Thursday, March 2, 1775. Raising a stench.

The women of Providence, Rhode Island, gathered at the town's market place and burned tea.

Last edition:

Sunday, February 26, 1775 Salem Gunpowder Raid

Labels: 1770s, 1775, American Revolution, British Army, Colonial North America, Massachusetts

Thursday July 10, 1941. The death of Jelly Roll Morton and the Pogrom at Jedwabne.

 

Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, more famously recalled as Jelly Roll Morton, died on this day in 1941.  He was 40 years old.

Morton was instrumental in the rise of jazz and sometimes claimed to have invented it.  He had not, but he was the first jazz arranger, so his claim was not completely without merit.  Fame came to him early with his famous Jelly Roll Blues.

Born in Louisiana of creole parents, he adopted the name Mouton when his mother married a man by that last name after his father, to whom his mother was not married, left the family when he was still young.  He later changed that to the anglicized version of Morton.

Famous in the 1920s, his career carried on into the late 1930s.  At that time, he was interviewed by Alan Lomax who encouraged Morton to record a series of songs for his collection from the early jazz era.  Morton was highly disinclined to do so, as the songs contained a ribald selection and Morton himself was a devout Catholic.  The song titles were not published until 2005 given their nature.

While paying at Washington D. C.'s Music Box bar he was violently stabbed.  He was refused treatment at the nearest hospital on the basis that it was all white.  While he did receive medical treatment at a hospital for African Americans, he never really recovered from the event and died on this day in 1941.

The Finns began a campaign to retake the Lake Ladoga region which they'd lost to the Soviets in the Winter War.

340 Polish Jews were murdered Jedwabne, a region that had just been taken by the Germans.  The pogrom is remarkable, however, in that it was carried out by Poles.

Details of the atrocity only came to light in the 1990s, so there's some murkiness regarding them.  What seems to have occurred is that animosity between the areas non Jewish population and Jewish population started when the town was turned over to the USSR following the joint German/Soviet invasion of 1939.  Jewish residents of the town, which made up about half of its inhabitants, were understandably relieved to be under the Soviets rather than the Nazis, with some welcoming the Soviet arrival.

The Jewish residents were hardly Communist supporters but the actions by a few cast suspicion upon an already disliked group.  On July 10 members of some German official unit arrived, probably the SS based on the discussion, and met with the town council. What occurred is murky but Poles from outside of the town, including at least one former NKVD operative, arrived and the pogrom commences.  Most of the victims were burned to death in a barn.  Residents of the town did participate.

As noted, many of the details were lost, probably more than a few intentionally.  The Germans seem to have had an early role, but they did not carry out the atrocity.  By some accounts, the Germans themselves were a bit surprised by the level of violence.  They may have filmed it, by some accounts, which was a common German practice, but no films have come to light.  

The revelation of the event after the collapse of the Soviet Union ultimately sparked a Polish law seeking to suppress stories which suggest that the Poles were more than victims during the war.  Poland did suffer terribly, but throughout Eastern Europe events like this occurred with local civilians often independently murdering local Jews whom they had lived with for decades.

The Germans commenced their assault on Smolensk.  They would take the city, but only after weeks of effort.  While it was a Soviet defeat, it was notable that already by this point in Barbarossa the Soviets were proving difficult to dislodge from urban areas.

Main gate,  Quonset Point Naval Air Station, during rush hour.  July 10, 1941.

February 27, 1941. Things Naval.

Vought "OSZU-1's" [Kingfishers] of the Neutrality Patrol, Quonset Point Naval Air Station, Roger Williams Way, North Kingstown, Washington County, RI.

The United States was not yet at war, of course, but was building towards it.  Given that, a photographer took some photographs at the Quonset Point Naval Air Station.

On the same day, the Academy Awards were given out on this day.  More on that here:

Today in World War II History—February 27, 1941

A New Zealand light cruiser engaged an Italian auxiliary cruiser in the Indian ocean.  They were not an even match and the result was predictable.

HMNZS Leander.

The Italian auxiliary cruiser Ramb I was sunk.

The sinking Ramb I.

The Italians continued to suffer one defeat after another, and earlier this week were pushed out of Mogadishu, Somalia.  None the less, the did score some Naval success elsewhere on this February 27, which an be read about below, with other World War Two events of the day:

Day 546 February 27, 1941

Daylight raid on Aircraft Works kills 53

27 February 1941: 8 Killed by Enemy Mines – Gozo Boat Sunk

Wyoming, North Carolina, Utah, Nebraska, and Missouri push the 18th Amendment over the top.

On this day in 1919, Wyoming, in combination with North Carolina, Utah, Nebraska and Missouri ratified the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution.  These legislative acts secured a sufficient number of votes to make the 18th Amendment the law. The Senate had passed the original proposal on August 1, 1917 and the House a revised variant on December 17, 1917.  The various states passed it in the following order:

1. Mississippi (January 7, 1918)
2. Virginia (January 11, 1918)
3. Kentucky (January 14, 1918)
4. North Dakota (January 25, 1918)
5. South Carolina (January 29, 1918)
6. Maryland (February 13, 1918)
7. Montana (February 19, 1918)
8. Texas (March 4, 1918)
9. Delaware (March 18, 1918)
10. South Dakota (March 20, 1918)
11. Massachusetts (April 2, 1918)
12. Arizona (May 24, 1918)
13. Georgia (June 26, 1918)
14. Louisiana (August 3, 1918)
15. Florida (November 27, 1918)
16. Michigan (January 2, 1919)
17. Ohio (January 7, 1919)
18. Oklahoma (January 7, 1919)
19. Idaho (January 8, 1919)
20. Maine (January 8, 1919)
21. West Virginia (January 9, 1919)
22. California (January 13, 1919)
23. Tennessee (January 13, 1919)
24. Washington (January 13, 1919)
25. Arkansas (January 14, 1919)
26. Illinois (January 14, 1919)
27. Indiana (January 14, 1919)
28. Kansas (January 14, 1919)
29. Alabama (January 15, 1919)
30. Colorado (January 15, 1919)
31. Iowa (January 15, 1919)
32. New Hampshire (January 15, 1919)
33. Oregon (January 15, 1919)
34. North Carolina (January 16, 1919)
35. Utah (January 16, 1919)
36. Nebraska (January 16, 1919)
37. Missouri (January 16, 1919)
38. Wyoming (January 16, 1919)
39. Minnesota (January 17, 1919)
40. Wisconsin (January 17, 1919)
41. New Mexico (January 20, 1919)
42. Nevada (January 21, 1919)
43. New York (January 29, 1919)
44. Vermont (January 29, 1919)
45. Pennsylvania (February 25, 1919)
46. New Jersey (March 9, 1922)

Connecticut and Rhode Island told Congress to pound dry sand and didn't ratify the amendment, not that that matter in context.  There were, of course, only 48 states at the time.

The 18th Amendment provided:

Section 1. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all the territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.
Section 2. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Section 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.

While the intent of the Amendment was clear; "bone dry prohibition", it didn't actually provide any definitions and so it required legislation to make it effective, which was quick in coming. 

As this list should indicate, Prohibition was actually massively popular in the United States including the Western United States.  Only two states refused to ratify the proposed amendment.  I'm not sure what the situation was in Connecticut, but Rhode Island was heavily Catholic with a large Italian demographic and likely found the proposal abhorrent for that reason.  Still, it's somewhat telling that Wyoming's ratification came with a slate of late Western states that voted for it.  Still, the entire process really only took one year once Congress had passed it.

Everyone is well aware of how the history of Prohibition worked and its generally regarded as a failure.  Like most popular history, it's become mythologized, which isn't a bad thing in and of itself as myths are the means by which humans originally remembered their history.  However, like other instances in which an event quickly turned into an unacceptable defeat, the myth isn't completely accurate.  The popular myth is that Prohibition was unpopular from the start and is a failed example of legislating morality.  While it may be an example of such a failure, it very clearly wasn't unpopular at first and in fact the opposite was very much the case.  Indeed, as late as the election of 1922 it remained so popular in Wyoming that William B. Ross, the Democrat who ran for office, ran on a platform of more strictly enforcing its provisions.

So a person might reasonably ask what happened to cause it to so rapidly fail and to be so inaccurately remembered.  Quite a few things really.

For one thing, the final push to pass Prohibition came in the context of World War One.  While momentum to pass it had been building for well over a decade, the war caused an enormous fear that American youth would be exposed to the corrupting influences of European culture.  If that seems really odd, and it is, we have to keep in mind that American culture in the 1910s remained predominantly Protestant in outlook (and indeed it still is).  English speaking Protestants took a distinctively different view of drink in this period than their Catholic fellows, in part because their history with it was considerably different.  While early Protestants had not been opposed to drink at all, this had evolved and by this point there was a strong anti drinking culture in the English speaking world.  People feared that progress on the anti drinking front would be lost when young Americans were exposed to French wine and, frankly, French women.

But for the most part the cultural impact on Americans, who were not in the war long, was much less than it would be for later wars, even where they fought overseas.  So this fear did not really last that long.  The short but deep depression that followed the war, moreover, reminded people that alcohol was an agricultural byproduct, and like a lot of things that impact a person's wallet, that had an influence.  The lid coming off of the culture in the 1920s had an additional big impact on things as the 1920s started to Roar and Prohibition became fashionable to flaunt.  That in turn inspired criminal activity that became a major problem.  By the early 1930s Americans had substantially changed their minds as a second depression, the Great Depression, again depressed the agricultural sector along with every other.  So, after a short stint, Prohibition went from massively popular to substantially unpopular, and the 18th Amendment was repealed.

Friday Farming News: Rhode Island directly purchases farms to preserve farming. Midwestern farmers worry about trade wars

Rhode Island farm, 1917

In an effort to preserve its farms and to allow young people to get into farming, the State of Rhode Island is buying farms that are for sale, irrespective of their inflated development value, and then reselling them to young farmers at their agricultural value with restrictive covenants on future development.

Good for Rhode Island.

The development pressure in a place like Rhode Island, one of the most densely populated states in the union, have to be intense.  But none the less there remain young people there who desire to farm.  Their farming efforts, based on the article I read about this new program, are market farms, or market gardening type farms, on very small acreages. The price of land is intense.  A real uphill battle.  I'm glad the state recognizes the value of having land preserved in this fashion and give them a lot of credit for taking this on.

Not everyone is.  One older farmer complained that "this is what the Communist did".

Nope, that's not what the Communist did at all.  

This is what those with an eye towards the future, with an agrarian eye, and a Distributist eye do in the present, in Rhode Island, and hopefully more places in the US in the future.

Driving pigs, 1916.

If politicians back east are worrying about the fortune of farming in their states, at least in one case, in the Midwest they're worrying about a trade war with China.

Well, all the way into the West, it turns out.

China in recent years has become an enormous importer of American pork and it was just set to become a major importer of American beef.  With the US set to ramp up tariffs on Chinese steel and other products China is retaliating, or threatening to, with tariffs on food imports to that country from the United States.

The wisdom of putting tariffs on food imports is really questionable, but it would hurt beef and pork producers to be sure.  All of this is a lesson on how ignoring a trade problem in its infancy, and we definitely have a long running one with China, is a really bad idea.

China is an international trade menace as it doesn't play fair and it steals information from other nations.  It should be slapped down, but that slapping should have occurred a decade ago.  We didn't do that, and as the GOP and the Democrats have been complicit in a cheap goods policy that basically encouraged the exporting of manufacturing overseas (one of the major factors that lead to the rise of Trump) they jointly had low motivation to address it.

Cheap goods, of course, are fine if you have the money to buy them from your good paying job, but once you have no jobs, that's pretty academic and that's what's happened in a lot of the American Rust Belt.  Those folks are mad, and Trump is their herald.  So we're hurtling towards a belated trade war that may very well be way too late and rather economically bloody, something that Trump should rethink and the suit and tie class, including the last couple of Presidents, ought to be berated for allowing to be set up.

A real oddity of it, however, is than it this process the American economy started to rhyme with the economy of the late 19th Century.  Not duplicate it, but mirror it.  The US was always a major agricultural producer but in the declining era of heavy manufacturing that sector of the economy has improved and become more important. . . sort of like it was prior to the 1890s.

Now, things are changing again as some manufacturing is returning to the US.  Trump has been getting credit for this, but that takes years to occur and likely reflects the cycle of manufacturing development.  So things are bouncing back in a more high tech fashion as the US has kept the lead there, a byproduct of a bunch of things but particularly of a good university system that, while it supports piles of fluff, does the important stuff really well.  Contrary to widespread "progressive" views the US is very near the top in producing university graduates. So much so that a lot of them can't find work in their chosen fields.

Anyhow, shades of the early 1890s here. . . which isn't good.  

Recall the Depression of 1893?

Lex Anteinternet: No, just go away

Uff:

Last fall, when I ran this:

No, just go away

 

World War One era poster, from when Daylight Savings Time was a brand new announce.

I have not been able to adjust to the return to normal time this year.

Not even close.

I'm waking up most morning's about 3:30 am.  That would have been early even when Daylight Saving's Time was on, as that would have been about 4:30, but that is about the time I had been waking up, in part because I've been spending a lot of time in East Texas, where that's about 5:30.  Indeed, my inability to adjust back to regular time is working out for me in the context of being up plenty early enough to do anything I need to do in East Texas, but it's the pits back here in my home state.

I really hate Daylight Saving's Time.  I understand the thesis that it was built on, but I think it's wholly obsolete and simply ought to be dumped.

I meant it.

But the annual darkening of the morning time unreality event is back. So now I get to feel exhausted by act of Congress.

I see I'm not alone in my views. There's a petition to Congress.  There was a bill in the California Assembly.  And in Kansas.  And a petition to put it to a referendum in Utah. Rhode Island is considering ending as well.

And good riddance, I say.

Saturday, April 17, 1909. Soccer riots.

Edith Kelly was photographed in her role in Havana.  She was an English actress, best known for her role in that production.

Thousands of angry soccer fans attacked the stadium at Hampden Park after a replay of the Scottish Cup between the Rangers and Celtics ended in a draw.

Soccer riots aren't a new thing.

The Scottish Football Association did not award the prize cup to any team.

Helen and William Howard Taft opened West Potomac Park to the public.

Child laborers were photographed in Rhode Island on  this day in 1909.

Last prior edition:

Wednesday, April 14, 1909. The Adana Massacre continues.

1900s, 1909, 860 BC, 860s BC, Adana Massacre, Agriculture, Animals, Cartoons, Christianity, Illinois, Iran, Minnesota, Ottoman Empire, Persia, Petroleum, Sheep, Smoking, tobacco, Women