Tuesday, November 3, 1925. Mitchell's Witness Demands Upheld, New Jersey Ballot, and the evolution of word meaning.

 Mitchell was having some success with his witness list.

And Cowboys Out Our Way illustrated the evolution of a word in a somewhat ironic way.

Last edition:

Saturday, October 31, 1925. Subpoena for Coolidge?

Labels: 1920s, 1924, 1925, 1926, 1930, 1930s, Art, Automobiles, Billy Mitchell, Calvin Coolidge, Dancing, Elk, Food, Great Syrian Revolt, Halloween, Lodging, restaurants and bars, Ruth Eastman, Wyoming (Mills), Wyoming (Salt Creek)

Friday, May 18, 1945. Paying the consequences.

" Five East Massachusetts boys set up an 81mm mortar. Front row, left to right: Pfc. Albert Bartolussi, 56 Dow St., Framingham; S/Sgt. Louis Zompa, 211 Elm Street, Lawrence; rear row, left to right: Armand Lesage Jr., 24 Mason Street, Lawrence; Cpl. Roger L. Leavitt, 113 Franklin Street, Lynn; and Pfc. Leopold Freda, 221 Cheslsea Street, East Boston. They are all fighting with the 306th Regiment, 77th Infantry Division. Okinawa. 18 May, 1945. 306th Infantry Regiment, 77th Infantry Division. Photographer: Roberts, 1st Information and Historical Service"

The U.S. Army took Sugar Loaf Hill on Okinawa.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced the deportation of Fritz Julius Kuhn of the German American Bund to Germany.  His citizenship had been revoked in 1943.  His family had already been repatriated, during the war, to Germany.

The entire series of events would crush him.  He sought to return to t he US without success.  He was arrested and tired by the post war German government.  He died in 1951 a broken figure.

The Chinese Army reoccupies Foochow.

Karl Karl Dönitz issues a statement expressing horror at the Holocaust and distancing the German military from it.

Yeah. . . whatever.

William Joseph Simmons, founder of the second KKK, died at age 65.

Irish Prime Minister Eamon De Velera, announces a $12 million food and clothing aid program for Europe.

Last edition:

Thursday, May 17, 1945. The emerging post war world.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Battle of Manila, Burma, Catholic, Christianity, Communism, Croatia, Denmark, Dutch Army, French Army, Japan, Lebanon, Marshall Islands, Okinawa, Philippines, religion, World War Two, Yugoslavia

Saturday, January 10, 1925. The KKK gets the boot from Kansas.

The Supreme Court of Kansas issued a ruling that the Ku Klux Klan was a corporation organized for profit. This had the result of banning the organization from Kansas as it could not receive a corporate charter there.

The clause of the Treaty of Versailles requiring it to grant most favored nation status to the Allied Powers of World War One expired.

France declined to withdraw form the Rhineland in spite of the negotiated date for that occurring on the baes that Germany, in its view, had violated the disarmament provisions of the treaty.

The British submarine HMH L24 sank after hitting the HMS Resolution, resulting in the loss o fits complete crew of 43.

USMC Sergeant Nelson Huron with his Fita-Fitas guards, Tutuila, Samoa. Leatherneck magazine, Jan. 10, 1925.

Last edition:

Thursday, January 8, 1925. Adding to Custer State Park

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Art, Calvin Coolidge, South Dakota

Saturday, November 1, 1924. Political, and real, warfare.

It was Saturday.

Country Gentleman's cover was a follow-up from the prior week's.

Sultan bin Saqr Al Qasimi II invaded the Emirate of Sharjah resulting in the overthrow of  Khalid bin Ahmad Al Qasimi, who had been the Emir since 1914.

Sharjah was one of the Trucial States under British protectorate status. It is now one of the United Arab Emirates.

He'd find his rule ineffective as he was ignored by Beudoins and Khalid retained support.  He remained the titular rule, however, until his death in 1951.

The Royal Air Force introduced its Meteorological Flight Service.

Éamon de Valera was sentenced to a month in prison for entering Ulster illegally.

Frontier lawman Bill Tilghman, age 70, was shot and killed by drunken prohibition agement Wiley Lynn, who obviously wasn't that dedicated to the cause of his employment. Tilghman would lie in State in the Oklahoma state house.  Lynn would escape conviction, pleading self defense, but was killed in a gunfight in 1932.

The days headline did, and did not, read like today's.

Last edition:

Thursday, October 30, 1924. King maker.

Labels: 1920s, 1924, 1924 Election, Calvin Coolidge, Chinese Warlord Era, Ireland, Irish Army Mutiny, Irish Free State, Personalities

Saturday, October 24, 1874. Domestic terrorists.

 

October 24, 1874 political cartoon by Thomas Nast decrying the alliance between the White League and the Ku Klux Klan in the South.

Last edition:

Monday, September 28, 1874. The Battle of Palo Duro Canyon.

Labels: 1870s, 1874, Army, Battle of Palo Dura Canyon, Cheyenne, Comanche, Indian Wars, Kiowa Tribe, Personalities, Ranald Mackenzie, Red River War, Texas

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

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

Saturday, July 26, 1924. Other around the world flights.

Argentinian pilot Pedro Zanni and mechanic Felipe Beltrame began their rather belated attempt to fly around the world.

Larry Estridge became the last person to win the World Colored Middleweight Championship, defeating title holder Panama Joe Gans in a 10-round bout at Yankee Stadium.  Segregation of titles by race would thereafter rightfully be abandoned.

The KKK held a rally in Issaquah, Washington that drew at least 13,000 people.

The weekly magazines were out.

The Saturday Evening Post with a girl who had a scouting uniform of some type, or perhaps was wearing an oddly colored representation of  Navy white shirt, with red instead of blue.

Country Gentleman had a classic of a draft team.

Last edition:

Friday, July 25, 1924. Speeding the game up.

Labels: 1920s, 1924, Albania, Armenia, baseball, Cheyenne, Ethnicities, Greece, Kosovo, Rodeo

Saturday, June 14, 1924. Flag Day.

The KKK attacked a gathering of the WWW at San Pedro, California.

May Sundstedt age 12. Scalded in the Raid at San Pedro June 14th

Last prior edition:

Friday, June 13, 1924. Macready jumps into the dark.

Labels: 1920s, 1921, 1924, 1940s, 1948, 1948 Arab Israeli War, 2020s, 2024, Aircraft, Calvin Coolidge, Classical Music, France, Laramie Wyoming, Music, Wyoming (Laramie)

Monday, April 28, 1924. Another West Virginian Coal Mine Disaster.

Ten years after the terrible disaster at Eccles, West Virginia, which killed 180 coal miners, 119 were killed in a mine explosion at Benwood, West Virginia.

Gov. Warren T. McCray of Indiana was booked into the Marion County Jail after being found guilty of fraud by a Federal Jury.

McCray had been an opponent of the Ku Klux Klan who helped figure in his conviction, although McCray admitted the truth of the allegations, which involved promissory notes and land speculation.  Becuase of the KKK's involvement, McCray was pardoned by President Hoover in 1930.  He lived out the rest of his days after serving three years of his sentence on his farm.

Last prior edition:

Sunday, April 27, 1924. Weimar warns.

1920s, 1924, Dawes Plan, German Weimar Republic

Saturday, April 5, 1924. Fighting the KKK in Lilly.

We haven't featured one for awhile, as they haven't been great, but on this day, The Country Gentleman restored the dignity of magazine cover art with a spring theme.

The Ku Klux Klan shot 22 people in Lilly, Pennsylvania, killing two.  The gunfire was sort of the equivalent of a drive by shooting, with the KKK shooting randomly into the town's railroad station after some townsmen, miner workers who were heavily immigrants from Eastern Europe, had "played a stream of water from the town fire hose upon the visitors(KKK) as they were marching back to the station." 

The KKK was in Lilly for one of their ceremonies in a local field and was returning to the station for transport to Johnstown, PA.  They did catch the train, and upon arrival at Johnstown they were met with 50 policemen who arrested 25 Klansman and confiscated 50 firearms.  The next day, an additional four residents of Lilly were arrested. Twenty-nine people were charged with murder.

Lilly was a mining town, and like most of them it had a strong contingent of Catholic and Orthodox miners, members of ethnicities that the Klan didn't like. A strong UMW union town, the residents weren't cowed by the KKK.  A monument to their efforts has been placed in the town in recent years.

Locally, there were concerns about spring floods. And the flight around the globe was suffering delays.

And the accusations against the former Attorney General Daugherty were getting bizarre.

Last prior edition:

Friday, April 4, 1924. Wolves in Albany County.

1920s, 1924, 2020, 2020s, 2024, Animals, baseball, Crime, Prohibition, The Roaring Twenties, Wolves

Saturday, March 1, 1924. The Nixon Nitration Works Disaster.

The Nixon Nitration Works disaster occured in which an explosion of ammonium nitrate killed at least 18 people, destroyed several miles of New Jersey factories, and demolished Nixon, New Jersey.

While a very famous industrial disaster, the Nixon Nitration Works and Nixon New Jersey are remembered now principally for being mentioned in Band of Brothers as Cpt. Lewis Nixon III, a major character Ambrose's depiction of the 506 Parachute Infantry Regiment, mentions it.  Lewis Nixon was in fact a member of the family that owned the plant, and it was the case that Richard Winters, his close friend and for most of his service in Europe his superior, worked there for a time after the war.

The Nixon's were troubled in general, and Lewis Nixon III was no exception.  His marriage contracted just after the start of the war failed during it, as did a subsequent one.  A third marriage to Grace Umezawa, formerly a Japanese internee, was successful.  She helped him overcome the alcoholism depicted during the series.

The KDP, the Communist Part of Germany, was reinstated.  The KDP, together with the NADSP, the Nazi Party, would figure enormously in the destruction of German democracy as the extremes grew increasingly powerful in the remaining years of the Weimar Republic.

Alice's Day at Sea, the first of 57 Alice comedies produced by Walt Disney, appeared.  They were short films meant to be shown before the feature, something at one time common.

White rats paraded in San Pedro, California.

Hacks, i.e., cabs, were allowed back in Hyde Park for the first time since 1636.

Not a hack, but on this day, an Irish Traveler feeding his pony on this day in 1924.

Locally, a story didn't add up.

A 20-year-old marrying a 15-year-old?  

And she was in 6th Grade?

Tuesday, November 27, 1923. Oklahoma Senate Approves Ban On Mask, Oil Filters, Odd feats of strength.

No, not that kind of mask you might see in a headline today, but rather the costume of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Wiggins shoe store mentioned in this article was still open in the 1990s, and maybe the 2000s.  It no longer is. By that time, it was one of two shoe repair shops still operating downtown.

Now there are none.

The modern oil filter was patented by George H. Greenhalgh. Prior to this, automobiles simply used a screen, which would partially account for the short engine life early automobiles had.

The Purolator oil filter is essentially what most vehicles use today, and is still in production.

The Purolator original design featured the cardboard filter which was inserted into a fixed housing.  I've worked on vehicles that retained this filter design exactly, and it is essentially the same as a modern filter except now the housing comes with the filter, and you replace the entire thing.  I've also worked on cars that used this sort of filter for their fuel filter.

While a revolutionary design, it did not become immediately widespread.  It wasn't until the 1950s, apparently, when they became universal, although my 1946 CJ2A, which I sold long ago, had one.  A 1954 Chevrolet Sedan I once had also had one.

Siegmund "Zishe" Breitbart pulled a wagon with fifty passengers through Washington D.C. with his teeth.

I'll confess the point of such stunts as this really escapes me.

Thursday, November 1, 1923. Walton arraigned, Krupp signs, Baltic treaties, Finnair founded, George Washington Cornerstone laid, the wages of sin.

Oklahoma was impeaching its anti Klan Governor.

Gustav Krupp signed an agreement with the French which established operating conditions for his mines in the Ruhr.  He was released from prison fourteen days later.

Estonia and Latvia signed a mutual defense treaty.

Finnair was founded as "Aero Osakeyhtiö".  It had one airplane at the time, a Junkers F.13 seaplane.

The George Washington Memorial cornerstone was laid.

Recently retired, at age 29, Irish mob gangster Bill Lovett was murdered in his sleep at an abandoned store in Brooklyn.  Lovett was a well-educated man who loved animals, and a distinguished World War One veteran, but a dedicated alcoholic who could be very temperamental when drunk.  He'd been in the Irish mob before and again after World War One, but had recently given up crime and drinking after marrying.  He fell off the wagon on October 31 while downtown for a job interview, and went to sleep in the store with a compatriot.  He was apparently murdered by other Irish mobsters.