Today -100: May 10, 1926: Of poles and gishes

Commander Richard Byrd and his pilot Floyd Bennett have flown to the North Pole and circled it a few times. Or say they did. Byrd’s records of the journey are... suspect. 

Coolidge says he’s proud that it was Americans who made this historic flight/fraud/whatever.

The British government is sending convoys of food through London streets accompanied by large numbers of soldiers with machine-guns, to bolster the narrative that the General Strike™ is attempting to win by starving the people.

Do you care what Dorothy and Lilian Gish think of the General Strike™? Does anyone? Well, the NYT informs us that the (American) actors, currently visiting London, are interested in it but entirely neutral. So now you know.

In Paris, Joan of Arc Day is marked by clashes between royalists (the Camelots du Roi) and police trying to stop them holding processions.

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Today -100: May 9, 1926: Of rumors and radios

The British government denies rumors that soldiers are shooting at mobs of strikers (if I haven’t already said this: no one died during the General Strike™).

The Trades Union Congress was holding back some unions from striking, saving them as a second line of defense, but some of them want to join the fun and down tools anyway, including electrical and gas workers. The TUC will say Sure, fine, whatever, because what are they gonna do, tell them to go back to work?

Strike leaders reject offers of aid from the Soviet Union which haven’t actually been made. They may not know that the government banned wire transfers from abroad to stop just such aid.

The Senate Interstate Commerce Committee decides to remove control over radio from Commerce Sec. Herbert Hoover (which a federal circuit court did last month anyway, leaving no system of control at all), and assign it to a 5-person commission appointed by the president, with Senate confirmation, because radio is becoming too important in American life to be entrusted to any one person. Licenses will be issued for two-year periods. No swearing or slander will be allowed.

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Today -100: May 8, 1926: Nothing to fear but fraud itself

Former Attorney Gen. Harry Daugherty is arrested, along with former Alien Property Custodian Thomas W. Miller (in charge of property seized during the War) and former RNC dude John King, for defrauding the US over the management of alien property. Not for literally defrauding the government, but because their taking large “commissions” from a Swiss company to which they transferred $7m from the German-owned American Metal Company constitutes defrauding the government of their honest, unbiased judgment. Daugherty says “I have nothing to fear.”

British Home Sec. Sir William Joynson-Hicks (Jix to his friends, if any) appeals for 30,000 more volunteer special constables to maintain safety/break the General Strike™. And the government announces to members of the military that “any action which they may find it necessary to take in an earnest endeavor (!) to aid the civil power will receive, both now and afterward, the full support of his Majesty’s Government.” 

The British government claims that the transport and railway workers’ unions are threatening the British food supplies. The Churchill-edited British Gazette says so. It’s not true, of course. The unions are also not attempting to overthrow the government, nor are they run by anarchists & Communists, as Churchill and many other Tories seem to think.

However, the Gazette does get worked up about all the wild rumors doing the rounds (at least the wild rumors it isn’t starting itself), such as that a couple of cops were killed or an omnibus was thrown into the Thames.

Nathan Leopold Jr., of Leopold n’ Loeb fame, refuses the kind offer of some prisoners making an escape after they kill a deputy warden at Stateville Prison, or at least that’s what he’ll be claiming. Leopold was in the solitary wing at the time for stealing some sugar from the kitchen, and was handcuffed in a standing position.

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Today -100: May 7, 1926: Of uttermost farthings, cricket as usual, and fürstenenteignungs

Sir John Simon of the Liberal Party, who used to be attorney general, declares that the General Strike™ is illegal (it isn’t) and every union leader is liable to damages “to the uttermost farthing of his personal possessions.”

Lucy Baldwin, wife of the prime minister, is dragooning society ladies into, I guess, driving working women around London.

The General Strike™ (Day Four) is settling in to dogged obstinacy and bitterness (the article uses the word “dogged” several times).

The General Strike™: In Glasgow and Edinburgh, street cars operated by “volunteer motormen” are smashed up.

Taxis in London are now also on strike.

But the Cabinet decides on “cricket as usual.”

The Reichstag rejects, by a narrow vote, a measure to expropriate the estates of the former royal families (the word for such an act is fürstenenteignung) as called for by the referendum in March. So now there’ll have to be another referendum next month, and they’ve tinkered with the voting system to make it harder to win.

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Today -100: May 6, 1926: Constitutional Government is being attacked

British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin says he’d be happy to resume negotiations – after the General Strike™ is called off. He issues an appeal to the British people, saying “Constitutional Government is being attacked,” asking “all good citizens” to “bear with fortitude and patience” any hardships from the strike, which he calls “the road to anarchy and ruin.” He talks about the law, which is “in your keeping,” without naming any actual laws that are being broken.

NYT stringer T. R. Ybarra, the son of a former Venezuelan minister of war, is content to report from his office: “The sentence I am writing was interrupted a few minutes ago by the noise of an angry scuffle in the street outside.” Strikers are trying to prevent the distribution of newspapers from the nearby London Times building.

The unions respond to the government’s British Gazette by starting their own paper, The British Worker, edited by Hamilton Fyfe, editor of the Daily Herald. Partly due to a shortage of paper, the Worker will never reach the circulation the Gazette achieved.

AP says that following the killing of  Assistant State’s Attorney William McSwiggin, “‘Scarface’ Al Caponi [sic]” and “One-Eyed Dick” have fled to Manitoba. As funny as it would be if one of Capone’s gang were called “One-Eyed Dick,” I’m pretty sure none ever were.

Sinclair Lewis refuses the Pulitzer Prize (with its $1,000) he was awarded for Arrowsmith. He says prizes make authors seek “alien rewards” rather than quality and a group like the Pulitzer jury should not become the arbiter of quality, like the French Academy. Ralph Pulitzer says Lewis “has the right to refuse any prize awarded to him, whether he does so from principle or from self-exploitation.”

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Today -100: May 5, 1926: Golly, a white elephant

Most British papers have been shut down by the General Strike™. The Times is literally a leaflet today. The Daily Mail tries to print in Paris, but the French printers said hell no. So the government starts its own propaganda rag, The British Gazette. The NYT seems bemused by its column on Zoo Notes (a white elephant is coming from Burma!). Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill, who was after all once a war reporter, is overseeing it and writing much of its content.

The government raises the price of milk to 2s a quart (and no, the NYT doesn’t say what the pre-strike price was, that would be informative, just stop asking).

Oxford University will grant leave of absence to students wanting to blackleg as a lark (newspapers won’t shut up about these young jackanapes).

 

“Britishers are such good walkers that lack of transportation facilities is not proving such a hardship to them as it would to continental dwellers.”

Cricket matches and horse races are suspended.

The Prince of Wales races back to Britain from France on an aeroplane so he can help out by doing, um, important emergency prince stuff. Did no one tell him that horse meets and cricket matches are suspended?

Nicaragua declares a state of internal war. There’s a Liberal revolutionary movement, whatever that means.

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Today -100: May 4, 1926: Challenged by an alternative government

The British government calls for volunteers to maintain vital services and people are lining up in large numbers to act as scabs against the General Strike™. The British Fascisti will organize their own efforts. The government gives itself emergency powers to, among other things, seize property, food & fuel, horses, cars, and utilities, to make arrests without warrant, and billet troops in private houses.

Before the strike starts, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin says, “The government has found itself challenged by an alternative government.” He warns that the General Strike™ will bring the country “nearer to civil war than for centuries.”

The unions which are ordering strikes include the Transport and General Workers (trains, street cars, buses), electrical, building, iron & steel. That’s 2,500,000 so far.

Food and hospitals and music halls will not be affected.

Following the refusal of union printers (who are not on strike per se) to print the Daily Mail unless an anti-General Strike™ editorial was removed, more and more newspapers are not appearing. However, the Mail is now being printed in Manchester, getting to London presumably in private cars. The Daily Mirror refuses to remove a list of railway stations where people can go to volunteer for blackleg work, so its printers don’t let it appear either.

Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith wins a Pulitzer.

Carteret, NJ Police Chief Henry Harrington says black Carterethoovians who return after the racist attacks will be protected.

Geez, the Orléanist pretender to the French throne died not 5 weeks ago and now its Victor, Prince Napoléon, the Bonapartist pretender to the throne, dies at 63. He’s been fake emperor since 1879 calling himself Napoleon V. His successor is his 12-year old son Louis, henceforth Napoleon VI, who will sit on the fake throne, or possibly on the floor if he doesn’t own a fake throne, for 71 years, dying on the exact same date as Five.

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Today -100: May 3, 1926: In which is revealed what cannot be tolerated by any civilised Government

The British General Strike™ is on after negotiations between the Trades Union Congress and the government fail. The government says there will be no further negotiations until the strike order is withdrawn. Also, they require as prerequisite for resuming negotiations the “sincere acceptance” of the Coal Commission report, including restructuring of the industry and interim increases in miners’ work hours and reduction in pay. Sincere acceptance! Sincere acceptance! Sincere!

In the coal fields, this is more a lock-out than a strike. The government doesn’t seem to be saying anything about that being called off.

The government claims that troop movements have nothing to do with smashing striking coal miners, they’re just there to provide “protection.” Why, if things kick off, they’ll probably primarily be protecting miners’ wives (sorry ‘bout all the alliteration, sometimes that just happens). “To suggest that they are partisans is absolutely unworthy and untrue.”

A Daily Mail editorial says “a general strike cannot be tolerated by any civilised Government” and that some of the miners’ leaders “are under the influence of people who mean no good to this country” and that a general strike “is not an industrial dispute; it is a revolutionary movement”. Or the editorial would say all that except the printers objected to it, so the newspaper is not printed today. Or for a while.

The government will use this as an excuse to end negotiations, citing “overt acts, including interference with the freedom of the Press.”

Texas Attorney Gen. Dan Moody, running for governor against “Ma” Ferguson (and impeached former governor James Ferguson) calls “Fergusonism” (their term, not his) “the plundering of the public treasury through extravagance and mismanagement of the public revenues, and the diversion thereof to the benefit of political friends. I charge that ‘Fergusonism’ means political quackery and political fakery.”

Edith Wilmans, the first woman in the Texas Legislature (1923-5) is also running for governor. Since Wilmans was not re-elected in 1924, there are currently no women in the Lege. Responding to “Ma” Ferguson being an obvious sock puppet for her husband, Wilmans promises not to marry while in office.

The Austrian and Italian football teams break off relations with each other, the former objecting to Mussolini’s recent remarks about the South Tyrol.

A witness puts Al Capone at the scene of the murder of Assistant State’s Attorney William McSwiggin. The witness (unnamed) was in a Cicero restaurant when Capone, his brother Frank and some cronies burst in and got weapons out of a secret panel in the wall. The cops now fully understand the crime, including that McSwiggin was not the target, so I’m sure they’ll be wrapping the whole thing up quite soon.

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Today -100: May 2, 1926: Sordid capitalists are the worst kind of capitalists

Florida is boycotting Ohio industries because Ohio bans the sale of Florida land in Ohio, presumably because so much of it is fraudulent.

The British General Strike™ begins tomorrow, Monday. The coal strike, which was inevitable given the ending of government subsidies and the mineowners’ insistence on miners working longer hours for less money, is being joined by railroad workers, steel workers, newspaper pressmen, and a bunch of other unions. It’s not a true general strike as the Trades Union Congress (TUC) plans to escalate it by stages. The unions affiliated to the TUC give it the authority to negotiate with the government on their behalf. TUC General Secretary Ernest Bevin says, “We have no quarrel with the people. We are not declaring war on the people. War is being made by the Government, pushed on by the sordid capitalists.”

Italian newspapers say this could never happen in Fascist Italy (they didn’t do May Day yesterday, either).

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Today -100: May 1, 1926: Nobody has ever worked harder at inactivity

The Spanish government exiles students and a Madrid U. professor of penal law, among others, to the Chaferine Islands, and suspends the newspaper Atalya for 8 days “for having published an article regarding the grazing grounds of the city.”

Fritz Rausenberger, the professor of ballistics (!) who invented the long-range gun Big Bertha, dies at 58.

Mussolini’s fat face will go on Italy’s banknotes, which is a very Trumpian move.

Walter Lippmann, “Puritanism De Luxe in the Coolidge Era,” Vanity Fair, May 1926 issue:

Mr. Coolidge’s genius for inactivity is developed to a very high point. It is far from being an indolent inactivity. It is a grim, determined, alert inactivity which keeps Mr. Coolidge occupied constantly. Nobody has ever worked harder at inactivity, with such force of character, with such unremitting attention to detail, with such conscientious devotion to the task. Inactivity is a political philosophy and a party program with Mr. Coolidge, and nobody should mistake his unflinching adherence to it for a soft and easy desire to let things slide. Mr. Coolidge’s inactivity is not merely the absence of activity. It is on the contrary a steady application to the task of neutralizing and thwarting political activity wherever there are signs of life. ... There have been presidents in our time who knew how to whip up popular enthusiasm. There has never been Mr. Coolidge’s equal in the art of deflating interest. ... He has discovered the value of diverting attention from the government, and with an exquisite subtlety that amounts to genius he has used dullness and boredom as political devices.

As a nation we have never spent so much money on luxury and pleasure as we are spending now. There has never in all history been such a widespread pursuit of expensive pleasure by a whole people. The American people can afford luxury and they are buying it furiously, largely on the instalment plan. And in the White House they have installed a frugal little man who in his personal life is the very antithesis of the flamboyant ideal that everybody is frantically pursuing. ... At a time when Puritanism as a way of life is at its lowest ebb among the people, the people are delighted with a Puritan as their national symbol. ... The Coolidges are really virtuous people in the old American sense, and they have provided this generation, which is not virtuous in that sense, with an immense opportunity for vicarious virtue.”

 

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Today -100: April 30, 1926: Of duels, series of molds, and aigoing

German Prez Hindenburg forces the Reichstag to change a proposed law requiring the sacking of  soldiers and civil servants guilty of dueling to one merely allowing them to be fired.

The French Academy of Science rejects the theory of Prof. Tissot of the Paris Museum of Natural History that “every living thing is but a series of mold”.

Japanese police in occupied South Korea have been suppressing Aigo gatherings mourning the former emperor/king Sunjong, who the Japanese dethroned in 1910 and died last week (the internet tells me that “aigo” means “oh dear” or “geez”). Another form this mourning takes is the stabbing of two Japanese aldermen in Seoul, one fatally.

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Today -100: April 29, 1926: Such a distinction is foreign to our soil

Chicago police think Assistant State’s Attorney William McSwiggin was machine-gunned by killers imported from New York by, as they call him, “Al Brown, alias ‘Scarface Al’ Caponi” and John Torrio. They don’t know Capone was actually there.

Democrats in the House of Representatives filibuster (for a few hours, anyway) a bill to erect a monument to the 93rd Infantry Division, a segregated black unit that included the Harlem Hellfighters, in France. The bill is sponsored by the Hellfighters’ wartime captain, Rep. Hamilton Fish.

New York Supreme Court Justice William Carswell refuses a certificate of incorporation to the Colonial Association of Russian Workers and Peasants of America, because there are no peasants in the US: “Such a distinction is foreign to our soil.” The petitioners, naturalized citizens, “need education in Americanism,” Carswell says.

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