Today -100: June 7, 1924: Of honest brokers, unsightly legal battles,, running mates, and strange and long inscrutable purposes

The Reichstag votes to accept the Dawes report 247-183 after a speech by Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann in which he says Germany has to get on the United States’s good side: “in the long run, the post of honest broker in European matters is certain to fall to the United States. America is too wealthy to feel any interest in weakening Germany. It is far enough away from Europe to see things correctly.”

The parents of Leopold n’ Loeb deny that they have set up a million-dollar defense fund or want “to stage an unsightly legal battle with an elaborate array of counsel and an army of high-priced alienists in an attempt to defeat justice.” Of course Clarence Darrow is an elaborate array of counsel all by himself. They do intend to go for an insanity plea.

The White House denies that Coolidge wants former Illinois governor Frank Lowden as his running mate. In fact, he has no preference at all.

The Prohibition Party’s convention nominates H.P. Faris (or H.P. Farts as the NYT index calls him, and I am WAY too old to laugh at that) for president and Dr. A.P. Gouthey of Seattle as his running mate. Gouthey immediately withdraws, so they nominate Marie Brehm, who will be the first woman to run for VP in the US. The convention declines to adopt a plank against tobacco use.

At Howard University, Coolidge praises the negro race and credits, um...: “The accomplishments of the colored people in the United States in the brief historic period since they were brought here from the restrictions of their native continent cannot but make us realize that there is something essential in our civilization which gives it a special power.” That something essential is of course Christianity. “But for the strange and long inscrutable purpose which in the ordering of human affairs subjected a part of the black race to the ordeal of slavery, that race might have been assigned to the tragic fate which has befallen many aboriginal peoples when brought into conflict with more advanced communities.” So that’s okay, then. If some negroes “have suffered, if some have been denied, if some have been sacrificed, we are able at last to realize that their sacrifices were borne in a great cause.”

The NYT finally mentions the Indian Citizenship Act, which passed into law days ago, granting US citizenship to Native Americans. An editorial reassures us that citizenship is “not considered inconsistent with wardship”.

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