Today -100: November 6, 1926: The prince was awfully keen to learn black bottom

Headline of the Day -100:

Italy will dissolve all Antifa parties, groups, or newspapers, sentence anyone outside the country spreading false or exaggerated news about conditions in Italy. And it brings back the death penalty for assassination attempts on Mussolini or the king as well as treason, armed rebellion, and espionage. Trials will be by military court. All passports are annulled and frontier troops are told to shoot anyone trying to go to, say, Switzerland.

Mussolini fires the interior minister for his role in running Ricciotti Garibaldi as an agent in France and adds takes over the post himself.

Coolidge says the only national part of the elections was the vote for the House of Representatives, so the R’s won (the Senate elections evidently don’t count as national elections because only 1/3 of the seats were voted on), no matter how many seats they actually lost.

Joseph Stalin recently gave a four-hour speech at the Communist Party Conference. He admits socialism hasn’t been completed in Russia, but “I am sure socialism will be victorious here if we follow the principles of Lenin and discard those of Trotsky.” He says the Communist Party will “wage merciless war against these rebels [Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev] until they reform their ways.” He says the US has now replaced Britain “as the head of the imperialistic States and as dominating the world.” He thinks that’s a bad thing.

Not one, but two stories in today’s paper about the Prince of Wales dancing. In Panama, he asked a shopgirl to dance at a ball (I’m not sure how long ago this was) because she was thin and the dignitaries’ wives he had been duty-dancing with were not. When he was pulled aside and told of her profession, he said “It must be a jolly good drug store” and kept on dancing with her. In the second story, we hear that former Ziegfeld Follies girl Edith Baker has been teaching him the black bottom dance. “The prince was awfully keen to learn black bottom,” she says. To save you from googling “black bottom” at work, here’s a British Pathé newsreel. I doubt Prince Edward performs it quite so athletically.

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