Tuesday, July 08, 2025

Today -100: July 8, 1925: A duel to the death


William Jennings Bryan arrives in Dayton, Tennessee. He says “The contest between evolution and Christianity is a duel to the death. ... the two cannot stand together.”

The Washington D.C. commissioner of public buildings and parks, who issued the permit for the big Ku Klux Klan parade next month, refuses one for an anti-Klan meeting because it would be “political.”

The English Lord Chamberlain bans Ernest Vajda’s play “The Harem,” which recently finished a 183-performance run on Broadway, because “the plot is objectionable, the dialogue nasty, and the whole atmosphere salacious.” Sounds cool.

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Monday, July 07, 2025

Today -100: July 7, 1925: Of rum-runners, home rule, skyscrapers, and excessive laws


Pres. Coolidge, annoyed at watching rum-running ships visible from his “Summer White House” in Swampscott, Massachusetts, orders the Coast Guard to put a stop to it. The rum-runners’ cache was stored in the very next cottage. The Swampscott police chief was recently arrested under the Volstead Act.

The appellate division of the NY Supreme Court rules that the change in the state Constitution granting home rule to NYC was not legally adopted, the 1920 and 1922 Legislatures having passed different versions of the constitutional amendment. So a bunch of laws passed under home rule are null and void, including pay raises, the city running buses and setting routes, police licensing of taxi cabs, etc.

House of Representatives Chaplain James Montgomery says there are too many laws, which just confuses the average citizen. What we really need in terms of laws is the suppression of seditious publications, heathen churches, and undesirable immigration.

The Tribune Tower opens in Chicago. I do love a skyscraper with buttresses.

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Sunday, July 06, 2025

Today -100: July 6, 1925: Princey goes bang bang


In Rhodesia, Edward, Prince of Wales shoots the largest blue wildebeest ever shot there, because he’s a dick.

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Saturday, July 05, 2025

Today -100: July 5, 1925: Of birthday harmonicae


Pres. Coolidge is visited in his “Summer White House” in Swampscott, Massachusetts by a local boy on his 13th birthday and Coolidge’s 53rd (yes, the 4th of July, the only president born on that date, if you’re looking for a bit of trivia with which to delight your friends and confound your enemies). He is turned away, but his note and a gift of chocolates are sent in and Cal sends a car to bring him back to White Court, where they give him some of the president’s birthday cake (made by the former pastry chef of King Albert) and a harmonica.

At a Garibaldi fête in NYC, anti-Fascist red shirts and Fascist black shirts have a little brawl after the Fascisti attack an actual 82-year-old veteran of the Garibaldi movement as he walks to the offices of the radical newspaper Martello on East Fourteen Street, which takes him past Fascist hq; the two buildings are so close to each other I’m surprised this sort of thing didn’t happen all the time.

July the Fourth was Defense Day. 8 million Americans either take part in a little parade or enroll themselves for military service in the event of a national emergency. Gen. Pershing and VP Dawes have a phone conversation which is broadcast over the radio.  One person not so ready for a national emergency: Secretary of War John Weeks, who hasn’t exactly announced that he’s resigning due to ill health, but has sold his D.C. home.

Some interesting info about the film biz in the Daily Mail (London) from an English owner of 24 cinemas in France, who says that after trying to fill up a weekly program of 90 minutes (the normal length in Britain is 150 minutes), he runs out of French films, few of which are made because the French market is so small (1,500 cinemas, 1/10th the number of the US) and French films just don’t sell in the US, which doesn’t like them any more than the French like American films, but since he needs to fill that 90 minutes the French audiences can watch American films and lump it (British audiences, on the other hand, love American films).

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Friday, July 04, 2025

Today -100: July 4, 1925: Of eccentric music and safety first


John Scopes’s lawyers, or at least Clarence Darrow, plan to get his trial transferred to federal court in Chattanooga or Knoxville, considering that the circus atmosphere in Dayton would be a problem and that the constitutionality of the anti-evolution law needs to be adjudicated pronto, before other states pass their own versions.

The Dayton school superintendent has evidently asked the evangelist Billy Sunday to assist the prosecution. AP reached Sunday’s wife, who says he won’t do it.

A man dies of blood poisoning in Niagara Falls after a “Safety First” sign falls on him.

Headline of the Day -100:


59.

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Thursday, July 03, 2025

Today -100: July 3, 1925: But what about gorilla gods?


Black groups protest to Pres. Coolidge over the march in D.C. the Ku Klux Klan plans for August 8th, suggesting it might lead to a race riot. Catholic and Jewish groups also object.

Alfred W. McCann, author of the error-filled anti-evolution book God — or Gorilla? (1922), declines William Jennings Bryan’s invitation to testify at the Scopes trial  because he believes in free speech.

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Wednesday, July 02, 2025

Today -100: July 2, 1925: Of Scopeses, charters, red archduchesses, and deposed archbishops


Lela Scopes, 28, sister of John Scopes is fired/not hired as a teacher in Paducah, Kentucky (she’d taken some time off to take college classes) after refuses a demand to denounce evolution, in case it affects her teaching of math, I guess. She’ll be offered a job in Winnetka, where she’ll teach for 30 years.

The Kansas Charter Board denies the Ku Klux Klan a charter, saying it lied in its application when it said the Klan does benevolent and charitable work.

Former archduchess Elisabeth Marie of Austria, granddaughter of penultimate Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph and daughter of Crown Prince Rudolf of Mayerling suicide pact fame (when she was 5), is “engaged” (the headline says “wed”) to Social Democratic deputy Leopold Petznek, despite still being married to, though legally separated from former Prince Otto Windischgrätz, whose actress mistress Elisabeth shot to death back in the day because the Habsburgs were just like that. Otto didn’t even want to marry her, but she got the hots for him and had Granddad-Emperor order him to drop the countess he was engaged to and marry Erzsi instead, which he did in 1902. She won’t actually be able to divorce Otto and marry Petznek, who will spend some time in Dachau, until 1948. Honestly, there’s so many more salacious details that I don’t have room for. It shocks me that there’s never been a biopic and the only biography of her hasn’t been translated into English.

NYPD cops (from the Bomb Squad for some reason) force entry into Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St. Nicholas after the NY Supreme Court deposes the archbishop, Platon Rozhdestvensky, in favor of Archbishop Adam Phillipovsky, which wasn’t a power I knew the New York courts had.

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Tuesday, July 01, 2025

Today -100: July 1, 1925: Of widow-reps, replenished Jessicas, German aviation, and foreign anti-Semitism


Edith Nourse Rogers, widow of Rep. John Jacob Rogers (R-Mass.), who died in March, wins a special election to replace him, beating former governor Eugene Foss, who ran as a “Coolidge Democrat,” whatever that might mean. She wins 70% of the votes. She’s the 6th woman elected to Congress, the first from New England, and she’ll remain in office until her death in 1960 at 79.

2 employees of publishing company Boni & Liveright are indicted for publishing Replenishing Jessica, by bohemian Greenwich Village author Maxwell Bodenheim, who later wrote Naked on Roller Skates (1930). Evidently the book is “salacious.” We’ll see if anything comes of this, but I’m kind of intrigued by the book’s title.

The Council of Ambassadors impose new restrictions on German aviation. They allow themselves to ban any German aircraft that might possibly be converted for military use, restrict the size of zeppelins, and bar Germans from international airplane races. They are also demanding a list of all planes, motors, spare parts, and pilots in training. Germans correctly think this is all aimed at restricting competition from German commercial planes, which is not a legitimate part of the Versailles Treaty.

The Bulgarian minister of war orders garrison commanders to crush anti-Semitism, which he says is foreign to Bulgaria.

It is not.

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Monday, June 30, 2025

Today -100: June 30, 1925: Earthquake


6.something magnitude earthquakes destroy much of Santa Barbara, killing 13.

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