Today -100: December 4, 1925: Of loans, indemnities, borders, and textbooks

Belgium is negotiating a major loan in New York to pay off its war debt, and Belgians will be asked, under a proposal by the president of the Bank of Brussels, to work free for a half hour per week at overtime rates, the money going to service the debt.

A League of Nations commission determines that Greece is entirely to blame for the recent War of the Stray Dog and must pay Bulgaria an indemnity of 20 million levas, which is the equivalent of some money, for material losses; it also recommends an additional 10 million levas for injuries and deaths of soldiers.

The Irish Free State, Northern Ireland & Great Britain come to an agreement on the Irish border, which is not to change it and indeed to suppress the report of the boundary commission. Ulster intransigence wins again, I guess. As part of the overall agreement, Britain will stop trying to get the Free State to pay any of Britain’s war debt (disputes over how to calculate it means the Free State has never actually paid any of it), and Ireland will take over payment of compensation for the Civil War, which means it has to pay for its own oppression (as was the custom).

Texas Gov. Miriam “Ma” Ferguson’s opponents have another potential ground for impeachment: a possibly corrupt deal for elementary school spelling books, which was made after she appointed her husband to the Textbook Commission, which then mysteriously awarded the contract to the highest bidder.

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Today -100: December 3, 1925: We don’t want hats!

Gen. Miguel Primo de Rivera supposedly gives up the dictatorship of Spain and dissolves the “Directorate” he set up in ‘23. He does not restore the Cortes or the Constitution or end press censorship. 

Dueling is still a thing in Germany, or at any rate Prussia. Junker aristo Bogislav von Somnitz is sentenced to 2½ years in prison for having killed a duelee in one of four (4, count ’em, 4) duels he held in a single day. The other 3 duelists will get 6 months in prison and the seconds 1 month. Somnitz had been assaulted at a hunting party by the baron who hosted it and the other 3 because of his refusal to participate in monarchist plots and to hide insurgents on his property. Naturally he challenged them. The first 3 duels were bloodless, mostly because the sun hadn’t come up yet, but it had by the time he faced Lt. von Kohl, who bled to death. The judge rules that Somnitz was not guilty of premeditated murder because he shot at his opponents’ legs and anyway the insult to his honor required a duel in response. 

A Turkish man who put up posters objecting to the government’s ban on fezes is hanged. Elsewhere, a mob demonstrates in front of the governor’s house in Marash shouting “We don’t want hats!”

Young Kip Rhinelander’s lawyer, retired NY Supreme Court justice Isaac Mills, sums up. Some quotes:

You might as well bury this young man six feet deep in the soil of the old churchyard where his early American ancestors sleep as to condemn him to be chained for eternity to this mulatto woman.

There is not a father among you – and I tried to fill this jury box with fathers [The jury is all-male, as was almost always the case in NY until jury duty became mandatory for women in the ‘70s] – who would not rather see his son in his casket than wedded to this mulatto woman. There is room in this fair county for blacks as well as whites, but the decent blacks object to this marriage, as do the decent whites.

He will hail your verdict if you find a verdict for him, as a person on the steps of the scaffold welcomes a reprieve from the governor.

He admits Alice was humiliated by “that indecent exhibition in the jury room,” but 

with the buoyance of her race she will regain her spirits. ... Let her gain a husband of her own race and find happiness with him [like her sister Emily,] who without vaulting ambition wed within her own color and kind.

Vaulting ambition is the worst kind of ambition.

Mills says Kip had the intelligence of a 14- or 15-year-old when he met Alice and a “physical infirmity” – is that how he’s referring to stuttering? – so he fell under her spell, and “mind you, women of her race mature earlier.”

He calls on the jury to free poor Kip “from this horrid, unnatural, absurd, terrible union.”

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Today -100: December 2, 1925: Of occupations and research

British troops evacuate (finally) the North Rhineland (Cologne and environs). Unlike the French when they de-occupied the Ruhr, the British are doing it without making any triumphalist fuss.

Commerce Sec Herbert Hoover complains at the lack of spending in the US on fundamental scientific research. He claims we spend ten times as much on cosmetics.

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Today -100: December 1, 1925: They must think I’m a bird

Texas Gov. Miriam “Ma” Ferguson refuses to call a special session of the Legislature, calling those requesting it “wolves” who “want to gather here and tear me apart.” “They tried to camouflage [the special session] as an inquiry into the foot and mouth disease and tick eradication. They must think I’m a bird. It’s my feet, my mouth, and my eradication they want.” Her feet? Her mouth?

Today the governor – Jim, not Ma, who quit for the day at noon – sat in the governor’s chair and talked to reporters, “using language in reference to the anti-Ferguson group that no lady Governor would think of, let alone use.”

The lady governor demands that Amon Carter, publisher of The Fort Worth Star Telegram, resign from the Board of Directors of the Texas Technological College because, she claims, he was drunk at a football game.

Hungary will ban foreign jazz bands after December 31st, not because the government hates jazz, which it probably does, but to protect native jazz bands.

Alice Rhinelander will not testify. Her lawyer Lee Davis, who last week made her strip for the jury, says “It struck me that it was just time the world was through with the slime of this case.” Alice is at the visibly-weeping-all-the-time phase of the trial. Davis, in his closing argument, accuses the opposition of attempting to smear everyone, from Alice’s mother to the chauffeur, who was ordered by a court to pay child support for his illegitimate child, which has what to do with his having told Kip that Alice’s father is black?

Headline of the Day -100:

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