A New Business Plot?

In the early 1930s, upset with President Franklin Roosevelt, some well-placed businessmen plotted to stage a coup and install Gen. Smedley Butler (an odd choice, given Butler's independent character) as a fascist "President", or at least there's reason to believe they were plotting that.

Butler wouldn't go along with it, the plot failed, and FDR, thinking it best to not disrupt the country too much, never brought it out in the open, if in fact he did not outright encourage a general belief that the whole thing had never happened.

Read the recent Robert Reich item here:

The dangerous anti-democracy coalition

American oligarchs are joining Trump and his faux working-class MAGA movement

Reich reports that Elon Must recently held a billionair's gathering with the tehme of defeating Biden in which he invited; well. . . :

The guest list included Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury secretary.

You've heard of Murdoch, of course, the Australian-born billionaire who owns newspapers of a certain type, and who has recently been opposed to Trump.  And you've heard of Michael Milken.  Certainly you've heard of South African born Elon Musk.¹

Consider this quote by billionaire Peter Theil.

The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron. ² 

Consider that somewhat alarming?  Well consider this, from the same individual:

But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

Theil contributed $15,000,000 to J.D. Vance's campaign.  And according to Reich:

Just 50 families have already injected more than $600 million into the 2024 election cycle, according to a new report from Americans for Tax Fairness. Most of it is going to the Trump Republican Party.

One of the really remarkable things about politics of the last 20 or so years has been the swamping of right wing money into it.  Rank and file Republicans like to worry about George Soros, but it's really the far right that's getting the cash infusion, and it's showing.  It had a major impact on altering Wyoming's politics existentially, taking a more or less "leave me alone, and I'll leave you alone" brand of local Republicanism into far right populism.  Early on, that was accompanied by lots of money. So much so that one frustrated legislature told me that those forces were "buying the legislature".  

The amazing thing to see is the degree to which those who have radically different economic interests simply follow along.  Again, the far right likes to call everyone else "sheep", but the analogy actually applies to Republican voters far more, who vote against their own economic interests continually.  

The extremely wealthy can use their wealth in any number of ways.  It's notable that Warren Buffett and Bill Gates weren't on the list.  But that this occurs at all is troubling, to say the least.  

Capitalist may believe that their interests serve everyone else, and that "freedom" would be "preserved" in an odd sort of Pax Capitalismus with a Cesarean Trump at its head, and probably as a figurehead but wealth, business and capital doesn't exist for the wealthy, but for everyone.  

Panem et circenses, hatred and discontent, and false internal enemies.  Sadly, the trend is well-developed, helped on by a Democratic Party beholding to its own blood soaked, genitals obsessed left wing.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Footnotes:

1. There's something concerning here that two really rich guys who were not impoverished when they showed up here are now messing with American politics in some fashion.  This, as much as anything, shows how screwed up our immigration policies are. Both Murdoch and Musk ought not to be in the US at all.

2.  It's getting impossible not to note the real rise of misogynistic commentary by the far right.  

It's not the comments of people like Harrison Butker so much, as the comments by other characters on the far right.  Butker's comments have to be taken from the position of traditional Catholic thought.  In some Evangelical corners of Christianity, however, there are now some really beyond hostile views of the current roles of women.  Interestingly, these same forces seemingly have no problems with conduct well outside the Christian norm, ranging from Trump's serial polygamy to Theil's homosexuality.

All this should give the far right pause.  People like Trump, or Theil, clearly aren't in the traditional Christian camp if their own conduct is observed.

Wednesday, November 14, 1923. In from the cold.

German Gen. Hans von Seeckt ordered that Berlin cafés, halls and cabarets must admit the city's poor and cold in order to warm themselves, least the Government seize them to be used for that purpose.

Von Seeckt's tomb.

Von Seeckt had been an important figure in the Imperial German Army before going on to be a major figure in the Reichswehr.  He was in the German parliament from 1930 to 32 as a member of a center right party, but turned towards the hard right thereafter.  He was assigned to the German military mission in China in 1933, where he restored the failing relationship with the Nationalist Chinese.  His advice lead to the 1934 Nationalist campaign that resulted in the Communist Long March.

Germany suspended payments on its reparations.

New Zealand's laws were extended to Antarctica as Governor General John Jellicoe applied its jurisdiction to the Ross Dependency.

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.

Sunday, December 31, 1922. New Year's Eve.

It was New Year's Eve, 1922.

That meant a lot of parties.  Parties occurring during Prohibition.  A fair number of them were dry, but a fair number were not.

French Prime Minister Raymond Poincare rejected German Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno's proposal for a non-aggression pact with Germany, which would have replaced French troops in the Rhineland with an international disinterested force.

Frankly, were I Poincare, I would have rejected it also.  What international force, following the Great War, would have even qualified as disinterested?

We mentioned Cuno here the other day, he was an economist.  Of some interest, he was born in 1876 and would die in 1933.  Poincare was born in 1860, and would outlive him, dying in 1934.

The Nine Power Treaty went into effect.  We've run the text of the treaty, signed by the U.S. France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Japan, the United Kingdom, Portugal, and China previously.

United States Supreme Court Justice Mahlon Pitney retired following his having suffered a stroke.

Justice Pitney.

Pitney was conservative, but also a libertarian, and has received praise in the modern era for being consistently libertarian.  He hailed from New Jersey, where his family had been located since colonial times, and only served for ten years before his stroke idled him.  He died in 1924 at age 66.

The Casper Daily Tribune had a cartoon on the cover regarding the Hays of the Hays Production Code, which we just discussed.

Wednesday, November 22, 1922. Unintended Consequences.

 Tampa Bay Times, November 22, 1922.

A mine explosion in Dolomite, Alabama killed 90 people.

Wilhelm Cuno.

Businessman Wilhelm Cuno was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Friedrich Ebert.  It was an appointment, not an elective, commission.

An independent politician, Cuno would serve in the role for less than a year and then retire from politics.  He'd become an economic advisor to Hitler in 1932, which he didn't do long either, given his death in 1933.

Tuesday, August 11, 1942. Inventive Actress, Distressed Convoy, No Vino.

This is a particularly interesting day for entries on Sarah Sundin's blog.

First, she notes:

Today in World War II History—August 11, 1942: Actress Hedy Lamarr and musician George Antheil receive a patent for a frequency-hopping system to prevent interception and jamming of radio communications.

This is, I'd note, a big deal.

Sundin goes on to note that the technology did not go on to be used in World War Two, but it is in cellular phones.

Lamarr, born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, was an Austrian by birth.  Her father was Jewish and from Lviv, in what is now Ukraine, and her mother had been born Jewish and converted to Catholicism, and was from Budapest.  Her film career commenced in Czechoslovakia where she received notoriety for the film Ecstasy, which featured a plot involving a neglected young wife.  The film included brief nude scenes, which the 18-year-old Lamarr may have been genuinely tricked into through the use of high power lenses, as they clearly embarrassed her.  The film became a sort of blue hit in Europe, but was not allowed to be shown in the United States or Germany.

Ultimately married six times, she fled to Paris to escape her first husband in 1937.  He was a wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer whom she had married when she was 18, and before Ecstasy was released.  Highly controlling, the marriage fell apart for that reason.  Her American discovery, so to speak, came in London when she ran into Louis B. Mayer, who put her under contract.

Inventive by nature, the frequency hopping design noted above was designed to prevent the detection of torpedoes.  It was adopted ultimately by the Navy, but not until the 1960s.

Larmarr had a notable American career in film during Hollywood's Golden Age.  That career went into a steep decline in the 1950s which effectively ended it.  She began to descend into reclusiveness, with her final marriage, to her divorce lawyer, ending in 1965.  She became estranged from one of her children when he was only 12.  In her final years she was nearly a complete reclusive, but did reach out by telephone, spending up to six hours a day talking to other people in that fashion.  She was 85 when she died in 2000, and her ashes were spread in an Austrian forest according to her wishes.

Her unusual stage name became an odd comedic trope in Mel Brook's film Blazing Saddles, with one of the characters being named "Headley Lamar" and therefore needing to constantly correct the pronunciation of his name.

The stricken HMS Eagle.

Sundin also notes that the HMS Eagle went down in the Mediterranean.  The Eagle was an aircraft carrier and part of the convoy that we noted yesterday that was headed to attempt to relieve Malta's material shortages.  She took only four minutes to sink after being hit by four torpedoes fired from the U-73.

The Japanese dispatched a large naval task force from Tokyo to Truk Lagoon, where they are tasked with escorting troops and supplies to Guadalcanal.

The Soviets began desperately evacuating the port of Novorossisk on the Black Sea in advance of oncoming German forces.

Sundin also notes in her blog that the U.S. War Production Board ordered that the entire American grape wine crop for the year be diverted into raisins for the military.

This recalls actions by the U.S. Government to prohibit brewing and distilling during World War One in order to divert the use of cereals for food, rather than alcohol.

Wednesday, March 4, 1942. Counterstrikes

Today in World War II History—March 4, 1942: Two Japanese H8K flying boats bomb Pearl Harbor—no damage. Aircraft from USS Enterprise strike Marcus Island in South Pacific.

From Sarah Sundin's blog.

If you were fighting the war, of course, it was a horrible day. . . if fighting was going on, which it was all over the world. But in terms of huge events, well, it was just another day in the war in some ways.

Operation K, the flying boat raid, had significant aspirations but was a flop.  It didn't do much, other than to remind everyone that Hawaii was still within Japanese air range.

H8K.  This one was in its last moments later in the war, just before the U.S. Navy, which took this photo, shot it down.

The round trip flight engaged in by the two Japanese aircraft from the Marshall Islands was nearly 5,000 miles in extent.

Marcus Island is the easternmost island of the Japanese archipelago and is extremely isolated.   The US bombed it repeatedly during 1942 and 1943, but never occupied it.

The remote island was first discovered by the Portuguese in 1694.  They didn't make a specific recordation of the location of the island, however, and it was not sighted again until British/Australian mariner Bourn Russell spotted it in 1830, noting that it was not on his charts, which of course it was not.  It was next sighted by an American evangelical mission to the Hawaiian islands in 1864. The first effort to occupy it commenced by a private Japanese expedition in 1886.

The United States and Japan both claimed the island early on, and in 1902 the US dispatched a warship to enforce its claims, but withdrew when it found the island occupied by the Japanese and a Japanese warship patrolling nearby.  The Japanese withdrew the civilian population in 1933 and made the island a military installation with a weather station and an airstrip.

The island was transferred to the United States in 1952, but in 1968 the US gave it back but continued to occupy it, having a substantial radio station there, whose antenna can be seen in the photo posted above from 1987.  The Coast Guard occupied the island until 1993, and then it was transferred to the Japanese Self Defense Force.

So, circling back to our focus, timewise, in 1916, when troops were being called up and deployed for the Punitive Expedition (was Lex Anteinternet: The Military and Alcohol. U.S. Army Beer 1943-1946). . .

what was the situation?

The law of the Officer's Club at Ft. Meyer, VA, being mowed by a mule drawn lawn mower.  This photo dates from early in the 20th Century at which time Congress had technically made the sale of alcohol illegal on Army bases, but at which point the Army chose to define beer and wine as not being excluded.

This follows from this post here:

Lex Anteinternet: The Military and Alcohol. U.S. Army Beer 1943-1946: Patrons of a bar and grill in Washington D.C. in 1943.  The man on the left is drinking a glass of beer, and it appears the woman is as well...

Let me explain.

In 1982 when I was stationed as a recruit at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, there came a time when us boots could go to the 1-2-3 Club, a sort of combination cheap fast food/beer/high school hangout, type club.  It wasn't great, but if you had nowhere else to go, and we had nowhere else to go, it was okay*.  

The 1-2-3 Club had 3.2% beer, which I guess actually no longer is brewed by anyone, save perhaps by Guinness, as draft Guinness is only 3%.  Nobody brews it in the context of its earlier days, in which it was brewed in order to comply with certain laws. It's history goes back to 1933 as Prohibition was being repealed.  Prohibition never completely dried up the supply of legal alcohol, contrary to what people imagine it did.  Alcohol remained legal for "medicinal" purposes and extremely low alcohol beer, i.e., "Near Beer" was legal.  In 1933, prior to Prohibition being officially repealed, the legal alcohol limit for beer was increased up to 3.2%.  

Following the end of Prohibition, some states restricted beer sales based on the 3.2% amount, and Oklahoma was one of them.  Generally, if you were below a certain age you could buy 3.2%.  You couldn't buy beer with a higher alcohol content than that.  This was, of course before "Light Beer", which generally has around 4% ABV.  Coors, which is pretty light to start with, introduced Light Beer prior to World War Two, far earlier than many people might suppose, and relaunched it in 1978.  Millers Lite actually came out in 1967, prior to the Coors relaunch, but as Gablingers Diet Beer, a market name doomed to failure. The recipe was later sold to Millers.

I never really did grasp why Coors would market light beer.  Coors is pretty light to start with and there were already all those 3.2% beers around.  Oh well, my view obviously isn't the clever marketing one, as light beers became a pretty big deal.

Anyhow, in 1982 you could buy 3.2% beer at the 1-2-3 Club on Ft. Sill, or 3.2% beer downtown in Lawton, Oklahoma.  Obviously, Ft. Sill also had a NCO Club, or clubs, and an Officer's Club, or clubs.

Camp Guernsey had a NCO Club and an Officers Club as well.  Camp Humphreys, Korea had them as well and I had a nice bulgogi there for lunch while there.

I guess this is somewhat of a thing of the past now, to my surprise.  The Army has completely done away with Officers Clubs and now there are unitized clubs.  Privates can go to the same club that officers can, although 1-2-3 Clubs remain.  Without knowing for sure, I suspect that not only is the culture of such clubs now radically different, but probably a lot of more senior officers and NCOs rarely show up at the club.  This is part of the current culture in which we do not wish to recognize any differences at all in the social status of anyone, but frankly, I think this likely a mistake, although one reflecting the current military culture.   The current military is small compared to the giant Cold War Army that followed the giant World War Two Army, and its much more selective than its been at any prior point in history.  There are certainly problems in the current U.S. military, to be sure, but one current feature of it is that the up and out and selective nature of it means that the guys were sort of fit the definition of a "working man" that were sung about by Tennessee Ernie Ford aren't really in the service anymore.  That may have some negative aspects to it as well, but its a fact.  Anyhow, given the current make up of the currently fairly small army, the traditional separation in all things between enlisted men and officers has been much reduced and the clubs are gone.

So what was the situation in 1916?

Starting in 1890, about the time that the temperance movement was really gaining cultural steam, the Army banned the sale of hard alcohol at military posts that were located in areas that had Prohibition. So, for example, if you were stationed in a county that was dry, the Army post was as well, sort of.  The Army barred the sale only of hard alcohol, so beer and wine was still sold and you could still consume them at the post canteen.

In 1901, however, Congress entered the picture with the Canteen Act of 1901 which prohibited the sale of any intoxicating beverage including beer and wine.  This was pretty clearly intended to make all alcoholic beverages a thing of the past on post, but in practice the Army simply chose to define "intoxicating" beverages to mean those having a pretty stout alcohol content.  So, once again, no Kentucky bourbon on post, but beer was probably okay.  

This continued to be the practice up  until May 18, 1917, when the Selective Service Act stretched the military prohibition beyond the base to include a five mile alcohol exclusion zone and, moreover, it was made a crime to sell alcohol to a uniformed soldier anywhere.  Congress, recalling the end run the Army did with the 1901 act, defined "intoxicating" to be anything containing 1.4% alcohol or more, a very low threshold.

To complete the story, when Prohibition ended the 1901 statute remained in effect and the Army, at this point, continued to enforce the 1.4% limit.  Halfway through the Second World War, however, the Army changed this allowed 3.2%, the figure that had been created earlier when Prohibition was lifted.  This standard remained in place until 1953 when a legal ruling determined that the entire Canteen Act of 1901 had been repealed by the 1951 amendments to the Universal Military Training and Selective Service Act.

So, going back to our query about 1916, in 1916 a soldier stationed almost anywhere in the U.S. was probably able to buy beer at the post canteen.  Beyond the post fence, there would have undoubtedly been saloons catering to soldiers that sold everything.  The scene of a night of leave in 1941 Honolulu depicted in From Here To Eternity in that regard was likely pretty accurate on occasion.  And at that point, in some of the US, the "saloon trade" was unrestricted.  Having said that, in some locations Prohibition had already come in.

Footnotes

*There were other places to go, to be sure. Ft. Sill had a swimming pool open to privates, but I never went there.  The one time I had on base free time when we could have gone, I had a horrible case of progressing pneumonia and no interest in going to a pool.

I did once go to the library, as odd as that may seem, simply because I was sort of tired of the intellectual quality of my stay at Ft. Sill and because I hoped it to be quiet.  It was quiet, and very nice.  I looked like a fish out of water there, however, and I simultaneously froze and fell asleep there.  The freezing due to my having acclimated to the 100F+ Oklahoma summers and the sleep due to simply being exhausted. 

"Denver has outgrown us". El Chapultepec closes.

I really wondered how it was hanging on.

I'd never been in there, and I apparently never got a picture of it from the outside for our Painted Bricks blog.  It wasn't very photogenetic anyway.  But when the Mexican restaurant turned jazz club found itself no longer in the seedy Five Points district it had survived in for years, but in the new gentrified up and coming Coors Field area, without moving an inch, it just didn't look quite right.  It's old school "the nightlife ain't the right life, but it's my life" type of genuine atmosphere didn't squire with the hipsterization of where it was.

COVID 19 didn't help things, but the owners were quick to note that it wasn't solely responsible for brining its 87 year existence to an end.

Jazz musicians and blues musicians, they shouldn’t have to time their sets around baseball innings and when the crowds are going to get out and be wild. They should be able to play their music, and the crowd should just be there to enjoy them, The employees and our musicians, our customers, we shouldn’t have to be worried about our safety when it’s time to leave.

Denver’s outgrown us.

So stated one of the owners.

I love Coors Field and baseball, about the only thing about Denver I actually like. But there isn't anything I like about Denver without some degree of reservation.  Like everything else, there really isn't a permanent "old Denver" that was in some state of perfection.  The area that El Chapultepec was in prior to Coors Field was a scary dump which was a bit scary to drive through in the middle of the day.  It wasn't until Coors Field overhauled everything downtown that it changed.

But it was a change that to an end the feeling that the jazz club belonged there.  A jazz club could probably exist somewhere else in Denver, but it wouldn't be genuine in the same fashion that El Chapultepec was.

But that's true of a lot of Denver now.

Indeed, that's true of a lot of the US, but Denver is somehow sort of unique in this way.  The town that my father was born in, four years before El Chapultepec opened, was still around in many ways into the 1980s when I first started to go there on my own. Bits of that, indeed, still are.  But when it pulled out of the oil recession of the 1990s it really started off in another direction even as the oil companies came back.  Prior to that point it was sort of an overgrown cow town in some real ways. Then it started to become a hipster epicenter, followed soon thereafter by a new weedy culture based on pharmacological stupefaction. That's what basically characterizes the town town today.  And the change hasn't overall been a good one.

Not that those who hung out at the jazz club were models of universal clean living.  It was a bar. But the set in seediness in the old Five Points district was of a different sort than the new widespread seediness that characterizes a lot of Denver.  In between was sort of a high point when it looked like the city would overcome its decay without creating a new one, based on Coors Field and what it brought to the downtown.  It did partially succeed but weed took a lot of it away.

The First Vice President of Color. . .

 no, not Kamala Harris.

Charles Curtis.

Curtis was Vice President from 1929 to 1933 under Herbert Hoover.  He was a Kansan who was 3/8 Native American from a variety of tribes in the Kansas region.  His first words were in Kansa and French, not English.  While his mother, from whom his native ancestry derived, died when he was extremely young, he was raised in my of his early youth by his grandparents on his mother's side.  He lived on the Kaw Reservation in this period, was an excellent horseman, and was known as "Indian Charlie."

He graduated from high school in Topeka and then read law, making him an example of a successful lawyer who had never been to university.  He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1893 and served there until 1907 when he entered the Senate.  After serving as Vice President, he resumed the practice law and died at age 76 in 1936.

Somebody worth remembering.