Today -100: September 16, 1921: I regard this hat-smashing as a serious piece of business

Franklin Roosevelt’s polio is admitted.His doctor says he won’t be permanently crippled. FDR is 39.

It’s not just Fatty Arbuckle’s pictures which are barred from being shown, it’s his alleged victim Virginia Rappe’s films as well. Some theatres have been using the publicity to sell tickets, although she was never exactly a major player in any movie.

Éamon de Valera wrote Lloyd George saying Dáil reps would only come to LG’s proposed conference as representatives of a sovereign state. So LG cancels the conference. 

Oh, now I understand the new Sinn Féin stress on “the Consent of the Governed™”: that was what Lloyd George said in 1916 should be the basis for peace after the Great War.

Former Illinois Gov. (and former mayor of Chicago, evidently the only person who’s been both) Edward Dunne (D) forms the National Unity Council to “develop harmony and good feeling between different classes,” or to put it another way, to fight the spread of the KKK.

Louisville bans a planned KKK meeting, and any KKK meetings in the future, and says anyone attending one will be regarded as a “law violator.” They don’t say what law.

The German government issues 10,915,500,000 new marks, which is the equivalent of some money, although it’ll be worth a lot less soon if that’s any consolation.

NY Night Court Magistrate Francis X. McQuade is cracking down on people who grab other people’s straw hats. “I regard this hat-smashing as a serious piece of business,” and he’ll send future hat-smashers to the workhouse. Straw hats are a not-after-Labor-Day thing, but not everyone can afford winter hats.

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