Today -100: November 6, 1924: But one instrument

Coolidge says his victory “has been brought to pass through the work of a Divine Providence, of which I am but one instrument.”

Robert La Follette is not gracious in defeat (and why should he be?), saying “The American people have chosen to retain in power the reactionary Republican administration with its record of corruption and subservience to the dictates of organized monopoly” but “We have just begun to fight.” He’ll be dead in a few months. His running mate Sen. Burton Wheeler says the people voted for their own material gain and the “exposure of corruption in Washington apparently made no impression upon them.” The NYT is thrilled about the seeming end of the La Follette threat to the two-party system they so love. A second editorial insists that support for Fightin’ Bob in the Northeast “is not a convinced and permanent radicalism but largely a temporary discontent.”

The London Times says “The election, in short, is a vindication of the theory that the United States is under ordinary circumstances essentially a Conservative country.”

The Wisconsin Legislature will get its first women members, three of them, all Republicans.

The last state to elect a woman to its Legislature was South Carolina in 1945.

The new Chinese regime of warlord Feng Yuxiang invades the Forbidden City and kicks out former emperor Puyi, 15, stripping him of his remaining titles.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: November 5, 1924: We must creep before we can walk

Calvin Coolidge is elected president. He is only the second veep to become president after the death of their president and then go on to be elected in their own right, the first being Theodore Roosevelt. John W. Davis gets 29% of the popular vote, the lowest of any Dem. candidate before or since – I mean, George McGovern got 37% in 1972. Davis wins every state of the Confederacy plus Oklahoma. La Follette gets 16.6% of the vote.

But the counts aren’t all in, and Davis refuses to concede, because he thinks La Follette votes will prevent Coolidge victories in the West (they won’t) and it could still be thrown into the House.

Republicans add to their majority in both houses of Congress. They will now hold 55 seats in the Senate and 246 in the House.

Al Smith is re-elected as governor of New York, with 3 points over Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who will never run for public office again. His overwhelming support in NYC did it. However the rest of the state government will be dominated by the R’s, who regain control of the State Senate, which the D’s had held by a single vote, increase their majority in the lower house, and take all the other state-wide offices.

That includes Florence E. S. Knapp, who is elected secretary of state, the first woman elected to state-wide office in NY, and the last for fifty (50!) years. She will oversee the census and hire a bunch of her relatives for the project, personally pocketing the salary of her stepdaughter, who didn’t know she was “employed” on the census. Knapp will be convicted of grand larceny and serve a 30-day sentence.

The number of women in the NY State Assembly has increased to one (1), Rhoda Fox Graves (R). There were 2 women elected in 1919, but it’s been a while. Graves will be the first woman elected to the State Senate in the ‘30s.

There will be 88 women in state legislatures.

Miriam “Ma” Ferguson (D) is elected governor of Texas with nearly 59% of the votes, as is Nellie Tayloe Ross in Wyoming, replacing her late husband. Because Ross’s is a special election to fill the remainder of his term, she’ll sneak past Ma to become the first woman governor in US history. The third woman governor in US history, Lurleen Wallace, hasn’t even been born yet. And it will be 50 years before there’s a woman governor who isn’t the wife or widow of a male governor.

Mary Norton (D) is elected to Congress from NJ, a seat she’ll hold until 1951. She’s the 5th congresswoman and the first Democratic one. During the campaign, she said women “ought not to have equal rights immediately. We must creep before we can walk.” She’ll be the sole woman in Congress until Florence Kahn (R) is elected from San Francisco in a special election next year to replace her husband Julius after he dies. And next year Edith Nourse Rogers (R) will also win a special election in Massachusetts to replace her dead husband John.

Klan-backed winners include William Pine (R) for Senate from Oklahoma; Rice “Puffed Rice” Means (R) for Senate from Colorado and Clarence Morley (R) for governor; Ben Paulen (R) for governor of Kansas; Ed Jackson (R) governor of Indiana.

Alabama votes to exempt veterans from the poll tax. California votes to allow prize fights. Massachusetts votes to allow women to occupy any state, county or city office and to change their name without losing their commission as a notary public. Oregon establishes a literacy test to vote. Texas levies a valuation tax to fund pensions for Confederate soldiers and their widows. Mandatory public school measures (i.e., banning parochial schools) fail in Washington and Michigan.

You know who didn’t vote? The 20 Rhode Island Republican state senators who fled the state in June to prevent the Senate getting anything done. I had no idea they were still in exile in Massachusetts, but they are. And RI doesn’t have absentee voting.

French composer Gabriel Fauré dies at 79.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: November 4, 1924: Of dissension, radio, and extra naps

The state chair of the Democratic Party in Kansas says 2 party campaigners, including the president of the League of Young Democrats, were suspended by the Ku Klux Klan because of their work for the Dems. Grand Dragon Charles McBrayer (McBrayer! I know!) says they were actually suspended for “creating dissension among klansmen.”

Coolidge and Davis both give boring talks carried by a bunch of radio stations (26 for Coolidge, 11 for Davis).

Headline of the Day -100:  

“Takes extra nap” may be the most Coolidge thing ever. Or the most Biden thing.

Election day! Thus ending the 4th presidential race I’ve covered in this series! Results tomorrow.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: November 3, 1924: Suuuuure they’ll win

Headline of the Day -100:  

Wilhelm von Hohenzollern, son of the German “crown prince” and grandson of former kaiser Wilhelm II, is part of a brawl between members of Stahlhelm, the monarchist veterans’ militia thing, and supporters of the Weimar Republic in Potsdam, although he and his fellow thugs flee after losing the struggle. Willy can, presumably, be a member of a veterans’ group even though he’s just 18 because his grandfather made him an army lieutenant at 10.

In Loup City, Nebraska, one Albert Duster is arrested for attempting to make a political, presumably election, speech in Polish, in violation of a wartime law against foreign languages.

Ohio KKK Grand Dragon Clyde Osborne blames the anti-kluxer violence in Niles on a “few hundred infuriated outsiders, largely of foreign birth” and “confessed enemies of the Republic, with the hidden forces of Sovietism and anarchy, which acknowledge no God. Now is the time for us to find out whether we are to have a free America or a country governed by mobs opposed to peaceful assemblage of law-abiding citizens.” Dude, we’re still trying to find that one out.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: November 2, 1924: Of klarades, minority rule, creatures of foreign powers, and persuasion

The Klan parade in Niles, Ohio doesn’t come off after all. The anti-Klannies search cars, trolleys etc for people with kluxer regalia and/or weapons. The article’s unclear on who started the shooting. No one’s dead yet, but 3 are alleged to be dying. The National Guard is sent in. It bans the procession and any public assemblages and it closes the pool halls because of that whole “rhymes with P” thing.

This time it’s Attorney Gen. Harlan Stone claiming that a deadlock in the Electoral College would (somehow) lead to Davis’s running mate Charles Bryan being made president. He says such “minority control of government in a democratic country means chaos. I know of no attempt at such control comparable with this one, unless it be the minority rule of the Soviet government in distracted Russia.”

Éamon de Valera is sentenced by a Belfast court which he calls “the creature of a foreign power” to one month for entering Northern Ireland. I’m not sure from where the British home secretary’s power to ban people derives.

Headline of the Day -100:  

A little obscure here, but Fightin’ Bob says he used his senatorial franking privileges for a friend without reading what was being sent out. He is also accused of saying that the Great War was caused by “international financiers,” and we all know what that means.

The NYT says it’s been a boring presidential campaign because neither of the main parties is running a man people love to hate. So it’s been a campaign of persuasion. Boring, boring persuasion.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: November 1, 1924: Of radio, golden streams, and non-denunciations

John W. Davis and Coolidge will both address the nation on a 23-station radio “chain” Monday, Coolidge following Davis.

Davis complains about the huge Republican slush fund (the RNC raised $3,742,962, which is the equivalent of some money, compared to the Democrats’ $552,368), but says the people will vote for a return to honest government even as R’s “pour a golden stream in every doubtful State.” So I guess Republicans liked golden showers well before Trump.

Sorry.

Not sorry.

Sen. George Wharton Pepper of Pennsylvania says if Coolidge denounced the Ku Klux Klan, he’d be breaking the law, somehow.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: October 31, 1924: My party is up against a maximum reactionary movement

British elections: the Tories win a super-strong majority of 209, taking parliamentary seats mostly from the Liberals, who lose 3/4 of their seats; that’s them done. Party leader H.H. Asquith loses his Paisley seat to Labourite Edward Mitchell; he says he’ll stand again, but that’s him done as a member of Parliament. Labour loses 40 of its 191 seats, despite increasing its share of the popular vote.

Soon-to-be-former Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald (who does not lose his seat) sez: “My party is up against a maximum reactionary movement. Let ‘em all come.”

There will be 4 women MPs in the new Parliament, down from 8: Lady Nancy Astor, Katharine the Duchess of Atholl (who used to be an anti-suffragist and honestly still may be), Mabel Philipson, and a newcomer, Ellen Wilkinson.

Winston Churchill returns to Parliament, this time as a “Constitutionalist.”

Not a good election for sons of party leaders, the sons of Baldwin and MacDonald failing to get elected to Parliament and Lloyd George’s son Gwilyn losing his seat.

The test case on whether tax return information can be made public is tried in Cleveland, the judge ruling that it can. But many local collectors are still refusing to follow the law.

In a little Roosevelt-on-Roosevelt action, Franklin Delano R. (who used to be assistant secretary of the Navy) says Theodore R. Jr. (who also used to be assistant secretary of the Navy) sucked at the job and Navy morale has plummeted, with officers resigning, ships sinking, men deserting, etc. He says when TR Jr. testified to the Senate Teapot Dome Committee, he displayed “the most charming and complete ignorance about his job that any government official has ever displayed.” Charming and complete ignorance is the best kind of ignorance, er, probably.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: October 30, 1924: Oh, c’mon, a mouse president would be AWESOME

Internal Revenue Commissioner David Blair orders local tax collectors to open income tax payment records to the public, but some of them are refusing.

Author Frances Hodgson Burnett dies at 74. She wrote Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess, and The Secret Garden. Er, those are three different books. She sued the producers of a play based on Little Lord F. that ran in England, establishing for the first time authors’ rights to control adaptations of their works, something Dickens tried repeatedly to do.

An explosion hits the home of Mayor H.L. Kistler of Niles, Ohio (the birthplace of William McKinley). Kistler had issued a permit for a Ku Klux Klan march for November 1st but denied one for the anti-Klan Knights of the Flaming Circle at the same time, because the Klan had firsties. Kistler & family are ok.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt says we need a man president, not a mouse president.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: October 29, 1924: If you want to leave things as they are you must get people excited about something else

France recognizes the Soviet Union. Russian emigrés in France protest and say that if they should ever take power in Russia, they won’t recognize any agreements between France and the USSR.

The Georgia Ku Klux Klan is telling kluxers not to vote for Davis for president. The Klan paper Searchlight is claiming Davis recently called in Indianapolis for complete equality, which obviously means intermarriage. The Democrats reply that Davis obviously meant legal equality, not social equality, that would just be silly.

Attorney Gen. Harlan Stone says yeah, Congress made income tax returns public records but it’s still illegal to publish that information, and he has no idea what Congress had in mind there, so there’ll have to be a test case to punt the issue to the courts. In which any newspaper they prosecuted would presumably say, if the Justice Dept doesn’t know what’s illegal why should we? Stone says anyone who publishes returns before the test case does so at their peril.

British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald says he’s heard that the Zinoviev Letter was discussed in “a certain club in London” 4 days before the Foreign Office even heard of it, and that the clubsmen “were in a state of great jubilation ‘that the thing would come off.’” MacD still won’t say it’s definitely a forgery but he has “suspicions.” Other cabinet members, such as Colonial Sec. J.H. Thomas, are quite clear that it’s “a mean and contemptible fraud.” That’s the worst kind of fraud. The War Secretary says it will be proven a fake in a day or two. The general election is today.

George Bernard Shaw, in a speech in Luton – but for who or what? – points out the cleverness of the old governing class in always “preventing an English election from being fought on an English question” as opposed to an Irish or, in this case, Russian one. “If you want to leave things as they are you must get people excited about something else.”

The Navy secretary lifts the ban on soda pop on Navy ships.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.