Today -100: December 9, 1922: Of contempt for law, reprisals, sopranos, and Cubist plays

Harding gives the State of the Union Address (still not so called), on something like an hour’s notice. Fightin’ Bob La Follette fails to applaud him.

Harding says he will call a governors’ conference to discuss enforcement of the 18th Amendment, which he calls a “nationwide scandal,” “the most demoralizing factor in our public life,” and says that “easy contempt for the Prohibition law... breed[s] a contempt for law which will ultimately destroy the Republic.”

He calls for constitutional amendments to ban child labor and something about tax-exempt securities.

And registration of aliens.

And he wants to prevent forest fires.

Really, it’s a long list of proposals for which there is no time in the remainder of the lame-duck 67th Congress.

One day after the assassination of Dáil deputy Sean Hales and wounding of Deputy Speaker Pádraic Ó Máille, four IRA leaders, including Commandant Rory O’Connor, who led the takeover of the Four Courts in April, are executed in reprisal – the government uses the actual word – after a hasty court-martial held the night of the assassination. A proclamation says anyone found with a bomb, firearm, or ammunition may be summarily executed on the signature of any 2 members of the Army Council.

Assholes are still going after German singers. The American League is protesting a Johanna Gadski concert in L.A.

A Parisian audience riots at Raymond Roussel’s Cubist play (whatever that might mean) “Locus Solus.” The play is about playing music for earthworms. Whatever. After this one performance, the theatre cancels subsequent ones, claiming equipment malfunction.

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