KAHN, OTTO HERMANN (1867- ), American financier, was born in Mannheim, Germany, Feb. 21 1867. His father had been among the refugees to America after the revolution of 1848 and had become an American citizen, but later returned to Germany. He was educated in a Gymna- sium in Mannheim, and after a year's service in the German army entered a banking house. In 1888 he entered the London branch of the Deutsche Bank, remaining there five years and be- coming a British citizen. In 1893 he went to the United States, and for two years held a position with the house of Speyer & Co. in New York City. Then after travel in Europe he joined the firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., in New York City.. In March 1917 he became an American citizen. He was a patron of music and gave private assistance to promising talent. He was chairman of the New York committee of the Shakespeare Tercentenary (1916) and was vice-president of the Permanent Blind Relief War Fund. He was chairman of the board of directors of the Metropolitan Opera Co. of New York and of the French theatre of New York, and a founder and later treasurer of the New Theatre Co. He was a trustee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and of Rutgers College. He was a director in numerous corporations, including the Equitable Trust Co. (N.Y.) and the Union Pacific railway. During the World War he took a leading part in show- ing to the Germans in the United States that Germany was in the wrong and must be opposed. He was the author of Right Above Race (1918); Our Economic Problems: A Financier's Point of View (1920) and Two Years of Faulty Taxation (1920).
KAHR, AUGUST RICHARD VON (1862- ), Bavarian Minister-President from March 14 1920 to Sept. 20 1921, was born on Nov. 29 1862 at Weissenburg in Bavaria. After March 14 1920 he came into office under military influences as a secondary result of the Kapp coup (March 13) in Berlin. The most powerful party in Bavaria, the Bavarian Volkspartei, was then in a state of much anxiety as a result of the experiences of Bolshevism, anarchy and violence through which Munich had passed in the spring of 1919. The Ministry presided over by the Moderate Socialist Hoffmann had, it is true, succeeded in quelling Bolshevism with the aid of Republican troops from Prussia and Wiirttemberg. The great majority of the Bavarian Catholic Volkspartei, however, as well as Liberals of various shades, not to speak of the Royalists and reactionaries, wanted further guarantees against a recurrence of the Bolshevist terror. The Kapp coup in Berlin, which in some of its aspects sprang from similar anxieties in Prussia, gave the signal for political action in Mu- nich, and at a midnight sitting the Bavarian Socialist Ministry was somewhat unceremoniously hustled out of office it is al- leged under military pressure and a Coalition Cabinet under von Kahr installed. The Coalition included reactionary Conserva- tives whose influence became more and more predominant. They were backed up by formerly Liberal Bavarian journals which had been bought up by the Prussian great industrialists. The new Minister-President had been Landeshauptmannthe high- est position in the provincial administrative hierarchy in Upper Franconia. He was known as a capable and energetic bureaucrat and as nothing else. Under his Government a formal state of siege was maintained, and the police under the reactionary pre- fect Pgehner exercised the greatest severity in the supervision of foreigners and even of non-Bavarian Germans, who were only admitted to the country by special permit. Above all, von Kahr and his Ministry endeavoured to maintain the armed volunteer force, the Einwohnerwehr. But the Reichstag in Berlin had passed a law for disarmament of this force, and the Government of the Reich insisted that Bavaria, like the rest of Germany, should comply in this respect with the Treaty of Versailles, the Spa decisions and the reiterated demands of the Allied Powers. Repeatedly it seemed as if the conflict between the Government of the Reich and that of Bavaria would end in open rupture. In the late summer of 1921, however, the Bavarian Government formally at any rate gave way, and it was understood that, by arrangement, the Einwohnerwehr was surrendering its arms and equipment. A fresh conflict arose over the measures which were taken by the President of the Reich, Ebert, on the advice of the Ministry of the Reich, as a sequel to the assassination of the Democratic Catholic Centre leader Erzberger (Aug. 26 1921). Orders were issued from Berlin for the suppression of several Bavarian newspapers which had been indulging in violent de- nunciation of Erzberger, the Republican constitution and the Government of the Reich. Von Kahr and his Ministry ques- tioned the right of the Reich to apply such measures to one of thi German federated states without previous arrangement, or least consultation, with the Government of that state. A serio complication was that the attitude of the Bavarian Governm was supported by the Prussian reactionaries, several of whom, like Ludendorff, had taken up their residence in Bavaria and were hoping to make it the centre of an anti-Republican or Ro; ist movement for the whole of Germany. The Government the Reich, under Dr. Wirth as Chancellor, manifested considi able firmness, and ultimately in Sept. 1921 von Kahr resign and was succeeded as Minister-President by the minister Darmstadt, Count Lerchenfeld, a man of experience and char ter, who commanded the confidence of the Catholic Volkspa, and of the Bavarian Liberals of all shades.
KALA-AZAR, or Black Fever (see 15.637*), a disease fi described in 1882 as a chronic form of malaria, or malacachexia, prevalent at the foot of the Garo Hills at the W. end the range separating the Brahmaputra or Assam valley on t N. from the Sylhet valley on the S. in India. From 1882 it spre; steadily up the Assam valley along the Grand Trunk Road to the of the Brahmaputra river. Travelling at a rate of about 10 a year in a wave of greatly increased mortality, leaving behind a few sporadic cases of the disease, it culminated in such a terrible outbreak in the Nowgong district during the first decade of the 2oth century that there was a decrease of 31.3% i n the popula- tion, against an increase of 8 to 16% in the more easterly un- affected districts, while much land fell out of cultivation. The epidemic carried off about one-third of the population over a narrow tract of country 250 m. in length in the course of 30 years, while various places on the N. bank of the Brahmaputra river were also affected to a lesser extent.
In 1889 an investigation of the epidemic was carried out by a selected medical officer, who found hook-worm ova in the evac tions of many of the cases, and reported the disease to be ank lostomiasis a theory which was soon disproved by the discovery that a larger proportion of healthy coolies imported into Assam after two medical inspections harboured these worms than kala-azar patients. In 1896 Sir Leonard Rogers investigated disease for the Government and wrote the first full descripti of it, but found no means of distinguishing it from what h; always been known as malarial cachexia, which had long be< sporadic in the Sylhet valley, except that it was more severe wit' a shorter duration and higher mortality. He concluded that it was an epidemic malaria, an opinion which was endorsed by the high authority of Sir Ronald Ross after a personal investigation in Assam in 1899. Rogers also obtained strong evidence of the disease being communicable, the infection being a very local or house one, and made recommendations based on this discove: for dealing with the disease in infected tea-gardens and to ch its further extension up the Brahmaputra valley, a natural ol struction to which existed in the shape of the sparsely populate Mikir Hills to the E. of the Nowgong district. These measu: resulted within the next few years in the disease being stam out of a number of tea estates and the cessation to a great extent of the further spread of the epidemic, for over 10 years later distribution of the disease in Assam was still the same, altho a limited fresh outbreak appeared in the more easterly Sibsa district a little later.
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