Sunday, July 25, 1943. The surreal end of Mussolini's Premiership.

Having been voted out of office the night prior, Mussolini left the meeting of the Fascist Grand Council that had voted to remove him, he went to award prizes at a farm festival and carried on business as usual.  The Fascist Grand Council reported its decision to King Victor Emmanuel III, who ordered Mussolini to report and asked him to resign.  Mussolini asked for more time and was arrested.

Marshal Pietro Badoglio was appointed Premier.

Badoglia had been Chief of Staff of the Italian army from 1925 to 1940, but had resigned following the disastrous performance of the Italian Army in Greece.

On the same day in the same country, Ubaldo Pugnaloni won the Giro d'Italia.

The Navy commissioned the USS Harmon, a destroyer named after Leonard Roy Harmon, a mess attendant who had been killed at Guadalcanal saving a fellow shipmate.  It was the first ship named after an African American in the U.S. Navy.

Harmon's citation reads:

The President of the United States of America takes pride in presenting the Navy Cross (Posthumously) to Mess Attendant First Class Leonard Roy Harmon, United States Navy, for extraordinary heroism and devotion to duty in action against the enemy while serving on board the Heavy Cruiser U.S.S. SAN FRANCISCO (CA-38), during action against enemy Japanese naval forces near Savo Island in the Solomon Islands on the night of on 12–13 November 1942. With persistent disregard of his own personal safety, Mess Attendant First Class Harmon rendered invaluable assistance in caring for the wounded and assisting them to a dressing station. In addition to displaying unusual loyalty in behalf of the injured Executive Officer, he deliberately exposed himself to hostile gunfire in order to protect a shipmate and, as a result of this courageous deed, was killed in action. His heroic spirit of self-sacrifice, maintained above and beyond the call of duty, was in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service. He gallantly gave his life for his country.

 

Thursday, May 10, 1923. The bizarre actions of Maurice Conradi.

Soviet delegate to the Conference of Lausanne was shot dead by former Russian White officer and émigré Maurice Conradi in the Cecil Hotel.  Two other members of the Soviet mission were wounded when they attempted to resist.  Conradi then handed his gun to a waiter and asked him to call the police, which they did.

Conradi.

Conradi was born to Swiss parents in 1896.  They were living in St. Petersburg at the time, where they ran a candy factory.  Most of Conradi's family were killed during the Russian Revolution, with several being executed by the Bolsheviks.  During this period he married his wife,  Vladislava Lvovna Svartsevich, and he immigrated to Switzerland following the defeat of Wrangel's army.

Conradi and his confederate Arkady Polunin were tried that following November and defended themselves on moral grounds, introducing evidence of Communist horrors. The prosecution fell into this, oddly enough, and introduced evidence of the happiness of Soviet citizens, something that would have had to have involved an element of delusion.  The jury found that all the elements of murder were present, but failed to convict him 5 to 4 anyhow, leading to a rupture in diplomatic relations between Switzerland and the Soviet Union.

In 1925 the Conradi's moved to Paris. They divorced in 1929.  Conradi then joined the French Foreign Legion, returning to Switzerland and remarrying in 1942.  He died in 1947.  Polunin went to Paris as well and died under mysterious circumstances in 1933.

Of the Soviet survivors, one, was executed in Stalin's purges in 1938.  The other was killed in 1942 while serving in the Red Army.

About as much as can be said of this entire episode is that it was downright bizarre.

Monday, October 9, 1922. Permission granted and rehearing sought.

Hairy Moccasin, Esh-sup-pee-me-shish, one of Custer's Crow Scouts, died on this day.  He was 68 years old.

Today In Wyoming's History: October 9: 

1922  A petition for rehearing was granted by the United States Supreme Court in Wyoming v. Colorado, a suit seeking to adjudicate the distribution of water from the Laramie River.

Commissioner of Indian Affairs Charles Burke telegrammed Superintendent of the Wind River Reservation's Shoshone Agency R. P. Haas at Fort Washakie, giving him permission to work with actor Tim McCoy and film producers in the movie The Thundering Herd.

The Girl Who Ran Wild was released.

Like most films of this era, it was melodramatic, featuring a plot in which Melissa Bummer declares her independence from the world after the death of her father.  She ends up in school and her teacher falls in love with her, and vice versa, and she reforms accordingly.

Some of these plots are, we'd note, a bit icky.

Thursday, September 21, 1922. Baby Ruth.

 Louis Mbarick Fall, aka Siki, became the world light heavyweight champion in boxing after champion Georges Carpentier knocked down Siki in the firth round, thereby violating a deal not to injury Siki in exchange for Siki throwing the fight.

Fall was a Senegalese veteran of the French Army from World War One.  His boxing career was impressive, and it was suggested at one time that he fight heavyweight champion, Jack Dempsey.

He ultimately lost the title to Irish fighter Mike McTigue in 1925, only to be murdered in New York City the following month.  McTigue, oddly enough, would die in poverty and ill health in Queens, New York, in 1966.

Boxing, it might be noted, has few happy endings.

Turkish nationalist seized Ezine, which was in the Allied neutral zone.

The existence of Dorothy Ruth came to light.  The one-year-old daughter of Babe Ruth had been sighted with the Babe and his wife Helen. The couple claimed she had been kept from public light, as she had been ill.

In truth, Dorothy's mother was Juanita Jennings, a paramour of Ruth's.  The couple adopted Dorothy in an age in which such infidelities were often kept secret and, most likely, that in spite of George Herman Ruth's behavior, their teenage wedding at St. Paul's Catholic Church in Ellicott City had some traction with the couple in spite of Ruth's infidelities.  That caught up, however, with Helen in 1925 when the couple separated..  She died in 1929 in a house fire in Waterford Massachusetts, by which time she was living with a Dr. Kinder, DDS, as "Mrs. Kinder".

Ruth would remarry actress and model Clair Hodgson in 1929. She was a widow and the union would last the rest of their lives, with Clair putting lacking structure into Ruth's' personal life.

Dorothy did not know that Juanita, whom she knew as Aunt Nita, was her mother until she was 59. She died in 1989.

The Cable Act was signed into law, allowing American women who married foreign nationals to keep 

Sunday Morning Scene. Churches of the West: Methodist Church of Ten Sleep, Washakie County Wyoming

Churches of the West: Methodist Church of Ten Sleep, Washakie County Wyoming.

Methodist Church of Ten Sleep, Washakie County Wyoming.

This church is the oldest church in Washakie County, Wyoming.  It was originally built as a Methodist Church in nearby Ten Sleep in 1905, and then moved to this location in 1925.

Seattle Mayor, and soon to be founder of San Calmente California, is 44 years old in this photograph.

Yes, 44.

I'd have guessed older.

And I don't know how old his wife is, in this photo, but my guess is that  she's no older than him, and if typical demographics then and now are assumed, she's likely in her late 30s.

This photograph was taken on or about March 2, 1919.  This just seems flat out the norm in photos of this era.  Everyone is older than they appear.

Some maintain, well, look at the number of kids. That'd age ya. . . Maybe, but even the kids usually, at least by the time they're in their mid teens, look older than at least my generation did when they were kids.  That boy in the back row, for example.  I'll bet he's 15 or 16.  He looks like he could be 25.

Hard living conditions?

Ole Hanson was the mayor of Seattle in 1919, and that was no treat.  That was the year of the big mid winter labor strike that many people worried was the beginning of Bolshevik agitation in the U.S. And frankly, while those concerns were misplaced, they weren't completely without some justification.  Europe was aflame in many places in Communist revolution, which had started in in ports in both the USSR and Germany.  No wonder people worried.

Hanson certainly worried.  After he resigned he wrote a book based on his concerns from 1919.

In it, he declared:

I am tired of reading rhetorical, finely spun, hypocritical, far-fetched excuses for bolshevism, communism, syndicalism, IWWism! Nauseated by the sickly sentimentality of those who would conciliate, pander, and encourage all who would destroy our Government, I have tried to learn the truth and tell it in United States English of one or two syllables....

With syndicalism — and its youngest child, bolshevism — thrive murder, rape, pillage, arson, free love, poverty, want, starvation, filth, slavery, autocracy, suppression, sorrow and Hell on earth. It is a class government of the unable, the unfit, the untrained; of the scum, of the dregs, of the cruel, and of the failures. Freedom disappears, liberty emigrates, universal suffrage is abolished, progress ceases,...and a militant minority, great only in their self-conceit, reincarnate under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat a greater tyranny than ever existed under czar, emperor, or potentate.

Indeed, he was convinced that the Seattle strikes were the attempted revolution, and said so:

The so-called sympathetic Seattle strike was an attempted revolution. That there was no violence does not alter the fact... The intent, openly and covertly announced, was for the overthrow of the industrial system; here first, then everywhere... True, there were no flashing guns, no bombs, no killings. Revolution, I repeat, doesn't need violence. The general strike, as practised in Seattle, is of itself the weapon of revolution, all the more dangerous because quiet. To succeed, it must suspend everything; stop the entire life stream of a community... That is to say, it puts the government out of operation. And that is all there is to revolt — no matter how achieved.

He toured the country with that message.

And he founded the town of San Clemente, seeing it as a Spanish style resort town on the Pacific for Californians tired of urban life.

He died in 1940, at age 66.