Today -100: July 19, 1925: Of konflicts, vaccines, and race in Staten Island

The Colorado Ku Klux Klan is in conflict with the national Klan, which is trying to force out its grand dragon. 40,000 kluxers have resigned and joined the Minute Men of America.

British doctor William Ewart Gye has developed a vaccine against the cancer, um, germ.

The Scopes trial is in recess for the weekend, so the duel of wits in Dayton is confined to written statements. William Jennings Bryan has found what he thinks is a devastating argument against evolution: Darwin was religious when he was young but died an agnostic, demonstrating the effects of the theory of evolution on the mind. Bryan thinks there’s been a major cover-up about this.

French and Belgian soldiers start leaving the Ruhr. The occupation should be over by the end of the month. They depart quietly in the early morning to avoid any sort of response by the locals, sarcastic applause or whatever.

80 young members of the Hakenkreuzler, an Austrian Nazi-adjacent group, invade a Viennese restaurant and attack the guests, yelling “Out with the Jews!” A hakenkreu, by the way, is a swastika, which is a word the Nazis never used and which won’t make its way into English for a few years.

A bunch of white men attack the home of Samuel Browne, a black mailman in Staten Island, the only black-owned house in the neighborhood. The Brownes have been offered substantial amounts to sell the house they bought last year and were “rude” when a “citizens’ committee” explained to them that property values in the neighborhood depended on its “exclusiveness.” The KKK will take credit for the attack, for whatever that’s worth. There have been numerous acts of vandalism, letters threatening that Mrs. Browne will be shot on her way home from the school where she teaches by an ex-serviceman (unnamed), and an attempt to get the Brownes’ fire insurance cancelled. There will be indictments and a lawsuit, which will not come to much of anything. (Update: oo, there’s a blog post on all this). Browne will soon start the first Staten Island NAACP chapter. According to their grandson, they lived in that house until they died in the early 1970s.

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