Today -100: November 11, 1926: Of ambassadors, falls, and gentlemen at heart

Canada appoints Vincent Massey as its first ambassador to the US. Massey only recently moved from business to politics, losing a race for Parliament last year and not running in this year’s elections. I guess no one likes him so they’re sending him to the US. His brother is the actor Raymond Massey.

Former secretary of the interior Albert Fall and oil tycoon Edward Doheny are arraigned for conspiracy to defraud the government in the oil leases at Elk Hills, California. Fall will also face at some point trials for bribery and Teapot Dome.

There are many government-owned corporations in the Philippines, including the national bank. Despised Gov-Gen Leonard Wood abolishes the body that governed them, the Legislature-created Philippine Board of Control, and grabs its power for himself.

France will deport Ricciotti Garibaldi and remove his name from the Légion d'honneur, which will be especially hurtful as he likes wearing the little ribbon, which he says is proof that he is a “gentleman at heart.”

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Today -100: November 10, 1926: Of de-deputizations, if that’s a word, and banishments

Italy’s parliament unseats 123 opposition deputies, including Communists and the multi-party “Aventine Secession” members, who have been boycotting the parliament for 2½ years in protest at the murder of Matteotti. The claim is that they used their parliamentary prerogatives to subvert the state. They will now lose their parliamentary immunity and cheap railway rates. I can’t help but notice that no mention is made of whether these deputies will be replaced and how any replacements will be chosen.

One Mexican senator shoots another senator dead, the first time this has happened in the Senate building (fatally, anyway).

The German Socialists celebrate the 8th anniversary of the founding of the Weimar Republic by introducing a bill to ban former kaiser Wilhelm from Germany forever.

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Today -100: November 9, 1926: Dangerous commotions are the worst kind of commotions

Evidently in response to the latest assassination attempt on Mussolini, the Italian Fascist Party is now weeding out insufficiently fanatical members. And banning performances in which animals are ill-treated or which might cause “dangerous commotions” or harm public morals, for example through hypnotic suggestion. Birth control information is banned (isn’t it already?). There’s also a new blasphemy crime. And a ban on giving newborns “ridiculous, shameful or subversive names.”

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Today -100: November 8, 1926: Ah, Herrin violence, how we haven’t missed you

So the idea of Ricciotti Garibaldi’s plot to run assassination plots and whatnot out of France against the Italian Fascist regime was to turn France against the anti-Fascist exiles. It’s probably not helpful to Mussolini that when the French secret police arrested Garibaldi, he spilled the beans immediately and completely.

Herrin, Illinois Mayor Jeff Stone and another man are machine-gunned in the streets by shooters in 4 cars. Inter-bootlegger strife? Revenge for Stone shooting a deputy sheriff / klansman a year ago? None of the witnesses saw nuthin’, as was the custom. The NYT notes that most of the recent Herrin/Marion shootings have been fatal, attesting to the marksmanship of mountain men (or possibly gunsels imported by St Louis bootlegger gangs) (or both).

Poland censors the press, making the printing of news the government doesn’t like illegal, as well as criticism of government officials and anything “derogatory,” with prison sentences or fines being determined by officials without recourse to courts.

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Today -100: November 7, 1926: We refuse to swallow those theories and ideas that are forced upon us

NYT: “The measures adopted by the Cabinet Council yesterday have created a new crime which hitherto existed neither in the Italian civil nor penal code. The new crime is called anti-Fascism. The mere fact of being opposed actively by word or deed to the present regime in Italy is an offence punishable by law.” Also, janitors now require police approval to be hired, presumably so they act as spies for the police.

Remember someone throwing a bomb at Mussolini’s car 2 months ago? It looks like Ricciotti Garibaldi was involved in facilitating that so he could rat out the would-be assassin to the Fascist government. 

Romania grants the country’s Jewish community two whole reserved seats in the Senate, one for Orthodox Jews, one for Reformed (the Senate is partly elected & partly appointed by local governments and corporate bodies).

At the Soviet Union’s Communist Party Conference, Trotsky says “We decline to renounce any part of our principles or views, and we refuse to swallow those theories and ideas that are forced upon us,” but “we have no intention of aggravating the differences and factional strife within the party.” He says the USSR is building socialism too slowly, that the people are worse off than before the war, and that the crops aren’t doing so well either.

Prohibition agents raid Chicago City Hall and arrest 3 clerks who had been selling liquor out of their lockers to the city and county employees who work in the building.

The Czech government bans the Charleston in dance halls, cabarets, even private homes if government officials or foreign diplomats are present.

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Today -100: November 6, 1926: The prince was awfully keen to learn black bottom

Headline of the Day -100:

Italy will dissolve all Antifa parties, groups, or newspapers, sentence anyone outside the country spreading false or exaggerated news about conditions in Italy. And it brings back the death penalty for assassination attempts on Mussolini or the king as well as treason, armed rebellion, and espionage. Trials will be by military court. All passports are annulled and frontier troops are told to shoot anyone trying to go to, say, Switzerland.

Mussolini fires the interior minister for his role in running Ricciotti Garibaldi as an agent in France and adds takes over the post himself.

Coolidge says the only national part of the elections was the vote for the House of Representatives, so the R’s won (the Senate elections evidently don’t count as national elections because only 1/3 of the seats were voted on), no matter how many seats they actually lost.

Joseph Stalin recently gave a four-hour speech at the Communist Party Conference. He admits socialism hasn’t been completed in Russia, but “I am sure socialism will be victorious here if we follow the principles of Lenin and discard those of Trotsky.” He says the Communist Party will “wage merciless war against these rebels [Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev] until they reform their ways.” He says the US has now replaced Britain “as the head of the imperialistic States and as dominating the world.” He thinks that’s a bad thing.

Not one, but two stories in today’s paper about the Prince of Wales dancing. In Panama, he asked a shopgirl to dance at a ball (I’m not sure how long ago this was) because she was thin and the dignitaries’ wives he had been duty-dancing with were not. When he was pulled aside and told of her profession, he said “It must be a jolly good drug store” and kept on dancing with her. In the second story, we hear that former Ziegfeld Follies girl Edith Baker has been teaching him the black bottom dance. “The prince was awfully keen to learn black bottom,” she says. To save you from googling “black bottom” at work, here’s a British Pathé newsreel. I doubt Prince Edward performs it quite so athletically.

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Today -100: November 5, 1926: My usefulness as a Judge has been seriously impaired

Annie Oakley, the sharp-shooter formerly with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, dies at 66. Her husband and fellow marksman Frank Butler will stop eating and die 18 days later. She once shot the ash off a cigarette in Kaiser Wilhelm II’s mouth. Um, he volunteered.

Prince Leopold of Belgium and Princess Astrid of Sweden get married in Stockholm. They’ll have to get married again in a Catholic church or the marriage won’t count in Belgium; they’ll do that next week. I guess they don’t get a wedding night until then.

Secretary of State Frank Kellogg blocks newly appointed Soviet ambassador to Mexico Alexandra Kollontai from traveling through the US to Mexico because US law says no commies.

Wyoming Gov. Nellie Tayloe Ross, the first woman governor in the US,  loses her re-election bid, so we’re down to one woman governor. FDR will name her director of the US Mint. She will die in 1977 at 101 years old.

George W. English, a Wilson appointee to the District Court for the Eastern District of Illinois, who was impeached in April for high misdemeanors and “tyranny and oppression,” resigns rather than face the impeachment trial. “My usefulness as a Judge has been seriously impaired,” he says in his resignation letter to Coolidge. It is, in fact, he says, his “patriotic duty” to resign, despite being totes innocent.

Colonel Ricciotti Garibaldi, grandson of liberator of Italy Giuseppe Garibaldi, is arrested by the French Secret Service and confesses to having been paid by the Italian government to act as agent provocateur with Italian anti-Fascists in France, convincing them to plot against Mussolini and then having them arrested. He also raised funds for a “Republican march on Rome,” which never happened.

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Today -100: November 4, 1926: Of hostility, janitor-legislators, and jail breaks

Headline of the Day -100:

Worst horror movie ever.

South Dakota elects its first Democratic governor, William Bulow. It’s been a state since 1889.

A black man, K.F.L. Barnett, is elected to the Nebraska Legislature. He is a janitor.

An attempted jail break attempt at the Tombs in Manhattan is thwarted, the 3 prisoners shooting themselves after a long gun battle (2 had already been shot by guards).

After that rather lengthy preliminary hearing, Aimee Semple McPherson, along with her mother and another woman are bound over for trial for criminal conspiracy. McP’s lawyer says if the prosecution’s claim that her kidnappers didn’t actually exist is true, then there couldn’t have been a conspiracy. Which I’m pretty sure makes no logical sense.

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Today -100: November 3, 1926: Elections elections elections

Republicans lose 7 US Senate seats but retain a 49-46 majority (plus one Farmer-Laborite).

R’s lose 8 US House seats, retaining a 238—194 majority.

Republican candidates sweep the California elections and Democratic ones the Texas elections.

Al Smith wins re-election as NY governor with 53.3% of the vote, over Ogden Mills’s 43.8. In fact, the Dems sweep the state-wide offices except for Attorney-General Albert Ottinger.

Sen. James Wadsworth (R-NY) loses his seat to Robert Wagner (D). Wadsworth was thought to be a strong presidential candidate if Coolidge doesn’t run again. Now, not so much. Franklin Cristman, who ran as a dry candidate, says the campaign and the election results show that “organized whiskey,” which is the worst type of whiskey, controls the D & R parties in New York.

On the Democratic side, the defeat of Atlee Pomerene for the Senate seat from Ohio rather damages the possibility of his being the Democratic candidate for president in ‘28.

Massachusetts Sen. William M. Butler (R), who received his old friend Calvin Coolidge’s only personal endorsement loses to David Walsh, who served a previous term (1919-25) and will serve for the next 20 years. Butler is expected to resign as chair of the Republican National Committee.

The 3 women members of Congress (Florence Kahn of California, Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts, and Mary Norton of New Jersey) are re-elected, and a new one, Katherine Langley of Kentucky, is elected. Kahn & Rogers replaced their dead husbands while Langley replaces a husband who is living, but in prison for Prohibition crimes.

Rutherford B. Hayes, son of the president, loses his run for the Florida Legislature.

The New York advisory referendum to ask Congress to modify Prohibition by allowing states to decide what constitutes an intoxicating beverage passes by 4 to 1 (7 to 1 in NYC).

Illinois’s referendum along the same lines passes with more than 60% of the vote, but California voters fail to repeal the state’s Prohibition enforcement law. Wisconsin votes to allow beer with less than 2.75% alcohol content, Montana repeals its liquor laws but Colorado and Missouri fail to permit booze for personal or domestic use. Nevada passes a referendum that simply states that Prohibition has failed to abolish liquor traffic abuses.

A California initiative to allow public schools to buy Bibles fails badly, while one to exempt cemeteries from taxes passes.

Iowa votes to allow women to be elected to the Legislature.

Oregon votes to remove from its 1857 Constitution the bit banning on negroes, mulattoes or Chinamen from the state.

At the Congress of Legal Medicine in Paris, a Dr. Villedent suggests that measuring the blood alcohol level of someone involved in, say, an auto accident, can be used to determine their level of inebriation.

In the wake of the most recent assassination attempt on Mussolini, there have been violent attacks on anti-Fascist newspapers, deputies, mayors, etc. 14 opposition periodicals are suspended. This was the excuse that The Duck was looking for. Meanwhile,

The Imperial Conference in London announces that its dominions, i.e. the whiter colonies (Canada, Australia, South Africa, etc), will henceforth be real nations. Governors will turn into viceroys.

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Today -100: November 2, 1926: Nothing short of death will satisfy us

Italian Fascists are super-pissed at the latest assassination attempt against Mussolini. Black Shirts are parading hither and yon demanding the death of Mussolini’s enemies. Fascist Party Sec. Augusto Turati rants to one crowd “Nothing short of death will satisfy us.” He says the numerous assassination attempts on The Duck shows they can’t be isolated acts. He wants punishment for not only the assassins but anyone who acts as an instigator, directly or indirectly. “It is all right to entrust the punishment of those responsible to the courts, but Fascism accepts the laws and the judges only on condition that their sentence be death.”

The Supreme Court rules that people can be tried for a prohibition violation in both state and federal courts without it violating double jeopardy because the 18th Amendment provides for dual jurisdiction. The NYT will editorialize tomorrow that Congress should ban federal prosecution for people already convicted by state courts. “Meanwhile, each fresh reminder of how much liberty has been thrown away in an attempt to repeal custom and to enact the morality of the Anti-Saloon League is helpful  for the return of common sense and something at least of earlier freedom.”

Al Smith says that if he is re-elected, he will not leave the state of New York to make speeches (i.e., while running for president) during his 2-year term. Well, he might go to New Jersey to play golf. Criticizing Odgen Mills for a campaign that lacks any substance but is rich with misrepresentation, he says a leaflet circulated in Harlem claims “Smith’s election will renew lynching in the South.” I’m not sure what the logic of that is.

I wonder where polling stations were located? An article about super-old voters mentions that the voting place for one, a blind dude in a wheelchair who voted for Abraham Lincoln (presumably in the 1860s, not now, but he’s 85 so who knows) is in a Brooklyn cigar store. A Col. Timothy Roberts, who voted for the prohibition referendum, was sgt. of the guard that watched over Lincoln’s body.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle praises Harry Houdini and says “His death is a great shock and a deep mystery to me.”

Houdini’s body is shipped from Detroit to New York in the air-tight coffin he was locked into for an hour in August, surviving through controlled breathing.

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Today -100: November 1, 1926: Of handcuff kings and assassinations

Harry Houdini (born Erik Weisz) dies at 52. Presumably that student punching him in the stomach caused his appendix to burst, leading to his death after two operations, one for appendicitis, the second for peritonitis.

Benito Mussolini is nothing if not lucky in his assassins. 15-year-old anarchist Anteo Zamboni, celebrating Halloween and the anniversary of The Duck’s accession to power, shoots at the Duck in his car in Bologna, hitting his coat (and that of the mayor of Bologna) but not him. Zamboni is then captured by... Pier Paolo Pasolini’s father. Then the crowd kills him.

There will be all sorts of theories about what “really” happened and who if anyone, was behind the latest assassination attempt, the 4th in a year.

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Today -100: October 31, 1926: Of colored citizens, racist immigration bans, and executioners

The “Mills Colored Citizens’ Committee,” whoever they might be, calls on black people to vote for Republican Ogden Mills for NY governor. They say that in 3 terms as governor, Al Smith has failed to appoint a single negro to any job and his neglect of negro interests was in obedience to the Southern interests he’ll need for his 1928 presidential run.

Mexico bans entry by foreign negroes and deports 26 from British Honduras.

The name of the new state executioner of New York (official title: State Electrician) is revealed: Robert Elliott, who also does that job for Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. He’s performed 10 executions in NY since his appointment in January. He didn’t want his name made public, and his children are only just now finding out about his side hustle.

The Grand Lama’s palace in Llasa is now lit by electricity.

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Today -100: October 30, 1926: Of standing and racist land laws

Marshal Józef Klemens Piłsudski orders Polish Sejm (Parliament) deputies to stand while a presidential decree is read out tomorrow. This is understood as another sign of Piłsudski’s monarchism. (I don’t know what happened with this; there’s no followup story).

Floridians will vote on an amendment to the state constitution to ban land ownership by foreigners not eligible for citizenship, in other words Asians, and restrict it to suckers. It will pass with 58% of the vote. Voters will decline to repeal it in 2008 but will do so in 2018.

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Today -100: October 29, 1926: Of kluxers and coal

The Senate’s Campaign Fund Investigating Committee, investigating charges that the Ku Klux Klan and convicted murderer D.C. Stephenson used to run the state of Indiana, hears that Sen. James Watson was literally a kard-carrying member of the hooded order and that Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans worked to re-elect him in the May primaries. 

British Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill says the ongoing coal strike means there won’t be a tax cut in the next budget.

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Today -100: October 28, 1926: Mills just pulled a bone

NY gubernatorial candidate Rep. Ogden Mills, in a speech to the Advertising Club, says Gov. Al Smith “cannot be trusted either in public or private life.” I don’t know what he’s implying about Smith’s private life, but Al, who also seems not to know, is super-pissed, and demands Mills retract, or else.

Gov. Al Smith says Dr. Pease’s statement on what his lab tests really showed about the quality of NYC milk “kind of puts the milk issue on the bum, doesn’t it?” “Mills just pulled a bone.” Republicans are suggesting that Tammany Hall pressured Pease to make the statement, which Pease denies (although he did break confidentiality with the R. Party that commissioned his report, until the Queens district attorney told him it was his “public duty” to go, um, public). Nevertheless, Mills continues to campaign on the “milk scandal,” saying “I suppose that if there were enough water in the milk so that a goldfish could swim in it, Dr. Pease and Dr. Harris [the health commissioner] would consider it good.”

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Today -100: October 27, 1926: Hearst has hung a milk can around his neck and he cannot get away from it

Dr. Herbert G. Pease, the lab dude that NY gubernatorial candidate Ogden Mills has been quoting about the poor quality of NYC milk, comes forward to say that his tests actually showed the milk to be perfectly fine and indeed of excellent quality. Mills, it seems, has been grossly misrepresenting his report. Gov. Al Smith says Mills was lying on William Randolph Hearst’s orders: “Hearst has hung a milk can around his neck and he cannot get away from it.”

Did you know there’s also a Socialist candidate for NY governor? It’s true! NYC Municipal Judge Jacob Panken.

Panken asks Smith & Mills to release the names of their contributors before the election. He suspects Wall Street interests are contributing to both the D & R parties, given their “single ultimate purpose, to serve faithfully the financial and commercial interests... Wall Street does not care which candidate is elected, as long as he is not a Socialist.”

Parliament censures Labour MP Alfred Salter after he refuses to retract his statement about having seen members drunk in the Houses of Parliament. He says if this is referred to a committee of privileges, he’s prepared to name the MPs in question. The House votes not to refer the matter to a committee of privileges. He is censured for making “a gross libel on the Members of this House and a grave breach of its privileges.”

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Today -100: October 26, 1926: You don’t hear the words tomfoolery and humbuggery nearly often enough these days

NY Gov. Al Smith calls on challenger Rep. Ogden Mills to “stop his tomfoolery” about milk.

Health Commissioner Louis I. Harris calls the lab tests that Mills commissioned on milk a “piece of conspirant humbuggery,” which is the worst kind of humbuggery, and says the tests are used “merely to alarm and befuddle those who have no technical knowledge” and they actually show that NYC milk is awesome. Also, the lab’s methods were faulty.

In Warsaw, it is widely believed that Marshal Józef Klemens Piłsudski, who led athe coup in May, is plotting to become king, which is all he’s wanted since a gypsy fortune-teller predicted he’d become king. He’s just met with a bunch of monarchists.

The Supreme Court upholds the president’s right to fire executive-branch officers without asking the Senate for permission, even where the posts required confirmation. This has evidently been a matter of dispute since Washington’s time.

The 4th anniversary of the Fascist coup in Italy this Thursday will be a national holiday and a day off, but government workers, and probably everyone else, will have to work on Sunday instead. There will be no speeches (except by The Duck, of course).

A German high court fines Wilhelm Jaenecke, the son-in-law of the late president Ebert and an attaché at the Foreign Office, for writing in the guest book of a hotel on Capri, where he was vacationing, “Here one feels so contented it is possible to forget a Hindenburg is President of Germany.” Hindenburg intervenes to remit the fine of 10 days’ pay, but Jaenecke will leave his government post for one in the Prussian civil service.

The House of Commons discusses whether Dr. Alfred Salter, Labour MP for Bermondsey, committed a gross breach of privilege (which is the worst kind of breach of privilege) when he said that he’d often seen MPs drunk in the House. Winston Churchill, of all people, says that if Salter’s charge is not repudiated it might injure Parliament’s reputation. Salter isn’t present, so further action is held over.

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Today -100: October 25, 1926: Of interested minorities, matches, and booze

Vice President Charles Dawes denounces primaries as creating “rule by an interested minority.” Selection of candidates by a nominating convention “would make possible an open fight by impartial delegates against possible corruption or a controlled candidate and better precipitates the issue before the people in the election.”

The steamship Falcon sets fire in England, coming ashore near Dover. Its cargo: 203 million matches.

Metropolitan Life Insurance Comp. says deaths from alcohol among its policy-holders increased 14% in the first 9 months of 1926, with the greatest increase in young persons.

W.C. Fields’s “So’s Your Old Man” premieres. I’ve not seen this one, and all the versions of it on YouTube are low-quality.

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Today -100: October 24, 1926: Of confused and troubled dragons, milk evil, and shameless violations of party discipline

Judge Webster Thayer, who has presided over the various Sacco and Vanzetti trials in an extremely biased and unprofessional manner, denies them a new trial, calling Celestino Madeiros, who confessed to the murder, a crook and a liar.

D.C. Stephenson refuses to answer questions from a delegation led by a newspaper publisher about the Klan dominance of Indiana politics during his Ku Klux Klan grand dragonship. “I am confused and troubled and I can only think of my own personal liberty and the individual peril I am in,” he tells them.

Headline of the Day -100:

Italy bans women from being mayors. So Mussolini first gave women the municipal vote, then before they could exercise it made the post appointed rather than elective, now this.

Leon Trotsky & Lev Kamenev are ousted from the Politburo & Grigory Zinoviev is expelled from the Comintern for “a shameless violation of party discipline,” which is the worst kind of violation of party discipline.

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Today -100: October 23, 1926: Of pardons, lynchings, and wiener dogs

The Texas Legislature’s investigating committee looks into the practice of selling pardons by Frank O’Rourke, secretary of the State Prison Commission, in partnership with gubernatorial spouse James Ferguson. Warden of the State Pen N.A. Speer testifies that a bunch of people showed up at the execution of two black men as guests of O’Rourke, proceeded to get super drunk and partied through the execution and the whole next day.

Georgia arrests 8 men, and is hunting 7 others, for the lynching of a white man.

Dachshunds, which were mostly “got rid of” in Britain during the war, reappear for the first time since 1913 at the big dog show.

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Today -100: October 22, 1926: Of milk and (joke I could only write if I looked up the lyrics to that song, which I won’t do)

The lab that NY gubernatorial candidate Rep. Ogden Mills has been citing to prove that milk in New York City is bad and adulterated and icky says the samples it analyzed show “nothing deleterious,” although they won’t show anyone the reports they made at the behest of Mills and the R. party. Mills says he’ll only show it while testifying at a Grand Jury; I guess he’ll just keep any information about the alleged great milk danger under his hat until then.

The Soviet Union expels H.D. Anderson, the last American YMCA person left in the country.

Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, is published, with 5,090 copies printed.

At the Princess Theatre in Montreal, a McGill student punches Harry Houdini in the stomach.

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Today -100: October 21, 1926: I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth; I am a citizen of the world

Eugene Debs, perennial Socialist candidate for president and occasional political prisoner, dies at 70 of health issues not unrelated to his time in prison.

Yes, I chose this picture because of that tie.

“In a speech devoted for the most part to milk,” Ogden Mills, R. candidate for governor of NY, says the milk is adulterated in Manhattan as well as boroughs he’s previously named. I have no idea if this is true, but it’s certainly having a Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-type effect on parents’ willingness to feed milk to their children.

The NYT says “many” women are running for the Legislature, “many” in this case meaning 15 candidates for the 150 Assembly seats and 3 for the 51 State Senate seats. The senate candidates are all socialists, as are 8 of the Assembly candidates (2 are from the Workers’ Party) and US Senate candidate Jessie Wallace Hughan. The article names exactly one (1) of these women, incumbent Assemblycritter Rhoda Fox Graves (R).

Headline of the Day -100:

Yay! Peace in our time!

Germany: the prosecutor of two reactionaries who plotted to assassinate Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann last year recommends they be acquitted. Kaltdorff, a follower of Hitler, says it was all just a hoax, that he was collecting material for a novel, and that that letter he wrote to his lawyer, who turned it over to the cops, was a joke he wrote while super-drunk, but he did repeat that Stresemann was a traitor. So they’re released, because far-right crimes don’t count.

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Today -100: October 20, 1926: Of forbud

Norway votes for a referendum ending the 1917 prohibition imposed by decree and confirmed in a 1919 referendum. Since then, smuggling from Germany has sprung up, much of it captained by former u-boat officers though, sadly, just using regular boats.

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Today -100: October 19, 1926: We do not even think of it. Why should we?

Headline of the Day -100:

First it was booze, then milk, now water. This election is very liquid-themed.

Queen Marie of Romania is visiting New York, and the Times will not shut up about it.

At an imperial conference in London, Canadian PM Mackenzie King says “Any talk of the annexation of Canada by the United States is purely political and should not be taken seriously.” “[I]t is the last thing Canada is worrying about. Nobody there really talks about it; nobody wants it, and personally I haven’t encountered a single soul in Canada who has ever mentioned it. We do not even think of it. Why should we?”

At the preparatory meeting for the Disarmament Conference in Geneva, France proposes that countries that use gas during warfare should be punished by a massive air chemical attack on them by all countries signing the ban on such weapons. The US, Germany, Italy and Japan oppose this idea but Belgium, Poland, Finland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia support it.

Colorado Republicans claim the state’s D’s are linked with the Ku Klux Klan. Their evidence is laughable.

Headline of the Day -100:

The NYT’s long habit of citing the opinions of randos (a shoemaker in this case) about the Soviet Union has not abated.

The Texas Legislature committee investigating the Fergusons hears that the governor’s husband told road contractors he could secure maintenance contracts for them in exchange for c.10%. Ferguson denies it.

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Today -100: October 18, 1926: I would not even advise my wife

Headline of the Day -100:

Along with Zinoviev, Kamenev, etc. They confess to conduct calculated to split the Communist Party and to violating party discipline.  They promise to obey the Central Committee in the future without any of that pesky expression of unapproved ideas. “We categorically repudiate the theory and practice of the freedom of forming groups and factions.”

Max Eastman finally publishes Lenin’s hitherto secret Testament criticizing Stalin, whose people have been denying it existed.

NY gubernatorial candidate Rep. Ogden Mills says he will personally vote yes on the referendum to modify Prohibition but he won’t advise voters to do the same; “I would not even advise my wife.”

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Today -100: October 17, 1926: Equal rights are all we are asking

Commerce Sec Herbert Hoover, in a speech for senatorial candidate James Wadsworth, says a Democratic-controlled Senate would cripple the Coolidge Admin’s work. “If our opponents shall be returned at this election, our legislative branch comes into conflict with the Executive, and we shall have neither party responsible and no direction of any sort.” In other words, he’s calling for one-party government. 

After that string of retaliatory mob shootings, Chicago politicians ask for a pause in violence during the elections. One of Al Capone’s lieutenants says they’re fine with that as long as the politicians make the North Side Gang “behave.” “Equal rights are all we are asking.”

“That wild beast called anti-Semitism,” as Soviet Commissar of Education Anatoly Lunatcharsky calls it, seems to be raising its wild head in Russia, and the government is trying to put a stop to it. Lunatcharsky says the cause of it is the fear of the middle classes and intelligentsia of competition from Jews, with their high intellect, ability, and enterprise. There are plans to colonize 200,000 Jews in the Crimea and, to try to head off a reaction rooted in the traditional Ukrainian peasant anti-Semitism, grant other lands to Ukrainians.

8 states – NY, Wisc., Nev., Ill., Colo., Missouri, Montana, California – will vote on Prohibition next month, some on modifying the Volstead Act, some (CA, Colo., Mont., Missouri) on eliminating state-level enforcement.

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Today -100: October 16, 1926: Of milk, royals, and jury fees

Ogden Mills claims that adulterated milk is flooding New York City, even Queens & the Bronx. He evidently thinks this is the issue he can ride into the governor’s mansion, I guess.

More fighting in the Prussian Diet as it ratifies the deal giving the former royal family enough money and property to make them the richest family in Germany, if not Europe. The Communists are not best pleased. Their deputy Wilhelm Kasper steals the large brass bell normally used to call for order and rings it whenever the president of the Diet tries to use a smaller, until Kasper is thrown out. The Socialists sit the whole thing out, abstaining from the vote and the fisticuffs. 

In a Kansas City court case in which a black man stands accused of “cussing out” a black woman, the jury refuses to give its verdict until it’s paid its $1 fee, for which they’d ordinarily have to wait until next month. So the judge locks them up while he goes to lunch, allowing them only bread and water.

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Today -100: October 15, 1926: Of libs, Germans, and souls

Herbert Asquith (aka Lord Reading and Asquith) resigns as leader of Britain’s Liberal Party after months of squabbling with David Lloyd George, to whom he is now ceding the field.

The new Czech Cabinet will include ethnic Germans – Sudeten Germans, if you will – for the first time. Robert Mayr-Harting will be justice minister and Franz Spina will be public works minister.

Thomas Edison thinks there might be such a thing as an immortal soul after all. He suggests religious teachers look for genuine evidence, but does not suggest how they should do that.

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Today -100: October 14, 1926: A recruiting film?

The Rhode Island Republican Convention calls for Prohibition to be put to a new referendum (but with strict enforcement until then).

Vice President Charles Dawes’s call for the abolition of primaries and a return to nominating conventions is not going over well with some Republican leaders.

Lon Chaney’s “The Phantom of the Opera” is still banned in Britain, not because of its content but because when the film arrived in Southampton last year, it was given a military escort by Territorials who were tricked into thinking it was a recruiting film.

Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne, introducing the title character, is published simultaneously in Britain and the US (it was Disney which viciously stripped him of his hyphens).

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Today -100: October 13, 1926: There’s enough business for all of us without killing each other like animals in the street

Dr. Alfred Salter, Labour MP for Bermondsey, says he’s seen many MPs drunk in the House of Commons chamber, from all parties but especially Tories. He says maybe Parliament having its own bars is not such a good idea.

Al Capone is questioned about yesterday’s machine-gunnery by the befuddled Chicago PD but is not under arrest. He tells a reporter “there’s enough business for all of us without killing each other like animals in the street, but they don’t see it.”

Yugoslavia, whose navy consists of a single light cruiser, would like to buy Belgium’s entire navy, which is evidently for sale.

Sir James Parr, High Commissioner for New Zealand, complains that most of the films shown in the country’s 350 cinemas (a lot more than it has in 2026) are American and almost none British: “Are New Zealanders to be completely Americanised?” Also, American films suck, he says.

Headline 

Said uniform consists of “a black cocked hat adorned with white ostrich plumes, a black swallowtail coat, with gold buttons and lace, and black trousers.”

Treasury Sec. Andrew Mellon says of Mussolini: “Many of his measures are unique, indeed. But they are effective, and he certainly is making a new nation out of Italy.”

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Today -100: October 12, 1926: Of mistrials, mob violence, dodging milk, and criminal petit bourgeois opposition

The federal trial of former attorney general Harry Daugherty ends in a mistrial when the jury fails to come to a verdict.

In retaliation for last month’s attempt by Chicago’s North Side Gang to rub out Al Capone, Capone gunmen kill the Gang’s head Hymie Weiss, 28 (aka Earl Weiss, born Henryk Wojciechowski), and gangster Paddy Murray in a machine gun attack outside the North Side Gang hq, Schofield’s Flowers, also wounding 3 others. One of the gunsels – not that the cops have any idea who they are – is called Sam “Golf Bag” Hunt.

NY Gov. Al Smith accuses challenger Ogden Mills of “talking about milk for political purposes.” He calls the Republican platform “the coldest and clammiest document” he’s ever seen.

Mills says Smith really just wants to be president and is only running for re-election because Tammany Hall ordered him to.

The Prussian Diet discusses – with the occasional thrown water tumbler – the settlement with former kaiser Wilhelm. Some are worried about a provision setting aside Bad-Homburg Palace for his use if he ever comes back to Germany. They are reassured that he won’t do that because then he’d have to pay taxes on his income and property like a common commoner.

The Soviet Politburo takes measures to prevent the opposition (Trotsky, Zinoviev, etc) being heard, including sending claques to meetings to disrupt speakers and censoring reports of meetings at which they were able to speak anyway. Pravda accuses “the criminal petit bourgeois opposition” of “aiming at undermining the party discipline and... trying to open up fresh discussion and foist upon the party decisions long ago rejected.”

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Today -100: October 11, 1926: Of baseball, illegal uniforms, and gas

The St. Louis Cards win the World Series over the Yankees. I’m reliably informed that this story is about baseball.

During the game, baseball fans in Emporia, Kansas gather outside the Emporia Gazette offices to watch the scores change on a magnetic score board, which sounds super-exciting. Clergy complain about this Sunday activity, although the Gazette, which started doing this with last Sunday’s game, pointed out that the game began 30 minutes after services.

The German League for the Rights of Man charges former prince Wilhelm (grandson of former kaiser Wilhelm) with wearing the uniform of an army lieutenant during maneuvers (he was made a lt. before the war, when he was 10, probably on merit, right?). Gen. von Seeckt was fired as Army Chief for allowing Willy to do this.

The American Legion opposes the ratification of the Geneva protocol banning the use of poison gas in war. It says gas is humane and effective. The opposition to poison gas, according to John Thomas Taylor, chair of the Legion’s Legislative Committee, comes from pacifists, not practical soldiers.

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Today -100: October 10, 1926: Of prospective wars, lynchings, and weddings

The Daily Express (UK) claims that Mussolini is planning to go to war with Turkey to gain “influence” on the Aegean coast.

A mob in Doyer, Tennessee seizes and lynches a black man, Rip Bell, who supposedly killed a farmer during a fight over a craps game (or “‘crap’ game,” as the NYT puts it, which is not what it was called then or ever).

The world’s first Esperanto-language wedding takes place in London. He’s British and she’s Austrian. There’s a Reuters newsreel of it on YouTube, obviously silent so what’s the point of that?

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Today -100: October 9, 1926: Of lynchings

In Aiken, South Carolina, a lynch mob of 100 to 150 assholes break into the county jail and abduct (almost certainly with the connivance of the sheriff, as opposed to the bullshit version given in this article) 3 negroes, one of them a woman, charged with murdering the kluxer sheriff last year in a shoot-out when he raided their farm looking for illegal liquor. They’d been convicted but the state Supreme Court overturned the verdict and ordered a new trial; yesterday the judge directed a not guilty verdict for... wait for it... Demon Lowman. The verdicts for the other two, Lowman’s sister & cousin, had not yet been delivered when the mob jumped the gun, as it were. Judge Lanham convenes the Grand Jury to do “the most searching inquiry possible” and says the lynchings were a disgrace to civilization and the white race. You can guess how effective the most searching inquiry possible will be.

The NYT says the lynchings were “a wanton act of savagery,” which is the worst kind of acts of savagery. It notes that the prisoners were let loose and then gunned down “in Mexican style” as they ran.

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Today -100: October 8, 1926: Religious war? OK!

George Key, chair of the Oklahoma Democratic State Committee, says Republican activities are “peculiarly calculated to produce a religious war in Oklahoma.” I think that’s about Johnston backing Al Smith for president in ‘28. The D’s candidate for governor, Henry Johnston, is an open member of the Ku Klux Klan; Republican candidate Omer Benedict admits to having been a kluxer in the past. 

The Texas House of Representatives demands that Gov. Miriam Ferguson fulfil her promise to resign if she lost the D. primary, as she did. The State Senate then kills the measure as not coming under the terms of Ferguson’s call for the special session.

At former attorney general Harry Daugherty’s trial, his lawyer explains that when he burnt all his bank records, it was “in some mad, lone moment”. The lawyer blames the whole bribe-taking thing on Dirty Harry’s friend Jess Smith, who conveniently committed suicide 3 years ago.

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Today -100: October 7, 1926: Without they first have the endorsement

Lamartine Griffin Hardman, 71, described as a “banker, cotton mill owner and practising physician,” wins the Democratic run-off primary for Georgia governor, one of many Georgia elections this year where Klan-backed candidates lose  big time.

The Indiana Republican newspaper editors’ organization releases a photostat of a contract signed in February 1925 by John L. Duvall, promising that if he is elected mayor of Indianapolis with Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson’s support (which he was), “I promise not to appoint any person as member of the Board of Public Works without they first have the endorsement of D.C. Stephenson” and to appoint Claude Worley chief of police. Duvall says it’s a forgery. It will be the basis of his corruption conviction a year from now.

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Today -100: October 6, 1926: Of endorsements and royal property

In the New York elections, William Randolph Hearst comes out for Ogden Mills (R) for governor and Robert F. Wagner (D) for senator. Neither of them seem to be especially thrilled by the endorsement.

Prussia settles former kaiser Wilhelm’s claims to get his shit back. The Hohenzollerns will get 20 million marks – which is the equivalent of some money – in cash, 280,000 acres of land, a few castles, etc. Willy rejected a better deal a while back but complete expropriation has been getting more and more popular, so... He still lives in the Netherlands, banned from returning, but the princes have drifted back to Germany. Communists want them expelled.

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Today -100: October 5, 1926: Of milk rings and baneful violators

Republican candidate for NY governor Rep. Ogden Mills attacks Gov. Al Smith for failing to bring down the bootleg milk ring, with its associated milk graft, and warns that a Smith victory would complete Tammany Hall’s control of state government. 

Democratic nominee for the New York US Senate seat Robert Wagner challenges James Wadsworth Jr. to say whether he advises, as Wagner does, a yes vote on the Prohibition reform referendum. Wadsworth would of course prefer to straddle the fence on this one.

Trotsky, Zinoviev, etc complained about Stalin’s crackdown within the Communist Party, including banning opposition members elected to the party conference, which has now been postponed 10 days. The Moscow party committee demands that the Central Committee repress “these bankrupt leaders, these baneful violators of party discipline” (baneful violators of party discipline are the worst kind of violators of party discipline, because of the bane).

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Today -100: October 4, 1926: As such

Headline of the Day -100:

British Foreign Sec. Austen Chamberlain visited Italy last week, and Italy got super-excited at what they assumed was a sign that it was finally taking its place among the big dogs and that an alliance would be formed with Britain to offset Franco-German cooperation. Chamberlain says there are no such plans. He says Fascism would not suit Britain, but that he admires Mussolini personally. “He is a man of great force of character, great shrewdness, and great charm and simplicity in his personal conduct, and however you may judge his policy he is a great patriot.”

Baron Maurice de Rothschild of the Rich-Fuck Rothschilds, is elected to the French Chamber of Deputies for the Hautes-Alpes Department by a large majority. He was elected before but that election was not validated due to some Rothschild-level bribery. While the Chamber was debating this, he sent every deputy a brace of partridges; they kept the partridges and voted against him. 

Oh noes! “European royalty is facing a crisis”! It seems that more princesses are coming of age than princes to marry them. Some have been resorting to marrying mere nobles instead.

In Constantinople, Turkey shows how post-Islamic it is now by erecting its first statue depicting a human. Kemal Atatürk, naturally.

An image search suggests that most subsequent statues of Atatürk portray him on a horse.

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Today -100: October 3, 1926: Of dragons, pleasant little trifles, and chapels

A group of Indiana Republican editors turns over evidence to the Indiana State Senate on the massive corruption and general shittery in the state government when it was under the control of Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson. One person who really wants this information to come out: D.C. Stephenson, now in prison for second-degree murder and pissed that his friends in government didn’t get him out of trouble (and who have made sure he’s had no contact with the outside world whilst in prison).

Noël Coward’s play “This Was a Man” is banned by the Lord Chamberlain because it depicts adultery, so much adultery. Coward says that in future he’ll concentrate his serious plays on Broadway; “I shall from time to time write a pleasant little trifle for London.” “This Was a Man” won’t have a commercial run in Britain until 2014.

Italy’s Cabinet Council approves restoring capital punishment, which was abolished in 1888, for assassination attempts against Mussolini and the royal family.

Yale makes student chapel-attendance optional.

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Today -100: October 2, 1926: Of political hypocrisy & relief

Democratic nominee for US Senate from NY Robert F. Wagner accuses Sen. James Wadsworth Jr. of “political hypocrisy” in changing from a dry to a wet position. Isn’t it surprising how Prohibition has turned into such a major issue in this election cycle, so many years into the great beverage experiment? There are just no other major issues this year.

Florida Gov. John Martin (D) is accused by the American Red Cross, among others, of sabotaging attempts to raise money for hurricane relief by downplaying the damage so as not to scare away tourists or burst the real estate bubble.

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Today -100: October 1, 1926: Of early beatings, expenses, steel trusts, and flying cork

The theme of New York Republicans in the gubernatorial race will be “Beat Smith this year and you will not have to beat him in 1928,” that is, for president. To be fair, Al Smith is certainly using the governor’s office as a stepping-stone to the White House.

Rep. Ernest Willard Gibson (R-Vermont) spent 36¢ on his unopposed re-election primary, but on what? This is infuriatingly undisclosed.

France, Germany, Belgium and Luxemburg form an iron and steel trust to limit production, fix prices, and exclude US and British steel.

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Today -100: September 30, 1926: Of prohibition, forgotten crimes, and climbing popes

The New Hampshire Democratic Convention, unlike the NY and Massachusetts ones, supports Prohibition, blaming the Republicans for laxness for enforcement.

The NYT complains about the slowness of justice in the Teapot Dome case: “If the guilty men are ever convicted and punished, it will be only after the great majority of the people have forgotten with what crime they were charged.”

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