January 11, 1921. Fractured and Rescued Russian Lives, 1921 Wyoming Legislature, Work.

Six of the seven Russian children adopted by Admiral Newton A. McCully, with their "governess" Eugenia Z. Selifanova, photographed on January 11, 1921.  

On this day in 1921, a press photographer photographed most of Admiral Newton A. McCully's adopted Russian children together with their governess who was a teenager herself.

McCully was a southern born American naval officer who had been embedded in the Imperial Russian Army during the Russo Japanese War.  In 1914 he returned to Russia as a naval attache and he was elevelted to commend of the U.S. Navy in northern Russia in 1918.  Following this he was sent to appreciate the military situation of the Whites in 1919.  He adopted these children in 1920.

McCully obviously appreciated the East due to all of this service.  A bachelor until 1927, he married Olga Krundycher, an Estonian, in 1929 on the claim that this would provide a mother for his children, and perhaps that was his reason, although I suspect that there was more to it than that.  She was later listed as their mother on census forms, even though the McCully adoptees were not all related and came themselves from varying regions of the former Russian Empire.  She was 29 years old at the time and the marriage took place in Tallinn, Estonia at which time McCully was still a serving naval officer.  He would live until 1951, dying at age 83.  She would live until 1968 and returned to Estonia for reasons of which I am not aware (or am I aware of when that occurred).

Eugenia  Selifanova was 18 or 19 years old when this photograph was taken. She later married another Russian immigrant, about 20 years her senior, and lived the rest of her life in Dearborn, Michigan. She had two children by the marriage and died in 1952.   She's already left the family, and probably had married, but the time of Admiral McCully's marriage.  Indeed, at that time McCully's mother was tasked with minding the children when he was away on duties.

It's easy to see what became of some of the children and that they had long American lives.  I wonder if anything of their early origins and culture was retained at all, or if anything of it remains in their ancestors.

On January 11, 1921, the United States severed all further participation in foreign councils, including the council that made up the Allied powers during World War One.

Also on this day in 1921, Wyoming's legislature convened for the 1921 session, as we reported in Today In Wyoming's History: January 11:  1921.   The 1921 legislative session for Wyoming commenced.

And, in an era before Social Security, this elderly gentleman was photographed at work.

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December 28, 1920. Famous Aviator and Aviatrix, Committees, Soviet Subjugation, the Roar from the 20s.

On  this day in 1920 a young Amelia Earhart rode in an airplane piloted by Frank Hawks at the California State Fair in Los Angeles.  She was 23 years old and her father paid the $10.00 charge for the ten minute flight.

Earhart in 1928.

It was the beginning of her interest in aviation.

We're all familiar with the Earhart story, of course, so I'll not go into it here.  Frank Hawks, however, is likely less well known to a modern audience, and of course there's no enduring mystery surrounding his death.

Frank Hawks.

Hawks had been an aviator in World War One and then was a record setting aviator after the war.  He retired from air racing in 1937 to become an executive in the Gwinn Aircar Company, being in charge of sales.  He flew around the country in that capacity demonstrating the safety features of the aircraft, but died in 1938 piloting one.

Gwinn Aircar.

Only two of the aircraft was ever made, and the Gwinn company subsequently folded.

Women in Washington D.C. who were on the inaugural committee were photographed.

Unlike now, the inauguration was in March at the time.

On the same day the Ukrainian communist party surrendered its independence to Russia's, which it probably had little choice but to do, in the Workers Peasant Union Treaty.  

Self determination of nations was a declared policy of Lenin's, but it was clearly not one that the Russian Reds meant.  At this point in time they were busy reassembling those portions of Imperial Russia that they could grab, and Trotsky was already proposing that the revolution should be taken to neighboring states.

General John T. Thompson received the first of his patents on his submachine gun.  The gun would go into production the following year but initial sales were poor.  The U.S. military did buy some, and it was intended as a military weapon, but overall it was a new gun in an era which didn't seem to require it.  The first real military application by the United States of the initial model, the M1921, came at the hands of the Marines in the Banana Wars.  The United States Postal Service bought some for guards and there were some police sales.  An early indication that it might acquire some infamy came in the form of sales that ended up being for the Irish Republican Army.

1921 advertisement for the expensive Thompson Sub Machine Gun.   While the gun may have been advertised as "sold only to law and order", it quickly came to be used by the unlawful and disorderly.

It would be the spate of Prohibition related crime, followed by Depression era crime, that would make the gun famous and which would in part lead to the National Firearms Act regulating the sales of automatic weapons.  A new improved version was introduced in 1928 which is the most famous various of the gun, outside the M1 version used during World War Two.

Lance Corporal of the British East Surry Regiment with M1928 Thompson Sub Machine Gun.

Of interest here, in redesigning the weapon for military use during World War Two it was discovered that part of the patented mechanism in the gun was unnecessary and it was omitted.  By that time soldiers were stripping the "H piece" from the earlier variants and leaving it out given that this slightly reduced the weight of a very heavy weapon.  M1A1 Thompsons remained expensive to produce and the military sought to supplant them during the war, but some remained in use as late as the Vietnam War.

And the Laramie Boomerang (from Wyoming Digital News Paper Collection) let the public know that it was flu season.

Poster Saturday. Some posters we saved to put up, and then didn't get around to it, in 2020

One of our "trailing threads" here are posters, which we like, and which we typically post on Saturdays, if we get around to it, which more often than not, we do not.

As the computer files on which the posters were saved are about to go, as there's a lot of them, and we're going into a new year, I thought I'd put some of those that were saved to post, but which weren't posted, up.  

More often than not, I don't comment on the posters. Some of them deserve comment, however, so its here.  Comment yourself if  you feel like it, and if feel like, please comment.

The poster is an old Hires Root Beer advertisement.

In a year in which Mia, the Native American woman on the cover of Land O Lake dairy products, was sent packing as culturally insensitive, this old poster no doubt also is.  Indeed, she reminds me of the Navajo Trucking of a blue eyed ostensibly Native American woman still on the doors of their trucking fleet. Still, this blog chronicles the century old and the poster is visually attractive.  

What role does birch bark play in Root Beer?

1920 was a banner year for women and we've posted a lot of magazine covers that dealt with that.  We missed the one above from July, 1920, however.

Magazine illustrations of the period, we'd note, were really art. That's something that's really been lost in the past century.

We also saved a lot of World War Two related posters that never went up.   Some of them are below.

The poster above is interesting in that the printing style retained the World War One appearance, even though its a World War Two vintage poster.  Which is a nice way to note that we also saved a few World War One era posters we didn't get around to putting up, in part because our century retrospectives dealt with the 1920, and not 1914 through 1918.

Cigarettes actually became a big deal during World War One. They weren't nearly as popular before the Great War.  The results would be disaterous.

The thought of Liberty calling on an old style rotary dial phone is a bit odd.  Not one of the better posters of the Great War.

1920 was a tragic year in the Russian Civil War; seeing the Whites driven out of Crimea and into exile, if they survived to make it into exile.  We covered that a bit this past year.  Surprisingly, given the conditions in which it was fought, it generated a lot of poster art, including this White poster from below.

1940, like 2020, was a census year.  The Federal Government according issued this poster hoping to get the populace to be counted.

2020 turned out to be an oddly controversial year this way, having to do ultimately with the counting of illegal residents in the country.  The topic of who to count is an oddly old one in American history going all the way back to the adoption of the Constitution which saw a compromise that slaves and Indians would be counted as less than a full person.  As the count determines representation in the House of Representatives, how people who cannot vote are counted has accordingly been a very long lasting feature of American politics.

December 20, 1920. Red Russia turns Redder.

Felix Dzerzkhinsky in Switzerland, 1918, with his wife and son.  The son was born in 1911 in prison where Sophia Dzerzkhinsky was a political prisoner.

On this day the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service was created as a special section of the Cheka.  Felix Dzerzhinkshy was at its head.

Dzerzhinkshy was a Pole of noble birth who was radicalized at some point in his early years and went on to a blood stained role in the early Soviet Union.  He died of a heart attack at age 59 in 1926.

November 26, 1920. Distant scenes.

San Francisco Harbor.  November 26, 1920.  This would be right about the time my grandfather lived and worked in San Francisco as a teenager.

On this day Simon Karetnik was executed by the Bolsheviks in an example, one of many, of the Communists destroying other radicals.  Karetnik was a Ukrainian anarchist leader (yes, that's a ironic situation to be in) of the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, and a quite successful one. The RIAU itself was fairly successful for some period of time in fighting the Russian Whites, but it was naïve in the extreme in deluding itself that there was a place for it in competition with the Reds, whom they resisted union with.

RIAU commanders, Karetnik third from left.

On this day in 1920 Karetnik and fellow RIAU officers went, with some reluctance, to a meeting with Red Army commander Mikhail Frunze who had ordered them place under a command of his army.  On the way they were arrested and executed.  Frunze was a successful Red Army commander who died in surgery in 1925.

RIAU commanders.

The entire event also helps demonstrate the absolute mess that Russia had become in its late imperial stage.  Anarchy was a theory that was never going to succeed because of its nature.  Revolutionary socialist other than the Communist were never going to prevail in a struggle as they were insufficiently organized and single minded.  The Whites couldn't succeed as they had no really strong central unity in fact or in theory. That doomed Russia to years of an alien whacky political theory that didn't match its nature or culture and which set Russia back so far in development that it is nowhere near overcoming it today.

The central feature of this rise of extremism had been a pre World War One governmental and economic system that was frozen in the distant past. With no outlet of any kind for a developing society, absurd economic and political theories festered underground.  It's no accident that many of these theories were the same as ones that were then also circulating in Germany and Austria, which likewise had old order monarchical systems going into World War One.

November 23, 1920. Empires

The news on this Tuesday in 1920 was still reverberating with the stories of recent European violence.

This included, as seen above, the naïve hope that the United States was going to be Armenia's protector.

In Washington D.C., high ranking officers of the Department of the Navy were out.

USMC Gen. John A. Lejune, 11/23/1920

 Navy personnel and Josephus Daniels

Anchorage Alaska, which had been founded in 1915, was incorporated.

Anchorage was, and is, as the name indicates a port city.  And today its a large one, much like any other large port city, all of which have a certain universal character.  It was also, however, right from the onset a railhead, which made it all the more important.

November 22, 1920: Violence and Echoes of Violence

An almost indescribable slate of violent events made the Monday morning headlines on this day in 1920. 

Of interest, and probably depending upon whether  you were receiving a morning or evening newspaper, the violence in Ireland may have focused on one side, or the other, in the strife going on there.

On the same day Woodrow Wilson, acting as the arbiter on where the boarder between Turkey and Armenia was to go, issued his decision.  It was a moot point, the Turks, who had prevailed in their war against Armenian, would dictate where that border would be to Armenia's detriment.

DuPont bought a giant share of General Motors.

Governor Octaviano Larrazola pardoned sixteen Mexicans who had been imprisoned for the March 9, 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico noting that they appeared to have no real connection with Villa and were press ganged by the Villista's at the time of the raid and forced to participate.

Governor Larrazola had been born in Mexico to then wealthy parents who had suffered under the French rule and who ultimately went bankrupt.  He entered the United States with a Catholic Bishop as a teenager intending to study theology, which he did do, and then become a Priest.  Ultimately, he determined he was not called to the Priesthood and became a teacher in El Paso, Texas.  In El Paso his focus turned to the law which he studied and then stood for the bar in Texas.  He moved to New Mexico in 1895 where he practiced law and entered politics, becoming the state's Governor in 1918.  He'd ultimately serve a term in Congress.  As he was highly independent and tended to anger his own party, his political career was intermittent.

November 20, 1920. Seasonal scenes. Reflections of a century ago and today.

 On this day in 1920, the White House Thanksgiving entre was delivered in a White House shaped crate.

I don't know if this was before the moronic custom of "pardoning the turkey" or not.  Of note, this turkey isn't as plump as the ones you see today in this role for a simple reason, farm turkeys have been genetically selected in the past century to be plump, and hence are more plump than their ancestors of a century ago, save for wild turkeys, which are just about like this.

The custom of collections for the needy was in swing.

The House of Mercy was collecting donations on this day in 1920.  The organization was an Anglican organization that aided unwed mothers.

I have no idea what the giant dog represented.

The House of Mercy now has the unfortunate status of having its named as part of a goofball dance play, Escape from the House of Mercy, by the highly woke who performed it briefly pre Coronavirus Pandemic at a park which is at the location of the New York House of Mercy.  Further performances of this silly stupidity have been postponed until COVID 19 is beat, by which time hopefully the woke will have moved on to something else.

This helps demonstrate, however, that the well off and historically ignorant section of society has no real understanding of conditions of the past in numerous ways.  Society at large in 1920 wasn't as wealthy as it is in 2020, the government largely did not fund welfare systems, and the ability of almost any woman to support herself and an infant without a male income winner was darned near impossible.  Institutions designed to address this weren't hotel resorts, to be sure, but the alternatives tended towards abject destitution.  Fruity dancers aren't likely to experience that condition today, in a much wealthier society in which there are extensive publicly funded social institutions.

Various notables were photographed, and some honored, at some sort of big event in Washington D.C.   This included General Payton March and his family.

Secretary of War Newton Baker and his son Jack also were there.

What this was isn't clear to me, but my guess is that it was a football game.

The Country Gentleman hit the stands with a seasonal cover illustration.

The Russian Orthodox Church issued a Ukase, a set of instructions with the force of canonical law, directing Bishops to carry on outside of Russia, a measure which acknowledged that in most of the country and its former empire the Communist Party was now in control and was suppressing religion. The move lead to the formation of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.  It still exist today in spite of the fall of the Soviet Union, but it reentered communion with the Church in Russia in 2007.  The ROCOR was not the only Russian Orthodox body outside of the Soviet Union, and a small element of its membership went into schism at the time of the reunion. The Russian Orthodox Church is the largest Orthodox Church. 

November 14, 1920. Russian and Irish Tragedies

Remnants of the Imperial Russian Black Sea Fleet steam away from Sebastopol forever carrying the remnants of Pyotr Wrangels White Russian Army and refugees.  The fleet managed to continue to exist as an entity until 1921, going first to Turkey and then to France.  In 1924 the ships were turned over to Soviet control but found to be unserviceable, and were sold as scrap.

On  this day, the fight of the Russian Whites in the eastern half of what had been the Russian Empire came to an end and the Russian White forces under Pyotr Wrangel abandoned Sebastopol and fled on the remaining loyal elements of the former Imperial Russian Black Sea Fleet, together with refugees.  Allied ships also departed the port taking with them their own nationals.  While fighting would go on in the east, it was the effective end of the Russian Civil War in the west, and the effective end of the war in general in terms of who would ultimately prevail.

Poster of Wrangel in Cossack regalia.

Wrangel would attempt to lead Russian refugees after his exile and formed, for a time, an organization that attempted to centralize that effort and to plan for a future war against the Communists in Russia, a quixotic effort under the circumstances.  In 1927 he moved to Belgium and became a mining engineer.  He was poisoned in 1928 by the brother of his butler, who is believed to have been a Soviet agent.  His descendants have refused to have him reinterred in Russia as the current Russian government has not denounced the evils of Communism.

Wrangel, who was part of the Russian military community descended from German origin, a surprisingly common demographic in Imperial Russian military leadership, had such close German roots that his grandfather had in fact been Lutheran.  Pyotr Wrangel was Orthodox however and had in fact been trained as an engineer prior to joining the Imperial Russian Army.  Like many senior military figures, he had actually dropped out of the service at the time of the Russian Revolution and only joined the Whites after having been arrested by, and escaping from, the Communists.  Such experiences were surprisingly common and to a degree demonstrate how Red paranoia actually fueled the war against them.  He was a very able commander and highly successful in the Russian Civil War before his reversal of fortunes.  A failure to find an overall command for the White effort partially explains this failure.

Wrangel, of wealthy and aristocratic background, obviously managed to find some success after his exile.  Most Russian refugees, however, were of much more modest means.  In the west they spread out among a collection of countries, with France being a common one, and rebuilt new lives in new countries while also retaining their Russian identity.  Their fortunes varied considerably from their compatriots who fled into China a few years later where economic conditions were dire.

Fr. Michael Griffin.

On this same day, Father Michael Griffin, a Catholic Priest in Ireland who sympathized with Republicans, and who had been missing since November 14, was found in an unmarked grave.  He is believed to have been murdered by the Black & Tans.  He is remembered in the name of a road in Galway, where he was from, and in the name of an Irish football club which is called The Father Griffins.

Eileen Quinn

This event shows the way the Anglo Irish War was starting to go, with guerilla extrajudicial killings becoming common.  Just a few days prior the pregnant Eileen Quinn, age 24, was shot by a police auxiliary, a police unit of the Royal Irish Constabulary often confused with the Black & Tans, when she was out in front of her tenant farmhouse nursing a baby.  She was wounded in the stomach and died later that day.  She and her husband Malachi were tenants of Lady Gregory Augusta, an Anglo Irish playwright of nationalist sympathies.  The death of Mrs. Quinn left her husband a widower and her three children without a mother.  Her husband had been away at the time of the killing attempting to negotiate a purchase of land.  A subsequent military investigation came to the conclusion that the killing was accidental and from a random shot designed to attempt to clear the area.

Both killings resulted in a way from the IRA ambush and murder of Sheriff Frank Shawe-Taylor the previous March, which had brought the Black & Tans and Auxiliaries in.

Black & Tan in Dublin, 1921.  He is armed with a Lewis Gun and an incredibly low slung .455 Webley revolver.

The British government had, as noted here the other day, just extended home rule to Ireland, but events like this showed that the measure had come too late.  Additionally, their heavy handedness resulted in contempt in both Ireland and the United Kingdom over them and support in Ireland for the IRA.