Today -100: March 31, 1922: Let’s just throw the ship out and buy a new one

Headline of the Day -100:  

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Today -100: March 30, 1922: Of treaties, radio umbrellas, and annulments

The Senate ratifies the naval limitation treaty and the treaty limiting submarines and poison gas, the former by 74-1, the latter unanimously.

A French inventor, unnamed in the story, hopes to invent a parasol/radio receiver.

NY Gov. Nathan Miller signs a bill removing the absolute right of annulment for a marriage entered into by someone under 18. And another bill firing teachers who are not citizens unless they are taking steps to become citizens. 

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Today -100: March 29, 1922: I make it a policy in my administration never to interfere with the ladies

Pres. Harding plans to stay out of the 1922 congressional elections entirely.

Yup, the NYC ordinance against women smoking that the police started enforcing yesterday definitely does not exist. A clerk sent Police Commissioner Richard Enright a draft ordinance without noticing that the aldermen had voted it down. “It looked authentic,” Enright says, although it wasn’t actually signed by the mayor. Mayor Hylan says “I make it a policy in my administration never to interfere with the ladies – for they will do as they please anyway.” The ladies were pretty pissed by the supposed ordinance and increased their smoking in restaurants in response.

Northern Irish PM Sir James Craig responds to Michael Collins’ accusation that he was breaking the agreement that Catholics in Ulster not be fired or, you know, killed, by saying that it’s Collins breaking his word and the South is sending armed men to create unrest in the North. They both have a point.

The prosecution rests in the 3rd Fatty Arbuckle trial, which is getting waaaay less coverage in the NYT and elsewhere than the first two. There’s a surprise witness, a secretary at the sanitarium where Virginia Rappe died, who has come forward suspiciously late in the game to relate that right before dying Rappe gave a complete account to her, blaming Arbuckle.

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Today -100: March 28, 1922: In which it is revealed what menaces the morals of young girls

NYC Police Commissioner Richard Enright orders cops to crack down on restaurants, hotels or places of public entertainment which permit women to smoke, based on an ordinance passed 2 weeks ago and signed by Mayor Hylan. Which is a surprise to the aldermen who supposedly passed this ordinance, although Alderman Peter McGuinness insists it was passed. It was not in fact passed; the cops are enforcing a non-existent law. When he introduced the proposed ban, McGuinness said, “The morals of our young girls are menaced by this cigarette smoking. ... young fellows go into our restaurants to find women folks sucking cigarettes. What happens? The young fellows lose all respect for women and the next thing you know the young fellows, vampired by these smoking women, desert their homes, their wives and children, rob their employers and even commit murder so that they can get money to lavish on these smoking women. It’s all wrong and I say it’s got to stop.”

30,000 Fascists march in Milan to celebrate the 3rd anniversary of the founding of the Fascist Party. One Communist is killed in a clash, as was the custom.

An assassination attempt on former Russian foreign minister Pavel Milyukov in Berlin goes awry, the bullet instead killing former secretary of state Vladimir Nabokov, father of the novelist.

Several women are running for Congress this year, including Ellen Duance Davis, the great-great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin, and two sisters,  Irene Cleveland Buell, city prosecutor of Ashland, Nebraska, and Mrs. A.K. Gault, mayor of St. Peter, Minnesota. Their mother was a cousin of Grover Cleveland.

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Today -100: March 27, 1922: Human needs are overlooked

Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, blames the forthcoming coal strike on financiers who manipulated the profits of the industry, whose operators then demanded wage cuts based on the manipulated data. He says when purely financial interests control an industry, “human needs are overlooked in the race for a balance sheet showing.”

2/3 of the Fiume Constituent Assembly ousted by Fascist raiders are hiding out and holding sessions in Yugoslavia. Fiume is occupied by the Italian military, which bans anyone wearing uniforms except those of the Italian Army.

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Today -100: March 26, 1922: Let’s head to the river with a long straw

Although federal Prohibition Director Roy Haynes ordered agents not to make ostentatious displays of destroying seized liquor, the Chicago director orders 350,000 gallons of alcohol dumped into the Chicago River.

Parisian restaurants will no longer have orchestras, because the tax man classifies restaurants with music as places of amusement, subject to a 25% luxury tax and a new extra 13% public assistance tax.

The Post Office explains that there is no risk of catching typhus from mail sent from Russia.

Helicopter technology is really coming along. Pateras Pescara’s chopper rises 6 feet into the air.

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Today -100: March 25, 1922: Be vewwy, vewwy quiet, I’m hunting plesiosaurs

Headline of the Day -100:  

The director of the Buenos Aires Zoological Garden, who authorized the expedition, says “I am laughed at, but I am convinced that some large, strange animals exist in Patagonia.” 

The US Senate ratifies the Four-Power Treaty, 67-27.

Former federal Prohibition Director for Pennsylvania William McConnell and some of his associates are indicted for issuing fraudulent permits to withdraw liquor from bond to bootleggers – 700,000 gallons during his 70 days in charge last August to October.

The NYT op-ed page suggests it was not “a real kindness” for Rep. Ansorge to name a black man to take the Annapolis entrance exams, because he would not be welcomed by racist cadets. “Race prejudice in the United States is a mountain that reason and moral indignation cannot remove.” So why even try?

Ford Motors will establish a 40-hour week. Edsel Ford says men need more time with their families.

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Today -100: March 24, 1922: Of subs, bonuses, cadets, and death penalties

A British submarine collides with a destroyer in the Mediterranean during a training exercise and goes down, with all 24 crew lost.

The Bonus Bill passes the House, 333 to 70.

Emile Holley is named by Rep. Martin Ansorge (R-Harlem, NY) as a candidate for the entrance exams at Annapolis, the first black man since the 1870s if he succeeds (he will not).

The Northern Irish Parliament extends the death penalty to bomb-throwing, and the attorney general is thinking about also applying it to carrying firearms without a permit.

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Today -100: March 23, 1922: You can call it what you like

Oklahoma Gov. J. B. Robertson (D) is arrested for taking bribes to allow an insolvent bank, the Guaranty State Bank of Okmulgee, to continue operating, as are a bunch of officials of several bankrupt banks and the former state banking commissioner.

Anti-Treaty IRAers will hold a convention to renounce the authority of the Dáil Éireann and the government. Commandant Roderick “Rory” O’Connor, announcing this to the press, is asked if this means a military dictatorship. “You can call it what you like,” he says. “[T]he rank and file is always right. It is the leaders who have failed.” Pres. Arthur Griffin bans the convention, for all the good that will do.

Constable Charles Hamby will run for sheriff of Travis County, Texas (which includes Austin) on an anti-KKK platform against incumbent Sheriff W.D. Miller, a Kluxer.

Mayor George Oles of Youngstown, a wacky grocer who ran as a joke promising, among other things, to permit spooning in public parks, rescinds his order that the police salute him, because he spent so much time saluting back that he didn’t have time for anything else.

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Today -100: March 22, 1922: Of secret agreements, floggings, failed banks, dictated convictions, and Saxon laws

Harding is pissed at Congress for not doing his bidding after it voted to reduce the army and navy below the level he wants, specified troop levels for Hawaii and the Panama Canal Zone, which he considers his sole prerogative, and will be voting for the veterans’ bonus. But since he ran on reestablishing “normalcy” after the “dictatorship” of Woodrow Wilson, he can’t be seen telling Congress what to do, so he has to seethe quietly and, presumably, leak to the press that he’s seething quietly.

The White House and State Dept deny that there is a secret US-UK anti-Japan agreement.

The Dallas KKK insists they weren’t the masked men who flogged a lumberman, and even offer a reward.

The Okmulgee County, Oklahoma grand jury indicts a bunch of people for bank failures, but their names have not yet been made public.....

South African PM Jan Smuts says the white miners’ strike was aimed at setting up a soviet republic.

50 congresscritters petition Harding for the release of prisoners convicted during the war under the Espionage Act only for expressions of opinion. More than 2/3 of the signers are Republicans.

The West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals reverses the death sentence on Harry Lattimar in Mingo County, as “the mob has dictated this conviction.” Lattimar, presumably a black man, was convicted of assault on an 8-year-old white girl.

The UMW calls for a strike at coal mines in the US and Canada next week.

In England, Mrs. Owen Peel is acquitted of betting fraud under a very old Saxon law which presumes that if a woman commits a crime in the presence of her husband she was under his power. The case stirs some outrage, and Lady Astor introduces a bill to repeal the law.

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Today -100: March 21, 1922: Of border troubles and occupations

The IRA makes incursions across the border they don’t acknowledge into Northern Ireland. There’s a lot of sniping, machine gun fire, etc. at the border.

Harding orders US occupation troops on the Rhine (currently 4,000 of them) home by July 1st. This coming right after the Allies failed to accede to the US demand for compensation to cover the cost of occupation is completely coincidental, says Secretary of War John Weeks.

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Today -100: March 20, 1922: Of inflation and KKKidnappings

The Reparation Commission will demand that Germany stop printing so much damned money. In exchange, this year’s reparation payments would be reduced.

The Toronto black community, as well as the police, are bodyguarding Matthew Bullock, the black man Canada refused to extradite to North Carolina, because of threats by the KKK to kidnap him.

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Today -100: March 19, 1922: Wading through blood

Gandhi is sentenced to 6 years for sedition.

Lord Peel, grandson of PM Robert Peel, is named the new Secretary of State for India. He knows jack shit about India, but he’s a viscount, so...

During the Irish election campaign, Éamon de Valera keeps speaking about the possibility of civil war, saying fighters for full independence may need to “wade through the blood of soldiers of the Irish Government, and perhaps through that of some members of the Irish Government, to meet their freedom.”

Colorado rejects the state KKK’s request for incorporation. The secretary of state says its stated purposes are too vague.

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Today -100: March 18, 1922: There is no sex in the quality of virtue

The Virginia Legislature passes a measure for film censorship. Thomas Dixon, author of The Clansman, speaks against the bill. Interestingly, the board of censors can ban obscenity, vulgarity, and elements likely to incite crime, but not sacrilege. 

A couple of days after the British arrested Kenyan nationalist Harry Thuku for sedition, protesters surround the Nairobi police station demanding his release. Police and white settlers fire into the crowd, killing 25 or more. After reading the Riot Act, of course, because there’s a right way to slaughter natives and a wrong way.

The article goes on to give a primer on Kenya, “land of great possibilities.” It notes that the natives are annoyed about agricultural wage cuts. See, the white settlers “depend entirely upon black labor for the cultivation of their estates, but the black man does not take kindly to work, so that problem is how to make him work.” The answer: forced labor, slavery if you will. 

Italy will send troops to occupy Fiume in order to establish a proper government there after the coup and certainly not to annex it, perish the thought.

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This is Frederick MacMonnies’s statue/fountain Civic Virtue, discussed here 2 days ago. The sculptor, who plans not to attend the “art inquisition,” says the sculpture’s just a fucking allegory; “There is no sex in the quality of virtue,” which he just happened to portray as a guy with his dick out standing over some women with snake tails.

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Today -100: March 17, 1922: Of kings, strikes, and male citizens

The German Reichstag removes illegitimate motherhood as grounds for dismissal from government work.

Egyptian Sultan Ahmed Fuad Pasa celebrates Egyptian (semi-)independence by changing his title to king, which to my ears sounds like a demotion but evidently not to his.

The New Jersey Legislature overrides Gov. Edward Edwards’s veto of the prohibition bill. However the attempt to override of another of  the bills sponsored by the Anti-Saloon League and vetoed by Edwards, banning curtains on the windows of pool halls and other places where beverages are served, fails by a single vote.

The South African Industrial Federation calls off the miners’ strike. The government has been claiming the whole thing is a Bolshevik plot, which it is not. The government now has 6,000 prisoners.

The Iowa attorney general stops Bessie Farnsworth running for the lower house of the state legislature because the state constitution says only “male citizens” are eligible. So she may run for the state senate, for which there are different qualifications.

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Today -100: March 16, 1922: Order shall reign

Éamon de Valera forms the Republican Association (Cumann na Poblachta), which will seek international recognition of the Irish Republic and which repudiates the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

Last month the New Jersey Supreme Court invalidated the state’s dry laws. Gov. Edward “Edward” Edwards, who ran as a wet, vetoes the Legislature’s attempt to replace those laws with more constitutional ones copied from the federal Volstead Act and this time including jury trials. Edwards says enforcement should be left to the federal government. 

Italian Prime Minister Luigi Facta tells Parliament that his government will restore order, acting impartially between the factions. “Order shall reign,” he predicts. It will, but not in the way he thinks.

South African troops occupy Fordsburg, near Johannesburg. Leaflets were dropped warning women and children to leave before the bombardment began.

An anti-Ku Klux Klan organization is formed in Oklahoma, called the Knights of the Visible Empire.

Isaiah Moore, indicted in Indianapolis for 12 counts of bigamy (he was arrested right before he was due to get married again and immediately started confessing, although he can’t remember the last names of all of the women he married), as well as grand larceny and embezzlement, says he’d like to become an evangelist when he gets out of prison. Of course he does.

There are protests over Frederick MacMonnies’s statue/fountain Civic Virtue, soon to be installed in front of NY City Hall in Manhattan.

The nekked dude is Civic Virtue, standing on two female figures with snake tails representing Vice and Corruption, which some criticize as sexist, like Mary Garrett Hay of the League of Women Voters, who says that in this age, woman should be placed not below man, but side by side with him in any representation of civic virtue. Such attacks and protests continued over the decades, including by (ahem) Anthony Weiner. Mayor LaGuardia hated the statue, which he called Fat Boy, and seized on the opening of Queens Borough Hall in 1941 to send it over as a gift. In 2012, after Queens let the marble deteriorate for 70 years, it was sent to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

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Today -100: March 15, 1922: Of wine and factional fighting

It’s Wine Week in France. The message: if the US wants France to pay its war debts, it’ll have to allow imports of French wine, that’s just science.

What the NYT calls “factional fighting” resumes in various parts of Italy, although it sounds like it’s mostly Fascists murdering Socialists.

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Today -100: March 14, 1922: They regard the discovery of the bones of a five-toed horse as a greater event than the birth of the Christ

German newspapers report on the marital infidelities of Princess Eitel, aka Sophia Charlotte, the wife of former kaiser Wilhelm’s second son Prince Eitel Friedrich of Prussia, after she admits them in court in a divorce case (Prince Eitel is denying this, and the transcript is not public record, so he thinks he can get away with lying) (in a few years he will cite her many infidelities when divorcing her) (he started fucking around before she did, by the way).

The KKK sends a note to Colorado Gov. Shoup’s negro messenger, George Gross, ordering him to leave Denver. Gross is president of the local NAACP, which protested the local Klan’s application for incorporation.

Willliam Jennings Bryan replies in the NYT letter pages to a couple of professors who criticized his views on evolution as ignorant. “[I]t is evident that they regard the discovery of the bones of a five-toed horse as a greater event than the birth of the Christ.”

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Today -100: March 13, 1922: Of sedition, revolutions, smallpox, and vowels

Gandhi on trial. The “sedition” turns out to be some articles he wrote that caused disaffection against the colonial government. He (and some banker on trial with him) say they won’t put on a defense but will plead guilty.

South African planes bomb strikers/“revolutionists” on the Rand. Clashes all over Jo’burg. Many strikers captured. Someone shoots at PM Jan Smuts but only hits his car.

There’s a revolution in Albania.

The Connecticut State Health Department threatens to quarantine Bethel unless every Bethelhoovian gets vaccinated for smallpox after an outbreak there. There is some vaccine resistance, and some are questioning whether there even are any cases of smallpox.

The faculty of Sofia University declares a strike against the Bulgarian government’s plan to eliminate a letter from the alphabet.

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Today -100: March 12, 1922: Of air strikes, telephones, coarse lies, limerick truces, and moral disarmaments

The striking white miners in South Africa are now occupying Johannesburg suburbs. A government plane bombs the Benoni Trades Hall, killing many strikers. An airplane, possibly even that one, is reported shot down and its pilot killed. Shootings between strikers and police are widespread, with the police seeming to get the worst of it, for now. 

New York City, which is expected to have 1 million telephones soon, is replacing the “Sweetheart, get me Klondike 555” system with one where users dial – “punch” is the word the article uses – their own desired numbers, although “telephone girls” will still make the actual connections. The automatic system is expected to take 10 years to phase in.

The secretary of Prince Eitel Friedrich, second son of former kaiser Wilhelm, denies to reporters that Princess Sophia Charlotte admitted adultery in the divorce case of Baron and Baroness Plettenberg. A “coarse lie,” the prince has authorized him to call the factually correct charge. The prince is also threatening libel suits against the NYT and any foreign newspapers publishing the story (German papers have been obediently silent, as they are in all divorce cases).

An agreement is reached in Limerick. Both Free State & Republican IRA forces will evacuate the city. Some of them are traveling out on the same trains, but in separate compartments.

Blacks in Harlem, who largely voted Democratic in last November’s mayoral election, much to the Republicans’ shock, are demanding greater representation on the Republican county committee. 

German Defense Minister Otto Gessler denies accusations in, I’m assuming, French newspapers, that Germany is secretly training secret soldiers not in the regular army. Responding to complaints that Germany disarmed militarily but not morally, he says it is impossible to disarm morally because of the Entente’s unfair attitude toward Germany.

Czech Pres. Tomáš Masaryk amnesties the Communists and others from the December 1920 rising.

So what is this full-page ad on p.82 of the NYT actually advertising?

Weirdly enough, it’s D.W. Griffith’s film Orphans of the Storm, now playing at the Apollo Theatre on 42nd Street at popular prices.

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Today -100: March 11, 1922: Of sedition, wool kings (well, wool king – there can be but one), electric chairs, teapot foreshadowing, and putsches

Mohandas Gandhi is arrested and charged with sedition. Sounds like Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu, before he was removed from office this week, had been holding off taking this step, which British newspapers have been baying for.

Sen. Robert “The Wool King” Stanfield (R-Oregon), who claims to be “America’s largest producer of wool and mutton,” presumably not from his own person, is accused by his creditors of defrauding them (he’s been badly hit by the drop in wool prices). Stanfield has been threatening to sue the Idaho agriculture commissioner for criminal libel for saying that the senator’s companies failed to pay for hay at the same time he somehow had money to buy hundreds of thousands of sheep dirt cheap. (Yes yes, pay for hay, sheep cheap, I see it too).

A black man, James Wells, is executed in Little Rock in the electric chair. The inexperienced electrician takes twelve (12!) shocks to kill him.

From the NYT’s news-in-very-brief section: “The National Popular Government League’s session yesterday was devoted to attacking Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall, who was charged with championing the Doheny oil interests. There were hints of a Congressional investigation.”

The US asks the conference of wartime Allied nations’ finance ministers currently divvying up German reparations for some of that money for the cost of the American Army of Occupation. The Allies just laugh. You negotiated a separate treaty with Germany, so don’t come to us to collect your money for you under the Versailles Treaty you refused to ratify, they snigger.

The German Supreme Court of Leipzig rejects Wolfgang Kapp’s offer to surrender for trial for high treason for the Kapp Putsch.

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Today -100: March 10, 1922: Of the unity of imperial foreign policy, rebellions, and ratifications

Because British Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu allowed the publication of that call by the Government of India for revision of the Treaty of Sèvres, he has been forced out. Something about collective cabinet responsibility. He says he never considered suppressing the Indians’ views or preventing them informing the Indian people of the views the government puts forward in their name. Lloyd George, on the other hand, insists that the unity of the Empire’s foreign policy can only be maintained by the various colonies shutting the fuck up.

The South African government is mobilizing the armed forces, including planes with machine guns, to put down the white miners’ strike, which at some point they’ll call the Rand Rebellion. The strikers’ executive has told strikers to stop shooting at black people.

The New Jersey Legislature ratifies the already-ratified 18th Amendment. I’m not sure why this is a big deal.

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Today -100: March 9, 1922: Their natural tendency toward violence has been skillfully utilized by Gandhi

In an unusual move, the Government of India calls on the Secretary of State for India to revise the unratified Treaty of Sèvres to accommodate Turkey more. The Muslims of India are supposedly super worked up about this. Lord Sydenham, who was governor of Bombay until 1913, explains that Indian Muslims are “wholly uneducated, intensely fanatical and wholly ignorant... Their natural tendency toward violence has been skillfully utilized by Gandhi,” who recruits them by claiming that British troops have attacked the holy places in Arabia (the Baron will later express similarly complimentary views about the Jews).

Pres. Harding turns down the invitation for the US to participate in the Genoa Economic and Financial Conference. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes says the US has decided it isn’t really an economic and financial conference but “rather a conference of a political character in which the Government of the United States could not helpfully participate.” 

Genoa should be a lovely site for the conference. It’s spring and the Fascist-Socialist gun fights are in bloom. Fascists burn a labor newspaper, and unions declare a general strike in protest (which they later call off).

The Irish Free State Bill passes the House of Commons.

St. Paul juries are evidently required to sleep on cots in the same room during deliberations, so a mixed-sex jury is causing some furore. At least one county is avoiding this problem by refusing to call up women jurors.

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Today -100: March 8, 1922: I trust everyone appreciates how I’m avoiding limerick jokes

Henry Ford closes down his car factory in Cork, Ireland after the town tries to force him to, among other things, hire a lot more people than he wanted to.

Nothing much going on in Limerick, despite the presence of three military forces there (regular IRA, “rebel” anti-Treaty IRA, British military). The rebel IRAers are patrolling the streets, though, as the Morning Post says, “the purpose of the patrols is not altogether clear.” Meanwhile, sectarian clashes kill five in Belfast, as was the custom.

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Today -100: March 7, 1922: Crucified to Italy’s flag

The rebel IRA forces that moved into Limerick give an ultimatum for the Free State forces to surrender the Limerick police barracks. They’ve also seized 3 hotels for billeting, or possibly they’re playing life-size Monopoly.

Dr. Laura Black Stickney (R) and Lois McKiever (Ind) lose elections for mayor of Saco, Maine and Bath, Maine respectively. There has yet to be a woman mayor in New England.

Illinois Gov. Len Small gets a postponement of his corruption trial because the court accepted his argument that it is essential that he not be distracted from handing out spring road-building contracts. It’s not as long a postponement as he wanted, which would have had the trial starting after the primaries. Instead, it will begin on April 3rd, eight days before them.

Poet-Aviator Gabriele D’Annunzio writes messages of support to the Fascists who took over Fiume, but he seems to be staying away this time. He also sends some, for lack of a better word, poetry:

Wolfgang Kapp of Kapp Putsch (1920) fame, hiding in Sweden, offers to surrender for trial. The German government is not enthusiastic.

The movie Sherlock Holmes, with John Barrymore in the title role, premieres.

Rep. Fritz Lanham (D-Texas) complains that the Congressional Record reports him saying that no helium was lost from the sea serpent in any of its flights, when he actually said no helium was lost from the C-7 (a military blimp).

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Today -100: March 6, 1922: Should have stuck with strawberry

IRA units invade Limerick City. The IRA, or at least some of it, has declared that it doesn’t recognize the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State but supports “the existing Irish Republic.” The British Amy still hasn’t withdrawn from Limerick, so this could get interesting.

A duel between the current editor of Le Figaro and the former editor is called off, which is just spitting in the face of the long proud history of Le Fig editors fighting duels, when they’re not just being shot dead by wives of finance ministers.

10 are ill from ptomaine in ice cream cones.

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Today -100: March 5, 1922: If there is one trouble with this White House job, it is in being a human being

After speeches are made by Tory leaders, including Austen Chamberlain and Winston Churchill, backing Lloyd George’s continuation as prime minister, he withdraws his threat to resign, which would trigger snap elections. Churchill’s speech, in Loughborough, stressed the need for unity against the “growing peril of Communism.”

Colonial Secretary Churchill says that the British government is using two weapons to restore order in Ireland: British good faith and Irish responsibility. He said “British good faith” with a straight face, too.

At a party celebrating his first year in office, Pres. Warren G. Harding says the achievement of that year is “the long step toward getting back to normal ways of government,” possibly referring to massive corruption. He says he likes parties like this because “If there is one trouble with this White House job, it is in being a human being.”

Russia says it will pay all its debts, even those incurred by the czars.

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Today -100: March 4, 1922: Of Fascist coups, hangings, and nosferatus

Fiume President Riccardo Zanella surrenders after Italian Fascists fire cannons at the government palace.

A lot of Wall Street brokerage houses have collapsed in the last few days.

The House Appropriations Committee voted to cut the army to 115,000 men, but Harding doesn’t want it reduced below 130,000.

Matthew Bullock will not be extradited from Canada to North Carolina. A detail I’d missed: the state first tried to extradite him for “inciting to riot,” only later charging him for attempted murder. Bullock, a black man, was worried that if returned to NC he’d be lynched like his brother.

A black man, Terry Williams, is hanged in Virginia for an alleged rape. By the Virginia authorities I mean, not a baying mob, not that there’s a huge difference.

Illinois really does hang Harvey Church, in a coma (maybe) and tied to a chair. The coroner has a theory that Church was actually drugged into that state by someone who didn’t want him exposing his confederate in the murder of two car salesmen, but Church’s family refuse to allow an examination of the body.

F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu premieres in Germany, with Max Schreck.

Headline of the Day -100:  

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Today -100: March 3, 1922: Of peeresses, women’s suffrage and duels

The House of Lords Committee on Privileges rules in favor of allowing Viscountess Rhondda to enter the Lords. This would also allow in 23 other peeresses (or maybe fewer). Margaret, Lady Rhondda, a suffragette from waaaay back and a Lusitania survivor, sued under the 1919 Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act. At some point this decision will be reversed, and no ladies will darken the towels of the Lords until 1958, just a few weeks after Lady Rhondda’s death.

The Dáil Éireann rejects a proposal to extend the vote to women over 21 in the upcoming elections (presumably it would otherwise be restricted to women over 30, as in Britain). Arthur Griffin says he’s not against it in principle, but regards the proposal as a delaying tactic by anti-treaty republicans, since, he claims, it would take months to organize. He’ll support women voting on equal terms with men under the Free State.

Prince Marino Torlonia is not excommunicated after his duel with Count Filippo Lovatelli over a sculpture the latter made of the former’s wife (yeah, I’d like to know more about that too). Evidently the Catholic Church is supposed to excommunicate anyone who dueled. (Update: ok, he was excommunicated and then immediately re-communicated, if that’s the term, after he claimed Lovatelli had attacked him and he only fought in self-defense.)

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Today -100: March 2, 1922: Of resignations, hangings, and mosquitos

Lloyd George has been threatening to resign as prime minister, saying the Tory MPs in the coalition are going all Joe Manchin. Tory party leaders would prefer to avoid an election right now and are trying to persuade him to stay in office.

Convicted murderer Harvey Church, who hunger-struck himself into what Illinois is claiming is a state of being “mentally dead,” which is not how hunger-striking works (also, the prison was force-feeding him), will be hanged tied to a chair. “Only two other men have been hanged bound to chairs in Chicago,” says the NYT without providing details.

New Jersey is going to war against its mosquitos.

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Today -100: March 1, 1922: Of royal marriages, special relations, and accompaniments of discreditable character

No links, NYT website still fucked.

Princess Mary, aunt of Queen Elizabeth II, marries Viscount Lascelles.

Britain ends the protectorate over Egypt, declaring Egypt an independent sovereign nation except for all the powers Britain plans to retain in Egypt (or as Lloyd George calls it, the “special relations” between the two countries). Martial law will remain until the Egyptian government passes an indemnity law for British interests.

Pres. Harding, in person, presents Congress his plan to support US shipping, including subsidizing it with 10% of customs duties.

The International Anti-Cigarette League ask Will Hays to ban cigarette smoking by women in movies, except “as the accompaniment of discreditable character.”

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