent in Altdorf reports that the voting was guarded by soldiers with swords and crossbows, because Switzerland.

Joan of Arc is canonized.

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Today -100: May 16, 1920: Of stinking carcasses, peace resolutions, ambassadors, crumbling regimes, and deserters

The Communist Party USA’s central committee writes to Eugene Debs, asking why he accepted the Socialist Party nomination for president: “Not even your name can hide their counter-revolutionary tendency. The class-conscious workers of America are through with the stinking carcass that calls itself the Socialist Party of America.”

The Senate passes the Knox Resolution ending the war with Germany and Austria-Hungary, voting 43-38 largely along party lines.

Pres. Wilson receives the ambassadors of Japan and Poland, in a move intended to dispel rumors that he’s sick again.

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During the war, Carl Amerine went AWOL from Camp Sherman in Ohio to see his wife and child. His father explained to him that he was now a deserter, and they shoot people for that, so he’s been living in a cave in the hills of Ohio ever since. Authorities somehow get word to him that he won’t be shot, and he turns himself in.

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Today -100: May 15, 1920: Not nostrums but normalcy

Eugene Debs issues a statement from prison accepting the Socialist Party nomination. “The Socialist Party will appeal this year to men who think.” As Adlai Stevenson would say, that’s not enough, we need a majority. The D’s and R’s are “both wings of the same bird of prey,” Debs says. Admitting to the divisions within the Socialist Party, he says the radicals keep the conservatives from giving away too much in order to popularize the movement. “To begin to placate your enemies is to invite decay.” He says campaigning from prison “will be much less tiresome and my managers and opponents can always locate me.”

The Socialist Party’s national convention decides to adhere to the Third International as long as the party is not required to adopt one particular means of attaining socialism, such as the dictatorship of the proletariat. The party will hire 3 negroes to do propaganda work among negroes; one will be black and work among black women.

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Speaking of normal, Warren G. Harding delivers his famous “Return to Normalcy”  speech (incomplete transcript) to the Home Market Club of Boston, setting out the theme of his presidential campaign and making the previously very-little-used word “normalcy” into a thing:

there isn’t anything the matter with world civilization, except that humanity is viewing it through a vision impaired in a cataclysmal war. Poise has been disturbed, and nerves have been racked, and fever has rendered men irrational. ... 

America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality. ... 

Let us stop to consider that tranquility at home is more precious than peace abroad, and that both our good fortune and our eminence are dependent on the normal forward stride of all the American people.

I’m a little startled to see words a later president kind of lifted:

If we can prove a representative popular government under which a citizenship seeks what it may do for the government rather than what the government may do for individuals, we shall do more to make democracy safe for the world than all armed conflict ever recorded.

The NYT reports the speech on page 20 and misses out on the word normalcy. The Library of Congress website has a studio recording Harding made of this speech in June for Columbia Graphophone.

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Today -100: May 14, 1920: Of mimeographs, barracks, debses, and night work

Pres. Wilson vetoes the appropriations bill for federal salaries because it gives Congress control over all government publications and mimeographs, which it could use to censor the executive branch.

Sinn Féin has a fun day out, burning down something like 50 police stations and barracks, some of them not presently in use, as well as some tax offices.

The Socialist Party national convention nominates Eugene Debs for president, as was the custom. This will be the fifth time he runs for president, although the first time he will do so from a prison cell (he’ll receive his most ever votes this time). His running mate is Seymour Stedman, evidently chosen because as a lawyer he knows what he can say and not wind up in prison like Debs.

NY Gov. Alfred E. Smith vetoes a bill banning women from night work in printing. He says “there is international recognition of prohibition of night work for women as a health measure.”

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Today -100: May 13, 1920: Because you just can’t eat thrones

Jackson, Wyoming (as in Jackson Hole), pop. 300, elects an all-female ticket for mayor and town councilwomen. The defeated ticket was all-male, and Rose Crabtree defeated her husband Henry for a council seat.

When Kaiser Wilhelm fled Germany, he left behind palaces full of stuff, and bills. Various provisioners who were owed the latter grabbed the former. “The royal beds were seized for unpaid wienerwurst accounts,” writes a NYT correspondent who is clearly enjoying himself. The throne, the actual throne, is about to go on auction in New York. Germany only allowed the export of that and other items because it was promised the proceeds would be used to import food.

The New York Board of Trade and Transportation opposes a blanket bonus for all WW I veterans (as opposed to just the disabled), saying it would “arouse the resentment and contempt of every patriotic American soldier and sailor.”

Italian Prime Minister Francesco Nitti resigns, unable to get support in a parliament largely divided between irreconcilable Socialists & Catholics.

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Today -100: May 12, 1920: Of huge cannibals

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Huge cannibals are the worst kind (the Yanomami are not cannibals, by the way, although Dr. Rice claims to have “recognized them at once” as a tribe of cannibals only seen by outsiders once before, in 1763; he's just that good). Rice was accompanied by his wife Eleanor, whose vacations kind of sucked: she was on the Titanic with her son and her previous husband, which is how he became previous.

The French government announces it will dissolve the General Federation of Labor (Confédération Générale du Travail), pissed at its Bolshie leaders and its attempt at a general strike since May Day. The rationale will be that unions are legally allowed to strike only for economic interests and the CGT is striking for political ends.

Cynthia Curzon, daughter of British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon, marries Oswald Mosley, 23-year-old Tory MP and future leader of the British Union of Fascists. The kings and queens of Britain and Belgium are in attendance.

The Netherlands won’t tax the former crown prince of Germany, because his residence in the country, under internment, is not voluntary.

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