March 21, 1919. Jams.

Cpt. S. A. Mitchell, American Red Cross, demonstrates the can opener he invented to open jam cans for canteens.  Ostensibly, Red Cross volunteers, mostly women, staffing the canteens were cutting their hands opening the cans which were opened at a prodigious rates due to servicemen's fondness for jam.

Cpt. S. A. Mitchell of the American Red Cross was photographed on this day with the can opener he invented for Red Cross canteens.

American servicemen visiting the canteens consumed jam at a prodigious amount.  Indeed, servicemen in general did, and the uniformity, in terms of offerings, of jam in the British Army was a frequent source of jokes.  At any rate, the Red Cross staff of canteens, mostly women, reportedly cut their hands frequently trying to open them, and Cpt. Miller put his inventive mind to work on the problem.

Bela Kun put his inventive mind to work and came out on top, briefly, in a struggle in Hungary that saw the Hungarian People's Republic become the Hungarian Soviet Republic and then seek aid from the Soviet Union against the French and others.

The Hungarian Soviet Republic was a dangerous development but not a large one.  It controlled only 23% of the country whereas the rest of it was either under Allied occupation or under control of other entities.  It occupied a region of large cities and therefore not surprisingly it had a lot of Socialist under its jurisdiction.

The Socialist in fact had caused the change in government to come about when they merged, without their leader's knowledge, with the Communist party in a move that they thought would increase their strength.  It did not.  The leader of the Communist, Bela Kun, was a mere tool of Lenin's and Lenin effectively ran the new state from afar and by way of radio contact with Kun.  One of its first moves was to purge the Socialist.  The government was hugely unpopular in the countryside where resistance to it was massive and in turn it utilized increasingly brutal measure to try to enforce its will.  

The Hungarian Soviet Republic existed only for 133 days and only for that long as it at first had the support of Hungarian nationalist as it promised to restore Hungary's borders, which were decreasing due to post war adjustments.  It attacked areas in the north that had been given to Czechoslovakia but then its formation of a new Czech soviet republic caused it to lose nationalist support as it was realized that the governments only goals were Communist.  A war against Romania went badly and the government fell to armed opposition.

Kun fled to the USSR and lost his life in Stalin's purges, a victim of the evil system whose stooge he was.