Wednesday, April 27, 1910. Elephants on the rampage.

A herd of nine escaped circus elephants rampaged through Danville, Illinois.

Last edition:

Thursday, April 21, 1910. Samuel Clemens passes.

Labels: 1910, 1910s, Death, Mark Twain, Personalities, The written word

Thursday, August 31, 1944. Montgomery promoted. The Red Army in Bucharest. The Mad Gasser in Mattoon, Illinois.

The Red Army entered a Bucharest already cleared of German troops by the Romanian Army.  Crowds cheered the arrival of the Red Army.

Romania would be one of the tragic examples of the Red Army not leaving where it appeared following the war. It would take a revolution in the USSR, more or less, and definitely in Romania, to restore Romanian sovereignty and establish Romanian democracy.

Bernard Law Montgomery was promoted to Field Marshal.

Almost slandered by American historians since the war, Montgomery was a great man and a strategic genius who had mastered the ability to fight with an economy of resources.  Born in England, but raised in Australia (his father was an Episcopal Bishop), he was truly one of the greatest Allied commanders of the war.

The 5th Army crossed the Arno.

Slovene partisans rescued 105 Allied POWs in the Raid at Ožbalt.

The US prevailed in the Battle of Sansapor.

Task Force 38.4 attacked Japanese positions on Iwo Jima and Chichi Jima.

The first of the Mad Gasser of Mattoon incidents in Mattoon, Illinois.

Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World has a good episode on this really weird event.

Last edition:

Wednesday, August 30, 1944. End of Operation Overlord.

Labels: 1940s, 1944, British Army, Italy, Operation Overlord, Petroleum, Philippines, Polesti Romania, Red Army, Romania, World War Two

Saturday, August 30, 1924. Late summer scenes.

The Dawes Plan went into effect.

Germany replaced paper marks with a coin, due to hyperinflation.

Clashes with the Ku Klux Klan resulted in six deaths in Herrin Illinois.

The French High Commission of the Levant created Lebanese citizenship.

Edwards, Prince of Wales, met with Calvin Coolidge.

Saturday magazines were out.

Last edition:

Friday, August 29, 1924. The start of the Second Saudi-Hashemite War.

Labels: 1920s, 1924, Dawes Plan, It was because of World War One, Kingdom of Hejaz, Monarchy, Saudi Arabia, Second Saudi-Hashemite War, Sultanate of Nejd

Friday, July 21, 1899. Ernest Hemingway born.

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois to Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a physician, and Grace Hall Hemingway, a musician.

Last edition:

Thursday, July 6, 1899 Ordered home.

Labels: 1890s, 1899, 1900s 1902, 1910s, 1915, Kansas National Guard, Philippine Insurrection, Spanish American War, Wyoming National Guard

Wednesday, June 7, 1922. State Farm Insurance Company founded.

State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company, the largest American automobile insurer, was founded on this day in 1922 as a mutual insurance company designed to assist farmers.  The founder, George J. Mecherle, was a tractor salesman and retired farmer.

The Greek Cruiser Georgios Averof shelled the Turkish city of Samsun.  The Ottoman government deported Greek residents of western towns under their control as a reprisal.

The British Mount Everest Expedition was called off due to the deaths of seventeen Sherpas in an avalanche.

Monday, October 10, 1921. Putative Beginnings

On this day in 1921the Federation of Central America, made up of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, came into existence. Tegucigalpa was the capital.  The treaty creating the union provided only for provisional delegates to its parliament, so in reality it never took off.

There have been numerous efforts to create such a union, following the end of Mexican claims to the region in the 19th Century. All have unfortunately failed, which has been a major contributor to the agony of the region in the 20th and 21st Centuries.

On states that failed, the Kingdom of Kurdistan was proclaimed on this day in 1921.

Encompassing a fairly small area of the region inhabited by the Kurds, all of which was within Iraq, the British put the putative kingdom down in 1924, and it was incorporated back into the British mandate in Mesopotamia in 1926 by the League of Nations.

Here too, if the state had been allowed to exist, much of modern history in the region would have been different, and potentially better.

The Yankees won game 5 of the 1921 World Series, regaining the lead from the Giants. The score was 3 to 1.

In other sports, a photographer caught a group of Army officers playing polo at Camp Grant., Illinois.

Polo, Camp Grant, October 10, 1921

Polo had become a big Army sport in the early 20th Century, and the interwar years were really its high water mark. During that period it was widely participated in and encouraged by the Army.  Polo became common not only in the Regular Army, but in the National Guard.
 

Hines was back at work photographing Appalachia, including the members of an African American 4H Club..

Miners cabins on the Elk River at Bream, W. Va. near Charleston. Others on slope beyond. A typical mining community here. Children go to Big Chimney school. Oct. 10, 1921. Location: Bream, West Virginia

Former 4H members who were attending an African American agricultural college in West Virginia.

Friday Farming: From 1941.

 

September 2, 1920. Changing views.

Most of the time when I put a newspaper up here, it's to mark some big or at least interesting century old event.  Every now and then, however it's to comment on something and how it was perceived, which by extension comments on how we perceive things now.

I see around here fairly frequently stickers that say "Welcome to Wyoming--Consider everyone armed".  It's an amusing joke based on the fact that firearms are really common here.  That's been the case as long as I can personally recall, but it also refers to the fact that over the past two decades there's been a real boom in the concealed carry movement.  I've taken a look at that and its history in this old post here:

Packing Heat

Now, by mentioning this here, I don't mean to suggest that I'm opposed to these state laws allowing for concealed carry.  I'm not. But I do want to point out how carrying hasn't always been perceived the way it is now.

In 2020 we can take it for granted that the press is universally liberal, and indeed "progressive", unless we specifically know otherwise about a particular outlet.  In 1920, however, its a little more difficult to tell.  Papers were Democratic or Republican and generally weren't shy about noting it, but they were also pretty slavish followers of social trends, unless they were absolutely bucking them.   All of which makes the headline about Gerald Stack engaging in an act of "Slander" against Wyoming men interesting.

Under the same circumstances today, there aren't very many Wyoming men who would regard his comment as slanderous. Some would find it childish and inaccurate, and some on the political fringes would hold it up as a positive or negative example. But quite a few people would take some secret pride in the thought that everyone in the state was packing.

In 1920, however, Wyoming was seeking to overcome its frontier image even while preserving it. The Cheyenne newspaper knew that his comment wasn't true and pointed it out. Beyond that, they pointed it out as being slanderous. An insult, as it was, to the men of Wyoming.

Apparently it wasn't an insult to women, presumably because women weren't thought to be packing.

In actuality, quite a few people at the time, including quite a few people were packing and the ownership of pocket pistols was common.  Chicago, for its part, didn't have a gun control law addressing handguns until 1981, much later than most people would suppose, and it hasn't been a huge success by any measure.  Having said that, Illinois restricted the carrying of concealed handguns in 1949, following World War Two, at which time, contrary to our general myth, there was widespread national support for banning handguns.  New York City, in contrast, passed a firearms licensing act for concealable handguns in 1911, making the carrying of them without a license a felony.

Again, this isn't an argument for anything.  It's just an interesting look at how we often inaccurately imagine what the past was like.

On something completely different, Boy Scouts from Mansfield Ohio returned home after an epic multistate bicycle trip.

Sunday, July 20, 1919. Romance on the convoy, violence on the border.

Section no. 1, The International Religious Congress of Triumph, The Church and Kingdom of God in Christ, lasting fifty days beginning July 20, 1919, Elder E.D. Smith, Apostle.  July 20, 1919.

Today was a Sunday, and the Motor Transport Convoy took the day off, or perhaps more accurately were taken into the homes of residents of Chicago Heights, Illinois.

The Goodyear Band joined the convoy at this point, as travelers who would presumably provide music.  I'm curious as to what the soldiers on the convoy thought of the extra, non military, non mechanic guests.

Perhaps they were welcome. The fifteen piece band, sent by Goodyear president Frank Seiberling, would ride in a five ton Packard which was equipped with Goodyear tires.   The tires were cutting edge technology at the time and the Packard had been driven across the continent, so equipped, before, so this was the proven vehicle's second trip.

Also on this day newsreel cameramen showed up and filmed the convoy.  Perhaps all the excitement contributed to a certain romantic atmosphere, as Pvt. Philip Fred Golick married Miss Mabel Ruth Kelley on this day. The couple had met in Bucyrus the prior Tuesday and she'd been following the convoy since.  A county clerk was found to issue a marriage license on Sunday and an Episcopal minister preformed the service.

A romantic atmosphere was not developing between the United States and Mexico, where things were again growing tense.  A private American vessel had been attacked and it was ramping up tensions between the two countries, which were already pretty tense as it was.

Saturday, July 19, 1919. South Bend to Chicago Heights, 80 miles in 9 hours. The Red Summer hits Washington D. C.

July 19, 1919, Saturday Evening Post.

The Motor Transport Convoy suffered an accident, at least the second it experienced to date, the first one that we have record of being a vehicle v. vehicle collision. This one saw a Dodge truck hit a pedestrian, who was injured as a result.

The Riker truck mentioned was likely a Liberty Truck.

The Red Summer spread to Washington D. C. on this Saturday, with riots breaking out and lasting for several days.

Servicemen, probably National Guardsmen, confronting a black resident of Washington D. C. during the riots.

The underlying cause of the riots was the evolution of the city as the Great Migration, amplified during the war, continued to bring large numbers of black residents into or on the outskirts of the city, which in fact was basically a southern city to start with in some ways.  In 1919 the city remained 75% white, but black migration was occurring and laws that had restricted black residence in the nation's capitol were retreating.  The reaction on the part of the white citizenry was not welcoming and the newspapers, including the Washington Post, were hostile to black residents.  On this occasion a false story reporting that a black man had raped a white woman commenced the riots in which servicemen participated and which the newspapers fanned, the Post even urging vigilante action.

National Guardsmen patrolling by motorcycle.

The lack of police protection ultimately caused black citizens to take up arms to protect themselves and their neighborhoods and the riot took on the character, to some degree, of a low grade street battle by the 21st. The number of people killed is unknown, but the white casualties outnumbered the black ones, which is unusual for these events.  President Wilson called out the National Guard, which the city oddly has even though its not a state, to put down the violence, but a torrential rain storm ultimately operated to do that to a greater degree than the troops did.

The Big Picture: 5th Co., 161st Depot Brigade, Camp Grant, Ill., Lieut. C.A. Geers commanding., Sept. 24, 1918

Entrance to United States Government War Exhibition, September 8, 1918, one quarter of a million people in attendance

Aerial view, Camp Grant, Illinois, 1000 ft. elevation. March 21, 1918.

Camp Grant, Rockford, Illinois. November 12, 1917.

Officers of the 86th Division and part of 92nd Division, Camp Grant, Illinois. November 7, 1917.

Camp Grant, Illinois, officers. November 5, 1917.

Camp Grant, Illinois' welcome of Governor Louden. November 1, 1917.

The Big Picture: [October 27, 1917] Birds eye view of Great Lakes Naval Training Station, October 27, 1917.

Camp Grant, Rockford, Illinois. September 19, 1917.

1917 Matoon Illionois Tornado