August 15 is a popular day for countries to declare or attain independence. Today is Independence Day in Korea, commemorating independence from Japan in 1945. It’s the same day in South and North Korea, but in South Korea it’s called Independence Day, while in North Korea it’s Fatherland Liberation Day.
It’s Independence Day in India, commemorating independence from England in 1947. In Republic of Congo, it’s been Independence Day since 1960, when they became independent of France. It’s National Day in Liechtenstein, too. It’s not exactly tied to independence, but everybody is invited to the head of state’s castle, and they serve free beer all day.
More Liechtenstein trivia: for a while, you could (supposedly) rent the entire country for 2 nights on Airbnb. It was listed as being able to hold 450-900 guests, and featured “500+ bathrooms.” As far as I know, nobody ever rented Liechtenstein, maybe because of the price: $70,000 (per night, I think). Also it’s one of only two “doubly landlocked” countries in the world; it’s bordered by Switzerland and Austria, which are both themselves landlocked countries. The other doubly landlocked country, by the way, is Uzbekistan.
But back to today’s holidays: in the western hemisphere, it’s Constitution Day in Equatorial Guinea. It’s not quite the same as Independence Day (that’s October 12), but it’s at least related.
Speaking of independence, there was a guy named Carloman in the year 747 in Austrasia. That wasn’t exactly a country, but it was a territory where Germany, Austria, and and Hungary now are (and parts of some other countries; it was a big territory). It was part of the Frankish Kingdom, which was, at the time, most of Europe. Anyway, Carloman was the mayor of the palace of Austrasia, or majordomo. Although it sounds like a kind of servant, it was actually the power behind the throne, and in effect the ruler. Carloman was majordomo in Austrasia (the northeast part of the Frankish Kingdom), and his brother (and I’m not making this up), Pepin the Short, was majordomo in “Neustrasia”, the northwestern territory.
On August 15, 747, Carloman declared his personal independence from the whole political scene and joined a monastery. As a celebrity monk, he even got his special monk haircut (a tonsure, where the top of your head is shaved) from the pope himself.
The Wizard of Oz, which debuted on August 15, 1939, had a (sort of) tonsured character: the Tin Man. To play that role required a shaved head and bright silver makeup, which was mostly aluminum dust. Aluminum dust can be pretty nasty stuff, and it made Buddy Ebsen, who was originally cast as the Tin Man, so sick he dropped out of the movie altogether.
When he first started feeling bad, though, he probably tried just taking some aspirin. In the 1930s, aspirin was just as associated with Bayer as it still is — maybe more so. Bayer invented it, and Aspirin was originally their trademarked product name. Heroin was another one of their trademarks, but both seem to now be in the public domain. Anyway, even earlier, in 1915, Bayer Aspirin was involved in the Great Phenol Plot.
Phenol is an acid that’s used in lots of chemical production processes, including making aspirin. It’s also used to make high explosives. Oddly enough, it was also used in the phonograph records made by Thomas Edison’s company around 1914 (there were other phonograph brands, but only Edison’s used phenol). The British started buying up all the phenol on the market to make bombs for their war effort, and neither Edison nor Bayer could get as much as they needed.
Edison’s response was to build his own phenol factory. It produced 11 tons of the stuff per day, which was much more than he needed for his records. It was looking pretty clear that the excess phenol from Edison’s new plant was likely to end up in England to make more ammunition.
The Great Phenol Plot was a plan by German government agents to corner the market in phenol on the pretext of supplying it to Bayer for Aspirin production. They weren’t exactly secret agents — the two guys behind the plan were the German ambassador and an official from the interior ministry — but it was just kept as quiet as possible. After all, there was a lot of public sentiment in the US, both for and against Germany, and one of the jobs of the German officials was to use propaganda to make Germany more attractive.
They set up a front company, the Chemical Exchange Association, through which they would route the phenol to the US company that supplied Bayer. The Chemical Exchange Association bought all of Edison’s excess production. Bayer didn’t actually need that much, so they sold the rest at a profit — making sure none of it went to war-related uses.
The whole thing would have worked except for the German ambassador. He had a briefcase full of details of his propaganda campaigns as well as the phenol plot and he accidentally left it on a train, where the US Secret Service, who were investigating the propaganda angle, grabbed it
There wasn’t anything strictly illegal about what they were doing; the US wasn’t at war, and trading with Germany was perfectly okay. But the documents were leaked to the New York World newspaper, which was stridently anti-German. They sensationalized it with the front-page headline The Great Phenol Plot. That attracted enough attention that the whole deal was dismantled.
Realistically, though, it worked. Edison got enough phenol and Bayer was able to keep producing Aspirin. And the agents who’d put the whole thing together — nobody could ever think of anything to charge them with — actually made a lot of money; the equivalent about $36 million today. Plenty enough, at the time, to be independent, at least financially. I don’t know whether they kept their government jobs.
