Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Today -100: July 30, 1926: If Catholics, scarfaces...

Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Today -100: July 30, 1926: If Catholics, scarfaces...: The Mexican government is expecting trouble when the anti-Catholic Church law comes into effect. Catholics are ordered disarmed, newspaper ...

Last edition:

Thursday, July 29, 1926. Fascist mindsets.

Thursday, July 15, 1926. Aragon Ballroom and Belgian inflation.

The Aragon Ballroom opened in Chicago.

King Albert of Belgium was given six months of dictatorial powers in an effort to address inflation.

The USSR's Central Committee approved a plan to resettle 570,400 Jewish families from the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR to the Crimea.

Harold P. Sheldon, Chief U.S. Game Warden, on this date.

Last edition:

Wednesday, July 14, 1926. A new around the world record.

Labels: 1910s, 1913, 1920s, 1926, Aircraft

Tuesday, May 9, 1876. Windy City.

Chicago was referred to as The Windy City for the first known time, in an article by the Cincinnati Enquirer. The headline was:

THAT WINDY CITY. Some Freaks of the Last Chicago Tornado.

Locally at least, Casper Wyoming is sometimes called "Wind City".

Ueno Park in Tokyo was dedicated.

Nikolaus Otto working with Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach started the world’s first internal-combustion engine that efficiently burned fuel directly in a piston chamber.

Last edition:

Sunday, May 7, 1876. First Black Hills sermon, maybe.

Labels: 1870s, 1876, Black Hills, Christianity, Corps of Discovery, Protestant, religion, South Dakota, South Dakota (Custer)

Saturday, January 10, 1976. The passing of Howlin' Wolf.

By Eatonland - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=132882253

Chester Arthur Burnett, known to blues fans as Howlin' Wolf, died at age 65 from complications from kidney surgery.

Burnett was born in Mississippi and was a protégé of Delta blues musician Charley Patton in the 1930s.  He served in the Army as a cavalryman at the beginning of World War Two but was abused by his NCOs upon being reassigned to an electronics role as he was illiterate.  He was discharged early and relocated to Chicago, where he became one of the founders of Chicago blues.

Legendary for his booming voice, he was an unusual bluesman for his time as he did well economically, trusting his earnings to his wife.  His band members received health insurance as part of their compensation.

Last edition:

Thursday, January 8, 1976. First Appearance.

Labels: 1970s, 1976, cartoo

Friday, October 23, 1925. Stray dog, beer and Billy Mitchell.

Dog: 

Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Today -100: October 23, 1925: Of invasions, discre...: War of the Stray Dog News: Greece invades Bulgaria, occupying posts and shelling villages (well, at least one village). Greece, claiming Bu...

Billy Mitchell's troubles hit the front page. 

Beer in Chicago did as well.

Delegates to a Congregationalist convention posed for a photograph.

Last edition:

Thursday, October 22, 1925: Follyology?

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Blog Mirror, Bulgaria, Greece, John Singer Sargent, Monarchy, pornography, Whatever It Is I'm against it

Blog Mirror: In Anti-Catholic Crusade, Trump's ICE Targets Holy Mass in Chicago

 

In Anti-Catholic Crusade, Trump's ICE Targets Holy Mass in Chicago

What an Anti American Idiot.

 

Oh, the irony.  Trump portrays himself as war loving buffoon Lt. Colonel Kilgore from Apocalypse Now, an anti war movie depicting the American military as inept and which itself is about a war that Trump's shin splints kept him out of, and which the US lost.

Heart of Darkness indeed.

Wednesday, July 8, 1925. Riffian assault.

Riffians launched an offensive against Fes.

Ralph Samuelson became the first person to perform a ski jump on water.

Antonio Genna of the Genna crime family became the third member of the Genna brothers to be shot to death in less than two months in the ongoing war with Capone's North Side Gang.

Pioneering photographer Clarence Hudson White of the Photo-Secession movement died.  He photographed dreamy female portraits, including nudes which debatably crossed into pornography, emphasizing, perhaps, an ongoing and developing problem in the age of film.

Last edition:

Thursday, July 2, 1925. Nikolai Goitsyn executed.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Communism, Monarchy, Russia, USSR

Monday, January 12, 1925. Ordering Thompsons.

The North Side Gang attempted a drive by assassination of Al Capone, with the would be killers armed with Thompson submachine guns.

Capone was inside a nearby restaurant at the time, conducting business, and only his bodyguard was wounded. The event did cause him to order Thompsons himself, which were not restricted from purchase in any fashion at the time.

These would have been the M1921 Thompson, not the M1928 Thompson that is more familiar to most people, although telling the difference between the two at a glance is difficult.  They were extremely expensive.

Period Thompson advertisement.  Thompson marketed them to police and for self defense, but of course at the price, they weren't economically attractive to regular people, and they were to criminal organizations, as well as to the police.

Last edition:

Sunday, January 11, 1925. Jargon of the Juveniles, Times Signal, Zanesville.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Teenagers, The Roaring Twenties, the spoken word

Monday, November 10, 1924. Henry Cabot Lodge passes.

He was a giant of American politics.

The Tientsin Conference opened in China between warlords Zhang Zuolin, Feng Yuxiang, and Lu Yongxiang.   Former president Sun Yat-sen, the ongoing head of the Kuomintang and the government sitting in Canton, organized the meeting to discuss the ongoing civil war.

Ranch property belonging to Mexican president elect Plutarco Elías Calles was expropriated by the state in accordance with Mexican agrarian laws.

Chicago mobster Dean O'Banion, leader of Chicago's North Side Gang, was gunned down in his florist shop, making the cover of The Casper Herald.  His murder was nearly inevitable as he'd grown crosswise with one of the Italian mob families in Chicago.

Last edition:

Saturday, November 8, 1924. Declaration from Honolulu.

Labels: 1920s, 1924, Honolulu Hawaii, Japanese Empire, Korea, Syngman Rhee

Monday, February 11, 1924. Booting Denby

The Senate began to move against Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby.

The vote was 47 to 34 to remove Denby, which would actually be something that Coolidge, not Congress, could do.

The Negro Sanhedrin, an attempt by the City of Chicago to have an all race congress to address racial issues, convened with representatives of trade unions, civic groups and fraternal organizations. The specific goal was to devise a program to protect the rights of African American tenant farmers.

Sunday, October 17, 1943. The Burma Railway completed.

The German surface raider Michel was torpedoed and sunk off of Japan by the USS Tarpon.  On the same day the German's lost the U-540, U-631 and U-841 in the Atlantic.

The Burma Railway, constructed with Asian slave labor and Allied POWs, was completed.

Tamils working on the bridge.

The railway may be best remembered today due to the fairly inaccurate movie, The Bridge On the River Kwai, which is nonetheless a great movie.

POW illustration of the construction of Bridge 227 across the Kwai.

A second concrete bridge replaced the original wooden bridge shortly after its construction. It was destroyed by the RAF in February 1945.  Shortly after the war, most of the original railway was dismantled and only the original 81 miles remains in use.

The Third Moscow Conference begins.

It would begin to work on the post-war world.

Chicago began running its subway for the first time.

Saturday, Sepember 22, 1923. Henning Hotel Robbed.

A major raid in Chicago on speakeasies resulted in the jails being filled to capacity.

Crime was a major story in Casper as well:

And the Governor of Oklahoma caught a dragon.

The Navy's ZR-1 dirigible flew over Washington, D. C.

Sunday, April 22, 1923. Agrarian rise.

The British commenced their occupation of Rawandiz, in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Kurdish city is near the Turkish and Iranian borders.  The United Kingdom was occupying the country under a League of Nations Mandate.  The border was contested by the Turks, who had occupied the city only a year prior, which motivated the British to garrison the town.

The Bulgarian Agrarian National Union won the vast majority of the seats of the country's Parliament.  The agrarian party is the only such party to come to power by a majority of votes being cast for it outright.

The party was a founding member of the International Agrarian Bureau and part of a strong rising agrarian movement in Eastern Europe. The movement would eventually spread to Western Europe as well, but the rise of Communism and World War Two would effectively destroy it and its influence waned. The Bureau dissolved in 1971.

The Italian fascists cut 1B lire from the country's budget by cutting civil service jobs, leaving the deficit in the budget at 3B for that year.

A bomb exploded at Comiskey Park in Chicago, but didn't injure anyone.  Nobody was arrested from the explosion, but it was suspected that it was the result of the hiring of non-union labor to point the exterior of the ballpark.  

I don't know if it's related, but owner Charles Comiskey was notoriously cheap.

"Queen of the Pinups" Bettie Page was born on this day in 1923.  Page was a good student, but from a broken home.  After several attempts to get her feet on the ground she turned to modeling in her late 20s and rapidly became, by the early 1950s an infamous pornographic model and actress and one of the few individuals in that line of work whose name was well known.  In 1958, she experienced a radical conversion to Christianity, stopped her pornographic career, and devoted the rest of her life to her conversion, although she ended up marrying and divorcing three times in her life. Her divorces prevented her from being accepted in a new desired career of Christian missionary to Africa.  She was subpoenaed to testify in front of a Congressional committee at the time investigating the pornography industry at a time when there still remained sufficient public will to attempt to do something about it, an era that has now very much faded.

In making her switch, she dropped out of the public eye but oddly was subject to a large scale revival in interest in the 1980s, which is the only reason I've heard of her.  She was the subject of a major biography at the time, and I can recall reading a detailed review of it in The New Republic, which used to have fantastic book reviews.  In the intervening thirty years, all sorts of rumors had spring up about her, even though she remained alive at the time.  About as much as can reasonably be said is that she struggled with her mental health and had abandoned the life that brought her to a certain section of the public eye.  She shares that trait with many in the industry, including many Playboy models, which in fact she was one of.

Dying in 2008, Page is a sad tale of a very smart person whose early life slid into vice with grotesque and tragic results, but also one of recovery and redemption, if not full recovery.  It's interesting that the public focus was on her only when she was deep into depravity, and then again late in life when a pornified culture wanted to focus on her earlier image.

Of some interest, Page and Marilyn Monroe took the same path, at almost the same time, although Monroe's turn to modeling, including nude modeling, happened at a significantly earlier age.  Both women were the products of broken homes, although Monroe's was significantly more broken.  Monroe, moreover, was just a teenager when she was first a true model, and it was not until the late 1940s that she was photographed nude.  Ironically, Monroe was able to start a career in acting before the news of her nude photographs broke, and while she was Playboy's first (unwilling) model, she was able to escape the immediate implications of it due to the intervention of Life magazine, which ran the same photographs before Playboy as glamour photos in order to save her career.  Page, in contrast, began a rapid descent after first consenting to be photographed.  They were almost bookends in a certain story in the evolution of American morality and the portrayal of women.  Neither of them was able to really able to escape their early story, although Page certainly lived a much longer life.

Both of them would suggest that something about the Second World War and the culture that followed, including the release of false "studies" that the public was apparently willing to accept at the time had an impact on the culture, assuming that the war was merely conicidental in this story. That seems unlikely.

The Big Picture: Stockyards.

South Omaha, Nebraska.  1908.

Same stockyard, September 1916.

Omaha stockyards, 1914.

Kansas City, 1909

Kansas City, 1907.

Union stockyards, Chicago.  September 1907.

Union stockyards, Chicago.  1899.

Union stockyards, Atlanta Georgia.  January 2, 1909.

Related threads:

Friday Farming: Denver Stockyards, 1939.

August 31, 1919. The Motor Transport Convoy gets a day of rest, no rest in Kiev, turmoil in Chicago

Railroad station, Carson City, 1940.  It likely didn't look much different in 1919.  The man is waiting for the mail, which was moved by train at the time.

On this day in 1919, the Sunday day of rest returned to the command.

It darned near had to. The command was behind, by several days, in its original anticipated schedule, but it had taken it 20 hours across the dust and muck of the Nevada desert to travel the stretch before Carson City, and this on a road that was theoretically a designated highway, although the designation at that time was just that, a designation.  Very little of the Lincoln Highway, as we've seen, was improved in any fashion whatsoever.  There had been problems with teh road the entire way, but after the column hit Nebraska the road became worse with each mile, with Utah's and Nevada's roads being particularly bad.

Speed, of course, in the era was relative. . . .

The command was provided "Union religious services".  I have no idea what that actually means.  General ecumenical perhaps?  Non protestant soldiers with Sunday obligations, which at this time would have largely been Catholics, but perhaps some Greek Orthodox, would have had to hike into town to see what was available for them.

And there was transportation to Hot Springs for bathing, which was no doubt welcome.

And some worked, including the operator of a tractor.

Emblem of the former Socialist Party of America

Meanwhile, in Chicago, a city the convoy  had passed through some weeks earlier, day two of the Socialist Party of America's Emergency National Convention saw the bolting left wing of the party.  The English speaking bolters, on this day, formed the Communist Labor Party in its own convention.

This was addressed a bit yesterday when it was related that the emergency was the rise of a radical, or rather more radical, left wing of the party that was hearing the siren song of Communism.  In this, the US Socialist Party was going through the same struggle that Socialist parties everywhere were.  Nearly all of them had started out as hardcore radical parties, but over the years as their fortunes had risen, their positions became less radical as they moved towards accepting democratic forms of government.  Ironically, World War One, during which it had been supposed that Socialist would take the position that all worker should be united in opposing the war in favor of the solidarity of labor, in fact saw the opposite development and the movement of mainstream Socialist towards accepting representative democracy.  At the same time, all the same parties saw movements within them that were extremely radical.  As this process occurred, these parties split.  In Russia, the split saw the rise of four different Socialist parties, with the Communist Party being the most radical.  Germany saw a succession of splinter parties that eventually saw two parties, the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party emerge.

In the U.S. the Russian Revolution gave rise to the Communist Party of America in May, 1919.  The Socialist Party continued on but radical elements within it were attracted to Communism. The Emergency National Convention was called to address this, and to put an end to it.  By that point, however, the right wing Socialist were a minority in the party.  While they seized control of the convention, they could not keep the left wing from walking out, which it did and on this day, in their own convention, the English speaking radicals formed the Communist Labor Party.  Ironically, the Emergency Session had come about due to the left wing demanding that it occur in order to move the Socialist Party towards Communism.

The Communist Labor Party was not to be long lived as it merged with the Communist Party of America the following year, which then became the Communist Party of the USA.  The Socialist Party of the USA would continue on, with various swings and splinters, until 1972 when it changed its name to the Social Democrats, USA, reflecting the evolution of the party.  Ironically, the Social Democrats have not seemed to really benefit from the current flirtation in some circles in the US with social democracy.  The Communist Party USA still exists as well, with its high water mark really having come during the 1930s.

Elsewhere, the fights brought by Communism saw dramatic events take place in Ukraine where the Whites entered the city, taking it without a fight from the Reds during the Russian Civil War but ending up fighting, slightly, forces of the Ukrainian People's Republic that entered the town simultaneously.

Russian White victory parade on this date in 1919 in Kiev.

The entire event in some ways is emblematic of the confusing nature of the Russian Civil War.

The Ukrainian People's Republic was an Ukrainian effort to create an independent government for the region following the collapse of the Russian Empire and the withdraw of the Germans from the region.  During that period various forces contested for control of the new country with a directorate emerging that had the most support. At the same time, the country found itself facing a Soviet invasion in January 1919 and it also found itself at war with Poland to its west.  To compound matters, White Russian forces contested with the Red Army for control of the region, and Ukrainian Greens sought to bring anarchy to the country, fielding an army of their own.

Under these conditions the independence of Ukraine was unlikely to occur but the region did manage to survive surprisingly long.  On this day the re emergent Whites took Kiev but the Ukrainian government sought to as well, not appreciating the ability of the Whites to move as quickly as they did.  The Whites retained control of the city.  The Ukrainian People's Republic effectively came to an end in 1921 with its territory divided between the Soviet Union and Poland, although it would amazingly maintain a government in exile up until the country was able to form its own government again following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

July 27, 1919. Riots, halts and finishes.

White mob during the Chicago riot.

On this day in 1919 the Red Summer came to Chicago when race riots broke out following a young black man accidentally wondering onto the white area of an informally segregated beach.  This caused whiles to react, resulting in their throwing rocks at black swimmers.  The young man was killed in the process.  Things descended from there with white mobs invading black areas. Authorities were intentionally slow to react. By the time the matter concluded on August 3, 23 blacks had died and 15 whites.

Illinois State Guardsman and Chicago policemen.  Authorities were slow to call out the State Guard, but when 6,000 Guardsmen were deployed to the city the riots came to an end.

The riots in Chicago, which had a large black population and which was a target destination of the Great Migration, are generally regarded as the worst of the Red Summer.  The city had been a powder keg all summer long and when violence erupted, white youth gangs were a major contributor to it, including the Hamburg Athletic Club which the then 17 year old future Mayor Daley was part of (his activities during the riots are unknown).

Ultimately the State of Illinois deployed the Illinois State Guard, deployment of the National Guard being impossible due to its not existing following its conscription during World War One. The State Guard forces, equipped largely with Spanish American War era arms, were not unsubstantial and the slowness in committing them and the lack of cooperation of the City of Chicago in addressing the violence contributed to the disaster.

Given the events, the cartoon run in the Chicago Tribune on this Sunday seems odd.

Cartoon from the Chicago Tribune, July 27, 1919.

Another disaster occurred at St. Ignatius Montana when fire destroyed the town.

In Iowa, the 1919 Motor Transport Convoy took the day off from moving, but not maintenance.

Apparently the quality of the food was becoming a concern.

Progress itself was a concern in the Round the Rim trip of the Air Corps, as reported in the Cheyenne paper. The bomber detailed to the effort had done a nose digger the prior day in Jay, New York.

In France, Firmin Lambot came out the winner in that years Tour de France.

Firmin Lambot

Monday, December 20, 1915. Mystery submarine.

The ANZACs completed their evacuation of Gallipoli.  

A submarine, or not, was found off of Chicago.

ON THIS DAY: THE FOOL KILLER SUBMARINE WAS RECOVERED FROM THE CHICAGO RIVER

Last edition:

Sunday, December 19, 1915. Voice of a sparrow.

Labels: 1910s, 1915, 1960s, 1962, Belgium (Ypres), British Army, entertainment, Greece, Medicine, Music, Personalities, World War One

Sunday, October 3, 1915. The Whale's last game.

Joffre suspended the French offensive at Champagne and ordered the French Army into a battle of attrition.

The Germans retook ground at the Hohenzollern Redoubt.

Russia warned Bulgaria:

Russia Issues Ultimatum to Bulgaria

The Chicago Whales won the Federal League Pennant.

The Federal League ceased its existance thereafter, and it was not only the Whales greatest game, but their last one as well.

An advertiser in the Cheyenne paper had sort of a combined sales pitch and warning.

Last edition:

Saturday, October 2, 1915. Banditry.

Labels: 1840s, 1846, 1910s, 1915, Alaska, Alaska (Wrangell), Art, children, Clothing, Conventionists, Ethnicities, Fortunino Matania, Immigration, Mexican Revolution, Mexico, Navy, Pancho Villa, Queen Victoria

Saturday, July 24, 1915. The Eastland Disaster.

The Eastland capsized in Chicago River drowning 844 people.

The U-36 was sunk in the North Atlantic by the HMS Prince Charles, a Q-ship.

Last edition:

Thursday, July 22, 1915. The Great Retreat.

Labels: 1910s, 1915, Central Powers, Eastern Front, Imperial Russian Army, Poland, The Great Retreat