Friday January 14, 1916. Collins resigns British employment.

Michael Collins resigned from his employment in London at the Guaranty Trust Company n order to return to Ireland.  He was already a clandestine Irish revolutionary.

Severe flooding caused dikes to burst at Zuiderzee, Netherlands.

The Royal Flying Corps ordered that reconnaissance planes have an escort of at least three fighters flying in close formation with them, and that a reconnaissance aircraft must abort its flight if even one of the three fighters becomes detached from the formation for any reason, due to highly losses from Fokker Eindeckers.

In the U.S., where they were not worried about Eindeckers, today it seemed that war worries had lessened.

Or maybe they did.

The Rocky Mountain News was also reporting that wolves were active in Aurora.

Last edition:

Thursday, January 13, 1916. Death of Huerta.

Pancho Villa, Santa Ysabel Massacre, Victoriano Huerta, World War One

Wednesday, August 30, 1922. The End of Greek Anatolia.

Young women photographed on this day in 1922.

A press photographer photographed a group of young women on this day in 1922.  None of them appeared as flappers.

The Turks won the Battle of Dumiupinar, bringing the Greco Turkish War effectively to a close.  As a result, this day is celebrated as Victory Day in Turkey.

This brought about the millennia long presence of a significant Greek population in Anatolia, one which had persisted even in spite of the Ottoman Conquest.  In no small part, it came about due to Greek greed which had sought to expand Greek control beyond what was initially logical, during the immediate post World War One period during which such efforts were effectively supported by nearly all of the Allied powers, and during which France, the UK, and Italy contributed troops to the effort.  Indeed, Italy seized islands for its own from Turkey.

Had the Greeks not overreached, they likely would have been supported longer by the Allies, which grew tired of the war and ultimately pulled its combat troops out of it.  Greece proved insufficiently strong to hold what it had taken against the revolutionary Turkish forces which had overthrown their own government, which had entered into a putative peace, and which fought the war well against long odds.

The war would result in a tragic mass population transfer of Greeks from Turkish lands, many of whom would relocate far from their homes in other lands, such as the United States and Australia.

In Ireland, the results of a recent peace continued to operate oddly.

Due to the odd nature of the treaty between the UK and the Irish Free State, a Second Irish Provisional Government was set up due to the assassination of Michael Collins, even though power was being transferred to the Dail.

Wisconsin Governor John J. Blain urged President Harding to ask Congress to take over the coal mines in order to abate the problems the long-running coal mine strike was causing and threatened to cause.

In Pennsylvania, a monument to George Washington was dedicated.

 Taft College was founded in California.

Monday, August 28, 1922. The dawn of electronic advertising.

A.C.M. Co. Mill, Bonner Montana.  Copyright deposit, August 28, 1922

WEAF in New York City, a radio station owned by Western Electric, which itself was a subsidary of AT&T, ran the first radio commercial.  

The audio ad was for the newly opened Queensboro Apartments in Jackson Heights and ran for fifteen minutes.

The military funeral of Michael Collins was held.  It had massive public turnout.

The terrible mine disaster in California hit the front page of the Casper newspaper.

Prohibition's prospects in Sweden and Mexico were also noted.

Unusually casually dressed man photographed on this day in front of a Navy seaplane.

.

Horse on this day at the Washington Animal Rescue.

Treasury watchtower, photographed on this day.

Page 8 of the same newspaper noted above was advertising suits for boys now that school was back in session.

It'd be a rare kid who'd dress like that at school today.  For that matter, nobody would have dressed like that when I was a kid.

The same page was advertising housing to the refinery workers next to the refinery.

See Ben Realty continued to exist up until just a few years ago.

 

Friday, August 25, 1922. Highest scoring baseball game ever.

The Cubs held off the Phillies 26-23 in Wrigley Field after being up by 19.  The game remains the highest-scoring game in major-league history.  Marty Callaghan of the Cubs batted three times in a single inning.

W. T. Cosgrave became Chairman of the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State, replacing Michael Collins in that role.

An earthquake occurred in the Tel Atlas region of Algeria.

Tuesday, August 22, 1922. Michael Colllins Killed.

Boston Post via Wikipedia..

Michael Collins, a principal architect of the frankly terrorist strategy of the Irish Republicans, and now Commander In Chief of the Irish Free State's army, was ambushed and gunned down at Béal na Bláth.

Collins' body in the hospital.

With the Irish Civil War seemingly winding down, the former guerilla leader, was touring the country inspecting regions which the Irish Free State had regained control of.  His trip on this occasion, through IRA stronghold Cork, was advised against, but Collins, perhaps being fatalistic, and having survived numerous prior attempts on his life, went ahead anyway.  Along the way his party stopped at Long's Pub and asked directions of a man standing at the crossroads who turned out to be an IRA sentry who recognized Collins. An ambush was set up for his return trip to Cork City.

When the ambush occurred, the Free State commander for the county ordered the convoy forward, but Collins, demonstrating a poor understanding of the proper tactics when ambushed, ordered the convoy stopped to fight the ambushers.  Collins was supposedly killed in the engagement by Denis "Sonny" O'Neill, a former Britsh Army sniper, not without irony as O'Neill had obviously answered the United Kingdom's call when Collins had opposed it.  Indeed, O'Neill had previously been a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary before the war.

There is some doubt, however, about this version of events, however, as O'Neill, while regarded as a fine shot, had been wounded in action in 1918 and made a prisoner of the Germans.  He was unable to resume employment with the Constabulary due to his injuries and was regarded as disabled at the time.  He was, however, granted a captain's military pension under DeValera's government in the 1940s.

Given all of this, and even at the time, conspiracy theories abound as to who actually killed Collins.

Whoever did, Collins' while widely admired, provides an example of living by the sword and dying by it.  Collins, more than any other man, was the architect of modern terrorist warfare.  He may have died a leader of a conventional army, but his most notable success was not as the leader of one.

Another view with more biographical details:

August 22, 1922: The Assassination of Michael Collins

Friday, June 16, 1922. Yes for the Free State

The Irish General Election was held.  Sinn Féin went into the election split into pro and anti treaty camps, with the pro treaty wing led by Michael Collins winning 58 of the 128 seats.  The anti treaty faction lead by Éamon de Valera took 34.  While that result showed fairly clearly that a majority of the Irish (whom in truth would likely have settled for home rule) supported the treaty, it did leave the pro treat portion of the party six seats short of a majority.

The rest of the votes for the 34 remaining seats went to the pro treaty Labour Party (17), the Independents (9), the agrarian Farmers Party (7) and the Businessman's Party (1).  This left the Dail with a clear pro treaty majority.

Chen Chiung-ming captured Guangzhou and announced the departure of Southern China's secessionist leaders, including President Sun Yat-sen.  This was also announced as a step towards reuniting China.

Easter Sunday, 1922

 April 16 was Easter Sunday in 1922.

On that date, Michael Collins survived an assassination attempt when his attackers failed to recognize him in Rutland Square in Dublin, and shot at some cars instead.  Collins was carrying a revolver and fired at his would be attackers.

Germany and Soviet Russia entered the Treaty of Rapallo which renounced all territorial and financial claims the two countries had against each other and restored diplomatic relations.

Japan's famous Imperial Hotel sustained damage in a fire.

Friday, March 17, 1922. St. Patrick's Day.

 Irish patriot Michael Collins addresses a crowed at Skibbereen in County Cork, Ireland.  The Irish Civil War was about to commences.

St. Patrick's Day 1922 was the first such day in an Ireland newly restored to independence after 500 years of English occupation.  It was also, unfortunately, one that was only quasi peaceful, as the Irish Civil War was about to break out.

While in the United States such things no longer occur, St. Patrick's Day also used to be a day of racist agitation by groups that saw their opposition to Catholicism as something to make a public protest about.  One such group with the Ku Klux Klan, which on this day held a parade in Washington, D.C.  The parade features this group of airborne racist flying above the demonstration dropping leaflets.

Interestingly enough, the swastika that appeared on the tail of this plane was not yet associated with Nazism, so the use here foreshadows the horrors that symbol would later be associated with.

Saturday, January 14, 1922. Hays dives into the movie industry.

William H. Hays resigned as Postmaster General in order to become head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors.  In that role he would end up associated with an effort to clean up, if you will, the movie industry, which would lead to him being somewhat misremembered today.

Hays would bring in the Hays Production Code, which was effectively a code of self-censorship for the movie industry. The draft code stunned critics of film, who were advocating state and Federal  restrictions at the time.  As the code basically gave them what they wanted, they were satiated by it and ceased their efforts for the most part.

The things that brought about the concern were real.  While we have a conceptual draft of a related topic, what had basically occurred is that film, both still and moving pictures, brought in the ability to portray topics, and by that we can largely say the topic was young women, in an easy to do and lurid manner.  Such things has always existed, of course, to a degree, but when illustrated magazines largely relied on illustrators, many of whom have been featured here, the effort and public reaction generally tended to preclude too much cross over from pornography and near pornography into popular media.

Film started to erode that significantly, and the real erosion really took off in the movie industry.  There were not controls on the production of movies at all, and as a result, starting almost from the onset of film, moviemakers found that they could insert some degree of pornography and get away with it.  Only partially obscured bathing scenes, or ones that weren't obscured at all, made their way into dramas.  Even famous producers, like Cecil B. DeMille, made silent films that were wholesale lurid, with a DeMille example ironically supposedly being one about early saints, the same featuring scenses of chained writhing nude women.

This has promoted an effort to do something about it, but the cross-over of private scandal into the news, coming from the movie industry, really pushed it over the top.  Divorces and scandalous deaths became headline news.  When Fatty Arbuckle was arrested it provided the final push.

Arbuckle would, of course, later be acquitted, but the scandal did give an unseemly look into things that people would no longer tolerate.  No matter what the truth of the tragedy was, it did feature a story of illicit sex (it seems) and scandalous behavior.  People had enough.

Faced with this, the movie industry organized and Hays was brought over. The Production Code would stave off the disaster and for around forty years keep American film from sinking into the moral sewer.  In the late 1960s the industry, looking at the time, calculated that they could break free from it, and they did, although not to their credit or to that of the arts.

On this day in 1922, the Anglo-Irish Treaty officially went into effect.  In a really confusing technicality, the Irish had two governments during this period, one being a provisional government that was to rule for the remainder of the year until the full transition into a Free State was accomplished.  However, as the Irish already had formed a Parliament, the existing Dail, and simply kept it in existence and perhaps can be regarded as the real government.  The Dáil Éireann was the technical successor to the Dáil of the Irish Republic, which had ceased to exist in December 6, 1921.  While De Valera claimed that it remained in existence after he lost what amounted to a vote of no confidence, nobody had challenged the transition up to that point.  Technically the current Dáil dates to 1937, when Ireland adopted a constitution declaring itself to be a republic,  and the Dáil Éireann became its lower house.

Members of the provisional government were, in fact, members of the Dáil Éireann, so in reality the latter rather than the former was the government.  Michael Collins, the famous republican guerilla (terrorist) leader of the Anglo Irish War was made the chairman of the Provisional Government.  He had been instrumental in negotiating the treaty with the United Kingdom.

The President of the League of Nations called for the evacuation of 120,000 Armenian Christians from Turkey.

Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post illustration featured a boy looking at stereographs.  Not one of his better illustrations in my view.

Judge was looking for smiling faces, and featured an alluring young woman coming out of a makeup case.

On the same day, The Country Gentleman gave us a different portrayal of a young woman with an illustration by Katherine R. Wireman.

I like that illustration better.

Mary Plant and Leicester Faust, the latter part of the Busch brewing family, married in St. Louis.

November 21, 1920 Bloody Sunday

This day is remembered to history as Bloody Sunday, one of two days in Irish history bearing that unfortunate title.  The day featured violence on both sides.

The day started with Michael Collins' men of the IRA targeting members of the "Cairo Gang" for assassination.  Many of the fifteen men killed by the IRA were British Army intelligence officers assigned to that effort with a few policemen and a few people of unknown allegiance also killed in the early morning action.

Photograph commonly claimed to be the Cairo Gang, but for which there is some doubt and which may actually be of the Igoe Gang.  RIC officers who worked undercover.

That afternoon British police forces raided a football match at Croke Park. The force was a mixed one of RIC personnel and Auxiliaries.  The situation was tense and shooting broke out, resulting in the British forces firing over 200 rounds and ultimately killing fourteen people.  The RIC later claimed that they were fired on first, but there is little evidence to support it. Testimony by municipal police who simply happened to be on duty there due to the football match was to the contrary. The best evidence is that the RIC and Auxillaries simply stormed in and began shooting.

Croke Park today, after being expanded. From Wikipedia Commons.

That evening two IRA men in British custody were killed, with the British claiming they were shot while after trying to violently escape but the evidence otherwise contesting that.

Like a lot of things in the Anglo Irish War, the bloody day has been mythologized and therefore has become a legend, but probably a tragic one that is still somewhat out of context.  The RIC and the Auxiliaries were already notorious for their heavy handedness, a shocking example of which we provided earlier this week.  But the bloodiness of the day really commences with IRA assassinations aimed at what was proving to be a successful British counterintelligence action. Those killings themselves came in the context of the IRA resorting a war of murder which has, over the years, been glossed over to be presented as a sort of urban guerilla war.  In reality, given their weakness in comparison to the British, they were terrorists and justified their actions in the context of their goals.  The British counterintelligence actions came in that context and were proving successful, but not so successful that the IRA wasn't able to figure them out and strike back, as the did on this day.

The killings later that day by the RIC were marked by the unwise decision to raid a football match, something of questionable purpose at best, and an even worse decision given the tensions that had developed during the day.  Given the nature of the RIC and the Auxiliaries, and the British counterintelligence effort in general, the chances of it turning into a bloodbath featuring what might have simply been reprisal killings of innocent people was high.  The RIC was already turning the minds of the uncommitted Irish, whom were a majority of the population, against the British and something like this was guaranteed to greatly increase that trend

Oddly the number of people killed in the 1972 Bogside Massacre by British paratroopers when they opened up on civil rights protesters was fifteen people, with eleven more wounded, making it about equivalent in terms of loss of life by British arms in a similar event.  It's that event that was commemorated in U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday.

July 30, 1919. Omaha to Columbus, 83 miles in 10.25 hours for the 1919 Motor Transport Convoy.

The Motor Transport Convoy resumed normal progress on this Wednesday, July 30, and went from Ft. Omaha to the county seat for Platte County, Nebraska, Columbus.

Trucks of this era had magnetos, a type of electric generator that aircraft sometimes still have but which automobiles have long since abandoned.  The Dodge had to have its carburetor and Bosch magneto cleaned in route.  The remarkable thing here is that Bosch is and was a German corporation, and therefore the Dodge was equipped with German magnetos.

A pontoon trailer was left in Ft. Omaha as too much of a strain on the Mack truck that had been towing it.  And a person might wonder about the strain of nightly entertainment in nearly every town in which the convoy was now stopping in.

Elsewhere, the Anglo Irish War took a new turn with the IRA carried out its first authorized assassination.  The target was a policeman. The act had been authorized by Michael Collins.  It's hard not to view such acts now, a century later, as what they were, murder.

And in Germany, the German government adopted a new constitution.

Feebleness in war; muddled thinking in the face of domestic terrorism

The Republic of Vietnam feared its population for most of the war, but following the defeat of the Communist forces in the Tet Offensive of 1968, it realized that, militarily, the tide had turned and started to plan to issue military weapons to the population out in the countryside, much like Switzerland does with its own population.  It didn't get around to it, but it planned to do it, as it realized at that point, with the war effectively won, as long as the United States continued to supply air power in the event of a North Vietnamese assault, it could trust its population to repel local aggression.  The fact that South Vietnam fell in the face of a massive North Vietnamese assault in 1975, when the United States failed to supply air power, doesn't moot the point, but actually tends to support it.

Switzerland has, of course, done just that for eons.  Israel does something similar, allowing the issuance of military type arms to some of its population in hostile areas, leading to some fairly incongruous photographs of that occurring in some areas, on occasion.  The same policy was pretty effectively followed, no matter what you think of its cause or government, by South Africa before apartheid was thankfully ended, when it faced a domestic terrorism problem in the countryside.

Which leads me to the bonehead comment of the New York Daily News today that today's domestic terrorist attack in Tennessee should lead to tighter gun control.

Baloney.

Terrorism isn't the same as conventional crime, no matter how violent.  It's not even the same as organized crime.  It may be criminal, but it's character is entirely different.

Terrorism is a type of guerrilla war.  Just because it's vile doesn't make it any less so. That's what it is.  Crime is a violation of the law.  War is the extension of politics by other means.  While a terrorist act may be criminal, they're done in the furtherance of political goals.  That's why they occur.  Moreover, no matter how loosely organized, they're done in the furtherance of political goals by some sort of organized entity.  The terrorist acts we've seen recently have been organized, at least in terms of influence, by the Islamic State in Syria and the Levant.  They don't need to have a central command to be responsible for them.  Their goal and means are clear, and the people who sign up as soldiers in their cause can enlist at any time, any where, without ISIL ever knowing it.  And they're not irrational or insane when they do so.

Gun control as a means of controlling violence is of highly dubious utility no matter what so many New Yorkers like to imagine. But as a means of controlling terrorism, it's insane.

The proof is more than ample.  Terrorist have never had any problem obtaining arms. The examples are too numerous to dispute.  The first example of modern terrorism is provided by the Irish Republican Army, with Michael Collins being the architect of a modern terrorist war.   The IRA had no trouble at any point in obtaining small arms, nor did its successor the Provisional IRA.  Nor did the Red Brigades or the Bader Meinhoff Gang.  Nor did the Viet Cong.  Nor did the Front de Libération Nationale.  Nor did the Irgun, Nor has ISIL in France.  Nor will ISIL, and ISIL inspired groups, here.  Such laws may, at best, require a terrorist to undergo more effort, but what they mostly do in this context is disarm the population that that terrorists propose to attack.

And why would they.  Unlike conventional criminals, terrorist share with dedicated volunteer soldiers a willingness to die for their cause, no matter what their cause might be. That's a distinction that's quite different from conventional criminals, which to seek to perpetuate their crimes for personal gain.  Terrorist do not, and often don't expect to live to see the victory they hope for.

With that being their mindset, no obstacle to obtaining arms will be effective. So, in contrast, society has to be prepared to suffer without recourse, surrender, or effectively resist.  We're doing the first right now.

The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that American have the right to keep and bear arms, a right that eastern states in particular like to attack.  It's sometimes snarkily noted that "we don't live on the Frontier anymore, and people don't have to protect themselves against Indian attacks".

Well, perhaps we do.

Average people in Paris found themselves effectively in that situation recently, with no ability to act.  In France, the average citizen can't carry a handgun for protection.  France was ideally set up for an ISIL inspired attack.  Its not that easy in a lot of the United States. And in at least Massachusetts the recent terrorist attack by two individuals had the impact of shutting the city down, something that may have been contributed to by an effectively disarmed population.

Such events are, of course, rare.  Even when they do occur, they actually impact very few people. But they will become more common. This won't be the last domestic terrorist attack that ISIL or ISIL inspired people launch in the United States, or in Europe.  For Americans, those who want to blame everything on the easy availablity of guns should realize that this is a situation that no police force can protect us from, and the military cannot either.  We have to do it ourselves, or be prepared to do it. For European nations that have so effectively disarmed the population, this is even more the case.

Most people, given the option of carrying something, would not.  Indeed, the overwhelming majority of people will not, or even cannot due to occupations that make it impractical.  Even people who might be totally qualified to do so by training, etc., generally will not. But calls to ban things are naive in the extreme.  Mao said that in the guerilla war, the geurilla swam amongst the population like fish.  They do, and even though most of us will never encounter one of the fish, some undoubtedly will in the future.  If even a tiny percentage of the population was capable of defending itself, it would make a difference for everyone.  Not might, it would.  At some point, an armed population is just hard to attack.  That doesn't mean such attacks would stop, but they might be stopped more quickly, or even deterred in some instances.  Day long spectacles like we had in Boston or Paris would likely be rarer.

Or at a bare minimum, government offices, and particularly recruiting stations, ought to have armed men. Why it hasn't become a policy, during a time of terrorist war, to require recruiters to have sidearms in their stations is beyond me.  That's crazy.  Members of the military are now targets everywhere, but they're also amongst the least likely to be armed while in the US.  That policy should end.

Movies In History: Michael Collins

Michael Collins

This is a historical drama in film treatment of Michael Collins' life during the Anglo Irish War and the Irish Civil War.  Collins, for those who might not know, was the military genius behind the IRA's terrorist campaign against the British, and also the subsequent military leader of the Irish Free State's successful struggle against the Irish Republican Army. For those unfamiliar with the history of those two struggles, that may be a bit confusing, in which case this film actually isn't 100% historically accurate.

Even so, it does a pretty good job of portraying the events from about 1916 through 1922, including contrasting Collins role in these events with those of Éamon de Valera, which is not an easy task really.  De Valera comes out the worse in the treatment, which he tends to also in objective histories.  The film does push this a bit further than it should, however, as it dramatically portrays de Valera as directly involved in Collins roadside assassination which is not true.  De Valera undoubtedly knew nothing about that until after it had occurred.

Otherwise, keeping in mind the limitations of film, this film does a really nice job of portraying very complicated events, including events which were really psychological in nature.  Irish penetration of the English police is well done.  The terrorist nature of the IRA's role in the Ango Irish War is well portrayed.  Material details are correct for the film.

This 1996 film is little known in the US, which is too bad as it is a good film with a good cast.  Liam Neeson portrays Collins, whom he somewhat resembles.  Alan Rickman portrays de Valera, whom he also somewhat resembles.  Worth seeing.