The flag of Greater Lebanon featuring the Lebanese cedar and the French tricolor.
On this day in 1920, Greater Lebanon came into existence as a French administrative unit.
Syria had attempted to define Lebanon as an administrative Syrian unit in its short lived state that was brought to an end by France in 1920. It's origins went back to the 1860s when European powers entered into a series of treaties with the Ottoman Empire in an effort to protect the Christian population of the region which has been subject to religious violence. The boundaries of the state were larger than those originally regarded as Lebanese and were based upon the map featured here yesterday. The expanded boundaries were created in order to attempt to give the region, which was anticipated as having statehood in the future, a large enough territory to have some sort of economic base.
The League of Nations would approve the creation of the entity in 1923 and it was declared to be the Republic of Lebanon in 1926 while still under French administration. It's status became a matter of contest during World War Two when the French Vichy administration allowed the Germans to transport arms through Syria to be used against British forces in the Middle East. Free French General Charles de Gaulle declared it to be independent in 1941, under pressure from the Allies to do so, in a move that would have been legally questionable.
On November 8, 1943 Lebanon held elections for an independent government and declared the League of Nations mandate over it to be terminated, which brought immediate Free French reaction in the form of arresting the government. However, on November 22, 1943 they were released under Allied pressure. The French left in December 1946, at which point both Syria and Lebanon had been admitted as founding members of the United Nations. No formal end of the mandate was ever declared.
Flag of Lebanon.
Lebanon has always had a troubled existence and its independence has not changed that. Regarded as a bright spot in the Middle East in the immediate post war world, regional violence has made the tiny state highly unstable and its religiously and ethnically diverse population have not always gotten along well since that time, with civil war dominating the 1970s and 1980s. Created as a state that was specifically to be a home for Maronite Arab Christians, members of the Catholic church whose branch dates back to Christianity's early days, demographic changes in the country, including a high immigration rate to the West (although Lebanese also have the highest return from immigration rate in the world) and an influx of Shia's have made the original political informal balance unstable.
This is a story that has a tangential impact on me, as one of my late uncle's was half Lebanese and half Irish by descent. His mother was Lebanese although I've lost track of whether she was born in Lebanon (I think she was) or the United States. Her parents had brought the entire family over when she was young. She had met and married her husband in Nebraska, but in latter years the extended family had a significant presence in Casper Wyoming where there was a small Lebanese immigrant community.
This reminds me that many of the divides that are commonly assumed to exist in the U.S. really don't in the way they're sometimes understood to. In Catholic communities the mixing of people of highly diverse ethnicity is frankly common.
France, for its part, which has taken an interest in the region dating back to the Middle Ages continues to do so today.
On the same day the USS S-5, an American submarine, sank accidentally when a crewman failed to close a value, and in attempting to rectify the mistake, jammed it open. No lives were lost. It was refloated, but sank again on September 3 while under tow.
Sonar image of the S-5 today.
The S-5 was just going into service when the accident occured. She was an S Class submarine, which was a new type adopted during World War One but which came too late for any of the class to see service during the war. A fair number of them remained in service when World War Two broke out and saw service, in spite of being dated, in both the U.S. Navy and the Royal Navy. Thirteen of the boats served all the way through the war for the U.S. Navy, with all but one decommissioned in October, 1945. The last remaining one in service was decommissioned a year later.
A killing in Chicago was attributed, by the killer, to widespread firearms carrying in Wyoming.
The details, at least as known at the time, were that wealthy real estate broker Gerald Stack was visiting Chicago when he pulled a pistol to use it to pistol whip a man, a discharged marine, who had insulted a woman in the bar. A tussle resulted and Stack claimed that the gun discharged several times, killing the other party.
Questions were raised about why Stack was packing heat, and he attributed that to the custom in Wyoming.
A question can actually be raised to the extent to which Stack's statement was accurate, and it would take somebody with more time to really find out. Certainly, firearms weren't uncommon in Wyoming and in 1920 it would still have been probable that many people in rural areas went about armed, and indeed, that's still the case. Indeed Wyoming train robber Bill Carlisle attributed part of his reason for moving to Wyoming to the fact that firearms were common and therefore you could always hunt for food if you were out of work, a statement that was apparently untrue as he took up train robbery.
Carrying firearms in town, however, wasn't universal anywhere in the West as so often believed and had actually been illegal in some Wyoming towns in the late 19th Century, although I don't know the status of that in 1920. Certainly one other murder earlier in 1920 which we've also featured here also featured a girl and a bar, showed the parties to have ready access to firearms.
An interesting aspect of both of these stories is the alcohol aspect of them. By this time, alcohol had been illegal for awhile, and yet it was clearly showing up. That fact is often oddly overlooked in the story of American violence, which has dramatically declined in recent years. When it occurs, it tends to occur between people who know each other and when they don't know each other, it's like automobile accidents. . . booze or drugs show up. Nobody seems to ever really ponder the latter.
Carrying a handgun in Chicago in 1920 doesn't strike me as a bad idea, given that the town has been notoriously violent since its earliest days and still is. Some would argue that carrying in Chicago today would be a good idea, and should be more widely allowed than it is.
It's also interesting how often the age old mix of men and women and a contest between men over women show up at any time as the roots source of such events.
