Today -100: December 9, 1919: I yearn to reach America on wings

Senate Foreign Committee Chair Henry Cabot Lodge kills the Fall Resolution calling on Wilson to cut off diplomatic relations with Mexico after he receives a letter from Wilson (or whoever) telling the Senate to butt out because this is the sole responsibility of whoever’s secretly doing the president’s job for him, that’s just the Constitution.

Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer says a special division of the Bureau of Investigation was created on August 1 to deal with “radicalism.” I guess the public didn’t know about this before now? Palmer doesn’t say who the special division’s head is, but it’s J. Edgar Hoover. Palmer admits that unrest and radicalism “arise from social and economic conditions that are of greater consequence than the individual agitators,” not that that’ll stop the mass arrests and deportations.

Poet-Aviator Gabriele D’Annunzio hopes, once Fiume is annexed by Italy, to fly to the US via the Pacific Ocean. “I yearn to reach America on wings,” he poet-aviates.

According to a Le Matin, physicist Ernest Rutherford has cracked the alchemical goal of the transmutation of matter. Good for him.

Although the coal strike seems near settlement, the government orders rationing, more extreme than during the war, limiting factory hours, closing dance halls, pool halls and bowling alleys after 11 pm, no lights on Broadway, etc. Maybe they could get Prof. Rutherford to transmute coal into diamonds. Or am I thinking Superman? Actually, has anyone ever seen Rutherford and Superman together?

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