Monday, January 26, 1925. Actors and Actresses born, Trotsky gets a pink slip.

 The great American actor Paul Newman was born.

And so was actress Joan Leslie.

Trotsky was formally booted from all of his military commands.

Last edition:

Sunday, January 25, 1925. Careless storage.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Ancient Egypt, Archeology, Norway, Wyoming Freedom Caucus

Thursday, January 15, 1925. Trotsky gets canned, Ross addresses the legislature.

Stalin fired Trotsky as head of the Soviet military.

Oh oh. . . 

Frankly, it made sense.  Trotsky has bizarrely retained cult of personality due to the James Dean Effect, but he was more radical in terms of the forced expansion of Communism than Stalin was, and his recent military schemes had been failures.  Moreover, leaving him in power in any sense was ultimately going to lead to a power struggle between him, and Stalin.

Nellie Tayloe Ross addressed the legislature.

Last edition:

Monday, January 12, 1925. Ordering Thompsons.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Chicago Illinois, Crime, Illinois (Chicago), Prohibition, The Roaring Twenties, Weapons

Tuesday, January 8, 1924. Telling Trotsky to pack.

Pravda reported that Leon Trotsky was ill, which savvy Kremlin watchers took, accurately, to mean that he'd be told to hit the skids soon.

Some kids hit the skates in Washington, D.C.

Thursday, August 23, 1923. Trotsky schemes, Turkey votes yes, Bluebeard's 8th Wife, Nancy Hayes Green dies, Fr. Giovanni Minzoni assassinated.

The Grand National Assembly of Turkey ratified the Treaty of Lausanne.  British, French, and Italian troops were withdrawing from Istanbul in accordance with the treaty.

Germany announced that it was introducing heavy taxation in order to address the country's economic woes.

Trotsky persuaded the Politburo, in a secret meeting, to finance the German Communist Party, the KDP, in order to overthrow the Weimar Republic.  A revolution in October was the goal, which planned for a Communist Germany to develop the agricultural Soviet Union, demonstrating how Communism, at the end of the day, always has an industrialized corporatism view of things, posters of smiling buxom peasant girls aside.

Bluebeard's 8th Wife was released.

Nancy Hayes Green, born in 1834, died after being hit by a car as a pedestrian. The car had hit a laundry truck.

Born into slavery in Kentucky, Green was already a widow by the end of the Civil War, having suffered the loss of her children as well.  Relocated to Chicago, she was employed in the household of Charles and Amanda Walker, transplanted Kentuckians.  Upon the Walkers recommendation, she was hired to portray "Aunt Jemima" for the RT Davis Milling Company.   The role was frankly demeaning by modern standards as it portrayed a happy picture of the antebellum south, including the status of slaves.  She continued to play the role for twenty years until replaced by Agnes Moodey, as Green would not travel to the 1900 Paris Expedition.  She used her fame from the role to advocate for the poor and for equal rights.

Portrait of Green, maybe, in character.  This could also be successor model Anna Robinson.

The depiction used for the pancake mix changed over the years as society became awakened to its inherent racism.  There was no real way, in the end, to disassociate it with its racist past, however, and Quaker Oats, the then owner of the brand, discontinued the image in 2020, during which time a variety of such depictions of brands were taken out of use by various companies.

Horrifying 1909 advertisement using the Aunt Jemima theme.

1935 Quaker Oats advertisement using a more familiar theme.

The name of the brand was changed completely to Pearl Milling Company, but interestingly minor use of the name and its branding continues by current owner, PepsiCo, so as to not have it become abandoned and become public domain.  Descendants of Robinson, it might be noted, protested the change in branding on the basis that ignored the history and heritage of the brand and American society, for good or ill.

Fr. Giovanni Minzoni, age 38, a Catholic Priest who opposed the fascist rule of Mussolini, was murdered in Argenta.  It is widely assumed that fascist Italo Balbo ordered his murder.

Balbo briefly resigned from office, but would return and was the Governor General of Libya when World War Two broke out.  He died in 1940 when an airplane he was a passenger in was shot down by friendly fire while trying to land at Tobruk.

August 21, 1940: Trotsky, the James Dean Effect, Cafe Socialism and Neoconservatism. Things that make you go "mmmm?"

This interesting item appears on the blog Today In World War II History for this day:

Today in World War II History—Aug. 21, 1940 & 1945

One of the interesting things about it is the photograph of Leon Trotsky with American admirers.

Trotsky in the photo looks like an aged professor. Not like the leader of the Red Army he once was.  He doesn't look like somebody that Stalin would bother to hunt down and have assassinated.

But Stalin did just that.

Trotsky retained admirers well after his exile and indeed into this very day.  Among the hard left functuaries who obtained employment roles in FDR's New Deal Administrations, along with closet Communists, were closet Trotskyites, a species of Communist. Both were a tiny percentage of those in the alphabet administration, of course, but they were both there. The difference between the two, and it was a significant one, is that conventional Communist had somebody to report to and receive orders from, with that somebody forming a chain back to Moscow.  Trotskyites didn't, and therefore they never posed any kind of real threat to the U.S. of any kind.

Indeed, Trotskyites then, and now, can be placed into the category of Socialist Oddballs, fo which the Socialist world is jam packed.  A feature of Socialist Oddballism is adherence to a theory "that's never been tried", which gives the adherent the comfort of not having to confront failure.  Every type of Socialism every tried, anywhere, has massively failed, which is why it isn't used by any serious nations today.  

Trotskyism is no exception.  It would have failed and Trotsky's immediate goals while a figure in the Soviet Union were a failure.  We've just been reading about one of them here, his war against the Poles.  Trotsky nearly succeeded in overrunning Poland, to be sure, but in his view, the next step was Berlin.  When the war on Poland failed, and failed big, he proposed an invasion of India.

All of which was nutty, but Trotsky benefits from the James Dean Effect, just like another Communist failure, Che Guevara. Dying before nature took them out, they're preserved by what people imagine them to be, just like the young actor who frankly wasn't all that great, rather than what they really were.

American Trotskyism has an odd twist to it, however, that should be mentioned.  Quite a few young American Trotskyites evolved, oddly enough, into Neoconservatives.  Over time, they became disillusioned with the nut job aspects of Socialist theory, but they interesting didn't become disillusioned about changing the world, and changing the world through intervention.  Neoconservatives, including some former Trotskyites, rose up into administrative power in the 1980s and introduced into Conservatism the concept of nation building.

Which didn't work well.

German Greed and Trotsky Goofs. . . and the Allies

We've been reading here, of course, in the century old news that Germany and Russia. . . Soviet Russia that is, had arrived upon a peace taking Russia out of the war.

Of course, Russia was taking itself out of the war anyway.  The Civil War was on, lots of regions of Imperial Russia were saying Прощай, or Hyvästi, or do widzenia or до побачення, or hüvasti and so on, all on their own . . and not only to the war, but to Russia itself.  Russia was flying apart and the Russians had started tearing each other apart.  This in turn seemed to be inspiring German greed as they kept advancing when they should have been sending troops out of Russia as quickly as possible in anticipation of their upcoming presumed offensive in the Spring.

Which of course was just the perfect time for Trotsky to do something stupid.  And that was his declaration of neither war nor peace at the peace conference with Germany. The Russians were just going to pack up their bags and go home.  That delcaration came on February 10.  The Germans weren't impressed.

And so a Trotsky blunder encouraged German avarice.