Today -100: November 22, 1922: There is not a bit of altruism in our foreign policy

Pres. Harding addresses a joint session of Congress to ask them for a ship subsidy bill for the merchant navy. He tells the congresscritters it is “loftier statesmanship to support and commend a policy designed to effect the larger good of the nation than merely to record the too-hasty expressions of a constituency.” Congresscritters are not taking well to being scolded for listening to the views of their constituents.

There’s another movement in Germany modeled on the Italian Fascists and the “Bavarian Hittlerites,” the Pan German Workers’ Party in Berlin. The Bavarian Parliament discusses the “Hittlerite” fascists for the first time; the interior minister admits that the movement is in a few points unacceptable but the rest can be accepted and Bavaria is strong enough “to cope alone with excesses of radicalism from either Left or Right.” So that’s okay then.

The French Senate rejects women’s suffrage, 156-134.

Exiled former sultan of Turkey Mohammed VI sends a message to Constantinople asking about all the wives he left behind when he fled. “All are well and happy,” he is informed.

In that referendum in Bulgaria, 75% vote to convict 22 former ministers of treason for getting the country into the Great War.

The Legislature of British Columbia votes unanimously to ask the federal government to ban immigration by Asiatics.

At the Lausanne Conference, Mussolini, “short and radiant,” tells a reporter that “There is not a bit of altruism in our foreign policy,” which is “nothing for nothing.”

Rebecca Latimer Felton is sworn in as US senator. First woman in the Senate, last slave-owner, 87 years old.

British PM Bonar Law refuses to meet a deputation of the unemployed, who have marched to London.

Ramsay MacDonald (or Macdonald, as the NYT misspells it) is elected leader of the Labour Party by Labour MPs, replacing J.R. Clynes, who led the party to electoral victory last week.

Kansas Attorney General Richard Hopkins files suit against 7 KKK state officials, since the Klan don’t have a charter to do business in Kansas. He wants it banned from holding meetings where the participants are concealed, fomenting racial/religious hostilities, and assembling to do unlawful things.

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