The Russian Communist Party allegedly rejects Albert Einstein’s theories as reactionary and “the product of the bourgeois class in composition.”
Headline of the Day -100:
He will demand the Chamber of Deputies give him emergency powers to rule by decree through 1923, or he will dissolve it. Remember: the Fascist and Nationalist parties won only 42 seats of the 535 in the last election.
British elections. “Women Turn Out in Large Numbers Despite the Heavy Fog.” Labour more than doubles its MPs to 142 and is now officially the opposition party. The Tories lose some seats but have a clear majority, 345 seats out of 615. Liberals are screwed, both the followers of never-to-be-relevant-again Lloyd George (62) and the followers of never-to-be-relevant-again Asquith (54). LG’s fantasy of a new centrist party is proved untenable.
Churchill loses his 2-member Dundee constituency (voters have 2 votes) to both Edwin Scrymgeour (how do you pronounce that?) of the Scottish Prohibition Party (the only Prohibitionist in the new Parliament) and E.D. Morel, whose pacifism landed him in prison during the Great War. Churchill had attacked Morel & Communist candidate William Gallacher for “A predatory and confiscatory programme fatal to the reviving prosperity of the country, inspired by class jealousy and the doctrines of envy, hatred and malice, [which] is appropriately championed in Dundee by two candidates both of whom had to be shut up during the late war in order to prevent them further hampering the national defence.” Worse, his wife Clemmie accused Morel of having been “born a Frenchman” and coming to England to avoid military service. Morel agreed that his father (but not his mother) was indeed French, just as Churchill’s mother was American, and says it was “very clever of me” to come to England when he was 8 to avoid conscription. Churchill comes in 4th place.
H.G. Wells fails to win the University of London seat.
Lady Nancy Astor is re-elected in Plymouth. The only other woman in the new Parliament is also a holdover, Margaret Wintringham. A bunch of women ran and lost. Lady Alice Cooper failed to win in Walsall, which her husband, who stepped aside so she could run, had represented since 1910. There are 34 women in the German Reichstag (0f 469), 8 in the Netherlands’ State General (of 100), and 2 in the Irish Dáil.
One interesting candidate is Col. Arthur Lynch, an Irishman who raised an Irish brigade to fight against the British in the second Boer War, was sentenced to death, pardoned, and elected to Parliament from West Clare for the Irish Nationalists. This time he ran for Labour, and lost badly.
Future Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald, defeated in 1918, wins in Aberavon, Wales. And Sidney Webb enters Parliament for the first time at 63, for Seaham.
The Mexican government complains that a mob in Breckenridge, Texas (and isn’t Breckenridge a very un-Texas name for a town?) ordered all Mexicans (and blacks) out of the town. Mexico also complains about the number of Mexicans being killed in the US, especially in Texas, including a lynching in Waco last week.
Another “Fascisti” group emerges in Jalapa, Vera Cruz, Mexico. (Update: ah, it will actually be called the Partido Fascista Mexicano. Won’t come to much.)
Isadora Duncan, giving a dance performance at Carnegie Hall, says her idea of Communism is everyone singing and dancing together. I think that’s also probably the gist of Lenin’s speech at the Communist International yesterday, but I didn’t read it.
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