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.”
Love the drama of the Opium conference! “Representative Stephen G. Porter, with dramatic suddenness, announced the withdrawal of the American Delegation and booked passage on the first ship home...Drastic declarations, which might have been unuttered otherwise, were made ...M. Zahle, almost unable to speak, declared it was the greatest tragedy as well as the greatest disappointment of his life...Lord Cecil…tremendously annoyed".
ReplyDeleteRegarding the use of radium for cosmetic purposes, the proponent, Dr. Charles H. Viol, has a library at Purdue University named for him, the Charles H. Viol Memorial Library for Chemistry, “Established and maintained by a fund bequeathed to the university in 1928 by Dr. Charles Herman Viol, 1886 - 1928, a graduate of the class of 1907, a pioneer in the study of radium and internationally known for his work on radium and radio activity." "Radium, he asserted, will reduce the scar to a minimum of disfigurement without the slightest danger to the patient”. I gather Marie Curie hadn't died yet.
And I love the Joynson-Hicks information, especially that "he wished to make perfectly clear he was in no sense an anti-Semite....The kind of aliens he wished to deport, he said, were those who crept in illegally, declined to comply with the regulations and trafficked in cocaine or led lives of open vice." You know, aliens in a Trumpian sense. He seems to be quite a character. According to Wikipedia, he is "best known as a long-serving and controversial Home Secretary in Stanley Baldwin's Second Government from 1924 to 1929. He gained a reputation for pious authoritarianism, opposing Communism and clamping down on nightclubs and what he saw as indecent literature. He was also heavily implicated in the banning of Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness (1928), in which he took a personal interest."
And thanks for the mention of the End of the World prediction. Nice to know that it didn't happen.