On this day in 1920, the remains of New York criminal, and heroic World War One veteran, Monk Eastman received a guard of honor on his way to his funeral
Eastman was a well known New York thug in an age filled with Empire State thugs. He was 44 or 45 at the time of his death, making him an old soldier at the time of his enlistment. He served heroically in the Great War and received a pardon from the Governor of New York before resorting to his prior life of crime. He was gunned down by a criminal confederate after an argument about bootlegging proceeds, with the gunman claiming he feared for his life.
He was a bad man in an age filled with really bad men, and a good soldier.
The USS John D. Ford was commissioned.
The Clemson Class destroyer would serve through World War Two, but was sold for scrap prior to the Korean War.
An unknown Vietnamese Communist, Nguyn Ai Quoc, would address the French Communist Party on this day.
He would later be known as Ho Chi Minh and was one of a collection of nationalist, by not all means Communist, figures who would oppose the Japanese occupation and then the French return following World War Two. A central figure in the Vietnamese Communist Party in the 40s and 50s he'd help shove aside the non Communist nationalist and thereby set his nation up for rivers of blood that would follow the French expulsion.
He deserves to remembered in unending infamy today, less bloody than Moa or Stalin, but still a figure representing a collection of real bastards.
On this day in 1920, coincidentally, Yugoslavia outlawed the Communist Party. Outlawing a stupid idea rarely works, and instead causes it to fester, and following World War Two it would reemerge, although in a less virulent form than in the USSR, or for that matter Vietnam.
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