March 18, 1921. The Peace of Riga

 Belarusian cartoon protesting the Treaty of Riga.

The Treaty of Riga officially settled the conflict between Soviet Russia and Poland.  In doing so, it drew borders through regions that were neither Russian nor Polish.

Ironically, Polish negotiators, fearing growing Soviet power and also fearing the internal strife that the situation was leaving itself with, chose to omit territories that Russia would have ceded to Poland that contained Polish populations. These populations would suffer under Soviet rule.  Some Poles likewise wished to omit Ukrainian territories offered to them and sought to back an independent Ukraine, but in the end regions of Ukraine were annexed and in future years would undergo Polanization.  Territory in Belarus was divided between Soviet Russia and Poland.

The treaty reflected the state of many former imperial regimes.  The Wilsonian concept of national self determination had failed to really appreciate that long existing empires had allowed for ethnic populations to blend on their maps, rather than retain precise territories, something that indeed reflected their pre imperial states.  There was typically a multi ethnic frontier of sorts in which populations of various ethnicities occupied the same territories but did not really mix.  This was very common as to German populations, which had expanded into the Baltic regions and Russia during prior centuries, and it was likewise common with Polish populations, which had expanded into Russia and the Baltics, as well into German regions a bit.  Poland, additionally, had been a major Medieval kingdom which stretched far beyond its 20th Century territorial claims, and at one time had been the largest western European state.

To complicate the matters further, the Poles were a closely related ethnicity to some populations on their borders, and in some periods of the past ethnicities that regarded themselves as distinct had regarded themselves as Polish, even when from very distinct groups.  Nonetheless, coming out of the Russian Revolution almost every culturally distinct group that had territory sought to become independent of Russia and treaties such as this ignored those aspirations. That would have to wait until after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It's easy to look back and criticize treaties such as this, but in reality, the Poles took less than they could have and they had real reason to fear Soviet Russia, as 1939 would prove.  If they'd taken all that they could have, 1939 would probably not have worked out for them, but what that would have meant in terms of the survivability of the Polish state, and the ability to influence things in the Stalinist starvation period of the late 1920s and early 1930s in the Soviet Union, is something at least worth pondering.

October 12, 1920. First and Lasts.

 Cleveland brought home the 1920 World Series victory.  It was their first.

Man O War beat Sir Barton at Windsor, Ontario.  A highly anticipated race, it was his last.

Sir Barton would spend his retirement years in Wyoming:

The three year old was ridden in the race by Johnny Loftus.

Sir Barton raced again in the 1920 season and set a world's record for the 1 3/16 miles dirt race that  year.  On October 12 of that year he was defeated by Man o' War in a match race at Kenilworth Park in Windsor Ontario.  He was retired and put to stun in 1921.  In 1932 he was sold into the Army Remount Service and stood at Ft. Royal, Virginia and Ft. Robinson, Nebraska.  He was then assigned to Wyoming rancher J. R. Hylton who was part of the Remount program.  The Remount Service at that time assigned out studs to ranchers in the program. 

In 1937 he died of colic and was buried on Hylton's ranch outside of Douglas.  His remains are now in Douglas' Washington Park where a memorial for the horse exists.

An armistice between Poland and the Soviet Union was entered into which was leading up to what would become the Treaty of Riga.  It would go into effect on October 18, 1920.  On the same day, Polish forces under the false flag of mutiny declared the existence of the Republic of Central Lithuania, which would be incorporated into Poland after a decent interval.

The settling conflicts involving a restored Poland contained seeds of future discord, although given its giant neighbor, the Soviet Union, and ultimately failing neighbor, Germany, that can't be really blamed for what occur to Poland in 1939.  The forming peace, however, left Poland with Polish territory in Lithuania, which made ethnographic sense but which caused Lithuanian discontent, and it also left Poland with large areas of Ukrainian and Belorussian territory which contained those ethnicities who were discontent with the results.

October 5, 1920. World Series begins, Russo Polish War ends, Railways reopen.

 The 1920 World Series started on this day, in 1920.

Crowd in Ebbets Field.

Cleveland won the first game, 1 to 0.

New York City Mayor John Hylan throws ball to open World Series at Ebbets Field

Poland and the Soviet Union signed an armistice to end the fighting between their countries.  Fighting would stop on October 18.

In Egypt, the American University in Cairo opened.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, a new railroad opened up.  Or rather a rebuilt raiilway.

The opening of the Jaffa-Jerusalem Railway was attended, as all such things were, by the senior British official.

The line had originally been a narrow gauge railway, but  the British reconstructed it to a new, more useful, wider gauge.

While it has been closed from time to time, updates and reconstructions have meant that the rail line remains in use today.

September 16, 1920. The Wall Street Bombing.

On this day, at 12:01 p.m., terrorist widely believed to be Galleanist anarchists, set off a bomb in New York's Wall Street district which killed thirty-eight people and injured hundreds more.

The bomb, designed to deploy shrapnel, killed mostly young workers in the district at a time at which young workers were very young.  It was left in a horse drawn wagon, with horse still attached, and went off at the busy noon hour.

The direct perpetrators of the act were never discovered.

On the same day, a Polish artillery regiment was destroyed, with some prisoners and wounded, by a Red Army cavalry unit that outnumbered it after it expended all of its ammunition during the Battle of Dytiatyn.  The Red Army unit was itself destroyed by Polish forces a few days latter.

The battle became a famous one for the Poles who established a military cemetery there.  That was later destroyed by the Soviets following World War Two and the location is now inside of Ukraine.

August 23, 1920. Portents

From the Sandusky Ohio Star Journal, August 23, 1920.  "The Sky Is Now Her Limit".

The achievement of the franchise was being heralded as a major advance for women in society by the press around the country, which of course, it was.

Poland's dramatic reversal of military fortunes, and the Soviet Unions, was also being noted.  The Poles were on the verge of defeat just a few days ago but now were defeating the Soviet Union.  Red Army soldiers were departing Trotsky's forces for captivity with the Poles.

At the same time, German workers in Danzig organized a Communist Soviet which took action to disrupt Allied shipments to embattled Poland.

Danzig's German dockworkers present an interesting item here, in that the Danzig Corridor was one of the contention points between Germany and Poland that the Nazi's would use as a basis for war.  At least in 1920, however, those German workers were Red.  They'd lose their homes in 1945 when the Soviet Union came in and pushed the Germans out and the city has since been known by its Polish name, Gdansk.  It's Polish dockworkers were instrumental in bringing down Poland's Communist government in 1989 which was the first step of the end of Communism as a serious entity anywhere.

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.

August 19, 1920. Advantage, Poland

 

Just a few days prior to this, the defeat, dismantling, and Communization of Poland appeared absolutely inevitable.  Had that occured, and it appeared inevitable, with Trotsky at the helm of the Red Army, the open question really would have been whether German Communist would have rose in rebellion against the republican socialist Weimar government and the Red Army crossed into Germany.

Now it was questionable whether the Red Army could form a stable defensive line against the Poles. The collapse of the Soviet Union was once again a real possibility.

It was a stunning reversal of fortunes in very little time.

On the same day, a rebellion broke out in German Silesia on the part of Poles.  This involved German sentiments in the region as Germans had broken out in celebration. . . and looting upon reading a false report on the fall of Warsaw.  The anti Polish feelings were so strong among Germans in this mixed ethnicity region that they assumed the end had come for Poland and were glad of it. When it soon became clear that this was not the case, Poles rose up in rebellion.

August 18, 1920 The 19th Amendment Ratified

Which meant that universal suffrage now included women.  Tennessee, "the Volunteer State", brought the amendment over the bar.

It was a close vote, passing by a margin of four, and only after some last minute changes in position came about.

Which shows, I suppose, that people, and by that we can suppose that to principally be men, were still not fully convinced that women should vote.  On the same day, North Carolina declined to pass the amendment.

Given the monumental nature of the 19th Amendment, a person could be justified in believing that its passage was the only think on people's minds that day, but of course that view would be wrong.  On the same day the fate of Poland remained in the headlines, and very much in the minds of Polish Americans as well.

Joseph P. Tumulty addressing crowd of American citizens of Polish birth or extraction, who called at the White House to present resolutions to President Wilson asking him to continue the present national policy in support of Polish independence.

Polish Americans wanted the US to do something about the fate of Poland, but there was really little the country could in fact do.  Proposed military interventions had been considered by the UK and France, but Weimar Germany had blocked them. Therefore, the 1st Division, pictured below, didn't have to worry about imminent deployment.

1st Division, Camp Zachary Taylor, Kentucky.  August 18, 1920.

August 17, 1920. Warsaw saved

At least for the time being, anyhow.  It would of course be taken by the Germans in 1939, and then by the Soviets at the end of World War Two, who would create a Communist government that would endure until Poland's self liberation heralded the beginning of the end of Communism.

It was also a primary election Tuesday, just as tomorrow will be, in Wyoming.

August 13, 1920. Working in the mill and the Pan African Flag.

Esmond Mills, Esmond, R.I.  August 13, 1920.

On this day in 1920 the Pan African flag was adopted by Garveyist organizations meeting in New York City.

The flag was in reaction to an anti black song that had lampooned the lack of a flag, as odd as that may seem, representing black causes.  The flag became influential in that it is not only still used for black causes, but became the basis of some national flags in Africa.

In Poland, Soviet troops advanced within 20 miles of Warsaw.

August 6, 1920. The Denver Post Wrecked By Tramway Strikers.

The Denver Post was wrecked by Denver's tramway strikers.

And in Poland, the fate of Warsaw looked grim.

August 5, 1920. Storm Clouds over Central Europe

On this date in 1920 it looked as if Britain and France were about to go to Poland's aid against the Red Army.

But as it turned out, Germany wasn't ready to see that happen. The Reichstag wouldn't allow Allied troops transit, in a vote taken this day, across its territory.  That effectively prevented an Allied mission to save the Poles.

The Poles would have to save themselves.

Six men standing in a row at one of the Capitol doors, Aug. 5, 1920

August 3, 1920. A mostly grim Tuesday.

The headlines were fully correct.  The Red Army was advancing on Warsaw and a Soviet victory appeared inevitable.

In Center Texas, a mob broke into the jail and lynched 16 year old Lige Daniels who had been in the jail for suspicion of murder since July 29.  The grisly image of his lynching was turned into a postcard.

He was totally forgotten until 1999 when his image appeared on the cover of the book Without Sanctuary which was written by an antique dealer who had collected such images that had seen such use.

On the topic of lynching, this map from a report to Congress shows the "Red Record of Lynching" in this time frame.

Probably some of this is surprising, but in other ways it isn't.  If states show up where lynchings are a surprise, as in the 34 for Wyoming, keep in mind that a lynching is an extrajudicial murder and actually not a racist hanging.  Many, and indeed in the South undoubtedly most, were racist murders, and some of those, as we've recently seen, extended outside of the South. But they'd also include the murders of others by any means that were extrajudicial in nature.

President Wilson's physician, Admiral Cary Travers Grayson, went on faction, the President now being deemed recovered from his stroke.

Admiral Grayson

The news broke that Mildred Harris of Cheyenne, originally, had sued Charlie Chaplin for divorce.

Given her tender years at the time of their marriage, if the whole affair had occurred today it would have been part of the Me Too set of stories.

Enrico Caruso acted a caricature artist at a benefit fair.