Today -100: February 28, 1925: Of American branches of dictatorships, speakers, and beer halls

Count Mihály Károlyi, who was president of Hungary for 4 months in 1918-19 and then fled into exile, is currently in the US. When he came last year when his wife Katalin contracted typhoid fever while in New York, the State Department imposed a condition on his visa that he not talk about Hungarian politics while in the country. Now they’re allowing him to respond at a lunch in his honor (organized by the ACLU) to attacks made on him in Hungarian newspapers about money he raised in 1914 for Hungarian separatism. His lawyers say that’s not enough. The ACLU says the US is “muzzling a foreign visitor on behalf of a foreign Government... [acting] as the American branch of the Hungarian dictatorship.”

House Republicans elect as speaker of the House Nicholas Longworth, who is married to Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter Alice.

Adolf Hitler loses a libel suit he launched against another right-winger, Otto Pittinger, for saying the Nazi movement was financed by French money. 

Odd that the NYT has that story but doesn’t mention that Hitler relaunched the no-longer-banned Nazi party yesterday. In a beer hall. Yes, that beer hall. He gives his first public speech since he was released from prison, two hours long, to a crowd of 3,000.

Joshua E. Russell, the federal prohibition director for Ohio, and 9 others, including Youngstown and Columbus politicians, are indicted for illegally withdrawing whisky from a distillery.

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Today -100: February 27, 1925: We are better off in the Philippines than a lot of people think

The House Aircraft Committee hearings continue. Rear Adm. Hilary Jones of the Navy General Board denies the claim of Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell of the Army Air Service that the Philippines could be taken in two weeks. He won’t say how long it might take but says it would require more than air power alone; “We are better off in the Philippines than a lot of people think.” The Committee also questions retired Lt. Clifford Tinker about an article he wrote blaming Congress for failing to supply helium to the dirigible Roma, which crashed in 1922 with 34 dead, but then strike his testimony from the record.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa is leaning more than it used to.

The Democratic Indiana state senators who fled the state have won: the gerrymander bill has been withdrawn. They won’t even be arrested when they return.

Charles Ponzi is convicted, again, in Boston.

A black man, Joe Airy, is lynched when he draws his gun after being surrounded by a posse after killing a Louisiana highway officer.

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Today -100: February 26, 1925: Of gerrymanders and charters

As Republicans in the Indiana State Senate attempt a gerrymander of Congressional seats, 14 Democrats flee for Dayton, Ohio to prevent a quorum being present (4 more remain in Indiana, but in hiding, I guess). The doorkeeper is to be sent to try to arrest them; he’s enlisting the Marion County Horse Thief Detective Association to find them. Indiana Republicans say the D’s can be indicted and extradited; Ohio officials say there’s no law allowing for such an extradition or for the Indiana sgt-at-arms of the General Assembly to arrest anyone in Ohio.

The Kansas State Senate votes to allow the Ku Klux Klan to operate in the state without a charter.

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Today -100: February 25, 1925: Of Desire Under the Fleurs du Mal, or something

New York City will implement “play juries,” which will determine whether plays are dirty or not. There’s a jury pool of 130 persons, I forget how it was chosen, from which juries will be picked (in secret) by the police chief. They won’t have direct enforcement powers, but if they find a play unduly salacious, Actors Equity will pull its members from the production.  District Attorney Joab Banton is trying to extricate himself from the machinery of censorship, saying he’ll no longer make announcements about individual plays, like he did about Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms,” but if any press agent uses complaints for publicity, he might retaliate by bringing their plays before the Grand Jury. The producers of “Desire” are happy that the play jury might actually see the play before making a decision on it, unlike Banton, who didn’t even bother to read it (he says he based his decision on reports from “seasoned playgoers” and others).

As NY book publishers are developing their own self-censorship program, in France the Baudelaire Society demands the retraction of the 1857 censorship of his “Fleurs du Mal.” The cops recently seized a first edition which was to be sold by auction on the grounds that it should have been destroyed 68 years ago.

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Today -100: February 24, 1925: Of reparations and over-excited actors

Con men in the occupied Rhine have been going around convincing businessmen that they work for the Allied occupation authorities and collecting “reparations.”

Headline of the Day -100:

85-year-old Fanny Weintraub, recruited from a Jewish old age home for “Salome of the Tenements.” A lost film.

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Today -100: February 23, 1925: Oh, cross/crossing, I just got that

The Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold celebrates its one-year anniversary in Magdeburg. I don’t really understand this group – largely veterans, organized along military lines to defend the Weimar Republic, but unarmed. They claim 3 million members.  Anyway, there are lots of Austrians present, and a bunch of boundary posts are burned.

The Ku Klux Klan re-enact Washington’s crossing the Delaware, in full regalia (robes, anyway, doesn’t say if they had hoods), with a red electric cross.

The ban on oysters in Chicago, spurred by that lethal typhoid outbreak, has been lifted and Chicagohoovians will no longer have to resort to oyster bootleggers, and I don’t know if that’s a real thing or a joke because, you know, Chicago.

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Today -100: February 22, 1925: Of vetoes and boycotts

Gov. Miriam Ferguson of Texas vetoes a bill allowing legislators and their families to accept free railroad tickets. It’s the historic first veto by a woman governor.

The anti-Fascist deputies who’ve been boycotting the Italian Parliament since the Matteotti assassination will resume their seats so they can be ineffective closer to the center of the power they don’t have.

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Today -100: February 21, 1925: I do not propose to be a goat

Former kaiser Wilhelm comes out against Germany having to pay reparations. Every combatant should pay its own expenses, he says.

NYC District Attorney Joab Banton has been pressuring theatre owners to rewrite or cancel “bad” plays. But after hearing that David Belasco was allowed to rewrite “The Harem” and “Ladies of the Evening” while he had been forced to withdraw “A Good Bad Woman,” William Brady says he’ll do the same and retracts his promise to cancel it. “I do not propose to be a goat.” The producers of Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms” are refusing to give in to Banton, who threatened them with the grand jury. Banton says the play is so icky no changes would suffice to make it meet his exacting standards (the only standard alluded to in the article clearly enough to be deciphered is the word “bastard,” which Banton ordered excised from one of Belasco’s productions).

Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell, assistant chief of the Army Air Service, deprecates the Navy’s claims that battleships can’t be sunk by airplanes and says the so-called test of this proposition with the Washington didn’t use real bombs, just dummies filled with sand. He proposes that he be given the battleship North Dakota to play with and says he’ll “blow it out of the water.”

The British Tory government gets Parliament to reject a Labour proposal to allow women to vote at 21 instead of 28 by promising to bring in a government bill for equal suffrage before the next general election. But the refusal of Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks (Jix to his friends, if any) to commit to that being at 21 raises suspicions because some Tories want to raise the voting age to 25.

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Today -100: February 20, 1925: Of confiscation, evolution, and fakes

Pres. Coolidge calls for ending federal inheritance taxes, saying combined with state taxes “the total burden approaches, if it is not actually, confiscation.” He says it’s socialism “under the guise of a law to collect revenue.”

The North Carolina Legislature kills a resolution against the teaching of evolution in state schools.

Charlie Chaplin is in court, suing one of his imitators, Charles Amador, who performs on film as Charles Aplin, using such Little Tramp signatures as baggy pants, under-sized derby, and the walk. Chaplin testifies that it’s the combination of these elements that creates a character who is “a symbol, a satire on humanity.” He says people have been fooled into seeing the pretender’s movies.

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Today -100: February 19, 1925: Of Navy backbones, helium, and swimmin’

The secretaries of war and the navy want Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell of the Army Air Service punished for expressing his pro-aeroplane, anti-battleship views to the House committee yesterday. Or that’s the rumor, which also says he’ll be called into the White House for a spanking (at any rate he will be demoted, then court-martialed, and then resign before the end of the year). The General Board of the Navy says battleships will continue to be the backbone of the Navy and have proven they can withstand aerial bombardment. They want an $80 million modernization program; Coolidge thinks $30 million is quite enough.

Headline of the Day -100:

Than who? Than what?

Charles Ponzi goes on trial in Boston for fraud in his 1920 Ponzi scheme.

The Senate bans the export of helium. 

As the 68th Congress winds down, the Senate spends most of a session discussing whether to create a swimming beach for negroes between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial on the opposite side of the tidal basin of the whites-only beach which was created in 1918. Finally, they strip funding for the segregated beach from the DC Appropriation Bill, closing it. In June it will be ordered dismantled. It was getting increasingly polluted and unsafe anyway. More here.

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Today -100: February 18, 1925: A group of aircraft could wipe out New York in a day

The House Aircraft Committee hears from army and navy leaders in a closed-door session that US air defenses are weak AF (which does not here stand for Air Force). The continental US needs 106 pursuit planes but has 21, 106 attack planes but has 1, 58 bombers but has 24. Panama, Hawaii and the Philippines are also under-planed, if that’s a word, which it isn’t. Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell of the Army Air Service says “A group of aircraft could wipe out New York in a day. The only defense would be from the air.” He’s talking about an aerial poison gas attack rather than bombing.

Fighting for Coolidge’s nomination of Charles Warren to be attorney general, the White House publishes the defenses of the sugar companies, one of which Warren represented until his nomination, against an anti-trust action the FTC is hearing.

Florence Prag Kahn (R) is elected to Congress from northern California in a special election to replace her husband Julius Kahn, who died two months ago. She’ll be the first Jewish woman in Congress, the 5th overall, and will be in office until she loses the 1936 election. Maybe at some point her election will get more than a single paragraph on the bottom of page 3, next to a much longer article on Mussolini having the flu and below a slightly longer article on a city councilman in Bath, England proposing a tax on women who bob their hair.

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Today -100: February 17, 1925: O Klanada

The Ku Klux Klan applies for incorporation in Canada.

(Update: the application will be rejected and the Klan mothership in Atlanta will deny knowledge of these kluxers).

Bavaria lifts the ban on the Nazi Party imposed after the Beer Hall Putsch. It’s still banned at the federal level.

There is opposition in the South African Parliament to the government’s Colour Bar Bill, no details of which are revealed by the NYT.

The new program of theatre censorship in Cincinnati takes its first scalp, with police ordering the Shubert to remove posters for “The Passing Show” which showed the actresses striking poses. STRIKING POSES!

Addison Procter, 86, the last surviving delegate to the 1860 Republican convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln, gave a bunch of speeches on Lincoln’s birthday, then dropped dead.

Also dead: Edwin Harper Sampson, 82, the last survivor of the squad that buried John Wilkes Booth... somewhere. The location of that grave goes with Sampson to his own grave.

NY Republicans and Democratic Governor Al Smith both want to extend the term of governors from 2 years to 4, but R’s want to do it starting in 1928 and Smith wants gubernatorial elections to take place in even, non-presidential-election years so that state issues will dominate the elections.. Smith also wants to make the offices of secretary of state, state treasurer and state engineer, which are now elective, appointive.

The first issue of The New Yorker appears.

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Today -100: February 16, 1925: Doomed, I tells ya!

Filibusters threatened in the Senate! The French spoliation claims and the Isle of Pines Treaty are doomed! Doomed!

The nomination of Charles Warren, Sugar Trust lawyer extraordinaire, as attorney general is in trouble.

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Today -100: February 15, 1925: Of nominations and reverse-impeachments

Coolidge nominates Frank Kellogg, the ambassador to Great Britain, to be secretary of state, and William Jardine to be AgSec. Kellogg’s education ended before high school.

Cal also names George Parks the next governor of Alaska. Unlike every previous governor, he actually lives there. He’s a mining engineer, currently the Assistant Supervisor of Surveys of Public Lands for Alaska, but he had the luck to have shown Pres. Harding around on the Alaska wing of his last, fatal tour and made an impression with Harding’s entourage. No one is more surprised by the appointment than Parks.

Former Texas Gov. James Ferguson rejects the idea of a constitutional amendment to reverse his impeachment, because it would be expensive and would take place in the summer. No, he thinks the state senate should “resolve itself into a court” and undo the impeachment (which would allow him to run for state office again).

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Today -100: February 14, 1925: Of pardons, treasonable and seditious offences, and short people

Although the Texas State Senate passed a pardon for the impeachment of former governor James Ferguson, husband of the current governor, the attorney general says they can’t do that, it would require a constitutional amendment.

The Irish Free State’s Dáil Éireann considers a Treasonable and Seditious Offences Bill adding forty (40) crimes, six (6) carrying the death penalty. The latter include levying war on the Free State or harboring people doing so. Other crimes: trying to “overawe” MPs or the governor-general, calling oneself president or any other such title, belonging to secret societies in the police or military, etc.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Cue Randy Newman song.

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Today -100: February 13, 1925: Noble reasonableness is the best kind of reasonableness

Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes tells the Lincoln Birthday Dinner that the US’s position in the world, free of commitments and entanglements, is noble reasonableness.

Theatrical censorship in Cincinnati, hitherto the job of the mayor’s secretary Newbold Pierson, which is a very theatre-censory name, will now be exercised by 9 people whose names will be secret, even from each other: 3 women, a minister, a lawyer, a broker, a banker, a businessman, and a doctor. They will attend all first nights and decide if there’ll be a second night, but hey, free theater tickets. They will “pay particular attention to the exposure of bare legs and the employment of suggestive lines and situations.”

The Italian National Council of Women protests the decision to refuse women the vote even in municipal elections (which must have slipped past me).

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Today -100: February 12, 1925: Stand back there, you coyotes

A performance of Barry Conners’ farce “Hell’s Bells” at Wallack’s Theatre on Broadway is interrupted when Eddie Garvie, finding he’d left his stage gun in his dressing room, picks up another gun, which he discovers to be filled with real bullets when he shoots Clifton Self in the arm (nearly taking out Shirley Booth) while shouting his line “Stand back there, you coyotes!” The police arrest Garvie (for having an unlicensed gun, actually the property of the stage carpenter, not for shooting a dude; he’ll be acquitted) but allow him to finish the play, which resumes after 20 minutes (Self wasn’t due to appear after that point anyway). Humphrey Bogart is in this production, but is not mentioned in the article. The play’s run will conclude in May.

The Irish Free State Dáil Éireann bans itself from considering any future bills legalizing divorce.

Greece appeals to the League of Nations against Turkey’s expulsion of the Greek Orthodox Church’s Patriarch Constantinos from Constantinople. Turkey says the expulsion does not violate the Lausanne Treaty and is purely a domestic matter.

I see in the entertainment ads that there’s a movie version of the play “Charley’s Aunt” starring Syd Chaplin, Charlie’s brother, which I’d never heard of, much less seen. Evidently it’s “The World’s Funniest Motion Picture.”

Headline of the Day -100:

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Today -100: February 11, 1925: Typhoid oysters are the worst kind of oysters

Coolidge reduces the cost of his inauguration of just a few thousand dollars, so a lot of donations are gonna have to be returned. There probably won’t even be fireworks.

The feds think they’ve tracked “typhoid oysters” to a company on Long Island. The oysters were kept in polluted waters. The feds think oysters are safe now, if people feel like a gamble. Something like 150 people died, which is still the most lethal outbreak of food-borne illness in the US.

Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson shows up in Parliament wearing a “startling” green dress, which is evidently a big deal. At some point this week she will rise to speak without wearing a hat, and that’ll be a big deal too.

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Today -100: February 10, 1925: Of internationals, non-uprisings, and wheelers

The Italian Fascists consider establishing a Fascist International.

Stalin gives what is supposedly his first-ever press interview. He pooh-poohs the idea that Germany is ripe for a Communist uprising. That would require the German workers shifting from socialism to Communism, some sort of economic crisis, and something going wrong in the nations (France) opposed (France) to Germany to prevent them intervening.

NY politician Everett P. Wheeler dies at 84. He once ran for governor, but is best-known for his long opposition to women’s suffrage and his frequent letters to the editor. Here he is deploring the 1912 NYC suffrage parade: 

And so 20,000 women paraded down Fifth Avenue to the sound of the trumpet and in the glare of the electric lights.  Did their leaders really think that any sensible man likes to have his wife, or his mother, or his daughter thus parade the streets?  It seems to me that this parade is one of the strongest arguments against universal suffrage for women that has yet been presented.  It shows such a failure to adopt means reasonable to a desired end that it destroys the confidence any of us may have had in the good sense and sound judgment of the leaders of this movement.

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Today -100: February 9, 1925: Of debts

Britain offers to forgive 2/3 of France’s wartime debt to it.

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Today -100: February 8, 1925: Dino Fight! Dino Fight!

Nepal’s Maharajah Tribhubana Bir Bikram issues a decree to abolish slavery and free the country’s 51,000 slaves. Wait, actually he made this speech more than two months ago, but news of it has only just now reached India and from there the rest of the world.

Rep. Mary Norton (D-NJ) tells a meeting of the National Democratic Club that her husband isn’t thrilled about her being in Washington. Elizabeth Marbury introduced her thus: “She is not hard, dried-up and vindictive, but possesses that rarest combination, the heart of a woman and the brains of a man.” Oy.

The Williamson County, Illinois Board of Supervisors votes for a “peace plan” for Herrin’s Klan-anti-Klan war, including the literal exile of Sheriff George Galligan and the revocation of the gun permits that have been handed out profligately. The kluxers aren’t happy about losing their guns.

The Lost World, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel, premieres in New York. It’s the first dinosaur movie. Wallace Beery is rather more beardy than I pictured Prof. Challenger when I read the book, and it’s impossible to watch him silently bellowing without imagining the voice of Brian Blessed. The special effects are... what they are.

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Today -100: February 7, 1925: Of opium, radium, jixes, and coal

The US delegates quit the Opium Conference after opium-producing countries refuse to agree to the US’s plans to limit production, saying it’s more of a demand-side problem.

Headline of the Day -100:

British Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks (Jix to his friends, if any) tells a Jewish deputation objecting to the registration of long-time immigrants, delays in naturalization, and deportations based on petty shit, that Britain has the right to exclude any aliens it wants, just like the US does with its racist anti-Asian laws. He hastens to add that he is “not in any sense an anti-Semite.” Indeed he is an anti-Semite in every sense (see David Cesarani, “The Anti-Jewish Career of Sir William Joynson-Hicks,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 24, No. 3, 1989).

For a few days, the NYT has been making fun of the Reformed Seventh Day Adventists, a small church on Long Island, whose prophetess predicted the world would end yesterday -100. It did not. The organizer of the group, Catherine Kennedy, even laid in a ton of coal. “She did not say to what use the ton of coal would be put if the prophecy was fulfilled.”

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Today -100: February 6, 1925: Where he will doubtless gather moss

Harlan Fiske Stone is confirmed as Supreme Court justice 71-6.

France recently amnestied some WW I army deserters, so Paul Grappe comes forward to claim his amnesty. He deserted in November 1914 and has been living as a woman since then. He says he’s tired of wearing women’s clothes.

The USSR will purge the military of active Trotskyites but soldiers who are just Trotsky sympathizers will merely be transferred.

As the 69th Congress winds down, a bunch of bills die from lack of time, including the measure to join the World Court. And some farm stuff.

Outgoing Congresscritter J. Scott Wolff (D-Missouri) is arrested for verbally abusing a black bellboy, claiming he gave the wrong change. Wolff is a dentist and a lawyer.

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Today -100: February 5, 1925: The Malice of Mortimer

The Senate will consider the Supreme Court nomination of Harlan Fiske Stone in open session.

Former director of the Veterans’ Bureau Charles Forbes and contractor John Thompson are sentenced to 2 years in prison and fined $10,000. Forbes and Thompson claim to be the victim of the “malice of Mortimer,” the informer Elias Mortimer, who was a middleman in the bribe deal and claims Forbes slept with his wife.

VP Charles Dawes finally explains why he refused Coolidge’s offer to sit in on Cabinet meetings: the president should only have people there who he trusts, so establishing a precedent that veeps sit in the Cabinet might prove embarrassing for a future president who doesn’t trust his veep.

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Today -100: February 4, 1925: Undesirable

Headline of the Day -100:

A bill before the Indian Legislative Assembly would treat as inferior races all countries that treat Indians as an inferior race. Meaning the United States, of course. And Japan, working on legalizing land ownership by foreigners, is considering whether it’s practical to exclude from that right people from US states that ban Japanese people owning land.

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Today -100: February 3, 1925: Of serums and amnesties

Well, the dog-sleds with the diphtheria antitoxic finally reach Nome, but it’s frozen solid.

Prussian Minister-President (prime minister) Otto Braun resigns again, after failing to construct a coalition or at least get neutrality from the People’s Party.

The USSR amnesties those who fought on the other side in the Civil War. In the Northern Caucasus anyway. The government says they’ve all realized their mistake.

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Today -100: February 2, 1925: The glory that was Hapsburg is gone

Headline of the Day -100:  

The second Edwin James front-page article in two days shitting on Austria.

A blizzard prevents the dog-sleds carrying diphtheria antitoxic reaching Nome, Alaska.

Sears, Roebuck & Co. open their first store, in Chicago, 33 years after starting life as a mail-order company.

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Today -100: February 1, 1925: Of patriarchs and man’s faith in his superiority

Greece protests Turkey’s expulsion from Constantinople of the Greek Orthodox Church’s Patriarch Constantinos, saying it’s a treaty violation. Greece implicitly threatens war by not releasing the 1923 class of conscripts.

Headline of the Day -100:  

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