Today -100: March 9, 1925: Insert that Will Rogers joke here

Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposes having a permanent Democratic Party structure, instead of creating one from scratch every presidential election year.

The federal lawsuit to cancel the Teapot Dome oil leases to Harry Sinclair’s company is about to start, but process servers have been unable to find Robert W. Stewart, the chairman of the Board of Standard Oil Company of Indiana. I mean, the chair of Amoco (as it may or may not have been called yet) has disappeared for the last two months (Standard will admit tomorrow that he left the country, possibly for Mexico). A couple of other potential witnesses, Henry Blackmer, the chairman of the Midwest Refining Company, and James O’Neil, the former president of Prairie Oil & Gas, fled to France more than a year ago and are refusing to give depositions there about their role in bribing Interior Sec. Albert Fall to... facilitate... the Teapot Dome leases. Blackmer will actually stay in exile for the rest of his life, except for a brief visit in 1949. He took his companies’ books and something like $25 million with him when he absconded, leading to fines in 1928 for tax evasion, perjury, & then for contempt for his continued refusal to return to the US to face the music. He died in Geneva in 1962 at 92.

Bavaria imposes a two-year ban on Adolf Hitler giving public speeches, although he can still address private meetings.

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