Today -100: March 3, 1925: I still believe in natural beauty

Headline of the Day -100:

Plastic surgeon J. Paul Fernel tells the convention of the American Master Hairdressers’ Association, “There is no longer any excuse for not being beautiful. ... There will be no excuse for a crooked nose or a weak chin. The girl will be turned over to the plastic surgeon and all will be well.” He says Flo Ziegfeld and other impresarios will soon have “beauty choruses made to order.” (Update: Ziegfeld will respond that he can find plenty of pretty girls without anyone resorting to plastic surgery: “I still believe in natural beauty.”)

The Japanese Diet passes a bill for universal manhood suffrage, repealing the minimum-tax-paying qualification and increasing the electorate from 3 million to 19 million, excluding the homeless, “paupers,” and former prisoners. Oh, and it’s only men over 30. (I think the final bill will be far less generous).

The South Dakota Legislature rejects women jurors.

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Today -100: March 2, 1925: America snapped it up

A federal dry agent, Orville Preuster, is blown up in his car in Niagara Falls. His friend Elmer Whitaker, who was cranking the car, is blown 40 feet away, injured, perhaps mortally. Bootleggers are suspected, but no one will ever be caught. As is often the case, the level of graphic detail in these stories is jarring: “Part of Preuster’s head was blown off and both legs were torn from the body.”

As part of his obsessive economy drive, Coolidge replaced paper cups at White House coolers with common drinking glasses, you know, one glass used by everyone. Rep. Allard Gasque (D-SC) asks if that doesn’t violate DC sanitary laws and, also, ick. Further, they’ve reduced the number of towels in the bathrooms, which might mean they aren’t being “sterilized” between users, which is also illegal.

Two Turkish women are running for the National Assembly, attempting to bring publicity to the cause of women’s suffrage (women will get the local vote in 1930, the national suffrage in 1934).

Cars in Rome will henceforth drive on the right side instead of the left. I think that’s just Rome.

French Guinea (West Africa) executes 6 medicine men (including one woman) convicted of cannibalism. They were all old, the woman saying she had hoped it would restore her youth but it didn’t so she was happy to be executed.

English inventor slash con man H. Grindell Matthews says he has sold his Diabolical Ray™ – no, wait, I guess he’s finally calling it a Death Ray. He says he gave England first chance to buy it but now “America snapped it up.” He’s no more specific than “America.” I guess this settles the fight in the Navy and Congress over whether planes or warships are the future of warfare, since Matthews claimed his ray can destroy both.

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Today -100: March 1, 1925: Of eberts, earthquakes, and Harlem

German President Friedrich Ebert dies of peritonitis several days after an appendectomy. He was 54 and is survived by wife Louise Rump (!) and some kids, including Freddie Jr., who will be mayor of East Berlin for nearly 20 years.

An earthquake is felt in New York City and a bunch of eastern states. We don’t know what it is on the Richter scale because Charlie Richter hasn’t invented it yet, and we don’t know where the epicenter was because the recording pin fell off the seismograph at Fordham. New York cops advise people to stay in their homes to prevent opportunistic burglaries.

Headline of the Day -100: 

The NYT finally notices the Harlem Renaissance (as it was not yet called), although it mostly focuses on jazz. It also points out (warns?) that some among the “swarthy races” practice a thing called “passing.”

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Today -100: February 28, 1925: Of American branches of dictatorships, speakers, and beer halls

Count Mihály Károlyi, who was president of Hungary for 4 months in 1918-19 and then fled into exile, is currently in the US. When he came last year when his wife Katalin contracted typhoid fever while in New York, the State Department imposed a condition on his visa that he not talk about Hungarian politics while in the country. Now they’re allowing him to respond at a lunch in his honor (organized by the ACLU) to attacks made on him in Hungarian newspapers about money he raised in 1914 for Hungarian separatism. His lawyers say that’s not enough. The ACLU says the US is “muzzling a foreign visitor on behalf of a foreign Government... [acting] as the American branch of the Hungarian dictatorship.”

House Republicans elect as speaker of the House Nicholas Longworth, who is married to Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter Alice.

Adolf Hitler loses a libel suit he launched against another right-winger, Otto Pittinger, for saying the Nazi movement was financed by French money. 

Odd that the NYT has that story but doesn’t mention that Hitler relaunched the no-longer-banned Nazi party yesterday. In a beer hall. Yes, that beer hall. He gives his first public speech since he was released from prison, two hours long, to a crowd of 3,000.

Joshua E. Russell, the federal prohibition director for Ohio, and 9 others, including Youngstown and Columbus politicians, are indicted for illegally withdrawing whisky from a distillery.

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Today -100: February 27, 1925: We are better off in the Philippines than a lot of people think

The House Aircraft Committee hearings continue. Rear Adm. Hilary Jones of the Navy General Board denies the claim of Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell of the Army Air Service that the Philippines could be taken in two weeks. He won’t say how long it might take but says it would require more than air power alone; “We are better off in the Philippines than a lot of people think.” The Committee also questions retired Lt. Clifford Tinker about an article he wrote blaming Congress for failing to supply helium to the dirigible Roma, which crashed in 1922 with 34 dead, but then strike his testimony from the record.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa is leaning more than it used to.

The Democratic Indiana state senators who fled the state have won: the gerrymander bill has been withdrawn. They won’t even be arrested when they return.

Charles Ponzi is convicted, again, in Boston.

A black man, Joe Airy, is lynched when he draws his gun after being surrounded by a posse after killing a Louisiana highway officer.

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Today -100: February 26, 1925: Of gerrymanders and charters

As Republicans in the Indiana State Senate attempt a gerrymander of Congressional seats, 14 Democrats flee for Dayton, Ohio to prevent a quorum being present (4 more remain in Indiana, but in hiding, I guess). The doorkeeper is to be sent to try to arrest them; he’s enlisting the Marion County Horse Thief Detective Association to find them. Indiana Republicans say the D’s can be indicted and extradited; Ohio officials say there’s no law allowing for such an extradition or for the Indiana sgt-at-arms of the General Assembly to arrest anyone in Ohio.

The Kansas State Senate votes to allow the Ku Klux Klan to operate in the state without a charter.

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Today -100: February 25, 1925: Of Desire Under the Fleurs du Mal, or something

New York City will implement “play juries,” which will determine whether plays are dirty or not. There’s a jury pool of 130 persons, I forget how it was chosen, from which juries will be picked (in secret) by the police chief. They won’t have direct enforcement powers, but if they find a play unduly salacious, Actors Equity will pull its members from the production.  District Attorney Joab Banton is trying to extricate himself from the machinery of censorship, saying he’ll no longer make announcements about individual plays, like he did about Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms,” but if any press agent uses complaints for publicity, he might retaliate by bringing their plays before the Grand Jury. The producers of “Desire” are happy that the play jury might actually see the play before making a decision on it, unlike Banton, who didn’t even bother to read it (he says he based his decision on reports from “seasoned playgoers” and others).

As NY book publishers are developing their own self-censorship program, in France the Baudelaire Society demands the retraction of the 1857 censorship of his “Fleurs du Mal.” The cops recently seized a first edition which was to be sold by auction on the grounds that it should have been destroyed 68 years ago.

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Today -100: February 24, 1925: Of reparations and over-excited actors

Con men in the occupied Rhine have been going around convincing businessmen that they work for the Allied occupation authorities and collecting “reparations.”

Headline of the Day -100:

85-year-old Fanny Weintraub, recruited from a Jewish old age home for “Salome of the Tenements.” A lost film.

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Today -100: February 23, 1925: Oh, cross/crossing, I just got that

The Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold celebrates its one-year anniversary in Magdeburg. I don’t really understand this group – largely veterans, organized along military lines to defend the Weimar Republic, but unarmed. They claim 3 million members.  Anyway, there are lots of Austrians present, and a bunch of boundary posts are burned.

The Ku Klux Klan re-enact Washington’s crossing the Delaware, in full regalia (robes, anyway, doesn’t say if they had hoods), with a red electric cross.

The ban on oysters in Chicago, spurred by that lethal typhoid outbreak, has been lifted and Chicagohoovians will no longer have to resort to oyster bootleggers, and I don’t know if that’s a real thing or a joke because, you know, Chicago.

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