On this day quixotic legal efforts to litigate against Prohibition came to an end when the Supreme Court upheld its validity.
Quite frankly, these efforts were doomed from the onset and fit into the category of pointless legal endeavors. A person has to wonder why they were even attempted given that they never had any chance of success. The 18th Amendment was clearly valid and, therefore, the Volstead Act clearly was as well.
The GOP Convention and its candidates were also engaged in some drama over who would be the nominee for the 1920 fall election.
One group that was happy about the Supreme Court's decision on Prohibition was the Kl Klux Klan, which was an ardent supporter of it as part of its nativist concepts that looked down on everyone other than white protestants. On this day that organization started a publicity campaign organized by the Southern Publicity Association, an advertising agency founded by its leader, Edward Clarke, together with Mary Elizabeth Tyler. The two had previously organized the Daughters of America, a nativist group. The Southern Publicity Association would go on to have the Anti Saloon League as one of its clients, showing the strange alignment between nativist racism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism and prohibition in some quarters.
The campaign was a success and is credited with boosting the organizations fortunes at a time at which its trajectory appeared to be sending it into ultimate obscurity. The KKK unfortunately benefited from the work done by the pair, whose changes to its structure resulted in a system which is still apparently used at least in part today. Clarke and Tyler also benefited from their work personally.
The pair took in 80% of the KKK members initiation fees, making it a lucrative occupation for themselves. They invested the money in businesses that made Klan paraphernalia and in working together, they started working together on an illicit relationship that caused Clarke’s wife to sue for divorce for desertion. This was causing problems as early as 1919 when they were rousted out of bed by Atlanta police, charged with disorderly conduct, and fined for possessing whiskey in violation of the Volstead Act. Given the support of the KKK for both prohibition and the “purity” of white women, the hypocrisy is notable, but the news did not become widely known at that time. It would break in 1921 and bring about Clarke’s downfall in the KKK in 1923. That year Clarke fled the country do avoid charges of violating the Mann Act but he ultimately plead guilty to those charges. He was still alive in the 1940s and died in obscurity after that. Tyler, who had been married multiple times starting at age 14 or 15, would marry one more time and would die in 1924.
Clarke and Tyler are interesting examples of hypocrisy at the leadership level of organizations of the type they lead and remind contemporaries of the leadership of the Nazi Party which was similarly weird and in which individual leaders might not measure up to the “purity” and virility platforms which they based their propaganda on. Clarke and Tyler were clearly brilliant organizers and campaigners and were hugely successful in their efforts even while violating the “purity” tenants they were espousing, just as the circle of strange people surrounding Hitler saved the Nazi Party from fading into Weimar German obscurity based on similar concepts which they themselves were not the best examples of.
The mess of the Great War induced collapse of the Austro Hungarian Empire was evident again as the Treaty of Brno was signed naturalizing people of Austria and Czechoslovakia based upon the language that they spoke.
On the same day, Battle of Fengwudong (Korean: 봉오동 전투; Hanja: 鳳梧洞戰鬪) was fought between Korean militias seeking independence of the Hermit Kingdom and the Japanese Army in Manchuria. While Korean independence would be a long time coming, and would be brought about due to World War Two, and imperfectly, the battle was a Korean victory.
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