The Funnies - Special Christmas Eve Edition

Cartoonist Jay Norwood "Ding" Darling expressing the Christmas sentiment 100 years ago for the Des Moines Register and Leader. Ding was a multi-talented fellow and important in the conservation movement as well as being an editorial cartoonist, he helped initiate the Federal Duck Stamp program, designed its first stamp, and headed up the US Biological Survey (the forerunner of the Fish and Wildlife Service) for Franklin D. Roosevelt. The man's got a Pulitzer, a National Audubon Society Award, and a nature preserve named after him...who says doodling won't get you anywhere?

100 Years Ago Today: Ford vs. Ghost

Not the eeriest of stories, but it satisfied my love of old cars, turn of the century events, and ghosts...so I give you Ford Model A vs. Mysterious Road Ghost!

100 Years Ago: The Black Tom Bomb

Morgan, in Philadelphia Inquirer
"Under the Stars and Stripes"

On a quiet morning in 1916, hours before dawn, New Yorkers woke to an explosion that shattered windows in Manhattan, could be heard as far away as Philadelphia and southern Connecticut, and measured 5.5 on the Richter scale. In fact, the reason you can't go into the torch of the Statue of Liberty today is owing to damage from shrapnel from this very explosion. The source was a tiny island  with a name that could have come right out of a pulp magazine. Black Tom Island was a munitions dump and shipping facility from which ammunition was shipped to the allies in Europe to support their efforts in World War I. At 2:08 AM on Sunday, July 30th, German agents detonated over 2 million pounds of ammo.

Initially, theories about the cause of the explosion abounded, but it didn't take long for the press to latch onto the idea of German sabotage. Kaiser Wilhelm and his government's denied any involvement, but there was no turning American sentiment. Within a a year the U.S. would enter the war on the side of the Allies and the die would be cast.

It would be 1939 before a joint German-American commission, analyzing the evidence, would come to the conclusion that Germany had actually supported the attack. Of course, by that time a certain Adolf Hitler was in charge of the Fatherland and he wasn't exactly inclined to pay reparations to Germany's old enemy. Reparations wouldn't come until 1953 when World War II had ended and the German economy had been taped back together. The final payment arrived in 1979 and the first "worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil" was brought to a close.

100 Years Ago - Beer, Bread, and Prohibition

The Price of a Pint
"As far as I can make out from the papers, Bert, the breweries seem to 'ave been
'ard 'it by this blinkin' war."

In 1916, while World War I was churning the fields of Flanders into blood-soaked poppy fields, the beer-soaked pubs of England were under siege by the British parliament. In a rationing move then Prime Minister, Lloyd George, implemented the Output of Beer Act of 1916 which cut England's production of beer and raised the per-barrel duty on brewers. Since then, various people have tried to link this action with a hidden prohibition agenda, however no conclusive evidence has ever emerged. In 1916 there may have been grumblings about the rationing of beer and higher prices, but in 1919 these would erupt into civil unrest which eventually undid the Output Act.

In 1917, though, the cartoonist Captain Bruce Bairnsfather, who'd served with a machine gun regiment in France and had been mustered out of the service after suffering shell shock and hearing loss during the Second Battle of Ypres, obviously didn't feel the pains of the people. His feature character "Old Bill" puts the gripes of the brewers in prospective.

Part of me has to wonder if Samwise Gamgee's pony, Old Bill, wasn't actually a bit of J. R. R. Tolkien tipping his hat to Captain Bairnsfather since they'd both served in the trenches during the Great War.

100 Years Ago: Ominous Overtones

Let America Beware: Some Day the Sun will
Rise Above the Stars
Kladderdatsch, 1916

On August 14, 1914 Japan entered World War I, formerly declaring war on Germany at the request of the British government. For doing so, the Japanese government had been promised possession of all German colonial territories in the Pacific should the Allies win the war. Japanese forces took possession of Shandong province in China and cut off the German settlement at Tsingtao by October and went on to seize the Mariana, Caroline, and Marshall Islands.

In 1915 Japan presented China with what would become known as the Twenty-One Demands. These saw Japan as the new and most important power in the Pacific. China would become little more than a Japanese protectorate and the colonial privileges enjoyed by the European Allies and United States would be rescinded in favor of Japanese interests.

This little propaganda cartoon printed in 1916 by the German paper Kladderdatsch (a paper that would later be a major promoter of the Nazi party) was meant to stir up animosities between the U.S. and the Allies. The hope (seemed to be) that the threat to American colonial concerns in China and the Pacific would be enough to fracture the alliance and stop arms shipments to Europe. Instead, the Twenty-One Demands proved so unpopular with the Allies that Japan withdrew the final group of them, leaving colonial possessions in the Pacific and China in tact until World War II. The damage done to the Japanese reputation, though, was irreversible...they had become a naval power, but would never have the close relationship with Europe they'd enjoyed before. Strange how, in a way, Kladderdatsch predicted the eventual strike on Pearl Harbor, though...