Tuesday, November 11, 1924. Armistice Day.

 

Last edition:

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

Labels: 1920s, 1924, Chicago Illinois, China, Chinese Warlord Era, Crime, Henry Cabot Lodge, Mexico, Plutarco Elías Calles, Politics, Republic of China, Sun Yat-sen

Sunday, October 8, 1899. Marines take Noveleta, Luzon.

Marines captured Noveleta, Luzon.

The Marines had not yet taken on their modern form, and remained very much attached to the Navy at this point in time.  It would not really be until World  War One when the Marine Corps as we currently imagine it would start to form.

Last edition:

Monday, October 2, 1899. An action in the Philippines.

Labels: 1890s, 1899, Army, Clothing, Kansas National Guard, Philippine Insurrection, Weapons

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

The Sultanate of Nejd, led by King Abdulaziz ibn Saud, attacked the Kingdom of Hejaz, ruled by King Hussein bin Ali, British ally during World War One.

Flag of the joint kingdom of The Kingdom of Hejaz and Nejd, which would become Saudi Arabia.

Hejaz contained Mecca and the city of Jeddah.  Citizens of Jejd had been barred from making the pilgrimage to Mecca, bringing on the war, and the thereby the birth of Saudi Arabia., at least as an immediate causa belli.  A more significant one may have been the end of British subsidies to both royal houses, removing restraint on both of them, and in the case of Hejaz, the ability to bribe other Arab principalities.

The Reichstag accepted the London protocol of the Dawes plan.

Last edition:

Thursday, August 28, 1924. The August Uprising.

Labels: 1920s, 1924, actors and actresses, August Uprising, California, California (Los Angeles), Ethnicities, Georgia, USSR

Wednesday, August 27, 1924. Color photos over the wire.

AT&T announced that a color photograph had been successfully transmitted from Chicago to New York via Wirephoto.

The German built, due to reparations, USS Los Angeles made its first flight.

The Lost Angeles over Berlin, 1924.

She was the longest serving rigid airship, serving, with interruptions, until 1939.

Last edition:

Monday, August 25, 1924. Ratifying the Dawes Plan and questionable movies.

Labels: 1920s, 1924, 1924 at the Movies, Camping, Dawes Plan, Diplomacy, German Weimar Republic, Movies, Politics

Saturday, August 16, 1924. Killers.

European powers agreed to adopt the Dawes Plan, save for ratification of their parliaments.

The body of Italian opposition leader Giacomo Matteotti was found in a shallow ditch about 14 miles  outside of Rome.

Boris Savinkov, Russian terrorist with the paramilitary wing of the outlawed Socialist Revolutionary Party, was arrested in Minsk by the Soviet secret police agency OGPU, because your opponents murdered is a murderer, while your own is a hero, apparently.

He was an anti communist and an admirer of Mussolini.

The Saturday magazines were out.

Judge had a pretty serious cover:

Last edition:

Thursday, August 14, 1924. Coolidge accepts.

Labels: 1920s, 1924, Calvin Coolidge, China, Disaster, the spoken word, Weather

Sunday, August 3, 1924. German memorial day.

Germany observed its first memorial day.  

German communists disrupted a noontime two minutes of silence, with German police moving in to restore order.

Jewish Berliners held a separate service in the memory of Jewish German soldiers who were killed during the war, as a Jewish cleric was not allowed to deliver a prayer at the Reichstag ceremony held that day.

Soviet agents raided Stolpce Poland in a mission to free two members of the Communist Party of Western Belarus.  Seven Polish policemen were killed but the Soviet mission failed and would cause a reassessment of such attacks.

An American plane had made the leap to Iceland in the around the world flight:

It was a Sunday paper, so it had some human interest ones, including the following one, which I"m not sure I grasp:

King Amanullah Khan of Afghanistan, declared a jihad against six tribes who had commenced the Khost rebellion.

Ja'far al-Askari resigned as Prime Minister of Iraq in protest of the Constituent Assembly voting to ratify the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty approving the terms of the Mandate for Mesopotamia and making Iraq a British protectorate.

British novelist Joseph Conrad died.

Last edition:

Wednesday, July 24, 1924. Around the world flight reaches the Orkneys.

Labels: 1920s, 1924, Army, First Around The World Flight, Orkney Islands, U.S. Air Force, United Kingdom

Wednesday, July 16, 1924. First news story on Big Foot to go nationwide.

BIG HAIRY INDIANS BACK OF APE TALE – MOUNTAIN DEVILS’ MYSTERY GROWS DEEPER – GIANTS SAID TO ROAM HILLS – SHAGGY CREATURES KILL GAME BY HYPNOTISM, IT IS SAID – VENTRILOQUISM IS USED – REDMEN’S EDITOR AT HOQUIAM GIVES THEORY OF REPORTED ATTACK AT SPIRIT LAKE

BY JORG TOTSGI, CLALLAM TRIBE, Editor of the Real American, Hoquiam Washington.

HOQUIAM, Wash., July 15. — (Special.) — The big apes reported to have bombarded a shack of prospectors at Mount St. Helens, are recognized by Northwestern Indians as none other than the Seeahtik Tribe of Indians. Seeahtik is a Clallam pronunciation. All other tribes of the Northwest pronounce it Seeahtkeh. Northwestern Indians have long kept the history of the Seeahtik Tribe a secret, because the tribe is the skeleton in the Northwestern Indians’ closet. Another reason the Indians have never divulged the existence of this tribe is that the Northwestern Indians know the white man would not believe the stories regarding the Seeahtik Tribe.

These facts are corroborated by Henry Napoleon, Clallam Tribe; L.J. James, Lummi Tribe; George Hyasman, Quinault Tribe.

GAME KILLED BY HYPNOTISM

Every Indian, especially of the Puget Sound Tribes, is familiar with the history of these strange giant Indians, as they are sometimes referred to by local Indians. Shaker Indians of Northwestern Oregon, who attended the Shakers’ convention on the Skokomish Reservation on Hood Canal last year, related to the writer their experience with the Seeahtik Indians.

Oregon and Washington Indians agree that the Seeahtik Indians are not less than seven feet tall and some have been seen that were fully eight feet in height. They have hairy bodies like a bear. This is to protect them from the cold as they live entirely in the mountains. They kill their game entirely by hypnotism. They have great supernatural powers. They also have the gift of ventriloquism, and have deceived many ordinary Indians by throwing their voices.

SEVERAL LANGUAGES USED

These Indians talk, beside the bear language of the Clallam Tribe and the bird language. The writer was told by Oregon Indians during his research work among them last year that the Seeahtik Tribe can imitate any bird of the Northwest, especially the bluejay, and that they have a very keen sense of smell. Oregon Indians at times have been greatly humiliated by the Seeahtiks’ vulgar sense of humor.

The Seeahtiks play practical jokes upon them and steal their Indian Women. Sometimes an Indian Woman comes back. More often she does not, and it is even said by some Northwestern Indians that they have a strain of the Seeahtik blood in them. Oregon and Washington Indians differ in regard to the Seeahtiks’ home. The Oregon Indians assert they made their home in or near Mount Rainier, while the Puget Sound Indians say they live in the heart of the wilderness at Vancouver Island, B.C.

“BIG BEAR” SPEAKS

Henry Napoleon of the Clallam Tribe came upon one of the members of the Seeahtik Tribe while out hunting on Vancouver Island. He related this story to the writer:

“I had been visting relatives near Duncan, B.C. and while there I had been told many stories of the Seeahtiks by the Cowichan Tribe of British Columbia and warned by them not to go too far into the wilderness. However, in following a buck I had wounded I went in farther than I expected. It was at twilight when I came across an animal that I believed to be a big bear but as I aimed at him with my gun he looked and spoke to me in my own tongue. He was about seven feet tall and his body was very hairy. As he invited me to sit down, he told me that I had come upon him unaware and that his mind had been projected to distant relatives of his, otherwise he (Mr. Napolean) would never have been seen.”

STRANGE MEDICINE USED

“After we talked for some time he invited me to the Seeahtik’s home. Though it was now dark, yet the giant Indian followed the trail very easily; then we began an underground trail and after hours of travel we came to a large cave, which he said was the home of his people, and that they lived during the winter in the different caves on Vancouver Island.

He also told me that the reason they were not seen very much was because they had a strange medicine that they rubbed over their bodies so that it made them invisible and that combined with their wha-ktee-nee-sing or hypnotic powers, made them very strong Tamanaweis men. They also told me that they could talk almost any Indian language of the Northwest. The next day they led me out and just at twilight I came out of the underground trail and they accompanied me to within a mile of the Indian village I was staying at.”

TRIBE HELD HARMLESS

The Seeahtik Tribe is harmless if left alone. However, if one of their members is injured or killed they generally take 12 lives for the one. This the Indians of the Northwest have learned, and even though the Seeahtik Tribe steal all their dried meat or salmon, or even steal their women, the Puget Sound Indians will not try to retaliate, for once the Clallam Tribe in righteous indignation captured a young man of the Seeahtik Tribe at Seabeck Wash., and took him across the Hood Canal to Brinnon, where other Clallam Indians were camped.

Kwainchtun, the writer’s own grandfather, kept telling the Clallams to be careful of the Seeahtik’s supernatural powers, but he was only laughed at. It was later told by Kwainchtun, that while they were still 20 yards from the shore the young Seeahtik made a mighty leap and immediately made for the mountains.

CLALLAMS ARE KILLED

Kwainchtun warned his people that they should move but again he was laughed at. That very night the Seeahtik Tribe came down and killed every Clallam there but Kwainchtun, who had moved his family across the canal. The Oregon and Washington Indians of the present believed that the Seeahtik Tribe was just about extinct, as it was 15 years ago since their tracks were last seen and recognized at Brinnon, Wash., where the giant Indians came every Fall to fish for salmon in the Brinnon River.

However, Fred Pope of the Quinault Tribe and George Hyasman were fishing for steelheads about 15 miles up the Quinault River, one day in September four years ago, when they were visited by Seeahtik Indians. Mr. Hyasman said he heard and recognized their peculiar whistling before they approached us and in the morning we found that they had stolen all the steelheads we had caught. Therefore, the Indians of the Northwest after reading an account of the “big apes” attacking a prospector’s shack immediately recognized the Indians referred to in The Oregonian as the Seeahtiks, or giant Indians.

Some Indians of the Northwest say that during the process of evolution, when the Indian was changing from animal to man that the Seeahilk did not absorb the “Tamanaweis” or soul power, and thus he became an anomaly in the Indian’s process of evolution.

Their sence of humor is vulgar and obscene as many ordinary Indians have told the writer, therefore, the Northwestern Indian is ashamed of this tribe, which is generally referred to as the skeleton in the Northwestern Indian’s closet.

The Oregonian, July 16, 1924.

The story was then picked up by the Associated Press. 

US flyers flew from Paris to London.

The London Conference opened to address the Dawes Plan.

Last edition:

Tuesday, July 15, 1924. The Free State frees prisoners.

Labels: 1920s, 1924, Army, British Empire, Diplomacy, Ireland, Irish Civil War, Irish Free State, Italian Empire, Somalia

Monday, July 14, 1924. Siberian revolt.

Forest fires in Washington, California, Idaho and British Columbia killed 35 people.

The Tungus Republic was declared within the Khabarovsk Krai and part of the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union in Siberia.  Armed rebels against the Soviet state had been in action since May 10.

Flag of the Tungus Republic.

U.S. Army aviators reached Paris on their transglobal flight.

Alvey A. Adee, Deputy U.S. Secretary of State from 1886 until June 30, 1924, died at age 81.  He was the model for the fictional detective, Nero Wolfe.

On Bastille Day for 1924, a monument to French African soldiers who served in World War One was dedicated in Reims. The Germans destroyed it during World War Two.

Last edition:

Sunday, July 13, 1924. End of the occupation of the Dominican Republic.

Labels: 1920s, 1924, Banana Wars, Dominican Republic

Monday, May 19, 1924. Bonuses and Tick Fever.

Congress overrode President Coolidge's veto of the World War Adjusted Compensation Act.

I can't say that act was a big surprise.

An image was transmitted by telephone line for the first time.  Over two hours, 15 photographic images were transmitted by AT&T from Cleveland to New York City.

Korean nationalist tried, but failed, to assassinate Japanese Governor General of Korea Makoto Saito.  The attempt was a clumsy one, involving firing on Saito's boat from the Chinese side of the Yalu.

Dr. Roscoe R. Spencer, after giving himself some time prior his own vaccine for Rocky Mountain Tick Fever, injected himself with "a large does of mashed wood ticks" and did not die, proving that the vaccine worked.

Today it would inspire a bunch of countervailing extreme theories.

Turkey and the United Kingdom failed to reach an accord on the Mosul Question, i.e., who owned the region.

The Royal Australian Air Force completed the first aerial circumnavigation of the continent with a Fairey IIID.

Last prior edition:

Sunday, May 18, 1924. Kīlauea

1920s, 1924, 1924 Olympics, Geology, Hawaii, Olympics, rugby

Thursday, May 15, 1924. "Patriotism, which is bought and paid for is not patriotism."

Calvin Coolidge vetoed the World War Adjusted Compensation Act (the Bonus Bill), noting "Patriotism, which is bought and paid for is not patriotism."

Last prior edition:

Wednesday, May 14, 1924. Pondering pacifism, charges of communism and executions.

1940s, 1944, Albania, boats and ships, Catholic, Collaborators, German Kriegsmarine, German Luftwaffe, German SS, Italy, Operation Diadem, The Holocaust, Vichy France, World War Two

Observations on a murder.

Earlier this week Robert Maher Jr., age 14, was murdered by Dominique Antonio Richard Harris, born in 2008, and Jarreth Joseflee Sabastian Plunkett, born in 2009.  The killing seems to have been planned for several days prior to the assault in the Eastridge Mall that lead to Maher's death.  Plunkett did the actual killing, with Harris slamming Maher to the ground beforehand.  

The technical origin of the fight was that Maher had called Plunkett and Harris "freaks" during Spring Break (something that didn't exist when I was in school) and that enraged the two of them.  He called them that has they went into a porta potty at a local park together, which is odd, but insulting them wasn't very smart.  This raises the specter of the Matthew Shepherd killing, which had elements which never really seemed to be accurately reported.  More likely, however, in the exaggerated juvenile maleness of the rootless and (I'll bet) fatherless mid teenage boy, that was an implied insult that had to be addressed.

Maher never seems to have gotten in a single punch in the assault.  The two assailants, who had stolen their weapons along with Red Bulls and candy that day, acted in such a fashion that, whether Harris intended it or not, gave Plunkett the opportunity to viciously knife him.

There's no reason here, we'd note, to use the classic "alleged" assault language. The two teenage boys killed the third. They're going to be tried as adults. They ought o be put away, forever.

But what else does this event tell us?

Casper's a rough town.

One thing that I saw soon after the murder was a comment by somebody on Facebook noting how they have moved from New Mexico, where their son had been knifed in a fight, to Casper under the belief that this was a quite safe town.

In another context, we've already spoken about immigrants into the state being delusional about it, and this is one such instance. Casper has never been a nice town.

Casper was founded in 1887, and it was violent from day one to some degree.  It was, however, originally a rial stop in cattle company, although it always had its eye on oil.  It was the jumping off spot for the invaders in the Johnson County War, which at least gives it a bit of a footnote in that violent event.  Casper's first murder occured on Saturday, September 20, 1890, when bartender John Conway shot and killed unarmed A. J. Tidwell, an FL Cattle Company cowboy in Lou Polk's dance house, following a round of fisticuffs.  The blood has been flowing ever since.

Casper really took a turn towards the wild side of life starting in World War One.  1917, as we've addressed here before, is when the Great War Oil boom really took off, and with it came a lot of men and a lot of vice. One of the things that created was Casper's infamous Sandbar district, in which prostitution was carried out openly and prohibition flaunted.  Repeated efforts to close it down utterly failed, until finally a 1970s vintage urban renewal project (yikes, the government taking a hand!") destroyed it.

With the booze and the prostitutes came murders (and no doubt disease) but it went on and on.  By and large, however, as odd as it may seem, people just acclimated themselves to it.  You got used to a town having a red-light district, and as there were some legitimate businesses in it, you'd go into it for legitimate reasons.  As a boy, we walked into the Sandbar in the early 70s to go to the War Surplus Store, which nobody seemed to think was a big deal. The America and Rialto movie theaters were just yards from the district, and the district's bars lapped up out of it into downtown Casper, with some of them being places were to walk around, rather than past, if at all possible.

Casper had quasi ethnic gangs when I was young, and at least in the schools that I attended, that was a factor of attending them.  You were careful about it.  It was impossible to get through junior high and high school without having been in a fight.  Most fights were hand to hand, but a teacher was knifed when I was in junior high breaking up a knife fight, so not all of them were.  In high school we all carried pocket knives and none of us were supposed to.  They were for protection.  While I was in high school, one of our classmates, who had been held back more than once, was killed outside a bar in a shooting, the result of a fight he provoked, which resulted in an ethnic riot at the school in which shots were fired.  The father of one of our classmates was killed by our classmate after he turned his molesting attention on her sister, having molested her for years.  Neither of these crimes resulted in prosecution.

The point is, for those who are shocked by the arrival of violence in Casper. . .well, it's been here since 1890.

The abandoned males

I keep waiting to hear the circumstances of the murderers' family lives and have not read any yet.  I'm sure it'll come out as the story advances.  While It's dangerous to speculate, there are reasons to suspect a few things, one being the killers likely had no fathers in the picture.   We're going to hear at some point that they were raised by their mothers, or in irregular homes.  I could of course be wrong, but I'll bet not.

Fatherless males are a major societal problem.  Fatherless males that are raised in an environment of sexual license are an even bigger problem.  Indeed, they're often fatherless for that reason in the first place, and they'll go on to spawn further fatherless children, who grow up in poverty and with little societal direction.  A minority will find that structure in the Old Law, the law before the law, which reaches back to tribalism in the extreme.  It's in the DNA.

The Old Law demanded death for transgressors too, something modern society has moved away from in large measure.  I've already heard it suggested that Harris and Plunkett should receive death, but due to their ages, I think that not very likely.  It'd be ill-advised, no matter what.  But tribalism spawns more tribalism.  The real personalities are lost of both the assailants and the victims.

Friday, March 31, 1944. Japanese command disaster.

Commander in Chief of the Japanese Combined Fleets, Admiral Mineichi Koga (古賀 峯一) was killed when his plane, a Kawanishi H8K ("Emily") flying boat, crashed during a typhoon between Palau and Davao while he was overseeing the withdrawal of the Combined Fleet from its Palau headquarters.  His second in command, Vice Admiral Shigeru Fukudome (福留 繁) went down in a separate plain off of off Cebu and captured by Filipino guerrillas.  As a result of that, Koga's battle plans associated with Palau and the defense of the Marianas, Operation Z, were captured by the Allies.

Fukodome, left, Koga, right.  1944.

Koga's death was kept secret until May, due to difficulties agreeing to a successor.

Fukudome survived the war, although he was tried for war crimes and found negligent association with the killing of two American airmen in Singapore. He was generally cooperative with the Allies after the war.  His prison sentence was brief, and he was an advisor to the Japanese government on the establishment of the Japanese Self Defense Force.  He died in 1971 at the age of 80.

Operation Desecrate One concluded.

The Red Army took Ochakov.

Generaloberst Georg Lindemann took command of German Army Group North, which had been commanded by Model.

Operation Ukrainian Committee was carried out by the Polish Home Army.  It saw the elimination of the small collaborationist Ukrainian Central Committee, which was active in recruiting Ukrainians for the SS Galicia unit.

The Central Committee was headed by a Ukrainian military refugee who had lived in Poland since 1923.  In a way, this shows the complicated nature of the war in the East, and of the post-war East, the "Bloodlands", in general.  Poland had claimed large chunks of Ukraine after World War One, and while it didn't keep all that it claimed in Ukraine and Belarus, it kept a lot of it.  Ukraine and Poland fought a war immediately after World War One over the issue.  Ukraine and Poland's struggle against each other, however, would soon be consumed by their mutual struggle with the Soviet Union, which would result in Poland being absorbed into the Communist state, but Poland avoiding it.  Poland then became a place of refuge for Ukrainians struggling against the USSR.

With the German and Soviet invasion of Poland in 1940, Poland was put in a desperate situation and ceased to exist, according to their enemies.  The Polish civilian death rate was the highest in Europe during the war, with regular Poles subject to German murders.  Ukrainians had suffered massively from the USSR's genocidal policies aimed at it in the 1920s and 1930s, and accordingly many Ukrainians aw the Germans as liberators.  The Germans saw no future for an independent Ukraine, but Ukrainian organizations sprang up under the belief that the Germans would grant them the same, with Ukrainian partisan movements also developing, some of which supported the USSR, and some of which opposed the USSR and the Germans, as well as the Poles on Ukrainian territory, the latter being a revival, more or less, of the Russo Ukrainian War in a weird way.

All of this continues to have overtones to the present day, with the Poles supporting democratic Ukraine in its war against Russia, but not really having forgotten the earlier Polish Ukrainian bloodletting.  Russian claims that Ukrainians are Nazis, which they are not, recalls the earlier pro Nazi movements in wartime Ukraine, not all of which have really been disavowed by modern Ukrainians.

The Disney short Donald Duck and the Gorilla was released.

Last prior edition:

Thursday, March 30, 1944. Operation Desecrate One

1940s, 1944, Adolf Hitler, boats and ships, Catholic Legion of Decency, Disease, German Army, Imperial Japanese Navy, Operation Desecrate One, Palau, Personalities, Red Army, U.S. Navy, Von Manstein, World War Two

Monday, March 24, 1924. Aid for the German poor.

The House of Representatives voted to appropriate $10,000,000 for food for poor women and children in Germany.

Last prior edition:

Sunday, March 23, 1924. Noise.

1920s, 1924, Cartoons, Fascism, Italy, Mussolini

Tuesday, March 18, 1924. The high water mark of the Irish Mutiny.

Forty armed Irish soldiers assembled at a hotel in Dublin to plan the next move in the Irish Army Mutiny.  A possible coup d'état against the Irish government was on the table.  

Loyal Irish troops surrounded the hotel and there was a standoff.  The result was that the young Irish government responded by securing the resignation of Irish Army Council members, along with that of Defense Minister Richard Mulcahy.

The mutiny was of the oldest type, an army rebelling for itself.  Mulcahy would go on to a long career in Irish government, including as Minister of Education.

A soldier bonus bill was passed in the US.

St. Mark's is a major downtown church in Casper today.

St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Casper Wyoming

This traditionally styled Episcopal Church includes the office buildings for the church a meeting room, kitchen and a day school, so the interior space used for services is smaller than the large exterior might suggest.

The view featured on the bottom photograph could not be seen until recently, as a large house once stood in what is now an open area. The church is across the street from the former St. Anthony's Catholic School, which has moved to a new location across town. The church was built in 1924.

It's stunning to think it was built for $120,000.

The Douglas Fairbanks film, The Thief of Baghdad, was released.

Alice Longworth, the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, was caught by the paparazzi on the streets of Washington D.C.