1886. Union Pacific employees required to wear blue uniforms. Attribution: Wyoming State Historical Society.
1890 Eleventh and final Territorial Legislature convened.
1890 The Wyoming Supreme Court, in the first of what has come to be an ongoing series of decisions, found Wyoming's system for funding public schools unconstitutional. Attribution: Wyoming State Historical Society.
1910 Work completed on the Buffalo Bill Dam.
1919 January 15, 1919. Murders in Germany, The Eve of Prohibition in the United States
This day is the centennial of one of the giant, and most mythologized days in the history of communism. Indeed, it's one of its foundational myths, and like most myths cited by communists, they've cited it without really grasping the story. On this day in 1919 German Freikorps officers murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The had both been captured following the collapse of the Communist uprising in Berlin and both tortured prior to their murder on this day.
Beyond that the details are murky.
It's known that they were under the custody of the Freikorps Garde-Kavallerie-Shutzendivision, a cavalry Freikorps unit that had been committed to action after the German Army had failed to put down an earlier phase of the rebellion and in fact had been repulsed. The Socialist German provisional government then turned to the right wing Freikorps, which did put it down. Both Socialist leaders were captured in the wake of the collapse of the rebellion. Both were tortured and the units commander Waldemar Pabst and a lieutenant in the unit, Horst von Pflugk-Harttung gave orders for them to be killed. The killing was very clearly a murder. Liebknecht was sent to the morgue as an unidentified body and Luxemburg was dumped in a canal. Their execution would spark further left wing rebellion.
The fact that it sparked additional uprisings says something about the extent to which Luxemburg and Liebknecht were held in high regard by the German hard left. The irony is that neither of them were as radical as they are now remembered to be. Indeed, it's hard not to look at both of them and assign a certain level of cluelessness to them. They had been opponents of the German war effort in World War One, as radical socialist generally were, but they were also opposed to the Sparticist uprising itself. They went along with it when it came, perhaps feeling they had no choice. Luxemburg, who was a Pole by birth and who had adopted Germany as her home and as the center of her revolutionary activities, was a critic of Lenin's and a vocal proponent of allowing all sides to participate in an imagined future democratic Germany. Both of them would have ironically found more of a home in the side they were rebelling against and in the name of revolution essentially operated against the very thing they were attempting to build. Had they lived, they would have been unlikely to have remained Communists and their views certainly did not square with the Communism that was rapidly coming into being in Soviet Russia.
Pabst, whom we would figure would have been a Nazi official, did not become that but briefly and went into the World War Two years as a businessman, after having been influential in early Nazi politics even though he never joined the Nazi Party, and fled to Switzerland on the even of the July 20 plot. It's not known if he was an extreme right wing sympathizer with it, but that fact is extremely odd if he was not. After World War Two he returned to Germany and associated himself with extreme right wing political parties again. He claimed that German Socialists Noske and Ebert had approved of his actions in ordering the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht but as he made that claim well after the war there's no way to know the truth of that claim and at least to me it seems highly unlikely. He died in Germany in 1970 at age 89, never having been punished for his role in the murders.
Both Liebknecht and Luxemburg have gone on to become Communist martyrs, an irony given that their views, while radically socialist, were also radically democratic, and did not square well with the German Communist Party's that they helped come into being, or with the Russian one at that time. In retrospect, they seem to have been more in the nature of true Social Democrats who went along with a rebellion and aided in it, when they really ought to have stepped back.
Beyond that the details are murky.
It's known that they were under the custody of the Freikorps Garde-Kavallerie-Shutzendivision, a cavalry Freikorps unit that had been committed to action after the German Army had failed to put down an earlier phase of the rebellion and in fact had been repulsed. The Socialist German provisional government then turned to the right wing Freikorps, which did put it down. Both Socialist leaders were captured in the wake of the collapse of the rebellion. Both were tortured and the units commander Waldemar Pabst and a lieutenant in the unit, Horst von Pflugk-Harttung gave orders for them to be killed. The killing was very clearly a murder. Liebknecht was sent to the morgue as an unidentified body and Luxemburg was dumped in a canal. Their execution would spark further left wing rebellion.
Luxemburg. Even in her portraits she appears vaguely perplexed.
The fact that it sparked additional uprisings says something about the extent to which Luxemburg and Liebknecht were held in high regard by the German hard left. The irony is that neither of them were as radical as they are now remembered to be. Indeed, it's hard not to look at both of them and assign a certain level of cluelessness to them. They had been opponents of the German war effort in World War One, as radical socialist generally were, but they were also opposed to the Sparticist uprising itself. They went along with it when it came, perhaps feeling they had no choice. Luxemburg, who was a Pole by birth and who had adopted Germany as her home and as the center of her revolutionary activities, was a critic of Lenin's and a vocal proponent of allowing all sides to participate in an imagined future democratic Germany. Both of them would have ironically found more of a home in the side they were rebelling against and in the name of revolution essentially operated against the very thing they were attempting to build. Had they lived, they would have been unlikely to have remained Communists and their views certainly did not square with the Communism that was rapidly coming into being in Soviet Russia.
Liebknechct, who was a lawyer by profession.
Pabst, whom we would figure would have been a Nazi official, did not become that but briefly and went into the World War Two years as a businessman, after having been influential in early Nazi politics even though he never joined the Nazi Party, and fled to Switzerland on the even of the July 20 plot. It's not known if he was an extreme right wing sympathizer with it, but that fact is extremely odd if he was not. After World War Two he returned to Germany and associated himself with extreme right wing political parties again. He claimed that German Socialists Noske and Ebert had approved of his actions in ordering the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht but as he made that claim well after the war there's no way to know the truth of that claim and at least to me it seems highly unlikely. He died in Germany in 1970 at age 89, never having been punished for his role in the murders.
Both Liebknecht and Luxemburg have gone on to become Communist martyrs, an irony given that their views, while radically socialist, were also radically democratic, and did not square well with the German Communist Party's that they helped come into being, or with the Russian one at that time. In retrospect, they seem to have been more in the nature of true Social Democrats who went along with a rebellion and aided in it, when they really ought to have stepped back.
Concrete Central Elevator. January 15, 1919.
Closer to home it was clear that Prohibition was on the right side of history and about to become the law of the land.
And some Wyoming artillerymen were arriving home. Governor Carey was addressing the state, and calling for a memorial for those lost in the recent war.
1941 School in Kooi destroyed by fire. Attribution: Wyoming State Historical Society.
1967 The first Super Bowl, an American celebration of televised advertising, occurred. A football game was also played as the Green Bay Packers of the National Football League defeated the Kansas City Chiefs of the American Football League, 35-10.
1991 The 1022nd Medical Company, Wyoming Army National Guard, deployed to Saudi Arabia.
2001 Wikipedia made its debut.
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