Today -100: April 1, 1925: Of bear ribs, Herriot’s Trump moment, states of debauchery, and super-persons

Rumors from Russia, of the sort that the NYT loves to publish with no collaboration, say that Trotsky has been permanently disappeared. The government is putting out a story that he’s escaped the country, but those rumors say this is just a smokescreen. None of this is true.

Curious just which North Dakota Indian tribe adopted Pres. Coolidge under the name “Bear Ribs,” I quickly gave up when my web search turned up actual recipes.

There’s been rioting, actual rioting, in the Latin Quarter of Paris – I assume the slogans were all shouted in Latin – over the Ministry of Education appointing Georges Scelle to a lectureship on international law at the Paris Law Faculty, slightly bypassing seniority. SLIGHTLY BYPASSING SENIORITY! His lectures have been disrupted by the proto-fascist Action Française’s student group, who claim favoritism and of course that the Masons were behind the appointment, leading the Ministry to close the faculty and suspend the dean for failing to keep order. In the National Assembly discussion of this, Prime Minister Édouard Herriot loudly comments about a deputy who is shouting and “gesticulating freely,” calling him “epileptic,” without, he claims, realizing it’s a guy who had a head injury during the war. Hilarity ensues.

Sen. Burton Wheeler says the witnesses against him at the grand jury were “herded into a hotel by Government agents who fed them booze and drank with them to a state of debauchery” for 3 weeks, during which the foreman was arrested for drunk driving. I guess that explains the odd pause in the hearings.

The 6th International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference closes with a resolution that “persons whose progeny give promise of being of decided value to the community should be encouraged to bear as large families, properly spaced, as they feasibly can.” Roswell Johnson, the geologist who offers the resolution, says “super-persons” have a moral responsibility to have children. Margaret Sanger criticizes Theodore Roosevelt Jr. for calling birth control advocates hoggish, selfish and bad citizens (I can’t verify Tee Arr Jay Arr’s exact original words).

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