May 22, 1919. Mixed Signals, Suffrage, and Ireland.

The Casper paper was warning, on this May 22, 1919, that the Germans were about to "invade" the occupied zone and resume the prosecution of the war.  The US was ready for them, however.

At the same time the news was also reporting that the size of the army of occupation was about to be reduced.

Mixed signal?

The 126th Infantry, which had been part of that body of men in Germany until recently, was on parade in Kalamazoo Michigan.

In Laramie, the Boomerang reported that German maneuvers were just a bluff, perhaps reading the wind more accurately.

All the way around the papers were reporting on the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution bringing in Women's suffrage.  It wasn't there yet, but it was making its way out of Congress.

The same issue ran an article on Sir Henry W. Thornton condemning the departure of American citizens to Ireland in aid of that country's Republicans.  Thornton was an American businessman whose expertise in transportation and railroads had lead him to Canada.  In 1919 he became a British subject and returned to Canada where he lived until shortly prior to his death.  He was a prominent figure in the British war effort, while still an American.

While Sir Thornton was condemning Americans departing for the Irish cause, also in Laramie poetry in celebration of that cause was being heard on campus.

The paper in Jackson remained more primitive.  It apparently hadn't updated its press during the war and from this issue it didn't appear to have joined any of the wire services that contributed to up to date news in Casper and Cheyenne.

Of interest here is the advertisement for Levi products.  Levis didn't become the big deal they later would become until World War Two, as we've discussed on this blog previously.  Here their overalls and coveralls are receiving higher billing than their trousers.  And I didn't know that they'd ever made "Rombers for Children".