Headline of the Day -100:
With increasing opposition in Parliament, and resignations of former supporters, Mussolini, in a surprise move, announces new elections for March or April. But first, he’s gonna change the electoral laws. Again.
Secretary of War John Weeks approves the use of federal lands in the construction of a bridge between San Francisco and Marin County. The Golden Gate Bridge will open in 1937.
Pres. Coolidge appoints the secretaries of war, the navy, interior, and commerce to a new oil conservation board. He cites the need to make sure there’s oil available for airplanes for the next war, cuz it’s not like you can run them on coal.
German serial killer (or as the NYT calls him, “wholesale murderer,” the term serial killer not being coined until the ‘60s) Fritz Harmaan is convicted in a Hanover court of 24 of the 27 murders for which he was charged. He’s sentenced to death, as is his accomplice Hans Grans. Haarman says he accepts the verdict, despite being innocent of some of the murders. Before sentencing, Haarman asked not to be sent to an insane asylum: “I go to the decapitating block joyfully and happily.”
Headline of the Day -100:
Speaking of fowl pests, Adolf Hitler is released from prison waaaay early. Disgracefully early. Five prisoners on the Bavarian left are also pardoned, just to pretend to balance things out. Only 2 of them are named in the article: Felix Fechenbach (murdered by Nazis in 1933) and Erich Mühsam (murdered by Nazis in 1934).
Spain will allow descendants of the Sephardi Jews expelled in 1492 to become citizens after two years’ residence.
The British Columbia Legislature calls for Canada to have its own ban on Asian immigration, abrogating any treaties standing in its way. Says Minister of Mines William Sloan, “Orientals and whites will not mix.”
German Chancellor Wilhelm Marx, following Gustav Stresemann’s attempt to form a cabinet, also fails. Stresemann’s Deutsche Volkspartei (DVP) refuses to join a cabinet which excludes the nationalist right wing, while the Zentrum party refuses to join one which includes them.
Albanian Prime Minister (and bishop) Fan Noli is overthrown by a coup led by followers of Ahmet Zogu, the future King Zog, who is still in exile, though not for long.
Roosevelt Grisby, a 20-year-old black man, is lynched in Charleston, Missouri. He supposedly attacked a white woman, and had been arrested. He is hanged, shot, dragged behind a car, and hanged again.
Serial killer Fritz Harmaan’s trial for 27 murders concludes in Hanover. A not hugely sympathetic judge stops him talking about his military record and love for his mother, asking if he was going to recount his whole life. “No, but humanity should not think me worse than I am.”
NYT Index Typo (?) of the Day:
The Soviet Union has discovered a brass plate stuck to a rock in the Chukchi Peninsula in eastern Siberia proclaiming the existence of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey Magnetic Station, the station presumably consisting of a rock and the magnetic recordings made by a US Coast Guard cutter. The mark threatens a $250 fine or imprisonment for removing the mark, despite it being in the, you know, Bering Strait. The Soviets, who did remove the mark, protest the “gross violation” of their sovereignty by the placement of this plate. Can’t wait to see if this escalates and am thankful they didn’t have nukes in 1924.
Headline of the Day -100:
The 1,500-foot club.
Former kaiser Wilhelm will omit the dispensing of his customary Christmas charity this year, because he is so very poor.
A smallish mob invades the Nashville General Hospital and seizes and lynches a 15-year-old black youth who had been shot trying to hold up a grocer.
The building of the Coffeyville Kansas Ku Klux Klan newspaper The Daily Dawn is blowed up real good. It miiiiiiight be a gas leak. The explosion happened “early today,” but was it at dawn?
Headline of the Day -100:
Bruce Bruce-Porter, which is exactly the sort of name you’d expect in a doctor with strong opinions about rubber corsets.
The French police arrest 300 Communists, 70 of them foreigners who will be deported. Sounds like a lot of those are refugees from fascist Spain and fascist Italy; none are Russian. Prime Minister Édouard Herriot tells the Chamber of Deputies that the government “will defend the democratic republic against both the Clerical peril and the Communist peril which are threatening it in opposite directions but with the same methods of agitation.” He says of the foreign Communists: “They are indulging in political demonstrations, and we will not tolerate it, we will not let them meddle in our political life.”
Headline of the Day -100:
It’s State of the Union time (still not called that, not for another decade). Coolidge doesn’t deliver it in person this time. He says “every American should be satisfied with the present state of the Union.” He wants Congress to pass the tax cut they failed to pass in June. Why, he says, if taxes on the wealthy were “scientifically revised downward,” they might actually yield more revenue while stimulating investment. He has nothing much other than that, just joining the World Court and a lot of vague aspirations not attached to any proposed legislation.
Russia reduces the size of its military to 562,000.
After a minister refused to perform her marriage because it is illegal in Montana for Chinese people to marry white people, Evelyn Kendall Moy says, or her foster parents the Moys say, she’s actually white, born to Canadians.
René Clair’s short film “Entr’acte” premieres, as does Erich von Stroheim’s extremely not-short film “Greed”.
Estonia quickly crushes an attempted Communist coup, which was ordered by the Soviet Union. The coup is partly a response to last month’s trial of 149 Communists, which, however, removed many of the people who might have done a better job organizing a coup (one, Jaan Tomp, was executed).
Frenchwomen are made eligible to their first public body: the Chambers of Commerce.
“Lady, Be Good!,” a musical comedy by George & Ira Gershwin, their first Broadway show, is playing at the Liberty. The NYT review praises Adele Astaire’s performance, adding that her brother “Fred Astaire, too, gives a good account of himself”.
The mutinying Sudanese soldiers surrender.
Federal prohibition agents in Seattle are prevented by a court order from destroying a radio station broadcasting bedtime stories they claim were coded messages to bootleggers in Canada and Japan.
The only Protestant church for lepers in the US opens in Carville, Louisiana at the leper colony there (James Carville’s ancestors were in the leper biz).
Charles Ponzi is arrested by Immigration, who intend to deport him because when he first entered the US from Canada he failed to mention his conviction there for forgery. The question now is whether Canada would accept his being deported there or whether it’ll have to be Italy. It will actually take another decade for him to be deported. (Mea culpa: there was a mistrial in Massachusetts sometime after he was released from federal prison in August which I missed).
Composer Giacomo Puccini (La bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and the uncompleted Turandot) dies at 65 of throat cancer.
Charlie Chaplin, 35, marries his second wife, Lita Grey, 16, in Mexico. And yes, she’s pregnant. And yes, they’re doing it in Mexico to avoid possible statutory rape charges. And while there is indeed quite an age difference, his 4th wife, Oona O’Neil, hasn’t even been born yet.
Coolidge invites Charles Dawes to sit in on Cabinet meetings when he becomes vice president in March, as Coolidge did when he was veep, but Dawes declines. We don’t know why.
The Slovak, German, Hungarian and Ruthenian deputies in the Czech Parliament walk out in protest at infringements on their language, school, and property rights. The Slovaks claim there is no such thing as a Czechoslovakian nation.
The first Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, which they’re calling the Big Christmas Parade, will be tomorrow. Unless it rains, in which case it’ll be Friday. Animals & costumes & clowns but no giant balloons. What’s the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade without Snoopy?
Headline of the Day -100:
Lord Allenby, the British High Commissioner of Egypt, presents Saad Zaghlul, the Egyptian prime minister, with a note containing numerous demands in response to the assassination of Sir Lee Stack, the British governor-General of Sudan: a £500,000 fine, an “ample” apology, punishment of those responsible (the assassins have been arrested, presumably after this note was written), a ban on political demonstrations, the withdrawal of Egyptian troops from the Sudan within 24 hours, something about increased irrigation for cotton in the Gezira province of Sudan, and a bunch of other stuff. The Brits are exploiting the situation for all it’s worth and then some. The note says the murder “holds up Egypt as at present governed to the contempt of civilized peoples.” It calls the government “directly responsible” for the assassination, for which it is certainly not directly responsible, because of its “campaign of hostility to British rights and British subjects... founded upon a heedless ingratitude for benefits conferred by Great Britain”.
Arkansas Gov.-Elect Tom Terral says the Democratic Party won’t win national elections if it keeps talking about the Klan. Or, to put it another way, Terral is a member of the Klan.
The Soviet admin is circulating to various army, union etc committees a censure of Leon Trotsky for undermining Leninism.
The Italian Chamber of Deputies (which the opposition parties are boycotting) votes 337-17 for a motion of confidence in Mussolini’s domestic policy (they voted for his foreign policy last week).
Headline of the Day -100:
The test case on income tax publicity begins. A grand jury indicts the Baltimore Daily Post, part of the Scripps chain, which supported La Follette for president. The NYT story rather cheekily repeats the names and tax amounts from the story for which the Post is being prosecuted.
Baron Hans von Ringhausen, a German pilot shot down during the Great War, arrives at Omaha, Nebraska to marry Bertha Wendell, sister of Charles Cummings, the American pilot who shot him down. She was a Red Cross nurse who nursed him back to health. If this (front-page) story sounds made-up to you, it probably is. At any rate Cummings, who appeared in Omaha a few months ago, will shortly vanish, along with the money of everyone who invested in his furniture polish company or sold polish for it. Presumably the sister and the “baron” will also depart.
The Inyo County water insurgents release the LA Aqueduct water.
Gandhi telegrams the opium conference, calling for the suppression of opium traffic.
Headline of the Day -100:
But then he would say that, wouldn’t he?
George Bernard Shaw gives the first of a series of broadcasts of his work on the BBC, reading his play “O’Flaherty, V.C.,” doing all the voices and even a bit of singing. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a recording of this?
Sir Lee Stack, the British Governor-General of Sudan and Sirdar (that’s like commander-in-chief) of the Egyptian Army, is wounded, and will die tomorrow, after bombs and bullets are directed at his automobile in Cairo by 7 students, who escape, for the time being.
At the world opium conference in Geneva, the US proposes limiting the production of opium and coca to the amount required for medical and scientific purposes, and banning heroin altogether. There are details, which are obviously unworkable.
The British Columbia Legislature votes for whipping drug traffickers.
Headline of the Day -100:
For just a second I had a very different image in my mind of what “tong heads” might be. Possibly bad guys in “The Tick.”
The Philippine Legislature, in its alter ego as the Philippine Commission of Independence, adopts a resolution for “immediate, absolute and complete independence.”
Mary Kolus’s divorce suit is rejected in a Trenton court because her husband being jailed for life for murder doesn’t meet the legal definition of desertion. The court also rejected her charge of infidelity as not proven, despite his conviction being for murdering the husband of his lover.
The US Chamber of Commerce submits its marching orders wish list to Coolidge, including subsidy of the merchant marine, a “scientific” immigration commission, tax stuff, and above all, the ending of the public release of personal income tax return info.
Headline of the Day -100:
Hey, you know what I hear is good for calming anger? Opium.
The Japanese are pissed that the British delegate implied that Japanese officials issue opium import certificates corruptly and that some countries have refused to honor those certificates. “We are a nation of the Samurai, and to us honor is more than all.” The conference is not going well.
Vice president-elect Charles Dawes has a hernia operation.
60 or 100 “raiders” from Owens Valley seize the Los Angeles aqueduct, which diverts water to the city to the detriment of Owens Valley agriculture. They open the gates to restore the water to the Owens River. The Inyo County sheriff asks the state to send troops but Gov. Friend Richardson thinks the whole thing will “blow over” in a few days. This is the start of the California Water Wars.
The oldest man in the world is Zora Agrah, is 150 and has been employed as a porter in Constantinople for over 100 years. His 5th wife (he was married to the 1st 3 simultaneously) is 65 “and too old for me,” so he’s looking for a new one.
Chicago Police Chief Morgan Collins will form a “strong-arm squad” 12 cops to battle organized crime (more breaking heads than making arrests, sounds like) and reorganize the detective bureau. “Those detectives who are too lady-like to do business with the gunmen are to be removed,” he says.
Another response to Chicago mob violence: the Sears, Roebuck catalog will no longer sell firearms by mail order.
Organ grinders with monkeys are disappearing from New York streets thanks to the closing of bars and the fact that monkeys are illegal. And you have to have a license to operate a portable organ, not that that ever stops anyone.
The 21 Republican state legislators from Rhode Island are ending their Massachusetts exile and in return Democratic state senators will end their filibuster of the budget. The D’s were trying to alter the ridiculously archaic state constitution, which still has a property qualification for voting and senatorial districts weighted towards rural areas, giving R’s a clear majority of seats despite only garnering 24% of the vote. This stalemate meant there’s been no budget and hence no salaries for officials or money for jails since January, so private citizens and banks stepped up to fund some of that, advancing state employees first 90% of their salaries, then 75%.
Newlyweds Leonard and Alice Rhinelander flee the glare of publicity. Reporters have discovered that Alice’s father was listed as “colored” when he naturalized in the ‘90s, as was her sister Emily on her marriage certificate.
Sen. Theodore Douglas Robinson is appointed assistant secretary of the Navy, a post which has previously been held by 3 Roosevelts, so of course Robinson is TR’s nephew. In making the appointment, Coolidge is acceding to a death-bed request from Henry Cabot Lodge.
Headline of the Day -100:
On the eve of the re-convening of the Italian Parliament after a 4-month hiatus, and with opposition deputies still boycotting in protest at the Matteotti assassination, Mussolini tells a plenary meeting of Fascist and Fascist-supporting deputies, “The reopening of Parliament is a proof of my constitutional intentions.” The opposition deputies, meeting on their own, respond, “Parliament is a bluff with which you hope to cheat public opinion.” M. says the Fascist militia are fully constitutional because they’ve sworn loyalty to the king; the opposition seems to think that’s insufficient. M. says “Not words, but hard facts, prove that the government is marching rapidly and continuously on the road of absolute normality.” I’m not sure “absolute normality” really entails all that marching. The opposition deputies affirm their refusal to return to Parliament and demand new elections, not run by the Fascist regime.
Coolidge says his victory “has been brought to pass through the work of a Divine Providence, of which I am but one instrument.”
Robert La Follette is not gracious in defeat (and why should he be?), saying “The American people have chosen to retain in power the reactionary Republican administration with its record of corruption and subservience to the dictates of organized monopoly” but “We have just begun to fight.” He’ll be dead in a few months. His running mate Sen. Burton Wheeler says the people voted for their own material gain and the “exposure of corruption in Washington apparently made no impression upon them.” The NYT is thrilled about the seeming end of the La Follette threat to the two-party system they so love. A second editorial insists that support for Fightin’ Bob in the Northeast “is not a convinced and permanent radicalism but largely a temporary discontent.”
The London Times says “The election, in short, is a vindication of the theory that the United States is under ordinary circumstances essentially a Conservative country.”
The Wisconsin Legislature will get its first women members, three of them, all Republicans.
The last state to elect a woman to its Legislature was South Carolina in 1945.
The new Chinese regime of warlord Feng Yuxiang invades the Forbidden City and kicks out former emperor Puyi, 15, stripping him of his remaining titles.
Calvin Coolidge is elected president. He is only the second veep to become president after the death of their president and then go on to be elected in their own right, the first being Theodore Roosevelt. John W. Davis gets 29% of the popular vote, the lowest of any Dem. candidate before or since – I mean, George McGovern got 37% in 1972. Davis wins every state of the Confederacy plus Oklahoma. La Follette gets 16.6% of the vote.
But the counts aren’t all in, and Davis refuses to concede, because he thinks La Follette votes will prevent Coolidge victories in the West (they won’t) and it could still be thrown into the House.
Republicans add to their majority in both houses of Congress. They will now hold 55 seats in the Senate and 246 in the House.
Al Smith is re-elected as governor of New York, with 3 points over Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who will never run for public office again. His overwhelming support in NYC did it. However the rest of the state government will be dominated by the R’s, who regain control of the State Senate, which the D’s had held by a single vote, increase their majority in the lower house, and take all the other state-wide offices.
That includes Florence E. S. Knapp, who is elected secretary of state, the first woman elected to state-wide office in NY, and the last for fifty (50!) years. She will oversee the census and hire a bunch of her relatives for the project, personally pocketing the salary of her stepdaughter, who didn’t know she was “employed” on the census. Knapp will be convicted of grand larceny and serve a 30-day sentence.
The number of women in the NY State Assembly has increased to one (1), Rhoda Fox Graves (R). There were 2 women elected in 1919, but it’s been a while. Graves will be the first woman elected to the State Senate in the ‘30s.
There will be 88 women in state legislatures.
Miriam “Ma” Ferguson (D) is elected governor of Texas with nearly 59% of the votes, as is Nellie Tayloe Ross in Wyoming, replacing her late husband. Because Ross’s is a special election to fill the remainder of his term, she’ll sneak past Ma to become the first woman governor in US history. The third woman governor in US history, Lurleen Wallace, hasn’t even been born yet. And it will be 50 years before there’s a woman governor who isn’t the wife or widow of a male governor.
Mary Norton (D) is elected to Congress from NJ, a seat she’ll hold until 1951. She’s the 5th congresswoman and the first Democratic one. During the campaign, she said women “ought not to have equal rights immediately. We must creep before we can walk.” She’ll be the sole woman in Congress until Florence Kahn (R) is elected from San Francisco in a special election next year to replace her husband Julius after he dies. And next year Edith Nourse Rogers (R) will also win a special election in Massachusetts to replace her dead husband John.
Klan-backed winners include William Pine (R) for Senate from Oklahoma; Rice “Puffed Rice” Means (R) for Senate from Colorado and Clarence Morley (R) for governor; Ben Paulen (R) for governor of Kansas; Ed Jackson (R) governor of Indiana.
Alabama votes to exempt veterans from the poll tax. California votes to allow prize fights. Massachusetts votes to allow women to occupy any state, county or city office and to change their name without losing their commission as a notary public. Oregon establishes a literacy test to vote. Texas levies a valuation tax to fund pensions for Confederate soldiers and their widows. Mandatory public school measures (i.e., banning parochial schools) fail in Washington and Michigan.
You know who didn’t vote? The 20 Rhode Island Republican state senators who fled the state in June to prevent the Senate getting anything done. I had no idea they were still in exile in Massachusetts, but they are. And RI doesn’t have absentee voting.
French composer Gabriel Fauré dies at 79.
The state chair of the Democratic Party in Kansas says 2 party campaigners, including the president of the League of Young Democrats, were suspended by the Ku Klux Klan because of their work for the Dems. Grand Dragon Charles McBrayer (McBrayer! I know!) says they were actually suspended for “creating dissension among klansmen.”
Coolidge and Davis both give boring talks carried by a bunch of radio stations (26 for Coolidge, 11 for Davis).
Headline of the Day -100:
“Takes extra nap” may be the most Coolidge thing ever. Or the most Biden thing.
Election day! Thus ending the 4th presidential race I’ve covered in this series! Results tomorrow.
Headline of the Day -100:
Wilhelm von Hohenzollern, son of the German “crown prince” and grandson of former kaiser Wilhelm II, is part of a brawl between members of Stahlhelm, the monarchist veterans’ militia thing, and supporters of the Weimar Republic in Potsdam, although he and his fellow thugs flee after losing the struggle. Willy can, presumably, be a member of a veterans’ group even though he’s just 18 because his grandfather made him an army lieutenant at 10.
In Loup City, Nebraska, one Albert Duster is arrested for attempting to make a political, presumably election, speech in Polish, in violation of a wartime law against foreign languages.
Ohio KKK Grand Dragon Clyde Osborne blames the anti-kluxer violence in Niles on a “few hundred infuriated outsiders, largely of foreign birth” and “confessed enemies of the Republic, with the hidden forces of Sovietism and anarchy, which acknowledge no God. Now is the time for us to find out whether we are to have a free America or a country governed by mobs opposed to peaceful assemblage of law-abiding citizens.” Dude, we’re still trying to find that one out.
The Klan parade in Niles, Ohio doesn’t come off after all. The anti-Klannies search cars, trolleys etc for people with kluxer regalia and/or weapons. The article’s unclear on who started the shooting. No one’s dead yet, but 3 are alleged to be dying. The National Guard is sent in. It bans the procession and any public assemblages and it closes the pool halls because of that whole “rhymes with P” thing.
This time it’s Attorney Gen. Harlan Stone claiming that a deadlock in the Electoral College would (somehow) lead to Davis’s running mate Charles Bryan being made president. He says such “minority control of government in a democratic country means chaos. I know of no attempt at such control comparable with this one, unless it be the minority rule of the Soviet government in distracted Russia.”
Éamon de Valera is sentenced by a Belfast court which he calls “the creature of a foreign power” to one month for entering Northern Ireland. I’m not sure from where the British home secretary’s power to ban people derives.
Headline of the Day -100:
A little obscure here, but Fightin’ Bob says he used his senatorial franking privileges for a friend without reading what was being sent out. He is also accused of saying that the Great War was caused by “international financiers,” and we all know what that means.
The NYT says it’s been a boring presidential campaign because neither of the main parties is running a man people love to hate. So it’s been a campaign of persuasion. Boring, boring persuasion.
