Saturday, February 15, 2025

Today -100: February 15, 1925: Of nominations and reverse-impeachments


Coolidge nominates Frank Kellogg, the ambassador to Great Britain, to be secretary of state, and William Jardine to be AgSec. Kellogg’s education ended before high school.

Cal also names George Parks the next governor of Alaska. Unlike every previous governor, he actually lives there. He’s a mining engineer, currently the Assistant Supervisor of Surveys of Public Lands for Alaska, but he had the luck to have shown Pres. Harding around on the Alaska wing of his last, fatal tour and made an impression with Harding’s entourage. No one is more surprised by the appointment than Parks.

Former Texas Gov. James Ferguson rejects the idea of a constitutional amendment to reverse his impeachment, because it would be expensive and would take place in the summer. No, he thinks the state senate should “resolve itself into a court” and undo the impeachment (which would allow him to run for state office again).

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Friday, February 14, 2025

Today -100: February 14, 1925: Of pardons, treasonable and seditious offences, and short people


Although the Texas State Senate passed a pardon for the impeachment of former governor James Ferguson, husband of the current governor, the attorney general says they can’t do that, it would require a constitutional amendment.

The Irish Free State’s Dáil Éireann considers a Treasonable and Seditious Offences Bill adding forty (40) crimes, six (6) carrying the death penalty. The latter include levying war on the Free State or harboring people doing so. Other crimes: trying to “overawe” MPs or the governor-general, calling oneself president or any other such title, belonging to secret societies in the police or military, etc.

Headline of the Day -100: 


Cue Randy Newman song.

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Thursday, February 13, 2025

Today -100: February 13, 1925: Noble reasonableness is the best kind of reasonableness


Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes tells the Lincoln Birthday Dinner that the US’s position in the world, free of commitments and entanglements, is noble reasonableness.

Theatrical censorship in Cincinnati, hitherto the job of the mayor’s secretary Newbold Pierson, which is a very theatre-censory name, will now be exercised by 9 people whose names will be secret, even from each other: 3 women, a minister, a lawyer, a broker, a banker, a businessman, and a doctor. They will attend all first nights and decide if there’ll be a second night, but hey, free theater tickets. They will “pay particular attention to the exposure of bare legs and the employment of suggestive lines and situations.”

The Italian National Council of Women protests the decision to refuse women the vote even in municipal elections (which must have slipped past me).

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Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Today -100: February 12, 1925: Stand back there, you coyotes


A performance of Barry Conners’ farce “Hell’s Bells” at Wallack’s Theatre on Broadway is interrupted when Eddie Garvie, finding he’d left his stage gun in his dressing room, picks up another gun, which he discovers to be filled with real bullets when he shoots Clifton Self in the arm (nearly taking out Shirley Booth) while shouting his line “Stand back there, you coyotes!” The police arrest Garvie (for having an unlicensed gun, actually the property of the stage carpenter, not for shooting a dude; he’ll be acquitted) but allow him to finish the play, which resumes after 20 minutes (Self wasn’t due to appear after that point anyway). Humphrey Bogart is in this production, but is not mentioned in the article. The play’s run will conclude in May.

The Irish Free State Dáil Éireann bans itself from considering any future bills legalizing divorce.

Greece appeals to the League of Nations against Turkey’s expulsion of the Greek Orthodox Church’s Patriarch Constantinos from Constantinople. Turkey says the expulsion does not violate the Lausanne Treaty and is purely a domestic matter.

I see in the entertainment ads that there’s a movie version of the play “Charley’s Aunt” starring Syd Chaplin, Charlie’s brother, which I’d never heard of, much less seen. Evidently it’s “The World’s Funniest Motion Picture.”

Headline of the Day -100:




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Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Today -100: February 11, 1925: Typhoid oysters are the worst kind of oysters


Coolidge reduces the cost of his inauguration of just a few thousand dollars, so a lot of donations are gonna have to be returned. There probably won’t even be fireworks.

The feds think they’ve tracked “typhoid oysters” to a company on Long Island. The oysters were kept in polluted waters. The feds think oysters are safe now, if people feel like a gamble. Something like 150 people died, which is still the most lethal outbreak of food-borne illness in the US.

Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson shows up in Parliament wearing a “startling” green dress, which is evidently a big deal. At some point this week she will rise to speak without wearing a hat, and that’ll be a big deal too.

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Monday, February 10, 2025

Today -100: February 10, 1925: Of internationals, non-uprisings, and wheelers


The Italian Fascists consider establishing a Fascist International.

Stalin gives what is supposedly his first-ever press interview. He pooh-poohs the idea that Germany is ripe for a Communist uprising. That would require the German workers shifting from socialism to Communism, some sort of economic crisis, and something going wrong in the nations (France) opposed (France) to Germany to prevent them intervening.

NY politician Everett P. Wheeler dies at 84. He once ran for governor, but is best-known for his long opposition to women’s suffrage and his frequent letters to the editor. Here he is deploring the 1912 NYC suffrage parade: 

And so 20,000 women paraded down Fifth Avenue to the sound of the trumpet and in the glare of the electric lights.  Did their leaders really think that any sensible man likes to have his wife, or his mother, or his daughter thus parade the streets?  It seems to me that this parade is one of the strongest arguments against universal suffrage for women that has yet been presented.  It shows such a failure to adopt means reasonable to a desired end that it destroys the confidence any of us may have had in the good sense and sound judgment of the leaders of this movement.

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Sunday, February 09, 2025

Today -100: February 9, 1925: Of debts


Britain offers to forgive 2/3 of France’s wartime debt to it.

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Saturday, February 08, 2025

Today -100: February 8, 1925: Dino Fight! Dino Fight!


Nepal’s Maharajah Tribhubana Bir Bikram issues a decree to abolish slavery and free the country’s 51,000 slaves. Wait, actually he made this speech more than two months ago, but news of it has only just now reached India and from there the rest of the world.

Rep. Mary Norton (D-NJ) tells a meeting of the National Democratic Club that her husband isn’t thrilled about her being in Washington. Elizabeth Marbury introduced her thus: “She is not hard, dried-up and vindictive, but possesses that rarest combination, the heart of a woman and the brains of a man.” Oy.

The Williamson County, Illinois Board of Supervisors votes for a “peace plan” for Herrin’s Klan-anti-Klan war, including the literal exile of Sheriff George Galligan and the revocation of the gun permits that have been handed out profligately. The kluxers aren’t happy about losing their guns.

The Lost World, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel, premieres in New York. It’s the first dinosaur movie. Wallace Beery is rather more beardy than I pictured Prof. Challenger when I read the book, and it’s impossible to watch him silently bellowing without imagining the voice of Brian Blessed. The special effects are... what they are.





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Friday, February 07, 2025

Today -100: February 7, 1925: Of opium, radium, jixes, and coal


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.”

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