1922

Some notable events, 1922

January 8: Derailed by the Great War, the campaign to erect a monument to President Abraham Lincoln in the National Mall resumes.

January 13: Following raids by the Saudi Ikhwan into the British protectorate in Transjordan, the British foreign office terminates relations with the Sultanate of Nejd.

February 2: Ulysses by James Joyce is released

February 8: Pope Pius XI succeeds the now-deceased Pope Benedict XV to become the 259th pope of the Catholic Church.

February 8: The Russian Cheka is reorganized as the State Political Directorate (GPU), ending its extraordinary status.

February 13: The Washington Naval Treaty is signed. The treaty limits battleship size to 40,000 long tons (excepting certain current construction), limits the total fleet size on a ratio of 5:5:3:2:2, and places additional limits on aircraft carriers, cruisers and submarines.

March 1: The United Kingdom issues the Unilateral Declaration of Egyptian Independence, formally recognizing the independence of Egypt with the exception of foreign policy and the military.

March 4: Nosferatu, German impressionist horror film directed by FW Murnau, is released.

March 11: In Mumbai, a young Indian lawyer and independence leader named Mohandas Gandhi is arrested for Sedition.

March 20: The USS Langley (CV-1) is commissioned as the first aircraft carrier in the US Navy.

April 6: Joseph Stalin becomes the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks).

April 13 : Samantha Waver is accepted in a job posting at Inkwell Studios.

May 1: In another inroad to reconciliation, President Wood and First Secretary Dyer sign legislation formally declaring May 1st to be a federal holiday, dubbed “International Labor Day”. Later that day, Dyer lays out a progressive legislative agenda before the House. The platform contains: legislation establishing a forty-hour standard work week with guaranteed overtime pay, lowering taxes on the poor while increasing income taxes on the wealthy, creating a national health service and a cabinet-level Department of Health, establishing cabinet Departments of Education and Labor, and a law establishing a National Labor Relations Board to streamline adjudication of collective bargaining. The platform is controversial and ambitious, and a crisis of leadership soon erupts.

May 12: Edward Douglass White Jr., Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, passes away.

May 17: New York becomes the first of five states this year to enact measures changing the apportionment of presidential electors from winner-take-all to a congressional district system.

May 19: The All-Russian Young Pioneer Organisation is formed.

May 24: The Turkish Liberation Army captures the city of Smyrna from the Greek Army

June 11: President Wood gives the first ever national radio address. In his speech, he urges moderation and reform to fight the tide of class warfare and militancy within the country. In his words, “the choice is reform or revolution; the rascals in on Wall Street would sooner see revolution before tearing away their claws from their acquired power.”

June 18: Nanook of the North , a film documenting the real life excursions of an average Inuit man, is released, the first “documentary” (despite being heavily staged and fictionalized)

July 8: President Wood kills the Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act, preventing a trade conflict with Europe.

July 14: The Vicksburg Pogrom: white reactionaries, assisted by the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, attempted to disrupt a local meeting of the Tenant Farmers Union. While the initial attack is successful, the eruption of strikes and counterattacks by the communist-led TFU will force a federal response in the coming days.

July 18: The first Republican Party Conference begins in Philadelphia. The party conference drafts a party constitution establishing the Republican Party of the United States of America as a membership organization of state Republican Parties, affiliated political clubs, and the Congressional Republican Party. A standing National Executive Committee is elected at the close of the conference, with President Wood serving as Chairman and First Secretary Dyer as Party Leader.

July 30: The Steelworkers Union founds the “Vulcan” sports club, headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to provide recreation for its members and their families. By years end, the club will have a presence in every steel-making city, offering recreational baseball, rugby, basketball and boxing programs.

August 1: The US Senate confirms Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. as Chief Justice. Harlan F. Stone is appointed Associate Justice. Together with Louis Brandeis and John Hessin Clarke, Wood now has a solid progressive bloc on the court.

August 16: A limited version of Dyer’s “Progress Platform” is enacted by the US House. It contains provisions establishing a cabinet Department of Education and Labor, strengthens food and drug regulations, and establishes a 40 hour standard work week.

August 23: The Mexican Civil War ends, following a peace agreement between Emiliano Zapata’s Liberation Army of the South, and President Plutarco Calles. The ruling Laborist Party hopes to cement its rule with land reform.

August 27: Armistice is signed between Greece and the Turkish Grand National Assembly. Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal presses claims on Istanbul and Eastern Thrace with British mediators.

September 2: “Black September” begins. 13 known members of the KKK in Mississippi are murdered in retaliation for the Vicksburg lynchings in a campaign by the Mississippi Red Army.

September 18: The Mississippi National Guard is paralyzed by mutiny over attempts to break tenant farmer and industrial strikes. The Great War veterans will not turn their guns on their former comrades.

September 24: “The National Youth March”: protests in major cities across the country, organized by the Young Communist League but with participation from the College Republicans and other civic organizations. Marchers demand that, with continued Selective Service registration and state National Guard conscription, voting franchise be extended to eighteen year olds.

October 1: Public Law 64-89 is enacted by the US federal government, opening all federal offices to women.

October 12: US Marshals arrest Warren County Sheriff Eric Jackson* for his participation in the Vicksburg Pogrom. President Wood warns Governor Lee Russell that unless constitutional order is restored, he will be forced to invoke the Insurrection Act.

October 14: The Wheeler Commission, a tripartite investigatory commission on race-relations in the United States, publishes its initial findings, detailing an endemic problem of extralegal violence and unconstitutional vote suppression across the southern United States.

October 18: The British Broadcasting Corporation is founded

October 26: Federal indictments rain down on Mississippi. In total, seventy-two white citizens and four black citizens are charged with violating the Anti-Lynching Act.

October 28: The Italian Fascists stage their “March on Rome”, steering Benito Mussolini to power. The Constitution is soon suspended, as a general terror campaign begins on enemies of the Fascists. Elsewhere, the Red Army occupies Vladivostok, signalling an end to major fighting in the Russian Civil War.

November 1: UK General elections occur, precipitated by Conservative withdrawal from the National Coalition. The Conservatives win a razor-thin majority government.

November 3: Mehmed VI, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, formally abdicates from the throne, marking the legal end for the 600 year long Ottoman Empire.

November 4: British archeologist Howard Carter and his team find the entrance to the tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings, untouched for thousands of years.

November 7: US Senate and state level elections. Political violence erupts in Alabama and South Carolina as black citizens engage in civil resistance to win their right to vote.

November 19: Albert Einstein wins the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in relativity (his theories confirmed by the solar eclipse earlier in the year).

December 7: Chinese Kuomintang leader Sun Yat-sen falls seriously ill before the fateful summit with Comintern representative Adolf Joffe. Some fear he is on death’s door, and as he recovers Sun Yat-sen begins to consider how the revolution must best survive without him.

December 8: President Wood delivers his State of the Union Address. Broadcast by radio and reprinted in full in newspapers across the country, Wood uses the speech to address the topic of class conflict at home, and violence in the Deep South. He declares that it is a moral imperative to give the heroes of the Great War their due for the blood sacrificed in building this great nation.

December 24: The Japanese Navy commissions Hōshō , the world’s first purpose-built aircraft carrier. The new aircraft carrier will serve to test naval and air strategies, and be the first of several aircraft carriers built during the interwar by the Japanese Navy.

December 28: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Transcaucasia sign a treaty of union, creating the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

December 31: At the end of the year, 8,000 German marks now equal one U.S dollar. The currency is practically worthless, and the inflation shows no sign of stopping.