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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