Discover Top Posts Tagged with #february 1919

United Artists Formed

Fairbanks, Pickford, Chaplin, and Griffiths in 1919.

February 5 1919, Hollywood--The movie business had boomed with the war, and many of the industry’s most prominent stars chafed under the producer-dominated system in place at the time. Hoping to gain more creative freedom (and a larger share of the box office receipts), actors Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and director D.W. Griffith, decided to found their own movie studio and distribution company, United Artists. They were assisted on the legal and financial side of affairs by William McAdoo, President Wilson’s son-in-law and, until December 1918, his Treasury Secretary. Pickford, Chaplin, Fairbanks, and Griffith split the preferred stock of the new company evenly, while the four and McAdoo split the common stock evenly. McAdoo would move to California in 1922 and would spend much of his remaining political career there, culminating in a term as Senator in the 1930′s, short of the Presidency to which he had aspired.

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Blanche Sweet reappears on the silver-sheet in “The Hushed Hour.” Following this she plays the heroine in Rupert Hughes’ novel of the war, “The Unpardonable Sin,” in which she is directed by Marshall Neilan.

Photograph by Charlotte Fairchild. Photoplay, February 1919. Internet Archive.

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Bratislava Made Capital of Slovakia

Czechoslovak troops in Bratislava on February 5.

February 4 1919, Bratislava--The new Czechoslovak government had been quickly expanding their influence over the areas within the former Kingdom of Hungary that they claimed as part of Slovakia. This included the city now known as Bratislava (formerly Pozsony or Pressburg), which Czechoslovak troops occupied on January 1. The city had hitherto been dominated by its large German and Hungarian population, many of whose leaders opposed the Czechoslovak takeover. In a blatant attempt to appeal to the Allies, they had renamed the city “Wilsonovo mesto” after Woodrow Wilson. On February 4, the city was declared to be the capital of Slovakia, and the new Czechoslovak administration began to move into the city. This met with resistance from the Germans and Hungarians, and protests the next week were violently suppressed by Czechoslovak troops. The city would gain its modern name of Bratislava in March.

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Éamon de Valera Escapes Prison

Boland, Collins, and De Valera.

February 3 1919, Lincoln--Notably absent from the opening of the First Dáil were Michael Collins and Harry Boland, though they were marked as present to avoid suspicion. In actuality, they were in England planning the escape of their colleague Éamon de Valera from Lincoln Prison. De Valera had managed to make an impression of a key to a door to the prison’s exercise yard. Three copies were made in Ireland, one of which Collins and Boland took with them, while the other two, according to all accounts, were sent to De Valera in prison baked into a cake. Young Irish women distracted the guards while Collins and Boland cut the wire surrounding the exercise yard. Their key broke off in the door, but one of De Valera’s keys worked, and they were able to quickly make their way to Manchester and then back to Ireland. In April, De Valera was made the second President of the Dáil.

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Reds Retake Kiev

February 5 1919, Kiev--In the vacuum left by the sudden German withdrawal from the Eastern Front after the armistice, both Bolshevik and nationalist groups had been trying to reestablish their authority. So far, British-backed Estonia excepting, the Reds had had the upper hand. Ukraine was no exception; Hetman Skoropadskyi’s puppet state had been quickly overthrown by forces loyal to the Rada, but their control was tenuous, and they were fighting another war to the west against Poland. The Bolsheviks set up their own Ukrainian government, and took Kiev after heavy fighting on February 5; the Ukrainian government fled west to Vinnytsia. This marked at least the fifth time the city had changed hands since the February Revolution.

The Red Army commander, Jukums Vācietis, wanted to stop at Kiev and consolidate along the Dnepr, but the local commander, Antonov, wanted to secure the rest of Ukraine and was soon drawn across the river. This would prevent the Ukrainian nationalists from consolidating and prevented the French from expanding their foothold around Odessa, but it tied up many troops that could have been used to fight the Whites in the Don or to aid revolutionary movements in the rest of Europe. The troops also did little to cement permanent Bolshevik power in the Ukraine; there was no civil administration to go along with the armies, and what little there was mainly served to seize Ukrainian grain for Russia.

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Kurt Eisner Assassinated

The monument to Kurt Eisner at the site of his assassination. In the days after the assassination, anti-Semitic goons spread “flour scented by bitches in heat” on the site to attract hordes of dogs to foul the area.

February 21 1919, Munich--Kurt Eisner’s republican government in Munich had not been well-received by most Bavarians. In January, Eisner’s USPD had been soundly defeated in the elections for both the National Assembly and the Bavarian Landtag--coming in sixth place in the latter with only 3% of the vote. Eisner delayed the convening of the Landtag for as long as possible, but was compelled to schedule it (and his inevitable resignation as Bavarian PM) for February 21.

On his way to the Landtag, Eisner was shot and killed by the twenty-two year old Count Anton Arco-Valley, who himself was then severely wounded by Eisner’s guards. Arco-Valley had just been denied membership into the anti-Semitic Thule Society due to his mother’s Jewish ancestry; he carried out the assassination apparently as an attempt to prove his anti-Semitic bona fides.

Eisner’s death opened a period of violence in Munich that would last over two months; within a week, the Landtag would have to leave the city for Nuremburg.

Sources include: Gregor Dallas, 1918: War and Peace. Photo from Wikipedia; CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=631480

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Weimar Government Opens

The National Theater in Weimar, site of the new National Assembly. The statue in front depicts Goethe and Schiller; Ebert perhaps wanted to remind the Allies of less warlike aspects of German history.

February 6 1919, Weimar--The National Assembly elected under Germany’s first free elections convened in Weimar, 140 miles southwest of Berlin. Berlin’s “Spartacist Week” had been less than a month ago, and Ebert and war minister Noske decided that distant Weimar would be a safer location for the assembly; it would lend its name to the next fourteen years of German government. Even Weimar was not completely safe; it required 7000 troops to eject a small force of Communists who had taken the first security forces prisoner. The National Assembly met for the first time on February 6, in the New National Theater; the elected members sat in the seats of the orchestra section.

Within a week, Ebert had been elected as the new German Republic’s first President (after dismissing both Hindenburg and industrialist Walther Rathenau), and Scheidemann was its first official Chancellor, backed by a coalition of the SPD, the liberal DDP, and Erzberger’s Catholic Zentrum party.

Sources include: Gregor Dallas, 1918: War and Peace.

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Covenant of the League of Nations Presented

February 14 1919, Paris--After only a few weeks, the Commission on the League of Nations had finished its work, and presented its draft of the Covenant to the Peace Conference as a whole. The League would have a general assembly of all nations, an executive council with one representative each from the Big Five (US, UK, France, Italy, and Japan) and four representatives from the other nations of the world. Decisions made by the general assembly would have to be unanimous, as the Big Five worried they would be out-voted.

Germany would not be permitted to join immediately, at the insistence of the French. There would be no League army, as the French army, but all members would pledge recognize each others’ borders. The League would support the Red Cross, combat arms trafficking and the slave trade, and would set up a permanent international court and an International Labour Organization would be founded. On the latter, work was already underway, spearheaded by AFL leader Samuel Gompers--many hoped this would lead to an international standard for an eight-hour workday.

While many details would still have to be dealt with--the proposed mandates over German colonies and former Ottoman territory, a proposed Japanese provision on racial equality, and the thorny American question of how the Monroe Doctrine would persist in the 20th century--Wilson believed his work in Europe was done. After an unprecedented two months overseas, he departed Paris on the evening of the 14th to head back to the United States.

Sources include: Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919.