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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