Today -100: April 25, 1925: My most sacred hope is to banish the horrors of war

The prospects of a Bulgaria-Yugoslav war seem to be fading, as France and Britain tell them to knock it off.

London police are pretending to think that the Reds will do a Sofia St. Nedelya Church thing and blow up the church where the service will be held for Gen. Lord Rawlinson, the commander-in-chief of the Indian Army since 1920, whose body has been returned from Delhi. The cops are inspecting every inch of St. Margaret’s Church for infernal devices, not neglecting the organ’s pipes.

Sen. Burton Wheeler is acquitted of the bullshit charge of representing an oil company before the Dept of Interior. The jury deliberated 10 minutes. They got dinner first. A minute later Wheeler got a telegram informing him that his wife had given birth back in DC while he was stuck in Montana with this nonsense.

German presidential candidates Hindenburg and Wilhelm Marx both make 15-minute radio addresses to the nation. The field marshal: “I proclaim to the world my most sacred hope is to banish the horrors of war”. Oh sure, you say that AFTER you lose a war.

The German republicans have been claiming that the US will halt loans to Germany if Hindenburg wins.

Outside a political meeting in Montmartre, a clash between Communists and Nationalists (probably Action Française or a similar nationalist/proto-fascist group) leaves 3 of the latter dead, allegedly shot from behind. In the National Assembly, the Right demands the suppression of Communist organizations.

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Today -100: April 24, 1925: Some good ones

Calvin Coolidge meets Will Rogers for 10 minutes at the White House. Afterwards, Rogers says Cal does have a sense of humor and has “some good ones,” but gives no examples. (I do know that Cal liked to buzz for the Secret Service, then hide under his desk while hilarity ensued).

5 British Fascisti are acquitted for the kidnapping last month of Harry Pollitt to keep him from a Communist-adjacent conference. I guess they portrayed it as a jolly jape and the jury swallowed it.

Fayette Avery McKenzie resigns as president of historically black Fisk University. He’s spent his presidency cracking down on the students, closing their newspaper, abolishing the student council, banning students from walking with students of the opposite sex, etc., and students and alumni are suggesting maybe replacing him with an actual black person. The first black president will in fact take office in 1947.

Wilson Godfrey Harvey, governor of South Carolina for 8 months in 1922-3, is convicted of violating banking laws at his Enterprise Bank (possibly for accepting deposits after he knew the bank was going bankrupt) and sentenced to either 4 months in the pokey or a fine of $400. He opts for the latter.

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Today -100: April 23, 1925: Something something cheese

The Wisconsin attorney general decides that the Ku Klux Klan cannot incorporate within the state.

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Today -100: April 22, 1925: If you can’t trust a poet to forecast elections, who can you trust?

In the Montana trumped-up trial of Sen. Burton Wheeler, the government sprung a surprise witness yesterday, George B. Hayes – not to be confused with George “Gabby” Hayes – a lawyer who claims that Interior Dept solicitor E.S. Booth, acting for Wheeler, called him to ask him to meet Wheeler at the Waldorf-Astoria, where Wheeler asked him to intervene with the Land Office re oil & gas prospecting permits. Wheeler is calling a Bell Telephone employee to come from DC to Montana to testify that there was no such phone call.

The NYT goes to the experts for intel on the forthcoming German presidential elections: passengers on a ship arriving from Hamburg. Evidently, Hindenburg is gonna lose, at least according to a couple of bankers and the poet Christoph Kaergel.

Headline of the Day -100:

The Puerto Rican Legislature passed a bill legalizing cockfighting. The ASPCA is lobbying Gov. Horace Towner to veto it.

Some time earlier this month, The Lost World was shown on a plane flight between London & Paris, the first feature-length in-flight movie.

It is pointed out to NYC Mayor John Hylan that the reason people keep getting run over crossing the street to get to the 4th Street entrance to the subway in Brooklyn is that it’s IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING STREET.

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Today -100: April 21, 1925: We are destined to live in peace for all time

The Bulgarian army, despite its treaty-limited size, seems perfectly capable of killing suspected Communists on the street by the hundreds.

Bulgarian police kill Capt. Ninkoff, the supposed Communist ringleader of the St Nedelya Church bombing – which I don’t think he was – “resisting arrest.”

A US Navy cruiser lands at Ceiba, Honduras. I guess there’s a revolt going on.

Japanese Ambassador to the US Tsuneo Matsudaira tells the Harvard Club that war between the US & Japan is “a matter of physical impossibility, and we are destined to live in peace for all time.” So that’s reassuring.

The Treasury Dept says it’s pretty much stopped rum-running.

The Associated Press, which has hitherto banned the broadcast of its articles on radio, will now allow it for news “of transcendent importance.”

Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson is finally in prison, awaiting trial. I’m expecting intensive coverage, as previewed by the NYT describing his first prison meal: fried liver and gravy, mashed potatoes, bread & water. He enjoyed it.

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Today -100: April 20, 1925: I am not the class murderer which I am pictured

Bulgaria is trying all public order offences in military courts, resulting in death penalties galore, some of which, possibly hundreds, are being immediately carried out.

Paul von Hindenburg, “77 years old and looking it,” gives the opening speech of his presidential campaign in Hanover. He complains about his candidacy being portrayed as signaling “imminent military reaction” (imminent military reaction is the worst sort of military reaction) and looks back fondly to the period when “I had the good fortune to hold the enemy back from our borders with a united nation behind me.” And a large heap of dead soldiers in front of him. He does acknowledge the Weimar Constitution, semi-believably. “I am not a militarist,” he says, not especially believably. “Also I am not the class murderer which I am pictured.”

Tonight is... the night they raided Minsky’s (not the first nor the last time). I’ve recently rewatched that movie and realized I’ve been mixing up Britt Ekland and Elke Sommer my entire life.

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Today -100: April 19, 1925: Of cavaliers, dragons, aviatrixes, and shallow ponds

Bulgaria is said to be rife with fighting, assassinations, and plundering, but who knows since the government imposed censorship and cut off all communications with the outside world. It’s afraid the church bombing was the signal for the start of a revolution. Martial law is declared, and house-to-house searches commence in Sofia. One theory: this is all about Yugoslavia trying to absorb Bulgaria. But there many other conspiracy theories making the rounds. The leaders of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union, which probably doesn’t rhyme so delightfully in Bulgarian, supposedly disappeared days before the explosion. Bulgaria asks the Powers to allow it to increase the size of its army, which is limited by the Neuilly peace treaty to 30,000, and to lend Bulgaria some planes so they can bomb Communists.

The National Bureau of Information and Education protests to Pennsylvania Gov. Gifford Pinchot against the planned execution of William Cavalier, now 15 but 14 when convicted of murdering his grandmother.

Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson and 2 others are indicted for 1st degree murder of Madge Oberholtzer (the 1st-degree part is that they didn’t get her to a doctor after she took poison after D.C. raped her).

The NYT says that Jews in Eastern European countries are stuck there, given the limited capacity of Palestine and the US’s immigration quotas. So Jews and their Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, Latvian and Romanian neighbors “must make up their minds to live together.”

The French Federation of Aeronautics bans women pilots and demands that Adrienne Bolland return her license. She tells them to suck it.

Headline of the Day -100:

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Today -100: April 18, 1925: A most difficult period

The left-centrist candidate for president of Germany, Wilhelm Marx, comes out for annexation of Austria. That’s... new.

Bulgarian PM Aleksandar Tsankov says “Bulgaria is passing through a most difficult period,” blaming the various assassinations and bombings and shit on Communists supported by Russia. Which is actually true.

I can’t find a date for this more specific than April, so I’ll just stick it here. The Crisis quotes Sen. Coleman Blease (D-SC): “I think the greatest mistake a white man ever made was to put his hand in his pocket to educate a nigger. You can’t educate a horse or a mule or a cow, and you can’t educate a nigger. They weren’t made to be educated. We don’t need them for lawyers or pharmacists and all that. They were made to cut wood, draw water, and work in the fields.”

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Today -100: April 17, 1925: A cunning plan

Remember the assassination of Gen. Konstantin Georgiev in Sofia, Bulgaria a couple of days ago? Turns out it was bait. During his funeral, attended by many generals and the Cabinet, the roof of the St Nedelya Church is blown up by an “infernal device” (which is the worst sort of device), killing 213 people, including Sofia mayor Paskal Paskalev; Gen. Stefan Nerezov, chief of Staff of the Bulgarian Army; former minister of war Kalin Naydenov; and several other generals and MPs. Cabinet members, who the positioning of the bomb suggests were the primary targets, escape because of the timing of the explosion. There was a large crowd in part because the Bulgarian Communist Party forged invitations and sent them out. Tsar Boris missed the funeral fun, at least that particular funeral fun, as he was attending the funerals of the people who died in the assassination attempt on himself.

The new Painlevé Cabinet in France will no longer have a “Ministry of the Devastated Regions.”

Opponents of the Cabinet, and of Joseph Caillaux in particular, plan to ask him, the first time he appears in the Senate, “Who started the war?”

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Today -100: April 16, 1925: Of diplomatresses, caillauxes, and singing sargents

Lucile Atcherson, 30, is appointed 3rd secretary of the US legation at Berne. A suffragist activist back in the day, Atcherson was the first woman in the diplomatic service, in 1923. Naturally, the NYT spells her name wrong. In 1922, Harding nominated her to the foreign service, but the Senate rejected her, considering it unseemly for a single woman to travel abroad. In a few years, lack of promotion (job assessments said the Swiss diplomats wouldn’t invite a mere woman to their reindeer games), a transfer to Panama, and an impending marriage will force her resignation.

The French United Socialists won’t join a Paul Painlevé-led government but agree not to block it either, as they would with Briand, so we’re a go. Painlevé asks Joseph Caillaux to be finance minister for what would be the third time, although the first since his wife shot the editor of Le Figaro dead and since he was convicted of treason. He asks Aristide Briand to be foreign minister, which should be fun because Briand is NOT a fan of Monsieur Caillaux. C’s ministership will not make it any easier to get approval of the of the government from the Senate (which was the body that held his treason trial). The right has never forgiven him for not starting a war with Germany when he was PM in 1912.

Maryland will stop hindering tourists driving home from vacations in Florida.

Gay or bi or whatever painter John Singer Sargent dies at 69.

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Today -100: April 15, 1925: Clipped!

Headline of the Day -100:

Shots are fired at Tsar Boris III’s car, killing the director of the Bulgaria National Museum and a servant but not his tsarishness. “The King’s experience was a thrilling one...” One interesting detail: he and the remaining members of his entourage returned fire. Does the tsar carry a gun? 

Elsewhere on Assassinations Day, which is evidently a Bulgarian national holiday, Gen. Konstantin Georgiev, one of the leaders in the 1923 coup, is shot dead as he goes to his church in Sofia with his granddaughter for services. (Spoiler Alert: ... ... nah). His assassin, Atanas Todovichin, will escape to the USSR, where he’ll be executed in 1938, as was the custom.

Madge Oberholtzer, who was assaulted by KKK leader D.C. Stephenson, dies of the poison she took after the attack a month ago (the Grand Lizard, or whatever his current title is, prevented her getting medical assistance). She was 28.

Aristide Briand fails to form a French cabinet after the United Socialists refuse to participate, so the task ping pongs back to Paul Painlevé. It’s believed that if Painlevé fails again, Briand will be given a chance to fail again.

Georgia Superior Court Judge Ogden Persons rules that a man can spank his wife.

Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances, my favorite of his films, opens.

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Today -100: April 14, 1925: Of industrial relations and license plates

The US Supreme Court overturns Kansas’s law requiring compulsory arbitration of labor disputes before the Kansas Court of Industrial Relations, saying it violates liberty of contract and property rights. AFL president William Green applauds the decision, so maybe I’m not understanding what’s going on here.

German republicans spread a rumor that Hindenburg’s presidential campaign is bankrolled by former kaiser Wilhelm. Probably not true. Probably. In response, the monarchist right accuses republicans of taking “foreign bribes.”

Temporary automobile license plates issued by Florida to tourists are not being honored by Maryland, so tourists driving through the state on their way home are being soaked for temporary MD plates and are getting stuck in their cars overnight waiting for offices to open or, if they’re really pissed off, taking the train to their home state and coming back with a plate.

The film The Wizard of Oz is released, starring Dorothy Dwan as Dorothy and Oliver Hardy as the Tin Woodman and, evidently, a “trained duck.” It doesn’t sound like it resembles the 1939 movie at all. The NYT says it’s “the type of rough and tumble farce that sends bright faces from the theatre.”

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Today -100: April 13, 1925: Painlevé feels the... levé

Paul Painlevé gives up on forming a French government, so it’s Aristide Briand’s turn to make an attempt.

Last Friday, Coolidge opined that the French government’s financial difficulties were not Herriot’s fault but inherited by him from previous governments. The French consider this unacceptable interference in their politics. (Of course these days J.D. Vance, if that is his real name, can lecture European countries on being unfair to fascist parties).

Newfoundland women get the vote from the age of 25 (men have it at 21).

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Today -100: April 12, 1925: Painlevé brings the... levé

Paul Painlevé of the Parti républicain-socialiste will be the next French prime minister, a job he briefly held in 1917. Aristide Briand, another former PM (I mean, who in the Interwar period wasn’t prime minister at some point?), will be foreign secretary.

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Today -100: April 11, 1925: Rolling eggs? In this economy?

The traditional White House Easter egg roll will take place this year, despite being on the birthday of Calvin Coolidge Jr., who died last July.

The Earl of Balfour, of Balfour Declaration fame, is greeted in Damascus by a riotous mob which forces him to skedaddle out of town.

French PM Édouard Herriot resigns after losing a vote in the Senate on exceeding the legal limit on the circulation of bank notes. He was in office 10 months.

Roberto Farinacci, secretary of the National Fascist Party of Italy and basically the #2 man in Italy after The Duck, for now, responds to recent Fascist-Communist violence by calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty and for exile “to one of Italy’s islands” for enemies of Fascism. He names several deputies and senators he’d like arrested.

More violence in Herrin, Illinois, in the lead up to the mayoral election, but it’s Klan-on-Klan violence, so that’s okay. The store of Marshal McCormack, a kluxer candidate opposed by other kluxers, is dynamited.

Klansmen in Jasper, Alabama are being sentenced for flogging a hotel clerk who “talked about” the Klan.

The National Geographic Society thinks the Arctic expedition it’s sponsoring, led by Donald MacMillan, will find a whole new continent somewhere between Alaska and the North Pole. The use of Navy planes will make possible a summer Arctic trip, which should make visibility much easier (Spoiler Alert: it won’t).

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Today -100: April 10, 1925: Of typical expressions, confidence, copyrights, and boats against the current

The German right-wing parties know that the best way to keep presidential candidate Field Marshal von Hindenburg popular is to keep him quiet, so he’ll only be making a few speeches, mostly in Bavaria. Nationalists surround his house to keep reporters away from him – when did Hindenburg start to go visibly senile, anyway? surely not this soon? The NYT observes: “Political sentimentality is not lacking. ‘Our father Hindenburg, like children he led us back from the war-torn front to our homes and it is thanks to him that civil war was avoided in Germany,’ is a typical expression.” Ludendorff seems to have given up his own presidential run to back his former boss, presumably after the Bavarian Nazis decline to nominate him.

French PM Édouard Herriot wins a vote of confidence, though with a large number of abstentions, after a fight in the National Assembly over the increase of currency and Herriot saying he was bound to secrecy not to disclose that the government account at the Bank of France was over the legal limit and... oh, more stuff like that.

The 6th Court of Appeals in Cincinnati rules that radio stations can’t infringe copyrights on songs. It rules against the argument that radio broadcasts are not performances in the legal sense. Consider yourself warned, WKRP.

London theatres are experiencing a shortage of blonde chorus girls, as the trend toward bobbing means fewer women are dyeing their hair.

Speaking of bobbed hair, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is published. Spoiler Alert: 

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Today -100: April 9, 1925: Each year there are a million more Poles in the world

Paul von Hindenburg will run for president of Germany after all, backed by all the right-wing monarchist parties. He evidently agreed only after receiving a letter from ex-kaiser Wilhelm, which is believed to have relieved him of his oath to the monarchy. The Deutsche Volkspartei of Gustav Stresemann and is brought into line behind the former field marshal by threats from the big financial interests to destroy the party.

French PM Édouard Herriot threatens to resign after losing a vote in the Senate he had made a matter of confidence – a $20,000 appropriation for secondary scholarships, of all things – but then fails to resign. The Cabinet spends the evening discussing the price of bread, “which tends to show that whatever else Premier Herriot has lost he has preserved his sense of humor.” Really, all of Herriot’s financial plans, including a forced levy on capital, look like failing.

Polish War Minister Władysław Sikorski says Poland won’t give up an inch of its territory to either Germany or Russia and “gave an enthusiastic account of the ability of Poland to protect herself.” For example, “each year there are a million more Poles in the world. ...it will not be easy to crush Poland, with her 30 million inhabitants.”

Labor Secretary James “Puddler Jim” Davis foresees a time when labor and management understand that strikes and lock-outs are just silly. It’s all cooperation now, he says.

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Today -100: April 8, 1925: Of tariffs and women’s suffrage

Coolidge seems to be content – I started to write happy, but it’s hard to picture Silent Cal as happy; oo, complacent, that’s better – about the existing rate of tariffs and rejects increasing them still further.

The French Chamber of Deputies votes 389 to 140 to give women the right to vote in municipal and cantonal elections, and to hold office. Now it’s up to the Senate, which has always killed women’s suffrage bills in the past, and will kill this one.

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Today -100: April 7, 1925: Of thrilled dark Africans, petty motives, and hindenburgs

Headline of the Day -100:

The prince of Wales in Sierra Leone. That didn’t start out well with “Dark Africa,” but “mammies with babies”? Jesus.

The Earl of Balfour, of Balfour Declaration fame, visiting Palestine, says it is “preposterous that Jews and Arabs were unable to live together in harmony,” and any controversy comes from petty motives and should be stopped at once, at once I say.

Western Australia votes against prohibition, 65% to 35.

Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg says he won’t run for president of Germany after hearing that Gustav Stresemann, former chancellor and current head of the Deutsche Volkspartei, won’t back him. So the right-wing is stuck with Karl Jarres, maybe?

Hitler formally renounces his Austrian citizenship. He is now stateless.

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Today -100: April 6, 1925: Of anthropoid apes and the divorce evil

North Carolina University cancels a planned series of lectures by U. of Berlin prof Wolfgang Köhler on “The Intelligence of Anthropoid Apes,” afraid that the subject might be close enough to evolution to provoke members of the Legislature. The University of Tennessee also cancels lectures, I think also by Köhler, who will emigrate permanently to the US, and a professorship at Swarthmore College, in 1935 after his refusal to begin his lectures with a Nazi salute and his public opposition to the firing of Jewish professors doesn’t go over so well.

A New Jersey Knight of Columbus calls the Ku Klux Klan cowardly and suggests they do something about “the divorce evil,” by which they mean the recent addition of cruelty as a ground for divorce in the state.

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Today -100: April 5, 1925: Of crown princes and fair bathers

The right-wing German parties unite behind Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg for the 2nd round of the presidential election. He was not in the first round and in fact has not dabbled in politics since the end of the war, but he is thought to be a stronger candidate than Karl Jarres, who won a plurality in the 1st round. Also, some Bavarian monarchists wouldn’t get behind Jarres. Hindenburg is 77.

One source of chaos in the German right has retreated, a bit: Bavaria’s Prince Rupprecht

backs off his claim to the German throne (but will retain his claim to be King of Bavaria until his death in 30 years). He admits that the north wouldn’t put up with a Catholic kaiser. So the monarchists are now united behind former crown prince Friedrich Wilhelm.

Atlantic City Mayor Edward Bader says this summer women won’t be required to wear hosiery on the beach, though their skirts must be at least 11 inches long. He sees his as a concession to “contrary” “fair bathers.”

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Today -100: April 4, 1925: Of sex-klansmen, student rioters, and lily white primaries

NYT Summary of the Day -100: 

D.C. Stephenson, former Grand Dragon of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan but not an ex-klansman, having formed his own Klan in the mid-western states, which have the largest number of kluxers. Also, “prominent in Republican circles” downplays his power; he has the same relationship to the Republican Indiana government as Elon Musk has to the Republican national government. Anyway, Stephenson has been indicted for the kidnapping and assault & battery (rape) of Madge Oberholtzer last month. More on this anon.

The chief justice of the DC Supreme Court throws out the indictments against former interior secretary Albert Fall and oil barons Sinclair & Doheny for bribery and defrauding the US government, on the grounds that Assistant Attorney Gen. Oliver Pagan (!) was in the room with the special grand jury investigating the Tea Pot Dome leases.

Some of the striking university students in Paris are tried for rioting. Students sentenced to brief prison sentences will be given political-prisoner status.

The NAACP will challenge the 1923 Texas law banning negroes voting in the Democratic primary (I didn’t mention it here, which I suspect means the NYT didn’t cover it). It will sue on behalf of a black doctor, Lawrence Nixon. In 1927 the US Supreme Court will rule that the law violated the 14th Amendment, so Texas will change the law so that parties, rather than the Legislature, could set their own racist rules. The Supreme Court (1935) will have no problem with this, though it will reverse itself in 1944 (when Dr. Nixon will vote in the Democratic primary).

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Today -100: April 3, 1925: Of bank notes, idiots, coalitions, and deaf drivers

French Finance Minister Etienne Clémentel resigns after announcing without authorization that the government will increase the number of bank notes in circulation (which the Cabinet had decided on) (this is about a genuine practical need for more notes, not a Weimar-type inflationary thing). This is more important than it sounds. Probably.

There’s a fistfight in the Italian Parliament, as was the custom. First an ex-Fascist deputy complains about Fascist violence at a local election, then punches a Fascist who yells “Idiot” at him. Then yadda yadda yadda, biff bash boom, resulting in 6 challenges to duels.

The German Social Democrats (SPD), Democrats (DDP), and the Catholic Zentrum party agree to unite as the “Weimar Coalition” behind Wilhelm Marx (Zentrum) in the 2nd round of the presidential election, although the SPD is holding off making it official to ensure the other 2 parties back Otto Braun in tomorrow’s vote for PM of Prussia.

The New Jersey attorney general says deaf people can get driving licenses.

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Today -100: April 2, 1925: Of thurtles and worthingtons

The federal Prohibition Unit and the enforcement units of the Coast Guard and Customs will be consolidated under Ass’t Treasury Secretary Col. Lincoln Clark Andrews.

French university students declare a strike in 18 universities over the suspension of the dean of the Paris Law Faculty, who doesn’t want a strike and says his suspension was kinda justified. Sometimes I think French students just like to strike.

The House of Commons votes 320-156 to reject an amendment offered by a Labour MP with the unfortunate name Ernest Thurtle (Angela Lansbury’s uncle) to abolish capital punishment in the army. Mr. Thurtle points out that the argument that the threat of execution is needed to keep the troops in line under fire is refuted by the exemplary performance during the Great War of soldiers from Australia, whose government blocked capital punishment. Secretary of State for War Sir Laming Worthington-Evans responds... you know, I don’t care what he said, I just wanted to get that name in here.

The House of Assembly of Bermuda, which still has a property-owning qualification for the franchise, rejects an act to establish women’s suffrage.

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Today -100: April 1, 1925: Of bear ribs, Herriot’s Trump moment, states of debauchery, and super-persons

Rumors from Russia, of the sort that the NYT loves to publish with no collaboration, say that Trotsky has been permanently disappeared. The government is putting out a story that he’s escaped the country, but those rumors say this is just a smokescreen. None of this is true.

Curious just which North Dakota Indian tribe adopted Pres. Coolidge under the name “Bear Ribs,” I quickly gave up when my web search turned up actual recipes.

There’s been rioting, actual rioting, in the Latin Quarter of Paris – I assume the slogans were all shouted in Latin – over the Ministry of Education appointing Georges Scelle to a lectureship on international law at the Paris Law Faculty, slightly bypassing seniority. SLIGHTLY BYPASSING SENIORITY! His lectures have been disrupted by the proto-fascist Action Française’s student group, who claim favoritism and of course that the Masons were behind the appointment, leading the Ministry to close the faculty and suspend the dean for failing to keep order. In the National Assembly discussion of this, Prime Minister Édouard Herriot loudly comments about a deputy who is shouting and “gesticulating freely,” calling him “epileptic,” without, he claims, realizing it’s a guy who had a head injury during the war. Hilarity ensues.

Sen. Burton Wheeler says the witnesses against him at the grand jury were “herded into a hotel by Government agents who fed them booze and drank with them to a state of debauchery” for 3 weeks, during which the foreman was arrested for drunk driving. I guess that explains the odd pause in the hearings.

The 6th International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference closes with a resolution that “persons whose progeny give promise of being of decided value to the community should be encouraged to bear as large families, properly spaced, as they feasibly can.” Roswell Johnson, the geologist who offers the resolution, says “super-persons” have a moral responsibility to have children. Margaret Sanger criticizes Theodore Roosevelt Jr. for calling birth control advocates hoggish, selfish and bad citizens (I can’t verify Tee Arr Jay Arr’s exact original words).

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Today -100: March 31, 1925: More difficult to manage

Ringling Brothers Barnum Bailey Circus will drop all wild animal acts (unless you count elephants, horses and such). They’ll continue to be displayed in the menagerie, but not perform or be walked across the street. Jack Ringling admits that people think the bears and giant cats are trained by cruel methods and name-calling (one of the black jaguars is called Nigger because of course it is), and that parents are afraid their children will see animal trainers eaten or whatever. Mabel Stark has transferred from performing with the 14 Bengal tigers to the equestrian side of things: “‘I find the horses more difficult to manage than the tigers,’ said Miss Stark, a trifle wistfully for one who has been clawed as often as she”.

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Today -100: March 30, 1925: Heh heh, 4 votes

Karl Jarres of the nationalist Deutsche Volkspartei (DVP) wins more than 10 million votes in the German presidential election (38%), but not a majority, so there will be a run-off in 4 weeks. Otto Braun (Social Democrat) comes in second with 7.8 million. Erich Ludendorff gets a little over 1%, so all that fuss about him being a spoiler was a waste of everyone’s time. In Coburg, and only there, ex-kaiser Wilhelm was on the ballot. He gets 4 votes. This is the first ever presidential election in Germany, by the way.

The Japanese Diet passes the suffrage bill, extending the franchise to about 14 million from 3 million, but only for men over 30 who are not dependent on charity.

Labour MPs in Britain oppose Vincent Lopez’s band being allowed into the country to perform when there are perfectly good British jazz musicians without jobs.

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Today -100: March 29, 1925: Of socialism, inferior babies, and words

The Socialist Party intends to contest the next NYC elections on a platform of 5¢ transit fare.

The international birth control conference being held in NYC is going seriously off the rails. Neuropathologist Max Schlapp says women who “go about getting themselves excited and overwrought in an emotional way” are producing inferior babies. Clarence Little, president of the University of Maine, compares the different races to soda flavors – strawberry, pineapple, chocolate, etc – and says mixing them together is just icky. Eugenic laws should guide races to blend desired racial characteristics (Little will spend the 1950s and ‘60s shilling for the tobacco industry, denying that smoking causes cancer or any other disease). The delegates pass a resolution calling on eugenic societies to recognize birth control as an essential part of eugenics.

The Oxford English Dictionary is adding phrases from the Great War, such as “strafe,” “dud,” “getting the wind up.” Strafe is defined here as “to punish,” used by British and American military prisoners for short sentences for disobedience. It derives from the German catchphrase “Gott strafe England,” meaning “May God punish England.” The later usage for planes machine-gunning ground positions is a World War II one.

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Today -100: March 28, 1925: Of ear fatigue and grade crossings

Sen. Burton Wheeler is indicted in D.C. on the charge, trumped up in retaliation for his work investigating Teapot Dome, of conspiring to use dummies to get prospecting permits on federal oil & gas lands in Montana beyond the number that individuals are allowed. A Senate committee already exonerated Wheeler on this; the grand jury only had the evidence the committee saw. It’s all a bit weird. The grand jury stopped sitting for 4 weeks, so Wheeler assumed the thing had been abandoned.

Psychologists at Princeton determine that radio produces “ear fatigue.”

NY Gov. Alfred E. Smith wins his 25% tax cut, but the Legislature refuses to increase the length of the gubernatorial term to 4 years from 2, restore direct primaries, restrict factory employment for women to 48 hours, or hold a referendum on the federal child labor constitutional amendment. There will be a referendum in November for a bond issue to eliminate grade crossings.

German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann makes clear that while Germany’s proposed security treaty with France, Britain and Belgium would confirm Germany’s western borders, it would not apply to its eastern borders, because fuck Poland anyway.

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Today -100: March 27, 1925: I’m sure it was a terrible smile

Mussolini’s return to public life after weeks of illness they’re claiming was ulcers and who knows, maybe it was, is celebrated in the Parliament with a fistfight between Fascist and Communist deputies, as was the custom. The Duck smiles as he watches, and The Duck never smiles.

Simplicio and Lucio Godino, Filipino Siamese twins, have learned to drive and seem to enjoy immunity to drive in excess of the Manila speed limit because the cops would have to arrest the innocent one along with the guilty one. The conjoined twins will later marry identical twins.

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Today -100: March 26, 1925: Come and take us

The Delaware Legislature votes 31 to 1 to retain the whipping post as a punishment.

The German right wing, pissed at Ludendorff continuing to run for president against their preferred candidate Karl Jarres, are rolling out his former colleague Hindenburg (who is not yet running) to endorse Jarres. Hitler’s newspaper in Bavaria claims industrialists backing Jarres offered the Hitlerites a bribe to endorse him rather than Ludendorff.

2 Wisconsin state senators, Bernhard Gettelman & James Barker (both R’s), support changing the state law to allow home brew and light wines for consumption at home, and in fact are both in violation of that law. “We make wine in our home and don’t care who knows it,” says Gettleman. “Here is my home address. Come and take us.”

The 6th international birth control conference opens in New York. Margaret Sanger apologizes that some of the delegates had difficulties with Immigration; she notes that US immigration quotas show the “crude method” used to deal with over-population. She suggests that the government should pay unfit parents not to reproduce. The current ban on birth control encourages, “with breakneck rapidity, of idiots, defectives, diseased, feeble-minded and criminal classes. The American public is heavily taxed to maintain an increasing race of morons which threatens the very foundation of our civilization.”

Oh good, she’s opened a new clinic specifically for black New Yorkers.

The Agriculture Dept studies how to eliminate garlic breath and determines that this can be accomplished by refraining from eating garlic.

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Today -100: March 25, 1925: Of friendly boers, beer halls, normal activities, alsatians, and pay rises

Lord Balfour, of Balfour Declaration fame, will visit Jerusalem and boy are the Arabs pissed. Students are going on strike and shops will be closed.

The Prince of Wales will visit South Africa, and is assured of a friendly visit from the Boers.

Erich Ludendorff refuses demands that he quit the German presidential race so as not to split the lunatic-right vote. Saturday he’ll have a rally in a Munich beer hall. Yes, that beer hall.

Éamon de Valera is elected to the Ulster Parliament for County Down, unopposed. He is however banned by decree from Northern Ireland, which you’d think being an elected (sort of) official would over-ride, but no.

Charles Hueber, a Communist deputy from Alsace, address the French National Assembly in Alsatian German (his French isn’t great) during a debate on Alsace-Lorraine administration, specifically whether the recovered provinces should be be fully integrated into the French state or have some sort of special status. Some deputies get annoyed that they can’t understand him, others ask to speak in Breton or Provençal.

A Soviet Union court invalidates the Sinclair Oil oil concession on Sakhalin Island, which is in theory divided between Russia and Japan but all of it is de facto occupied by the Japanese. The court says that isn’t an insurmountable obstacle and Sinclair should have begun work by the start of the year regardless. The reason Russia signed the deal with Sinclair was to induce the US government to support Sinclair’s little venture and by extension Russian control of its bit of Sakhalin. This did not happen because the Harding administration’s corrupt links to Sinclair either didn’t extend to the State Dept or didn’t override the US refusal to recognize the Soviet Union (the entity with which Sinclair had that contract), or its unwillingness to risk friction with Japan. By the end of the decade, Japan will be meeting its oil requirements from Sakhalin alone.

The House of Representatives recently raised its own pay by one-third to $10,000. Some pretended to object during the debate, but all but 8 are accepting the raise. The identify of the 8 is as yet unknown, except for Henry St George Tucker III (D-Virginia), whose grandfather, Rep. H St G T Senior, also refused a raise more than a century ago.

Headline of the Day -100:

One shudders to imagine what those might be.

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Today -100: March 24, 1925: So-called science

The Tennessee Legislature passes the Butler Act: “it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Gov. Austin Peay (D) signs the bill, calling it “a distinct protest against an irreligious tendency to exalt so-called science and deny the Bible in some schools and quarters – a tendency fundamentally wrong and fatally mischievous in its effects on our children, our institutions and country.” Anyways, he says, the Bible disproves the theory of evolution.

NYPD Commissioner Richard Enright issues secret orders to every beat cop and detective to “Arrest all known thieves and criminals and have them brought to the line-up at 9 o’clock March 24.” It’s unclear what will be accomplished by arresting people who would be serving prison terms if there had been actual evidence against them. They may just want new mug shots. Cops are stopping musicians on the streets to check that their musical instrument cases don’t contain burglary tools.

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Today -100: March 23, 1925: Of capitals

The Great Powers are keeping their Turkish ambassadors in Constantinople. Turkey insists they move to Ankara, which has been the capital for a year and a half.

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Today -100: March 22, 1925: Of candidates and passes

The 1928 presidential race is off to a start. Frank Willis, Republican senator from Ohio and former governor, starts campaigning, beginning with a series of 45 speeches in various states. He’ll continue this campaign right up through a Delaware County Willis-for-President Club rally in March 1928, at which he will drop dead.

The Indian viceroy bans Theodore Jr. and Kermit Roosevelt from taking the Hunza Pass into Turkestan for their rare-animal-hunting expedition, because there is a shortage of native porters; some Swedes hired them all. He suggests they do it next year. The boys say they’ll try to find another route.

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Today -100: March 21, 1925: Of the Christianity of bankers, stormy careers, firesides, and lynchings

The French National Assembly discusses religious matters in the traditional manner, with two hours of screaming matches and fistfights, which start after Prime Minister Édouard Herriot refers to “the Christianity of bankers,” which is a reference to a cardinal’s manifesto aimed at bankers and capitalists. He says the cardinals are trying to destroy the republic and inciting open rebellion, which is funny cuz it’s true.

I’m not following NY Gov. Al Smith’s fight with his Republican Legislature closely enough to understand why the R’s are fighting his attempt to cut income tax 25%.

Erich Ludendorff is running for German president under the imprimatur of the German Völkisch Freedom Party (that’s 2 words in German, because of course it is), which has so few deputies that it’s not entitled to its own seat in the Reichstag restaurant. The NYT says he can’t win but could take enough votes away from fellow rightie Karl Jarres (Deutsche Volkspartei) to make him lose. It also says “Ludendorff’s political career has been stormy,” which is one way to describe narrowly escaping prison after participating in a putsch.

Playwright George Bernard Shaw says of radio, “If I could see and hear a play from my fireside, I would never enter a theatre again.”

A black man is lynched in Waverly, Virginia.

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Today -100: March 20, 1925: Of viceroys, informants, and patents

Lord Curzon, former viceroy of India, foreign secretary, and co-president of the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage, dies at 66. I guess the NYT is right that he would have been prime minister but by the time he reached that stage in his career prime ministers no longer came from the House of Lords. Eventually the Tories changed the law to allow inherited lords to renounce their titles and seats in the House of Lords so that Alec Douglas-Home could become PM (1963-4).

That tornado killed at least 823 people.

The Dáil Éireann, working on a treason bill, votes to impose 5 years in prison for failure to inform the authorities of designs against the state (“designs against the state” is a fun thing to say in a bad Irish accent). Justice Minister Kevin O’Higgins says odium should no longer attach to informers in a state based on universal suffrage.

Coolidge increases Herbert Hoover’s power at the Commerce Dept, again, by moving the Patent Office to it from Interior.

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Today -100: March 19, 1925: Of tornadoes

A big-ass tornado wends through Illinois, Missouri & Indiana, killing hundreds.

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Today -100: March 18, 1925: Of blood-tasting, sargents, and “conditions”

Charles Warren declines Coolidge’s offer of a recess appointment to be attorney general after he lost two confirmation votes. While the NYT says “The White House raised the white flag in its fight with the Senate” (“Now that he has allowed the Senate to taste blood, what Presidential policies it will next set out to devour no man can foretell”, it’s not clear whether the decision was really Warren’s or Coolidge’s.

Coolidge immediately nominates John Garibaldi Sargent, a former Vermont attorney general (1908-12) and a partner in the law firm of Coolidge’s cousin. He and Cal were childhood friends. The Senate immediately confirms him by voice vote. Without hearings or, I have to assume, knowing much of anything about Sargent, whose work until now has been confined to Vermont.

At the Supreme Court hearings  on Oregon’s anti-parochial-school measure, the state keeps mentioning the “conditions” prevailing in Oregon as a reason for the federal government to butt out, without ever specifying what those conditions are.

The British Fascisti deny kidnapping Harry Pollitt to keep him from his conference, but say it might have been members of theirs, who even knows. In Parliament, Home Sec. Joynson-Hicks admits that the stationmaster saw the abduction happening, but just assumed Pollitt was some lunatic being taken back to the local insane asylum.

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Today -100: March 17, 1925: Of attorneyz generalz, domes, school strikes, and antifa ulcers

Charles Warren loses his second confirmation vote for attorney general by a wider margin, 46 to 39.

At the trial in the federal government’s lawsuit to revoke the corruptly awarded Teapot Dome oil leases, the federal court judge blocks the government lawyers from tracing the Liberty Bonds used to pay off Interior Sec. Albert Fall. They’re only allowed to trace them from Harry Sinclair to Fall, not to trace them back from Fall to Sinclair, or something. Fall’s son-in-law Milton Everhart, who acted as Fall’s bagman, takes the Fifth.

The strike in Alsace against public schools ordered by Archbishop Ruch begins. Village priests stand in school doorways to prevent children attending. Some delay morning mass until after the start of the school day.

Coincidentally, the US Supreme Court hears arguments in the case against Oregon’s Klan-backed law requiring children aged 8 to 16 to attend public, rather than Catholic parochial, schools. Oregon Assistant AG Willis Moore ignores the religious aspect of the law and the whole Klan thing and says the people (the law is a 1922 referendum) were exercising their police power in regulating schools. He also argues that since the Supreme Court ruled that child labor could only be regulated by the states and not the federal governments the same logic applies here.

The secret illness which has kept Mussolini out of public sight for weeks is revealed to be an ulcer.

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Today -100: March 16, 1925: Of adjournments, kidnappings, and PJs

Democratic senators are planning to prevent the Senate from adjourning for a couple of days so that, after Charles Warren’s nomination to be attorney general is rejected a second time, there will be time in which Coolidge has the ability to nominate someone else; if he fails to do so he cannot legally make a recess appointment. In theory, anyway.

Harry Pollitt of the Communist Party of Great Britain is kidnapped off a train by 8 members of the British Fascisti, preventing him reaching the conference of the National Minority Movement.

Atlantic City Mayor Edward Bader says any attempt to wear pajamas on the beach, evidently a trend in Europe and Florida, will not be tolerated.

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Today -100: March 15, 1925: Of recesses, school boycotts, and elections

Coolidge says if his nomination of Charles Warren to be attorney general fails again, he will give him a recess appointment. Now everyone is pissed at everyone else. Coolidge thinks the Senate is interfering with his right to name his own Cabinet; senators think he is invading their constitutional powers (it doesn’t help that he’s announcing this before the 2nd vote on Warren).

The re-absorption of Alsace into France is not going as smoothly as it might. The laicist French government is imposing secular schools in Colmar, that is, removing Catholic teaching from public schools (4 hours a week, I believe). So Archbishop Ruch orders children to boycott schools for 3 days from tomorrow to “break down the plans of the Freemasons.” The government points out that this would be illegal and expose parents to prosecution.

The Hungarian government may have difficulties pushing through an election bill whose details are odd enough to be worth mentioning: deputies who explain their votes to anyone, especially foreigners, can lose their seats; men can vote at age 24 if they have 4 years of school, women at 30 if they have 6 years; secret ballots only in Budapest and 5 other places; no parades or placards or meetings 30 days before elections; the creation of a new upper house.

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Today -100: March 14, 1925: Of pines, protocols, opium, and firebrands

After it’s been pending more than 20 years, the US Senate finally ratifies the Isle of Pines Treaty recognizing the island as part of Cuba, but kicks a vote on ratification of the Lausanne Treaty with Turkey down the road for what will turn out to be a couple of years.

The British rejection of the Geneva Protocol banning chemical & biological weapons as a first step to general disarmament means, or seems to mean, that that goal is effectively dead. The US may propose its own disarmament conference.

The Indian Assembly votes a resolution for the reduction of opium, even after alliterative Finance Minister Sir Basil Blackett informs them that British policy is to derive the maximum revenue from the minimum output of opium. One assemblyperson says opium helps coolies mitigate the effects of hard work and illness. Another says the statistics fail to take into account the large consumption of opium by elephants.

The NYC play juries issue their first rulings, acquitting Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms” and Sidney Howard’s “They Knew What They Wanted” (filmed several times, including in 1940 with Carole Lombard and Charles Laughton – how is it I’ve never seen this?), while Edwin Justus Mayer’s “The Firebrand” is ordered to shorten a kiss (with Joseph Schildkraut, not Edward G. Robinson, who’s also in the play, and definitely not the two of them together).

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Today -100: March 13, 1925: Of re-nominations, Chaplins, and un-impeachments

Coolidge re-nominates Charles Warren to be attorney general. Just being stubborn, or reckoning on some of the absent senators from the last vote showing up this time?

The US government is trying to expel Hannah Chaplin, mother of Charlie, from the country. I guess Labor Secretary James Davis made this decision personally, for some reason? As I understand it, she came to the US ostensibly for medical treatment, and is now being expelled because of her medical (really, mental) condition.

The Texas Legislature passes an amnesty for former governor James Ferguson, the husband of current governor Miriam “Ma” Ferguson who was impeached in 1917. This will restore his citizenship rights.

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Today -100: March 12, 1925: Of insurgent Republicans and surreptitious alliances

Several Republican senators meet Coolidge (showing up at the White House uninvited) to suggest that if he tries to re-nominate Charles Warren to be attorney general he’ll just lose again.

Warren complains that the Democrats “made use of the insurgent Republican group”.

Sun Yat-Sen dies at 58.

The British Labour Party warns against secret treaties, saying future Labour governments won’t honor them. Former Labour Education Minister Charles Trevelyan suggests that “surreptitious alliances” against the Soviet Union might be being forged right now.

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Today -100: March 11, 1925: Of non-confirmations, a city with one fewer Jew, social registers, and Savannah, can it be, justice?

The Senate confirmation vote for Charles Warren for attorney general ties at 40 to 40, and therefore fails. VP Dawes, who’d been told there wouldn’t be a vote today, arrives too late to break the tie, heh heh. Warren, considered by many to be too close to the Sugar Trust, which is maybe not a good look for a Republican Party trying to get past the corruption of the Harding years, is just the 7th Cabinet nominee rejected by the Senate in the history of the republic. The previous confirmation failure was Henry Stanbery in 1868 (he had stepped down as Andrew Johnson’s attorney general to help defend him during his impeachment trial, and was rejected when Johnson nominated him to resume the post). The most recent rejection was John Tower in 1989, the 9th ever.

Austrian-Jewish newspaper editor & novelist Hugo Bettauer, author of The City Without Jews (1922), a satire on anti-Semitism, is shot in Vienna by Nazi dentist Otto Rothstock, who didn’t like the book. Everyone’s a fucking critic. Bettauer will die 16 days later. Rothstock will plead insanity and be put in an asylum, then released a year and a half later. He died in 1990 at 86, still bragging about the murder.

Headline of the Day -100:

That “despite” is doing a lot of work here. Yes, Alice Rhinelander is included in the Social Register supplement by virtue of the marriage which her husband is trying to get out of because she might be a negro.

The Flatiron Building, you know, that triangular New York one, which was opened in 1902, is sold to an investment syndicate for something like $2 million.

The League of Nations Council responds to Germany’s conditions for joining, which are: 1) Germany gets a seat on the Council, 2) no military duties, given that Germany is disarmed, 3) no passage through Germany for troops under League orders. The Council says 1 is ok but not 2 & 3.

Astonishingly, a Savannah, Georgia jury not only convicts a white man, Lewis Lightfoot, 18, to life for murdering a black man, but sentences him to life, possibly because Lightfoot was a bootlegger who shot a customer who tried not to pay. 

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Today -100: March 10, 1925: Of presents, masks, southbound oil tycoons, and... a woman! Imagine that, a woman!

During the Senate votes on committee assignments in which the Republican leadership demotes R’s who supported La Follette, Democrats vote “present,” or possibly “present and snickering.”

Texas bans masks (as in Klan masks).

At the Teapot Dome lawsuit trial, the vice president of Standard Oil of Indiana admits that Chairman Robert W. Stewart is “southbound,” or as the NYT puts it, “safely outside the process-serving zone.” They say he’s on a super-secret super-important deal, so they had to keep his movements secret.

Headline of the Day -100:

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