Today -100: June 29, 1926: Of Wing-Dings, vets, whips, and ironsides

The Governor General of Canada, Julian Byng, known, naturally, as “Bungo,” refuses Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s request to dissolve Parliament and call new elections. He is the first and last governor general to reject such a request. The most recent election was only in last October and Byng thinks Arthur Meighen (C) should be allowed to try to form a government before there’s resort to another election. So King and his Cabinet, facing a motion of confidence over bribe-taking in the Customs Department and other scandals, resign. Meighen will try to form a Conservative government backed by only a plurality in Parliament (King’s Liberals have been ruling in a shaky coalition with the Progressives).

This is called the King–Byng Affair, or the King–Byng Wing-Ding. Those wacky Canadians.

The Senate passes a bill amending the World War Veterans’ act to provide hospitalization benefits for women veterans and nurses from the Spanish-American War in private hospitals, since VA hospitals are men-only.

The Educational Committee of the Prussian Diet rejects a Socialist motion to abolish corporal punishment in schools. Failing that, they tried to abolish it for girls. Then for 6-year-olds. But Prussians love them some whipping.

During the filming of “Old Ironsides,” a Wallace Beery film (with Boris Karloff in what I assume is a small role) which I haven’t seen but which is available on Tubi, a cannon explodes, destroying the masts, sending six extras falling to the deck. One is dead.

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Today -100: June 28, 1926: Wait, and hear me out, what if we use the Navy to protect the negro’s ballot?

Gen. Manuel Gomes da Costa, the leader of last month’s coup in Portugal, declares himself supreme ruler. All political prisoners will be exiled.

The NAACP launches a $1m fund to fight Jim Crow laws. NAACP Exec. Sec. James Weldon Johnson says “The federal government will use a navy to prevent a man from taking  a drink, but will not empower a deputy marshal to protect the negro’s ballot.”

The manufacture of horsewhips dropped 58.5% in 1925 over 1923.

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Today -100: June 27, 1926: Of gold, kluxers v. gypsies, and parole

Incoming French Finance Minister Joseph Caillaux sacks Georges Robineau, the governor of the Banque de France who opposed the use of France’s gold reserves to defend the franc. Caillaux says Robineau had often expressed a desire to retire; Robineau denies this.

Austrian Socialist MPs stalk out of Parliament to protest it electing Anton Rintelen, the former governor of Styria, as minister of education, calling him a fascist, which is not wrong.

A group in Klan kostumes shoot up a Gypsy camp in Westchester Cty, New York.

New York criminals are hastily pleading guilty to get into Sing Sing before Wednesday, when parole laws change.

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Today -100: June 26, 1926: Atlantis located, without even the benefit of Google Maps

Republicans are in disarray over Congress’s failure to pass a bill to aid farmers. Coolidge supports the Fess plan, involving aid to a cooperative marketing bureau, which is dead in the water.

German archaeologist Prof. Paul Borchardt says he’s figured out where Atlantis was: the Sahara Desert in Tunisia. It sank in an earthquake. Before that, it went to war with Egypt or something, dunno, stopped reading.

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Today -100: June 25, 1926: Let the males have one place in the country where they can live in peace

Spain arrests 30 lawyers, journalists, army officers, etc. Evidently a conspiracy has been uncovered to... issue a manifesto calling for the restoration of constitutional rights.

The Senate Campaign Fund Investigating Committee questions Pittsburgh Police Superintendent Peter Paul Walsh, who admits having ordered detectives to get out the vote for John Stuchell Fisher and George Pepper, the Republican candidates for governor & US Senate respectively. And by “admits,” I mean Walsh lies about it until the letter he wrote to the Detective Bureau inspector is read out to him. And when I say “wrote,” he insists, “I did not write it Senator. The stenographer wrote it, but I signed it.” “And you dictated it?” “Yes sir.” (The letter, by the way, was stolen from the Detective Bureau by some whistleblower and delivered to the Committee). He claims neither candidates’ campaigns asked him to issue that order. The Committee has also been examining the large amounts of money the Anti-Saloon League inserted into the primaries.

The British House of Lords rejects by a vote of 125 to 80 a measure to allow peeresses to sit in the Lords.  “Let the males have one place in the country where they can live in peace,” exclaims Baron Banbury. Lord Cecil notes that the claim that women aren’t up to the physical strains of being a Member of Parliament hardly applies to the Lords.

Britain’s oldest general is Sir George Higginson, age 100, Crimean War vet.

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Today -100: June 24, 1926: Maybe someone got him a beard for his birthday

Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson reappears. Believed to have drowned in the ocean a month ago, she claims to have actually been kidnapped and drugged and held for ransom in a shack in Mexico, then escaped when her kidnappers left her by herself. There are plenty of details I won’t go into, but there’s a good chance this is total horseshit.

Aristide Briand forms a government. The finance minister will be Joseph Caillaux for the umpteenth time.

Italy threatens to stop participating in the League of Nations unless anti-Fascist meetings are banned in Geneva. Swiss Foreign Minister Giuseppe Motta points out that a recent incident was caused by Fascists trying to disrupt an anti-Fash meeting.

Edward, Prince of Wales turns 32. “At the same age King Edward [VII] had a beard and was a father.” He goes to a horse show, as was the custom.

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Today -100: June 23, 1926: In the long run

Philadelphia Mayor Freeland Kendrick, who is also president of the Sesquicentennial Exposition, denies the Ku Klux Klan a parade license and bans them from using the Sesquicentennial Auditorium. Kleagle Paul Winter says “They will pay in the long run, all right.”

Someone else who won’t be participating: Bishop Joseph Berry of the Methodist Episcopal Church, who resigns from the Exposition committee because it will be open on Sundays such as July 4th.

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Today -100: June 22, 1926: Of taxes & budgets

Coolidge says it will be a while before taxes can be reduced again, even as budget cuts, with more budget cuts planned, are increasing the size of the surplus, because who knows what could happen by 1928. I mean, who even knows?

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Today -100: June 21, 1926: Gross ingratitude is the worst kind of ingratitude

Édouard Herriot fails to form a new French government; Aristide Briand gets another chance.

There’s a “riot” in Garfield, New Jersey, where the (Passaic-area) textile strike is in its 21st week. And by riot I mean cops attack a crowd that refuses their order to disperse. The crowd gets especially riled when the cops arrest a woman with 3 children, including a baby. The Garfield police have been recruiting special policemen, but the majority refuse to take their oath upon finding that the pay is only $23 a week.

The German referendum to confiscate the property of former ruling families in Prussia and other states (4 kings, 6 grand dukes, 5 dukes, 7 princes, etc) receives 96% of the vote, but the turnout is only 39%; 50% is required. So the monarchists win by boycotting the vote. A private letter from Pres. Paul von Hindenburg “leaked,” calling the measure “a deplorable lack of traditional feelings and an act of gross ingratitude.” Many people thought his intervention unseemly.

British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s son Oliver comes out as a Spiritist. He’s seen ghosts and everything.

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Today -100: June 20, 1926: Makin’ beer

Rep. Fiorello La Guardia makes some beer in his D.C. office by combining two legal products, a near-beer and a malt extract, to create beer with a 2.84% alcohol content, and giving it out. Experts pronounce the beer fine, but the Prohibition Unit says you’d get sick well before you got inebriated, something about solids.

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Today -100: June 19, 1926: In which is revealed what offends the moral sense

Stuff I should have been talking about earlier: The Pennsylvania elections this month, specifically the Republican gubernatorial and US Senate primaries, which in this very Republican state are the only ones that matter, were tremendously corrupt and tremendously expensive. They’re being investigated by the Senate. Gifford Pinchot, term-limited out of the governor’s office, lost the Republican primary for US Senate to Rep. William Scott Vare, but I’m sure there’ll be no hard feelings. American Federation of Labour Pres. William Green is pissed that someone forged a letter of him endorsing John Stuchell Fisher for governor; the Fisher campaign paid for an ad in the Pittsburgh Gazette-Times featuring the forgery.

A NYT editorial thinks the candidates (at least Pepper & Vare) were unaware of what was going on, placing the blame on the donors: “what offends the moral sense [is] the spirit in which rich men set out to win a political contest by means of long purses. ... the callous indifference, the sublime unconsciousness of doing anything wrong ... The real Pennsylvania scandal is the fact that Pennsylvania did not seem to know that it was doing anything scandalous.”

The leader of last month’s coup in Portugal, Gen. Manuel Gomes da Costa, fires Adm. José Mendes Cabeçadas, who the coup leaders appointed president & prime minister. Gomes da Costa will take both posts as well as minister of war. Martial law is declared.

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Today -100: June 18, 1926: Excessive offensive American propaganda is the worst kind of propaganda

Spanish Foreign Minister José de Yanguas says Spain will withdraw from the League of Nations since it turned out to be “an organization of war.”

Brown University is no longer Baptist; trustees and the U. president will no longer be required to be Baptist.

Australian censors ban King Vidor’s film The Big Parade for “excessive offensive American propaganda.”

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