Today -100: December 31, 1925: Of pensions, fevers, longevity, and inventions

John Hylan resigns as New York City mayor one day before his term expires, which for some convoluted reason is the only way he gets a pension ($4,205 a year). Outgoing Police Commissioner Richard Enright does the same ($5,000). Temps will fill in for 24 hours.

Commerce Sec Herbert Hoover warns against the “fever of speculation” in stocks and real estate. Well I’m sure he’ll fix all that. He’s also against buying by instalment plan.

Dr. Hornell Hart of Bryn Mawr College tells an American Sociological Society meeting that by the year 2000 humans will live to 100 on average and some to 200. Hart lived to 78.

Nils Aasen, Norwegian inventor of both the hand grenade and the anti-personnel mine, dies at 47 of tuberculosis brought on by a nervous breakdown. He was having trouble trying to invent an insomnia mask.

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Today -100: December 30, 1925: But I was opposed to blood-letting

The British are so excited that Princess Astrid of Sweden – “according to an unnamed Swedish diplomat, she is one of the prettiest girls in Europe” (and what better judges of feminine pulchritude can there be than unnamed Swedish diplomats, I ask you) – will be visiting Buckingham Palace, so they’ve decided she’ll probably marry Prince Edward. She won’t. She’s 20, he’s 31.

Headline of the Day -100:

No one’s heard from Leon Trotsky in a while, but at the Communist Congress when Zinoviev reminds everyone that last year Trotsky was accused of semi-Menshevism – semi-Menshevism! – he pipes up “Correct!”. Stalin notes that he had opposed the demand by the Leningrad Committee, led by Zinoviev and Kamenev, who are now at odds with Stalin, for Trotsky to be removed from the Politburo and the Communist Party: “They demanded blood, but I was opposed to blood-letting, thinking, before long what would be left of the party.” What indeed.

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Today -100: December 29, 1925: Murderous delirium is the worst kind of delirium

With the Radical members of the French Cabinet rebelling against PM Aristide Briand’s financial proposals, Briand threatens to throw them out of the Cabinet and form a new one in alliance with the Right Center.

Mexico bans marijuana which, we are informed, produces “murderous delirium. Its addicts often become insane.”

The District of Columbia bans horses on four major streets.

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Today -100: December 28, 1925: You’ve got to have a sense of humor if you’re going to live in that town, Philadelphia, anyway

Smedley Darlington Butler, former Philadelphia police chief, gives a blistering speech to the Adult Bible Classes Federation of Pennsylvania, calling Mayor W. Freeland Kendrick a “disloyal chief” who fired him because he insisted on going after big people as well as “little dummies” for Prohibition violations (you could be forgiven for reading his remarks about crime and thinking that Prohibition was the only law on the books). He says of Kendrick’s claim that he fired him because he didn’t give him proper respect: “No, I didn’t. I should have pulled his noise.” He says the fundamental issue today is “whether we Americans are to be governed by a lot of bootleggers and naturalized foreigners.” He bitches that the people of Philly (Pheople?) didn’t support him and are “getting about what they deserve.”

In the audience is Gov. Gifford Pinchot, who is said to want Butler to succeed him as governor, a plan Butler explicitly disclaims. Pinchot says Butler showed that a Man could enforce the law “even in Philadelphia.”

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Today -100: December 27, 1925: Turkish delight

The new Turkish Civil Code ends the right of husbands to unilaterally divorce their wives. Divorce will now be granted only by courts and only for cause – insanity, desertion, infidelity etc. This will not be applied retroactively to annul, say, the divorce that Turkish President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk decreed for himself in August.

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Today -100: December 26, 1925: Of greetings and non-pardons

German politicians including Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann (whose name the NYT gets wrong) send messages of Christmas greetings to the US, which were recorded on wax discs and broadcast on US radio stations. Americans were not used to hearing the voices of European leaders. The records also have songs from the Berlin State Opera. Part of the program was recorded in Stuttgart on a piano wire by the telegrapone process

California Gov. Friend Richardson rejects the practice of giving Christmas pardons, saying Californians will “enjoy this sacred day better with the knowledge that a score of murderers, robbers and pickpockets have not been turned loose upon them.”

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Today -100: December 25, 1925: If sorcery is outlawed, only outlaws will have sorcery

Pres. Harding’s widow Florence, who died a year ago, burned his papers after his death, we are just now hearing. Let the conspiracy theories begin!

A Mississippi grand jury indicts Coahoma County Sheriff Dr. S. W. Glass and 3 deputies for their role (unspecified here) in the lynching of a black man, Lindsey Coleman, after he was acquitted of murder.

Turkey bans sorcery.

A Christmas party hosted by the Italian gang at the Adonis Social and Athletic Club, a Brooklyn speakeasy, is rudely interrupted by the White Hand Gang and its leader, Richard “Peg-Leg” Lonergan. Tipped off in advance, the Italians and their special visiting guest Alfonse Capone kill four of the White Handers. Capone kills Lonergan personally and I guess the Italians keep Lonergan’s peg-leg as a trophy. This is the Adonis Club Massacre, although you’d think Christmas Massacre would have been better. It’s Capone’s first “massacre.” Capone will tell police that he was helping out as... the doorman.

Headline of the Day -100:

A heart attack, not some sort of Port Huron wicker man situation.

The Club Alabam’, off Broadway, offers a very blackface Xmas. Dinner de Luxe for 3 bucks, 6-9 pm, dancing from 10; god knows what happens between 9 & 10. Probably not a massacre.

The NYT Sunday Magazine will have, I guess this upcoming Sunday, an article on the Rhinelander v. Rhinelander trial.

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Today -100: December 24, 1925: Wherein is revealed the pest of our age

Pope Pius declares a new holiday (yay!): the Feast of Christ the King. The idea is that it will remind people of that obscure 1st-century chatterbox and combat “the pest of our age,” laicism, which lowers Christianity to the level of other religions, you know, the false ones. Also, the Catholic Church should have “independence from civil power.”

Gen. Smedley Darlington Butler claims he resigned as Philadelphia’s director of public safety not because he was ordered to by the Marines or because Mayor W. Freeland Kendrick had fired his ass, but because Kendrick demanded that he “lay off the big places” in Prohibition raids. He had wanted to padlock the Ritz-Carlton; places like that will be important to the city’s finances in the sesquicentennial year. The Smedster withdraws his resignation from the Marines.

The Ku Klux Klan, pissed off at the Salt Lake City ordinance against mask-wearing, protests against someone wearing false whiskers – FALSE WHISKERS! – while collecting for the poor dressed as Santa Claus. So Santa will no longer be allowed to stalk the streets of Salt Lake in disguise.

The NYT responds to American Federation of Labor Pres. William Green’s screed against Italian Fascism by suggesting that it’s American unions that are the real dictators. “John L. Lewis is the Mussolini of the United Mine Workers”, it says, for refusing to submit the coal strike to arbitration. And not just here: “England is threatened by the unsocial, uneconomic and anti-national exactions of labor unions.”

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Today -100: December 23, 1925: But I can still spit in their eye

Gen. Smedley Darlington Butler has been on leave from the Marines for two years in order to be director of safety (police chief) for Philadelphia. He’s militarized the cops, encouraged them to shoot “bandits,” armed firemen, and extended his Prohibition raids to the Ritz-Carlton and other major hotels, putting him at odds with politicians, including Mayor W. Freeland Kendrick. But he has been refused permission to extend his leave, which ends next week; he has orders to go to San Diego. He even went to Washington to ty to persuade Coolidge to change his mind, but Coolidge wouldn’t see him. He previously threatened to defy his orders to return to the Marines, but backed down. Now he reverses again and resigns from the Marines. So he’s a little surprised to learn, an hour later, that Mayor Kendrick has fired his ass. He tells reporters, “Now we are in the open. If the mayor fires me, I’ll be nothing after January 1. I’ll be neither a marine nor a policeman. But I can still spit in their eye.”

The American Federation of Labor warns unionists to oppose Fascist infiltration as strongly as they do Communists. AFL Pres. William Green says “Fascismo is endeavoring to instill that blighting philosophy among the people of every nation.”

Pres. Coolidge accepts the League of Nations invitation to join in preparing for a disarmament conference. 

Russia and Turkey sign a peace treaty. It’s only for three years.

The NYT suggests that Mussolini’s “Brilliant evocations of the glorious Roman past and of a glorious future may be a way of winning popular acquiescence in a galling present.”

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Today -100: December 22, 1925: We must choose between slavery and vodka

Some Italians claim that Mussolini’s purported intention to declare Italy an empire, which was reported as breaking news a couple of days ago – and a week before that – actually meant a spiritual and cultural rather than a territorial empire. The Italian embassy in the US calls the empire reports absurd, absolutely fantastic, and misleading.

The All-Russian Communist Congress divides over whether to suppress the kulaks. Bukharin is offended that the radicals, led by Zinoviev, take the highly unusual step of demanding the right to submit a minority report. Stalin says a few things I don’t understand, including “we must choose between slavery and vodka.”

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Today -100: December 21, 1925: Of the government of Wall Street, distressing methods, and battleships

Benjamin Gitlow, the Communist leader pardoned by NY Gov. Al Smith last week, gives a speech calling for foreign industrial and farm workers living in the US to unite with negroes to “overthrow the government of Wall Street.”

The French Chamber of Deputies approves PM Aristide Briand’s Syrian policy. Killing Syrian, his policy is killing Syrians, or as he puts it, “It was a cruel thing that France was obliged to maintain order by distressing methods.”

Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin premieres at The Bolshoi.

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Today -100: December 20, 1925: Very little future for aviation

Noted futurist H.G. Wells, asked to write for Airways magazine on the future of air travel, responds that as he has found it “unpunctual, untrustworthy and inconsiderate to the ordinary passenger, there is very little future for aviation.”

We are also informed that British planes in the future will be made of metal, since the shortage of wood during the war restricted production. Another story today says houses will also be made of metal in Britain, because bricklayers are refusing to speed up to meet the housing shortage.

Jewish groups in Hungary oppose the World Court reviewing the Hungarian law restricting the proportion of “races” in colleges to their proportion in the population. They’re afraid to base a challenge to the law on outsiders and on the Treaty of Trianon, the much-hated treaty imposed on Hungary after the Great War. 

A Kansas judge issues a state-wide injunction against Klan parades in regalia.

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Today -100: December 19, 1925: Wiggle wiggle

During the Senate debate on the US joining the World Court, Sen. Irvin Lenroot (R-Wisc.) points out that the Republican 1924 platform called for just that. William Borah (R-Idaho) responds “if a man could be conceived who thought this was an injurious proposition or detrimental to his country and would still vote for it because his platform said so, he would be the slimiest creature that ever wiggled his was through the United States Senate.” A simple no would have sufficed.

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Today -100: December 18, 1925: Of insubordination, fascist menaces, and Christmas trees

Col. Billy Mitchell is convicted of insubordination for expressing views on military aviation contrary to those of his superiors and is suspended for 5 years.

The French government thinks the “Fascist menace” is dissipating. It helps that the French Fascists and the monarchists are now fighting (literally), with the latter now finally united behind a single pretender to the crown, from the Bourbon line of the royal family (ousted in 1830) rather than the Orléans line (1848).

Italy’s commissioner for South Tyrol, which was awarded to Italy after the Great War, reverses a decree, part of Italy’s attempt to suppress the German language and culture, banning Christmas trees.

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Today -100: December 17, 1925: ‘Tis now Ankara’s turn to speak

Two far-right German monarchists, one a petty criminal who loves him some Hitler and one a former mental patient, are arrested for a plot to assassinate Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann. One of them told a lawyer about it and the lawyer told the police.

The League of Nations gives Britain a mandate over Iraq and sets a border between it and Turkey, which is not best pleased and still claims Mosul, responding “‘Tis now Ankara’s turn to speak.” Britain thinks there probably won’t be a war with Turkey. Probably. 

New York City Mayor-Elect Jimmy Walker pledges to make NY a clean city. Supposedly there’s been an influx of gamblers since the election, believing NY would be an open city.

Sir Basil Thomson, head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch during the Great War, is arrested in Hyde Park “committing an act in violation of public decency” with a Miss Thelma de Lava, which doesn’t sound like a real name but it is the one she gives the police. He also gives a fake name; both are bailed but fail to appear as ordered.

The Kentucky Court of Appeals awards the black servants of “turfman” John T. Hughes the money he left them in his will, rejecting the claims of his (white) relatives. So Ellen Davis, a former slave in her 80s, is now the richest black woman in the South. Her son, who is also Hughes’s son, also gets a legacy.

The State Democratic Women’s Association of Texas will not support Gov. Miriam “Ma” Ferguson for re-election. Nor will the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. I don’t think any women’s group supports her. The president of the Texas branch of the League of Women Voters is annoyed that people outside Texas think Ferguson’s election was a victory for women.

Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy is published.

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Today -100: December 16, 1925: With a friendly smile, respectful bow and doffing of the hat

Special constables seize their barracks in Belfast to demand compensation for their units being disbanded under the Irish agreement. Other cops in Derry & elsewhere in Northern Ireland refuse to hand in arms and equipment.

The Texas Textbook Commission removes references to evolution from a biology textbook.

People in Edineţi, a town in Bessarabia, which was annexed by Romania in 1918, will be required to salute Romanian officers, “with a friendly smile, respectful bow and doffing of the hat.” In the meantime, the Town Commandant’s hat will be paraded through the streets on a stick so the Edineţihoovians can practice the smiling, bowing, and doffing.

The Nacionalista & Democratic Parties of the Philippines Legislature agree to join together to fight for Filipino autonomy, in response to Coolidge’s State of the Union call for strengthening the power of the governor-general against the Legislature (and also the veto by Gov.-Gen. Leonard Wood last week of a bill for an independence plebiscite, but the NYT kinda missed that one).

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Today -100: December 15, 1925: Oh sure it looks easy now that you’ve explained it

Kip and Alice Rhinelander have scattered to the winds. Not the same winds, of course. He’s making sure she can’t serve him to sue for support, she’s, I dunno, escaping reporters? Anyway, the Ku Klux Klan are searching for her in Florida hotels in which she’s thought to be staying. Not ominous at all. (Update: she’s actually still in New Rochelle; the NYT helpfully provides her address.)

The Republican Senate leadership decide not to ostracize newly elected young Robert La Follette Jr. after all. They recognize him as a Republican and put him on three Senate committees.

Harry Houdini’s new show opens at the 44th Street Theatre. The entire second act is devoted to exposing the ticks used by mediums. Some of the audience members are annoyed that he asked questions of them based on letters his assistant took from coats in the cloakroom.

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Today -100: December 14, 1925: His favorite

Headline of the Day -100:

Oops. 9 years old. “Rose, he said, had always been his favorite.” His less-favored children must be wondering what’s in store for them.

Incidentally, Rudyard Kipling has been sick, but is now on the mend. This has been worth something like a dozen news articles over the last couple of weeks. It’s always a little weird when the NYT mounts a death-watch. Kipling won’t actually die anytime soon.

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Today -100: December 13, 1925: Of cars, cavaliers, empires, and mosques

Yugoslav Prime Minister Nikola Pašić’s car runs over and kills a teacher. Later in the day, the acting foreign minister’s car also runs over a woman. Ice, they say, and definitely not some sort of sick competition.

Pennsylvania Gov. Gifford Pinchot sets an execution date for William Cavalier, who was 14 when convicted of murdering his grandmother.

It is hinted that Mussolini might promote Italy to an empire rather than a mere kingdom in the new year. The new emperor would, of course, be the spineless Victor Emmanuel, not Moose, perhaps the reason this never came to pass.

A mosque is being built in Paris, more or less the first in mainland France. The Grande Mosquée de Paris will open next year in the 5th arrondissement. 

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Today -100: December 12, 1925: No additional punishment would act as a deterrent to those who would preach an erroneous doctrine of government

The League of Nations invites the US (and other non-members Germany and Russia) to join a committee to prepare for a disarmament conference. 

NY Gov. Al Smith pardons Benjamin Gitlow, the former Socialist state assemblyperson convicted of “criminal anarchy” in 1920 for stuff published in a newspaper of which he was business manager. Smith says he’s been “sufficiently punished for a political crime”* and in prison “has meekly submitted to the sovereign power of the State,” which I’d consider an insult if anyone said it about me. Smith says “no additional punishment would act as a deterrent to those who would preach an erroneous doctrine of Government.” Gitlow will run for governor next year as the Workers Party candidate. The Comintern will expel him from the Communist Party in 1929 as insufficiently radical and yadda yadda yadda, he’ll turn anti-Communist by the late ‘30s and write I Confess: The Truth About American Communism in 1940.

*I failed to notice the significance of this, but Gitlow will point out next week that Smith “admitted in his pardon that there is such a thing in this country as imprisonment for political offenses.”

In Prussia, Robert Grütte-Lehder of Gen. Ludendorff’s Nazi-adjacent German Völkisch Freedom Party (DVFP) is on trial for murdering Heinrich Dammers of that same group in 1923 for supposedly passing party secrets to the Communists. This is the first Berlin trial for the “Feme murders” (Fememorde – punishment murders) in which far-right groups cleaned house. c.30 officers and such are said to be awaiting similar trials. Grütte-Lehder, “resembling an east side gangster,” accuses DVFP party leaders and Reichstag members of inducing him to kill Dammers, giving him a letter – an actual letter – authorizing it.  (Update: I think it actually just tells him to establish order in the Stettin branch of the party, which Grütte-Lehder says amounts to the same thing.)

The Italian Chamber of Deputies passes Mussolini’s labor law abolishing all labor unions except Fascist “syndicates,” which he says are different from Socialist labor unions in that they are based on class collaboration. Strikes will be banned in favor of mandatory arbitration. The Duck tells the Chamber that this should be considered a war measure “because I consider the Italian nation in a permanent state of war.” “Even as controversies are not permitted at the front in wartime, so now we must realize the maximum national efficiency.” A NYT editorial gives this, um, illuminating analysis: “Italy’s new labor laws would indicate that the hen of dictatorship has been brooding over the eggs of radicalism and, oddly enough, has hatched out chickens shaped in the Fascist image.”

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Today -100: December 11, 1925: Punishing rebels

Republicans in the House of Representatives who didn’t back Nicholas Longworth for Speaker or didn’t vote for a new House rule to kill bills not supported by the Republican Party leadership – mostly Wisconsin Progressives – are ousted from committee chairmanships; some are expelled from their committees.

 

Women’s organizations in New York want a minimum marriage age, which is currently 12 years old with parental consent under common law.

Lady Nancy Astor, MP offers to pay to send any British Communist (and his family) (she assumes it’s a he) who thinks Soviet Russia is so great to Russia if they will live there two years to enjoy “the joys of Bolshevist rule.” She is not offering to pay their return fare.

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Today -100: December 10, 1925: Budget!

Coolidge calls for a budget of $3,494,222,308. This would include $76m for aviation and $22m for prohibition enforcement. But he wants states to pay for their own damn roads.

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Today -100: December 9, 1925: In the right direction

Calvin Coolidge sends Congress his State of the Union address (not yet called that). He calls for joining the World Court because “Wars do not spring into existence. They arise from small incidents and trifling irritations which can be adjusted by an international court.” He wants to send power from the federal government to the states, but mostly, he says, “we are going in the right direction. The country does not appear to require radical departures from the policies already adopted so much as it needs a further extension of these policies and the improvement of details.” He says negroes “should be protected from all violence,” without using the word “lynching.” One state he doesn’t want to send more power to is the Philippines, where he wants the governor general to have even more power “so that he will not be so dependent upon the local legislative body to render effective our efforts to set an example of the sound administration and good government, which is so necessary for the preparation of the Philippine people for self-government under ultimate independence.”

France arrests 3 Englishmen as leaders of a spy circle trying to steal French aviation secrets. This may or may not be retaliation after the British supposedly arrested French spies trying to steal British aviation secrets.

Headline of the Day -100:

Tick tick tick tick...

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Today -100: December 8, 1925: Of stranglers, pearl-colored spats, and uniforms

Russia arrests 15 Czarist-era executioners, who between them strangled 500+ revolutionaries secretly in a cellar. I’m surprised the arrests didn’t happen much earlier.

The 69th session of Congress opens (not counting the special session back in March). And the big thing you need to know about it, evidently, is that Robert La Follette Jr. took the oath of office wearing pearl-colored spats, which “were commented on smilingly by old Senators, who recalled that the elder La Follette also was partial to spats but of a less conspicuous shade.” Nicholas Longworth, husband of Alice Roosevelt, daughter of Theodore, takes over as speaker of the House. Alice looks on from the visitors’ gallery, wearing... oh, who cares what she was wearing. She is sitting next to Mary Borah, wife of Sen. William Borah, the actual father of the child Alice gave birth to in February. Awkward. 

The increasingly fascist Society of Awakening Hungarians adopts a uniform, much like the Italian Fascists, and adopts a battle axe as their emblem, this, I think:

There may be push-back from the government on the whole uniform thing.

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Today -100: December 7, 1925: Of wars, barbaric noises, and outrages

Former Texas Gov. James Ferguson writes in his weekly newspaper Ferguson’s Forum, mostly known for featuring advertisements from companies wanting government contracts and other favors, “The war is on.”

Siegfried Wagner, son of composer Richard, calls jazz “barbaric noise” and “nigger rhythmics” turned out by “half-civilized negroes.” In 1913 Kaiser Wilhelm banned army officers from dancing the tango, “this nigger grotesque.” Everyone’s a critic.

At a meeting to protest “the dismemberment of Ireland,” Éamon de Valera calls the decision not to change the border between North & South Ireland the greatest outrage ever committed by England against the Irish people. Surely he can think of a few greater outrages committed by England against the Irish people.

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Today -100: December 6, 1925: I do and I don’t

Texas Attorney Gen. Dan Moody, who is not a fan of the governors Ferguson, seems to kill the idea of a special session to impeach Gov. Miriam, saying it’s against public policy to have a privately funded session. So a special session could only be held if the legislators pay their own expenses, and we know that ain’t gonna happen. But if the impeachment movement is sputtering, it’s probably because the governors Ferguson have been leaking that they won’t be running for re-election (she will, though, and will lose humiliatingly to Dan Moody). Also, the grand jury has yet to weigh in.

Mussolini calls for schools to be “inspired by the ideals of Fascism.” Aren’t they all? “It is not necessary to burden the mind with infinite notions which can never be remembered, which leave nothing worth while.”

German Chancellor Hans Luther and his Cabinet resign. No one else wants the job, so Luther will probably retain it.

The Rhinelander v. Rhinelander jury refuses to annul their marriage, denying Kip’s charge that Alice R. tricked him into marriage by racial fraud. Alice will now demand alimony and attorneys’ fees. A reporter asks if she still loves her husband and she says “I do and I don’t.” Jurors insist to reporters that racial prejudice did not enter into their deliberations.

So the Rhinelanders are still married but won’t, I think, ever meet again. His lawyers will appeal the ruling for a couple of year and fail. In 1929 she’ll sue Kip’s father Philip for alienation of affections (Kip was legally obligated to support his wife, but didn’t). He’ll try to get a Nevada divorce, but New York State won’t recognize it because she was not present. She will then file suit in NY for separation, finally forcing the family to negotiate with her, paying her $31,500 (most of which went to her lawyers, as is the custom) plus $3,800 a year in exchange for an NDA and giving up the right to use the name “Rhinelander” (it will, however, appear on her grave stone). Leonard died in 1936 at 32 of pneumonia. He didn’t re-marry; neither did Alice, who died in 1989.

W. E. B. DuBois will point out that “if Rhinelander had used this girl as concubine or prostitute, white America would have raised no word of protest; white periodicals would have printed no headlines, white ministers would have said no single word. It is when he legally and decently marries the girl that Hell breaks loose and literally tears the pair apart.”

There’s a detail I haven’t managed to shoehorn in yet: 40 years before all this, Kip’s uncle William (brother of Philip) married an Irish servant, to a horrified social and familial reaction that will sound familiar. The family sent a lawyer to try to bribe his wife to go back to Ireland. William shot the lawyer in the shoulder, which resulted in his death 6 months later, but William was never charged.

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Today -100: December 5, 1925: Of verdicts and family traditions

The jury in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander reaches a verdict! In 12 hours! We don’t know what it is!

NY Gov. Al Smith becomes a grandfather (assuming he wasn’t already one). The news is a surprise because no one knew that his son Arthur eloped last year when he was 17 and a student at the Christian Brothers Academy. His older brother Al Jr. also eloped last year.

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Today -100: December 4, 1925: Of loans, indemnities, borders, and textbooks

Belgium is negotiating a major loan in New York to pay off its war debt, and Belgians will be asked, under a proposal by the president of the Bank of Brussels, to work free for a half hour per week at overtime rates, the money going to service the debt.

A League of Nations commission determines that Greece is entirely to blame for the recent War of the Stray Dog and must pay Bulgaria an indemnity of 20 million levas, which is the equivalent of some money, for material losses; it also recommends an additional 10 million levas for injuries and deaths of soldiers.

The Irish Free State, Northern Ireland & Great Britain come to an agreement on the Irish border, which is not to change it and indeed to suppress the report of the boundary commission. Ulster intransigence wins again, I guess. As part of the overall agreement, Britain will stop trying to get the Free State to pay any of Britain’s war debt (disputes over how to calculate it means the Free State has never actually paid any of it), and Ireland will take over payment of compensation for the Civil War, which means it has to pay for its own oppression (as was the custom).

Texas Gov. Miriam “Ma” Ferguson’s opponents have another potential ground for impeachment: a possibly corrupt deal for elementary school spelling books, which was made after she appointed her husband to the Textbook Commission, which then mysteriously awarded the contract to the highest bidder.

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Today -100: December 3, 1925: We don’t want hats!

Gen. Miguel Primo de Rivera supposedly gives up the dictatorship of Spain and dissolves the “Directorate” he set up in ‘23. He does not restore the Cortes or the Constitution or end press censorship. 

Dueling is still a thing in Germany, or at any rate Prussia. Junker aristo Bogislav von Somnitz is sentenced to 2½ years in prison for having killed a duelee in one of four (4, count ’em, 4) duels he held in a single day. The other 3 duelists will get 6 months in prison and the seconds 1 month. Somnitz had been assaulted at a hunting party by the baron who hosted it and the other 3 because of his refusal to participate in monarchist plots and to hide insurgents on his property. Naturally he challenged them. The first 3 duels were bloodless, mostly because the sun hadn’t come up yet, but it had by the time he faced Lt. von Kohl, who bled to death. The judge rules that Somnitz was not guilty of premeditated murder because he shot at his opponents’ legs and anyway the insult to his honor required a duel in response. 

A Turkish man who put up posters objecting to the government’s ban on fezes is hanged. Elsewhere, a mob demonstrates in front of the governor’s house in Marash shouting “We don’t want hats!”

Young Kip Rhinelander’s lawyer, retired NY Supreme Court justice Isaac Mills, sums up. Some quotes:

You might as well bury this young man six feet deep in the soil of the old churchyard where his early American ancestors sleep as to condemn him to be chained for eternity to this mulatto woman.

There is not a father among you – and I tried to fill this jury box with fathers [The jury is all-male, as was almost always the case in NY until jury duty became mandatory for women in the ‘70s] – who would not rather see his son in his casket than wedded to this mulatto woman. There is room in this fair county for blacks as well as whites, but the decent blacks object to this marriage, as do the decent whites.

He will hail your verdict if you find a verdict for him, as a person on the steps of the scaffold welcomes a reprieve from the governor.

He admits Alice was humiliated by “that indecent exhibition in the jury room,” but 

with the buoyance of her race she will regain her spirits. ... Let her gain a husband of her own race and find happiness with him [like her sister Emily,] who without vaulting ambition wed within her own color and kind.

Vaulting ambition is the worst kind of ambition.

Mills says Kip had the intelligence of a 14- or 15-year-old when he met Alice and a “physical infirmity” – is that how he’s referring to stuttering? – so he fell under her spell, and “mind you, women of her race mature earlier.”

He calls on the jury to free poor Kip “from this horrid, unnatural, absurd, terrible union.”

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Today -100: December 2, 1925: Of occupations and research

British troops evacuate (finally) the North Rhineland (Cologne and environs). Unlike the French when they de-occupied the Ruhr, the British are doing it without making any triumphalist fuss.

Commerce Sec Herbert Hoover complains at the lack of spending in the US on fundamental scientific research. He claims we spend ten times as much on cosmetics.

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Today -100: December 1, 1925: They must think I’m a bird

Texas Gov. Miriam “Ma” Ferguson refuses to call a special session of the Legislature, calling those requesting it “wolves” who “want to gather here and tear me apart.” “They tried to camouflage [the special session] as an inquiry into the foot and mouth disease and tick eradication. They must think I’m a bird. It’s my feet, my mouth, and my eradication they want.” Her feet? Her mouth?

Today the governor – Jim, not Ma, who quit for the day at noon – sat in the governor’s chair and talked to reporters, “using language in reference to the anti-Ferguson group that no lady Governor would think of, let alone use.”

The lady governor demands that Amon Carter, publisher of The Fort Worth Star Telegram, resign from the Board of Directors of the Texas Technological College because, she claims, he was drunk at a football game.

Hungary will ban foreign jazz bands after December 31st, not because the government hates jazz, which it probably does, but to protect native jazz bands.

Alice Rhinelander will not testify. Her lawyer Lee Davis, who last week made her strip for the jury, says “It struck me that it was just time the world was through with the slime of this case.” Alice is at the visibly-weeping-all-the-time phase of the trial. Davis, in his closing argument, accuses the opposition of attempting to smear everyone, from Alice’s mother to the chauffeur, who was ordered by a court to pay child support for his illegitimate child, which has what to do with his having told Kip that Alice’s father is black?

Headline of the Day -100:

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Today -100: November 30, 1925: They wish to go as fast as possible along the same road

Coolidge’s Aircraft Board of Inquiry rejects Billy Mitchell’s call for a unified Air Force, continuing the existing system of separate army and navy air services.

Texan citizens create a fund to pay for a special session of the Legislature to investigate Gov. Miriam Ferguson, since it turns out that special sessions don’t have the power to appropriate funds for themselves during the special session.

A day after Gov. Ferguson announces a bounty on rich flouters of prohibition law, George Brady, a black butler at the Governor’s Mansion is arrested for attempting to sell liquor to some white dudes. Brady had a death sentence commuted by a previous governor, but his parole was revoked by another governor “on general principles,” he was then furloughed to work in the Mansion, and later pardoned by Ms. Ferguson.

The NYT op-ed page says it would have more sympathy with Ferguson’s critics if she hadn’t campaigned on a promise to let her husband do most of the governoring, a job divided between “an elected wife who confesses small knowledge of how to exercise it and a husband whose record shows that he knows too much.”

British Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill says “The Socialist in his folly and the Communist in his malice would undermine and fatally wreck the pillars of our society. They wish to go as fast as possible along the same road, but the Communist thinks he can smash his way by violence and the Socialist believes he can do it by humbug.” I’ve said it before: we just don’t use the word “humbug” often enough these days.

Gandhi is fasting again. The NYT fails to say why, but it’s a “penitential” 7-day fast after “moral lapses” by some kids at the Satyagraha Ashram.

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Today -100: November 29, 1925: Of booze bounties

Texas Gov. Miriam “Ma” Ferguson offers a $500 reward for the arrest and conviction of any Texan for violation of prohibition laws – if they’re worth more than $5,000. This is her response to critics of her pardons of poor people jailed for low-level liquor offences, such as certain millionaire newspaper publishers. The press conference does nothing to dispel the notion that it’s her husband who is really running the state, as she turns all the hard questions over to him. The Austin American editorializes, “James E. Ferguson Should Cease to Be Governor.”

The Italian bill currently being debated to punish expatriate Italian critics of Fascism by removal of their citizenship and seizure of their property neglects to specify what actual infractions are covered or how the culprits’ guilt will be determined.

The collapse of the Painlevé government in France halted work on a bill to suppress the French Fascisti.

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Today -100: November 28, 1925: They’ve scraped Hell with a fine-tooth comb and they’ve found nothing

The German Reichstag ratifies the Locarno treaties, 291 to 174, and authorizes the government to apply for membership in the League of Nations. 

Bells are installed under each seat in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, just in case deputies would like to drown out, say, a Communist deputy.

Aristide Briand manages to form a Cabinet.

Reporters who thought they’d be having a press conference with Texas Gov. Miriam Ferguson are instead presented with her husband, former impeached governor James Ferguson, described as “a tall, lean, hard-bitten man of the shrewd farmer type,” who explains that his wife is too tired from shaking hands at the Thanksgiving football game between the U of Texas and the Aggies. In the two-hour presser, Ferguson doesn’t quite dispel the notion that he’s the person really running the state, repeatedly deploying the pronoun “we,” as in “We haven’t decided whether we will run for governor again,” and even saying “I” came second in the first primary. He says the impeachment talk is from a dastardly coalition of the Klan and supporters of other candidates for governor next year. He denies selling pardons. He admits that road contractors have been making huge profits, but attributes it to the good weather. He says “They’ve scraped Hell with a fine-tooth comb and they’ve found nothing.” Ferguson, who during his own impeachment 12 years ago refused to say who had given him a $156,000 loan, now admits it was 3 brewers supporting his anti-prohibition stance.

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Today -100: November 27, 1925: Of cabinets, kings of Siam, lonely Thanksgivings, and hangings

Édouard Herriot fails to form a Cabinet (in bargaining with him, the Socialists rather overplayed their hand), so Aristide Briand is given another shot at it.

King Rama VI of Siam dies at 44. He has no male heirs but a daughter was born 2 days (or possibly 2 hours, I’ve seen both) before he died. The throne will go to his brother. VI went to Oxford, where he was a member of the Bullingdon Club, just like Boris Johnson, and he translated Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice into Thai.

Kip Rhinelander, whose family bullied him into this annulment lawsuit, has no contact with that family on Thanksgiving. He eats his dinner alone in his hotel with the family lawyer/Kip-wrangler. Alice celebrates the holiday with her family.

Two Greek colonels, one of whom was the chief of police at Saloniki, are publicly hanged outside Athens before a crowd of 30,000, for embezzling public funds. It’s a novelty, hanging having only recently been introduced in Greece. Don’t know how they used to execute people.

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Today -100: November 26, 1925: I don’t give a damn if he is

France: Paul Doumer, like Briand, fails to form a cabinet, so Édouard Herriot, who was last prime minister in April, will try next.

Texas Gov. Miriam Ferguson celebrates Thanksgiving by pardoning another 105 prisoners, including 27 murderers. Bribes? Maybe. She is under threat of impeachment for incompetence and waste of government funds, and many are criticizing her profligate issuing of pardons, a lot of them for prohibition offenses but including a bunch of murderers as well. One of her opponents in the Legislature, who the NYT annoyingly does not name, says “The next governor of Texas will be a man.” Speaker Lee Satterwhite says if Ferguson refuses to call a special session, he will. He says normally the chivalric men of the Legislature – and only men, although there was one (1) woman in the previous Lege) – wouldn’t pick on a woman, but she isn’t really governor, just “an accident in the Governor’s office... under the domination of her husband,” former impeached governor James Ferguson. Attorney General Dan Moody has advised the Speaker that he has the power to call a special session and that wanton waste (wanton waste is the worst kind of waste) constitutes a ground for impeachment; Attorney General Dan Moody will be the next governor of Texas.

On the witness stand in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander: a chauffeur who drove Kip around and pointed out to him that Alice’s father was a colored man. “I don’t give a damn if he is,” Kip responded.

Incidentally George Jones, Alice Rhinelander’s British-born father, always insists that he is a colored man (or mulatto, as they say in Britain), not a negro. It’s a very important distinction for him.

5 British Communists (including future general secretary Harry Pollitt) are sentenced to 1 year for conspiracy to utter seditious libels and incitement to mutiny. 7 others get 6-month sentences after refusing to promise not to have anything to do with the Communist Party.

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Today -100: November 25, 1925: First they say she said too much, and now they say she said nothing

France: Aristide Briand fails to form a cabinet. Leon Blum was asking for more ministries for the Socialists than Briand was willing to give. Paul Doumer will make the next attempt.

French Pres. Gaston Doumergue cancels the official reception for the new Russian ambassador, Christian Rakovsky, who has been insisting that the Garde Republicain Band play the Internationale at the event.

Kip Rhinelander’s lawyer asks to amend the charge against Alice Rhinelander from positive fraud to negative fraud. They’re no longer claiming that the Kipster didn’t realize she had negro blood but that she should have told him – nay, was required to tell him – that she was not white. Her lawyer responds, “First they say she said too much, and now they say she said nothing.”

Leonard Kip Rhinelander’s name has been removed from the 1926 edition of the New York Social Register.

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Today -100: November 24, 1925: You loved to have me do that, didn’t you, old scout?

Bryn Mawr College’s Self-Government Association (i.e., the student body) calls for  students to be allowed to smoke. The president agrees, saying the ban no longer rests on “intelligent public opinion.” A questionnaire shows half the students smoke.

50 members of the Texas Legislature sign a petition calling on the Speaker to call a special session (since Gov. Miriam Ferguson refuses to do so) to investigate the highly corrupt highway spending overseen by her husband. They plan to use the session to impeach members of the Highway Commission and, oh yeah, Gov. Ferguson herself. Attorney General Dan Moody last week forced the American Road Company to return $600,000 of excess profits.

French Pres. Gaston Doumergue asks Aristide Briand to form a government and become prime minister for the 8th time. The composition of his cabinet will likely have to move rightward. This sort of instability in French government could never happen today.

Headline of the Day -100:

There has been a series of violent assaults on women recently in Toledo, and this is the police response.

At the Rhinelander annulment trial, those letters from Kip to Alice are read to the court, after the judge orders women spectators to leave the courtroom (he’d just suggested it to them earlier, with limited compliance – then he read one of the letters). After reading the first letter, whose contents the NYT fails to disclose (but they will be available from street vendors the next day), Kip’s lawyer, retired NY Supreme Court justice Isaac Mills, asks him, “You recognize that letter as smut?” Young Kip agrees that the letter he wrote, which wasn’t exactly intended for public consumption, was indeed smut. Mills describes the second letter as “the vilest smut.” So if you’re wondering, the Kipster’s letter was about him going down on Alice. “You loved to have me do that, didn’t you, old scout?”  (Isn’t that the name of the porn version of The Great Gatsby?) Her lawyer asks him, “You had no suspicion inside of you that to put your head between her legs was an unnatural thing?” He didn’t.

It gets grosser from there. Her lawyer asks the justice to clear the court so the jury can inspect her body to determine whether Kip would have recognized her skin color as negroid. She is told to lower her coat, under which she is wearing only underwear, down to her breasts and raise it to her knees. Crying all the time. He then asks Kip if she’s the same color she was when they spent a week fucking in the Hotel Marie Antoinette. He concedes that she is.

(Because things have gotten sooooo much better in the last hundred years, Brigitte Macron, wife of the French president, recently had to provide scientific evidence of not being a man to the court trying her defamation suit against an “influencer” who said she was.)

The federal Bureau of Education compiles a list of 40 books all children should read by age 16. Little Women, Robinson Crusoe, tons of Twain & Kipling, Alice in Wonderland, and, um, Uncle Remus.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court upholds the death sentence on William Cavalier, at 15 the youngest person ever sentenced to death in the electric chair in Pennsylvania. When he was 14 he killed his grandmother with a rifle to steal money to go to the movies. No article I’ve read about the case says what the movie was, but we are informed that he enjoyed it.

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Today -100: November 23, 1925: Of confidence and spirit photographs

France: the government of Paul Painlevé loses a vote of confidence in Parliament, the right wing and the Communists joining forces to defeat it.

An article in Scientific American debunks a “spirit photograph” of St John the Evangelist and some cupids which Arthur Conan Doyle defended as totally real. The article, by Walter Franklin Prince, who actually believes in some psychical stuff, identifies the original on which the fraud is based: a 17th-century painting by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, with some added “ectoplasm.” “Do London spiritualists never visit the National Gallery?” he asks.

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Today -100: November 22, 1925: Foreshadowing

The Rhinelander v. Rhinelander case was abruptly adjourned Thursday after Alice’s lawyers blatantly attempted to blackmail young Kip, showing him a letter he wrote to Alice in hornier days but not reading the letter to the court... yet. Evidently it’s explosive enough that his lawyers are now reportedly negotiating for a 6-figure settlement.

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Today -100: November 21, 1925: Of queens mother, prohibition, and burying Snoopy’s arch-nemesis

Queen Mother Alexandra, the Denmark-born widow of Edward VII, dies

at 80.

Coolidge calls for prosecutions of users of alcohol and not just bootleggers.

France has finally given the body of The Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen, back to Germany, which holds a ceremony in which the coffin is accompanied by planes. One of which crashes, killing its 21-year-old pilot. It’s what Reddy would have wanted, probably. 

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Today -100: November 20, 1925: Of new world spirits, candidate kings, and jaundice

At the dinner of the NY State Chamber of Commerce, Pres. Coolidge (also broadcast over the radio) calls for the US to join the World Court. While reassuring his audience that it would involve few actual obligations, he says it would have a tremendous sentimental effect. “It would be public notice that the enormous influences of our country were to be cast upon the side of the enlightening processes of civilization. It would be the beginning of a new world spirit.”

Fascist deputies in the Italian Parliament attack and throw out Communist deputies. 

I must have missed the speech where Mussolini threatened to annex the Austrian Tyrol. So far, this campaign consists of the post office refusing to deliver mail in South Tyrol, which was awarded to Italy after the war, unless it’s addressed in Italian.

Archduke Albrecht II, a lesser Habsburg, who “has not previously shown striking qualities of leadership” but is pushing to become King of Hungary, becomes leader of the more or less fascist (mostly more) Society of Awakening Hungarians.

The NYT refers to the questioning of Kip Rhinelander on the stand as “at times unprintable, and a constant dwelling on unpleasant subjects.” Was it jaundice? He says that Alice’s father, whose blackitudinousness is more obvious than hers, told him that he was an Englishman with jaundice, and he believed him. “Mr. Davis tried to get him to admit that he had seen the elderly negro in his nightshirt but without success.”

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Today -100: November 19, 1925: Of odium, the only live force in Italy, defectives, and the arms of women in Havana

The British House of Commons ratifies the Locarno Treaty in what is being called “the spirit of Locarno,” meaning a European desire for enduring peace. Ramsay MacDonald and David Lloyd George criticize the lack of consultation with the British Dominions. Foreign Minister Austen Chamberlain (whose brother will declare “peace for our time” in 1938) says, “I do not say that these treaties when ratified will make war impossible...” Disappointing. “...but I do say they will render war infinitely more difficult.” How will it render war infinitely – infinitely! – more difficult? Because any country that starts a war will be “clearly putting itself in the wrong before the whole civilised world and bearing the odium of such wrong-doing.”

The Italian Parliament is considering a bill to make Mussolini responsible only to the weak-ass king, not, as now, in theory, to parliament and the king. Other “ultra-fascista” bills would give The Duck a veto over the agenda of Parliament and seize the property and revoke the citizenship of Italians living abroad who say bad things about (“damage the prestige of”) the Fascist regime. The Duck praises the idea of Italians all voluntarily subscribing to pay off the war debt to the US. He sez “Today Fascismo is the only live force in Italy. Everything else can be relegated to museums.” Also, “Throughout the world there is a feeling that the parliamentary system was good in the past, but today it is insufficient for the needs and passions of modern society.”

Dr. Clarence Cook Little, president of the University of Michigan, calls for the sterilization of mental “defectives.” He says there won’t be any abuse of this because “a public opinion intelligent enough to understand its need will be intelligent enough to prevent its abuse.” See, and you were worried about abuse.

The Hungarian Court of Appeals reverses the death sentences (and possibly the convictions as well? unclear) of József Márffy and Karl Marosi, two leaders of the Society of Awakening Hungarians who threw bombs into a Jewish dance hall 2 years ago, killing 9, but it does sentence them to 6 years for trying to bomb the French Legation, the homes of 2 Liberal leaders, a court building, etc. Some light googling failed to reveal whatever happened to these dudes.

Rhinelander v. Rhinelander: Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander is questioned by Alice’s lawyer Lee Davis:

“What is the color of your wife’s body?”

“Dark.”

“How dark?”

“Fairly dark.”

“Is it very pronounced?”

“It isn’t any darker than the arms of women I have seen in Havana.”

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Today -100: November 18, 1925: You must admit that there is no longer room for modesty here

Headline of the Day -100:

A French expedition plans to reach the North Pole next year utilizing motorized amphibious sledges, some of them carrying airplanes. Honestly, that explanation is more than a little disappointing after reading “mystery sleds” in the headline.

The British Admiralty decides that the destroyer Vivacious won’t have former Prime Minister Lloyd George’s badge as its insignia but rather... a squirrel.

The Italian Senate discusses giving women the municipal vote, while the Chamber considers abolishing elections in 7,000+ of the 9,000 municipalities. Bit of a roller coaster for the Italian women there.

Rhinelander v. Rhinelander: Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander testifies, or, as the NYT puts it, “A sadly confused young man stuttered his way through the intimate confessions of his courtship”. Alice’s lawyer Lee Davis gets him to admit that he, in the words of Davis, “voluntarily fell in love with” Alice quite soon after meeting her in 1921. This undercuts Kip’s lawyer’s assertions that he was the weak-minded victim of a scheming woman. He admits that it was he who pursued her and it had been his idea to get an apartment with her. Davis: “I didn’t want to bring filth into this case, but you must admit that there is no longer room for modesty here.” The Kippinator also admits that some of the claims in his pre-trial sworn statements, such as that he had frequent conversations about race with Alice in which she lied, were not true and were inserted by his father’s thug/lawyer. It’s possible Kip is trying to sabotage the case his family forced him into.

His testimony is interrupted so they can bring to the stand... famous black-face actor Al Jolson, who just wants to deny ever speaking with Alice, as she had claimed in one of her letters. The newspaper reports have caused him some trouble with his wife.

Back to the main witness. Leonard admits having taken meals with Alice’s relatives, despite having previously said that he doesn’t want to associate with colored people. He does deny having played a game of deuces wild with black men.

Then some of his letters to Alice are read out. He is forced to admit he was trying to get Alice to think about sex.

“What did you mean by ‘If you are real nice to me, once in a while I will let you drive’?”

“If she would let me caress her.”

....

“What is the worse deception, to lead a girl to believe you want to marry her and take that which is most precious to a woman, or for her to say she is white and not colored?”

“The latter.”

Davis asks if he didn’t recognize that a phrase Alice used, “strutting party” (dancing) was “a typically negro expression.” He did not.

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