Today -100: April 1, 1924: Of education, pleasant & profitable work, people’s kaiserdoms, and protectorates

The Federal District Court in Oregon strikes down the state’s law for compulsory education in public schools, which is a Klan-backed referendum passed in 1922 aimed at destroying Catholic parochial schools. Gov. Walter Pierce says the state will appeal to the Supreme Court, where (Spoiler Alert) it will lose.

John W. Davis, the former US ambassador to Britain, says it wouldn’t be worth it to run for president if he had to give up his legal work for financial interests like Morgan Bank, work he finds pleasant and profitable. He will (Spoiler Alert) wind up running for president, and he will find it neither pleasant nor profitable.

A DC grand jury indicts Harry Sinclair for refusing to answer the Senate Teapot Dome Committee’s questions.

Heading into elections, German right-wing parties are moving in the direction of monarchism, or, as Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann’s German People’s Party (DVP) is now calling it, for “People’s Kaiserdom.” Whatever that means. Stresemann says he has nothing in common with the Weimar constitution.

Oswald Mosley, independent MP for Harrow (and a Tory when he first entered Parliament), switches to the Labour Party.

Control of Northern Rhodesia (present-day Zambia) is taken from the British South Africa Company, founded by Cecil Rhodes, and the colony becomes a British “protectorate.” The BSAC’s authority over Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) was removed last year. The company will continue to receive royalties from mining operations until independence.

Sometime this month Ford Madox Ford’s Some Do Not …, the first book of the Parade’s End tetralogy, is published.

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