Today -100: October 29, 1924: If you want to leave things as they are you must get people excited about something else

France recognizes the Soviet Union. Russian emigrés in France protest and say that if they should ever take power in Russia, they won’t recognize any agreements between France and the USSR.

The Georgia Ku Klux Klan is telling kluxers not to vote for Davis for president. The Klan paper Searchlight is claiming Davis recently called in Indianapolis for complete equality, which obviously means intermarriage. The Democrats reply that Davis obviously meant legal equality, not social equality, that would just be silly.

Attorney Gen. Harlan Stone says yeah, Congress made income tax returns public records but it’s still illegal to publish that information, and he has no idea what Congress had in mind there, so there’ll have to be a test case to punt the issue to the courts. In which any newspaper they prosecuted would presumably say, if the Justice Dept doesn’t know what’s illegal why should we? Stone says anyone who publishes returns before the test case does so at their peril.

British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald says he’s heard that the Zinoviev Letter was discussed in “a certain club in London” 4 days before the Foreign Office even heard of it, and that the clubsmen “were in a state of great jubilation ‘that the thing would come off.’” MacD still won’t say it’s definitely a forgery but he has “suspicions.” Other cabinet members, such as Colonial Sec. J.H. Thomas, are quite clear that it’s “a mean and contemptible fraud.” That’s the worst kind of fraud. The War Secretary says it will be proven a fake in a day or two. The general election is today.

George Bernard Shaw, in a speech in Luton – but for who or what? – points out the cleverness of the old governing class in always “preventing an English election from being fought on an English question” as opposed to an Irish or, in this case, Russian one. “If you want to leave things as they are you must get people excited about something else.”

The Navy secretary lifts the ban on soda pop on Navy ships.

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