Anarchist bomber Eric Muenter committed suicide while in New York police custody.
The Ottoman Army failed at a final attempt to recapture ground in the Battle of Gully Ravine.
British forces withdrew from Lahij, South Arabia.
Last edition:
Ostensibly exploring the practice of law before the internet. Heck, before good highways for that matter.
Anarchist bomber Eric Muenter committed suicide while in New York police custody.
The Ottoman Army failed at a final attempt to recapture ground in the Battle of Gully Ravine.
British forces withdrew from Lahij, South Arabia.
Last edition:
Anarchist Eric Muenter fled Washington D.C. to New York City where he planted a bomb on the munitions ship SS Minnehaha. He then traveled to the home of J. P. Morgan Jr. with more dynamite and two revolvers, invaded the house intending to take the family hostage and force the Morgan company to stop financing munitions shipments to Europe for the Allied war effort.
He was clearly deluded.
Morgan was at home with his wife and butler and they subdued Muenter despite the anarchist shooting Morgan twice in the groin and leg.
Morgan recovered within the month. Muenter was arrested.
Muenter was decidedly odd, but very intelligent. Born in Uelzen, Province of Hanover, he immigrated with his parents and three sisters to Chicago at the age of 18. While still a student, Muenter worked as a German and French instructor at Racine College and Kenwood Preparatory School between 1895 and 1896,[5] then graduated with his A.B. from the University of Chicago in 1899. He was a German instructor during this period, but went back to Europe for fourteen months. He taught German at the University of Kanas in 1902, and then began instructing German at Harvard while he was a student there.
In 1906, while still a student at Harvard, he murdered his first wife by poison. He went on the run after that, but in those pre Internet, pre drivers license, per Social Security days, he managed to actually resume teaching and studying. He graduated from Texas A&M University in 1909 and taught at the University of Oklahoma,Vanderbilt University Emory and Henry College and Cornell University, where he earned a PhD. He remarried during this period.
It was a Saturday.
Last edition:
A giant in the history of Mexico, liberal Mexican general and dictator Porfirio Díaz died in exile in Paris. His wife and surviving son (his three other children died as children) were allowed to return to Mexico.
Díaz would be remembered now as a giant in the history of Mexico, and indeed to some extent he is, if he could have surrendered power democratically in 1910. He was not of a democratic mindset, but had been a moderating and liberal influence in the country's history and had been very successful as a technocratic dictator, advancing the countries economy a great deal. Time was ripe for him to surrender power in 1910, and he could be remembered today for advancing the country and bringing into democracy, rather than a man whose attachment to power sent it into radicalism and civil war.
There's also a lesson here about politicians hanging on after their time . . . and into old age. . .
An opponent of war, German-American anarchist Eric Muenter planted a time bomb in the Senate reception room of the United States Capitol, Washington, D.C. It went off at midnight and didn't hurt anyone. He stated that his goal was to "make enough noise to be heard above the voices that clamor for war. This explosion is an exclamation point in my appeal for peace."
People with a similar political view would soon be amongst the revolutionary combatants in Russia, but oh well.
Parliament passed the Munitions of War Act to address the shortage of artillery shells in the UK. David Lloyd George was appointed Minister of Munitions to oversee the effort.
At Gallipoli, where a lot of shells were being used, the Ottoman 1st Division staged a second counterattack in the Battle of Gully Ravine and got within 30 metres of British trenches before losses became unbearable. Ottoman commanding officer Faik Paşa then ordered Ottoman troops to dig in, violating orders from General Otto Liman von Sanders.Paşa was relieved and replaced with Mehmet Ali Paşa, which is confusing.
The Imperial Russian Navy's Baltic Sea squadron attacked a German squadron laying mines in the Baltic Sea at the Battle of Åland Islands. The SMS Albatross was hit and ran aground, with 27 sailors dead and another 49 wounded. The SMS Prinz Adalbert and Prinz Heinrich sailed to assist the German squadron, but British submarine HMS E9 torpedoed Prinz Adalbert and forced it to struggle to shore, damaged.
The Chilean Navy took the submarine Guacolda from the Fore River Shipyard. Built for the Royal Navy, US neutrality laws precluded the British from taking delivery.
Last edition:
On oil, the issue had an Autocar Truck advertisement advertising gas and electric trucks. . . the latter being something that locals now insist just can't happen.
France sent aircraft over the Ruhr in preparation for entering it.
Czechoslovak Finance Minister Alois Rašín was shot by an anarchist.
A white mob destroyed Rosewood, Florida. We reported on the start of these events a few days ago.
In Sofia, Bulgaria, an explosion of surplus artillery shells sold to a junk dealer by the Interallied Disarmament Commission killed twelve.
The Japanese Communist Party (日本共産党 or Nihon Kyōsan-tō) was formed by three former anarchists, proving that one goofball crackpot body of thought can easily yield to another. It would be outlawed, but wouldn't really go away, in 1925, and then be allowed again following Japan's defeat in World War Two.
The first fully automated telephone exchange appeared in the United Kingdom.
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were found guilty of the murder of Frederic A. Parmeter and Alessadro Bernadelli in a robbery.
The British sponsored Chamber of Princes, a deliberative body of Indian nobility, met for the first time.
Lana Turner, the legendary actress, was born in Idaho. Prince Peter Kropotkin, sponsor of crackpot economic anarcho communist concepts, died disappointed in the Soviet Union, which he'd returned to once it went Communist, finding out that it was not what he was anticipating, mostly because what hew as anticipating was hopelessly naïve and stupid.
The Prince had spent years in exile only to return to find that decades of communist concepts lead to misery, repression and death. Probably like most latter day apologies for the zillions of failed communist and socialist theories, he reconciled that it had never been tried, even if it had been.
On this day in 1920 Karetnik and fellow RIAU officers went, with some reluctance, to a meeting with Red Army commander Mikhail Frunze who had ordered them place under a command of his army. On the way they were arrested and executed. Frunze was a successful Red Army commander who died in surgery in 1925.
The entire event also helps demonstrate the absolute mess that Russia had become in its late imperial stage. Anarchy was a theory that was never going to succeed because of its nature. Revolutionary socialist other than the Communist were never going to prevail in a struggle as they were insufficiently organized and single minded. The Whites couldn't succeed as they had no really strong central unity in fact or in theory. That doomed Russia to years of an alien whacky political theory that didn't match its nature or culture and which set Russia back so far in development that it is nowhere near overcoming it today.
The central feature of this rise of extremism had been a pre World War One governmental and economic system that was frozen in the distant past. With no outlet of any kind for a developing society, absurd economic and political theories festered underground. It's no accident that many of these theories were the same as ones that were then also circulating in Germany and Austria, which likewise had old order monarchical systems going into World War One.
On this day, at 12:01 p.m., terrorist widely believed to be Galleanist anarchists, set off a bomb in New York's Wall Street district which killed thirty-eight people and injured hundreds more.
The bomb, designed to deploy shrapnel, killed mostly young workers in the district at a time at which young workers were very young. It was left in a horse drawn wagon, with horse still attached, and went off at the busy noon hour.
The direct perpetrators of the act were never discovered.