Today -100: November 15, 1926: Of traffic

Thomas Edison says cities will soon have to ban new skyscrapers because of congestion. He predicts that helicopters, whenever anyone manages to invent one, will help. Also, some intersections streets should be eliminated by elevating one of them. Also, traffic cops should have scientific training in order to direct traffic efficiently (he thinks they should let more cars go through intersections at a time).

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Today -100: November 14, 1926: Of censorship, monarchists, and charioting in drag

Polish dictator Marshal Józef Piłsudski asks the Sejm (Parliament) to switch jurisdiction over newspapers from the courts to his government to enforce his ban on publishing anything critical of the government.

The reactionary royalist Camelots du Roi stage a “brief but fierce riot” outside the Sorbonne to protest Minister of Public Instruction Édouard Herriot’s presence at a literary conference on Victor Hugo. 

Anthony Asquith, the prime minister’s son who will become a film director, appears as a stunt man standing in for Phyllis Neilson-Terry in “Boadicea,” driving a chariot in a wig.

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Today -100: November 13, 1926: Of cannons, aerial bombardment, hats, and nannies

Joseph “Joe” Cannon, congresscritter for all but 2 terms from 1873 until 1923, super-powerful speaker of the House 1903-11, dies at 90.

Gang warfare in Williamson County, Illinois takes to the air when members of the Shelton Gang drop 3 bombs from an airplane near the farmhouse of Charles Birger, missing it as well as Birger’s inevitable cock-fighting arena. The badly made bombs all fail to explode anyway; probably the fuses blew out on the way down.

Italian Fascist Party General Secretary Augusto Turati issues an order that hats be raised when processions with Fascist banners pass by. The order includes foreigners.

The Christchurch Sun publishes P. L. Travers’s short story “Mary Poppins and the Match Man,” the first appearance by Ms Poppins, who is 17 in the story. The first Poppins book will be published in 1934.

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Today -100: November 12, 1926: Of armies, non-writers, and straw clocks

The French government will introduce bills reducing its army from 650,000 to 400,000 and conscription from 18 months to 12.

Coolidge gives an Armistice Day speech saying the US won’t join the World Court except on the terms laid down by the Senate, which would give the US a bunch of exemptions no one else has.

Wilson’s ambassador to Germany James Gerard, in an Armistice Day speech at Richmond Hill High School, says Europe hates us.

George Bernard Shaw is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Which baffles him a little; he thinks it must be a reward “because I wrote nothing at all this year.”

Some dude in Germany builds a clock made of straw. Just straw. Clockwork, pendulum, all that shit, made of straw. No picture of it seems to survive.

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Today -100: November 11, 1926: Of ambassadors, falls, and gentlemen at heart

Canada appoints Vincent Massey as its first ambassador to the US. Massey only recently moved from business to politics, losing a race for Parliament last year and not running in this year’s elections. I guess no one likes him so they’re sending him to the US. His brother is the actor Raymond Massey.

Former secretary of the interior Albert Fall and oil tycoon Edward Doheny are arraigned for conspiracy to defraud the government in the oil leases at Elk Hills, California. Fall will also face at some point trials for bribery and Teapot Dome.

There are many government-owned corporations in the Philippines, including the national bank. Despised Gov-Gen Leonard Wood abolishes the body that governed them, the Legislature-created Philippine Board of Control, and grabs its power for himself.

France will deport Ricciotti Garibaldi and remove his name from the Légion d'honneur, which will be especially hurtful as he likes wearing the little ribbon, which he says is proof that he is a “gentleman at heart.”

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Today -100: November 10, 1926: Of de-deputizations, if that’s a word, and banishments

Italy’s parliament unseats 123 opposition deputies, including Communists and the multi-party “Aventine Secession” members, who have been boycotting the parliament for 2½ years in protest at the murder of Matteotti. The claim is that they used their parliamentary prerogatives to subvert the state. They will now lose their parliamentary immunity and cheap railway rates. I can’t help but notice that no mention is made of whether these deputies will be replaced and how any replacements will be chosen.

One Mexican senator shoots another senator dead, the first time this has happened in the Senate building (fatally, anyway).

The German Socialists celebrate the 8th anniversary of the founding of the Weimar Republic by introducing a bill to ban former kaiser Wilhelm from Germany forever.

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Today -100: November 9, 1926: Dangerous commotions are the worst kind of commotions

Evidently in response to the latest assassination attempt on Mussolini, the Italian Fascist Party is now weeding out insufficiently fanatical members. And banning performances in which animals are ill-treated or which might cause “dangerous commotions” or harm public morals, for example through hypnotic suggestion. Birth control information is banned (isn’t it already?). There’s also a new blasphemy crime. And a ban on giving newborns “ridiculous, shameful or subversive names.”

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Today -100: November 8, 1926: Ah, Herrin violence, how we haven’t missed you

So the idea of Ricciotti Garibaldi’s plot to run assassination plots and whatnot out of France against the Italian Fascist regime was to turn France against the anti-Fascist exiles. It’s probably not helpful to Mussolini that when the French secret police arrested Garibaldi, he spilled the beans immediately and completely.

Herrin, Illinois Mayor Jeff Stone and another man are machine-gunned in the streets by shooters in 4 cars. Inter-bootlegger strife? Revenge for Stone shooting a deputy sheriff / klansman a year ago? None of the witnesses saw nuthin’, as was the custom. The NYT notes that most of the recent Herrin/Marion shootings have been fatal, attesting to the marksmanship of mountain men (or possibly gunsels imported by St Louis bootlegger gangs) (or both).

Poland censors the press, making the printing of news the government doesn’t like illegal, as well as criticism of government officials and anything “derogatory,” with prison sentences or fines being determined by officials without recourse to courts.

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Today -100: November 7, 1926: We refuse to swallow those theories and ideas that are forced upon us

NYT: “The measures adopted by the Cabinet Council yesterday have created a new crime which hitherto existed neither in the Italian civil nor penal code. The new crime is called anti-Fascism. The mere fact of being opposed actively by word or deed to the present regime in Italy is an offence punishable by law.” Also, janitors now require police approval to be hired, presumably so they act as spies for the police.

Remember someone throwing a bomb at Mussolini’s car 2 months ago? It looks like Ricciotti Garibaldi was involved in facilitating that so he could rat out the would-be assassin to the Fascist government. 

Romania grants the country’s Jewish community two whole reserved seats in the Senate, one for Orthodox Jews, one for Reformed (the Senate is partly elected & partly appointed by local governments and corporate bodies).

At the Soviet Union’s Communist Party Conference, Trotsky says “We decline to renounce any part of our principles or views, and we refuse to swallow those theories and ideas that are forced upon us,” but “we have no intention of aggravating the differences and factional strife within the party.” He says the USSR is building socialism too slowly, that the people are worse off than before the war, and that the crops aren’t doing so well either.

Prohibition agents raid Chicago City Hall and arrest 3 clerks who had been selling liquor out of their lockers to the city and county employees who work in the building.

The Czech government bans the Charleston in dance halls, cabarets, even private homes if government officials or foreign diplomats are present.

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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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Today -100: November 5, 1926: My usefulness as a Judge has been seriously impaired

Annie Oakley, the sharp-shooter formerly with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, dies at 66. Her husband and fellow marksman Frank Butler will stop eating and die 18 days later. She once shot the ash off a cigarette in Kaiser Wilhelm II’s mouth. Um, he volunteered.

Prince Leopold of Belgium and Princess Astrid of Sweden get married in Stockholm. They’ll have to get married again in a Catholic church or the marriage won’t count in Belgium; they’ll do that next week. I guess they don’t get a wedding night until then.

Secretary of State Frank Kellogg blocks newly appointed Soviet ambassador to Mexico Alexandra Kollontai from traveling through the US to Mexico because US law says no commies.

Wyoming Gov. Nellie Tayloe Ross, the first woman governor in the US,  loses her re-election bid, so we’re down to one woman governor. FDR will name her director of the US Mint. She will die in 1977 at 101 years old.

George W. English, a Wilson appointee to the District Court for the Eastern District of Illinois, who was impeached in April for high misdemeanors and “tyranny and oppression,” resigns rather than face the impeachment trial. “My usefulness as a Judge has been seriously impaired,” he says in his resignation letter to Coolidge. It is, in fact, he says, his “patriotic duty” to resign, despite being totes innocent.

Colonel Ricciotti Garibaldi, grandson of liberator of Italy Giuseppe Garibaldi, is arrested by the French Secret Service and confesses to having been paid by the Italian government to act as agent provocateur with Italian anti-Fascists in France, convincing them to plot against Mussolini and then having them arrested. He also raised funds for a “Republican march on Rome,” which never happened.

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Today -100: November 4, 1926: Of hostility, janitor-legislators, and jail breaks

Headline of the Day -100:

Worst horror movie ever.

South Dakota elects its first Democratic governor, William Bulow. It’s been a state since 1889.

A black man, K.F.L. Barnett, is elected to the Nebraska Legislature. He is a janitor.

An attempted jail break attempt at the Tombs in Manhattan is thwarted, the 3 prisoners shooting themselves after a long gun battle (2 had already been shot by guards).

After that rather lengthy preliminary hearing, Aimee Semple McPherson, along with her mother and another woman are bound over for trial for criminal conspiracy. McP’s lawyer says if the prosecution’s claim that her kidnappers didn’t actually exist is true, then there couldn’t have been a conspiracy. Which I’m pretty sure makes no logical sense.

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