1923

Some notable events, 1923

January 1: Under the terms of the Railway Act of 1921, British rail companies are consolidated into four major firms.

January 2: Under the leadership of Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Soviet Union forms a committee to develop the romanisation of the Russian alphabet, led by Professor N. F. Yakovlev and with the participation of linguists, bibliographer, printers, and engineers. This will culminate in a bill in 1924 establishing the Latinization of some 70 languages within the Union.

January 3: At the beginning of the new Senate term, the pro-administration Republicans push through a major revision of US Senate procedures, reinstating the rules to move the previous question, cutting off the possibility of unlimited debate.

January 7: The Rosewood Massacre: following the false report made by local newspapers that a white woman had been raped in the majority black town of Rosewood in rural Florida, a white supremacist mob, led by hooded members of the KKK attacks and burns the town to the ground. As many as 150 perish.

January 14: French troops occupy the Ruhr, strangling the second Ruhr Uprising in the cradle, and enforcing reparations payments.

January 24: Protests by unionists against the Gainesville Daily Sun turn violent, leading to the injury of several police, and the burning of the newspaper’s offices.

February 1: The Sun-Joffe Manifesto is signed, declaring that the Soviet system is not right for China while establishing terms for Soviet aid in unifying the country. At Joffe’s direction, the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee orders the suspension of covert activities.

February 14: Peace demonstrations in the US, organized by the Workers Party and various front groups, condemn the French occupation. President Wood has already ordered the State Department to attempt to mediate the conflict.

February 22: Time magazine debuts in the United States.

March 17: Yankee Stadium opens for business in the Bronx.

March 20: The first issue of horror/fantasy anthology Weird Tales is published

April 4: The United States recognizes the Republic of Turkey following the ratification of the Treaty of Lausanne, establishing the country’s modern borders and bringing the (legal) end of the Ottoman Empire.

April 18: The Soviet Sports Club Dynamo, so named for ‘power in motion’, is founded under the sponsorship of the State Political Directorate.

April 28: Wembley Stadium opens in London

May 8 : The Great War Adjusted Compensation Act, AKA the Bonus Bill, is signed into law.

May 9: Railway workers in Java, Dutch East Indies, take strike action following declining wages and raising rents for company housing. The use of armed force to suppress the strike is narrowly averted with a compromise negotiated after three days.

May 18: The Wheeler Commission on Race Relations recommends invoking Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, reducing representation to states proportional to the population they actively suppress from voting.

June 1: The National Forests are significantly enlarged by the Clarke-McNary Act.

June 13: Li Yuanhong, President of the Republic of China, is overthrown by the warlord Cao Kun.

June 20: The novel Aelita by Alexei Tolstoy is published in the USSR. It quickly becomes a favorite due to its strong socialist themes and optimistic, fantastic setting.

July 3: At the height of the economic crisis, German workers and unemployed begin a spontaneous uprising in Hamburg, fanned on by hyperinflation and declining living conditions. The uprising is crushed within the week, but every movement of the Reichswehr sees new problems develop elsewhere. Germany is on the verge of becoming a failed state.

July 13: The Hollywoodland Sign is formally completed

August 2: Warren G. Harding, US Senator, passes away of an apparent heart-attack. With one of the more powerful conservative voices in the Senate absent, the Wood faction of the Republican Party neuters the ability of the Senate to hamstring the Cabinet.

August 20: An expedition led by Roy Chapman Andrews of the American Museum of Natural History, finds the first Dinosaur eggs in Mongolia as well fossils like Velociraptor and Protoceratops.

August 30: Hyperion Animation Studios is founded by brothers Walt and Roy Disney.

September 1: Miguel Primo de Rivera, with the support of King Alfonso XIII and the army, overthrows the constitutional government of Spain and establishes a military dictatorship.

September 2: The Kanto region of Japan is devastated by a 7.9 magnitude Earthquake, causing damage in the cities of Tokyo and Yokohama

September 9: TS Eliot’s The Waste Land is published in the United Kingdom.

September 11: The Reichstag passes an Enabling Act, allowing Chancellor Gustav Stresemann’s cabinet to rule by decree. Existing Papiermarks are cancelled, to be exchanged for a new Rentenmark at a rate of one trillion to one. New policies affecting industrial arbitration force the large industrial firms to bargain with unions and workers.

October 7: The US Navy’s first purpose built carrier, the USS Kitty Hawk(CV-2), is laid down at the Newport News Shipyard.

October 30: British Prime Minister Bonar Law dies in office from an upper GI tract infection, later revealed to be a complication from throat cancer. He is succeeded by Stanley Baldwin.

November 5: The “Scissors Crisis” (in which the prices of industrial goods dramatically increased while the price of agricultural goods fell) gripping the Soviet Union comes to a head, with waves of strikes among urban workers. A group of party dissidents sign a critical letter to the Central Committee drafted by Leon Trotsky, while the working-class rank and file form a new Workers’ Opposition.

November 8: Adolf Hitler begins the ultimately unsuccessful Beer-Hall Putsch. The streets of Munich are seized by street fighting between the Nazi Sturmabteilung , the Bavarian state police, and the militants of the Kommunistische Arbeiter-Partie Deutschlands , a left-splinter from the official KPD.

November 20: Vladimir Zworykin, a Russian-American inventor, files a patent for a “television system”, using a cathode ray tubes to transmit and receive electrons in a sequence eventually forming an image.

December 4: The public record of the phrase “the Baby Boom” is published in The Atlantic , in an article discussing the major increase in birth rates attributed to the return of millions of soldiers and the end of wartime conditions.

_December 21:_The Ten Commandments , an epic adaptation of the classic Biblical story of Exodus by C. B. DeMille, is a massive success.

December 31: The Naturalization Act of 1923 goes in effect. Aside from providing citizenship to all non-citizen aliens who served in the US armed forces in the Great War, the Act also repeals racial restrictions on naturalization.