Today -100: July 31, 1923: The president is having a hard fight

Pres. Harding has pneumonia, as shown by an x-ray taken in his room at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. He responds to the x-ray people showing up, “Bring them in, I have nothing to conceal.” Fact Check: He has many things to conceal, but probably not in his chest cavity. He has breathing and heart problems and his doctors describe his condition as “grave.” But evidently he is “bearing his affliction with courage.”

The Salvation Army gifted a radio to Sing Sing for use on death row, but the authorities ban its use there.

A NYT reporter accosts ex-kaiser Wilhelm as he walks the streets of Doorn and asks about royalist plots to restore him to the German throne. He disclaims any knowledge of anything happening outside Holland.

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Today -100: July 30, 1923: Of ptomaine, lychings, and dictographs

Pres. Harding’s staff admit that his “ptomaine poisoning” is worse than they’d previously suggested. He’ll be cancelling all of his California events. It’s undecided whether he’ll return to D.C. via the Panama Canal as planned or take a less arduous route.

A black man is burned at the stake in a swamp in Mississippi.

A French court-martial sentences 3 former German police in Essen to death for espionage, to wit, placing a dictograph near a French officer’s villa.

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Today -100: July 29, 1923: Of ptomaine, pie fights, and jelly balls

Pres. Harding has “ptomaine poisoning,” which they’re blaming on bad crabs. Harding denies that; he thinks it was bad canned food but refuses to name the product for fear of doing it economic harm. He cancels a planned trip to Yosemite and all his scheduled appearances in Oregon and his train is now moving south towards San Francisco, where he will rest in his hotel for a couple of days. Or, you know, whatever.

Incidentally, the food poisoning mis-diagnosis gave credibility to the theory that the president was poisoned by Florence Harding. That and her refusal to allow an autopsy.

Charlie Chaplin and Pola Negri call off the “engagement” I refuse to believe was ever a thing. Negri says Chaplin is too temperamental.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Yet more proof that silent movies were documentaries. 

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Astronomer Willem de Sitter, inventor of Sitter Space.

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Today -100: July 28, 1923: Of territories and opium

Pres. Harding is in Seattle after his ship rams a destroyer in Puget Sound in a heavy fog. His trip through Alaska has impelled him towards a more conservationist position on the territory. He thinks part of the territory can be a state in a few years, but he doesn’t say what should happen to the rest of it (is this division based on “where da white folks at?” Of course it is).

The US is upset that the Lausanne Treaty did not include the Hague Opium Convention (there ain’t no convention like an opium convention), given that most of the US’s smuggled opium comes from Turkey via, of all places, Switzerland.

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Today -100: July 27, 1923: His Canadian girlfriend

Warren G. Harding is in Vancouver, the first sitting US president to visit Canada. And he’ll be dead soon. Coincidence?

Headline of the Day -100:  

More proof that silent movies were documentaries. 

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Today -100: July 26, 1923: Dr. Evil voice: 5 million marks

British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin does not agree with the French and Belgian position that the only reply to Germany should be a demand that all resistance in the Ruhr should end, with terms set by them after Germany surrenders. France is complaining that it has to maintain a big army but Germany is barely allowed any army, so its capacity to pay reparations is bigger than it claims. Something like that.

Germany is going to print a 5 million mark note. It presumably won’t show up in the Ruhr, where the French are grabbing any German cash they can find. 

The cashier at the Essen branch of the Reichsbank is fined 5 million marks, which he’ll be able to pay off with one of those notes, and given a 2-month sentence for giving the French the wrong key when they demanded access to the vaults, a key that instead of opening it activated some security thing, and the French can’t figure out how to break in.

Manuel Quezon, who resigned as president of the Philippine Senate, says the demand for the recall of Gov.-Gen. Leonard Wood is nothing personal (sure it is, he’s an autocratic jerk), and Harding should replace him with someone who could work in harmony with the Filipino people. An actual Filipino, for example.

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Today -100: July 25, 1923: Peace at last, peace at last

The Treaty of Lausanne is signed between Turkey and the Allies. The Great War is finally officially over, as is the Ottoman Empire. The Allies will remove their occupation troops from Constantinople; Britain will get Cyprus; the Allies’ merchant ships can go through the Turkish Straits; peace between Greece & Turkey with massive ethnic cleansing. The Allies (and the US) don’t get special treatment or outright exemption from the Turkish courts for their nationals.

Yugoslavia (which seems finally to be spelled that way rather than Jugoslavia) refuses to sign, because the Ottoman Empire’s reparations are to be paid by all the territories that are no longer in the Empire, including those Yugoslavia now holds, but it’s claiming it actually acquired them from the Balkan Wars.

The NYT says the real winners from the Lausanne Conference are the Swiss: “Six months of hotel bills for the diplomatic delegations of a dozen States is a bigger indemnity than Turks or Greeks vainly hoped for.”

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Literally. During Communist/Social Democrat riots in Frankfort against “usury and Fascism.” One placard: “No justice without blood.”

George Baker was hanged last year for murdering a deputy sheriff in Georgia. County officials plan to charge his father with criminal libel for inscribing on George’s tombstone that he was “unjustly” executed.

The French Cabinet decrees that the only political material broadcast on radio will be government announcements, ministerial speeches and such; opposition politicians are banned from the airways.

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Today -100: July 24, 1923: Of governors-general, duels, and pogroms

Both houses of the Philippines Legislature ask Pres. Harding to remove Governor-General Leonard Wood. Unanimously. 

Hungarian Prime Minister István Bethlen challenges Col. Pál Prónay, leader of a Freikorps-type group, to a duel. Duels are illegal in Hungary.

Pogrom in Vilna.

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Today -100: July 23, 1923: Of the perilous voyage of unprepared autonomy

Turkey’s Dept of Religious Affairs issues a decree allowing Muslims to get fillings in their teeth.

Five women are claiming to be Pancho Villa’s widow.

Pres. Harding leaves Alaska.

Éamon de Valera asks American Irish for $100,000 to fight the Irish elections.

The NYT editorializes that all those Filipino politicians who resigned over Governor-General Leonard Wood’s insistence on employing the corrupt Ray Conley as chief of the Secret Service were using it as a pretext: “This is not a conflict between Leonard Wood and the Filipino leaders, but between the American forces believing in a thorough preparation for eventual independence and the Filipino politicians who wish to embark by themselves upon the perilous voyage of unprepared autonomy.”

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Today -100: July 22, 1923: Of blacks & Republicans and movies & churches

A conference of black leaders from 18 states in Atlantic City calls for passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, enforcement of the 14th and 15th Amendments, and more or less threatens to withhold black votes from the Republican Party until it cleans up its act.

The Church of Saint Matthias in Budapest, where the kings of Hungary were traditionally crowned, has been deconsecrated and will be closed until it can be reconsecrated, because it was used to film a historical movie depicting one of those coronations. A bishop played an archbishop (they were going to put an actor in the archbish’s coronation robes, but they found a wafer blessed by the pope sewn into it, so they had to use someone holier than a mere actor).

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Today -100: July 21, 1923: Viva Pancho Villa, or not so much

Francisco “Pancho” Villa, who has been out of the public eye for the last 3 years, is assassinated, along with his secretary and 3 of his entourage. 7 men shoot up his car. Although most of them will be captured, and punished lightly or not at all, it remains unclear who gave the order – there are so many possibilities. People he crossed in the past, government leaders worried he might re-enter politics in the 1924 elections or lead another revolution, etc. The government will of course push the “feud” line. Villa had spent the 3 years of his retirement learning how to read and write.

The National Woman’s Party, in a convention held in Seneca Falls to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the 1848 convention there, chooses wording for an Equal Rights Amendment: “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.” They’re calling it the Lucretia Mott Amendment. 

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Today -100: July 20, 1923: Of the pleasure, the exhilaration, the happiness, and the gaiety of life, and bones

Nancy Astor’s bill banning liquor sales in pubs to those under 18 is being debated in the House of Lords. Lord Dawson of Penn, physician to King George (who he will later euthanize), sings the praises of alcohol, which “adds to the pleasure, the exhilaration, the happiness, and the gaiety of life,” although he thinks up to age 18 practically no alcohol is really needed.

One of St Martin’s bones is stolen. Fortunately, he’s dead and probably doesn’t need it (which bone is not specified).

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Today -100: July 19, 1923: Of wood and paying propositions

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Lord Alfred Douglas, “a former friend of Oscar Wilde,” has sued the Morning Post for libel after it celebrated the demise of Bosie’s Plain English, saying “It must no longer be a paying proposition... to invent vile insults against the Jews.” They note that the paper claimed that during the Great War, Churchill put out a false report about the Battle of Jutland as part of a scheme by a Jewish financier to manipulate the stock market, for which Churchill was paid off with a bunch of furniture. Churchill testifies that lawyers including the current lord chief justice advised him that suing Douglas & Plain English was unnecessary because they were too contemptible for any decent man to take notice of their libels. Ouch. Douglas also claims the Jews killed Lord Kitchener in 1916 to prolong the war. The jury is directed to bring in a verdict of technical libel and awards Douglas one (1) farthing and he has to pay his own lawyers. He’ll keep pushing the Jutland story and Churchill will come after him in a few months, sending him to jail.

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Today -100: July 18, 1923: Of crown princes

Former Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm sues the German government to get his estate in Silesia back. He says his son (17) wants to be a gentleman farmer.

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Today -100: July 17, 1923: Dr. Evil voice: 30 trillion marks

Magnus Johnson of the Farmer-Labor Party wins the special election to the US Senate from Minnesota. His son Francis will create the world’s biggest ball of twine.

Mussolini bans gambling.

Germany now has 30 trillion marks in circulation, which is the equivalent of, well, some amount of money that drops dramatically every single day.  The printing presses are running 24/7.

The Pasteur Institute claims to have created a vaccine against measles but I guess it really hasn’t.

In the British Parliament, the Independent Labour Party’s Philip Snowden introduces a motion calling for socialism. It loses 368-121.

There is a “cattle dipping war” going on in Amite County, Mississippi, with some stockmen in quarantined tick regions  resisting the mandatory but sometimes fatal process. Federal forces kill a man trying to dynamite a dipping vat.

The Philippine Cabinet resigns, along with the mayor of Manila and some prosecutors in a dispute with Governor-General Leonard Wood following his reinstatement of the chief of the Secret Service, Ray Conley, who has been accused over and over of taking bribes, I guess from gambling interests, but “cleared” each time.

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The title of the next Star Wars movie, probably.

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Today -100: July 16, 1923: Northern exposure

Warren G. Harding, in Fairbanks, Alaska, is farther north than any president has ever been, and he’ll be dead soon. Coincidence?

The French military orders everyone in Essen & other Ruhr cities to keep all their windows shut between 9pm and 6am, despite the 100-degree heat.

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Today -100: July 15, 1923: Of putsches, bedbugs, and hypnotic radio

Nazis in Munich celebrate Hermann Erhardt’s escape from prison with a riot and a fight with the police, as was the custom. “Wild rumors are current about the size and strength of the ‘Hitler-Ludendorff army,’ crediting it with being able to start a ‘putsch’ with 100,000 to 150,000 armed men.”

I mentioned the Department of Agriculture bounty of 1¢ per bedbug for experimentation. They wanted 1,200, but so far have received just one (1). Yes, someone in Philadelphia mailed them a single bedbug.

Another follow-up: that hypnotist succeeded in putting a subject in a trance over radio station WHN on Long Island, from 10 miles away.

I once heard an exorcism on the radio, driving through California’s Central Valley.

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Today -100: July 14, 1923: Of putsches, lotteries, lynchings, panamas, and wireless chloroform

Hermann Erhardt, the Freikorps leader in the Kapp Putsch, escapes from prison, where he was awaiting trial for treason. Four hours after he asks for a bath, the guards begin to get suspicious...

It’s taking Harding and his party 48 hours to sail from Skagmore to Sewart, Alaska. He’s been playing bridge and shuffleboard. Also, there are movies, but the NYT fails to tell us which ones.

A French sergeant wins 1 million francs, which is the equivalent of some money, in a lottery, but he’s stuck in the army for the next 4 years.

In Columbia, Missouri, George Barkwell is acquitted of murder for his part in a lynching. Rep. Leonidas Dyer suggests that this shows the need for his always-thwarted federal anti-lynching bill.

I’m afraid the song “Yes, We Have No Bananas” slipped into the musical scene earlier this year without proper acknowledgment here, but in today’s paper we have 1) a Yale professor (admittedly of poly sci) in a sanitarium who says the title is indeed grammatically correct, if misleading, and 2) this ad one page earlier:

Scientific Breakthrough of the Day -100:  Hypnotism broadcast by radio, used as anaesthesia. It’s perfectly safe for other listeners-in, though: only people mesmerist/mind-reader Joseph Dunninger has worked with before in person will be affected.

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Today -100: July 13, 1923: Or rising radical tides and prosperous farmers, injunctions, colonies, and diabolical wheat

In Alaska, Pres. Harding takes an oath against mistreating dogs or horses.

Mussolini issues a long list of things, some quite vague – “distortion of the truth,” etc –  which could result in newspapers being censored or suppressed. Also, deputies and senators will be banned from acting as editors, because they have parliamentary immunity and he really wants to put some editors in jail.

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The federal district court in Chicago makes permanent the injunction issued last October against railroad workers, 400,000 of them, doing strike stuff – interfering with RR company property, taunting, jeering or threatening scabs, being unnecessarily near to workers’ entrances, holding meetings or parades, making phone calls encouraging strikes, going to scabs’ homes, etc etc. Judge James Wilkerson says these peaceful acts aren’t peaceful: “The peaceful words of pickets, the peaceful exhortations of strike leaders, take on, by virtue of the atmosphere of lawlessness and violence in which they are spoken, a force not inhering in the words themselves, and therefore transcending right of free speech.”

Unable to get the US to open itself up to large numbers of Italian immigrants, Mussolini sends a delegation to Mexico to discuss establishing Italian colonies there. Labor unions are strongly opposed to dealing with Fascists. Or Rotarians, for some reason.

Headline of the Day -100:  

This sign goes up in Hollywood, uh, land.

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Today -100: July 12, 1923: Of klan acts and bedbugs

New York finds the Walker Anti-Klan Act to be useless against the Klan and will let the KKK get away with failing to file its membership list and other info.

And a cross is burned in New York itself, near a negro cabaret, believed the first such event in the city.

The Department of Agriculture is offering 1¢ per bedbug sent to its experiment station in Vienna, Virginia, which is developing insecticides. I can see no way in which this can go wrong.

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Today -100: July 11, 1923: Armed with blackjacks to enforce their whims

Egyptian prince Ali Kamel Fahmy Bey is shot dead by his wife of six months, the former, um, courtesan Marguerite Alibert, in the Savoy Hotel in London, after they had a night at the theatre, seeing, um, The Merry Widow. No doubt we will be hearing more of this...

NY Republican State Committee chair George Morris responds to a rather imperial demand from the Anti-Saloon League that the state party be more dry and end its “subservience” to the wet minority. Morris says it’s too early to talk about the 1924 election and “we are not going to submit to dictation of that sort from any quarter or as a party be driven into action by persons or groups who come armed with blackjacks to enforce their whims.” The fall Republican convention has been called off, presumably for fear of a public squabble over liquor.

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Today -100: July 10, 1923: Of totem poles

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And he’ll be dead soon. Coincidence?

The NYT notes that Harding’s speeches on his travels seem to be detailing the Republican platform for 1924. As such, they are “benevolent but vague, full of indefinite promises, and calculated to please the greatest possible number.”

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Today -100: July 9, 1923: Of easy surrenders, salmon, and Michelin monsters

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Asking French PM Raymond Poincaré to say what his terms will be if Germany stops passive resistance; he’s been calling for unconditional surrender first.

In Alaska, Pres. Harding meets “Indians in the conventional dress of civilized communities”. They’re complaining about white salmon fishers driving them out through modern fishing techniques.

The Michelin Man used to be a lot creepier.

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Today -100: July 8, 1923: Of whipping bosses and the excitement of a tortured people

Thomas Higginbotham, the “whipping boss” in the Florida peonage labor camp who beat a prisoner convicted of hopping a train to death, is convicted for second degree murder. He will be sentenced to 20 years.

German Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno tells the Vatican that “Sabotage in the Ruhr can be explained as growing out of the excitement of a tortured people and as a questionable attempt at self-defense.”

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Today -100: July 7, 1923: Of farmer-laborers, booze prescriptions, 12-hour bluff and insincerity, and resistance

The Farmer-Labor Party has split into two parties. Oh noes!

Federal Judge George Bourquin invalidates the parts of the Volstead Act limiting how many alcohol prescriptions doctors may write and the quantity of alcohol they may prescribe.

Steel manufacturers promised Pres. Harding they’d end the 12-hour day, and then it took, what, two days? for Elbert Gary of US Steel to walk it back, saying they’ll do it if and when there’s a surplus of labor. AFL Pres. Samuel Gompers says the promise is “tainted with bluff and insincerity.”

France and Belgium threaten to cut off diplomatic relations with Germany unless Chancellor Cuno repudiates Ruhr resistance.

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Today -100: July 6, 1923: Of cruises and kluxers

Warren G. Harding sails for Alaska, the first president to visit the territory.

The Indiana KKK claims 85,000 members, more than any other state (Texas is #2) (but you knew that).

The NAACP asks Pres. Harding to send federal troops to Tuskegee, Alabama to protect black doctors at the Negro War Veterans’ Hospital from the Klan.

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Today -100: July 5, 1923: We should have built up the country together

In Oregon, which is celebrating the 80th anniversary of the area being invaded by white people, Pres. Harding meets an old Indian chief and suggests that all the genocide and whatnot was just a silly misunderstanding: “if the Indian had known of the purposes of the nation and the nation had understood the Indian we need never have had any warfare between the races, but we should have built up the country together.” Harding is initiated into the Cayuse tribe and he’ll be dead soon. Coincidence?

A new invention to remotely control unmanned airplanes through a player-piano-type mechanism directed by wireless is demonstrated for French army officers including Maréchal Pétain, who will himself be remote-controlled from 1940.

A lynch mob 200 strong hangs a black man from a tree on Main Street, Schulenberg, Texas.

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Today -100: July 4, 1923: Of dueling and kluxers

Russia is trying a Red Army officer who killed another officer in a duel over a woman, who witnessed the duel so she’ll also be prosecuted. He’s charged with murder and “action derogatory to the honor of the Red Army” in reviving “the feudalistic custom of officers of the Czarist regime.”  (Update: he gets just 18 months, benefiting from a general amnesty for Red Army soldiers with medals. The woman is acquitted).

1,000 Ku Klux Klansmen, in full regalia, parade in Tuskegee, Alabama to protest the hiring of black people at the Negro War Veterans’ Hospital.

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Today -100: July 3, 1923: Did he make choo choo noises?

In Spokane, Pres. Harding calls for development of natural resources because, after all, the US’s population will rise to 300 million within a century. He says development of natural resources won’t exhaust them but, somehow, multiply them.

Pope Pius, after pissing off the French, now calls for Germany to end passive resistance – excuse me, “criminal resistance” – in the Ruhr.

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The Italian Fascist government refuses passports to 2 Socialist deputies to attend a London conference, because they have dared to oppose Fascism. One of them is Giacomo Matteotti, who will be murdered next year.

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Today -100: July 2, 1923: Of bears, corvées, and Tolstoys

Pres. Harding feeds gingerbread to bears in Yellowstone Park.

Bulgaria introduces compulsory work for the government. 8 months for men aged 20-40, 4 months for women aged 16-30, any time the government calls them up, and it could be all at once or not. And additionally communes may conscript people for “work of common interest” for up to 21 days a year.

Leo Tolstoy’s daughter is resisting the Soviet government’s demand that she turn over his unpublished writings. They’re threatening to banish her to Siberia if any more of them are published abroad. She is trying to keep to his principles in publishing them without copyright.

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Today -100: July 1, 1923: As crazy as usual

Gen. Juan Crisóstomo Gómez, brother of Venezuelan dictator Juan Vicente Gómez and also vice president and governor of the Caracas Federal District, is assassinated in Miraflores Palace.

The Ku Klux Klan opposes joining the World Court. They prefer kangaroo courts.

Immigration quotas reset today, spurring the ridiculous ritual created by current immigration laws of steamships – 12 of them – racing towards NY Port today.

8 or possibly 10 Belgian soldiers are killed by the bombing of a train in Buer. So hostages are seized, curfews imposed, etc in various towns controlled by the Belgians.

Former Crown Prince Frederick William will, purportedly, run for president of Germany.

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