Saturday, February 23, 1924. Electric Trucks.

The Saturday magazines hit the stands, including this issue of Colliers:

The issue had some good articles on it, including one that would still be considered timely.

Politics and oil were a topic.

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.

And Colt had an advertisement on handguns in a national magazine, something that wouldn't happen now.  While the government is referenced, it's really home protection, a theme we still see, that is being suggested.

The Royal Navy intervened in the ongoing dockworkers strike to move 4,500 bags of mail from the United States.

Albanian Prime Minister Ahmet Zogu was shot twice by an anarchist would be assassin, but survived.

Sunday, September 16, 1923. The Amakasu Incident.

Prominent anarchists, Sakae Ōsugi and Noe Itō, his wife and Sakae's 6-year-old nephew Munekazu Tachibana, were beaten to death by the Kenpeitai, under the command of Masahiko Amakasu. The bodies were then thrown into a well in what would become the Amakasu Incident.

The soldiers responsible were court-martialed, with their defense being impromptu national defense.  The convicted defendants received relatively light sentences.

Oklahoma was clamping down on the KKK.

 

Friday, January 5, 1923 Frances overflies the Ruhr.

French air force roundel.

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.

Saturday, July 15, 1922. Flat tire.

The Saturday Evening Post hit the stands and mailboxes with a classci Cole Phillips' illustration of a woman beset by a flat tire.

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.

Thursday July 14, 1921. Sentences, reports and passings.

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were found guilty of the murder of Frederic A. Parmeter and Alessadro Bernadelli in a robbery.

Vanzetti and Sacco.

Both men were Italian born anarchists. Their trial was problematic to the degree that it can be regarded as potentially fatally flawed, although historians have concluded that both men were probably involved in the anarchist plot that resulted in the crime even if they were not the murderers.  Of course, their involvement may have been tangential, and nobody should receive the death penalty for a crime they did not commit.

The trial was not the celebrated cause it is now immediately at the time, but problems with the trial soon became evident, and it then became widely known.

Eamon de Valera met with Prime Minister David Lloyd George in London.  Following the two-hour meeting, Lloyd George met with King George V concerning the earlier meeting.

Morgan Bonaparte Mizell, made famous through a Frederic Remington illustration, died at age 58.  He was a hard living Florida "cracker" cowboy.

February 8, 1921. Ford Grousers, Future Pinups, Former Intellectual Lights

 Secretary of War Newton Baker tested a fully tracked Ford coup.

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.

Peter Kropotkin, Russian prince and economic dipshit.

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.

November 26, 1920. Distant scenes.

San Francisco Harbor.  November 26, 1920.  This would be right about the time my grandfather lived and worked in San Francisco as a teenager.

On this day Simon Karetnik was executed by the Bolsheviks in an example, one of many, of the Communists destroying other radicals.  Karetnik was a Ukrainian anarchist leader (yes, that's a ironic situation to be in) of the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, and a quite successful one. The RIAU itself was fairly successful for some period of time in fighting the Russian Whites, but it was naïve in the extreme in deluding itself that there was a place for it in competition with the Reds, whom they resisted union with.

RIAU commanders, Karetnik third from left.

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.

RIAU commanders.

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.

September 16, 1920. The Wall Street Bombing.

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.

On the same day, a Polish artillery regiment was destroyed, with some prisoners and wounded, by a Red Army cavalry unit that outnumbered it after it expended all of its ammunition during the Battle of Dytiatyn.  The Red Army unit was itself destroyed by Polish forces a few days latter.

The battle became a famous one for the Poles who established a military cemetery there.  That was later destroyed by the Soviets following World War Two and the location is now inside of Ukraine.

April 15, 1920. Crimes and Revolutions.

Children at the Washington D.C.,Municipal Play Ground at 18th. & Kalorama Road planting a tree in memory of animals killed during World War I during "Be kind to dumb animals" week. The tree was entered on the honor roll of the American Forestry Association.  April 15, 1920

On the front page of the newspapers around the country, the events in Mexico continued to make front page news as Mexico slid back into war with itself.

Also on the front page, the strike in Chicago, which we haven't been addressing, came to an end, as did a local high school student's strike.

Not on the front page of this paper, however, elevator operators were going out on strike. 

This is a nearly extinct occupation, at least in the form which once existed when elevators were mechanically complicated and had to be manually stopped at floors with precision.  W here they exist now, it's mostly as a courtesy of sorts, or as a form of announcing operator, a la Fran Kubelik in The Apartment.

In Braintree Massachusetts a guard and paymaster were murdered in the robbergy of a shoe company.  The murder would ultimately lead to the trial, conviction and execution of anarchist Nicola Sacca and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

Vanzetti left, Sacca, right.

The trial was tainted by the defendants' anarchism and their status as Italian immigrants and it was accordingly controversial at the time.  Debates about the verdict started nearly immediately and have continued to this day with the result that its now fairly impossible to determine what their status was in regard to the crime, if any.

On this same day Irish Republicans acted to establish their own law enforcement and judicial system in the parts of Ireland they controlled or heavily contested.  Ultimately, 21 of the Irish counties would come to have Republican police and judicial systems and some counties would act to recognize the Irish Republic as the sovereign rather than the crown.

March 9, 1920. Primaries, Republicans, Democrats, Communists, Anarchists and Smoking.

On this day in 1920 the New Hampshire Primaries were held.  It was the first time that New Hampshire's primary had the "first in the nation" status and only the second time it had been held, having been established in 1916.

The top Republican vote getter was Gen. Leonard Wood, where as the top Democrat was Herbert Hoover.

Wood was a physician and career Army officer who was a close associate of Theodore Roosevelt. That was part of the reason that Wood had been bypassed for the senior command of the U.S. Army in France during World War One, but only part of the reason.  That same association, however, made him a very serious contender for the 1920 Republican nomination.

Hoover, a mining engineer by trade, had come into the public eye due to his leadership of relief efforts in Europe following World War One.  During the war and following it he'd urged that taxes be raised and he'd been a critic of the Palmer raids.  He ran on Progressive policies such as the establishment of a minimum wage, the elimination of child labor, and a forty-eight hour work week.  While he did well in the New Hampshire primary as a Democrat, that very month he switched parties and in 1928 he ran, successfully, as a Republican.

Regarding politics, elsewhere Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman met with Lenin. They were among those who had been deported several weeks prior.  Both had been born in Imperial Russia and their radicalism resulted in their being rounded up and sent back there just prior to the Palmer Raids.

In meeting with Lenin they complained about Communists treatment of anarchists and lack of freedom of the press.  Lenin told them to pound sand.  Both would later write books about their delusionment with Soviet Russia.

In some ways its hard not to regard both of them as completely delusional.

In Cheyenne, the paper noted an effort to wipe out smoking by 1925.

The New Hampshire's first in the nation status wasn't a big deal at the time and it didn't make the front page of any Wyoming newspaper on this day.

The troubles over the ratification of the Versailles Treaty, however, did.

With all this news, it's no wonder some folks felt they needed a drink.

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.

January 3, 1920. A Roaring Start

1920 was certainly off to a "roaring" start.

The news on January 3 was all about the Palmer raids of January 2, which came one day after the first Palmer raids on January 1.  A huge sweep of the nation had rounded up a lot of "Reds", which in this context were simply radicals of all stripes.  Indeed, in Russia, where the civil war was raging, the Reds of the Communist Party had proven to be bad news for the socialist left, even the radical socialist left, as well as for anarchists.  In the US, however, they were all being rounded up together.

Radicals were even reported lurking in Denver stores.

The Press, which was generally Progressive, didn't shed any tears for the radical right. Now the Palmer Raids are regarded as an embarrassment, but the time, not so much. . . at least for awhile.

Mexico was showing up again on the front page and had been for some time, we'd note.  Fighting was still ongoing and an election was scheduled.  In the midst of it, Carranza had decided to try to reorganize the Mexican Federal army.

Radicals in store or no, the National Western Stock Show, a big even that's still held annually in Denver, was about to get rolling.

In Washington D. C., famous figures of the recent war continued to visit.

Admiral Jellicoe with Admiral Niblack on the latter's arrival at the Union Station, Washington D.C., January 3, 1920

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.