Today -100: October 24, 1926: Of confused and troubled dragons, milk evil, and shameless violations of party discipline

Judge Webster Thayer, who has presided over the various Sacco and Vanzetti trials in an extremely biased and unprofessional manner, denies them a new trial, calling Celestino Madeiros, who confessed to the murder, a crook and a liar.

D.C. Stephenson refuses to answer questions from a delegation led by a newspaper publisher about the Klan dominance of Indiana politics during his Ku Klux Klan grand dragonship. “I am confused and troubled and I can only think of my own personal liberty and the individual peril I am in,” he tells them.

Headline of the Day -100:

Italy bans women from being mayors. So Mussolini first gave women the municipal vote, then before they could exercise it made the post appointed rather than elective, now this.

Leon Trotsky & Lev Kamenev are ousted from the Politburo & Grigory Zinoviev is expelled from the Comintern for “a shameless violation of party discipline,” which is the worst kind of violation of party discipline.

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

Today -100: October 23, 1926: Of pardons, lynchings, and wiener dogs

The Texas Legislature’s investigating committee looks into the practice of selling pardons by Frank O’Rourke, secretary of the State Prison Commission, in partnership with gubernatorial spouse James Ferguson. Warden of the State Pen N.A. Speer testifies that a bunch of people showed up at the execution of two black men as guests of O’Rourke, proceeded to get super drunk and partied through the execution and the whole next day.

Georgia arrests 8 men, and is hunting 7 others, for the lynching of a white man.

Dachshunds, which were mostly “got rid of” in Britain during the war, reappear for the first time since 1913 at the big dog show.

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

Today -100: October 22, 1926: Of milk and (joke I could only write if I looked up the lyrics to that song, which I won’t do)

The lab that NY gubernatorial candidate Rep. Ogden Mills has been citing to prove that milk in New York City is bad and adulterated and icky says the samples it analyzed show “nothing deleterious,” although they won’t show anyone the reports they made at the behest of Mills and the R. party. Mills says he’ll only show it while testifying at a Grand Jury; I guess he’ll just keep any information about the alleged great milk danger under his hat until then.

The Soviet Union expels H.D. Anderson, the last American YMCA person left in the country.

Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, is published, with 5,090 copies printed.

At the Princess Theatre in Montreal, a McGill student punches Harry Houdini in the stomach.

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

Today -100: October 21, 1926: I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth; I am a citizen of the world

Eugene Debs, perennial Socialist candidate for president and occasional political prisoner, dies at 70 of health issues not unrelated to his time in prison.

Yes, I chose this picture because of that tie.

“In a speech devoted for the most part to milk,” Ogden Mills, R. candidate for governor of NY, says the milk is adulterated in Manhattan as well as boroughs he’s previously named. I have no idea if this is true, but it’s certainly having a Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-type effect on parents’ willingness to feed milk to their children.

The NYT says “many” women are running for the Legislature, “many” in this case meaning 15 candidates for the 150 Assembly seats and 3 for the 51 State Senate seats. The senate candidates are all socialists, as are 8 of the Assembly candidates (2 are from the Workers’ Party) and US Senate candidate Jessie Wallace Hughan. The article names exactly one (1) of these women, incumbent Assemblycritter Rhoda Fox Graves (R).

Headline of the Day -100:

Yay! Peace in our time!

Germany: the prosecutor of two reactionaries who plotted to assassinate Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann last year recommends they be acquitted. Kaltdorff, a follower of Hitler, says it was all just a hoax, that he was collecting material for a novel, and that that letter he wrote to his lawyer, who turned it over to the cops, was a joke he wrote while super-drunk, but he did repeat that Stresemann was a traitor. So they’re released, because far-right crimes don’t count.

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

Today -100: October 20, 1926: Of forbud

Norway votes for a referendum ending the 1917 prohibition imposed by decree and confirmed in a 1919 referendum. Since then, smuggling from Germany has sprung up, much of it captained by former u-boat officers though, sadly, just using regular boats.

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

Today -100: October 19, 1926: We do not even think of it. Why should we?

Headline of the Day -100:

First it was booze, then milk, now water. This election is very liquid-themed.

Queen Marie of Romania is visiting New York, and the Times will not shut up about it.

At an imperial conference in London, Canadian PM Mackenzie King says “Any talk of the annexation of Canada by the United States is purely political and should not be taken seriously.” “[I]t is the last thing Canada is worrying about. Nobody there really talks about it; nobody wants it, and personally I haven’t encountered a single soul in Canada who has ever mentioned it. We do not even think of it. Why should we?”

At the preparatory meeting for the Disarmament Conference in Geneva, France proposes that countries that use gas during warfare should be punished by a massive air chemical attack on them by all countries signing the ban on such weapons. The US, Germany, Italy and Japan oppose this idea but Belgium, Poland, Finland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia support it.

Colorado Republicans claim the state’s D’s are linked with the Ku Klux Klan. Their evidence is laughable.

Headline of the Day -100:

The NYT’s long habit of citing the opinions of randos (a shoemaker in this case) about the Soviet Union has not abated.

The Texas Legislature committee investigating the Fergusons hears that the governor’s husband told road contractors he could secure maintenance contracts for them in exchange for c.10%. Ferguson denies it.

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

Today -100: October 18, 1926: I would not even advise my wife

Headline of the Day -100:

Along with Zinoviev, Kamenev, etc. They confess to conduct calculated to split the Communist Party and to violating party discipline.  They promise to obey the Central Committee in the future without any of that pesky expression of unapproved ideas. “We categorically repudiate the theory and practice of the freedom of forming groups and factions.”

Max Eastman finally publishes Lenin’s hitherto secret Testament criticizing Stalin, whose people have been denying it existed.

NY gubernatorial candidate Rep. Ogden Mills says he will personally vote yes on the referendum to modify Prohibition but he won’t advise voters to do the same; “I would not even advise my wife.”

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

Today -100: October 17, 1926: Equal rights are all we are asking

Commerce Sec Herbert Hoover, in a speech for senatorial candidate James Wadsworth, says a Democratic-controlled Senate would cripple the Coolidge Admin’s work. “If our opponents shall be returned at this election, our legislative branch comes into conflict with the Executive, and we shall have neither party responsible and no direction of any sort.” In other words, he’s calling for one-party government. 

After that string of retaliatory mob shootings, Chicago politicians ask for a pause in violence during the elections. One of Al Capone’s lieutenants says they’re fine with that as long as the politicians make the North Side Gang “behave.” “Equal rights are all we are asking.”

“That wild beast called anti-Semitism,” as Soviet Commissar of Education Anatoly Lunatcharsky calls it, seems to be raising its wild head in Russia, and the government is trying to put a stop to it. Lunatcharsky says the cause of it is the fear of the middle classes and intelligentsia of competition from Jews, with their high intellect, ability, and enterprise. There are plans to colonize 200,000 Jews in the Crimea and, to try to head off a reaction rooted in the traditional Ukrainian peasant anti-Semitism, grant other lands to Ukrainians.

8 states – NY, Wisc., Nev., Ill., Colo., Missouri, Montana, California – will vote on Prohibition next month, some on modifying the Volstead Act, some (CA, Colo., Mont., Missouri) on eliminating state-level enforcement.

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

Today -100: October 16, 1926: Of milk, royals, and jury fees

Ogden Mills claims that adulterated milk is flooding New York City, even Queens & the Bronx. He evidently thinks this is the issue he can ride into the governor’s mansion, I guess.

More fighting in the Prussian Diet as it ratifies the deal giving the former royal family enough money and property to make them the richest family in Germany, if not Europe. The Communists are not best pleased. Their deputy Wilhelm Kasper steals the large brass bell normally used to call for order and rings it whenever the president of the Diet tries to use a smaller, until Kasper is thrown out. The Socialists sit the whole thing out, abstaining from the vote and the fisticuffs. 

In a Kansas City court case in which a black man stands accused of “cussing out” a black woman, the jury refuses to give its verdict until it’s paid its $1 fee, for which they’d ordinarily have to wait until next month. So the judge locks them up while he goes to lunch, allowing them only bread and water.

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

Today -100: October 15, 1926: Of libs, Germans, and souls

Herbert Asquith (aka Lord Reading and Asquith) resigns as leader of Britain’s Liberal Party after months of squabbling with David Lloyd George, to whom he is now ceding the field.

The new Czech Cabinet will include ethnic Germans – Sudeten Germans, if you will – for the first time. Robert Mayr-Harting will be justice minister and Franz Spina will be public works minister.

Thomas Edison thinks there might be such a thing as an immortal soul after all. He suggests religious teachers look for genuine evidence, but does not suggest how they should do that.

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

Today -100: October 14, 1926: A recruiting film?

The Rhode Island Republican Convention calls for Prohibition to be put to a new referendum (but with strict enforcement until then).

Vice President Charles Dawes’s call for the abolition of primaries and a return to nominating conventions is not going over well with some Republican leaders.

Lon Chaney’s “The Phantom of the Opera” is still banned in Britain, not because of its content but because when the film arrived in Southampton last year, it was given a military escort by Territorials who were tricked into thinking it was a recruiting film.

Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne, introducing the title character, is published simultaneously in Britain and the US (it was Disney which viciously stripped him of his hyphens).

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

Today -100: October 13, 1926: There’s enough business for all of us without killing each other like animals in the street

Dr. Alfred Salter, Labour MP for Bermondsey, says he’s seen many MPs drunk in the House of Commons chamber, from all parties but especially Tories. He says maybe Parliament having its own bars is not such a good idea.

Al Capone is questioned about yesterday’s machine-gunnery by the befuddled Chicago PD but is not under arrest. He tells a reporter “there’s enough business for all of us without killing each other like animals in the street, but they don’t see it.”

Yugoslavia, whose navy consists of a single light cruiser, would like to buy Belgium’s entire navy, which is evidently for sale.

Sir James Parr, High Commissioner for New Zealand, complains that most of the films shown in the country’s 350 cinemas (a lot more than it has in 2026) are American and almost none British: “Are New Zealanders to be completely Americanised?” Also, American films suck, he says.

Headline 

Said uniform consists of “a black cocked hat adorned with white ostrich plumes, a black swallowtail coat, with gold buttons and lace, and black trousers.”

Treasury Sec. Andrew Mellon says of Mussolini: “Many of his measures are unique, indeed. But they are effective, and he certainly is making a new nation out of Italy.”

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