On November 19, 1918, the day after the proclamation of the Republic of Latvia, the People's Council, a provisional parliament formed by representatives of the various political forces, held its first meeting. The main item on the agenda was the approval of the composition of the provisional government, the formation of which had been entrusted to the agronomist and publicist Kārlis Ulmanis the previous day.
During the war, Ulmanis had been active in refugee supply organizations, but after the February Revolution of 1917 in Russia he threw himself into political activities, demonstrating energy, organizational skills and political foresight. The Latvian Farmers' Union, which he led, had become the most prominent civic party within a few months and had largely pushed for the establishment of the Latvian National Council, which, working in Russia under Bolshevik rule, had declared the establishment of an independent Republic as its goal since the beginning of 1918.
In the cabinet proposed by Ulmanis, there were several other important names alongside him. The candidate for the post of Foreign Minister was Zigfrīds Anna Meierovics, head of the Foreign Affairs Department of the Latvian National Council, who had been in London for several months and had just a week earlier sent the unexpectedly good news that His Majesty's Government recognized Latvia as a "de facto" sovereign territory.
Another prominent member of the cabinet was Mikķlis Valters, a doctor of state sciences, an activist and socialist revolutionary. It was he who fifteen years prior was the first to express the idea of a free Latvia. Now he was entrusted with the post of Minister of the Interior. Other members of the government were engineers, lawyers, and agronomists. There were still very few professional politicians in Latvia at that time.
The question of how to communicate the text of the Declaration of Independence to all citizens of the future state was discussed. In Vidzeme and Rīga, the newspaper "Jaunākās Ziņas" devoted half of its 12 pages to the declaration of independence that day.
Kurzeme and Latgale had to print the text of the November 18 declaration specially, and in Latgale a different typeface was used - the Latin letters that are now so familiar to us, while in the rest of Latvia, everything was still printed in Gothic letters.
There was also a proposal to adapt the text to the peculiarities of the speech of various peoples. In the end, the proposal of the only representative of Latgale so far, Stanislavs Kambala, was accepted - to print in Latin letters but in literary Latvian. Following Kambala's suggestion, it was also decided that the declaration should be translated and printed in Russian in order to reach the many Old Believers of Latgale, who were also full citizens of the future Latvia.
However, it was the internal affairs issues that had to receive the most attention at the meeting on November 19.
From various parts of the country came news that the German police were continuing to act as they had come - searching the homes and apartments of Latvian organizations, and allegedly temporarily detaining some representatives of the Latvian Revolutionary Socialist Party. They were looking above all for weapons and obviously did not want to allow the Latvians to be armed. Food and other materials were still being taken to Germany.
The extent to which the Provisional Government was able to influence the situation was shown by the fact that even the representatives of the People's Council had to ask the German plenipotentiary, August Winnig, for emergency railway tickets. There was also the news that a unit of Russian White Movement had turned up in Gulbene; nobody knew anything more, but even this signal showed that the newly created Latvian state was by no means the only claimant to this land. The first Latvian government faced the difficult and dangerous task of winning and consolidating genuine independence.
