So, if you lose a war, rather than a Triumphal Arch, do you get a hurricane fence of disgrace?

Monday, April 14, 1975. Collapse In Viet Nam

Operation Babylift concluded.

Congressional staff members, Richard Moose and Charles Miessner, back from South Vietnam released a report stating that "no one including the Vietnamese military believes that more aid could reverse the flow of events." 

Their report further stated that evacuation of Americans from Saigon was being resisted by Ambassador Graham Martin and other senior officials.

The cover of Time featured a crying Vietnamese child and the words "Collapse in Viet Nam".

Soviet power lifter Vasily Ivanovich Alekseyev appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Widely admired all over the globe, he died at age 69 of heart problems, something not all that uncommon for the very bulky.

The Federal Election Commission commenced operating.

Sikkim voted to merge into India.

Actor Fredric March passed away at age 77.  He acted for many years, but is best recalled by me for his role in The Best Years Of Our Lives.

Last edition:

Sunday, April 13, 1975. Start of the Lebanese Civil War.

Labels: 1970s, 1975, Apostolic Christianity, Canada, Chad, Christianity, Islam, Lebanese Civil War, Levant, Levantines, Maronite Catholic, Music, Operation Babylift, Operation Eagle Pull, Palestinians, religion

Blog Mirror: January 14, 1954: Joe DiMaggio Marries Marilyn Monroe

An interesting and sympathetic, while honest, treatment of a story we first looked at here in the context of her marriage during the Second World War.

January 14, 1954: Joe DiMaggio Marries Marilyn Monroe

DiMaggio, who we would have to assume had a thing for blond starlets, as this notes, would cap his marital attempts at two.  Monroe attempted three times.  So did Dorothy Arnold, who we would have to characterize as a minor actress.  She died in 1970, leaving behind her third spouse.

Arnold and DiMaggio's union resulted in the only child either of them had, the troubled Joseph Paul DiMaggio III.  He lived a troubled life, there being a lesson in here, but interestingly remained close to Monroe after his father and the actress divorced. He was one of the last people she called.  He died at age 57.

Upon reaching 60

That's how old I am today.

When I was young.  I was about three when this photos was taken, maybe two.  My father was 36 or 37.

Americans like to debate at what age you are "old", with that benchmark, and the one for middle age, moving over the years to some extent.  Some go so far as to claim that the term doesn't mean anything. 

It does, as you really do become older and then old, at some point.

The United Nations categorizes "older" as commencing at age 60, something, given their mission, that would encompass the totality of the human race.  Some polling you'll see suggests that Americans regard it actually starting at 59 or 57.  Pew, the respected polling and data institution, noted the following:

These generation gaps in perception also extend to the most basic question of all about old age: When does it begin? Survey respondents ages 18 to 29 believe that the average person becomes old at age 60. Middle-aged respondents put the threshold closer to 70, and respondents ages 65 and above say that the average person does not become old until turning 74.

Interesting.

It is not like flipping a switch, and it doesn't really happen to all people at the exact same time.  I'm often reminded of this when I observe people I've known for many years.  Men in particular, I used to think, aged at a much different rate than women.  I knew a few of my contemporaries who were getting pretty old by the time they were in their 30s, and I know a few men in their 70s who are in fantastic shape and appear much younger than they really are.  I recall thinking, back when I was in my late 20s, that my father was getting older, but wasn't old, right up until the time he died at age 62.

Having said that, I’m often now shocked, I hate to admit, by the appearance of women my own age, again that I knew when they were young.  It's not like I know every girl I went to high school with, but I know a few of them, and some of them have held up much better than others.  In that category, some of my close relatives have really held up well.

Up until recently, I could say that I've held up well, but this past year has been really rough health wise. First there was colon surgery in October, followed by a prolonged medical addressing of a thyroid nodule which was feared, at first, to be aggressive cancer. Working that out is still ongoing, but that now appears much less likely, meaning that only half the thyroid will need to be removed.  

All of that has reminded me of Jesus' address to Peter:

Amen, amen, I say to you, when you were younger, you used to dress yourself and go where you wanted; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.

John, Chapter 21.

Peter, by the way, was between age 64 and 68 when he was martyred.  St. Paul was over 60, it's worth noting, when he met the same fate.

It's been rough in other ways as well.  One thing is that, in spite of what people like to claim, your fate is really fixed by age 60.  You aren't going to leave your job as an accountant and become an Army paratrooper.¹ If you are a paratrooper, you're going to retire now, as 60 is the military's retirement cutoff age.  If you've spent decades in the Army, and retire at 60 (most servicemen retire before that), you aren't going on, probably, to a career you don't have any strong connection with.

In my case, as I started to type out here the other day and then did not, as it didn't read the way I really wanted it to, I can now look back on a long career, over 30 years, and largely regard it as a failure, even though almost everyone I know would regard it as a success.  I won't get over that.  I'd always hoped to make the judiciary, but I'm not going to, and there's no longer even any point in trying.  I'm reminded of this failure every time I appear in front of one of the new judges and see how incredibly young they now are, and also when I listen to suggestions that the retirement age for judges be raised up to the absurdly high 75.

At age 60, if I were to go to work for the state (which I'm also not going to), I couldn't really ever make the "Rule of 85" for retirement.  As a lifelong private practice attorney, I'm now actually at the age where most lawyers look at their career, and their income, and decide they can't retire, some retreating into their office personality as the last version of themselves and nothing else.  I'm not going to become a member of the legislature, something probably most young lawyers toy with the idea of.  I'm not going to become a game warden, something I pondered when young.²  I'm way past the point where most similar Federal occupations are age restricted, and for good reason.

This is, work wise, pretty much it.

I said to myself, this is the business we've chosen; I didn't ask who gave the order, because it had nothing to do with business!

Hyman Roth, to Michael Corleone, in The Godfather, Part II ,

I'm also never going to own my own ranch, which was a decades long career goal.  I have acquired a fair number of cattle, but my operation is always going to be ancillary to my in laws at this point.  When I was first married my wife and I tried to find our own place, with she being much less optimistic about it than I. There were times, when the land cost less, that we could almost make, almost, a small place. We never quite did, and now, we're not going to.

Indeed, thinking back to St. Peter, I'm now at the age of "you can't", with some of the "can'ts" being medical.  I could when I was younger, but now I can't, or shouldn't.  Others are familial.  "You can't" is something I hear a lot, pertaining to a lot of things, ranging from what we might broadly call home economics, in the true economic sense, to short term and long term plans, to even acquisitions that to most people wouldn't be much, but in my circumstances, in the views of others, are.  Some are professional, as ironically it's really at some point in your 50s or very early 60s where you are by default fully professionally engaged, with that taking precedence over everything else, including time for anything else.

One of the most frustrating things about reaching this age, however, is seeing that you probably will never see how some things turn out, and you don't seem to have the ability to influence them.  I'm not, in this instance, referring to something like the Hyman Roth character again, in which he hopes to see the results of his criminal enterprise flourish but fears he won't live long enough to.  Indeed, I find myself curiously detached from concerns of this type that some people have.  I've noticed, for instance, the deep concern some aging lawyers have about their "legacy" in the law, which often translates to being remembered as a lawyer or their firm's carrying on.  I don't have those concerns, and indeed, taking the long view of things, I think it's really vanity to suppose that either of those wishes might be realized by anyone.

No, what I mean is that by this age there are those you know very closely, and you have reason to fear for their own long term fate, but you really don't have much you can do about it.  People who seem to be stuck in place, for instance, seem beyond the helping hand, and more than that, they don't really want, it seems, to be offered a hand.  People who have walked up to the church door but who won't go in as it means giving up grudges, burdens or hatreds, can't be coaxed in, even it means their soul is imperiled.  It recalls the last final lines of A River Runs Through It. .

I remember the last sermon I ever heard my father give, not long before his own death:

Each one of us here today will, at one time in our lives, look upon a loved one in need and ask the same question: We are willing Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true that we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don’t know what part of ourselves to give, or more often than not, that part we have to give… is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us… But we can still love them… We can love—completely—even without complete understanding….

I guess that's about right. 

Footnotes:

1.  Or, I might note, a Ukrainian Legionnaire.  You are too old to join.

Interestingly, I recently saw an article by a well known, I guess, newspaper reporter who attempted to join the U.S. Army in his upper 40s.  He apparently didn't know that you are well past the eligible age of enlistment at that point.  He was arguing that there should be some sort of special unit made for people like himself, or like he imagined himself, well-educated individuals in their upper 40s.  Why should there be if you can recruit people in their 20s?

2. Wyoming Game Wardens were once required to retire at age 55, but a lawsuit some decades ago overturned that. It, in turn, was later overruled, but by that time the state had changed the system. Since that time, it's set it again statutorily, with the age now being 65 by law.  There aren't, therefore, any 67-year-old game wardens.

Statutorily, the current law provides:

9-3-607. Age of retirement.

(a) Any employee with six (6) or more years of service to his credit is eligible to receive a retirement allowance under this article when he attains age fifty (50).

(b) Effective July 1, 1998, any employee retiring after July 1, 1998, with twenty-five (25) or more years of service may elect to retire and receive a benefit upon attaining age fifty (50) as described in W.S. 9-3-610.

(c) Repealed by Laws 1993, ch. 120, §§ 1, 2.

(d) Any employee in service who has attained age sixty-five (65), shall be retired not later than the last day of the calendar month in which his 65th birthday occurs. 

Age limitations of this type are tied to physical fitness.  But what about mental fitness?  As mentioned here before, Gen. Marshall forcibly retired most serving U.S. Army generals, or at least sidelined them, who were over 50 years of age during World War Two, and that had to do with their thinking.  We now allow judges to remain on the bench until they are 70.  Would 60 make more sense?  And can the same argument be made for lawyers, who are officers of the court?

Wednesday, March 31, 1943. Oklahoma!

Oklahoma! opened on Broadway.

Having a very long initial run, and having been revived from time to time, I have to admit, I've never seen it.

I have been, however, to Oklahoma on numerous occasions.

The Afrika Korps withdrew from Cap Serrat, the Tunisian city that's about as far north in Tunisia as you can go.  

The British took El Aouana, Algeria.  The ancient city is famous for the French discovery for four dolman there.  Dating back to Roman times, the city was named Cavallo, "horse", by the Romans.

A photographer was apparently touring the Port of San Francisco, which I've also been to.

USS Albireo (AK-90), the former John G. Nicolay,  a Navy cargo ship at San Francisco on this day.

Cavalryman, Gen. Frederick Gilbreath, Commander of the San Francisco Port of Embarkation, on this day in 1943.

Actor Christopher (Ronald) Walken born on this day in 1943 in New York.

Russian writer and politician Pavel Nikolayevich Milyukov (Па́вел Никола́евич Милюко́в) died in exile in France on this day in 1943.  He had been a member of the Provisional Russian Government after the fall of the monarchy.   While an opponent of the Communists in his native land, he supported Stalin's efforts to expand Soviet territory and was an ardent supporter of the Soviet war effort against the Germans.

Wednesday, August 30, 1922. The End of Greek Anatolia.

Young women photographed on this day in 1922.

A press photographer photographed a group of young women on this day in 1922.  None of them appeared as flappers.

The Turks won the Battle of Dumiupinar, bringing the Greco Turkish War effectively to a close.  As a result, this day is celebrated as Victory Day in Turkey.

This brought about the millennia long presence of a significant Greek population in Anatolia, one which had persisted even in spite of the Ottoman Conquest.  In no small part, it came about due to Greek greed which had sought to expand Greek control beyond what was initially logical, during the immediate post World War One period during which such efforts were effectively supported by nearly all of the Allied powers, and during which France, the UK, and Italy contributed troops to the effort.  Indeed, Italy seized islands for its own from Turkey.

Had the Greeks not overreached, they likely would have been supported longer by the Allies, which grew tired of the war and ultimately pulled its combat troops out of it.  Greece proved insufficiently strong to hold what it had taken against the revolutionary Turkish forces which had overthrown their own government, which had entered into a putative peace, and which fought the war well against long odds.

The war would result in a tragic mass population transfer of Greeks from Turkish lands, many of whom would relocate far from their homes in other lands, such as the United States and Australia.

In Ireland, the results of a recent peace continued to operate oddly.

Due to the odd nature of the treaty between the UK and the Irish Free State, a Second Irish Provisional Government was set up due to the assassination of Michael Collins, even though power was being transferred to the Dail.

Wisconsin Governor John J. Blain urged President Harding to ask Congress to take over the coal mines in order to abate the problems the long-running coal mine strike was causing and threatened to cause.

In Pennsylvania, a monument to George Washington was dedicated.

 Taft College was founded in California.

Sunday, not Monday, is the commencement of the week, and there was nothing particularly unusual about Sunday except. . .

I had a feeling of disquiet all afternoon long.

Not that I didn't know why.

Sometimes you are offered several chances to fulfill a goal, but with any such scenario, there comes a final one.  I'm not sure exactly how to put it, but there's that one last promotion board in which you might go from Lt. Col. to full General, or that one last season in the minors where maybe they'll pick you up for the majors, or maybe, or your last shot at the heavyweight title, or that last chance to be drafted by the NFL.  In all of those circumstances, and many others in life, there's a lot of random fate at work.  

This is particularly so in modern life, as we don't live in as much of a meritocracy as we like to imagine. We never really have.  In earlier eras, connections of all kinds mattered a great deal, and to add to it a person's race and gender mattered a lot.  I.e., if you were a white, protestant, male you were a lot more likely to "go places" than if you were anything else.  If you were a black, or Native American, female, well your fate was pretty much picked out for you no matter what your talents or desires were.

And that wasn't right.

Currently, we oddly live in a bit of the reverse, although it is nowhere near as much of the reverse as some would like to imagine.  In some fields, the emphasis on diversity now operates that if you are part of an old favored class, you are actually a bit disadvantaged now.  There's an emphasis to correct the errors of the past demographically, and achieve societal justice in a hurry, all of which, ironically, means that injustice of a type can be meted out on an individual basis.

Monday seemed to go well at first, but by mid-afternoon it was obvious that it wasn't going to complete that way.  Those swinging for the fences should expect not to hit at all, as that's the true, and therefore not be disappointed when the ball doesn't connect.

But that can still mean that there's no joy in Mudville, individually, so to speak.

So there was the disappointment.

By the following day, when the results were in, there was shock, and not just on a personal level.  It was as if the Majors had gone down to semi pro teams, sort of.  Nobody knew who they were.  A person could somewhat guess the reasons, maybe, they'd been picked up, but only somewhat, and that was speculation.  It was hard not to be mad, actually.

Tuesday morning I went and got my second COVID booster.  I'd been meaning to for a while, and my wife had been urging me to. She wanted me to get it on a Friday on the basis that I'd be feeling under the weather the following day, but Tuesday was the day that worked, so I went.  I didn't really expect a problem.

The following day I had to drive to a distant town and meet a witness.

This proved my wife's warning correct.  By morning, I did not feel right, which has tended to be the case with the vaccinations I've received so far.

Now, I don't want to over exaggerate this, and I'll be frank that I absolutely do not grasp why people forego getting vaccinated.  The vaccines are safe for the overwhelming majority of people, and COVID 19 is not a disease to be taken lightly.  And my reactions to the vaccines have not been severe by any means. By the afternoon of the shots I have a sore arm, and the next day I just feel sort of not well. That clears up by noon.

But this is the first time that I opted to drive halfway across the state, early in the morning, after getting the shot.  I never felt severely ill, but I felt somewhat icky, and I'm worried what sort of odd impression I may have made on the witness.  He didn't seem to act as if I was suffering from the flu or that I appeared to have taken two shots of Jim Beam first thing in the morning (which I did not, of course), so hopefully it was noticeable only to me.

This morning, the dog got me up at 4:00 a.m.  I've been sleeping later than that for several months, so that wasn't welcome.

All these, in context, are minor defeats.  Indeed, in my analogy, maybe it's more like Al Smith not making it to President.  He was a great man and is admired today, and you can't really expect to be elevated like that.

But all defeats are relevant only internally, really.  So if they matter, it's the individual who determines that.

Archibald "Moonlight" Graham.

The movie Field Of Dreams is all about such defeats.   The Black Sox and Shoeless Joe Jackson, etc.  In the film, the protagonist Ray Kinsella at one points takes an author, who himself has suffered personal defeats, to a baseball game and receives the message that he's to go find Archibald "Moonlight" Graham.  Probably most of the viewers of the film don't realize that Graham was in fact a real character, and just like the character in the movie, he appeared in a single major league game before leaving the game, albeit the next year in reality, going on to practice medicine in Chisholm, Minnesota.  The actual Graham had completed his medical degree the same year as his single major league appearance.  As a practicing physician, he worked to provide free glasses for the children of Iron Range miners.  He was, therefore, much like the character that is portrayed in the film, first located by Kinsella in Chisholm in a time travelling night in 1972 (after the real Graham's death), where he informs Kinsella that he can't travel to the field due to his duties of a doctor. Kinsella replies that it would "kill some men" to be so close to their dream and not touch it, to which Graham replies that it would be a tragedy if he had only been a doctor for one day, rather than only have been a baseball player for a day.

I don't know.  I must be too self focused, or too something else, as I always end up viewing the tragedy as being the opposite, which I guess is why I don't find It's A Wonderful Life to be heartwarming the way other people do.

Oh well.

Best Posts of the Week of August 15, 2021. The going down in defeat edition.

The best posts of the week of August 15, 2021.

A big week for defeat, nationally and personally.

Sunday August 15, 1971. The End of Bretton Woods

Defeat in Afghanistan

Afghanistan: What We Should Do.

Kabul airport

President Biden hasn't been in office long. . .

Not sending "American boys to (fill in bank) boys should do for themselves". The President's speech.

How we lost the war in Afghanistan

Ben Sasse on Afghanistan.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson on the situation in Afghanistan.

An answered prayer?

Tom Tugendhat speech on Afghanistan

Lex Anteinternet: An answered prayer?

What were their lives like? Admiral McCully's adopted Russian orphans, Eugenia Z. Selifanova and Olga Krundvcher.

Recently here I posted this:

January 11, 1921. Fractured and Rescued Russian Lives, 1921 Wyoming Legislature, Work.

Six of the seven Russian children adopted by Admiral Newton A. McCully, with their "governess" Eugenia Z. Selifanova, photographed on January 11, 1921.  

On this day in 1921, a press photographer photographed most of Admiral Newton A. McCully's adopted Russian children together with their governess who was a teenager herself.

McCully was a southern born American naval officer who had been embedded in the Imperial Russian Army during the Russo Japanese War.  In 1914 he returned to Russia as a naval attaché and he was elevated to commend of the U.S. Navy in northern Russia in 1918.  Following this he was sent to appreciate the military situation of the Whites in 1919.  He adopted these children in 1920.

McCully obviously appreciated the East due to all of this service.  A bachelor until 1927, he married Olga Krundycher, an Estonian, in 1929 on the claim that this would provide a mother for his children, and perhaps that was his reason, although I suspect that there was more to it than that.  She was later listed as their mother on census forms, even though the McCully adoptees were not all related and came themselves from varying regions of the former Russian Empire.  She was 29 years old at the time and the marriage took place in Tallinn, Estonia at which time McCully was still a serving naval officer.  He would live until 1951, dying at age 83.  She would live until 1968 and returned to Estonia for reasons of which I am not aware (or am I aware of when that occurred).

Eugenia  Selifanova was 18 or 19 years old when this photograph was taken. She later married another Russian immigrant, about 20 years her senior, and lived the rest of her life in Dearborn, Michigan. She had two children by the marriage and died in 1952.   She's already left the family, and probably had married, but the time of Admiral McCully's marriage.  Indeed, at that time McCully's mother was tasked with minding the children when he was away on duties.

It's easy to see what became of some of the children and that they had long American lives.  I wonder if anything of their early origins and culture was retained at all, or if anything of it remains in their ancestors.

Sometimes I'm haunted by the stories I post here, and they're usually things like this.  Not the big battles and the mass carnage, but rather the small stories of individuals caught up in the big events.

White Russian troops disembarking in Constantinople as refugees.

And its hard not to feel that way regarding the story of Newton McCully and his seven adopted children who had been taken out of Sevastopol as the Reds closed in on it, and then to Constantinople, and then on to the United States. 

Let's start with Admiral McCully, whom in some ways is both the central, and an ancillary, figure in our story.

Newton McCully was a South Carolinian born in 1867 whose father had served in the Civil War for, not surprisingly, the Confederacy.  McCully sought and obtained an appointment to Annapolis and, as noted above, he was embedded in the Imperial Russian Army during the Russo Japanese War.  In 1914 he returned to Russia as a naval attaché and he was elevated to commend of the U.S. Navy in northern Russia in 1918.  Following this he was sent to appreciate the military situation of the Whites in 1919.

He was a bachelor all of this time, which was not surprising for a naval officer given the life they lead.  He'd been in the Navy since 1887.

Something about Russia and Russians, or perhaps just a deep sympathy with a distressed people, heavily struck him in 1919.  During that time he had occasion to be with distressed Russians and to go into Russian orphanages and the like.  At some point he determined to attempt to bring back nine children into the United States with him.  He ended up bringing seven, as two couldn't go for various reasons (one was ill, and one was not actually an orphan, although his father consented to him going with McCully).

McCully adopted the seven children in Russia and sought diplomatic permission to bring them into the United States and to reside at his boyhood home in Anderson, South Carolina, for a time until his home in Washington D. C. could be refurbished to be suitable for children.  He had to post $5,000 a piece for each immigrant, a gigantic sum in 1921.  His mother was living and the initial plan was for the seven to live with her, there, during that time period.  Their stories, and some of their names, are noted in this period news article here:

There was, we'd note, an element of confusion on the number of children in early reports and indeed in some later ones, created in part by Euginia Selfinova's young age.  Some reports seemed to assume that she was one of the orphans, which in a way she was, and to include her in the count.  That wasn't her states however.  There were in fact seven, and she was the eighth young Russian, if looked at that way, to come into the United States with McCully.

Their names (subject to some confusion and difficulties in translation) and ages in 1921 were as follows:  Nikolai Smnov (12), Ludmila Manetzkaya (11), Anastasia Sherbotoc (Sherback)  (Sherbackova) (10), Nina Furinan (8), Feodore Pozdo (4), Ninotahkl Limendo (3) and Antonina Klimenko (2)..  Added to that was Euginia Selifanova, who was 19.  She apparently was already attached to some of the children prior to Admiral McCully asking her to come along and, according to his early interviews, asked her to come along as governess, something that tends to show up in quote marks as if there was confusion or doubt over her status.

McCully's concerns left him with quite a brood on his hands, to say the least, which no doubt explains in part why he chose to ask Selfanova to come along.  Selfanova would have been an adult at this time both in fact, experience and culture and McCully was a bachelor with a busy Naval career.

McCully, children, and Selifanova at a baseball game on November 22, 1922.  The woman in the center is "Miss Gleaves"

We'll pick up here, because of her role in the story, with Selifanova, who turns out to be one of the most difficult to trace.  We'll do that in part, as its necessary to explore Selfianova in order to discuss the story overall and later developments.

Selifanova obviously lived with the family for several years, but then another mystery develops.  Almost nothing is known about her, not surprisingly, before she accompained McCully and the children to the United States.  Her last name simply means the daughter of Selifan, which isn't very helpful and Selifanova is a fairly common Slavid last name.  It might not be Russian, for that matter, but some other Slavic language.* In the few photographs that exist of her, she uniformly has a stern appearance.

She seems to have left the McCully household prior to 1929 when an new woman enters the picture as the wife of Admiral McCully.

We'll take up McCully's wife in a moment, but the marriage in 1927 seems to have come to everyone as a surprise, in no small part as it took place in Tallinn, Estonia.  The Admiral didn't even inform his mother of the marriage until after it occurred.  Early press reports indicated that the marriage was undertaken as McCully had determined he needed a mother for the children, but much of that really doesn't wash in context.  By that time Nikolai, Ludmila, Anastasia, and Nina Furinan were all teenagers and approaching adulthood.  That still left the children at home, of course, but their minding would not have have been the burden that it early would have been, except perhaps if Selifanova had left the household.  The evidence seems to be that she had.

Indeed, her full name is associated with Andrew Trago at about this time.  "Trago" is generally a Latinate name, but Andrew was listed as Russian born on the one census form we've found noting him.  That might not be too surprising, however, as immigration agents weren't good at recording actual last names all that accurately at the time and European peasants proved to be quite willing to accept new last names.  His actual original last name may have been anything sounding close to that.  Anyhow, Adrew Trago was also Russian born but about twenty years Selfinova's senior, leading to some doubt if this is the right person.  Nonetheless, a Euginia Selifanova was was of the same age as the governess married Trago and the couple lived out their lives in Dearborn Michigan, having a son and a daughter.

Having said that, records for the couple are incredibly spotty. The showed up in a census just once, in 1940, and that document reported their son Boris as being 22 at the time.  If that's the case, he would have been born when Euginia was 16, which is clearly incorrect for these photographs.  Having said that, almost everything about the Trago family was vague.  This might simply be explained by slightly moving the dates of his birth and making him slightly younger.  Indeed, in 1940 the family may have had a reason for listing him as older than he was for one reason or another.  At any rate, at that point, Euginia disappears from history.

Euginia wasn't the only one who disappeared at that. The new bride shortly did also, but not quite as definitively.

The bride was Olga Krundycher.  In 1927 Admiral McCully married her in Tallinn, Estonia.   She was then 29 years old and, moreover, ethnically Estonian.  Indeed, she had a family last name of Sermann, and this was her second marriage, as she was a widow. The marriage seems to have come to everyone as a surprise.  The Admiral didn't even inform his mother of the marriage until after it occurred.  Early press reports indicated that the marriage was undertaken as McCully had determined he needed a mother for the children, but much of that really doesn't wash in context.  By that time Nikolai, Ludmila, Anastasia, and Nina Furinan were all teenagers and approaching adulthood.  That still left the children at home, of course, but their minding would not have have been the burden that it early would have been, except perhaps if Selifanova had left the household.

Olga, while an Estonian, appears to have been married to a Russian and perhaps a Russian army officer.  Her father's occupation is what records exist is listed as "soldier" and it may be the case that he was an Imperial Russian Army officer. The clues exist in that at the time of her wedding it was noted in Estonian papers, which covered it, that she "still" spoke some of her "native language".  If she'd grown up in Estonia we'd expect her to speak it perfectly. So its clear that she had at least some prolonged absence.

And while its certainly possible that McCully may have been willing to marry a Russian peasant, we can doubt that.  In the 1920s class distinctions were higher than they are now and McCully was of Southern aristocratic birth.  Indeed, while it might have been quasi scandalous if he'd done so, we'd note that Selifanova wasn't enormously younger than Krundycher at the time that she seems to have left the family.  Of course, we don't know anything else about Selifanova or her character, or even her opinion of McCully and vice versa.  She's truly a figure in the background, not smiling in photographs.  Krundycher is somewhat different.

Anyhow Olga was then 29 years old, ethnically Estonian and a widow. The marriage made the newspapers in Tallinn.

The Admiral may have thought Krundycher a good mother for his family, as American press reports at the time had it, and perhaps she was.  But here too we are presented with a mystery.  Other than the marriage being announced, she disappears from the record to a degree.  She's not buried with Admiral Newton, and indeed, she died in Estonia in 1968, not in the US.  

In fact, we can find her first back in Estonia by 1931, where he arrival was announced in the society page.  The marriage was presumably going well at the time and she seemed to be hailed as a bit of a celebrity.  Nonetheless, she died in Estonia nearly forty years later.  What happened?

Well, that's pretty hard to tell.  What we do know is that as late as 1943 the McCully's, Newton and Olga, were living in Florida, Admiral McCully now well retired. She is listed as his wife on materials pertaining to his death.  They seem to have still been married at the time of his death, and frankly returning to Estonia in the 40s would have been nuts.

Still, the records support she want back to Estonia at some point.  Perhaps after her husband's death, and all of her adopted children having assumed their own adult lives, she felt the call of her native country again.  Or perhaps she was just visiting it at the time of her death.

So, as to the two adult women who were part of this story, we know something at this point.  Selifanova appears to have married a few years later, and to have then lived out her life in Dearborn Michigan, dying at a fairly young age overall. 

Krundychter entered the picture as a somewhat celebrated, but much younger, bride of the Admiral but ended up back in Estonia where she lived until the end of her life many  years later.  She was born in Imperial Russia, seems to have lived in Russia for some time, suffered some sort of tragedy with her first husband, and then returned to Estonia before marrying the Admiral.  At some point, she went back to Estonia, by then an middle aged, or even elderly in context, woman and live there, apparently, until her death in the 1960s.

And what of the children?  Well, we can tell something about their lives from a few period articles and some coming quite later, which gives us a few clues about what their lives were perhaps like.  We'll sum up what we know about each first.  Let's list them out by age as of their time of their adoption and entry into the United States.

1. Nikolai Snourov (12).

Snourov was a boy soldier in the White Army when he came into the eye of Admiral McCully, and therefore hew as rescued from a really grim fate. Had he remained in Russia, and survived the war, he was young enough he could have expected service with the Reds and probably in the Second World War in the Red Army.  He may very well not have lived that long, however, as he could have been killed in combat, or by the Reds at any point leading up to World War Two, one way or another.

He not surprisingly ended up in World War Two as it was, but in the United States Navy.

Snourov was from Kharkov, Ukraine and had been born on April 1, 1909.  In 1933 he married Clair Wilhelmina Von Moser in Baltimore.  The couple had at least one son.  Nikolai did not outlive his adopted father by long, and died in 1954 at age 45.

2. Ludmila Manetzkaya (11)

Ludmila was born in Sevastapol in Crimea.  She married Raymond Francis Colee in 1934 in Florida, where she lived the rest of her life.  She died in 1985 at the age of 75.  She and her husband also had at least one child, whom was named Newton, no doubt after her adoptive father.  Newton passed away in Florida in 2004.

A charming photograph of Ludmila wearing an elaborate kokoshnik, a traditional headdress for Russian, but not Ukranian, women.  Taken in 1924, she would have been fourteen or fifteen at the time it was taken.

Ludmila McCully, 1924.

3 Anastasia Sherback  (Sherbackova) (10), 

Anastasia's real last name was Sherbackova, making her the daughter of Sherback.  On April 23, 1929, her name hit the New York Times society columns when she married William Mortiz of New York.  She was eighteen years old at the time.

4, Nina Furinan (8)

This Nina is the child who is the hardest to find anything out about.  Her age upon entry would indicate that she'd been born in 1912 or 1913.  None of the later information available supports any of the children, however, being born that year.

There are listings for an Antonina Vasilivna Forman for this family, but she was born, according to the records in 1909, which would have made her eleven when she came into the country.  This doesn't match, however, an 8 year old age at the time of entry either, but then at least one other age is also off. 

We know that in this group of children one was latter marred under the last name "Lash" and lived in Detroit.  A 1943 article on another one of the children noted that she was an artist. This is almost certainly here.

5 Feodor Pazdo Mikkaelovich(4)

Feador was born in Sevastopol in 1916.  He married Mary Ann Caruso in November, 1942, in Miami, by which time he was going by the name of Feodor McCully.  

Feodore also served in the United States Navy during World War Two.

Like a lot of the McCully children, he spent the rest of his life in Florida and South Carolina.  He did in 1970 in Florida at the age of 53.  

6 Ninotahkl Limendo (3)

Obituaries support that a Nina Mikhailovna Razahavalina McCully was part of the group and that she was born on June 30, 1915, in Yalta.  She was the daughter of Michael S. Rashavalin and Elena V. Melele.  She was clearly one of the McCully Russian orphans, so this is likely her.  She married John B. McDonald on August 22, 1941 in Santa Monica, California.  She and her husband lived in South Carolina, Florida and California, before she died on June 25, 1999 at the age of 83.

7. Antonina Klimenko (2)

Klimenko was also born in Sevastopol and her original last name is Ukrainian, not Russian.  She's the McCully child about which we know the most, perhaps because she was the youngest and likely, in some ways, the most American. . . maybe.

Antonina served in the U.S. Navy during World War Two, the family being still sufficiently noteworthy that her joining the Navy made the newspaper.  In 1945, following the war, she married George Von Bretzel and they also made their home in Florida.  George, interestingly, in spite of his last name, was also a Russian refugee, having been born in Japan to Russian parents before immigrating to the United States and serving in World War Two.  Indeed, because of his last name he likely came from a quasi aristocratic family that had German roots as well as Russian, something not uncommon for Russian nobility.

He worked for the CIA.  She lived until 1979, dying at the age of 61 in Florida.  The couple had two children.  At the time of her death in 1979 Ludmila was living in St. Augustine Florida, her sister Nina Lash in Detroit, and her sister Nina McDonald in Palos Verdes Estates, California.

Okay, so that's what became of them, but what of their lives?

Based on what we can find, they had adventurous childhoods.  Their adoptive father seems to have taken them all over the world when he could, and they accordingly lived in such places as Brazil.  Upon his retirement, he apparently bought a yacht and they lived for a time on it, before it was sunk when struck by a ship. They all survived the sinking.  In later years, they remained close to their father.

And while we can't tell for sure, there seem to have been a strong element of Russianness that was incorporated into the rest of their lives.  To the extent that we can tell, they all became American citizens only in adulthood, there father preserving the option for them, as he'd promised, for them to return to Russia, which none of them did.  They had a Russian governess early on, and then a Russian speaking Estonian step mother.  The youngest of them married another Russian refugee.  Even the youngest of them surely spoke Russian and had some knowledge of the culture of their homeland.

They also lived remarkably American lives. They spread out across the country while young, although they seemed to gravitate back towards Florida in their later years.  The boys all lived remarkably short lives for Americans, but lives that are interestingly about in context of life spans for Russians, which is usually attributed to environmental conditions in Russian culture in Russia.  As there were only two boys, this could be merely coincidental with them.

Were they raised Russian Orthodox?  Did their governess and adoptive mother instill in them a sense of a Russian identity?  Did the older ones retain it due to having been born in Russia?  Or were they just glad to have been rescued from an undoubtedly hard fate.

Of that last item, it seems we can be sure.  They called him "Dyadya" (Дядя), the Russian word for "uncle", right from the onset, but it's pretty clear he became more than that.  And its an extraordinary tale of generosity.  He entered into the role well into his middle age when some of them were very young, and with nobody really at home to help him.

*Technically "ova" merely identifies the bearer of the name as a woman.  It actually shares the same root as ovum, i.e., "egg".

January 14, 1921. Warm places, happy faces, sad disembarkations, happy teas

Spring Bayou, Florida.  January 14, 1921.

I don't know anything about Spring Bayou, but it looked nice on this day in 1921.

Family, friends, and others greeting US Navy aviators Lt. Louis A. Kloor , Jr., Lt. Walter T. Hinton, and Stephen A. Farrell at Pennsylvania Station, New York on January 14, 1921. Alexandra Flowerton, with muff in center, Anna Louise Kronholm and Eugene George Farrell also picture.

The friends and family of Naval aviators again gathered to greet their return.

Who Alexandra Flowerton was in this scenario is not explained, but the photographer clearly favored here in the scene.

Defeated White troops disembarked in Turkey.

Russian refugees going ashore at Constantinople, as it was then called, wearing rags, carrying duffle bags.

They were on to new lives in new communities, first in Turkey, and then later to other European locations for the most part.  Most would never see Russia again, and those who did, did so in the context of an other great war in which their fate was generally unhappy.

Recently elected Congressman Alice M. Robertson and suffragist photographer Anita Pollitzer gatered for tea and appeared rather happy.

 

Alice M. Robertson and Anita Pollitzer.  Pollitzer was a photographer and suffragist. Robertson was an incoming Congressman from Oklahoma.

And somebody saw fit to photograph a tire testing machine at the Bureau of Standards.

Bureau of Standards tire testing machine.

The Reassessors. Smedly Butler

He entered the Marine Corps in 1898 and served until 1931, and saw action all over the world.  He is one of the most decorated Marines in history, having won the Congressional Medal of Honor twice.

After his retirement the disillusioned Butler wrote a book called War Is A Racket.  His views might be summarized by the following quote.

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Looking back on the 1910s

We've now completed the entire decade that is the primary focus of this blog in sort of real time, although in fairness we didn't really start focusing on things in that fashion until 1916.

It's really been interesting.

In terms of the purpose of the blog, this exercise has achieved what we started out to achieve.  The authors now know a lot more about 1910-1919 then they did previously, including everything from details on the Punitive Expedition and the Great War, to picayune details of daily living.

One thing that historians, and we can fancy ourselves that if only from a amateur point of view, tend to do when they look back on an area that they've concentrated on is to to emphasize how that decade changed things, and by saying they emphasize it, they risk overemphasizing it.  Or perhaps its that every major event changes the world in ways that are only appreciated, and large, later on.  But, having noted that risk, we'll go on to say something that's obvious but under appreciated.

The 1910s changed everything.

Things were changing anyway, and in part because they're always changing.  But the pace of change in the 1910s was blistering.  Cheap automobiles had only been introduced in the prior decade, the 1900s, but already by the 1910s they were making major changes in daily life.  Commercial air travel, something completely nonexistent in 1910, as aircraft only dated to 1903, had actually arrived in its infancy and aircraft were also starting to carry the mail.  Serious long distance travel remained the domain of steam locomotives, if on land, and would for many years to come, of course.  On the sea, modern ships now dominated, although surprisingly enough the age of sail hadn't completely passed and wouldn't for another couple of decades.

At the conclusion of the decade, 1919, horses remained a major economic factor and major means of transportation and they would continue to do so into the 1920s and beyond, but what surprised me is, by the end of the decade, the degree to which it was recognized that the day of the horse was in fact rapidly passing.

Wyoming Stockman Farmer, March 1, 1919.

That passing was causing a revolution in industry that was hugely accelerated by World War One.  The outbreak of the war caused a major increase in the demand for petroleum oil well before the U.S. entered the war, something very much accelerated due to the Royal Navy having started the transition away from coal. That latter trend is one that we're now still playing out to this day, as coal enters what is likely to be its final industrial stage, having been in a decline now for over a century.  At the same time, the 1910s really saw the creation of the Oil Age, which we are still in but which is also in a present state of transformation. The 1914-1919 demand saw an increase in the refining capacity of the United States that would impact towns like Casper Wyoming and convert them into cities with massively increased populations virtually overnight.  That same era saw the last great boom in equine farming in the world, something Wyoming participated in, which was followed by a massive crash.  1919 would be the last year that farmers enjoyed economic parity with urban dwellers in the United States.

Sidewalk stamp from 1919 in Casper Wyoming.

That the equine age hadn't passed yet, but was on the way out, was perhaps best demonstrated by the 1919 Motor Transport Convoy that we just featured this past year, but the events of The Punitive Expedition, the Mexican Revolution, World War One, and the Russian Civil War did and were demonstrating that horses remained hugely viable in the present at that very time.  Very little appreciated now, going through events demonstrated this to a great degree.  Motor transport largely failed in the Punitive Expedition.  Horses, and even cavalry, remained employed in the Great War including in France. The German 1918 Spring Offensive, in the end, failed in no small part due to a lack of horse transportation combined with the onset of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic.

French war dead, World War One.

On that, we might note that in an era when we constantly hear about how bad things are in our own time, the 1910s say the absolute acclimation to death.  The entire Western World engaged in a massive bloodletting on a scale that most would not are endure in our current era.  By the end of the war entire cultures were so used to it that they kept on fighting in bloody civil wars without a let up, making the war fatigue claim we so often hear about the Great War seem rather false.  In the U.S., acclimation to it was so high that the country thought nothing about sending airmen on a cross country race that featured constant fatalities.  Newspaper headlines constantly discussed death by criminal violence, and the country didn't really get that upset about massive race riots that defined 1919 in certain ways.

War dead of the Mexican Revolution, which started before World War One and continued long after.

The country was about to go into the "Roaring Twenties", but like the violence of the post Civil War American West, a question really has to be asked if the violent Roaring Twenties was hugely impacted by the violent 1910s.  Nothing in the 20s or early 30s would replicate the violence of World War One in scale and thousands upon thousands of men were released from wartime service all over the globe with little thought to what they'd been through and how that would impact them.

The 1910s also saw the massive popular onset of Prohibition, which was a movement that gained momentum in the entire English speaking world in that decade. That would help fuel the violence and lawlessness of the 1920s, but at the time to support prohibition was to be a Progressive and to be on the "right side of history".  World War One again caused the movement to accelerate and actually come into being, first as a wartime measure, in the United States.

Christmas Day edition of the Cheyenne State Leader celebrating the permanent passing of John Barleycorn.  It wouldn't be so permanent.

By far, however, the biggest event of the decade, and the one that is still with us today, is the smashing of the Old Order, brought about by World War One, in a fashion which failed to replace it with anything.  That lead to immediate, and long lasting, violence, and the reverberations are still very much with us.

The demise of the imperial and monarchical regimes due to World War One is well known, but the vast impact of it is still poorly understood, particularly because the second great war of the century, World War Two, came to define the century and the aftermath of it, the Cold War, dominated over half of it.  Given that, what occurred before seemed like a prelude when in fact the events are all closely tied and the sorting out of what occurred has still not been completed.  And this is no wonder if we consider that the Old Order was 1,500 years old at the time, in some ways.

By the Old Order, we mean that monarchical system that had dominated in Europe for most of its post Roman Empire period.  Indeed, even now, we live in a period in which the passing of that system is really very brief.  The system was never uniform and isn't anything like its commonly recalled, but its existence was remarkably long lived.

Crowned heads of states, many of whom early on never wore a crown, reentered the European scenes in the 400s as the Roman Empire collapsed.  Indeed, during that period, with the Roman Empire separated into to two governments, in the East it was itself rapidly returning to monarchy.  Following the collapse of the empire in the West, strongmen from Germanic conquering tribes evolved from heads of family groups, the kin into kings, men who were at first heads of tribes, and then of larger bands, and then in later years, that arrived in different places in Europe at different times, then of nations.  By the middle of the Middle Ages the system was unquestionable, even if the legitimacy of an actual monarch may not have been.

Charles the Great receiving the surrender of Widukind at Paderborn, 785

The acceptance of the permanency of a royal family took a much longer period to really arrive.  The post Henry VIII of the United Kingdom gives ample proof of that, with the current royal family not occupying that chair until 1714.  But that most nations would have a monarch, and that monarchs might claim more than one nation, was well accepted.

Which is not to say that it wasn't challenged and that it didn't evolve.  As early as 1215 English noble families, with that status meaning much less than it was to later, were able to force their king, King John, to acknowledge rights that went beyond the crown in the form of the issuance of the Magna Carta.  This act also establishes the permanency of the English Parliament which has existed in various forms since that time.  Parliament became stronger and stronger, as did the concept of representative rule, over the centuries and by 1642 it had become so strong that the Parliament contested the Crown for the rule of the country, suspending the monarch for a period until it was restored in 1660. That event, however, demonstrated that representatives bodies in Europe were now so strong that in Western Europe crowned heads served at their pleasure.

The Magna Carta.

That  pleasure wore out again with Englishmen, this time in the Crown's North American colonies, in 1774 such that by 1776 they declared those colonies independent and, in their following organic documents, they abolished monarch completely in favor of a conservative representative republic.  They had an advantage in their revolution, which went surprisingly rapidly from discontent to separation, in that they already had formed representative bodies and were used to acting independently already.

Declaration of Independence.

That conservative and radical concept provided an example, but in a people with no real democratic habits, in 1789 when the French, or more accurately Parisians, rebelled against their king in a revolution that would ultimately fail but which has ironically set the standard for revolutions ever since.  A person can debate whether the American Revolution or the French one really indicated that the age of monarchy had completely ended, but in truth it had been ending long before either.  The examples, if we include the English example as well, therefore, provide examples of how the end of monarchy could come about, that being either 1) in an orderly developed fashion through a process of natural evolution; or 2) violently and with the institutionalization of disorder as its feature.  The latter example, unfortunately, became a disturbingly common one.

French Charter of 1814, a bill of rights imposed upon Louis XVIII by the Congress of Vienna as a condition for his restoration.

From 1789 on various European monarchies struggled with this evolution.  The United Kingdom, which had started evolving away from monarchy by 1215, handled it best of all, having an institutionalized process for that evolution.  Many other European nations handled it much more poorly.  France went through cycles of revolution, monarchy, and republicanism, before it finally came around to permanent republicanism in 1870.  1848 saw republican revolutions all over Europe.  Other nations saw the old order retrench in their traditional governmental institutions suppressing democratic developments as much as they could, with Germany (which had only been a state since 1870) and Imperial Russia providing prime examples.

Uprising in Berlin in 1848, one of a series of republican revolutions that year which came close to creating a republican German constitutional monarchy only to see it fail due to disorganization.

Where the Old Order hung on with the least amount of surrender to a growing literate class, no matter how marginal that literacy may be, the struggle became malignant.  The difference in developments between societies that had democratic institutions that functioned and those that did not, with the latter often existing only as a bare marginal concession to the inevitable, was stark.  Everywhere, by the late 19th Century, radical challenges to the Old Order existed, even spilling into fully democratic nations that had made the transition well prior, but nowhere were these movements stronger and more active than in those nations that had monarchs who actually functioned as monarchs.  Imperial Russia, where the Czar remained as absolute of monarch as any in the Western World, provides a prime example, although Imperial Germany wasn't really far behind it.

Nicholas Romanov after his abdication.

In spite of the growing strengths of those movements, the nations of the Old Order went into war in 1914 seemingly unified and strong, and indeed the advent of the war in some ways boosted the strength of the monarchs as their populations and what functioning democratic institutions there were, rallied to their nations.  The Imperial German and Austro Hungarian crowns did not suffer from going to war in 1914, and the Imperial Russian one did not for the same.

A dapper Wilhelm Hohenzollern after his abdication, 1933.

The division of nations in terms of their development during that war was not a pure one by any means, but there was one that was notable nonetheless. Republican France and Parliamentary Britain lined up against Imperial Germany and Austria rapidly in the contest.  Various monarchies did join the Allied cause, but all of them were democracies in various degrees except for Imperial Russia, which provided an embarrassing exception until it collapsed in 1917.  On the other side, the Central Powers all featured governments that strongly endorsed central authority and a central authority that was autocratic and invested with the Old Order.  The Central Powers, for that reason, didn't find the Ottoman Empire to be an embarrassing ally the same way the Allied found Russia, as even though its underlying nature was different in every sense, the principal one that identified them, autocracy, was the same.

Halife Abdulmecid Efendi, the last Caliph of the Ottoman Empire, during his exile.  He came into the position post war and occupied it for the last two years of its existence, which came to an end in 1924.

As soon as the war's stresses became strongly manifest, a struggle which had from the very onset been touched off as a violent protest against Austrian autocracy and empire by a common man, saw working class radicalism develop everywhere in the old imperial regimes except for the Ottoman Empire, where instead nationalist and republican forces began to emerge.  Nowhere in the states most invested in the Old Order was there a long lasting society wide support of its continued existence.

Blessed Charles of Austro-Hungaria, who became the last Emperor of the Austro Hungarian Empire in 1916 with the war in progress. A devout man, he attempted to secure a separate peace with France upon ascending to the thrown.

The collapse started to come suddenly, first in 1917 in Russia where a decades long smoldering collection of underground forces and a small republican one toppled the Romanov's and then went into a fratricidal civil war against each other.  That followed rapidly into Germany where the forces of the radical extreme left made the continuation of the war by Germany and the continuation of the Hohenzollern monarchy untenable.  Indeed, as Kaiser Wilhelm went into exile in the Netherlands, the other more local German royal families rapidly collapsed as well, leaving the German Social Democratic Party to deal with the collapse, the rise of the radical left, and a war that had to be immediately concluded.  Germany descended into a brief period of civil war followed by a long period of instability until the forces of the extreme left  and the forces of the extreme right, in the new form of fascism, destroyed the country's democracy in 1932 with the Nazi Party claiming the thrown of the country.

Benito Mussolini, who became the Italian head of state in 1922.

That same story, but in a much less protracted form, had already played out in Italy, which had a parliament going into World War One but which had never been politically stable.  The Fascists toppled the elected government in the 1920s and brought in a new radical right wing order, although it allowed the King to remain on his thrown.  In Spain, which had not fought in the war, the monarch and the republican government collapsed giving rise to a bloody civil war which saw the forces of the right emerge victorious.  Portugal, another Allied power that was a republic but a weak one likewise slid into a dictatorship in the post war period.  Radicalism in Japan, which only had a semi functioning parliamentary body, caused a struggle in the Imperial army, which was divided not only politically but in terms of age, with older, right wing, officers prevailing over young, left wing ones, taking Japan into a finally highly autocratic era under its Old Order, the only one to really survive the period.

The drama also played out in newly liberated lands.  Many new countries oddly opted for constitutional monarchies, trying to somewhat recreate what they'd lately experiences, but some of those did not last long.  Poland briefly had a title to its ancient thrown, backed by Germany, but rapidly became a parliamentary democracy before becoming a practical dictatorship prior to World War Two.  Finland likewise briefly had a German monarch before he resigned in the face of the obvious and the country fought out its own civil war before emerging as a democracy.

Porfirio Diaz in 1910.

Even in North America this drama played out to a degree, and oddly somewhat before that in Europe.  Mexico had struggled since its independence with its own imperial legacy, never finding a way to transform into a functioning democracy.  In 1884 Porfirio Diaz had come to power and, while theoretically an elected head of state, he ruled as a practical imperial monarch, even appearing in his portraits as one.  In 1910, as a result of a stolen election, democratic forces rose up against him and deposed him before they descended into periods or counter revolution and revolution that would last nearly twenty years and which saw initially democratic forces slowly slide into more and more dictatorial ones until Mexico emerged in the 1920s as highly left wing single party state.

Plutarco Elias Calles, who would be the Mexican head of state from 1924 to 1928 and whose extreme left wing policies would lead to the Cristero Rebellion, the last phase of the Mexican Revolution.

All of this is highly significant as it makes the 1910s one of the most pivotal, and perhaps the most pivotal, decades of the 20th Century and modern history.  Vast portions of what was destroyed in terms of intellectual and societal deposit has never been recovered, restored or replaced and the struggles of the subsequent decades have failed to fill the vacuum.  It's common to note that the results of World War One brought about World War Two, and then to note, often in other works, that the conclusion of World War Two brought about the Cold War.  But in fact the cause and effect of the 1914-1918 disaster were far greater than that, and vast as those stated implications are.

A large Portuguese crowd observing the Miracle of the Sun on October 13, 1917. The events of Fatima were extraordinarily well documented and widely participated in.

In May through October 1917 three Portuguese children claimed to receive visitations by the Virgin Mary, the authenticity of which is widely accepted by Catholics as well as some Orthodox.  As a feature of those visitations, they claimed to have received three messages.*  Among the content that they included in the messages they received was:

If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church.

That the war raging in 1917 was to end is obvious to us know, as it ended in about one year following the visitations.  That a worse one greater than the first occurred is of course obvious to all.  And that Russia, the flagship of Communism spread errors around the globe is easy to see as well.  But many have debated what the full extent of those errors were and the degree to which the errors coming out of the cataclysmic of 1914-1918 continue to manifest themselves to this day.

King Alfonso XIII of Spain, whose monarchy was abolished in 1931, only to fall into civil war in 1936.  The Nationalist had no desire to restore him to his thrown.

What is clear is that the strong resistance to the end of the cycle that imperial regimes exhibited from the 1770s onward built up like steam in a sealed vessel before it exploded in 1917.  By that time, that sealed political steam was not only explosive, it was corrupted and infected in that same atmosphere by a radicalism that countries that had developed no democratic habit could contain.  Even in those countries that were democracies, but which were weak ones, such as post 1918 Germany, Italy, and Spain, they proved impossible to contest and contain.  The festering of the far left would bring evolution across the globe from 1917 forward until the Soviet came to an end on December 26, 1991.  The festering of the far right would bring the world into a Second World War in 1939, assuming that earlier imperial far right wing malignancy in the Far East isn't included, in which case the world descended in 1932.  It would take that Second World War and millions of additional deaths to put to an end of the rise of a global far right fascist movement which, while extremely distinct in many ways, shared some of its most malignant traits, including a fascination and advocacy of the application of death, with the far left of Communism.

While that struggle is seemingly now concluded, what was never fully restored was a concept of humanity and natural order that existed earlier on.  The change came too rapidly to be coherent in that fashion and the forces that claimed an organic reason for their positions had not had them exposed in the full light of day before they were let out to spread like viruses.

Indeed, in some remarkable ways, no matter how different, and indeed they were radically different in a plethora of ways, most of the political and societal theory was that governed the globe's societies prior to 1910 may have been, they did have some central principals.  Most of these principals remain, but because of the radicalism of the 1917 explosion, nearly all of them have been challenged, most wish very little thought given to what that challenge meant, and nearly all without the influence of any scientific thought into them.  Indeed, on the latter, social theories that were bootstrapped into political ones of the late 19th Century and early 20th were often justified in the name of "science" when they were quite contrary to it, with horrific examples of the same playing out in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.**

It's always tempting, of course, when looking at an era that you're studying to conclude that that era was the conclusive one to history.  There are so many "pivotal decades" and the like claimed that they can't all be true.  Indeed, perhaps no one claim is really true as history is a stream, not a canal with a series of locks.  Having said that, the 1910s saw a lot of history vastly accelerated, diverted, and broken.  The world has been different since then, and in many ways that are not good ones.  The forces unleashed in the 1910s were akin to opening Pandora's box, and we've never been able to put the disorder that the decade saw released back into any state of order.  Many of the ills and confusion that we experience today have their origins in that fateful ten years.

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*Sister Lucia, the only one of the three children to live into adulthood, recounted the messages as follows:

Our Lady showed us a great sea of fire which seemed to be under the earth. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in a huge fire, without weight or equilibrium, and amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear. The demons could be distinguished by their terrifying and repulsive likeness to frightful and unknown animals, all black and transparent. This vision lasted but an instant. How can we ever be grateful enough to our kind heavenly Mother, who had already prepared us by promising, in the first Apparition, to take us to heaven. Otherwise, I think we would have died of fear and terror. 

 You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end: but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the Pontificate of Pope Pius XI. When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father. To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the Consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she shall be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.

The third part of the secret revealed at the Cova da Iria-Fátima, on 13 July 1917 was as follows.

I write in obedience to you, my God, who command me to do so through his Excellency the Bishop of Leiria and through your Most Holy Mother and mine. 

After the two parts which I have already explained, at the left of Our Lady and a little above, we saw an Angel with a flaming sword in his left hand; flashing, it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire; but they died out in contact with the splendour that Our Lady radiated towards him from her right hand: pointing to the earth with his right hand, the Angel cried out in a loud voice: 'Penance, Penance, Penance!'. And we saw in an immense light that is God: 'something similar to how people appear in a mirror when they pass in front of it' a Bishop dressed in White 'we had the impression that it was the Holy Father'. Other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with the bark; before reaching there the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died one after another the other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions. Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels each with a crystal aspersorium in his hand, in which they gathered up the blood of the Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God.

It was later noted that:

The purpose of the vision is not to show a film of an irrevocably fixed future. Its meaning is exactly the opposite: it is meant to mobilize the forces of change in the right direction. Therefore we must totally discount fatalistic explanations of the “secret”, such as, for example, the claim that the would-be assassin of 13 May 1981 was merely an instrument of the divine plan guided by Providence and could not therefore have acted freely, or other similar ideas in circulation. Rather, the vision speaks of dangers and how we might be saved from them.

The Fatima apparitions are widely accepted by Catholics and are also accepted by some Orthodox, as noted.

**The primary example of this would be how the science of genetics morphed into the social and pseudo science of eugenics, which in turn provided a pseudo scientific basis for Nazi racial policies and, ultimately, mass murder.

A lessor, but still disastrous, example would be the "scientific" nature of the Communist economic model which purported that history itself was subject to inviolate economic laws, all of which coincidentally justified the Communist economic model.

Many other such examples, we'd note, in all 20th Century societies, exist.