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- William T. Anderson--aka "Bloody Bill Anderson"--was born in Hopkins County, KY, in 1840. His family moved to Kansas when he was a youngster. As a young man he made money by rustling horses and selling them to unsuspecting buyers. His father, a diehard Southerner, got into an argument with a judge who was a Union loyalist, resulting in his father being shot dead. Bill, fearing for his own life, took off for Missouri, where he made a living robbing travelers. Union soldiers pursued him, and he killed several of them. Shortly after the Civil War broke out Anderson joined up with a gang of Confederate guerrillas led by former schoolteacher William Quantrill. Anderson developed a useful skill as a guerrilla--setting up ambushes of Union soldiers and their civilian allies, which earned him the admiration and trust of the gang's leaders. It wasn't long before the authorities found out who Anderson was, and they arrested and imprisoned his sisters, one of whom died in custody, leading Anderson to vow bloody revenge. He played a vital part in what became known as the "Lawrence Massacre"--on August 21, 1863, Quantrill's gang attacked the small Kansas town of Lawrence, which had a reputation of being a center of abolitionists and pro-Union militias, known as Jayhawkers, and a particularly violent group of anti-slavery vigilantes known as Redlegs, who themselves were responsible for the killings of many pro-Confederate and/or pro-slavery civilians. Approximately 450 guerrillas attacked Lawrence shortly after 5:00 am, taking over a hotel for their headquarters and fanning out across town with lists of men to be killed. Many of those killed were unarmed, including approximately 20 young men who had just been recruited into the Union army, although they had not yet been sworn in. Altogether approximately 150 men and boys--some as young as 12--were executed, some of them shot or knifed, and others tied up and thrown into burning buildings. The guerrillas set fire to as many buildings as they could, and approximately one-quarter of the town eventually burned to the ground. Anderson himself was implicated in some of the most brutal murders committed during the incident, and it was estimated that he personally killed more than a dozen unarmed prisoners.
After the raid Quantrill and his band went to Texas to spend the winter, and it was here that Quantrill and Anderson had a falling out. Anderson accused Quantrill of the murder of one of the guerrillas, resulting in Quantrill's arrest by Confederate authorities. Anderson then formed his own band of guerrillas and returned to Kansas, becoming one of the most feared of the guerrilla bands infesting the area. On Sept. 27, 1864, Anderson led his band in an attack on the Kansas town of Centralia. He captured 24 Union soldiers, and after assuring them of good treatment, proceeded to execute them all. He then laid a trap for Union forces coming to relieve the town, which resulted in more than 100 militiamen being killed.
Approximately a month after that incident, Anderson was himself the victim of an ambush by Union troops. Caught by surprise, many of his men were killed, wounded or fled. Anderson was recognized by a pursuing Union officer, who fired several shots at him. He was hit behind the ear with at least one bullet and, apparently, died instantly. - Soundtrack
Author and social reformer Lydia Marie Child was born on February 11, 1803, into a staunchly abolitionist family (a stance that was quite unpopular at the time). She attended a seminar for a year, and her social awareness was largely due to the influence of her brother, a Unitarian clergyman who later became a professor at Harvard Divinity School. She took up the cause not only of the abolition of slavery but also the care of the poor. She wrote many books on various subjects, ranging from anti-slavery tracts to tips for housewives.
In 1826 she founded the first magazine directed at children, "The Juvenile Miscellany". She discontinued that publication in 1833 when she married David Child and the two published "An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans". The book came under severe criticism from many quarters of American society--especially in the South--largely due to the fact that it advocated the formal education of blacks, but overall it focused attention on a subject that many Americans of the time knew little or nothing about--slavery--and actually converted some slaveowners to the abolitionist cause.
From 1840-44 she and her husband were the editors of "The National Anti-Slavery Standard", a newspaper published weekly in New York City. They moved to Wayland, Massachusetts, in 1852, buying a farm and settling down there. They continued their involvement in the abolitionist cause, writing books and contributing money to anti-slavery organizations, and got involved in the anti-death penalty movement.
She died on her farm in Wayland on October 20, 1880.
She was involve to posthumous soundtracks like Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987). In 1973 it recorded the soundtrack to this song in A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (1973), Boardwalk Empire (2010) and The Middle (2009).- British novelist William Harrison Ainsworth's career lasted so long (60 years) and his output was so prolific that some critics have termed him "the king of historical potboilers". His most lasting of the many books he wrote is probably the series about the infamous highwayman Dick Turpin, which was so popular that there was a successful series of films featuring him in the 1920s.
Harrison was born in Manchester, England, in 1805. He picked up his taste for history and writing as a youngster. His father was a criminal-defense attorney, and as a child William would sit fascinated as his father told tales of the daring highwaymen and bandits he defended. His father also moved in Manchester's social circles, and young William met such literary figures as Charles Dickens and Edward George Bulwer-Lytton at the family estate. The youngster began writing melodramas and plays while still in grammar school, and even set up his own theater in the basement of his parents' home where he would stage these productions, making all the costumes, props and scenery himself. He also began submitting poems and short stories to local literary magazines, and began getting published in such publications as "The New Monthly Magazine", "London Magazine" and "Edinburgh Magazine".
In the early 1820s he struck up a friendship with noted historian Charles Lamb. In 1824 his father died and Ainsworth, now an attorney, took over his father's law firm in London, and stayed there for two years. He and a friend, John Partington, co-wrote a romance novel, "Sir John Chiverton", which became quite popular and attracted the attention of writer Sir Walter Scott, who wrote Ainsworth to request a meeting. Ainsworth married Fanny Ebers, the daughter of a prominent book publisher, in 1826. He began helping his father-in-law to run his business, but soon tired of that life and set up his own law practice. However, he still kept his hand in the writing game, and in 1834 his novel "Rookwood" became a national best-seller. cementing his reputation as an author and giving him the financial security to devote himself full-time to writing.
His novel "Jack Sheppard" (1839) was also a success, both critically and financially. In addition to writing, Ainsworth was also editor of "Bentley's Miscellany" magazine from 1840-41. In 1846 he attended a dinner given at the home of Charles Dickens--with whom he had now become close friends--and Dickens gave him a personally signed copy of his new novel, "The Haunted Man". In 1842 Ainsworth began his own literary magazine, "Ainsworth's Magazine", while still working as editor of both "Bentley's Magazine" and "The New Monthly Magazine". Unfortunately, he was forced to terminate his own magazine in 1854 for financial reasons but bought "Bentley's Mischellany" (and was forced to sell that in 1868). He was still writing novels and they were selling, but not in the numbers that his earlier ones had, and he soon moved from the glitz and glamour of London to the more staid (and less expensive) seaside community of Brighton. His financial situation didn't improve much, though, and he eventually moved from Brighton to lower-rent Tunbridge Wells in 1867. He soon had to sell his magazines, and even some of his family property, to stave off financial ruin. He was eventually forced to work for what was called a "penny dreadful" magazine, "Bow Bells" (penny-dreadfuls were adaptations and severely edited versions of major British works, which were then sold--without even covers--for a penny apiece), to make a living.
He died at Reigate, Surrey, England, on Jan. 3, 1882. - Allan Pinkerton was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1819. As a young man he became involved in the struggle for voting rights for Scots. Disappointed with the movement's failure, and chafing under the political restrictions existing in the U.K. at the time, he emigrated to the U.S. Traveling throughout the Midwest, he finally settled in Chicago and secured a job as a deputy sheriff. He discovered that he had a real knack for catching criminals, and in 1852 formed his own company, the Pinkerton Detective Agency--the first of its kind in the country--and was soon hired to track down and capture a bandit gang responsible for a series of train robberies. His success in that endeavor resulted in his getting more business and his agency expanded. Pinkerton was extremely careful in the selection of his agents and the Pinkerton Agency soon developed a reputation--among both law-abiding citizens and criminals--as being tough, tenacious and incorruptible, which was more than could be said for many of those in "official" law enforcement at that time, especially in the West and Southwest. The agency's reputation--it never gave up until its quarry was either captured or killed, no matter how long it took--was such that merely a rumor that "the Pinkertons are after you" was enough to cause many a bandit gang to break up and flee the area (the company's logo, a large black and white eye, was responsible for the coining of the term "private eye").
After the Civil War Pinkerton set out to capture the infamous James Gang led by the notorious brothers Frank James and Jesse James, a task that took the agency the better part of ten years. Several times they came close to capturing the gang. On one occasion they raided the James homestead, missing the brothers by just minutes; frustrated, one Pinkerton man tossed a lit stick of dynamite into the James home. The resulting explosion severely injured Mrs. James, who lost an arm. Eventually Jesse was murdered for the reward by two of his own gang members, and Frank surrendered not long after that.
Allan Pinkerton died in 1884, leaving the agency - which is still in business - to his two sons. - Writer
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Poet Emma Lazarus was born into a wealthy family in New York City on July 22, 1849. Her first book of poems, "Poems and Translations", was published in 1867, when she was just 18. Renowned author Ralph Waldo Emerson was impressed with her work and praised it, and her next book, "Admetus and Other Poems" in 1871, was dedicated to him. She published a string of well-received poems and verse works over the next few years.
In 1881 she became involved in the plight of the new waves of immigrants to the US, and became a strong advocate of the rights of immigrants, an unpopular stance during a time when many immigrant groups--especially those of Eastern Europe and Ireland--were under attack by anti-immigrant groups in the US, who said they were "polluting" US culture. Her most famous work, "The New Colossus", was chosen to be the inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty, welcoming immigrants coming into New York harbor. It contains what are among the most well-known words in the English language: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free".
She published her last book in 1887, and died in New York City on November 19 that year.- Sitting Bull, a Hunkpapa Lakota (Sioux) holy man and war chief, was born in 1831 near the Grand River in what is now the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He was named after his father, who was killed by Crow warriors--the Crow tribe being a longtime enemy of the Lakota--in an ambush. In the mid-1860s, during what became known as Red Cloud's War, Sitting Bull led the Sioux in a series of attacks on US Army posts and civilian wagon trains in the Powder River area of the Dakotas. Although other Indian tribes signed a peace treaty with the US government ending the war in 1868, Sitting Bull refused to and continued his attacks on military and civilian targets into the 1870s. He attacked crews building railroads across the Indian territory and miners who were panning for gold in the Black Hills, an area sacred to the Sioux. His attacks prompted the US government to send federal troops to the area, under the command of Col. George Armstrong Custer, to stop them. In 1875 the US Interior Department ordered all Sioux living outside the area known as The Great Sioux Reservation to move onto it, and any who did not would be declared "hostile" and could be forcibly removed to the reservation. Rather than persuading Indians to follow the Department's orders, this policy resulted in several tribes previously hostile to each other, such as the Cheyenne and Kiowa, to unite in alliance with the Sioux against the army, although many chiefs who had previously fought the army--such as Red Cloud, Gall and Spotted Tail--decided it was in their best interests to take their followers and live on the reservation.
In 1875 the Cheyenne and several Sioux clans joined forces to resist the army's attempts to place them on the reservation. They used Sitting Bull's camp as their main assembling point, as did many other Indians who had bolted from the reservation. As more and more Indians arrived the camp expanded in size, until there were an estimated 16,000 Indians living there. It was this camp that Custer stumbled across on June 25, 1876. His attack on the camp, and the subsequent defeat and annihilation of his command, became known as the Battle of the Little Big Horn, named for the river that ran through the camp. Contrary to popular opinion, however, Sitting Bull had nothing to do with the defeat of Custer's forces--his task was to organize a defense of the camp, and it was other chiefs who led the counterattack on Custer.
Custer's defeat led the US army to assign thousands of troops to the area to track down and capture Sitting Bull, and over the next year or so many Sioux chiefs surrendered their bands due to the intense pressure from the army. Sitting Bull, however, refused to surrender and in 1877 led his band across the border into Canada, where he knew the US army could not reach him. However, conditions in Canada deteriorated for the Indians, with cold and hunger taking their toll. On July 19, 1881, he crossed back into the US and led his band of nearly 200 Indians to Fort Buford, South Dakota, and surrendered. Initially taken to Fort Yates, near the Standing Rock Reservation, Sitting Bull's band was transferred to Fort Randall, where they were kept for almost two years as prisoners of war. They returned to Standing Rock in 1883.
The next year Sitting Bull was given permission to leave the reservation to join the "wild west show" of Buffalo Bill Cody, aka "Buffalo Bill", and he became an audience favorite. He returned to the reservation after only four months with the Cody show, however. By that time he had become somewhat of a celebrity and many whites visited the reservation hoping to see him. He turned a tidy profit charging his "fans" to have their pictures taken with him.
In 1890 a movement known as the "Ghost Dance" swept the Standing Rock reservation. Part of the movement's message was to encourage Indians to defy the authorities and leave the reservation. The Indian Agency administrators were concerned that Sitting Bull, who was still considered a leader among the Sioux and wielded great influence over them, was planning on taking as many Indians as he could and flee the reservation. They ordered the tribal police to arrest and jail him to keep that from happening. On December 15, 1890, a force of more than 40 Indian police arrived at Sitting Bull's house. As they prepared to take him away, nearby Indians who had heard what was happening began to gather around the house. Sitting Bull refused to go with the police, and the crowd became angry. Reportedly a Sioux onlooker grabbed a rifle and fired it at the officer in charge, hitting him. The officer then pulled his weapon and shot Sitting Bull in the chest, and another officer fired a round into his head. The crowd then attacked the police, who fought back, and in the ensuing mêlée eight Indian police and seven Indians in the crowd, along with Sitting Bull, were killed. - Writer
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American poet and writer John Greenleaf Whittier was born on December 17, 1807, near Haverhill, Massachusetts. He grew up on a farm with an extended family, consisting of three siblings--two sisters and a brother--and his mother's sister and his father's brother. The farm was fairly large but not particularly profitable, and the family made just enough money to get by. Whittier was a rather sickly child, and couldn't help out with farm chores very often (among other problems, his color-blindness made it difficult for him to distinguish between ripe and unripe fruits) and his frailty and bad health were problems for him throughout his life.
His formal education was not particularly extensive--due to his family's ongoing financial problems and his own poor health--but he developed into an avid reader who studied his father's books on the Quaker religion so thoroughly that the theology became the guiding principles in his life. He was strongly influenced by the religion's emphasis on one's responsibility to one's fellow human beings, which contributed to his becoming a fervent abolitionist later in his adult life.
Introduced to poetry by a teacher, Whittier wrote his first poem, "The Exile's Departure", in 1826. His sister thought so highly of it that she sent it to a newspaper, the Newburyport Free Press, and its editor, the abolitionist publisher William Lloyd Garrison, published it in the June 8 edition. Garrison was also impressed by the young boy's writing ability and urged him to attend the Haverhill Academy, a recently opened private school. Paying his tuition with money obtained from a variety of jobs--including shoemaker and teacher--he graduated from the Academy in 1828. Garrison hired him as editor of his weekly publication The American Manufacturer in Boston. Whittier soon developed into a fierce opponent of President Andrew Jackson, and in 1830 he was hired as the editor of the prestigious New England Weekly Review in Hartford, Connecticut, which was one of the most prominent Whig publications in the region.
Whittier ran for Congress in 1832 but lost. The experience caused him to have a nervous breakdown, and he returned home to the family farm at Haverhill to recuperate. The next year he resumed his relationship with Garrison, and soon joined his mentor in the abolitionist cause. He published an anti-slavery pamphlet, "Justice and Expediency". The pamphlet earned him the wrath of Northern businessmen and Southern slaveowners, effectively ending any hopes he may have harbored for a political career, and he devoted the next 20 years of his life to helping rid the country of the cancer of slavery. He helped to found the American Anti-Slavery Society, and was a very effective lobbyist in Congress for the cause, helping to recruit quite a few congressmen to the abolitionist movement. His activities were not without consequences, though. He received more than a few death threats, was stoned by mobs in his travels around the country and was run out of town several times. This didn't stop his activities on behalf of the movement, however, and in 1838 he became editor of The Pennsylvania Freeman, an anti-slavery newspaper in Philadelphia, a position he held for the next two years (in that same year the newspaper moved to a new office, which was promptly burned down by a rioting pro-slavery mob). Unfortunately, he and Garrison developed differences over the direction of the abolitionist movement, and the two bitterly split in 1839.
Whittier went on to help form the Liberty Party, an abolitionist political group. However, the combination of his editorial duties, his poetry and prose writings, his activities in the abolitionist movement, the violence directed against it--and him--and his continuing health problems contributed to his having yet another nervous breakdown. He returned to his home in Amesbury, and stayed there for the rest of his life. Although that ended his active participation in the abolitionist movement, he was still a strong supporter of it, and helped the Liberty Party to evolve into the Free Soil Party. In 1847 Whittier became editor of The National Era, probably the most powerful and influential abolitionist paper in the North, a post he held for the next ten years, and contributed what many believe to be his best writing to the paper. With the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865, which outlawed slavery, Whittier ended his abolitionist activities and devoted himself to writing poetry. He was one of the founding members of The Atlantic Monthly--a publication that survives to this day--and in 1867 he met Charles Dickens while the renowned British author was on a visit to the U.S., an event that left a deep impression on him.
Although Whittier spent virtually his entire life in Massachusetts, he died at the home of a friend in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, on September 7, 1892. Among his most famous works are the poems "Barbara Frietchie", "Snow-Bound" and "The Brewing of Soma". The city of Whittier, California--home of former US President Richard Nixon--is named after him.- Gunfighter John Wesley Hardin was one of the most notorious killers to come out of the Old West (while staying overnight at a hotel, he was awakened by the snoring of a man in the next room; Hardin reached over, grabbed his pistol and fired a shot through the wall, killing the man). He was a Southerner who harbored a deep hatred of blacks; the first man he is known to have killed, when he was 15, was black, and while fleeing the law for that murder he shot and killed at least one, and possibly four, Union soldiers, most of them black, who were attempting to arrest him.
Hardin later got a job herding cattle on the Chisholm Trail, but the combination of his white-hot temper, a quick draw and the prodigious amounts of alcohol he regularly imbibed resulted in his killing at least seven men along the way; when the herd arrived in Abilene, KS, he got into more gunfights, resulting in three more deaths. He returned to Texas soon afterwards, got married and settled down to raise a family (he had three children), but he soon reverted to his old ways, adding four more murders to his total, before being captured by a county sheriff. Although jailed, he soon broke out and was on the run again.
His hatred of Northerners in general and blacks in particular caused him to become involved in a political battle between pro- and anti-Reconstruction forces in Texas (he naturally took the side of the latter) in 1873 and he killed a former State Police officer who led the pro-Reconstruction forces. In 1874 he murdered a sheriff's deputy in Brown County, TX. The deputy was well liked, and it roused the fury of the locals, who formed a lynch mob. The mob actually lynched three men for the murder, none of whom had anything to do with it but all of whom were related to Hardin, which is why they were hanged; by this time Hardin had managed to flee to Florida (his wife and parents remained safe in protective custody). In 1877 he was captured in Pensacola, FL, by Texas Rangers (during his stay in Florida he was suspected of at least one and probably five more murders). He was tried for the Brown County deputy's murder in 1878 and sentenced to 25 years in prison, but only served 16 years before being pardoned in 1894. While in prison he had studied law, and after his release he was admitted to the Texas bar.
In 1895 Hardin testified as a defense witness in a murder trial in El Paso, and after the trial was over he decided to stay in that city and open up a law practice. Although he tried to remain "straight" after becoming a lawyer, he was--almost inevitably--drawn back to his old ways by his pride and a return to the heavy drinking he had once been known for. On top of that, El Paso Constable John Selman Sr., an outlaw in his own right, had an ongoing conflict with Hardin; Selman's son, a lawman, had attempted to arrest a female acquaintance of Hardin's and was pistol-whipped by Hardin for his trouble. Seething over Hardin's beating of his son, Selman entered the Acme Saloon where Hardin often played dice. The bustle of the saloon allowed Selman to enter unnoticed by Hardin. He got behind Hardin and shot him several times, although the first one actually killed him. Like many of the legendary figures of the old west, Hardin had met a violent end from someone who hadn't the courage to face him man-to-man and shot him in the back. It was said that in his last moments, even though slowed own by age and without the advantage of his youthful quick reactions, Hardin still managed to reach for his pistol before he died, although not aware of who it was who had shot him.
In the end, he died as he had lived--by the gun. - Benjamin Harrison was the 23rd President of the US. He was born in North Bend, Ohio, on August 20, 1833. He came from a family which had a long history in politics--his grandfather William Henry Harrison was a former US President, his father was a Congressman and he had cousins who were congressmen, governors and mayors.
He was educated at Farmers College and Miami University in Ohio, graduating from the university in 1862. He was admitted to the bar in 1864 and began a law practice in Indianapolis, Indiana, but soon became involved in Republican politics. He held some minor party and appointed offices, During the Civil War he organized an army unit, the 70th Indiana Infantry, which he commanded as a colonel. The unit was posted to mostly garrison duty in Kentucky and Tennessee, and in 1864 it was attached to the forces of Gen. William T. Sherman in Georgia.
After the war he returned to Indiana and got even more involved in state politics, becoming a driving force in what became known as the Radical Republican movement. He ran in the Republican primary for the gubernatorial nomination in 1872, but was unsuccessful. In 1876 he finally got the nomination, but lost the election. In 1880 he headed the Indiana delegation to the Republican convention and was a major factor in securing the presidential nomination for James A. Garfield, who won the election. He was offered a cabinet post but turned it down in favor of being the party's nominee for Senator, and won the election. As a senator he was a strong advocate for civil-service reform and helped in the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. He lost his bid for re-election that year, but in 1888 secured the Republican nomination for President. He ran against Democrat Grover Cleveland, and although Cleveland won the popular vote, Harrison received more votes in the electoral college, therefore winning the presidency.
As President, Harrison's most notable accomplishments occurred in foreign affairs, and he sponsored the first Pan-American Conference in 1889 between the US and Latin America. On the domestic front, his administration secured passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which was popular with the public, but it also passed the highly unpopular McKinley Tariff Act and the even more unpopular Sherman Silver Purchase Act. A major scandal occurred in the Veterans Bureau--later to become the Veterans Administration--during Harrison's presidency; it had been very strictly run during Cleveland's term, but Harrison loosened oversight of it and soon the extravagant expenditures lavished by the bureau's top management on themselves and their cronies shocked the public and forced the resignation of the bureau's pension commissioner. In the 1890 elections the Democratic party took control of Congress. Public dissatisfaction with Harrison's administration led to his defeat by former president Cleveland in the 1892 elections, after which Harrison returned to Indianapolis and resumed his law practice. He wrote several articles for local newspapers and eventually published two books, "This Country of Ours" (1897), a collection of his writings; and a memoir, "Views of an ex-President" (1901).
He died in Indianapolis on March 13, 1901. - Music Department
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Born in New York City in 1861, pianist/composer Edward MacDowell formally studied music at an early age. He went to Paris, France, at age 15 and attended the world-famous Conservatoire. Two years later he left France and traveled to Germany, where he studied at the Frankfurt Conservatory. He found his niche there, and three years later he was appointed head piano instructor at the Darmstadt Conservatory, where he began his composing career. He worked with famed composer Franz Liszt, who was impressed with his work and encouraged him to continue composing. His compositions met with success in Europe, and he returned to the US in 1884, where he married Harriet Nevins, who had been one of his pupils in Germany. They returned to Germany shortly thereafter, living in Wiesbaden until 1888, when they went back to the US and settled in Boston, Massachusetts. He began to teach music privately, and performed works of his own and other musicians' all over the city.
In 1896 he was offered the job of head of the new Music Department at Columbia University in New York, and he accepted. There he began an orchestra and a chorus, but when he attempted to make the musical arts part of the academic curriculum, he ran into strong opposition from the more conservative academics, who argued that serious music students did not study at American universities but traveled to Europe for study, as he did. He was not able to overcome those faculty objections, and, exasperated, he resigned from his position and took to his farm in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Although he continued to compose music, he rarely made public appearances after that incident. He died in New York City on January 23, 1908.- Born Robert Leroy Parker in Beaver, Utah, in 1866, the outlaw later to become famous as Butch Cassidy (he took the name Butch because he was once a butcher and the name Cassidy in honor of a local rancher who had befriended him as a youth) started his criminal career at an early age, stealing livestock when he was just a teenager. He soon left the Beaver area and hooked up with other rustlers and thieves, eventually forming a gang known as The Wild Bunch, which included such well known desperadoes as The Sundance Kid and Harvey Logan. The gang began robbing banks, payrolls and trains all over Colorado and Utah, and became so proficient at it that the Pinkerton Detective Agency was hired to run them down, and in addition a $4000 bounty (a huge sum at the time) was placed on their heads. The gang soon broke up and Cassidy and his partner The Sundance Kid headed to Mexico. Even that wasn't far enough, however, as both the Pinkerton detectives and professional bounty hunters were soon in Mexico looking for them, so they fled to Argentina, where they set up shop--under assumed names--as cattle ranchers. The ruse worked for a while until one night The Sundance Kid, under the influence of too much alcohol, began to brag about the many robberies they had gotten away with. A few days later a bank in a nearby town was robbed by two English-speaking bandits, and suspicion immediately fell upon the two, who were forced to pull up stakes and flee again. They wound up in Chile, and though they made several attempts to settle down and give up their lives of crime, circumstances dictated otherwise. They eventually crossed into Bolivia with plans to rob a bank in the small town of San Vicente. A hotel worker, having heard that the police were on the lookout for two English-speaking bank robbers, became suspicious of the pair and informed the local police chief. The chief and two of his men approached them in a restaurant, whereupon the Sundance Kid opened fire, killing one of the officers. The two gunmen fled and the police requested help from an army cavalry regiment that happened to be in town, and the soldiers and police soon trapped Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in a small house, where, after an all-night siege and gun battle, the two were found dead the next morning of gunshot wounds. Although rumors have surfaced over the years claiming that the pair actually escaped the battle and returned to the US, so far no real evidence has surfaced to conclusively prove that story.
- Italian novelist Antonio Fogazzaro was born in Vicenza, Italy, in 1842. His parents were opposed to the Austrian occupation of northern Italy, and their political activities came to the attention of the occupation authorities, forcing the family to flee into exile to southern Italy. As a young man he studied at the University of Padua and the University of Turin--where, after graduating, he practiced law--and after his father brought the family back from exile, he moved to Milan. Fogazzaro followed in his father's footsteps and continued his political activity, but when he got into trouble it wasn't with the Austrians but with the Catholic Church--in 1905 he published his novel "Il Santo" ("The Saint"), which was termed "heretical" by the church and ran into censorship problems across the country.
His most famous work was the "trilogy" of novels written about the "Risorgimento", or the struggle against the Austrians in northern Italy known as the "War of Liberation". He died on March 7, 1911, from complications resulting from an operation. He was 69 years old. - Writer/journalist Jacques Futrelle was born in Pike County, GA, in 1875. After graduating from high school, he held a variety of jobs--including theater manager--but finally secured a position in the editorial department of the Boston "American" newspaper. While there he wrote a series of short stories, which were eventually published. He began a series of detective novels, "The Thinking Machine", featuring Prof. Augustus Van Deusen, a professor at an American university who used his intellect to solve crimes. Van Densen first appeared in the closing chapters of an adventure serial Futrelle wrote, "The Case of the Golden Plate", in 1906. The series was featured in several magazine articles, and the stories were later published in two volumes of collections.
Futurelle was one of the passengers on the SS Titanic, which sank on April 15, 1912. He did not survive. - French author and novelist Louis Hémon was born in Brest, France, in 1880. His father was the Inspector-General of the University of Brest, and Louis was educated at the Ecole Coloniale, intending on a career in the diplomatic service. However, during his school days he wrote articles on sports events and some fiction stories for various Paris newspapers, and in 1906 he won a literary prize for one of his stories. He soon moved to London, England, where his writing career began to take off, and he met and married a local woman. However, the death of his wife in 1911 left him unable and unwilling to stay in London anymore, and he journeyed to Canada. He documented his travels in a journal, later published as "The Journal of Louis Hémon" (1924).
While in Canada he got a job as a laborer on a farm in Quebec. He stayed there for six months. During that time he met a woman named Eva Bouchard, who lived on a neighboring farm. Taken with her, he used her as the heroine for his most famous novel, "Maria Chapdelaine" (1921).
In 1913 he left the farm and headed west, looking for material for further stories. On July 8 of that year he was walking alongside a railroad track near Chapleau in Ontario when he was struck and killed by a passing train. He was buried in Chapleau. - British poet and dramatist James Elroy Flecker was born Herman Elroy Flecker in London, England, in 1884. His father, Rev. W.H. Flecker, was appointed headmaster of the Dean Close School in Cheltenham, England. The family lived on campus, and young Herman spent most of his youth there. He came to writing poetry at an early age (13), and at age 16 he was sent to Uppingham and from there to Trinity College, Oxford (where he changed his first name from Herman to James), which he attended from 1902 to 1906.
At Oxford he achieved average grades, but that was due mainly to his obsession with French poetry, to which he devoted much of the time he should have spent studying the school's classical curriculum. It was also at Oxford that, despite the strict evangelical Protestant upbringing by his father, he rejected Christianity and became an agnostic.
Upon graduation from Oxford he secured a job teaching at a private school in Hempstead at the end of 1906. He had decided that he wanted to become an interpreter in the consular service, so he set about learning as many languages as he could. He already spoke French and German, and to those he added Italian, Spanish and modern Greek. In 1908 he passed the consular service examination, and then began a two-year course in modern languages at Cambridge.
In June of 1910 he was posted by the consular service to Constantinople, Turkey, but shortly afterwards he was discovered to have tuberculosis and was returned to England to recover at a sanitarium in the Cotswolds, where he stayed for three months. He had already published two books of verse, "The Bridge of Fire" and "Thirty-Six Poems", and it was at the sanitarium that he wrote the play "Don Juan". When he left the sanitarium he traveled to London and Paris, then back to Constantinople and from there to Beirut, Lebanon, where he was vice-consul and where he married a Greek woman, Helle Skiadaressi. In May of 1913 he began to have major health problems--tuberculosis again--and was taken to a sanitarium in Switzerland. He spent the last few years of his life in a variety of sanitariums in that country. It was during that period that he re-converted to Christianity.
James Elroy Flecker died in Davos, Switzerland, on January 3, 1915. - Porfirio Diaz, known for his long and autocratic rule of Mexico and his disdain for the poorer classes, was actually born into a lower-middle-class Spanish / Mixtec Indian family in Oaxaca. His father was a blacksmith and an innkeeper and died when Porfirio was only three years old. He was educated by the Catholic church in what was to be his preparation for entering the priesthood, but by age 16 Diaz realized he had no intention of becoming a priest. Many men of Oaxaca had joined the Mexican army to fight in the Mexican-American War of 1846, and at 18 Diaz did the same, but the war ended before he saw combat. He left the army and returned to Oaxaca to study law. There he became acquainted with Benito Juarez, the state's governor. The civil war of 1854 pitted Juarez and his liberal reformers against the dictatorship of Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna--of "the Alamo" fame--and his supporters, mainly wealthy landowners and the Catholic Church. Diaz came out squarely on Juarez's side, and fled Oaxaca to join Juarez's revolutionary army. Diaz proved to be an able commander and defeated Santa Anna's forces in several key battles, earning a promotion to general. Juarez eventually triumphed and Santa Anna fled Mexico, but the victory didn't last long. Mexico was soon invaded by the French, on the pretext of collecting on loans from French bankers that Mexico couldn't pay. They overthrew Juarez and installed a member of the Hapsburg royal family as ruler, calling him Emperor Maximilian. Diaz again fought with Juarez against this French occupation, and upon Maximilian's overthrow and execution, Diaz resigned from the army and retired to Oaxaca. Juarez died and was succeeded by Sebastian Lerdo, whose administration was racked by internal squabbles, chaos and rebellions. Diaz was persuaded to lead a rebellion against Lerdo, and in 1876 Diaz's forces drove out Lerdo after defeating his army in several battles. Diaz took Mexico City and became president.
At first his regime instituted many needed reforms, settled the national debt and embarked on an ambitious program to modernize the country, bringing railroads and telegraph services to many areas of Mexico that didn't have them. He was succeeded at the end of his term in 1880 by his former Minister of War, but ran for president in the 1884 election and won handily. However, his administration grew more repressive the longer it stayed in power, and eventually it became allied with the very forces it had once fought. Diaz wanted to bring foreign investment into the country, and to that end he instituted a controversial program of wholesale "evacuations" of the poor from the cities to the countryside, so that foreign investors and tourists wouldn't see them and would be more inclined to invest their money in Mexico. Eventually his autocratic rule and repressive policies resulted in a series of rebellions and uprisings, led by such legendary Mexican figures as Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata and Venustiano Carranza, among others. In 1913 these leaders combined their forces in a final assault on Mexico City, Diaz's seat of government, defeated his armies and forced him to flee the country. Ironically, although he came to power in Mexico largely because of his fight against the French, he wound up spending his exile in Paris, where he died in 1915. - Music Department
Leo Frank was a New York-born Jew who moved to Marietta, Georgia. In 1913 he was the superintendent of the National Pencil Co., which was partly owned by his uncle, when he was arrested for the rape and murder of a local girl employed at the factory, 13-year-old Mary Phagan. She had been raped and strangled and her body found in the factory's cellar on August 26. Frank was the last person known to have seen her alive. When authorities were told about rumors that he had been seen flirting with the young Phagan, he was regarded as the chief suspect and shortly thereafter arrested. Prosecutors, along with local and state politicians, cast him as a rich, arrogant Yankee Jew who had come to the South to prey on young Christian women. A former member of the US House of Representatives used the specter of Jewish predators "ravaging our little girls" to help revive the Ku Klux Klan. Frank, to no one's surprise, was found guilty of rape and murder and sentenced to death, even though there was little actual evidence to connect him to the crime.
In 1915 Georgia Gov. John Slaton, after investigating the case himself, came to the conclusion that Frank had been unjustly convicted and that the trial had been rigged against him from the beginning. He commuted Frank's sentence from death to life imprisonment. Local citizenry, however, were outraged. A large mob of at least 1000 people surrounded Slaton's home, shouting and protesting his action, some of them urging the crowd to break into the house and lynch the governor. In August of 1915 a group of approximately 30 armed men calling itself "The Knights of Mary Phagan" broke into the prison where Frank was being held, tied up the warden and guards and kidnapped Frank. They drove him 150 miles to a place called Frey's Gin, near Mary Phagan's home, and before a shouting, angry crowed, hanged him from a tree. After his dead body was cut down, members of the crowd stomped on and otherwise mutilated it, while others took pictures and some even took bits of the rope that was used to hang him and sold them as souvenirs. Many of the members of the lynch mob were known to people in the area, including authorities, but local newspapers never used their names in stories about the lynching and none were prosecuted for or even charged with the crime. Among the lynch mob were a former Georgia governor, several local police officers and sheriff's deputies, a Superior Court judge, the Sheriff of Cobb County, several prominent businessmen, a future District Attorney and a future mayor of Marietta.
Frank's mutilated body was driven to Atlanta and turned over to an undertaker. A crowd of several thousand showed up at the establishment, demanding to see his body to ensure that he had indeed been hanged. When the undertaker refused, the crowed threatened to break into the business and see for itself, and began throwing bricks and rocks through the windows. The undertaker relented and let the crowd file past the body, many of them spitting on it.
In the early 1980s a re-investigation of the case determined that Mary Phagan had in fact been raped and murdered by the company's janitor, a black ex-convict named Jim Conley, who police at the time had initially suspected but let go when they turned their attention to Frank. In 1986 the Georgia State Board of Paroles and Pardons granted Frank a posthumous pardon.- Additional Crew
French poet and novelist Remy de Gourmont was born in the Normandy town of Bazoches-en-Houlme in 1858. His father came from a long line of printers and engravers, and his mother was descended from the 16th-century French poet François de Malherbe. He received his education at the University of Caen, and in 1883 got a job in Paris at the National Library.
He became a follower of the "Symbolist" movement in French poetry, and was strongly influenced by Stephane Mallarme. He began to move in literary circles, and eventually he and J.K. Huymans met, and they co-founded and became co-editors of "Mercure de France". Unfortunately, an article he wrote for the magazine in 1891 caught the attention of French nationalists who considered it "pro-German", and the resulting furor caused the publication to fire him. A further series of personal and professional setbacks resulted in his becoming almost a "hermit", venturing out into the "outside world" only occasionally, and then just briefly.
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 turned him from a moderate leftist into a firebrand--and at times violent--anti-German nationalist. Shortly after the war started he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, and died in 1915.- Victoriano Huerta was a former general in the Mexican army who became President of Mexico in 1913 by overthrowing President Francisco I. Madero, and later had him executed. Huerta's regime was marked by extreme brutality against his opponents and the Mexican population in general, and his excesses resulted in a coalition of prominent Mexican military and political figures that united to overthrow him.
Huerta was born in Colotlan, Mexico, in 1854 to Indian parents. He was educated at the Chapultepec Military College and graduated as an officer in the Mexican army. He rose to the rank of general during the rule of longtime dictator Porfirio Díaz, and when Diaz was overthrown Huerta remained in the army to serve Diaz's successor, Francisco Madero, as Chief of Staff.
In 1913 units of the army in Mexico City rebelled against Madero, and Huerta joined forces with them. Madero was forced to resign, and Huerta took over the presidency. Several days later Madero was shot on Huerta's orders. Huerta then dissolved the national legislature and established a military dictatorship, with himself at the head. His regime quickly earned a reputation for inefficiency, corruption and brutality, which resulted in an alliance of well known Mexican figures, both civilian and military, such as Pancho Villa, Álvaro Obregón, Emiliano Zapata and Venustiano Carranza to overthrow him. The American government eventually dropped its support of Huerta and switched it to the rebels. It sent troops to occupy the coastal city of Veracruz, and did not stop the smuggling of arms to the rebel forces inside Mexico. Huerta's army was badly defeated in several battles against the opposition forces, and on July 15, 1914, with rebels approaching Mexico City, he resigned and fled to Spain. He traveled to the US in 1915 and attempted to organize forces to return to Mexico and take power again, but was arrested by American authorities on charges of fomenting rebellion in Mexico. He was jailed at the US army post of Fort Bliss, TX. He died there of cirrhosis of the liver in 1915. - American journalist, novelist and playwright Richard Harding Davis was born in Philadelphia, PA, in 1864 (literary talent ran in his family: his father was a newspaper editor and his mother was a writer). He attended Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, and in 1886 he began his literary career as a journalist on the "Philadelphia Record" newspaper. Three years later he went over to "The New York Sun". The next year he was hired as managing editor of "Harper's Weekly" magazine, and in that capacity traveled all over the US, Central America and the Mediterranean. He showed a facility for war coverage, reporting on the Greco-Turkish War, the Boer War in South Africa, the Cuban front of the Spanish-American War and World War I. His coverage of the German invasion of Belgium in that war brought his name to the international forefront, and was considered by many to be the quintessential example of war correspondence.
His first effort as a fiction writer, "Gallagher", was published in "Scribner's" magazine in 1890 and began his long and successful career as a writer and novelist. His second wife was stage actress Bessie McCoy, whom he married in 1912 (his first marriage lasted from 1899 to 1910), and Davis began yet a third successful career as a playwright (he wrote 25 plays altogether) and became a celebrated member of the New York City "social set". Many of his novels and plays have been made into successful films.
He died of heart disease in 1916 at his home in Mt. Kisco, NY. - Early information on Florence La Badie is sketchy. She is thought to have been born in New York City in 1888, and was either taken away from or given up for adoption by her birth mother. Florence was adopted by a married couple named LaBadie, who legally gave the child their last name. Her adoptive father, Joseph LaBadie, is believed to have been an attorney in Canada, and the family spent time in Montreal, where Florence grew up. She was educated in both Montreal and New York, and after graduation from high school she worked as a model for well-known illustrator (and, later, film director) Penrhyn Stanlaws.
She took up a career on the stage, first appearing there in 1908. She signed up with director Chauncey Olcott's theatrical company, and went on the road with them. In 1909 she went with a friend, Mary Pickford, to the American Biograph film studio in New York to watch Pickford at work in In the Window Recess (1909), and Pickford got her a bit part in the picture. La Badie didn't make any films for a year after that, though, at which time she signed a contract with Biograph.
In 1911 she left Biograph for Thanhouser. She met with great success in Thanhouser's pictures, and was gradually promoted to lead roles, working there from 1911-1917 (making her the player who worked at Thanhouser the longest). She became the best-known of all of Thanhouser's players and was wildly popular in fan magazines and trade journals.
Although she was engaged twice (to actor Val Hush and writer Daniel Carson Goodman), she never married. She was the "companion" of film mogul Marcus Loew for several years.
On August 28, 1917, while driving a car near Ossining, New York, with her fiancé Daniel Goodman, the car's brakes failed and it plunged down an embankment at high speed, rolling over when it hit the bottom. Goodman escaped with relatively minor injuries, but she was thrown from the car and incurred a compound fracture of the pelvis. She was taken to a hospital in Ossining, where her conditioned worsened. She died of septicemia (infection) on August 28. She was 29 years old. - Originally a schoolteacher, Mary Maurice caught the acting bug and joined the Pittsburgh (PA) Stock Company in 1868. After a long and distinguished stage career she signed with Vitagraph and made her film debut in 1909. She appeared in almost 150 films for the company, and played mothers or grandmothers in so many of them that she got the nickname "Grand Old Lady of the Films". She stayed with Vitagraph until shortly before her death in 1918.
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A former salesman and vaudeville and stage actor, Harold Lockwood was one of the earliest romantic stars of American films. He was paired with Mary Pickford, Kathlyn Williams and Dorothy Davenport, among others, but his most popular films had him as the lover of May Allison, and they became one of the earliest screen romantic teams. Unfortunately, Lockwood contracted influenza during the worldwide flu epidemic of 1918, and was one of the millions who died from it.- Writer
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British poet Wilfred Owen was born in 1893 in Oswestry, Shropshire, England. He attended London University, but moved to France in 1913 to escape the harsh English winters, which were bad for his health. He secured a job in Bordeaux as a tutor for a wealthy family and wrote a poetry book, "Minor Poems", which he never published.
When World War I broke out he returned to England and enlisted in the army, being assigned to a unit called the Artists Rifles. However, his poor health resulted in his being invalided out in 1917. He spent four months in a military hospital in Scotland, where he met Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon took the young Owen under his wing, and after reading some of his poems encouraged Owen to continue with his writing. His health began to improve, so he began to study and lecture in Edinburgh, took part in concerts there and edited the hospital's in-house magazine. He eventually got a job as a major-domo in a hotel where many officers from his old unit were staying. When his health had recovered sufficiently he tried to find a post in England, but the army sent him back to France as a commander of front-line troops. He saw combat and was awarded the Military Cross for "gallantry under fire" in October of 1918. However, the next month while leading his men in an attack across the Sabre River in France, he was shot and killed.- Spanish novelist Benito Perez Galdos was born in Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands, in 1843 to a wealthy family. He was sent to an English school in the Canary Islands, and later he studied law at the University of Madrid. Although he graduated with a law degree, the practice of law never interested him, and upon graduation he became involved in the literary circles of Madrid, and eventually got a job as the literary and drama critic of the magazine "La Nacion". He had always wanted to be a playwright, and although he wrote and published numerous plays--many of which met with great success and some of which were turned into films--he soon realized that his greatest talent was as a novelist.
He continued writing plays and novels while on the staffs of various literary publications, such as "Las Cortes" and "La Revista de Espana" magazines, and eventually he secured a position as editor of "El Debate". After a visit to France, however, he undertook what is generally considered his greatest work--"Episodios Nacionales", a project that became four series of books of ten volumes each and one series of eight books. Each book came out an average of every three months, in addition to his "regular" novels.
A lifelong bachelor, he was a somewhat reclusive man, though he did travel extensively in France, England and Spain, and the general public knew very little about his private life. Towards the end of his life his eyesight began failing him, and by 1912 he was completely blind. That didn't stop him, however; he continued to write, although dictating his work to a secretary, until he died in Madrid in 1920. - Cyrus Brady, an Episcopal minister, was a successful author, with over 100 books to his credit, and went to work for Vitagraph in 1914 as a screenwriter. He wrote everything from romances to action pictures, and even took on the serial genre. His brother, Jasper Ewing Brady, was also a screenwriter, first for Vitagraph and then for Metro. Cyrus died in Yonkers, NY, in 1920.
- Aleksandr Kolchak, a Czarist admiral who led the military resistance to the Bolshevik government in Russia after the 1917 revolution, was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1874. His family had a long history of military service (his father was an artillery officer who fought the British in the Battle of Sevastopol in the Crimean War, scene of the famous "Charge of the Light Brigade"), and Kolchak graduated from the Russian Naval Academy in 1894. He was soon posted to the wilds of Vladivostok, spending four years there before returning to Russia and being stationed at the huge Kronstadt naval base. He took part in two expeditions to Russia's Arctic regions, for which he picked up the nickname "Polar Bear". During the 1905 Russo-Japanese War Kolchak was posted to a cruiser at Port Arthur, and his ship was responsible for sinking a Japanese heavy cruiser. He was then transferred to shore duty at an artillery battery during the Japanese siege of the city. He was seriously wounded and captured by the victorious Japanese forces, but the severity of his wounds resulted in his being returned to Russia by the Japanese shortly before the end of the war.
Recuperating from his injuries, he was assigned the task of helping to remake and improve the Russian navy, which had been virtually destroyed by the Japanese during the war. He was posted to the Baltic Fleet upon the outbreak of World War I with the job of planning an attack on the German naval bases at Kiel and Danzig, a task he handled so well that he was promoted to Vice-Admiral and given command of the Black Sea Fleet, which was operating against Turkish forces. Kolchak noticed that there were no railroads between the coal mines in eastern Turkey and the capital, meaning that the country's entire coal supply had to reach the capital by ship. He devised a plan to attack and sink as many Turkish coal ships as possible, and his effectiveness at that task severely damaged the Turkish war effort.
Russia's overall military and political situation was deteriorating rapidly, however. Several staggering military defeats, resulting in enormous casualties (100,000+ dead at the Battle of Tannenberg alone), demoralized the Russian army, spawning mutinies, mass desertions and open revolt. The czar was overthrown in 1917 and a new government, headed by Aleksandr Kerensky, took power. Kolchak was sent to Great Britain and the US as an "observer", although many thought it was to remove him as a potential rival to Kerensky. After a tour of Britain and a short visit to the US, Kolchak returned to Russia via Japan. He was in Manchuria in 1917 when the Bolsheviks overthrew Kerensky and seized power. Kolchak joined the opposition to the Bolsheviks, commonly called the "Whites" (the Bolsheviks were commonly called the "Reds"). After a series of coups and countercoups wracked the White government, Kolchak was eventually offered the position of "Supreme Ruler", which he accepted. He was supported by the Allied powers, which wanted Russia to stay in the war against the Germans. Kolchak consolidated his power through some very repressive means, including mass arrests and executions of opponents.
Kolchak's forces achieved several impressive victories against the Bolshevik armies in the country's Siberian region, partly due to the money, arms and other supplies he received from the British. In addition, the Red Army's brutal treatment of the population under its control--including rapes, looting, tortures and executions--brought about a series of local uprisings against them. All this resulted in the Reds retreating and Kolchak's forces taking control of a territory of almost 300,000 square miles. Unfortunately for them, they couldn't hold it for very long. Running out of supplies by spring, they were attacked by fresh Red Army forces and pushed back. Also, the authoritarian and somewhat arrogant Kolchak had alienated his political and military allies (he had several thousand Czech and Polish troops in addition to his own forces), as did the widespread corruption in his government and the brutal treatment of civilians by some units in his army, and the British and American governments refused to give him any more aid. The Red Army broke through the White lines in the Ural Mountains and took several important cities. By the end of the year the White forces, hammered by bad weather, running out of supplies and suffering many casualties, retreated towards their Siberian bases in disarray. The Reds attacked and captured the important White city of Omsk, a major setback for the White government, which lost a huge amount of much-needed ammunition and 50,000 of its troops taken prisoner. The Whites' situation continued to deteriorate, and there were several coup attempts against Kolchak by opponents who perceived him as weakened. In 1920 new leadership took over the White government and dismissed him. He was promised safe passage to the British embassy in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, but instead he was handed over to the Red army, which quickly tried him and sentenced him to death. He was shot by a firing squad on Feb. 7, 1920. - Notorious Chicago gangster--and one of the last of the "Mustache Petes", a nickname given to the old-line Italian gangsters by the "Young Turks" trying to take over--Giacomo "Big Jim" Colosimo was born in Colosimi, Italy. His family emigrated to Chicago in 1895, where "Big Jim" got an early start in the criminal underworld. He worked as a precinct captain and bagman for a succession of corrupt Chicago politicians, garnering himself some valuable political connections. that came in very handy later in his career. In 1902 he married a woman who was a madam at a long-established Chicago brothel, and he soon opened a second one. Colosimo had a knack for the prostitution business, and it wasn't long before he had expanded his holdings from two brothels to more than 200. This brought him into close contact with the men who ran Chicago's underworld, many of whom patronized Colosimo's houses, which not only offered women but gambling.
His success attracted the attention of the dreaded Black Hand extortion gang, and he turned to Johnny Torrio, a New York gangland figure he had befriended, and brought him to Chicago to take care of this problem, which Torrio promptly did--the Black Hand hoods who threatened Colosimo were sound found dead. With the threat of the Black Hand no longer hanging over his head, Colosimo indulged his penchant for the good life--which resulted in his being nicknamed "Diamond Jim"--and opened an exclusive restaurant named after himself. Torrio also helped Colosimo open several new brothels, and in one of them he installed a friend and colleague from his Brooklyn days to be a combination bartender/bouncer/enforcer--a tough cookie named Al Capone.
In 1920 the Volstead Act, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol, went into effect. Torrio saw that there would be huge amounts of money to be made supplying a thirsty population with booze and advised Colosimo to get in on the ground floor, but he refused. Shortly afterwards Colosimo, who had abandoned his first wife, left Chicago to marry his second wife. He returned to Chicago a week later and was contacted by Torrio, who asked Colosimo to meet him at his restaurant for an important meeting. Colosimo arrived there, sat down at a table to wait for Torrio and was promptly shot and killed by several unknown gunmen. Torrio, Capone and New York gangster Frankie Yale were suspected of being the triggermen, but nothing was ever proved and they were never charged with the murder.
Colosimo's funeral was, as was the custom among gangsters at the time, an epic. Huge, expensive floral arrangements surrounded an ornate bronze coffin. There were more than 50 pallbearers, many of them judges and Congressmen. More than 1000 marchers followed the coffin to Oak Woods cemetery. Colosimo was scheduled to be buried in a Catholic cemetery, but the Archbishop of New York forbade Colosimo from being buried in any Catholic cemetery in the city. It wasn't because of the innumerable murders, thefts, beatings, corruption, gambling, prostitution and other crimes he was responsible for--he was banned from burial in a Catholic cemetery because he had divorced his first wife. - Born into a wealthy cattle-ranching family, Venustiano Carranza followed in his father's footsteps and joined the Mexican army. He became a supporter of Francisco I. Madero in Madero's efforts to overthrow the corrupt dictatorship of Gen. Porfirio Díaz. When this proved successful, Madero appointed Carranza as Secretary of War and Secretary of the Navy. However, soon after assuming power Madero was assassinated in a coup masterminded by Gen. Victoriano Huerta, forcing Carranza to flee. He organized an army to fight against Huerta, and allied his forces with those of rebels (and former bandits) Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. The combined rebel army encircled Mexico City--Huerta's base--and fought their way to the city's gates. They soon took the city, forcing Huerta to flee, and Carranza, Villa and Zapata took over the government. Soon, however, Carranza and Villa locked horns and in the ensuing power struggle, Villa was driven from Mexico City and retreated back to his headquarters in Durango. In 1915 Carranza assumed the presidency of Mexico and set about to make many needed reforms. He introduced an independent judiciary, instituted land reform, decentralized government power and called for a Constitutional convention, which was convened in 1917. A new constitution was written--which is still used today--and he was elected as the first president under this constitution.
However, many forces were arrayed against him, including his former allies Villa and Zapata, who thought his reforms didn't go far enough, and many wealthy landowners and the Catholic Church, who thought that his reforms were too radical. Carranza placed a bounty on Zapata's head, which eventually resulted in his assassination, and Carranza's army hunted down Villa in northern Mexico. As his presidential term drew to a close, however, he offended several powerful military and political leaders by picking a man they did not approve of to succeed him. In 1920 an alliance of these leaders, headed by Gen. Álvaro Obregón, led a rebellion against Carranza. His forces were defeated and he fled Mexico City. He headed toward Vera Cruz to reorganize, but on 5/21/20, he stopped in a house in the town of Tlaxacalantongo to spend the night. Obregon's spies learned of his whereabouts, and later that night the house was attacked by Obregon's men and Carranza was shot and killed. - Playwright and journalist Charles Haddon Chambers was born in Sydney, Australia, on April 22, 1860, to Irish immigrants. After graduating from school he took a government job with the New South Wales Civil Service, but left after a few years to be a stockrider in the outback.
At age 22 he left Australia for London, England, to try his hand at journalism. He also began writing plays, and it wasn't long before a comedy he wrote, "Captain Swift", was produced by Sir Beerbohm Tree at the Haymarket Theatre in 1888, and it was a hit. In 1890 another of his plays, "The Idler", was produced on Broadway in New York. Several of his plays were turned into films.
During World War I he worked for the British government turning out propaganda. He died of a stroke in London in 1921. - American novelist Edgar Evertson Saltus was born in New York City in 1855. His family had been in New York City for quite some time--his ancestor, Adm. Kornelis Evertson of the Dutch Navy, had led the expedition that captured New York from the British in 1673.
Saltus got his schooling in New York City and attended Yale University in 1876, but left after a year. He spent several years traveling around Europe. He returned to the US and attended Columbia University, where he obtained a law degree (although he never practiced law). His first published work was a biography of 'Honore de Balzac', "Balzac", in 1884. "The Philosophy of Disenchatment", which came out the next year, was an account of philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and his school.
His first novel was "Mr. Incoul's Misadventure" in 1887, and was well received. He turned out several more works over the next few years, both fiction and non-fiction (his 1893 book "Imperial Purple", a study of Roman emperors, was a favorite of US President 'Warren G. Harding'). He is also thought to have written several "potboilers" under other names, including such works as "The Lovers of the World" and "The Great Battles of All Nations".
Married three times--the last to the woman who wrote his biography--he died in 1921 in New York City after a long illness. - Director
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A longtime and respected stage actor, Van Dyke Brooke went into the film business in 1909. A prolific actor, writer and director for Vitagraph, he stayed with the company until 1916, when the studio cleaned house and fired many of its "old-timers". He stayed in the business as an actor until his death in 1921.- Born in Illinois in 1855, William Barclay Masterson, nicknamed "Bat", drifted westward as a teenager and tried his hand at such professions as buffalo hunter, army scout and gunfighter. While visiting his brother Jim in Dodge City, Kansas, in 1876, he was offered a job as deputy city marshal by the assistant city marshal, Wyatt Earp. Since Jim Masterson was already a deputy marshal, Bat took the job. His instincts as a lawman and gunfighter were so good that the next year he was elected sheriff of Ford County, which included Dodge City, where his brother was still a marshal. However, two years later he ran for re-election as county sheriff and lost. He left Kansas and traveled to Arizona, where he spent much time as a professional gambler in the Tombstone vicinity, returning to Dodge City in 1882 to help his brother Jim in a business dispute. For the next ten years Masterson divided his time between being a professional gambler and short stints as a lawman in various small towns in Colorado. His reputation often preceded him, however; in Denver the local sheriff, after being advised that Masterson was in town and drinking heavily, demanded that he either surrender his guns or leave town. Not wanting to go unarmed in a town where he had a lot of enemies, Masterson was forced to leave. The incident apparently did no lasting damage to his reputation, however, as in 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Masterson as United States Marshal for the Southern District of New York State. Although he was also offered an appointment as marshal of the Oklahoma Territory, Masterson said that because of his reputation anyone wanting to make a reputation for himself would come after him, and since he saw no use in getting caught up in a kill-or-be-killed situation, he turned it down. He remained U.S. Marshal in New York State for two years, resigning in 1907 to take a job he had never done before: a sportswriter with a New York City newspaper, the Morning Telegraph. He kept that job for the rest of his life, and in fact was at his desk working on October 25, 1921, when he dropped dead.
- British writer, novelist and ornithologist William Henry Hudson was born in 1841 in Argentina. His parents were English, though born in the New England area of the US (his grandfather came to the US from Exeter, England, on the Mayflower). His father eventually moved the family to Argentina, where William was born, to raise sheep. Young William roamed the pampas--as the Argentine plains were called--becoming an expert on the plant and animal life of the area. At 15 years old he took part in a cattle drive that was caught in a severe blizzard and he contracted rheumatic fever, which adversely affected his health for the rest of his life. While recovering from the illness, he read "The Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin (V), which made a lasting impression on him.
After his parents' death he began to travel extensively, but in 1869 he moved to England and settled there. In 1876 he married a much older woman, and they lived on the edge of poverty, even though they had income from two boarding houses, until his wife inherited a house in the Bayswater section of London, where Hudson spent the rest of his days.
His early novels were influenced by his life on the South American plains, being mainly romances in that exotic setting, but were not particularly successful at the time. He is probably best known for his 1904 novel "Green Mansions" (filmed in 1959 as Green Mansions (1959)). Although not as successful as many of his contemporaries, such as Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, Hudson became close friends with them. He soon began writing books with ornithological themes, and began to gain recognition. Several of his books helped to bring about the "back-to-nature" movement, such as "Afoot in England" (1909), "A Shepherd's Life" (1910) and "A Friend in Richmond Park" (1922).
Hudson died in London, England, after a bout with heart disease, in 1922. - Writer
Czech author Jaroslav Hasek was born in 1883 in Prague, Bohemia (now Czech Republic), which at the time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was an alcoholic schoolteacher who was constantly moving the family in search of better paying jobs, and died when Jaroslav was 13. The youngster apprenticed himself to a druggist at 15, but decided that wasn't for him and eventually attended business school. He briefly worked as a bank clerk before taking up a career as a freelance writer and journalist.
In 1907 he became involved in the anarchist movement, which brought him to the attention of the Austrian secret police, resulting in his being arrested and imprisoned several times for his political activities. That same year he met a young woman named Jarmila Mayerova, and the two decided to get married. However, her parents did not approve of him--especially his politics--and would not sanction their marriage. Hasek resolved to distance himself from his political activities and concentrate on his writing in order to win her parents' approval, but when he was arrested for vandalizing an Austrian flag, her parents moved her from Prague far out into the country, hoping that the distance would eventually break up the couple. It didn't work, though, and the two were married in 1910. Unfortunately, it didn't work out and she moved back with her parents in less than a year.
In 1914, on the outbreak of World War I, Hasek was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army and sent to the Russian front. He was captured by the Russians in 1915 and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp, where he contracted typhus, but he eventually recovered. At the camp he was recruited into an outfit called The Czech Legion, a unit put together by the Russians consisting of Czech POWs who agreed to fight the Austrians. At the end of the war he left the Czech Legion but joined the Red Army, mainly as a recruiter and propagandist. In 1920 he remarried, although he was still technically married to Jarmila.
In 1920 he returned to Prague, but his health had severely deteriorated and he was grossly overweight. He began working on a book of his that had originally been published in 1912, called "The Good Soldier Schweik and Other Strange Stories", about the adventures of a good-natured but not particularly bright soldier named Schweik who looked on his army time as basically a lark. He now began to rewrite and add new chapters to the book, giving it a somewhat darker tone due to his own wartime experiences, but his health kept getting worse and he wound up dictating the new chapters to an assistant because he could not actually perform the physical task of writing. He died of heart failure in the Czech village of Lipnice on Jan. 23, 1923. His final work, now called "The Good Soldier Schweik", has become a classic in European literature, and has been successfully adapted on stage and in film many times.- American novelist Emerson Hough was born in Newton, IA, in 1857. After graduating from Newton High School in 1875 he attended the University of Iowa, attaining a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1880. He later studied law and was admitted to the Iowa bar in 1882, which was also the year in which he had his first work published--an article in "Forest and Stream" titled "Far From the Madding Crowd".
Moving to White Oaks, NM, he opened a law practice there and also wrote for the local newspaper, "The Golden Era". He returned to Newton 18 months later due to his mother's illness, where he wrote "The Story of the Outlaw: A Study of the Western Desperado". Among the outlaws and lawmen covered in the book were Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. When Garrett killed Billy in New Mexico, Hough moved back there and struck up a friendship with Garrett.
Hough moved around the country working for various newspapers. In 1899 he was hired as western editor for "Forest and Stream" magazine. The publisher of that publication, George Bird Grinnell, was a noted conservationist--he founded the Audubon Society--and Hough was an enthusiastic adherent of that movement. "Forest and Stream" assigned him to survey Yellowstone Natonal Park in the winter of 1893, providing him with a guide and arranging for a military escort from Fort Yellowstone to accompany them. Hough's survey revealed that, among other things, the park's buffalo herd, which was thought to number close to 1000, was barely 100, mainly due to poaching. Hough's revelations resulted in many eastern newspapers taking up the anti-poaching cause, and in 1894, due largely to Hough's efforts, the US Congress passed a law making poaching in national parks a criminal offense, which up to that time it wasn't. Hough and others also lobbied for the creation of a national park system, and the National Park Service was eventually created in 1916.
Hough had his first novel, "The Mississippi Bubble", published in 1902, which became a best-seller. Many novels followed, all set in the west and fiercely protective of the land and its people, often railing against the moneyed interests that wished to exploit them. To that end he worked on the presidential campaign of Theodore Roosevelt in the 1916 elections. During World War I he served as a captain in the US Army's intelligence service.
He died in Evanston, IL, in 1923, shortly after seeing the premiere of The Covered Wagon (1923), an epic film based on his 1922 best-selling novel of the same name. - Actor
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After a distinguished career of more than 30 years on stage, Charles Kent entered the film industry in its earliest stages--his debut, as far as is known, was in 1908 in Macbeth (1908)). He was not only an actor but a director, and guided many upper-echelon films for Vitagraph, often starring in them. He was one of the first directors to use close-ups creatively, for which he was savaged by contemporary critics. He retired from directing in 1913, but continued acting until shortly before his death.- English novelist and poet Maurice Hewlett was born in Kent, England, UK, in 1861. He attended London International College, but never graduated. He had intended to become a lawyer and began studying at law school, but it took him 12 years to actually getting around to finishing it. He passed the bar exam, but he never actually practiced law.
He had dreamed since his youth of traveling the world and becoming a writer, and his first trip to Italy (one of many he would make to that country over the years) convinced him he was right. In 1888 he married Hilda Herbert, the daughter of a vicar. She hardly fit the image of a prim and proper vicar's daughter--she loved flying and eventually obtained a pilot's license, and during World War I she actually built planes for the Britiah RAF.
The couple settled near Salisbury, and for two years Hewlett had a government job as Keeper of the Land Revenue Records for the Record Office, which gave him a steady income while allowing him time to continue his writing. He specialized in historical novels. His first book, "The Forest Lovers" (1898), was set in medieval England and was a major success.
He also wrote books of essays, volumes of poetry and travel books, mainly about his adventures in the Italy he so loved. He also wrote adventure stories about the legends and folk tales of Iceland, and his books of poetry were hailed as "fine" and "moving".
Maurice Hewlett died in 1923. - Dutch novelist Louis Couperus was born in The Hague in 1863. His father was an official in the Dutch government, and when Louis was ten years old his father was appointed to a position in Java, Indonesia (then a Dutch colony known as the Dutch East Indies), and the family moved there. They were there for five years when his father suddenly died, and the family returned to Holland. He graduated from the University of Holland at The Hague, and was hired there as a teacher.
He published his first novel, "Elina Veere", in 1889 and was critically acclaimed by the Dutch "realist" school of literature. The book's success enabled him to leave teaching and devote his full time to writing. He returned often to Java for inspiration and used the location as a background in much of his work. He married in 1891 and he and his wife moved to Italy from Holland after his mother died. In 1921 he returned to the Dutch East Indies as a correspondent for the "Haagsche Post" newspaper.
His work resulted in his becoming one of the most famous writers in Holland. One reviewer called him "unquestionably a major novelist of the world, hidden away in the Dutch language". He was awarded the Order of Orange Nassau in 1896 and the prestigious Order of the Netherlands Lion in 1923; as part of that award, he was given a house in the country. Ironically, shortly after he moved into that house he received either an insect bite or a scratch; he contracted blood poisoning, and died from it on July 16, 1923. - Actor
- Producer
Francisco "Pancho" Villa was born Doroteo Arango to rural peasant parents in San Juan del Rio, Mexico, on June 5, 1878. He later took several aliases, the most popular and well-known being "Pancho Villa". Raised in poverty in Durango, he turned to cattle rustling and robbery as a young man. The turning point in his life, however, was the day his sister was attacked and raped by Mexican army troops. Villa wanted revenge against the whole world and soon turned from being simply a bandit leader into a full-fledged revolutionary with the aim of overthrowing Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz. To that end Villa became an ally of another revolutionary, the urbane and educated Francisco I. Madero, and although the two were about as opposite from one another as it was possible to be, Villa soon became a diehard supporter of the diminutive Madero, whom he affectionately called "the little man". Madero appointed Villa a colonel in the revolutionary army. On May 11, 1911, Villa led a daring raid against the federal stronghold of Juarez, soundly defeating the government forces and securing Madero's position as the new president. After Diaz was driven from power and Madero installed as president, Villa went home. His stay there was not to be very long, however. Two years later Madero was overthrown and executed by renegade Gen. Victoriano Huerta. Enraged, Villa re-formed his army, now called the Army of the North, and became an important member of a coalition of anti-Huerta forces, among whom were such legendary Mexican figures as Emiliano Zapata and Venustiano Carranza.
Villa's mounted troops, called "Villistas", were highly mobile and seasoned by years of fighting against the Diaz regime. They inflicted a decisive defeat on Huerta's army in northern Mexico at the Battle of Zacatecas on June 23, 1913, then began a campaign to drive Huerta's forces south to their stronghold of Mexico City. By December, in conjunction with the armies of Carranza and Zapata, Villa captured Mexico City, forcing Huerta to flee and placing control of the government in the hands of the three rebel leaders. However, the following spring Villa was forced out of the triumvirate when he lost a power struggle with Carranza. In the ensuing conflict his troops were badly defeated by Carranza's army and Villa was forced to withdraw to his headquarters in Durango. There he resumed his life as a bandit, raiding isolated American border towns and mining camps as well as Mexican villages.
On March 9, 1916, troops under Villa's command raided the town of Columbus, New Mexico, looted it, burned down much of it and caused the deaths of more than a dozen residents, although about 30 of their own men were killed by American soldiers and civilians defending the town (supposedly Villa was angered by the U.S. authorities allowing elements of Carranza's army, which was pursuing him, to cross through American territory as a shortcut in an attempt to get ahead of Villa and ambush him, and the raid was in retaliation for that). The U.S. government sent an expeditionary force into Mexico under Gen. John J. Pershing to capture Villa. However, Villa's maneuverability and superior knowledge of the terrain enabled him to elude the pursuing American troops, and Pershing's forces withdrew from the area the following year.
In 1920 the Carranza government struck a deal with Villa in which he agreed to halt his raids in exchange for settling down on a ranch in Canutillo and being appointed a general in the Mexican army. However, on June 20, 1923, Villa was ambushed and murdered in Parral by followers of Álvaro Obregón, a former army general, who feared that Villa would oppose their leader's candidacy for president in the upcoming elections. Immediately following his death the name of Pancho Villa was eliminated from all history books, children's books and all monuments in Mexico. It wasn't until 1975 (more than a half-century after his death) that both the Mexican and American governments felt safe enough to exhume his body, and when they did, they discovered that someone had stolen his head. After a large parade was held in his honor in Mexico, Pancho Villa's body was sent to the cemetery where many Mexican revolutionary heroes were buried, and he was finally given the proper burial he deserved.- Director
- Cinematographer
William Matthew Tilghman served as a lawman for 35 years. In his career he rode with the Earps, was a lawman in Dodge City, Kansas, and battled the Dalton gang and the Wild Bunch. In the early 1900s he became fed up with the way Hollywood glamorized the outlaws of the west and, along with his friends E.D. Nix and Chris Madsen, set out to make a movie of how it really was back then. They starred in the film, Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaws (1915), as themselves and arranged to have a member of the Dalton gang named Arkansas Tom released from prison to act as a technical consultant. They met with some difficulty in getting the film shown--theater owners didn't want to show it because there were no name actors in it. Hollywood told them to put Tom Mix in it if they wanted it to sell, but Tilghman refused.
In 1924, some businessmen from the town of Cromwell, Oklahoma, contacted Tilghman, hoping to persuade him to accept the position of town sheriff. Cromwell was a virtual cesspool of crime: bootlegging, gambling and prostitution (many of the prostitutes being underage) were among the illegal activities going on, all under the protection of a corrupt federal Prohibition agent named Wiley Lynn. Cromwell was a booming oil town, and its citizens wanted Tilghman to run the "bad element" out of town in order to preserve its future; they didn't want the town to dry up when the oil did. Tilghman was reluctant at first, but finally took the job and promised to clean up the town. He made good on his promises, closing down gambling houses, arresting bootleggers and moonshiners and sending the prostitutes home to their families. This upset those in town who were running the various crime rings, including Wiley Lynn. One night as Tilghman was having dinner with friends at Ma Murphy's restaurant, Lynn showed up. He claimed he had a warrant, and was coming in to clear out the underage girls who worked there, dancing with lonely men. He was brandishing a pistol, and according to witnesses was either drunk or high on cocaine. As Tilghman and his deputy attempted to disarm Lynn, he pulled out a .22-caliber pistol and shot Tilghman in the mid-section. He escaped, while Tilghman lay dying on the boardwalk. A doctor was summoned, and a friend fetched Tilghman's young wife and children. The doctor was unable to save him, and Tilghman died on a table in Ma Murphy's, surrounded by his friends and family (in 1925 Wiley Lynn was tried for and acquitted of Tilghman's murder, but was dismissed from federal service. In 1932 he was shot and killed by an agent of the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation).- Irish-American gangster Charles Dion O'Bannion, nicknamed "Deanie", was, unlike many of his fellow contemporary gangsters, born and raised in the US. From the small Illinois town of Marca, his family moved to Chicago after his mother's death in 1901, settling in an Irish neighborhood on the city's North Side.
O'Bannion's childhood friends included future gangsters Hymie Weiss, George Moran--aka "Bugs Moran"--and Vincent Drucci (aka "The Schemer"), all members of an Irish strongarm robbery crew called The Market Street Gang. The gang came into its own during the infamous Chicago newspaper wars, in which the city's competing newspapers hired gangs of thugs to beat up business owners who didn't sell their paper or newspaper boys who sold the competition's paper. O'Bannion graduated from beating up newspaper boys to safecracking--for which he was eventually arrested--and drugging patrons' drinks in the dives he worked at, after which he and his gang would rob them when they passed out.
O'Bannion was still a small-time hood when Prohibition came into effect in 1920, and it was then he found his calling. He began by smuggling beer, whiskey and gin from Canada to the US, and was extremely successful at it. He built his own outfit, known as The North Side Gang, and made huge amounts of money supplying the wealthy Chicago area called the Gold Coast, along the lakefront, with illegal liquor. He still kept his hand in the strongarm business, however, and his mob became infamous for hijacking the trucks of rival bootleggers, beating up or killing the drivers and taking their loads. When he married in 1921, he indulged his passion for flowers--and got himself a legitimate front for his rackets--by buying a flower shop, which eventually became the main supplier of floral arrangements for the funerals of many of the gangsters killed in the city's internecine mob wars.
Italian gangster Johnny Torrio had called a meeting of Chicago's bootleggers in 1920 to divide up the city and put a stop to the bloody battles among the various gangs. O'Bannion attended the meeting and was awarded the North Side territory, including the very profitable Gold Coast section, in exchange for supplying the Torrio gang with muscle in its effort to ensure that their candidate won the election for mayor of nearby Cicero, thus ensuring a haven from which they could run their organizations without fear of prosecution.
The "agreement" only lasted for a few years before O'Bannion started chafing under Torrio's control. In addition, the city of Cicero had become a virtual gold mine for Torrio since he assumed control of it, and O'Bannion wanted in. Torrio mollified him by giving him a strip of the city in which to establish his speakeasies. O'Bannion used that to persuade other Chicago speakeasy owners to move their operations to his Cicero fiefdom, to which Torrio took strong offense, but O'Bannion refused Torrio's order to stop bringing in new speakeasies. In the meantime, a family of brutally violent Italian bootleggers called the Gemma Brothers began moving into O'Bannion's Chicago territory, and his complaints to Torrio about them went unheeded. Infuriated, O'Bannion began hijacking the Gemma gang's trucks. The Gemmas decided to kill O'Bannion and wipe out his mob, but were stopped by the other Italian gangs, who did not want a full-fledged gang war bringing heat on them. The last straw, though, was when Torrio discovered that O'Bannion had double-crossed him on a liquor deal that had cost him more than $500,000. He finally gave the Gemmas the go-ahead to kill O'Bannion.
On November 10, 1924, on the pretense of buying flowers for a fellow mobster's funeral, gangster Frankie Yale and two compatriots visited O'Bannion's flower shop. As O'Bannion extended his hand to greet Yale, the mobster suddenly grabbed his arm with both hands and the two gunmen pulled out pistols and emptied them into O'Bannion. He died instantly. - Director
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Born in Montreal, Canada, Frederick A. Thomson--not to be confused with cowboy star Fred Thomson--had a 20-year career on the stage as an actor and producer before entering the film industry. He was a longtime director at Vitagraph, although he would occasionally appear in the studio's films as an actor. He directed his last film in 1921, and after appearing in A Tailor-Made Man (1922) for United Artists in 1922, he left the business.
He died in Hollywood of heart problems in 1925. He was 55.- Actor
- Producer
A stage actor since his early teenage years, Lester Cuneo made his first film, a comedy short, in 1910. It was quite successful, and he soon began appearing in a series of comedy shorts, which he also directed. Tiring of comedies, he decided to make himself a cowboy star and turned to making westerns. He was also successful in that endeavor, and soon became one of the country's first western stars. Unlike many other cowboy actors, however, Cuneo also played dramatic parts in other pictures. His career was interrupted by World War I, and after completing his military service, he returned to Hollywood and resumed his career in Westerns. He formed his own production company and made his own films, and his character was known as "The Smiling Daredevil." His pictures were initially successful, but their success didn't last long. Cuneo's career went downhill, and after a series of personal and professional failures, he shot himself to death in 1925.- Russian writer and poet Fyodor Sologub was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1863. His father was a tailor and shoemaker who died when Fyodor was four. He and his sister were raised by their mother, who was a servant. In 1882, after attending the St. Petersburg Teahers Training Institute, he was appointed a teacher at a local school, and afterward began teaching math for the Russian Ministry of Education.
In his spare time Sologub had been writing prose and poetry, and in 1884 his poem "Fox and Hedgehog" was published. In 1886 his first article, "About Muniipal Schools", was published in Russki Nachalny Uchitel No. 4. Over the next several years he published a variety of articles and short stories, often under the pseudonym "Sologub". In 1894 the first of over 100 short stories he would write, "Ninochka's Mistake", was published in St. Petersburg. The next year he published a book of poems, entitled simply "Poems: The 1st Book", which caught the attention of such writers as Anton Chekhov and Valery Brusov. His novel "Heavy Dreams" was published in 1895. In addition to writing poems and novels, Sologub also translated the works of many of the top French writers--Honore de Balzac, Guy De Maupassant and Verlaine, among others--into Russian.
He became involved in several art and literature movements, collectively known as "Symbology", which included such figures as Sergei Diaghilev. In 1907 he published what is probably his best-known work, the novel "The Petty Demon". He also retired from schoolteaching in that year, and traveled to Finland with his sister, who was being treated for tuberculosis (at the time called "consumption"), but she died soon afterwards. In 1908 he married Anastasia Chebotarevskaya, a writer and translator who was to become one of his greatest supporters and influences.
When the Bolsheviks took over the country in 1917 Sologub was strongly opposed to them. In 1919 he and his wife applied for permission to leave the country, but were denied. Repeated applications were also denied, and Anastasia's health began to deteriorate. In 1921, suffering from a variety of diseases and exhaustion, she drowned while attempting to take a swim. Devastated, Sologub was never the same after her death. He died in St. Petersburg in 1927. - Born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1858, George Washington Goethals graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point in 1880. Commissioned as a lieutenant, ,he was assigned to the army's Corps of Engineers, and gained experience in the planning and building of canals and harbors, which came in handy when he returned to West Point as an instructor.
In 1907 US President Theodore Roosevelt picked him to serve as chairman and chief engineer of the US Canal Commission, the agency tasked with constructing the Panama Canal. Goethals took over complete control of the project in January of 1908. It was, to say the least, a daunting task; his two predecessors had resigned under the stress of the enormous project. He not only had to overcome the technical problems involved in the construction of the canal itself, but he had to feed and house more than 3,000 workers. In addition, the workforce had been ravaged by such tropical diseases as malaria and yellow fever, although they were eventually brought under control.
The Canal was finally opened in 1914, and US President Woodrow Wilson appointed Goethals as the first Governor of the Canal Zone, a position he held until 1917, when the US entered World War I. He was appointed acting Quartermatser General of the Army . He left the army in 1919 and started his own engineering firm, George Goethals and Co., of which he was president until 1928.
He died in New York city on Jan. 21, 1928. - British essayist, literary critic and biographer Edmund Gosse was born in London in 1849. His father was a zoologist, who later became somewhat of a religious fanatic, belonging to a very conservative, fundamentalist sect called the Plymouth Brethren. The father did not believe in public education, and consequently Edmund was schooled at home; he never attended an actual "school" until he began college.
In 1867, at age 18, he was appointed assistant librarian at the British Museum. In 1875 he went to work for the Board of Trade. He eventually became acquaintances, and then friends, with many of the major figures in British literature of the day, such as 'Rudyard Kipling', 'George Bernard Shaw', 'Henry James' and 'Max Beerbohm'.
He was a lecturer in English Literature at Cambridge's Trinity College from 1884-90. In 1904 he left his post at the Board of Trade to become Librarian at the House of Lords. In 1925 he was knighted, being made Commander of the Order of the Bath 1907.
He died in 1928 following an operation. - Composer
Alvaro Obregon was born near Alamos, in the Mexican state of Sonora, to a family of poor farmers (one story is that his grandfather was an Irish immigrant railroad worker named O'Brien, which would account for Obregon's pale complexion and reddish hair, traits uncommon in Mexicans; supposedly, his father "Mexicanized" the family name to Obregon). In 1911 he was elected mayor of Huatabampo, as a supporter of reformist President Francisco I. Madero, who was engaged in putting down a rebellion led by renegade Gen. Pascual Orozco. Later Madero was overthrown and assassinated by Gen. Victoriano Huerta--who had originally helped Madero put down Orozco's rebellion but who soon turned against him--and Obregon joined such notable Mexican figures as Gen. Venustiano Carranza and former bandits Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata in the fight to overthrow Huerta, which was accomplished on July 24, 1914. Obregon was appointed by Carranza to be Minister of War and Secretary of the Navy; when Villa and Zapata later rebelled against Carranza, Obregon supported him and helped to lead Carranza's forces in putting down the revolt. Although Villa had a reputation for daring and imaginative tactics, Obregon was a trained soldier--which Villa wasn't--and that paid off in two famous battles later to become landmarks in Mexican history: the battle of Guanajuato and a week later the battle of Celaya, both of which resulted in defeats for Villa's forces (and, in the case of Celaya, very heavy casualties; he lost 3000 dead in one day). Two weeks later Villa again attacked Obregon, this time at the battle of Trinidad and Santa Ana del Conde, and was again soundly defeated (it was in this battle that Obregon lost an arm). Villa waited until mid-July to try another attack on Obregon, this time at Aguascalientes, but was decisively defeated again (although these battles took place over a period of four months and were fought at different locations, they are known collectively as the Battle of Celaya). Obregon's foresight in seeing the advantages of field artillery for offense and the use of masses of machine guns and successive layers of heavily fortified trenches for defense, and his skillful tactical use of them, was in large part responsible for his victory and had the effect of turning the battlefield advantage to the defenders. A good example of that principle took place at the second battle at Celaya, in which Villa's troops made a direct assault on Obregon's front line, which was defended by ascending and interlaced rows of machine guns, resulting in the loss of hundreds of Villa's men while Obregon's casualties were minimal.
After helping to defeat the Villa/Zapata rebellion--Villa finally gave up the fight and returned home to Durango, while Zapata was assassinated by men looking to collect the bounty Carranza had placed on him--Obregon returned to political life. When it came time to pick a successor to Carranza, Obregon--who had wanted the job himself--discovered that Carranza had picked one of his own men rather than Obregon. This, in conjunction with many of Carranza's land and social reforms that had angered the powerful Catholic church and the country's wealthy landowners, resulted in Obregon organizing a revolt against Carranza (ironically, he found support among his old enemies when the remnants of Emiliano Zapata's forces joined him). Carranza's army was eventually defeated and in 1920 Carranza himself was ambushed and killed while trying to reorganize his forces in the state of Puebla. Gen. Rodolfo Herrera was appointed provisional president until elections could be held in December, which resulted in Obregon being elected as Mexico's president.
Obregon's four years as president were marked by widespread agrarian reforms and the resumption of good relations with the US, due in large part to Mexico's sale of oil to its giant neighbor to the north. He put down a revolt by Gen. Adolfo de la Herrera, who rebelled when he found that Obregon was going to pick Plutarco Elías Calles to succeed him as president, a job that Herrera believed should be his. Herrera's revolt was quickly put down, and soon afterward Obregon stepped down and Calles took office.
Calles' administration believed that the Catholic Church wielded far too much power in Mexico and had too much control over the people (the country was approximately 98% Catholic), and instituted policies designed to strip the Church of much of its power and influence. This resulted in what became known as the Cristero War, a period from 1926-929 marked by widespread revolts and rebellions by many of the country's Catholics, a revolt spurred on by the Church itself, which branded Calles and his administration as "atheistic" and "Communists". In 1928 Obregon ran for re-election and won; he returned to Mexico City to celebrate. On July 27 he was shot and killed in Mexico City by a Catholic fanatic who believed Obregon was trying to destroy the church.- German playwright and novelist Hermann Sudermann was born into a poor family in Matziken, East Prussia, in 1857. His father was a brewer and descended from a line of very strict fundamentalist Mennonite Christians; one of his ancestors, Daniel Sudermann, was a Protestant clergyman who played a major role in fomenting the religious wars that wracked Europe in the 18th century.
As a young boy Hermann was apprenticed to a pharmacist but he detested the smell of the medicines and formulas in the pharmacy and ran away. He attended Konigsburg University, where he studied history and philology. However, he chafed at the restrictions and conventions of academic life at the time, and one day just stood up in the middle of a class and left, never to return.
He next showed up in Berlin, attempting to break into legitimate theatre as a writer, but met with such little success that he was forced to take a job as a private tutor in order to survive. He managed to get a job as an editor on a small political weekly, but eventually turned out a few novels that met with some success, "Frau Sorge" and "Geschwister", and in 1889 his play "Die Ehre" was produced in Berlin. In 1890 his novel "Katzensteg" (aka "Regina") attracted attention for its sympathetic portrayals of the poor and downtrodden.
His 1891 novel "Sodoms Ende" was declared "immoral" and temporarily banned by court order. His next work, however, is undoubtedly his most famous: the play "Heimat" (aka "Magda"), a major hit on stage (and a favorite of such stage luminaries as Sarah Bernhardt, Eleanora Duse ad Mrs. Patrick Campbell).
Apart from the occasional novel, Sudermann concentrated on writing plays for the next several years, but not entirely successfully. He actually achieved more success as a novelist than as a playwright, although the modern perception of him is generally exactly the opposite.
He died in Berlin, Germany, in 1928. - Actor
- Director
- Producer
Silent-film star William Russell was born in the Bronx, New York, in the late 1880s (various sources give it as 1884, 1886 and 1889). His mother, Clara, was a highly regarded stage actress. Russell studied law at Fordham University (and, some sources say, Harvard University). He started a law practice in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but it wasn't particularly successful. He tried a variety of other jobs--including bookmaker and boxing instructor--before deciding to give the stage a shot. He had actually been a fairly successful child actor on the stage, and after re-entering the profession as an adult, he found himself acting with Ethel Barrymore in "Cousin Kate" on Broadway. Russell kept busy as a stage actor, appearing with many of the top stars of the day, including Chauncey Olcott and Cathrine Countiss. He toured the country in various stock productions.
His film career began at Biograph in 1910 with "The Roman Slave", directed by D.W. Griffith. He stayed almost a year at Biograph, although he was used mostly in small parts. In 1910 he left Biograph for Thanhouser. There he became a star, and Thanhouser put him in quite a few of its productions. His brother Albert Russell also appeared in several of his films.
In 1913 Russell left Thanhouser to return to Biograph, but later that year he again left Biograph to go back to Thanhouser. He finally left Thanhouser and worked for a variety of studios, both major and minor, over the next several years. In 1917 he married actress Charlotte Burton, but it ended in divorce four years later. From 1916-20 he worked for American Film Co., appearing in The Torch Bearer (1916), The Strength of Donald McKenzie (1916) and The Man Who Would Not Die (1916), among others. In 1919 he formed his own production company, William Russell Productions, and produced and appeared in This Hero Stuff (1919), directed by Henry King. He freelanced at studios as varied as Fox Films and Victor. In the 1920s he decided to move to Hollywood after having spent much of his life in New York City. He married actress Helen Ferguson, and that marriage lasted until his death in Beverly Hills, California, on February 18, 1929, from pneumonia.