Merry, Happy, Jolly, Blessed

By Pamela | December 20, 2019

My Own True Love and I are setting off on another holiday adventure. I don’t plan on writing blog posts while I’m away. (Unless I come across something that you need to know RIGHT NOW! Which is always possible. There is a lot of history out there.) But I’ll be back on January 3 with more historical stuff for your amazement and amusement.

In the meantime, have a merry/jolly/happy/blessed time as you celebrate the victory of light over darkness in the tradition of your choice.

Now if you’ll excuse me I need to make a list and check it twice. (Actually, I have three lists, but who’s counting?)

A Year in Review: 1919

By Pamela | December 17, 2019

I almost decided not to do a podcast looking at 1919, even though it has been on my editorial calendar* since roughly this time last year. My friend Elizabeth Lunday is doing an amazing job looking at 1919 in detail and from many different directions on her podcast The Year That Was.  It is living up to my expectations, which were high indeed.

In the end, however, I couldn’t quite walk away from it. I had so many notes. And it was such a critical year. Instead of bringing peace, the end of the war to end all wars left unresolved conflict in many forms its wake. This is probably true of all wars, now that I think about it, but it happened on an unprecedented scale after World War In the aftermath of the war, people attempted to rebuild the world, and tore it apart in the process.

The Versailles Peace conference in which old white men in black coats determined the fate of the world.

The most obvious example of this was the Versailles Peace Conference, which began in January 1919 and officially ended in 1920. The treaty produced at the conference:

(It is worth remembering that the United States did not sign the Versailles Treaty. Instead we signed a separate treaty with Berlin because the Senate would not ratify our inclusion in the League of Nations, which was also a product of the peace conference.)

In addition to a seriously flawed peace treaty, the end of the war left many people with unrealized expectations about social changes. The failure of those expectations to materialize resulted in violence, often at the hands of those who did not want social change to occur. Some examples:

  • Indian nationalists expected to received self-rule on the dominion model in recognition for their support of the British empire in the war. Instead they got repressive laws and the Amritsar Massacre at the hands of a twitchy British brigadier-general
  • A similar combination of high hopes and toxic backlash resulted in the Red Summer of 1919 in the United States. Black soldiers came home to an atmosphere of increased racial tension fueled by competition for jobs and housing, white fears of black upward mobility and black discontent with the state of civil rights. Faced with anti-Black race riots, they fought back.
  • Uprisings began in Germany in November, 1918, just as the war ended. Sailors mutinied at Kiel. The army’s brutal suppression of the mutiny set off a series of strikes and military rebellions that spread across the country, culminating in the left-wing Spartacist uprising in January 1919. The revolution was put down by force with the help of Freikorps volunteer militias, which had been formed by returning soldiers with support from the army. Heavily armed militia units retook the public buildings that the revolutionaries and previously seized and shot hundred of the demonstrators, including those who had already surrendered.

Here are a few other high or low points from 1919 that I’ve spent some time thinking about:

  • • The Great Boston Molasses Flood occurred on January 15. It sounds funny, until you picture the reality of 2 million tons of molasses pouring at 35 miles an hour through a busy commercial district in Boston in the middle of the day. The fifteen-foot high wave killed 21 people, injured 150 more, snapped supports that held up an elevated train and smashed buildings. The company that owned the faulty molasses tank tried to blame anarchists—the early twentieth century equivalent of blaming terrorists. In fact, it turned out that shoddy construction was to blame—leading many states to pass laws requiring that engineers and architects approve plans for major construction projects. Building permits have a purpose beyond plumping up municipal coffers.
  • On January 16, Nebraska ratified the 18th Amendment, prohibiting the sale of “intoxicating liquors” , completing the ratification process. The Amendment didn’t include a process for implementing the ban: that came with the passage of the Volstead Act on October 28, 1919. Prohibition went into effect with a roar on January 17, 1920, and stayed in effect until the amendment was repealed in 1933.
  • On June 4, 1919, Congress approved the 19th amendment for women’s suffrage—something I guarantee you’ll be hearing more about here on the Margins throughout 2020.
  • Walter Gropius established the Weimar School of Design in Weimar, later known as the Bauhaus School,  laying the foundation for the International Style of architecture, described as “less is more” or “less is bore” depending on your personal taste.

Obviously this isn’t a comprehensive list. Do you have a “favorite” event from 1919 that I’ve left out?

 

*Editorial calendar is a rather grand term for a rough list of ideas and where they might fit. But it is useful. In the case of today’s blog post, for example, I have been making notes on my Scrivener document as and when things cross my path.

A Year in Review: 1819

By Pamela | December 10, 2019

In the history book in my brain, 1819 is dominated by the Peterloo Massacre.

England suffered a severe depression at the end of the the Napoleonic war, as a result of the transition to a peacetime economy. The sudden drop in government spending and the loss of wartime markets for British grain and manufactured goods led to falling prices, unstable currency, and widespread unemployment.

Members of Parliament reacted in their own self-interest as landowners and passed protective tariffs on grain as a way of solving the country’s economic problems. The new Corn Laws protected landowners’ incomes, but meant urban laborers had to pay a higher price for bread when times were already hard. (1)

Workers reacted with strikes and bread riots across England. (2) Members of working class societies called public meetings, in which they called for the repeal of the Corn Laws and parliamentary reform. Instead of taking actions which would have negatively affected the wealth and power of individual members of Parliament, in 1817 the government attempted to stifle the reform-societies by making public meetings illegal, suppressing all societies not licensed by the government, and suspending the Habeas Corpus Act, so that prisoners could be held without trial.

These measures brought a temporary lull in popular demonstrations, but did nothing to solve the underlying problems. In 1819, reformers once again held mass meetings in the larger industrial cities, one of which resulted in the Peterloo Massacre on August 16 1819. An estimated 60,000 workers gathered on St. Peter’s Field in Manchester to hear radical orator Henry Hunt. Fearful that a large group of reformers would turn into a large group of rioters, the local magistrate ordered a squadron of cavalry to charge through the crowd to arrest Hunt. As massacres go, the immediate damages were small: eleven people dead and roughly 700 people injured.(3) The fear generated in the ruling classes was huge.

The government moved quickly to deter further demonstrations. Hunt and eight other organizers of the Manchester meeting were arrested and Parliament passed the Six Acts: a series of repressive laws intended to eliminate unauthorized public meetings, suppress the radical press, and make it easier to convict popular meetings.

Obviously the Peterloo Massacre wasn’t the only thing of importance that happened in 1819. Maybe it wasn’t even the most important thing. Here are some other high points, low points, and things that caught my imagination:

  • The princely states of the German confederation had their own concerns about radical movements. Universities, student groups, and gymnastics associations had become hotbeds of liberal and nationalist sentiment inspired by the French Revolution —not the kind of thing that made nineteenth century monarchs happy. When a slightly crazy student named Karl Sand assassinated the conservative playwright August von Kotzebue, the ministers of the major German states used it as an excuse to crack down. The result was a hard-nosed policy agreed on by a consortium of German states called the Carlsbad decrees, which prohibit political meetings, imposed censorship of the press, outlawed student fraternities and gymnastics associations, and gave universities the right to remove any professor who taught “subversive” doctrines. The immediate effect was to shut down political and nationalist expression in German. Or at least to send it underground.
  • The Cotton Mills and Factories Act of 1819 made it illegal for factory owners in Great Britain to employ children under the age of nine. Children between the ages of nine and fifteen were limited to a twelve hour work day. The passage of the act has been tied to the Peterloo Massacre, but in fact the first version of the act was drafted in 1815.(4)
  • The British founded Singapore as a free-trade port. Previously the Dutch East India Company had held a trading monopoly in the region. Allowing unregulated free-trade in the new port, change the economic dynamics in the region.
  • The United States acquired Florida from Spain in exchange for assuming some five million dollars in claims against the Spanish government by United States citizens.
  • European and American companies began industrial scale-whaling in the Pacific islands. The availability of a cheap source of oil made the second wave of the industrial revolution possible (5) and made cities safer through the use of whale oil lamps on city streets(6). These changes occurred at the cost of the massacre of whale populations.
  • The publication of Jakob Grimm’s German Grammar and Horace Wilson’s Sanskrit-English Dictionary, both of them blockbusters in the field of linguistics. Yes, blockbusters. Linguistics was one of the most exciting academic subjects of the day, with a popular intelligent audience akin to archaeology or astronomy today. It both pushed the boundaries of human knowledge and fed the fervor of romantic nationalism. (Which I swear I will write a blog post about one of these days.)

Oh yes, one last thing. The future Queen Victoria was born on May 24.

(1) Apparently they hadn’t learned anything from the French Revolution.
(2) Never a good sign. Bread riots have been a warning flag for potential revolution from ancient China through the Arab Spring.
(3) Compared, say, to the Amritsar Massacre a hundred years later, when a stupid order by a British general result in 400 deaths and 1000 people injured in a peaceful gathering of 10,000.
(4) I’m going to resist the temptation to make comments here about change and legislation and leave you to draw your own conclusions.
(5) The short version: machinery needs to be oiled
(6) At least in “good” neighborhoods