Today -100: May 7, 1922: Of domed teapots, lynchings, pictures of France as painted in Los Angeles, and hot thief chases

Suspicious senators disbelieve Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall’s claim that oil companies were draining oil from the Teapot Dome reserve in Wyoming, which is his stated reason why the reserve needed to be leased to Harry Sinclair before all the government oil was drained. Geologists, including the Wyoming state geologist, say the geo. structure of the formation, featuring a deep water line, actually makes it impossible for slant drills to siphon off its oil. Sen. John Kendrick (D-Wyoming and former governor) has been taking point on the Senate inquiry and notes that the Interior Dept lied last month when it said there was no lease, 6 days after it was signed.

Three black men are burned at the stake, one at a time, by a lynch mob in Kirven, Texas after a 17-year-old white girl, Eula Ausley, is sexually assaulted and stabbed to death. Supposedly the first, “Snap” Curry, confessed and implicated the other two, who refused to confess even under torture (and castration, according to some reports). It is now believed that Snap was actually rape-murdering with two white men from a family in a feud with the Ausleys, not with the other two lynched black men, Mose Jones and Johnny Cornish, who had nothing to do with it. The cops had arrested the white men and then let them go once they had enough blacks to blame the crime on. There’s a book on the events.

The Genoa Conference is widely believed to be about to fail. Everyone plans to blame Russia.

Some French newspapers are demanding the suppression of the Rex Ingram-directed, Rudolph Valentino-starring World War I film The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse because it puts too much emphasis on the American military role and depicts the German soldiers as “strong and splendid, though barbaric” (not sure where that quote comes from). Illustration complains “we are shown a picture of France as it is painted in Los Angeles.”

Headline of the Day -100:  

Once again proving that silent films were actually documentaries.

And yes, yes, was it the chase that was hot, or the thief? We may never know.

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