The British forces, in trying to re-assert their control over the country, often resorted to arbitrary reprisals against republican activists and the civilian population. An unofficial government policy of reprisals began in September 1919 in Fermoy, County Cork, when 200 British soldiers looted and burned the main businesses of the town, after one of their number – a soldier of the King's Shropshire Light Infantry who was the first British Army death in the campaign – had been killed in an armed raid by the local IRA on a church parade the day before (7 September).
At a DAP meeting on 12 September 1919, Party Chairman Anton Drexler was impressed with Hitler's oratorical skills. He gave him a copy of his pamphlet (My Political Awakening), which contained anti-Semitic, nationalist, anti-capitalist, and anti-Marxist ideas.
People continued buying stock regardless and by September 1919, the Black Star Line company had accumulated $50,000 by selling stock. It could thus afford a thirty-year old tramp ship, the SS Yarmouth. The ship was formally launched in a ceremony on the Hudson River on 31 October.
The Omaha race riot occurred in Omaha, Nebraska, September 28–29, 1919. The race riot resulted in the lynching of Will Brown, a black civilian; the death of two white rioters; the injuries of many Omaha Police Department officers and civilians, including the attempted hanging of Mayor Edward Parsons Smith; and a public rampage by thousands of white rioters who set fire to the Douglas County Courthouse in downtown Omaha.
On September 30, a massacre broke out against blacks in Elaine, Phillips County, Arkansas, being distinct for having occurred in the rural South rather than a city. The Elaine massacre or the Elaine race riot occurred on September 30–October 1, 1919, at Hoop Spur in the vicinity of Elaine in rural Phillips County, Arkansas. Although official records of the time state that eleven black men and five white men were killed, estimates of the actual number of black people who were killed range from 100 to 237. The white mobs were aided by federal troops (requested by Arkansas governor Charles Brough) and vigilante militias like the Ku Klux Klan.