Wolves are “ravaging” Russia, killing cattle and the odd human.
Senator Robert Stanfield (R-Oregon) insists that his arrest in a Baker, Oregon café for being drunk and disorderly is a stitch-up and he hadn’t had a drop to drink, not a drop. He claims the cop who arrested him and beat him up (Stanfield threw the first punch) has been fired.
With the NYC Democratic primary imminent, Mayor John Hylan’s friends say he’ll run as an independent if he loses by fewer than 30,000 votes.
Hylan says the election odds being quoted for the primary are “fakes” paid for by the traction interests (Brooklyn Betting Commissioner Fred Schumm is disgusted that such a bitter campaign has produced so little betting, with no one, except some late Wall Street money, willing to put money on Hylan no matter what the odds).
Hylan says he’ll win anyway: “The decent people will predominate”. He says that if nothing else, his campaign has “unmasked [Gov.] Al Smith. He is no longer of the common people. He is serving the interests and eating $63 worth of ham and eggs a day at the Biltmore which you are paying for.” He points out that while Smith praised Hylan for his “clean life,” he hasn’t said anything similar about the candidate he actually supports, Jimmy Walker. Hylan refers to Walker’s “record” along these lines, but doesn’t say what he’s referencing, presumably because New Yorkers know. But what do they know about J.J.? The speakeasies? The brothels? The, gambling, I think?
Walker addresses a meeting in Harlem, bringing with him black boxer Harry Wills. He says he told the Boxing Commission, which was set up by a law he introduced in 1920, that if they discriminated against Wills (this is presumably about the heavyweight title bout with Jack Dempsey that never happened after Dempsey weaseled out, saying he’d never box any negro again) he would work to repeal the law, which would make prize fighting illegal in New York again. I suspect Walker undercut whatever good that did him with the black audience by saying “I come from a race and a religion [Irish and Catholic] which have as many haters as you have”. (Hylan’s also a Catholic).
Anna Jarvis, who created the holiday of Mother’s Day, is acquitted of disorderly conduct for showing up at a War Mothers convention to protest their use of the carnation as an emblem. Jarvis would later become so disgusted by the commercialism of her holiday that she started a movement to rescind it, whereupon, if I have this correctly, the florist and greeting card interests paid to have her put away in a sanatorium for the rest of her life.
There's an unforgettable scene in "My Antonia" by Willa Cather in which we learn why two old Russian immigrants left Russia -- they were driving a troika for a wedding party, and in order to save themselves, they tossed the bride and groom overboard to the wolves. "The wolves were bad that winter..."
ReplyDeleteAccording the Wikipedia's article on Senator Robert Stanfield, "In the midst of prohibition, he was arrested following a drunken bar fight in Baker."
And according to Wikipedia's article on Anna Jarvis, "By the early 1940s, she had become infirm, and was placed in a sanatorium by friends and associates where she died on November 24, 1948.[1] A legend exists that a portion of her medical bills were paid for by florists."