June 7, 1920. Prohibition Upheld, Probicity for Evil Commences, Koreans Prevail at Fengwudong (봉오동 전투)

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.

The Mexican Revolution. . . where we're at in terms of century delayed time.

Yesterday we ran this item:

Lex Anteinternet: Venustiano Carranza assassinated . . .: .

Venustiano Carranza assassinated . . .

on this day in 1920, by officers who had betrayed him, pretending to offer him a safe lodging for the night in the town of Tlaxcalantongo.  Sometime during the night, their forces surrounded the house and then opened fire into ito.  Oddly, the assassins then telegramed Obregon to inform him that "we are at your service" but also asked for permission to bring Carranza's body to Mexico City for burial.  Obregon replied with the comment "It is very strange that a group of officers who vouched their loyalty and honor should have permitted him to be assassinated instead of complying with your duty."

And it goes on from there.

So, where are we at on this story that we've been following for years and for which there are now 306 entries on this blog.

The story starts with the revolution against Porifirio Diaz in 1911

Well, not really.  Diaz, who had been a lieutenant of Mexican revolutionary and then president Benito Juarez, served as President of Mexico three times with his last period of dictatorial service running form 1884 until May 21, 1911.  An odd statement to an American reporter about being willing to hold elections in 1908 lead to one and ultimately he proved unwilling not to run, as he'd promised, with his running meaning an assured reelection..  That lead to the rebellion in 1910 we now call The Mexican Revolution, lead at first by the improbable Francisco Modero.

Diaz at age 77.

On this date in 1920, Diaz had been dead five years.  He'd died of natural causes at age 85 in France.

In 1911 he took to his exile and was succeeded by Francisco León de la Barra y Quijano, whom Mexican conservatives called the "white president" due to his purity.  He only served until November.

León.

During his short administration León had to attempt to deal with the growing revolution against him and the growing right wing extremism in his army.  He wouldn't succeeded, but he did succeed in outliving the revolution  He was still living in 1920 and had a career as a diplomat ahead of him.  He ultimately retired to Spain, but even there was used unofficially in this capacity as a go between between France and Spain.  He died in 1939 of natural causes.

Modero.

León's successor was Modero who was a weak president from November 1911 until he was killed in a military coup on February 19, 1913.  His death threw the country back into civil war.

The fallen Huerta.

His successor was the successful head of the coup, Victoriano Huerta.  Huerta was able to topple Modero, but he couldn't quell the revolution, and he went into exile in July 1914.  Going first to Europe and then the United States, he died an alcoholic in 1916.

His successor, Francisco Sebastián Carvajal y Gual, served for only a month before also going into exile, a victim of Huerta's failed effort to reclaim Diaz's position in Mexico.  His story was happier, however, as he met his wife in exile in the United States and he ultimately returned to Mexico in 1922 to resume his legal practice, which he occupied until his death by natural causes in 1932.

And then came Carranza.

So, so far we've seen the assassination of two of the real revolutionary presidents of Mexico, the odd but admirable Modero and the determined and not so admirable Carranza.  And we've seen the exile of three of the right wing pretenders, two of whom had died by natural causes.

Not dying by natural causes up to this point were thousands of Mexican soldiers who had fought on both sides of the Mexican Revolution, and in some cases literally on both sides.  Included in that number was Emiliano Zapata, the greatest of the Mexican revolutionaries, who was its best post Modero hope.

And the revolution was getting increasingly extreme. Having gone from a hope for democracy with Modero it was coming to increasingly reflect the extreme left wing politics of revolutions of its age, something that would have ill consequences for Mexico in coming years.

Indeed, a real oddity of Mexico's post Maximillian politics in general, up to this point, is how radical it was even when seemingly combined with conservative elements.  If Diaz sometimes dressed like Napoleon, his politics, he in some ways was like him.  He was a political liberal but one who did not trust the democratic process.  Ultimately he governed as a moderate liberal with a focus on stability.  Even today he is credited with having laid the foundations for modern Mexico.  His real fault was in not trusting democracy and running for reelection in 1910, when he promised not to.

Had Diaz held to his initial promise, Modero would have been elected in 1910.   Whether Diaz stepping away from politics voluntarily would have necessarily resulted in a Mexican army that would have accepted the election is another question, and one we will never know the answer to.  Had that occured, Mexico would have stepped into being a true democracy in 1910, something that would take another century to occur.  Diaz's failure to trust his own people lead to a revolution in which propelled radicals to the top.  One of those radicals was Carranza, who ended up sharing that lack of trust with Diaz.  He sought to dictate the results of the upcoming 1920 Mexican election, which in turn lead to his bloody end in May, 1920.  That put Obregon in the position of being the assured ultimate next president of the country, with extreme radicals rising up right behind him.

Pondering the 1918/1919 Influenza Pandemic

The 1918 Flu: A Pandemic Sweeps Wyoming

We've posted this once before, but as I'm going to refer to it again on the site I'm posting it again.  It's an excellent article.

Part of the reason I'm posting this is that this article has been getting a lot of renewed attention due to the COVID 19 pandemic.  Like everything by Roberts, it deserves the attention its getting.  I was going t repost it about a week or so ago, but as I'd posted it before, I didn't at that time.  however, as I'm referring to it in an answer to a question that's been posted yesterday, I thought I'd note it again.

I'll also note that the 18/19 Flu is getting a lot of attention in the press due to current events, and one of the things that is locally drawing attention is the steps taken to combat it.  The Wyoming Tribune Eagle (which occasionally quotes our This Day book), recently ran an article stating, about quaratines that first appeared in Kemmerer:

As precautionary measures, the health officials sanctioned the cancellation of all parties and the closure of churches, movie houses and theaters – anywhere that large groups of people congregated together. 

Most people took these sanctions to heart, but there was no penalty for not doing so. It wouldn’t be until the crisis got worse that the recommendations would become orders.

In the meantime, doctors made recommendations that might sound familiar: If you are sick, stay home in bed, stay at least five feet from people, cover your nose and mouth when coughing or sneezing, and stay away from people who are noticeably ill. Droplets from coughing, sneezing, talking and laughing were the source of the disease’s spread. There was an immediate effort to ban public spitting on sidewalks, stairs and streetcars.
Some folk wisdom crept into the papers as well: Refrain from wearing tight clothes and shoes, keep cool while walking and warm while sleeping. These had little effect on the disease, but some, such as warnings not to use public towels or drinking cups, seem like common sense today. One thing neither professionals nor good Samaritans mentioned was to wash your hands, especially after caring for a sick family member. 

On Oct. 8, the Spanish Flu arrived in Cheyenne. At first, only 10 people were stricken with the disease. Not taking any chances, Superintendent A.L. Jessup followed health officials’ recommendations and closed the city’s schools Oct. 9. He asked parents to keep their children close to home and not let them loiter in the neighborhoods, something parents were reluctant to do. Pool halls and saloons remained open, although loitering in the depot lobby was banned. 

On Oct. 10, the cases in Cheyenne sprang up to 50 persons. In response, all libraries and club reading rooms closed. Civic organizations cancelled meetings. To prevent loitering, cigar stores were ordered to pull their seats or box them up. Soda fountains had to remove their chairs and stools. On Oct. 11, Gov. Frank Houx ordered all saloons, pool halls, Red Cross work rooms and night schools across the state closed. By public order, all funerals would be private family affairs. 

By Oct. 15, the increasing count of flu cases jumped by 100 in less than 48 hours. Police chased children off the streets, while doctors pleaded with restaurants to change the worst of their habits.

County 10 News had an interesting article regarding events in Fremont County (hence "County 10", it's license plate number), in which it noted that the local newspaper was complaining about orders put in place by that county's health official in October, 1918.  None the less, local quaranties there soon expanded, as it reports:

 A little more than a week later, Dr. Thomas Maghee, the doctor serving at the State Training School was appointed the health officer of Lander. He issued a quarantine order that read as follows: 

A quarantine, with all its objectionable features, is imposed for the object, to stamp out and terminate an epidemic, thus preventing much suffering and even loss of life. 

The prime necessity is to PREVENT CONTACT of infected persons with those who are well. Therefore, a person will not be permitted to assemble on the street corners, in places of amusement or in business houses. 

TWO PERSONS are an assemblage under the law. 

Persons who have symptoms of the Influenza or who have recently had it, must remain at home or suffer arrest. 

Visiting between families and acquaintances must cease at once. Ladies with children must remain at home and keep their children with them. 

Children are absolutely forbidden to be on the streets or to visit neighbors. Special arrangements will be made by the authorities when necessary to use a child to send on errands. Children found on the street, without a permit will be arrested. 

Hotels are permitted to allow only the guests from out of town to remain about the lobbies. And the people of the town must not congregate there. 

Merchants will deliver supplies to the quarantined houses when requested.
Crowds assembling at the newsstand, the depot or post office will no longer be permitted. Until further orders, one person ONLY at ANY ONE TIME will be permitted to enter or remain in a saloon as long as it is necessary to get a drink, nor can persons frequent cigar or candy stand except under the same circumstances.

The Powell Tribune also recently looked back at the 1918/19 flu in this context, noting:

There was good news with the end of World War I hostilities a week later, but no end to the flu quarantine. In fact, the Powell Tribune of Nov. 22 recorded even stricter quarantine rules issued by the town council. The post office lobby was closed for two hours at mid-day. Stores could remain open for business, but it became unlawful for anyone to be in a store except to transact business. And children were required to stay home. 

The town council stated flatly “an emergency exists.” 

Quarantine regulations made it unlawful for parents to allow their children “to congregate or play with other children in this town, or allow or permit them to congregate or play on the streets or property within town except on the premises where they live.” 

As November drew to a close, the Powell Tribune still expressed hope the quarantine was doing its job. 

“According to the report of our local health authorities this morning, there are now only about a dozen cases of influenza in Powell, and as none of the patients are seriously ill, it is taken as a hopeful sign that the situation is improving,” the Tribune reported on Nov. 29. 

But it was not to be. Nor would there be public festivities for Christmas. For many Powell homes there was profound grief and gloom during the Christmas season. According to research by Park County Archives Curator Brian Beauvais, 187 cases of the flu were reported in Powell that December, on the heels of 89 cases in November.

 Elsewhere events caused advertisements to appear that are reminiscent of what we're seeing now, in our own era.  Hard hit in 1918/19, and hard hit again in 2020, Teton County's paper of a century ago had merchants noting business restrictions as follows:

Yes, a century ago we're seeing curbside due to quarantines. . .  just like we've been seeing this past month.

Things went further:

So what to take away from all of this?

Well, even though the 1918/19 Flu is something we posted on here well before we started daily entries on events 100 years past here, we've done a really poor job of what it was really like. We just rolled right over the news of the era, noting it, but not really digging deep into it.  World War One was our focus. But for people enduring the 18/19 Flu, it was more than something playing in the background, it was the major daily event of their lives.

And those lives were hugely disrupted by it, then as now.  Quarantines were put in effect all over the state.  Then, like now, there were some in some places that objected to the restrictions when they first came in.  According to at least one Wyoming newspaper, relaxing things too soon caused the disease to advance, although with a titanic viral wave of the type faced at that time, before there was any vaccine, that's pretty debatable.

It's common in these retrospectives to note, if a lesson is supposed to be drawn, that "we've been through this before", but most of us really haven't.  Therefore, we can't really claim that we should be encouraged by the suffering endured in 1918/1919.  Indeed, I've heard some pretty bad attempts at that including one just the other day by somebody who noted that in his family they'd kept on keeping on, but entire family groups had died.  That's not exactly something that encourages us now.  If anything, should comfort at all, it's the long pause that's given by the fact that to some extent such events are the human norm, the species will get through it, and we're all just passing through anyhow, something that gives few people comfort.

But for historians and fans of history, there's something else here.  And that is this. We're living through history right now.  The current pandemic dominates our thinking and the news right now, and soon a major recession will, and is already starting to.  Locally, the absolute crash in oil prices is on a lot of our minds.

So are cancelled high school graduations and weddings, birthdays for children that are on Zoom, and a gloom that settles over everything we do.  It must have been like that during the winter of 1918/1919 as well.  We look back and think of the Spring Offensive of 1918, the Battle of Belleau Wood, the end of the German and Austrian Empires, and the like. But for people living at the time, there was a lot going on, and a lot of it was pretty bad.  Maybe there's some odd comfort in that, and maybe that's a lesson on taking in our sense of history a little less compartmentalized than we tend to do.

Blog Mirror: The Dumbest Blog Ever; The Burden of Proof.

One of the new blog links added here recently is The Dumbest Blog Ever which in fact isn't the dumbest blog ever.  Far from it, it's brilliantly written and usually exhibits a Saki like sense of the ironic.  It's basically a series of daily short stories.

Every once and awhile the blogger steps out from his persona and writes seriously, as he did here.

The Burden of Proof

We've commented a lot here on the Coronavirus and we've accepted the strategy employed in the U.S. to date including the strategy employed by our own state.  But this blogger presents the counter argument, or suggests it, in a different, and indeed jurisprudential, manner.  It's short and worth reading (most things on our own blog being long and likely now worth reading).

An aspect of this that we're going to have to increasingly consider as a society, fwiw, is that at some point the economy has to be opened up.  It's a hard, hard thing to be willing to consider and some aren't.  But most people don't live in a world where they can't work, and frankly the resources of the entire nation can't indefinitely be tied up in the creation of fictional money to tied the economy over.  It won't work indefinitely. That inevitably leads to the point that those who are noting this are arguing to kill people for economic reasons.

That's not really what most people mean. There are those of course who completely argue to throw all caution to the wind and just open everything back up, or who argued never to close things down in the first place, but they're few. What most people mean is that at the point where it seems we've flattened the curve we have to cautiously open things back up.  It won't be instant but so far nobody is arguing that it take six months to fully reopen.

Lurking in the background of all of this is the big unknown question. What if SARS-CoV-2 comes roaring back as things lift?

There's a lot of negative speculation in the press and country right now which inevitably brings out the least likely worst possibility as the probable.  I frankly think, and I'm not ignorant on viruses in general, that a general revival of the pandemic next Fall is overwhelmingly probable.  My overall prediction is that a vaccine will come quicker than predicted, given the resources going into it, and antivirals that are not yet developed for this disease may be able to alleviate things by Fall (note, there's no proof whatsoever that anything currently out there as a medicine does anything on this bug).  So I think the current course of opening things up as we head from Spring to Summer makes sense, although I also think the pace at which we do it is critical.

But note also that all this does is "flatten the curve".  The real idea is that we flatten it flat enough that most of us or a lot of us get "herd immunity" via vaccines.  Also, by flattening it, we hope to avoid swamping emergency services, and it seems we've largely done that except in big cities.

Of course, big cities are where the disease is really prevalent in a desperate sort of way, or in other areas where there are dense crowded conditions.  That all says something about living conditions, but we'll save that for some other day.

We are also really hoping, as a society, and a species, that we'll flatten the curve out of existence.  While herd immunity is the acknowledged goal, a secondary hope, and not a completely unrealistic one, is we flatten the disease down to completely manageable.  We've done that with other viruses and there's sort of an unspoken hope that's the case here.  It seems to be the hope of the Chinese, whose population is so vast that they can't possibly avoid new spikes if that can't be achieved and their economy can't possibly endure that.  That will destroy their economy no matter what the Chinese attempt to do to address it. And it is the nearly spoken hope that the Prime Minister of New Zealand expressed the other day and seems to be their now acknowledged strategy.

But what if the doctor who spoke on Meet The Press this past week is correct.  I quoted that item here:

Well, first of all, let's just take the numbers. At most, 5-15% of the United States has been infected to date. With all the experience we have had so far, this virus is going to keep transmitting. It's going to keep trying to find humans to do what it does until we get at least 60% or 70% of the people infected. That is what it will take to get herd immunity. You know, Chuck, we are in the very earliest days of this situation right now. You know, if I could just briefly say one story here. Right after 9/11, I spent a number of days up at your studios doing filing around the issue of what was happening. The predecessor here, the late Tim Russert, used to say to me all the time, "Hi, Doc. How're you doing? Is the big one here yet?" And I would always say, "No, Tim, it is not." If he asked me today, "Is the big one here? Is it coming?" I would say, "Tim, this is the big one." And it is going to be here for the next 16 to 18 months. And people do not get that yet. We are just on the very first stages. When I hear New York talking about the fact they are down the backside of the mountain, I know they have been through hell. And that is an important statement. But they have to understand that’s not the mountain. That is the foothills. They have mountains to go yet. We have a lot of people to get infected before this is over.

In other words, Dr. Osterholm's view is that this is going to be with us until we get herd immunity, one way or another.  Elaborating on how that will occur, he stated:

Well, herd immunity is clearly going to happen if we do not have a vaccine. I do think that we have a better chance of a vaccine than some. The statement that came out yesterday from the World Health Organization suggesting there may not be immunity was misinterpreted to mean that we do not have evidence today that you are protected from humans. But we have actually animal model data, monkeys that have been infected intentionally and then rechallenged, that were protected. We have a new study on Friday that said vaccine protected them. So I think we are going to have it. I just do not think it is going to be soon. And we are on virus time right now, not human time. And so what we can get done in the next 16 to 18 months, that is great. But if we do not, we will not have a vaccine in time to protect most of the people in the world.

Then what?

I frankly don't know.  I guess our economy could be shut down again in the Fall and probably would be, and I guess that can be justified, and maybe is moreover mandatory from an ethical prospective.

But it literally cannot be done indefinitely.

Or can it?

Shutting things down was basically what was done for the 18/19 Flu, to the extent that they could be.  World War One, of course, kept things from shutting completely down.  But there were repeated local quarantines again and again.  And at least into 1920, as we've seen from our 1920 entries here.

Maybe that's the new normal.

Blog Mirror: A Past Pandemic In Wyoming: The Spanish Flu, 1918-1919

A Past Pandemic In Wyoming: The Spanish Flu, 1918-1919

Takeaways from Super Bowl LIV

The Akron Pros, the 1920 Champions.

1.  The Roman numerals for 54 are LIV.

When it gets to the big Roman numerals, I always get confused.

2.  I'm older than the Super Bowl, although not by much.

The National Football League completed its 100th Season, which means that the NFL started in 1919.

Except it didn't. The NFL was founded on August 20, 1920.  It hasn't started its 100th Season. This is the second year in a row that they've claimed 1919 as their foundational date, but it isn't.

3.  The halftime show was weird.

And I do mean weird.  I'm not sure what was up with it.  Shakira's singing was lackluster and her dancing was both embarrassing and odd.  Jennifer Lopez was effectively nude. 

The whole thing was much like a cabaret scene out of Godfather II, which is supposed to demonstrate the fallen nature of pre revolution Cuba.

4. Why does a football game require a big halftime show?

I still don't get why this is.  The entire thing was not only weird, but really overblown.

5.  Electric cars are set to replace gasoline engined cards quicker than I supposed.

I had thought it would be a decade.  The full scale electric car advertisements by major automobile manufacturers would strongly suggest that it'll be quicker than that.  More on that tomorrow.

6.  Virtue signalling works better in the abstract.

A few liberal media outlets spent some time hand wringing over the Kansas City Chiefs and their traditions, with the dying New Republic taking time out from advertising its trip to Cuba this year (maybe to see the cabaret?) to really dive off into the shallow end of this pool.

It's probably because my interest in sports is so small that I don't really worry much about this, but at any rate everyone seemed to get over it for the game.

7.  It was the Women's Year in advertising, sort of, if not in the halftime show.

A few companies spent some time really attempting to show that they back women and women's causes, even showing some in football uniforms, even though actual physical size and strength requirements make football solidly a male game.  To watch them, we'd nearly suppose that there was a campaign to require female admittance into the NFL, when in fact women are free to enter the NFL if they can play the game.  Biology generally prevents that, although I'd be surprised if the day doesn't arrive when there's a female kicker (there was, fwiw, a female professional baseball player as early as 1922).  That's not the point.

The point is that its really odd to see the advertisements in the same year that featured a blatantly sexist halftime show.  Perhaps a person isn't supposed to say that, as both performers are Latina performers and much of the performance was in Spanish, but a pole dancing Jennifer Lopez isn't intrinsically different from a pole dancer at a strip club, particularly as Lopez started off wearing less than strippers probably wear when they start their act. 

It's weird how in an era when we're having a trial of Harvey Weinstein for being a creeper we're parading Shakira and Lopez around nearly nude on stage.

Something is wrong with that.

8.  The NFL has no pre war heroes?

Or so it would seem.

Professional football really wasn't a big deal until after World War Two, but you would think that in listing its fifty great players for its pre game celebration of its centennial it'd have found at least a few of them who played the game before 1945.

What about Jim Thorpe, for example?

9.  Mr. Peanut is back.

Thank goodness.

When you went all the way to France, spent months there, and realized you forgot to get a souvenir for the folks back home just before boarding the ship. . .

Paris, lampshade made from flour sack, January 27, 1919.

Virginia ratifies the Equal Rights Amendment. Or actually it doesn't.

On January 15 Virginia passed legislation ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment.

National Woman's Party cartoon. The constitutional amendment referred to in this cartoon is the 19th Amendment extending suffrage to women.

Which pretty much means nothing, legally, given that the expiration date for the amendment expires in 1982.

The Equal Rights Amendment, the ERA, was first drafted as a proposed amendment to the US Constitution, in its earliest form in 1921 by the National Woman's Party, a political party that had come up in the Suffrage era.  The text was revised by the head of the party, Alice Paul, in 1923 and again in 1943.  That text was basically used by Congress when Congress passed by Congress in 1972.  It reads:

Section 1: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Section 2: The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3: This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

Alice Paul of the National Woman's Party raising a glass of grape juice in celebration of the passage of the 19th Amendment granting women suffrage in 1920.  Paul lived a long life and died in 1977.

The original Congressional act had a fairly typical seven year time period in which for the states to ratify the amendment.  Wyoming passed the ratifying act on January 24, 1973, making it the third state in the union to ratify it.  It failed to gain a sufficient number of state ratifications, however, in that period so Congress, by that time heavily Democratic in the post Watergate era, extended the deadline to 1982.  By the end of that period the proposed amendment had only secured 35 out of the necessary states and the original act died.

That legislative death hasn't kept there from being state action since 1982, although the 1982 extension itself raised real Constitutional questions in the first place.  

Since 1982 three more states have passed ratifying acts, with Virginia being the latest, bringing the number of states now up to a pointless 38.  Four states, however, have rescinded their ratifications, bringing it down to a pointless 33, maybe.  Backers of the ERA claim that pre ratification rescissions are invalid, although they seem less bothered by post deadline ratifications.  In truth, there's no good reason to suppose that a state can't rescind its approval of a Constitutional amendment prior to it becoming law, in spite of claims that this is a legally deficient process.  Indeed, the four resicinding states all rescinded prior to 1979, with two of them doing so prior to 1975.  One state's rescision, Kentucky, was vetoed by the Lt. Governor of that state in the Governor's absence, which itself raises Constitutional questions as it hasn't been determined if a Governor can veto anything on a proposed Constitutional Amendment.

So what's all this mean?

Well it means that the ratification is invalid and mostly just a show of support for the old text.

And now what?

Well, the whole thing will go to the United States Supreme Court in a messy procedure in which the Court will be asked to sort out the Constitutional dog's breakfast this situation creates.  The questions are numerous, including whether or not a state can ignore the passage deadline (it can't), whether or not a state can rescind its ratification (it can, but probably only before the deadline as well), whether a Governor or person holding a state's chief executive role temporary can veto anything on a proposed Constitutional amendment (probably not) and whether Congress can validly extend the deadline in the first place.

That last matter might not seem to be an issue, but it is.  The time limits on the ratification of Constitutional Amendments exists for a reason and part of that reason is making the making an original action valid in time.  Extending out deadlines creates a situation in which the passing legislatures in the early ratification may no longer hold the same view later on.  Seven years is a fairly typical period for a Constitutional amendment.  Ten years could have been a valid period, but if you get out to twenty or more the process may be void on its face.

Moreover, in this case, extending the deadline did not receive the Constitutionally required 2/3s majority necessary to pass a proposed Constitutional Amendment, and so it was passed simply as a law.  The better legal position, therefore, is that the deadline actually expired in 1979.  This doesn't really matter here, however, as no states ratified the act between 1979 and 1982.

Or maybe it does, of the state's that passed the amendment prior to the original deadline passing, 24 of them referred to to the original deadline in their ratification.  That may mean that they voted to ratify by that date, and not approve an endlessly open ratification process.

None of which answers the question of whether the ERA, in 2020, should be passed into law at all.

In 1972 the proposal was a radical one in context, which is why it failed to ultimately pass.  The nation was reeling in a period of radicalism brought on by the late 1960s and all that era entailed.  The "Women's Lib" movement was at its height and interestingly later younger feminist have retreated from much of what that movement then sought.  But as radical as it was, much of what its backers then proposed would not have comported with later developments.

Indeed, even at the time its backers claimed that its impact would be nearly non existent in numerous ways.  It wouldn't require, for example, that women serve in combat in the military and it wouldn't require women to be conscripted, if there was conscription. Opponents of the ERA claimed that it would do both, and lead to "unisex" public bathrooms.  Since that time social engineers in the government have operated in support of their theories within the military and women do serve in combat roles in spite of a nearly universally held view within the services that its a bad idea and bathrooms have become a matter of odd American public debate.

The point is not to debate that, but to point out that if the ERA passed today, there'd be nothing for the text to do in the context of what it originally proposed to do. Subsequent legislation achieved the same goals.

Which doesn't mean that the text would be without impact.  It would be, in the form of litigation on what "on account of sex" means.

Originally it obviously meant on account of gender, and the definition of gender was the biological one that science supports, male and female.  The vast majority of the original proponents of the ERA, and the legislators who voted for it, would have had no other meaning even remotely in mind. But in the current era that's not how it would be taken at all.  Various groups would argue that "sex" meant gender as they self identify it, or maybe even the physical act of sex.  Indeed there's already been an argument by two feminist scholars that the original ERA no longer fits the bill and a new one should be drafted with uses a term with something like "gender in all its expressions", which is vaguely coded language that would enshrine the currently popular concept that gender is self identified rather than biologically identified as a Constitutional principal.

No matter what a person feels about those things, the lessons of 1919, and also of 1973, demonstrate why on most issues its better to let things actually get sorted out legislatively rather than amend the Constitution. The 18th Amendment which provided women the right to vote everywhere, can be pointed to as a success, as there were many states in which women still couldn't vote in, in 1919, and nobody would hold that opinion now except for an extremist.

Regions in North America that allowed women to vote in 1917.  By 1919 there's be more white on this map, including Mexico which had extended the franchise in its post revolution constitution by that time.

Prohibition, on the other hand, also from 1919 gives us an opposite example.

Lots of states had gone dry by 1919, all on their own.  When Prohibition came into law, however, in 1920 full scale opposition to it was already rolling and advanced.  The Constitutional Amendment seemingly served to fire a spirit of brazen resistance to it, and because of what was occurring at the time, it was wholly unnecessary.  Had Prohibition not become the law of the land, the trend was that it was becoming the law of most of the states and that it had really widespread support.  Making it a Constitutional Amendment all but killed that support very rapidly.

Roe v. Wade provides another example.  While no Constitutional Amendment was involved, the constituionalization of an issue badly has lead to a massive decline in respect for the Supreme Court as well as the odd idea that the Court itself is a national Oligarchic Panel.  If anything the removal of what was a legislative issue from the legislatures has lead to decades of bitter dispute and the retreat of one side, the left wing side, into the courts in a fashion that's inherently anti democratic and not very well respected among a large amount of the nation's population.

Which is not to say that the same thing would happen in regard to the ERA. Rather, what I'm saying is that the history on women's equality actually did play out the way Prohibition would probably have but for the Constitutional Amendment requiring it.  There's nearly no legal inequality between women and men now save for jobs that are absolutely gender defined.  Over the past 47 years these issues in terms of the law have been worked out themselves.  So passage of the ERA now would serve at most to do nothing at all, or at worst to be used for things it was never intended to be used for.

Critics may point out that there's still social inequality, although like many fin de siecle debates the degree to which this is true is very overstated.  But that brings up another point which is the Roe v. Wade one.  While there are very much issues that need to be addressed by way of the Constitution, it pays to be very careful about those as the constitutionalization of an issue serves to fire up a spirit of resistance which more conventional laws do not.  The resistance here would likely not be massive, but then the need for the ERA at this point isn't great either.

January 5, 1920. The first Monday of the year. Ice, Raids, Long and Bobbed Hair, and Fighting the Reds

It was the first Monday of the New Year, and the New Decade, the date, being the first of a full work week, when the new year really begins, at least for adults.  

So how did it start off?

Joseph and Thomas Leiter skating on the basin, Joseph takes a fall.  Washington D. C., 1/5/20.

Washington D.C. was apparently having a cold snap, as the Tidal Basin was frozen and children were taking advantage of it for ice skating.

 Miss Betty Baker, daughter of the Secty. of War and Miss Annie Kittleson skating on the Tidal Basin, Washington D. C., 1/5/20.

Admiral Jellicoe was still making the rounds.

Admiral Jellicoe photographed in Secty. Daniels office at the Navy Dept.  1/5/20.

The Supreme Court upheld the Volstead Act thereby wiping out booze for good, or so it would seem, right down to the ultra light beer level.

At the same time, things were developing and heating up in Ireland, where separatists Republicans were fighting the British in their effort to form a separate republic.  A familiar map was beginning to take place there.

Closer to home the Palmer Raids were still being celebrated and a new effort was underway for a sedition act designed to take on home grown Reds, described by the Casper headline writer as "long haired men and short cropped women". That headline actually did catch a hair style trend in radical women, albeit on that was about to spread.  As described by Whitaker Chambers in Witness, radical women of the time bobbed their hair.  Soon, that style, perhaps boosted by the daring radicalism, would spread to the female population in general.

By 1924, bobbed hair would be a flapper thing.  In 1920, it was a Red thing.

Reds and their opponents were at it tooth and nail elsewhere.

In Poland the Battle of Daugavpils concluded with the Soviets retreating into Latvia and being taken into custody there. That was possible as Poland and Latvia, which had been fighting, had concluded an armistice in the struggle between them and had asked the Poles for help. The anti Red forces were approximately half Pole and half Latvian, and fought successfully under Polish command.

Mustered Polish armor in the form of French tanks at Daugavpils.

December 31, 1919, New Year's Eve, and . . .

contrary to widespread commentary here and there, it wasn't the last New Year's Eve prior to Prohibition.

A scene not yet arrived.  Woman pouring whiskey into a glass of Coca Cola in 1922.

That's because Wartime Prohibition remained in effect, the Supreme Court having decided that "wartime" meant until a peace treaty with the Central Powers was entered into by the United States, which had not been done.

The war was over, of course, and the Versailles Treaty had been entered into, but the Senate hadn't ratified it. A technical state of war therefore remained. And so did wartime prohibition.  This New Years was dry.

And that even where state prohibition, as in Wyoming, Montana and Colorado, hadn't taken effect.

Of course, people here and there did hoist a glass. And bootleg liquor, including deadly wood alcohol stuff, was already making the rounds.  But for a lot of people, indeed most people, this New Years would be celebrated sober.

December 26, 1919. The Red Sox trade Babe Ruth.

A look at the news in Albany Count, New York, December 26, 1919.

Elsewhere in New York, on this day in 1919 Babe Ruth was sold by the Boston Rod Sox to the New York Yankees.  The price was $125,000, the largest every paid to that date, and an enormous sum in context.

The Red Sox had one five of the first sixteen World Series.  They would not win another one until 1946.

Christmas, 1919.

And so Christmas, one year out from the end of the Armistice, arrived.

Much of the news had returned to the routine, although one big new event for much of the country, Prohibition, was making the holiday season a bit different this year, which most newspapers were celebrating.

Otherwise, in the US, the season had returned much to normal, and was very recognizable to us today.

Which included the day for foreign residents living in the U.S.

Christmas morning, Ecuadorian legation, 1919.

The Red Cross remained at work in the distressed regions of the world, including in Siberia, where an effort was made to being Christmas joy to Russian orphans.  You have to wonder how the future for these children played out and if they recalled this Christmas in 1919.

Christmas Eve, December 24, 2019. Horses, Missions to Europe, No Arms To Mexico

December 24, 1919. Christmas Eve for that year.

In New York the annual trees for horses was photographed.

 The annual Christmas tree for horses provided by the Animal rescue league in Washington, D.C. In addition to the Christmas tree which was hung with apples, ears of corn and other horse dainties, well filled nose bags were provided.

If this seems odd, keep in mind that Washington D.C, like very major city, had thousands of working horses. This effort was an annual one to take into account the hard work they did in an edible form.

Unfortunately, the prints were heavily damaged at some point.

Also on this day, delegates going to Europe to identify U.S. dead for return were photographed.

Former Sergeant Willie Sandlin of Hyden Ky. who was appointed by Secty. Baker, a special escort for the return of soldier dead from overseas. Sandlin, and Secty. Baker.

By and large, few were returned. Most families chose to leave their family members where they fell, in a tribute to their effort.

Miss Jessie Dell who was appointed take charge of the office to which families of men buried overseas can go to get information regarding their dead.

One nation still at war. . . with itself, was getting cutoff from U.S. Arms. The news hit this day, on Christmas Eve.

December 21, 1919. Radicals booted out, Twins seeking cowboys.

On this day in 1919 a group of radicals, including perpetual sourpuss Emma Goldman, were deported.

Emma Goldman's deportation photograph.  If it seems that she's frowning in the photo due to deportation, Goldman was always frowning.

Goldman is a celebrated figure today, but at the time plenty of people were glad to see her and her fellow travelers go.  Frankly, she was a perpetual malcontent.  In the US she advocated for extremist positions.  Upon returning to Russia (she'd grown into her teen years there, and was born in a town in what is now Lithuania), she grew rapidly discontent with the Soviets and then relocated to Germany, where she wrote two books about her "disillusionment" with Russia.  While living in Germany, she irritated the German left who rapidly grew discontent with her, and then went on to the UK, which seemingly occupied the status of host country for the perpetual malcontent at the time.  During the Spanish Civil War she was at first enthusiastic about the anarchist Republicans but worried they were giving too much over to the Reds, which probably failed to grasp that there was no way that the organized Spanish extremist left wasn't going to dominate over the disorganized Spanish left. Eventually she ended up in Toronto, which ironically was an extremely conservative town at the time.

Emma looking discontent in 1911.

She probably came by her perpetual discontentment honestly and presents what ought to be a case study in the combination of high intelligence with a really messed up early life.  In other words, while she's widely admired today in spite of advocating for really loony ideas, she herself was pretty much a loony.  As we've dealt her story before we won't go into detail here, but she was born into an unhappy family which was her mother's second marriage.  Her mother had two children by her prior husband, to whom she'd been married very young, and the second marriage was basically arranged and never happy.  Goldman's father was strict and potentially abusive.  Goldman herself was raped by a suitor while in her early teens.  Her constant discontent with everything thereafter may well have been due simply being a highly discontented person, which given the nature of her life, a person can't blame her for.

Emma Goldman in 1886, in about the only photograph of her smiling.

She lived a genuinely crappy life in a lot of ways and was in the Eastern European demographic that was attracted to radicalism due to the conditions she was living in.  Smart, difficult and working in manual labor, she was attracted naturally to radical political ideas, even though they were not grounded in any sort of reality.  It says something about the spirit of the times that they gained traction in their own day.

They'd obviously gained enough that the US determined to deport foreign born radicals and on this day in 1919, it did it.

This has been looked back on as a betrayal of American values, but a person, even now, has to pause a bit and wonder if it was.  Goldman was truly a radical and her ideas antithetical to any sort of government at all.  Soviet Russia, while definitely having a government, was nearly the poster child for radicals at the time and she was a Russian.  Some seeing the product of radicalism in their own land might reconsider their own cause but she never did, just finding other left wing movements lacking.

Without going too far it it, it's also notable that a lot of the figures of the radical left were of this era were, quite frankly, messed up, and then adopted lifestyles that guaranteed they'd be even more messed up.  For the 1910s, this is sort of book ended by the perpetually crabby Goldman on one end and the perpetually befuddled looking Rosa Luxemburg on the other, both now heroes with no achievements which keeps their heroism going on, as their adherents can always imagine that the ideas they advocated for were never tested, even if they were.

She died in Toronto in 1940 and her body was brought into the United States for burial.  She's one of the poster children of a certain brand of radicalism from that era even though, in retrospect, she is to be more pitied than celebrated if some degree of rationalism is applied.

One paper that wasn't questioning the deportation was the Cheyenne State Leader, which even suggested that if their ship sank they'd welcome it.  The Leader was never subtle in its views.

The leader also reported the unlikely story that two sixteen year old Texas twins were required to marry six feet tall Wyoming cowboys or forego an inheritance. The Leader often had odd stories like that, and a person has to wonder if the story was accurate.  It reportedly originated by way of a letter to Leader from the aforementioned twins, which sounds fairly dubious.  Hopefully it was.