Strange Times 203: A Horror of Amusements

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On the Mends

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Strange Times is a twice-monthly look at the weirdest news 1921 has to offer. Today we have a dying skeptic and a dying nation. Appropriate wheat until the peasantry starves on… 

July 22, 1921

• The Duke of York—the future King George VI—invites 200 wealthy boys and 200 work house boys to play together for the weekend, in hopes of fostering understanding between the classes.

• American Red Cross captain Emmett Kilpatrick, imprisoned in a Soviet dungeon, is threatened with torture and death for striking one of his guards.

• Lady Astor and Lloyd George criticize America in the House of Commons, saying that a country that refuses to spend money on alcohol should be able to afford to house its poor.

• The Weather: Fair today and tomorrow; no change in temperature.

Today this man would have an alarmingly popular podcast.

HAMPTON, N.J., July 21.—Samuel Case, 82 years old and totally deaf, while picking berries along the tracks of the New Jersey Central Railroad today was struck by a train and killed. Case was regarded as eccentric, and there is an unverified report that his wealth amounted to $500,000. He leaves a wife, 80 years old, and a son, 65.

Mrs. Case said tonight that although her husband inherited considerable money fifty years ago, he had bought worthless properties and became miserly. He spent a large part of his time picking coal on the railroad tracks, from which he had been repeatedly warned, as he was totally deaf.

His son, Walter Case Glen Gardner, N.J., said that his father had a horror of amusements, cut his own hair and deplored the fact that he could not make his own boots. He compelled his wife to make her own clothes. According to the son, he frequently berated Thomas A. Edison and “useless” electric lights, declared the telegraph was a “swindle,” did not believe in the existence of submarines and held every one crazy who believed anything in the newspapers.

The Soviet famine is one of those ongoing stories, like the troubles in Ulster and the West Virginia coal wars that I don't often mention in the newsletter because covering them would preclude me from covering anything else. But this story is a tidy encapsulation of the starvation that resulted from Civil War, drought and the disastrous policy of grain confiscation, plus it has the word "poods."

PARIS, July 21.—Strange stories reach Paris of an approaching convulsion in Russia, a full half of whose population has returned to the mental and physical level of the Middle Ages. As always before a great catastrophe, the minds of the ignorant and superstitious peasants are filled with mysterious reports that have swept across the country like a prairie fire.

Thus it appears that in the vast famine area from Samara to Perm great numbers of the inhabitants are emigrating westward, drawn by the belief that American bread is to be distributed to famine sufferers in Moscow, while a similar pilgrimage to the east has been undertaken by others, urged by the yet more fantastic story that a new Czar has arisen in the East who is to save Russia from her miseries.

There seems scant hope for either class of wanderers. It is stated here that no less than 3,000,000 tons of wheat are required to save Russia from famine. As a result of the commandeering of wheat by the Bolsheviki from the peasants, the latter refused to sow more than was necessary for their own families. The drought has reduced this meagre quota to nothing. Last year the harvest in the richest regions, that formerly yielded from 90 to 100 poods (a pood is about 36 pounds) per acre fell to an average of from 3 to 7 poods. This year even that is lacking, and there are no reserves.

Even should it be possible to import stocks of wheat into Russia it is difficult to see how the distribution could be carried on outside the urban centres. Animal transport is non existent because the beasts have been killed for food instead of being allowed to die of hunger. The railroads have broken down almost entirely. Between Kiev and Odessa, formerly the most active commercial centres of all Russia, the sole communication is two trains weekly. Road traffic, held up by armed bandits, “green” raiders and other rebels against Soviet authority, is a thing of the past.

Russians in Paris emphasize the importance of restraining Russia’s neighbors—the Poles, for instance, or anti-Bolshevist leaders like Wrangel or Savinkov—from trying to take advantage of the Bolsheviki’s weakness to renew armed action against them. This, they declare, would once more rally the mass of the people to the support of the Bolsheviki against foreign or reactionary invaders. The chief hope of the exiles here appears to be in the Church. They expect that in the event of the breakdown of the Soviet regime the reins of power will be taken by Tikhon, the Patriarch of Moscow. Order, they say, will be maintained as far as possible by the Orthodox Church, the only organized force in the midst of the universal anarchy that will follow the fall of the Bolsheviki until a new Constituent Assembly can be elected by popular vote, to decide the future form of government.