Wednesday, June 03, 2020

Today -100: June 3, 1920: Of grammar, keeping abreast of the world, and prescriptions


Pres. Wilson vetoes a bill criminalizing the transporting across state lines of licentious movies because it has bad grammar (which turns out to be a clerk mistakenly putting the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the wrong place. The House corrects and re-passes it.

A Senate committee has been investigating campaign spending in the Republican primary, and some candidates, notably Illinois Gov. Frank Lowden, whose campaign paid delegates to the national convention large sums without any stipulation about how they were to spend it, are seeing their campaigns tank as their spending practices are revealed. Which upends the plans of the Republican Old Guard to use Lowden to undercut the Wood & Johnson campaigns.

Wall Street betting odds favor Johnson 6:5, with both Wood & Lowden at 3:1. On the Democratic side, William Gibbs McAdoo is favored 8:5, followed by Edward Edwards, the New Jersey governor so nice they named him twice.

At the NAACP conference in Atlanta, W.E.B. DuBois (whose first initial the NYT gives as N) calls for black people in the South to be given the vote “if the South wishes to be abreast of the world”. I can’t imagine where he’d get the idea that the South wants to be abreast of the world.  When the conference ends, delegates going north will be provided special Pullman cars in which Jim Crow rules will not be enforced.

Hubert Howard, federal Prohibition Director for Illinois, says that since prohibition went into effect, Chicago doctors have issued 300,000 spurious prescriptions for liquor (out of 500,000). Conditions evidently requiring alcoholic treatment include: fainting, insomnia, stomach ache, toothache, headache, runny nose, lumbago, menstrual cramps, bronchitis, ptomaine poisoning, gastritis, gaseous eructations, hay fever, asthma, grip, and of course, alcoholism. The usual prescription is for one ounce three times daily.


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