Today -100: April 13, 1926: Just the same, it’s a nightgown

The first duel, at least in France, conducted with 4-ounce gloves is fought, if that is the word, between a Romanian and a Swiss in a Paris gymnasium. One is nearly knocked out in the 3rd round and the Swiss dude declared the winner. The subject of their quarrel is not disclosed.

The Senate ousts Smith Wildman Brookhart (“insurgent Republican”-Iowa) from his seat by a vote of 45 to 41. A bunch of Republicans join the D. motion because Brookhart supported Robert La Follette rather than Coolidge in the 1924 presidential election. They replace him with Dem. Daniel Steck, who Brookhart defeated, barely, questionably, in the 1924 election.

Steck will fill out his term and lose his bid for re-election in 1930. Brookhart will run for Iowa’s other Senate seat, winning the primary less than two months from now and then the general, making him work colleagues with Steck, which I’m sure wasn’t awkward in the slightest.

Col. Alexander Williams, commander of the Marine Corps’ 4th Regiment, is being court-martialed for having been drunk at a party.

Sentence of the Day -100: “He said he had dim recollections of a fight, but could not recall that an ostrich was his opponent.”

At the Los Angeles trial of 17 cast members of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms, a police officer who attended the play on behalf of the Board of Education says he found the play not to be of a clean character, but under cross-examination admits it would not incite him to any questionable action. The sensitive copper says he blushed and “After I left that place I couldn’t look the world in the face for hours.” He says his “feelings were hurt, terribly hurt,” especially by one actress wearing a nightgown. A defense lawyer shows him a photo of the extremely modest garment. “Just the same, it’s a nightgown,” the bashful copper insists. “And so you object to flannel nightgowns, do you?” “Yes, sir.”

A new New York state law punishes restaurant owners who falsely claim their food is kosher.

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Today -100: April 12, 1926: No one can stop our inexorable will

Mussolini has hisself a “triumphal procession” in Tripoli, although what his triumph is is unclear. He has iodine on his nose from being shot, and a white plume topping off his uniform (that of an honorary corporal in the Fascist militia), but can I find a picture of the beplumed Moose? I cannot. The NYT says he “looked every inch a Roman ruler” as he rode on a horsie past “strange crowds which seemed to combine the wild savagery of the desert with the instinctive calm of an ancient people”.

Honorary Corporal Mussolini’s address to the Libyan natives asserts that his visit is not a mere administrative act but an affirmation of the Italian people. “No one can stop our inexorable will,” he brags.

The buses of the Philadelphia-Asbury Park Coach Company will play radio programs in the day and motion pictures at night.

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Today -100: April 11, 1926: Of Daddy & Peaches

Chinese Prime Minister Duan Qirui is toppled by a coup, as was the custom.

NY real estate developer Edward West “Daddy” Browning, 51, marries Frances “Peaches” Heenan, 15. Browning had some time before advertised looking for a 14-year-old to adopt as a companion to a boy (or girl; I’ve seen it both ways) he’d adopted as one of a pair with his first wife, who then fled to Paris with her dentist, keeping the other kid. Browning likes adopting girls, some of whom were essentially sold to him by their parents. Browning met Frances at a high school sorority dance which he’d sponsored, as one does. They married to short-circuit an action in Children’s Court brought by the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, during a one-week postponement granted because someone supposedly threw acid at Frances.

The happy couple (I love that guy on the left)

The millionaire didn’t tip the town clerk, the article reveals.

Anyways, they’ll separate, he’ll try to adopt a 16-year-old who will turn out to be in actuality 21, a legal adult ineligible for adoption. Peaches will have a vaudeville career and an affair with Milton Berle. And I haven’t even mentioned the African goose. There’s a book, because of course there is.

Headline of the Day -100:

How proud they must be of themselves.

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Today -100: April 10, 1926: My voyage to Libya contains no menace

Mussolini says his trip to Tripoli isn’t about threatening other European colonizers: “My voyage to Libya contains no menace.” 

There’s a very brief military coup in Greece.

Germany is demanding, not its own air force per se, but for its army officers to be allowed to train as pilots. After all, they say, flying is now considered a sport, so officers have as much a right to fly as to play golf.

British miners reject the mineowners’ proposal that they accept reduced wages and longer hours. I’m sure this can all be resolved without any unpleasantness. 

The Post Office bars the April issue of Mencken’s The American Mercury from the mails.

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Today -100: April 9, 1926: Of reapportionment and redwoods

The House of Representatives refuses, by a vote of 265 to 87, to do its constitutionally mandated duty to reapportion congressional districts following the 1920 census. Some congresscritters claim that there is no such constitutionally mandated duty.

Prohibition agents padlock a redwood tree in Humboldt County, California which someone had turned into a still.

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Today -100: April 8, 1926: Fancy, a woman!

Irishwoman Violet Gibson, 49, daughter of Lord Ashbourne, who was lord chancellor of Ireland on and off between 1885 and 1905, shoots Benito Mussolini right in his fat face, grazing his fat nose (you know that thing he did where he crosses his arms and tilts his fat head back super-smugly? that’s what saved him from the bullet entering his fat brain). Then her gun jams. This is not the first assassination attempt on The Duck, nor will it be the last, but Gibson was the only woman would-be assassin and the only one who actually succeeded in shooting him. “Fancy, a woman!” he says. The Duck calls for no disorder, but there is, of course, disorder, with Fascists attacking the remaining opposition newspapers and chanting slogans in the streets.

Annoyingly, this will just increase his popularity. Pope Pius says Moose was “spared by God.” After a year of back and forth in the Italian government over how to deal with this – portray it as a conspiracy, put her on trial, treat the whole thing as an amusing incident and put it behind them as quickly as possible, (the Duck’s approach), claim Gibson is insane (which she kinda is, just look at her eyes! LOOK AT HER EYES!),

(although, compare and contrast that image, printed in many newspapers, with this, in today’s paper

or this, as they appear now)

They’ll deport her to Britain, where she will spend the remaining 30 years of her life in an insane asylum, abandoned by her embarrassed family. There’s a biography of her, and there’s an Irish television documentary, available free on Tubi.

Capt. George Wilkins & Lt. Carl Eielson fly over the Arctic Ocean, looking for previously undiscovered land to claim for the US. They don’t find any. They plan to explore the Pole of Inaccessibility, presumably looking for Bond-villain bases.

Yet another clash between textile strikers and cops in Passaic, NJ. Small boys throw stones at the police chief’s car. The American Legion deploys on the side of the mills but are forced to flee.

Judge James Parmenter of the Boston Municipal Court acquits H.L. Mencken, saying the American Mercury does not tend to corrupt the morals of youths. He finds all the articles in it “intellectual and of serious nature,” although he just doesn’t understand the one about jazz.

A group of “fanatical university students” in Budapest are arrested for planning an armed invasion of Czechoslovakia. A “former archduke” is rumored to be involved.

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Today -100: April 7, 1926: Of Shylock nations, quacks, shonks, pretenders, werewolves?, and sex magazines

Fascists in Venice, pissed at the US Senate’s delays in passing the war debt settlement and at Sen. William Borah’s comments during the debate about Fascist violence in Italy, attack sailors from US destroyers. In the Piazza San Marco, Fascists call one sailor “a fat swine and the representative of a Shylock nation.” The four destroyers abruptly leave Venice, possibly pursued by Fascist gondoliers.

There’s a movement to “boom” Columbia University Pres. Nicholas Murray Butler for the Republican nomination for governor of New York. They think an opponent of Prohibition like him is the party’s best chance, or to put it another way, that Prohibition may be a decisive issue in 1926.

The New York Legislature passes a bill requiring physicians to be registered every year. There is a problem, or at least a panic, over “quack” doctors.

The New York State Assembly rejects the Shonk Bill for a 48-hour week for women and minors. Women are currently limited to 54 hours.

Herbert Shonk is my new favorite name.

A “congress” of Russian exiles in Paris chooses Grand Duke Nicholas, the first cousin once removed of the late Czar Nicholas, to lead the “glorious task of liberating our country.” He replies that it is the poor oppressed Russian people who “have the right to establish the basis of their existence.” In other words, start without me.

Elsewhere, Prince Jean, Duke of Guise takes over as the new pretender to the French throne from the Orléanist line, following the death of Prince Louis Philippe. He did have the option of renouncing the “title” and thus avoid having to leave France under the 1886 law exiling the heads of the 3 overthrown royal lines, but he boldly steps up, saying “I lay claim to all his [Louis Philippe’s] rights...” Of which there are none. “I assume all the responsibilities...” Of which there are none. “and I accept all the duties...” Of which there are none. “...of that position.” He will call himself King Philip VIII. He is married to his cousin, because of course he is.

In Berlin on Easter Monday, Communists and Werewolves fight over a café, which is probably not as entertaining as it sounds and which leads to one death and one wrecked café. In Munich, police break up Communist conferences.

H.L. Mencken counter-sues Franklin Chase over his arrest for selling an issue of the American Mercury. He informs the judge that the Merc is not a sex magazine, which makes you wonder – or is it just me? – what a sex magazine edited by H.L. Mencken would be like.

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Today -100: April 6, 1926: Malicious prosecutions are the funnest kind of prosecution

Former New Mexico governor Washington Ellsworth Lindsey, which is not a very New-Mexico-governor sort of name, kills  himself, possibly due to illness. His obit very nearly spells his name correctly.

H.L. Mencken is arrested on Boston Common, in a pre-arranged test case/publicity move, for selling an issue of The American Mercury to Franklin Chase of the Watch and Ward Society, who has been trying to get the Merc prosecuted and banned from the mails at least since it published an article, “Keeping the Puritans Pure” by A. L. S. Wood, of which he was the subject, although the court case will be about the article “Hatrack” by Herbert Asbury, which is about the hypocrisy of small towns towards “harlots” and is sadly free of “obscenity,” if you ask me.

Former Kansas governor Jonathan Davis, acquitted on charges of selling pardons, sues three Kansas City newspapers, various editors and reporters, prison guards, a highwayman, and a bank wrecker, for libel and malicious prosecution.

At the 96th annual conference of the Mormons, Mormon Pres. Heber Grant warns against immodest skirts and afternoon teas.

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Today -100: April 5, 1926: Looks like I’ll have to run

Austria’s Supreme Court abolishes stage censorship.

Kansas’s former governor Jonathan Davis, now “cleared” of having sold pardons, says “Looks like I’ll have to run” for governor again.

Mussolini will visit the Italian colony Tripoli. He’s going there on a warship. The Fascist paper Popolo d’Italia, which translates, I believe, as The Poppadom of Italy, says the ship recalls the ships of the Punic Wars: “It is a spectacle of force, not a parade; it is a majestic sign of greatness, not the order of the day in a debating hall.” This excursion is supposed to show the unified nature of the new Italy, putting aside petty regional squabbles in favor of oppressing people in Africa like a big boy nation. Later this month there’ll be a National Colonial Day.

Pennsylvania Gov. Gifford Pinchot warns state employees not to campaign against his candidacy for US Senate, or else.

A secret meeting last week of royalists from Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Russia agreed to establish a monarchist international.

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Today -100: April 4, 1926: If you’re being bribed by a forger, inspect the bag o’ cash very carefully

Kansas’s former governor Jonathan Davis and his son Russell are acquitted for the second time for taking a $1,250 bribe to pardon a forger. One wonders what the juries were thinking.

Communal fighting in Calcutta, which was set off by Hindu Samajists invading a mosque, kills at least a dozen. So far.

Italian organ grinders, some of them with monkeys, have left the streets of London in droves, following the order of Mussolini, who thinks they harm Italian prestige. Their, um, jobs have been filled by crippled & blind war veterans.

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Today -100: April 3, 1926: Of prohibition, slander, and studying communism

Against a rising feeling that Prohibition enforcement is already going too far, an amendment to the Volstead Act is introduced in the US Senate at the behest of Gen. Lincoln Andrews, the head of the federal Prohibition agents, increasing penalties and seizures for various booze crimes, and more controversially allowing dry cops to break into people’s houses that have stills...

(https://theonion.com/dhs-ice-can-enter-homes-without-pants/)

Chicago radio announcer Philip Friedlander is fined $25 in the very first radio slander case for falsely broadcasting that State’s Attorney Robert Crowe was seen entering the Moulin Rouge cabaret.

California Attorney Gen. Ulysses Sigel Webb rules that schoolchildren can’t be asked to write essays about Communism, because that would force them to research the subject.

I wonder how many parents naming their kid after Gen. Grant (Webb was born in 1864) had to decide for themselves what the S. should stand for, since in Grant’s case it didn’t stand for anything (and his real first name was Hiram), and how many of those parents chose “Sigel.”

One of my resentments about Grant and Harry S. Truman is that they insisted on putting a period after the S., signifying an abbreviation when there was no actual abbreviation.

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Today -100: April 2, 1926: Of bankruptcy rings and bathtubs

George W. English, a Wilson appointee to the District Court for the Eastern District of Illinois, is impeached by the House of Representatives for high misdemeanors (that’s the worst kind of misdemeanor), abuse of power (“tyranny and oppression”). Something about a “bankruptcy ring.” It’s kind of obscure to me. And to the congresscritters. At one point their vote on one of the charges is walked back because they didn’t understand what they were voting on. At one point John Rankin (D-Miss.) and Ogden Mills (R-NY) get into a slanging match and a near-fistfight. Rankin later denies having used what is described only as a “highly insulting term,” saying “I would not call any white man what I had in mind.”

Theatre producer Earl Carroll is arrested for perjury for denying that at a party he threw for Harry Thaw, the killer of Stanford White, a naked woman swam on the stage of his theatre in a bathtub full of “alleged wine,” as was the custom.

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Today -100: April 1, 1926: 21 nuns, no waiting

The House Foreign Affairs Committee hears “evidence” that 21 Carmelite nuns who were illegally teaching religion in Mexico were arrested and threatened with being sold to bordellos.

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Today -100: March 31, 1926: Follow the dotted line

Democrats in the Senate plan to block ratification of the war debt repayment deal with Italy until after the mid-terms, considering it overly generous. Reed Smoot (R-Utah), opposing the rejection of the deal, says “I do not want to see Italy exhausted.”

Vera, Countess Cathcart sails for England. Her play having failed, she plans to try to make money writing about her immigration problems in the US.

France resumes sending prisoners to Devil’s Island, 340 of them. Captain Louis Grenet of the prison ship La Martinière (which the NYT amusingly misnames La Mariniere, which is the name of those French blue & white stripey shirts) charmingly declares that there’s no risk of mutiny: “Hot steam from ten pumps into the cages soon melts any revolt.” One of the prisoners, whose sentence of death by the guillotine had been commuted by the president, has a tattoo around his neck: “Executioner, when cutting, follow the dotted line.”

Charlie Chaplin and Lita Grey have a second son, Sydney, less than 11 months after Charles Jr. was born. Lita has yet to reach her 18th birthday.

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Today -100: March 30, 1926: Of censors and fasters

The League of Nations Advisory Commission on Child Welfare wants to establish movie censorship boards, one in each country.

Berlin hunger artist “Jolly” ends his public fast after 44 days. Quitter. 44 days is a record for “professionals,” as opposed to starving people.

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Today -100: March 29, 1926: Of pretenders, bread, loop the loops, and glaciers

Obit of the Day -100: Prince Louis Philippe, who had been the pretender to the French throne since 1894 for the Orléanist royal line, dies of pneumonia at 57 in Sicily. His great-grandfather was deposed by the 1848 revolution. Exiled from France more than once, LP was imprisoned when he tried to return to offer to do his military service. He filled his time never being king by serving in the British army; trying to join the French, Russian, Belgian and Italian armies; hunting; climbing mountains in Tibet; being an anti-Dreyfusard; getting named in multiple divorce cases (the dude, sorry, Duke, liked to fuck). It was a busy life but a useless one.

Americans are eating less bread, partly because home baking is declining. Also, sliced bread hasnt been invented yet (it will in a couple of years).

Aviatrix Sophie Elliot-Lynn (whose name was seemingly never spelled the same way twice) loops the loop, the first woman to do so in Britain. She also does a spinning nosedive and other stunts. She scoffs at the thought that all this shit is dangerous: “Airplanes have been brought to such perfection that there is little danger.” She will have a minor crash in 1929 but it will be a fall down the stairs of a London tram that will kill her in 1939.

A group of US and Canadian scientists apply to the Danish government to go to Greenland with some thermite to blow up glaciers to clear the sea routes and because it would be cool.

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Today -100: March 28, 1926: Of cursed tombs, downing pens, furniture, highest destinies, and horsies and buggies

Georges Bénédite, Egyptologist and curator of the Louvre, dies in Luxor, the 6th victim of the Vengeance of Tutankhamen™.

A playwrights’ strike is averted. Their beef with producers had something to do with musical numbers being performed by bands.

Grace Coolidge, redecorating the White House in early Colonial style, appeals to the nation for free furniture. See, that sort of furniture “cannot be purchased” because it is handed down generation to generation, so people should stop doing that and instead donate it, free, to the White House.  (The White House will deny asking for free furniture, but I notice it took several days for them to do so).

The textile strikers in Passaic, NJ (yes, the strike is still going on) call for the arrest of  Chief of Police Richard Zober and 12 other cops for assault. Of course an arrest warrant was already issued 3 weeks ago, but no one could be prevailed upon to serve it. The ACLU is threatening civil suits. 

Wyoming Gov. Nellie Tayloe Ross tells some Girl Scouts that freedom for women is great and everything, but “I am old-fashioned enough, however, to believe that no career is as glorious or satisfying as that which wifehood and motherhood offers, and it is there she fulfills her highest destiny.”

Chicago mayoral election news: the Post Office is unable to find 50,000 addresses of registered voters, presumably fake ones. And Mayor Big Bill Thompson and his competitor, State’s Attorney Robert Crowe, both file libel actions against The Chicago Evening Post for reporting that they’d gotten into a fist fight. They say they didn’t (a likely story).

In 1881, Sheriff S. Foster Black arrested “Edwin Turner” for stealing a horse and buggy in Binghamton. Turner then escaped from the Broome County, New Jersey jail, going out the window on a rope tied from sheets, as was the custom, was re-captured and then, while being transported, escaped from a train via, what else, the bathroom window. Now, 45 years later, Black, who is now a 91-year-old deputy sheriff (and was the one who allowed him to use that bathroom), spots a newspaper picture of one Edwin Turner Osbaldeston, who claims to be the oldest survivor of the Crimean War, so Black arrests him yet again. Osbaldeston, 93, is a retired doctor in Ashbury Park. He claims this is a case of mistaken identity and that he has never been in Binghamton in his life (a likely story).

George Hir, Hungarian deputy from the fascist Awakening Hungarians party, dies from poisoning. His wife denies that it was a suicide, insisting he was murdered by the Doublecross League of Blood, something related to the fascist plot to counterfeit French francs to finance a coup.

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Today -100: March 27, 1926: Beloved or feared and respected by all

Sen. Walter Edge (R-NJ) introduces a resolution for a referendum in every state on modifying prohibition to permit less boozy booze. For some reason, this would be on the 1928 rather than the 1926 ballot.

Mussolini celebrates the 7th anniversary of the Fascist movement with “the severe discipline of the strong.” “At home the government has solved formidable problems with the consent of the people, while opposition of all sorts was dispersed.” Because nothing says consent like dispersing opposition of all sorts. The Moose continues, Trumpily: “Abroad Fascist Italy is beloved or feared and respected by all, in spite of the impotent maneuvers of the old and outcast political parties we have definitely wiped out.”

Ruth Bryan Owen, William Jennings Bryan’s daughter, announces that she is considering running for the Florida Legislature. She won’t; she’ll run for the US Congress instead. She’ll lose, but she’ll win in 1928.

The Holy Synod in Moscow, which rules the Red faction of the Russian Orthodox Church, will abolish monasticism. Monks will be required to take up some useful profession.

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Today -100: March 26, 1926: Of fake Spanish women, real miracles, former royals, and castor-oil and rubber-club adolescences

Luis Fernando / Luigi Ferdinando d'Orléans, a French AND Spanish prince who was expelled from France for “bad conduct” in 1924 and then stripped of his Spanish princely privileges, is arrested by customs officials on the Spanish/Portuguese border (the article doesn’t specify which country’s officials) on suspicion of smuggling (nor does it specify what he was smuggling), disguised as a Spanish woman.

Headline of the Day -100:

(The article does not explain what the hell he’s talking about).

12.5 million signatures have been collected in Germany for a plebiscite on confiscating without compensation the properties of all the former royal families. That’s enough signatures to force the holding of the plebiscite.

The NYT says that Mussolini isn’t getting blowback from the Matteotti trial because he’s successfully ascribed the 1924 murder to an earlier phase of Fascism. “The movement has outgrown its castor-oil and rubber-club adolescence.”

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Today -100: March 25, 1926: Guilty guilty guilty

The trial for the murder of Giacomo Matteotti ends with 2 of the defendants acquitted and 3 found guilty of unintentional murder. Amerigo Dumini, Albino Volpi and Ameleto Poveromo (whose name in his Italian Wikipedia article is translated by my web browser as Hamlet the Poor Man) are sentenced to nearly 6 years, but will get the benefit of time served and an amnesty law for political murders and be out in a couple of months. Dumini and Hamlet the Poor Man will be re-tried after World War II and get longer sentences. Dumini will electrocute himself while changing a lightbulb in 1967.

The New Jersey Hotel Men’s Association is fighting a bill in the NJ Lege which would allow black people denied service in hotels, theatres, restaurants, etc to sue for $500.

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Today -100: March 24, 1926: I never heard a more self-complacent speech in my life

The Reichstag defeats a motion of no confidence in Chancellor Hans Luther 259 to 141 after Luther tells them that the Locarno treaties form the basis of his policies. The debate features the debut speech of Grand Adm. Alfred von Tirpitz, the unrestricted-submarine-warfare guy from the last war, who says Locarno and the League of Nations would bring Germany “into complete dependency on France,” adding, “but not in some kinky sexual way.” He may not have said the last bit.

In the British Parliament, Foreign Sec. Austen Chamberlain survives a resolution brought by former PM David Lloyd George to reduce his salary (by how much is not specified here) after a vote of 325 to 136. Chamberlain’s speech was marked by “ill-temper” and “a feeling of self-satisfaction,” was “conspicuous for length rather than clearness, for acidity of tone rather than power of argument.” Former PM Ramsay MacDonald says “I never heard a more self-complacent speech in my life.” Everyone’s a critic.

At the Matteotti trial, the lawyers for 3 of the accused say that Matty totally brought it on himself by not surrendering after the Fascists “conquered” but continued to “torment” the poor Fascists until they could take it no more. Part of this blame-the-victim approach is to assert that they killed him because he was a nasty person and not because he was an MP; there’s a special penalty for people who murder MPs.

is a claim I’m pretty sure we’ve seen a few times before.

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Today -100: March 23, 1926: When Irish elves are smiling

The NY State Senate kills bills to restore state enforcement of Prohibition.

Vera, Countess Cathcart’s play Ashes of Love opens on Broadway, with the countess playing the lead role. The audience found it “dull” and laughed in all the wrong places, according to the NYT. She evidently sucks as both a playwright and an actor.

Mysterious “elfin” music is heard near Milltown, Ireland.  Hundreds have traveled thence to catch a glimpse of the elves.

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Today -100: March 22, 1926: Of dictators and humanized public institutions

Headline of the Day -100:

No kidding.

Actually, the article, which does not mention Herr Hitler at all, is about media tycoon Alfred Hugenberg, the Rupert Murdoch of his day, whose far-right German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, or DNVP) is still a couple of inches shy of fascism. HuggyBear’s preferred dictator, if any, is not revealed.

Labor Secretary James J. Davis is evidently so vital to the functioning of the federal government that Coolidge told him not to run for governor of Pennsylvania, so he says he won’t, although he does inform us of what his platform would be if he did run, which he says he won’t. He would “humanize our public institutions,” which is a good way of describing reforms or probation and juvenile courts and abolishing poor houses. He really won’t run for governor, although it sure sounds like he’s champing at the bit. He will be elected to the US Senate in 1930.

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Today -100: March 21, 1926: Of vets-screwer-overs, illinium, and nipples

Charles Forbes, the former head of the Veterans’ Bureau, which he and his cronies robbed blind, begins a two-year sentence at Leavenworth, of which he’ll serve 20 months.

Element #61 has been discovered by scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and named illinium. In other news: no, they haven’t, they just think they have. Which is probably why my computer doesn’t recognize the word “illinium.”

Headline of the Day -100:

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Today -100: March 20, 1926: Is it a dog or a fish?

John Calvin Coolidge Sr. deeded his farm to Pres. Coolidge 3 weeks ago and other property before that. Inheritance tax avoidance? The deed was actually owned until 3 weeks ago by the estate of his father, Calvin Galusha Coolidge, who died in 1878. The successful businessman/farmer/etc died supposedly penniless and without a will.

NYT Op-ed on JCC Sr.: “The most that could be got out of his close-lipped Yankee taciturnity was the expression of his belief that his son would do ‘fairly well’ as President.”

King George visits a London exhibition of Canadian artists and is baffled, by a Futurist painting, as was the custom, asking “Is it a dog or a fish?” (the artist is sadly unidentified, nor is the species depicted in the artwork revealed, which is just poor journalism). 

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Today -100: March 19, 1926: Of Seniors and challengers

Pres. Coolidge’s father, Col. John Calvin Coolidge Sr., dies at age 80. A retired JP and former Vermont legislator and senator, Senior also occupied posts ranging from constable to road commissioners to town selectman. The president was informed onboard the train he was taking to Senior’s bedside.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Land of Mist is published, in which he shits on his Professor Challenger character, who discovers the spirit world, or something. At least Doyle didn’t do this to Sherlock Holmes.

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Today -100: March 18, 1926: Of leagues, gross immorality, and pygmies

The League of Nations Assembly fails to admit Germany to the League because of the whole fight about who gets to join the Council and in what order. Everybody’s blaming Brazil. The League will take this up again in the next session in five months.

Famous biologist J.B.S. Haldane, who will coin the word “clone,” at least in its modern sense, wins his appeal against his expulsion from the Cambridge University staff by the Sex Viri committee (If you are at work, do not google “sex viri”) for “gross immorality” because he was named as a respondent in the divorce case of Charlotte Franken, which some people seem to think is none of Cambridge’s business. He will marry Franken later in the year.

An expedition to Dutch New Guinea led by Berkeley Prof. Matthew Stirling begins next month. It’s looking for pygmies, as one does.

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Today -100: March 17, 1926: His death was a tremendous blow to me

The New York Assembly Judiciary Committee, dominated by Republicans,  kills Gov. Al Smith’s measures for a 4-year gubernatorial term, for reapportionment for both houses of the Legislature on the basis of – can you imagine it? – population. It does approve a referendum for a pay raise for the governor, whose current $10,000 a year is less than that of some of his appointees. The State Senate Judiciary Committee kills a proposal for a referendum to ask the US Congress to modify the Volstead act to permit the sale of light wines and beer. The Assembly’s Labor and Industries Committee kills Smith’s proposal for a 48-hour work week for women & children.

The first witness at the much-delayed Matteotti murder trial, Amerigo Dumini, leader of the Fascist death squad, admits to organizing the Socialist leader’s kidnapping, but claims Matteotti died of natural causes, as one does during a kidnapping: “Matteotti was not murdered, he died. His death was a tremendous blow to me.” Dumini says he couldn’t have been part of the actual killing because he was driving the car. Then why did you have bruises when you were arrested 2 days later? he is asked. He denies he had bruises only to be shown the report of the police doctor. Old war wounds and insect bites, he says. And what about all the blood on the car if Matty died of TB? It ain’t going well for Dumini. He is unable to substantiate his claim that Matteotti was involved in the 1924 murder of Fascist Nicola Bonservizi in France (which he wasn’t).

The Indianapolis City Council adopts an ordinance pushed by the White People’s Protective League for residential segregation by race.

The House of Representatives votes 48 to 2 to reject an amendment to the DC Appropriations Bill withholding the salary of any teacher who teaches evolution or “disrespect to the Bible, partisan politics or that ours is an inferior form of government.”

Headline of the Day -100:

“I can totally pull out in time,” Herbert Hoover says.

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Today -100: March 16, 1926: Kitty!

The Great Smoky Mountain Conservation Society sends Pres. Coolidge a wildcat as a, you know, pet. Instead, he’ll be sending it to the zoo.

The Italian government makes its first (?) use of the law allowing it to strip the citizenship of expats who criticize the Fascist regime, in this case the radical journalist Carlo Tresca, currently residing in New York.

Lady Vera Terrington, who was the 4th woman Member of Parliament (1923-4), is divorcing Harold, the 2nd Lord Terrington, for adultery. He says he will fight the suit.

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Today -100: March 15, 1926: If they don’t want them that’s their look-out

Capt. Frank Doudera, a famous hunter, is bringing two timber wolves he captured in Quebec to New York, intending to give one to Mayor Jimmy Walker and the other to Brooklyn Borough President Joseph Guider. This according to a telegram he sent the Canadian Pacific Railway, which informed the NYT. Do they WANT timber wolves, the intrepid reporter asks. “I don’t know,” but “if they don’t want them that’s their look-out.”

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Today -100: March 14, 1926: Of booze and bribes

An Anti-Saloon League delegation visits the White House, trying to get Coolidge to condemn the move in Congress to, um, water down the Volstead Act. Coolidge evidently tells them he doesn’t see any need to inject himself into the Prohibition discussion.

The US government, as I probably mentioned, is suing to cancel Harry Sinclair’s Teapot Dome oil lease. Wallace Abbott, secretary to former Interior Secretary Albert Fall, was supposed to testify about Sinclair’s bribing of Fall; instead, he commits suicide.

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Today -100: March 13, 1926: Of reasonable concessions, dining alone, fasts, and disarmaments

Germany rejects the compromise proposal that Poland join the League of Nations Council on a non-permanent basis at the same time as Germany joins both the League and the Council, with decisions on Spain and Brazil postponed. French PM Aristide Briand says they’ve reached “the extreme limit of concessions.” British Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain says there’s no point in further discussions: “We have made every reasonable concession, and if the Locarno plan fails now the plain fault will be that of Germany” (yes, it’s his brother Neville who made every unreasonable concession to Germany in 1938).

It’s generally agreed that if an agreement is not reached, the future of the League of Nations would be in doubt, and the already shaky governments of France and Germany, and possibly Britain, would fall.

Since Crown Prince Carol renounced the Romanian throne in January, the king and queen are barely speaking and no longer eat together. There is a plan afoot to allow him to return from exile as a private citizen. (The article offhandedly, after the fold, mentions that 1) there is an anti-Semitic student strike in Bucharest, 2) the Horthy regime is using it as an excuse to station troops there just when it’s trying to get the parliament to pass a new voting system modeled on Mussolini’s. Maybe put that shit ahead of the royal gossip).

Following the success of hunger artist “Jolly,” so many people have applied to sit in a glass booth and not eat that the Berlin chief of police bans any new professional fasters (grandfathering in those like Jolly who are currently mid-fast).

The Danish Folketing (Parliament) votes to mostly abolish the army and navy.

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Today -100: March 12, 1926: Like asking a Methodist to seek a pardon for being a Methodist

Virginia’s State Senate has its first ever impeachment, that of Sen. Alfred C. Smith, after it’s discovered that he was convicted of forgery in South Carolina in 1913 and of getting his Virginia law licence fraudulently in 1914. During the impeachment debate, Smith accuses Sen. James Barron of doing the work of the Knights of Columbus. The senate removes him from office. In November he’ll be re-elected, unopposed (!) to serve the remainder of his term. He’ll be convicted of fraud, again, in 1938 and go to prison.

Socialist congresscritter Victor Berger lobbies the government to restore Eugene Debs’s civil rights. Attorney Gen. John Sargent tells him Debs would have to apply for a pardon personally. Berger says this Debs refuses to do because he asserts that he did nothing wrong: “This is like asking a Methodist to seek a pardon for being a Methodist.”

During a debate in the British Parliament on maintaining a Navy of 102,675 men, George Lansbury (grandfather of Angela) proposes reducing that by, oh, say, 100,000, saying the Navy is used for capitalist exploitation throughout the world. His motion loses 167 to 19.

Mississippi bans the teaching in state-supported schools that man “ascended or descended from a lower order of animals.”

Austrian Fascists are calling for restorations(s) of the Habsbugs (that was a typo, but I like it so I’m keeping it), but with Otto as king of Austria and other Habsbugs as kings of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Croatia. I’m not sure how this would work with their other goal of Anschluß with Germany; presumably Germany would have to restore its own emperor or even all its royal families.

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Today -100: March 11, 1926: Of councils, beer, and engagements

Brazil threatens to veto Germany joining the League of Nations Council (which would stop it joining the League at all) if Brazil doesn’t also get a permanent seat on it (no South American country currently has a permanent seat). Other countries (Italy, Spain) might block German entry to the Council if other countries don’t come in at the same time, but Sweden is threatening to veto the entry to the Council of any other country than Germany. (Also, if Germany doesn’t join the League, the Locarno treaties don’t go into effect).

During a heated debate in the House on relaxing Prohibition, Emanuel Celler (D-NY) reads out George Washington’s recipe for beer.

Rudolph Valentino denies rumors spread by Pola Negri that they are engaged. She pulled this same stunt with Charlie Chaplin.

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Today -100: March 10, 1926: Of Of briands, bootleggers and hijackers, municipal housekeeping, and amaaaaazing stories

Aristide Briand succeeds himself as prime minister of France, the 9th time he’s held the job. He’ll also be foreign minister, so he’ll have to scurry to Geneva for the talks on German entry to the League of Nations. This cabinet is further to the right than the last. No one thinks it will last long.

Charles English, supervisor of recreation of the Chicago Board of Education, says Chicago boys no longer play cowboys and Indians, but bootleggers and hijackers. The girls, he says, imitate screen vamps.

Bertha Landes is elected mayor of Seattle, the first woman mayor of a major US city, although she was acting mayor while Edwin Brown was out of town at the 1924 Democratic National Convention. She fired the corrupt chief of police; Brown reinstated him when he returned. It’s Brown who she just defeated on a slogan of “municipal housekeeping.” (The NYT reports, incorrectly, that the voters also voted in the city-manager plan, which would have more or less abolished the position of mayor).

The magazine Amazing Stories’s first issue appears. The first magazine exclusively devoted to scientifiction, as Hugo Gernsback called it (he didn’t coin the term science fiction, but he did put it into widespread use a bit later, after scientifiction failed to catch on) (don’t know who it was who later came up with “sci-fi,” which Harlan Ellison, who despised the term, always pronounced skiffy).

Was it just reprints of 19th-century stories? No! Here’s an original story by a teenage author:

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Today -100: March 9, 1926: Well, journalism and permanent revolution

Leon Trotsky is now a professor at the Moscow School of Journalism in his copious free time.

German nationalists are complaining about American negroes appearing on the Berlin stage.

France’s current lack of a government may delay Germany’s entry into the League of Nations, since a decision has to be made first on whether Poland, Brazil, or Spain are also admitted to the LoN Council. Germany insists that it has to be part of that decision, so it should only be made after Germany becomes a League member.

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Today -100: March 8, 1926: Mr. Watson, come here, and tell me how tall the Woolworth Building is

For the 50th anniversary of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone (its patent, anyway), a wireless phone call is successfully made between New York’s AT&T offices and the British Post Office in London. Reporters talked with their trans-Atlantic counterparts, two minutes each. They chit-chat about night life and whether you can obtain liquor in New York (yes). A reporter from the Westminster Gazette asks how tall the Woolworth Building is, to settle a bet about whether it’s taller than the Eiffel Tower. There was a phone cribbage game. In other words, they ran out of stuff to say each other. The listeners on the NY side say the sound quality is equivalent to local service, those in London say it’s better. Trans-Atlantic telephone isn’t ready to go commercial yet because of intermittent static and because so many radio-heads have built sets that can listen in on calls.

The 36-year-old Charlie Chaplin is dyeing his graying hair.

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Today -100: March 7, 1926: Of arrest warrants, poles, fakers, and ears

The JP who issued arrest warrants for the Passaic chief of police and 2 patrolmen for beating strikers can’t find any cops willing to serve the warrants.

There will be as many as 10 Arctic expeditions this year.

Rep. W.D. Upshaw (D-Georgia) slaps Robert Choate, the Washington correspondent of The Boston Herald, for writing that in a congressional debate on Prohibition (Upshaw’s for it), he got so excited that he forgot to use his trademark crutches. The slap came after Upshaw complained that people would think he was a faker and Choate responded “And I think you are one.” He’s not the only one who thinks that.

Dr. Fritz Pfuffer, a Viennese ear doctor, says city noises are making people’s ears bigger. In a couple of generations, they’ll be “like a dachshund’s.” 

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Today -100: March 6, 1926: Of cathcarts, confidence, and centenarians

A Passaic, New Jersey justice of the peace issues an arrest warrant for Chief of Police Richard Zober and 2 patrolmen for clubbing textile strikers.

A federal judge rules on Vera, Countess Cathcart’s writ of habeas corpus, saying someone can’t be excluded because of something that was not a crime where they did it (adultery in South Africa in this case). She can now stay in the US as long as she wants. The government was forced to admit to every argument brought by her lawyer Arthur Garfield Hays (of Scopes Monkey Trial fame & the ACLU; named after three mediocre presidents). It was attempting to thwart a habeas hearing until Hayes threatened to personally take her to Ellis Island and demand they lock her up so he can then demand they unlock her up.

The French Cabinet led by Aristide Briand loses a vote of confidence.

Reports inform Coolidge that the recent drop in the stock market didn’t affect the commodity markets and that business fundamentals are so strong that everything’s just fine.

Tick tick tick.

Salem, Massachusetts Mary Elizabeth Newhall will have her 100th birthday next week – guess they didn’t get ALL the witches. She’s been walking with crutches since she caught polio at 3. Her father was the town crier from 1842 to 1881, when the town abolished the post.

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Today -100: March 5, 1926: No right to fill a man’s skin with liquor

A coffee-house waiter in Budapest leaves a suicide note saying that the reasons for his suicide and the persons involved in it are explained by a crossword puzzle he has constructed. The police can’t solve it.

After the violent police attacks on textile factory strikers in Clifton & Passaic, New Jersey yesterday, they are now wearing Great War trench helmets and gas masks. Reporters, who after having $3,500 worth of camera equipment destroyed by the fuzz yesterday, are now taking pictures and newsreel footage from planes and armored cars (the  type banks use). But the police have dialed down their thuggery. Edward Moore, who claims to have invented a “centrifugal riot gun,” which he invented at the end of the war and can shoot 4,000 rounds per minute, helpfully offers it to Passaic.

Federal Judge J.C. Hutchison (Houston) condemns Prohibition agents buying liquor for informants in sting operations: “Prohibition agents have no right to fill a man’s skin with liquor just to make a case.”

The Lord Chamberlain, Britain’s theatrical censor, orders changes in Vera, Countess Cathcart’s play Ashes at the request of Lord Craven’s friends, because it’s a theatre roman à clef (if that’s the term I’m looking for) based on their affair. Following Lord Cromer’s orders, the play’s location has been changed from South Africa, the words “lover” and “mistress” deleted, and the name of the Lord Craven character changed from “Rayhaven.” There will be a New York production next month, which will not have these alterations (it will close after 8 performances).

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Today -100: March 4, 1926: Of strikes and nickel

The Passaic, New Jersey police used fire hoses on textile factory strikers a day ago and now, along with Clifton police, attack strikers with tear-gas bombs and clubs and motorcycles. To be fair, some of the children the motorcycle cops run down had hit them with snowballs. The cops make a special target of press photographers and newsreel cameramen, smashing their cameras (and hands).

In its largest day of trading ever, the markets tumble following the Interstate Commerce Commission’s rejection of the Nickel Plate merger.

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Today -100: March 3, 1926: Of Bimbas

Anthony Bimba is convicted of sedition, but not of blasphemy, the prosecution having downplayed the charge under that 300-year-old law. The judge expresses annoyance at the Lithuanian community of Brooklyn using the legal system to conduct its internal disputes, calling it “over-contentious.” He fines Bimba $100. Bimba’s conviction will be reversed on appeal. He will become a naturalized US citizen in 1927, but in 1963 the government will try to deport him, claiming he failed to mention the 1926 prosecution when he applied for citizenship; the government will eventually drop that case, which was probably initiated in retaliation for his refusal to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1957.

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Today -100: March 2, 1926: Watch out

The War Department turns down an offer by the Benrus Watch Co. (owned by three Jewish brothers who immigrated from, where else, Switzerland) to install – for free – a giant illuminated wristwatch on the Statue of Liberty. The War Dept (why is this their decision?) says a wristwatch would simply be too modern for the classical statue.

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Today -100: March 1, 1926: Of dirty businesses, the real cause of the crime wave, and what means the same thing as negro

Prince Aage of Denmark, who renounced his position as #1 in the royal succession and joined the Foreign Legion, as you do, says being a king is “a dirty business.” “Give me the army,” he says. Whenever the prince of Wales falls off a horse, “everybody in the the world laughs at it,” but when Aage falls off a horse in Morocco, “I just rub myself and that’s the end of it.” No comment.

William McDougall, professor of psychology and racist twaddle at Harvard, says crime in the US is caused by racial mingling, which erodes the traditions which preserve order.

A black man, Joseph Manning, is fined $30 for disorderly conduct. He approached a young woman eating breakfast in a Park Row restaurant, then dared to object when she told him, “Shut up, nigger.” The magistrate says, “There are too many of your kind in Harlem who want people to believe they are not negroes by taking offense when they are called negroes. Nigger means the same thing as negro.”

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Today -100: February 28, 1926: Of vindications, maids, and cruel and barbarous bedtimes

Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, who ran for governor of Texas in 1924 allegedly to “vindicate” her husband, impeached former Gov. James R, announces that she’ll need a second term to finish that vindication. She wants the impeachment expunged from the record and says she wouldn’t be running again if that had happened. That’s quite a platform, especially since the state senate has already refused to do that. She says she will continue to be advised by her husband just like previous governors have been advised by their wives (I notice she never claims that she advised James when he was governor).

Mary Harrison, widow of Pres. Benjamin Harrison (by the way, she was the niece of his first wife), appears in court in Harlem to plead for mercy for her maid, who had stolen a bunch of her jewelry.

In Pittsburgh, the master (job title, not an S&M thing, probably) who reviews divorce cases and makes recommendations which the court usually rubber-stamps, agrees with Miriam Elpern that the 9:00 or 9:30 bedtime he imposed on her is cruel and barbarous.

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Today -100: February 27, 1926: Baby’s day out

Less than 3 weeks after being convicted of attacking a 12-year-old girl, black man Harry Butler is hanged in Georgetown, Delaware. Although only 100 or so spectators are allowed to observe the... entertainment (not counting those watching from the roofs of neighboring buildings), afterwards thousands are allowed to look at the body on the scaffold. “Many of the women carried babies, raising them to their shoulders to see the negro.” Before the execution, the crowd was singing, but the article does not list their songs.

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Today -100: February 26, 1926: Of bridges and elections

A $425 million Deficiency Bill is held up by a bunch of senators hiding in the cloak room to prevent a quorum for a vote on whether to tax Navajo tribes to build a bridge in Nevada and another over the Colorado River, neither of which would be of any benefit whatsoever to the Navajo.

Dems in the NY Legislature propose a bill to increase the term of office for the governor from 2 years to 4, starting with whoever is elected in November, with elections held in the off year. Republicans agree to the idea of a 4-year term but want elections to be held in the same year as presidential elections. I don’t really understand the reasons for the parties’ preferences here.

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Today -100: February 25, 1926: Going through the arch

French army pilot Lt. Léon Collot (Collet? Callot?) makes a bet that he can fly through the arch at the bottom of the Eiffel Tower. He succeeds, then his wing catches on one of the Tower’s radio antennas, and he crashes and burns. There is no mention of whether the plane was his personal aircraft or the army’s.

Germany is offering to allow Spain – but absolutely not Poland – a seat on the League of Nations Council, in exchange for the end of the occupation of the Rhineland by the end of the year. (Update: Germany will deny this, so who knows).

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