Today -100: March 2, 1923: That story will one day be told

Former British prime minister David Lloyd George thanks the intelligence service for “g[iving] us the information which ultimately brought America into the war. That story will one day be told.” One assumes he’s referring to the Zimmermann telegram.

Pola Negri breaks off her alleged engagement to Charlie Chaplin. He needs a rich wife, she says. Chaplin has claimed poverty.

The Ku Klux Klan’s former acting head E.Y. Clarke is indicted by a federal grand jury for paying the train-fare for a woman to come from Houston to New Orleans for some hanky panky. Yes that was illegal in 1923. Mann Act.

The Senate Immigration Committee is worried that Japanese workers will take over Hawaii.

Germany plans to confiscate any goods sent into Germany proper from the Ruhr if they pay the French the 10% tariff they’re demanding.

German inflation is now so out of hand that cash registers are useless because their numbers don’t go up that high.

The Wisconsin Senate votes to allow anyone to look at anyone else’s income tax returns.

A NYT editorial begins, “President Harding’s quiet acquiescence in the burking of his World Court proposal by the Republican Senate...” I’m delighted to see a word I’d thought had died out before 1923 still going strong, 95 years after the murderous careers of Burke & Hare were halted. In the 1980s (‘70s?) we used “disappeared” to mean the same thing, adopted from the practice of death squads in El Salvador and elsewhere of “disappearing” dissidents, but that usage died out despite its usefulness.

Secretary of Labor James Davis wants to “enroll” aliens living in the US, to “Americanize the alien before he alienizes America”, to make him a citizen or deport him if he is not worthy of citizenship. He wants them to have the “grave respect” that the Welsh have for the sanctity of the home.

The North Carolina State Senate rejects a bill to make secret societies (i.e., the Klan) register the names of of their members and a bill to ban masks, but does pass one against wearing a mask to commit a felony.

The lower house of the South Carolina Legislature votes to ban pool and billiards.

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