Sunday, February 24, 2019

Monday, February 24, 1919. Wyoming National Guardsmen in Berlin? Woodrow on the Commons, Wobblies in detention. Working Children result in taxation, temporarily, Wimpy in alcohol. Women in film.

Woodrow Wilson on the Boston Commons.

President Wilson was back in the US and took in some adulation on the Boston Commons. He was about to step into the fight for the League of Nations and the Versailles Treaty that would ultimately kill him.


Spanish anarchists arrested by the  New York police under suspicion of harboring a plot to assassinate President Wilson.

At the same time, a group of IWW anarchists were oddly plotting to assassinate Wilson.  Exactly why a century later, is unclear, as he was certainly less unsympathetic to labor and the rights of at least small nations than others in U.S. politics, although he certainly wasn't sympathetic with anarchists or communists as a group.

Child laborers in a furniture factory in 1908.  These boys would have all been of military age in World War One, which may explain the stoicism that seems to have been so common with American soldiers of that conflict.

Speaking of work, Congress passed the Child Labor Tax of 1919 which imposed a 10% income tax on those companies using child labor.  The Supreme Court would strike the law down as unconstitutional in 1922, something that isn't surprising as this was in the pre Lochner era.


The papers were reporting on those events.  And on a rumor that the 148th Field Artillery, which contained Wyoming National Guardsmen, was in Berlin.

It wasn't.

Meanwhile the Federal Prohibition bill was down to .05% being the top allowable level, less than Wyoming's 1% which had just Quixotically passed.


Releasing movies on Monday had become a thing.


Female heroins, both comedic and dramatic, were in vogue.


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