Today -100: November 18, 1922: We do not believe in your genius

The Italian Chamber of Deputies gives Mussolini his dictatorial powers by a vote of 306-116, the 116 consisting of Socialists, Communists, and Republicans, the 306 including former prime ministers Vittorio Orlando and Giovanni Giolitti. Unitary Socialist Party deputy Filippo Turati complains about Mussolini riding roughshod over the Chamber; the duck replies “I treated the Chamber the way it deserves to be treated.” Turati says “we cannot vote confidence with revolvers pointed at our throats.” Republican Giovanni Conti, whose 40th birthday this is, tells M., “They hail you now as a messiah. Soon you will become a jest... We do not believe in your genius; we do not believe in the possibility of an enlightened despot.”

After the Turkish National Assembly orders the deposed Ottoman sultan Mohammed VI put on trial, he flees Turkey on a British warship, heading into exile on Malta with his retinue, including his First Chamberlain, doctor, valet, barber, bandmaster, confidential secretaries, and two eunuchs. Mohammed insists he is not abdicating.

After a secret trial in Irish Free State military courts, four men are executed for possessing illegal revolvers. Irish Minister of Defence Richard Mulcahy signed off on the executions: “People have to be shot. It was necessary to shock the country into a realization of the grave thing it is to take human life.”

Rebecca Latimer Felton, appointed to the Senate to fill Georgia’s vacant seat temporarily, is traveling to D.C. On the same train is the man elected to fill the same seat, Walter George. He’s willing to hold back on presenting his credentials in order to let her take the seat for a day, but it’s not clear if the Senate will allow that.

Scientific American offers prizes for proof of psychic phenomena, including $2,500 for a psychic photograph produced under test conditions.

During her last visit to Boston, Isadora Duncan said that “all puritanical vulgarity centers in Boston.” So the mayor bans her from returning to the city.

The ethnic cleansing of Breckenridge, Texas seems to have ended with the dispatch of Texas Rangers following the complaint by Mexico and Secretary of State Hughes’ telegram to Gov. Pat Neff asking him to do something.

Marcel Proust dies. There won’t be a NYT obit until December 10th. Temps (Paris) says “Poor Marcel Proust has proved by dying that he really was sick. One had begun to doubt it.” 2 of the 7 volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu remain to be published in French and the English translation of the 1st volume appeared/will appear some time this year.

A large hog is sent to the White House, from Arkansas but with its sender unidentified, so it’s not clear whether the Hardings are supposed to keep it as a pet or eat it for Thanksgiving.

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Today -100: November 17, 1922: Revolution has its rights

Mussolini speaks before the Chamber of Deputies, demanding it grant him the power to rule by decree through 1923. “He did not appear before the Chamber in the guise of a suppliant asking for its confidence, but rather as a conqueror imposing his will.” Boy, that’s saying it. The duck: “I am today performing in this hall what is an act of purely formal deference toward you and for which I do not seek your thanks. Italy has given herself a government outside, above and against any designation by Parliament. Now I affirm that revolution has its rights and I add that I am here in order to defend and make most of the Blackshirts’ revolution by inserting it intimately as a force tending toward development, progress and equilibrium in the history of the nation.” He says with 300,000 Blackshirts behind him he could have bivouacked them in the Chamber or punished his enemies but he didn’t because he’s magnanimous that way – “at least for the present.” He refuses to let most of the deputies who planned to respond to him do so.

Before he left for the Chamber, Mussolini got some fencing practice in, because of course he did.

By the way, I think Mussolini was using the title “duce” by this point, but the US newspapers that insist on using “fascista” and “fascisti” haven’t picked up on it yet. I will be using “the duck” until it stops being funny.

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Today -100: November 16, 1922: Of reactionary relativity, new coups, Brelections, and singing and dancing together

The Russian Communist Party allegedly rejects Albert Einstein’s theories as reactionary and “the product of the bourgeois class in composition.”

Headline of the Day -100:  

He will demand the Chamber of Deputies give him emergency powers to rule by decree through 1923, or he will dissolve it. Remember: the Fascist and Nationalist parties won only 42 seats of the 535 in the last election.

British elections. “Women Turn Out in Large Numbers Despite the Heavy Fog.” Labour more than doubles its MPs to 142 and is now officially the opposition party. The Tories lose some seats but have a clear majority, 345 seats out of 615. Liberals are screwed, both the followers of never-to-be-relevant-again Lloyd George (62) and the followers of never-to-be-relevant-again Asquith (54). LG’s fantasy of a new centrist party is proved untenable.

Churchill loses his 2-member Dundee constituency (voters have 2 votes) to both Edwin Scrymgeour (how do you pronounce that?) of the Scottish Prohibition Party (the only Prohibitionist in the new Parliament) and E.D. Morel, whose pacifism landed him in prison during the Great War. Churchill had attacked Morel & Communist candidate William Gallacher for “A predatory and confiscatory programme fatal to the reviving prosperity of the country, inspired by class jealousy and the doctrines of envy, hatred and malice, [which] is appropriately championed in Dundee by two candidates both of whom had to be shut up during the late war in order to prevent them further hampering the national defence.” Worse, his wife Clemmie accused Morel of having been “born a Frenchman” and coming to England to avoid military service. Morel agreed that his father (but not his mother) was indeed French, just as Churchill’s mother was American, and says it was “very clever of me” to come to England when he was 8 to avoid conscription. Churchill comes in 4th place.

H.G. Wells fails to win the University of London seat.

Lady Nancy Astor is re-elected in Plymouth. The only other woman in the new Parliament is also a holdover, Margaret Wintringham. A bunch of women ran and lost. Lady Alice Cooper failed to win in Walsall, which her husband, who stepped aside so she could run, had represented since 1910. There are 34 women in the German Reichstag (0f 469), 8 in the Netherlands’ State General (of 100), and 2 in the Irish Dáil.

One interesting candidate is Col. Arthur Lynch, an Irishman who raised an Irish brigade to fight against the British in the second Boer War, was sentenced to death, pardoned, and elected to Parliament from West Clare for the Irish Nationalists. This time he ran for Labour, and lost badly.

Future Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald, defeated in 1918, wins in Aberavon, Wales. And Sidney Webb enters Parliament for the first time at 63, for Seaham.

The Mexican government complains that a mob in Breckenridge, Texas (and isn’t Breckenridge a very un-Texas name for a town?) ordered all Mexicans (and blacks) out of the town. Mexico also complains about the number of Mexicans being killed in the US, especially in Texas, including a lynching in Waco last week.

Another “Fascisti” group emerges in Jalapa, Vera Cruz, Mexico. (Update: ah, it will actually be called the Partido Fascista Mexicano. Won’t come to much.)

Isadora Duncan, giving a dance performance at Carnegie Hall, says her idea of Communism is everyone singing and dancing together. I think that’s also probably the gist of Lenin’s speech at the Communist International yesterday, but I didn’t read it.

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Today -100: November 15, 1922: Gum or gun

French senators debating women’s suffrage say French women don’t need it because French men treat them so well, though obviously it’s different for British and American women. But the big argument, as always, is that women would be told how to vote by their priests. And thanks to the, you know, war, there are 1.8 million more women than men.

Germany: Joseph Wirth’s cabinet falls after Gustav Streseman’s right-wing People’s Party (DVP) demands greater representation in the coalition government and the Socialists refuse.

Secretary of War John Weeks says the US could afford the 150,000-man army he wants if everyone just cut back on chewing gum.

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Today -100: November 14, 1922: Of free white people, beer, and fascists

The Supreme Court unanimously rules that Japanese people aren’t “free white people” and therefore can’t become US citizens. Justice Sutherland says the Court must follow the original intent of the Framers, who intended to exclude black people and Indians from citizenship. Takao Ozawa argued that Japanese are free people and he’s pretty pale, but nope, the Court says it’s not about skin color, which can vary, that “white person” actually means, exclusively, members of the Caucasian race. This case (Ozawa v. US) upholds California’s law forbidding land ownership by people ineligible to be citizens. A separate case upholds Washington’s similar Alien Land Act.

Lady Astor is having trouble with her re-election bid because of her stance on prohibition, which is that she’d like it but realizes that the British people aren’t ready for it yet. Brewers are spending a lot of money to defeat her. “I am not trying to take away any one’s beer,” she insists.

Other movements being called fascist, or rather Fascisti, because the NYT insists on the Italian plural, include Hungarian monarchists led by former prime minister István Friedrich,

and a Czech group that wants idlers sent to prison. The Hungarian group self-identifies as fascist, not sure about the Czech.

Outgoing NY Governor Nathan Miller is going back into the practice of law, while incoming guv Al Smith will spend the rest of the year on trucking. Which sounds like a euphemism, but isn’t.

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Today -100: November 13, 1922: Of stupid populations, masks, and flying machines

More than 1,000 dead in Chilean earthquake + tidal wave.

Archbishop Curley of Baltimore says “America... has one of the most stupid populations in the world, because it allows such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan to exist.” He’s pissed at the Oregon ban on parochial schools. And at the Masons, who also supported it.

The KKK in Georgia will resume the wearing of masks, now that the elections are over and kluxer Clifford Walker has been elected governor.

Russia seizes an Italian steamship and, for some reason, a French one, as reprisal for the treatment of Communists in Italy.

3 veterans sue the town of Rye, New Hampshire, which owes them $400 for joining the Navy in 1864.

The Soviets are secretly building a flying machine with flapping wings.

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Today -100: November 12, 1922: I owe Muskogee nothing

Alice Robertson graciously accepts her defeat in her congressional re-election race, saying when the congressional session is over, she’ll only return to ungrateful Muskogee long enough to collect her clothes. “I owe Muskogee nothing.”

She will live the rest of her life in Muskogee.

Awkward.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Not sure what the back story is, but there must be one: When Mississippi Gov. Lee Russell goes to Tennessee for a college football game, Lt. Gov. Homer Casteel assumes power as acting governor and starts pardoning black prisoners. Thanks to some obstruction about pardon forms, he has to type them up himself and only gets two done before the governor rushes back. The State Prison Board seems to be refusing to honor the pardons. The state Supreme Court will uphold them.

I had thought the Met had rejected as pointless the idea of going on the radio, but here they are performing Aida on WEAF. AT&T’s engineers prepared the Kingsbridge Armory for the performance for a week, using canaries to test the amplifiers.

An anti-Klan newspaper in Chicago, Tolerance, has been printing the names of KKK members, resulting in boycotts, withdrawals from banks, shunning, and bans from juries.

Scotland Yard attacks the Daily Mail for publishing the truth about how Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir William Horwood was poisoned. They also think this might be a conspiracy to kill a bunch of prominent people by sending them anonymous arsenic chocolates but yeah the press should definitely keep that secret.

British Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law hopes to return to election campaigning Monday. He has a sore throat. Not sure if he knows yet it’s throat cancer. Winston Churchill, recovering from appendicitis, finally returns to the campaign trail, where his wife has been covering for him. He has to be carried on a chair. He says the Coalition Government prevented war with Turkey.

Congresscritter-elect Winnifred Huck says there should be an amendment to the Constitution requiring a referendum of all the people before a war can be declared.

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Today -100: November 11, 1922: I would have proclaimed a dictatorship, which I could have done easily

Headline of the Day -100:  

Sir William Horwood, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, is poisoned – in Scotland Yard itself – by a box of chocolates with walnut & arsenic that arrived in the mail.  He’ll survive, but it’s probably not a great reflection on his detecting skills. To be fair, it’s his birthday (54), so he thought they were from his daughter. He’ll hereafter be known as the Chocolate Soldier by the rank & file, who are not fans, and are in fact suspects in the poisoning. Or it’s the Communists, because it’s always the Communists. Or “a desperate gang of race track crooks.” Sir Basil Thomson, former head of Special Branch, thinks it can’t possibly be a deliberate poisoning because English people just don’t kill public officials with poison. It’ll turn out to be some random nutter.

Mussolini tells an American reporter that only Communists call the Fascists reactionary. Why, he didn’t even have to reopen parliament, which he did. If he were reactionary, “I would have proclaimed a dictatorship, which I could have done easily.” Color me reassured. He says women will probably eventually get the vote, but they won’t know what to do with it.

Irish Free State forces capture Erskine Childers, novelist and de Valera’s #2. If they’d been smarter, they could have followed him to de Valera and got him too.

Commerce Secretary Andrew Mellon orders the release of vessels seized outside the 3-mile limit for having liquor on board if they haven’t sent boats ashore. That’s about 20 ships over the last few months.

Headline of the Day That My Father Would Have Enjoyed -100:  

Happy Armistice Day or, as the French have decided to call it, Capitulation Day.

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Today -100: November 10, 1922: Of disappointments, coercion, Nobels, and wet enthusiasm

Headline of the Day -100:  

Headline of the Day -100:  

The Nobel Prizes in physics for 1921 and 1922 are given, respectively, to Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr.

32 black people are arraigned for protesting the Fulton School in Springfield, Ohio, which has just opened to educate all the black students of the district. Stones were thrown, guards pointed guns, etc.  The Civil Rights Protective League will win an injunction against the school, since Ohio laws did not sanction Jim Crow schools. The school board will then fire all the school’s black teachers to insure no white students had to suffer the humiliation of being taught by a black teacher, and they’ll allow white parents to transfer their children out, which almost all of them will.

The New Jersey Board of Education rejects the appeal of a couple of fathers to overturn Berlin Township’s rule requiring vaccinations for pupils. One of the fathers has threatened to shoot any doctor who tries to vaccinate his child.

Mussolini will privatize the railroads, telephone and telegraph systems (all of which suck).

The Association Against the Prohibition Amendment says if the D’s and R’s refuse to accept the people’s wishes, it will be forced to run independent wet candidates for Congress in 1924. They say there are 205 wets in Congress; the Anti-Saloon League counts 140. 

Tomorrow’s op-ed:

The United American Lines transfers the registry of 2 of its ships from the US to Panama to avoid the new rule about not carrying alcohol.

Supposedly Portugal stops a revolution. 

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Today -100: November 9, 1922: Of nice little women, farmer-laborers, tittles, and Bavarian Mussolinii (that’s the plural of Mussolini, right?)

Rep. Alice Robertson (R-Oklahoma), defeated in her bid for re-election, says there was a lot of election cheating.

Annie Dickie Olesen blames her defeat for US Senate from Minnesota on “Republican newspaper propaganda, usually contained in this sentence: ‘She is a nice little woman, but she cannot win.’” Henrik Shipstead, who won, will be the only member of the Farmer-Labor Party in the Senate, for a few months anyway.

More wets are elected to Congress, and Andrew Volstead (R-Minn.) himself is voted out, though losing to a Lutheran minister, Ole Kvale, who’s even drier than he is (and another Farmer-Laborer). Federal prohibition authorities say the wet majorities in New York and New Jersey won’t cause them to ease up on those states.

The South is “solid South” for Democrats again after victories in various congressional and gubernatorial elections.

Lee Tittle, who lost his Republican primary challenge against US senator from Washington Miles Poindexter, who subsequently lost the general election to Clarence Dill, kills himself by drinking poison, but are you KIDDING me with these names?

The NYT talks about rising “Fascisti” activity in Bavaria. One thing I’ve been curious about was when Nazis were first referred to as fascists, and here it is. Also, I believe we have the 1st NYT mention of a certain someone: “The leader of the movement... is one Herr Hittler [sic], who is said to be desirous of becoming a Bavarian Mussolini.”

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Today -100: November 8, 1922: Of elections, klandidates, vampires, and what women’s hands are made for

So many confident but wrong predictions in today’s NYT reporting of election results.

The R’s lose 77 House seats but retain a majority of 225-207. The R majority in the Senate of 60 to 36 is reduced to 53:42 (and one Socialist, Victor Berger of Wisconsin).

In state and national races, D’s are doing much better even than anticipated, which they think shows a rejection of the Republican policy of high tariffs – maybe best not to pass a measure that will raise the cost of living 6 weeks before an election.  All of which bodes well for the D’s for the presidential election in 1924 – why, Harding might not even be re-nominated by his party!  But mostly this is a course correction from the crazily broad R. sweep of 1920.

Al Smith (D) is elected governor of New York for the second time, easily defeating incumbent Nathan Miller. D’s in fact sweep state offices but R’s narrowly hold both houses of the Legislature. Royal Copeland, health guy during the Spanish Flu, is elected to the US Senate.

Governor-Elect of the Day -100:  

Some propositions:

CA: Prop 2 Declares all acts prohibited by the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution unlawful (52%). Among the 30 or so other propositions, one which would have banned unlicensed people acting or advertising as lawyers loses nearly 3:1 and one to ban vivisection gets only 30% of the vote.

-Colorado overwhelmingly rejects allowing Asians property rights.

-Illinois, in an advisory vote, overwhelmingly approves legalizing light wines and beer. Ohio rejects a similar measure.

-Massachusetts overturns the state’s prohibition measure and rejects state censorship of movies. I assume they can still be “banned in Boston.”

-California, Illinois, Montana, Kansas and Iowa vote for soldiers’ bonuses, but in Oklahoma a majority of all voters is required and it only gets a majority (52%) of those who voted on the measure.

-South Dakota votes to retain its Blue Laws.

-Michigan rejects a state income tax.

-Nebraska bans picketing, I guess?

-Missouri votes to strip the word “male” from voting requirements.

-Oregon votes 52.7% to require children 6 to 18 to attend public schools. This is a Klan-backed measure aimed at closing Catholic parochial schools; it will be overturned by the Supreme Court before it can take effect.

-Washington voters repeal the poll tax but refuse to remove vaccination requirements for school children.

John Roberts, editor of a Montreal weekly, The Axe, is hauled up before the Quebec Legislative Assembly for printing the rumor that two members of the legislature, who he does not name in either his paper or when questioned by the Lege, murdered shopgirl Blanche Garneau in 1920. The Assembly finds him guilty of infringing the honor, dignity, and smugness of the Assembly and passes a bill to put him in jail for a year. This is the first ever bill of attainder in Canada. Other rumors say she was killed by a club of the sons of politicians and judges – possibly including the Quebec premier’s son – named... wait for it... the Vampire Club.

The French Senate, where ideas go to die, is discussing women’s suffrage. One senator, annoyingly unnamed, says “Woman’s hand was made to kiss, not to drop a voting paper in a ballot box.”

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Today -100: November 7, 1922: Of malicious lies, leagues of some women voters, bombings, and crowbar governors

The D.C. District Court overturns the District’s minimum wage law for women, because women are totally equal now.

Rural New Hampshire polling stations close at 3 pm?  Some states just specify sunset.

Joseph Frelinghuysen, US senator from New Jersey (R) running for re-election on a dry platform, calls a “malicious lie” stories going around that he has liquor in his cellar. Whether that malicious lie has anything to do with his losing the election today to Gov. Edward Edwards (the man so nice they named him twice), an opponent of prohibition, I do not know.

Mrs Herbert Ottenheim, president of the Kentucky League of Women Voters, appeals to women to vote. And by women, she means white women. She calls on them to prove wrong the Southern anti-suffragists who said black women would vote and white women stay home.

The Irish Free State made a raid looking for Éamon de Valera, missed him but made several arrests of prominent Republicans. One of them, Mary MacSwiney, begins a hunger strike. This will be a touch awkward as she is the sister of Terence MacSwiney, the lord mayor of Cork who hunger struck to the death in British custody 2 years ago.

Southern Rhodesia votes against being absorbed into South Africa by 59%. And by Southern Rhodesia, I of course mean white people in Southern Rhodesia.  The colony, which has been ruled by the British South Africa Company founded by Cecil Rhodes, will now have to be given responsible self-government.

Hecklers including Knights of Columbus break up the first attempt by the Ku Klux Klan to hold a meeting on Long Island.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Obit of the Day -100:  Morgan Bulkeley, insurance guy, baseball guy (1st president of the National League), two-term Connecticut governor and US senator. The interesting thing about the two-term-governor part is that he was only elected to one term. Under CT rules, if no one got 50%, it was thrown to the Legislature. In 1888, a Republican Legislature chose Bulkeley despite his having fewer votes than the Dem (see? they were like that even then). 2 years later, when Bulkeley hadn’t even run for re-election, the two houses of the Legislature were controlled by different parties and deadlocked, so Bulkeley just... stayed in office for a whole extra term. He did have to break into his own office with a crowbar after a D. official changed the lock. The Legislature refused to appropriate funds to run the state government during those two years, so he got Aetna Life Insurance, of which he was president, to fund it. Connecticut changed its election rules after that. Dead at 84.

Huh, they had yogurt in the US in 1922:

You will notice very interesting results.

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Today -100: November 6, 1922: Of royal weddings, vigor, clean living

Former kaiser Wilhelm’s wedding comes off, a legally mandated Dutch civil ceremony followed by a religious one. He wears a Prussian general’s uniform. Pretty sure he’s not actually a Prussian general. “He looked every inch an ex-King and ex-Kaiser.” What does that even mean? The former crown prince is dressed in the field uniform of the Death’s Head Hussars and accompanied by a woman not his wife, who is boycotting. There are jeers from the distanced crowd, led by journalists who were prevented from getting any pictures of anything interesting. Lots of American and English journalists, just one German. Willy had wanted the bells of churches in Doorn to ring, but nope. I get the feeling locals are kinda over the whole expat-ex-royals thing.

In Turkey, the Nationalists officially take over.

Fash-Curious Headline of the Day -100:  

The eagerness to take Mussolini at his own self-appraisal is evident in the line “Italy has obtained a strong Government.” It’s only been a week.

The Chicago school district will advise female students against marrying men who have not lead clean lives (this is presumably a VD thing).

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Today -100: November 5, 1922: The people have too much money and use it wrongly

Headline of the Day -100:  

I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s the highest-ranking black man in government. There seems to be a high school named after him in New Orleans.

Vice President Calvin Coolidge, in a campaign speech in Chicago, says “The people have too much money and use it wrongly. Good living never has been so high nor bad living so low as it is today. The cure, of course, is religion, embodying in conduct the spirit of Christ.”

The deposed Turkish sultan Mohamed VI rejects the Grand National Assembly’s decision, which he says doesn’t represent the will of the nation, and refuses to go.

There are 15 women candidates for the House or Senate. One is Winnifred Mason Huck of Illinois, running in a special election to fill for the rest of the 67th Congress (until March, that is) the seat held by her father until his death last year. She will win, making her the 3rd woman in Congress, along with Mae Nolan, who will likewise fill out her dead husband’s term as rep for California’s 5th district. Nolan will also run for re-election and become the only woman in the 68th Congress. The first 4 women in Congress, including Alice Robertson, who will lose her re-election bid this week, are all Republicans.

The Times thinks Adelina Otero-Warren, running for Congress from New Mexico, another Republican, will also win. That’s wrong, but she is the first Latina to run for Congress (the first to actually win, Barbara Vucanovich, will be elected 60 years later).

All 48 states now have at least one radio broadcaster.

The British Broadcasting Company begins broadcasting. It gives the news & weather, then repeats them so listeners can take notes. The BBC of course later banned hesitation, repetition or deviation.

Nauseating Headline of the Day -100:  

By Alice Rohe, who interviews Mussolini, says his big nose is “suggestive of power” and seems thoroughly entranced by him, at least until he tells her women are inferior to men. In the ‘30s she will write “Why I Fled Italy” for the Reader’s Digest.

The movie The Headless Horseman premieres, starring... Will Rogers?

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Today -100: November 4, 1922: Ottoman Empire 1299-1922

Turkey’s Grand National Assembly deposes the sultan: “The Palace of the Sublime Porte having, through corrupt ignorance, for several centuries provoked numerous ills for the country, has passed into the domain of history.” Which means we can stop using the phrase “Ottoman Empire,” not that many people still were. The Caliphate survives, to be headed by whichever member of the former royal family the Grand National Assembly finds most compliant qualified.

Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover calls for the voters to return a Republican Congress because the Republicans have done such a good job with economic recovery and reducing unemployment, which, as you know, Republicans like Hoover always do.

To be fair, Hoover was actually quite good at organizing famine relief in Europe. And now he receives his reward: a blanket made from human hair from a grateful woman in Poland. A nice card would have been fine.  “Mr. Hoover is understood to be undecided as to what use to make of the gift.”

Mayor Harry Barber of North Bergen, New Jersey, holds up the pay of the town’s police until after the election to prevent them contributing to his opponent.

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Today -100: November 3, 1922: Life-destroying confusion is the worst kind of confusion

I’d forgotten H.G. Wells was standing for Parliament, for the University of London seat. He says he’d support Labour, as “its policy is a policy of steady, watchful, generous, comprehensive, scientific organization amid the strained, shattered, wasteful and life-destroying confusion in which we live today.”

Mussolini has picked an odd enemy for special vituperation. Count Sforza, the ambassador to France (and a former foreign minister), resigned immediately upon Mussolini taking office without, Mussolini points out, even waiting to see what the Fascist foreign policy would be. This is obviously an insult to the king or something, and while Sforza quit without making any public statement, the Fascists won’t shut up about it. Sforza (whose father died a month ago) will eventually be forced into exile, returning after the war to become foreign minister again.

Rain prevents Pres. Harding playing golf on his 57th, and last, birthday.

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Today -100: November 2, 1922: Of worthy presses, order, broadcasting tests, and train tracks

Mussolini says once the present conditions are over, he’ll restore freedom of the press, “on condition that the press proves worthy of liberty.” Meanwhile his followers set the Socialist newspaper Avanti’s printing plant on fire.

Headline of the Day -100:  

The British Broadcasting Company is almost on the air and is now running tests. Which consists of anti-Labour-Party messages. Two weeks before a general election. They claim the operator just said anything that came into his head. Labour is not best pleased.

Headline of the Day -100:  

More proof, if further proof were needed, that life in the ‘20s was precisely as portrayed in silent films (except for the “negress” part, obvs).

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Today -100: November 1, 1922: Of frock coats and fascists

100,000 Fascists march through Rome. Mussolini and the other new ministers take the oath to the king, the Constitution and the laws. After that lie, the king hugs the duce.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Mussolini’s first move is to threaten to fire any civil servant not at his desk by 8 a.m. every day. Evidently bureaucrats operate a “two-hat system,” having one hat that they wear outside, and one permanently left on a hook in the office to fool people into thinking they’re actually in the building somewhere when they can’t be found.

Mussolini says his internal policy will be “Discipline, economy, sacrifice” and “iron rule.” Doesn’t that sound like fun? You can see why he’s so popular. He complains about “lawlessness” in Italy, which is a bit fucking rich.

The US may join the World Court, even though it was set up by the despised League of Nations. 

The IRA rebels demand that newspapers refer to them as Republicans rather than Irregulars and not put quote marks around their military titles. There will be a £1 fine for each offense.

Turkey sentences the signers of the post-Great War Sèvres Treaty to death, as well as members of the Grand Vizier Damat Ferid Pasha’s cabinet. Several of those, including Ferid Pasha, have fled to Switzerland.

Ruth Schermerhorn  – which sounds like a character in a Preston Sturges movie – took out an ad in a Chicago newspaper (I think she lives in Iowa) looking for a prospective husband willing to pay her $5,000 she needs for medical treatment for nerve damage from having been shot by her first husband. A bank employee has agreed to the contract. Ain’t love grand.

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Today -100: October 31, 1922: Revolution of the peculiar and relatively harmless Italian type

The NYT says of the Fascisti Revolution, “All is over except the shouting.” So much shouting.

Mussolini names a Cabinet that’s half Fascist, with Mussolini holding both the interior and foreign affairs portfolios. Only one Cabinet member has ever held office before. 

Headline of the Day -100:  

Actually, he says “One always must speak well of one’s creditor – and we all owe the United States money,” which doesn’t sound much like friendship. He does complain about US immigration restrictions.

Sometime around now, US Ambassador to Italy Richard Child writes to his father: “We are having a fine young revolution... No danger. Plenty of enthusiasm and color. We all enjoy it.”

The NYT editorializes that “What has happened in Italy is certainly revolution, but revolution of the peculiar and relatively harmless Italian type.” Rather less wince-inducing is its comment that “The Fascisti are a self-appointed group of best minds whose title to power... rests on the fact that nobody was willing to fight to keep them out.”

In Spelter City, Oklahoma, 4 masked Klansmen try to abduct the president of anti-Klan organization True Blue Americans, one Tom Bogus. Bogus and a cop get in a shootout with the kluxers, one of whom is killed.

Super-Kinky-Sounding-But-Not-Actually-Super-Kinky Headline of the Day -100:  

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Today -100: October 30, 1922: To Rome

Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel calls on Benito Mussolini, 39, to form a government. The Fascists’ demands escalated rather quickly over the last few days from 5 Cabinet ministers to 6 to complete control. And now they’ll have it. Mussolini is on his way to Rome to meet the king (he’s been making statements recently repudiating his former anti-monarchical views).

We are told that France’s “gravest fear” about the Fascist takeover is that there might be “difficulties” with Yugoslavia. The Fascists are again talking about reclaiming Fiume (Mussolini met with Poet-Aviator Gabriele d’Annunzio yesterday), the Swiss canton of Ticino, and even Malta and Tunisia.

Kansas Gov. Henry Allen (R) orders the attorney general to expel all Ku Klux Klan officials from the state. They didn’t apply for a charter, and they probably do other bad things.

The incoming class at Columbia includes a 12-year-old who wants to be a lawyer, seven 15-year-olds and 56 16-year-olds. It would have been helpful to know the total size of the freshman class.

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Today -100: October 29, 1922: Wherein is revealed the cause of all the abnormality in our daily life

Italian King Victor Emmanuel rejects the government’s request that he sign a state of siege. And that’s it for representative democracy, folks. Fascists are mobilizing at various locations, but have not actually started to march on Rome.

At former kaiser Wilhelm’s wedding, there will be no presents.

Henry Ford says he has “no hatred in my heart for the Jew.” So that’s good. “I do not blame the Jew money-lender for bunking humanity just as long as humanity lets him get away with it.” But “the Jew” is responsible for all the wars and “he is the cause of all the abnormality in our daily life because he is the money maniac.” But, you know, no hatred.

New British Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law’s favorite drink is hot milk. Really, that’s everything you need to know about him.

Headline of the Day -100:  

3-year-old with a shotgun. Less interesting than the headline promised.

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Today -100: October 28, 1922: Of evil Cabinet spirits and mingoes

Italian King Victor Emmanuel asks Luigi Facta and his Cabinet to stay in office as caretakers until a new government, whatever that may be, steps in. 4 ministers, the anti-Fascist ones, have definitively resigned anyway. At the Fascist convention, Mussolini referred to Facta as “that kindly but useless gentleman” (it’s funny cuz it’s true) and the 4 ministers as “the evil spirits of the present Cabinet”. There will need to be some Fascist participation in the next government, or they will make the country (more) ungovernable.

The United Mine Workers gives up the Mingo strike after more than 2 years, facing a third winter of strikers living in tents and violent suppression by the state of West Virginia.

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Today -100: October 27, 1922: The march without actual marching

The Fascists merely threaten a March on Rome, and the Facta government resigns. To be fair, they weren’t really that enthusiastic about resisting Mussolini (think Ted Cruz to the duce’s Trump) and the army and police might not have been willing to stop the Fascists. The resignation doesn’t necessarily mean that the next government will be Fascist; at this stage, no one knows what it means.

Greece arrests Prince Andrew at Corfu for his role in the military disaster against Turkey. Also arrested: a general, the former foreign minister, the former interior minister, and the former governor of Thrace.

Éamon de Valera summons a republican alt-Dáil, which meets secretly and calls on de Valera to resume the presidency.

Following a speech given by William Jennings Bryan Sunday in St Paul, a bunch of Twin Cities Christian pastors call for action to remove the teaching of evolution (“a program of infidelity masquerading under the name of science”) in tax-supported schools, including the state university.

Bonar Law is running on a truly exciting platform: abolishing the Cabinet Secretariat and transferring British League of Nations representation to the Foreign Office. Oh, and abolishing the Pensions Ministry.

The NYT thinks Harding will replace retiring Supreme Court Justice William R. Day, who was appointed by Roosevelt, with a Democrat, because it’s customary for the Court to have at least 3 members of the opposition party and the NYT thinks there’s only one D. justice, because they’ve forgotten about Brandeis. Also, Justice Mahlon Pitney has had a stroke and is expected to resign/die. 

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Today -100: October 26, 1922: Of threats and bulwarks

Mussolini concludes the Fascist convention by saying that if the government isn’t given “peacefully” to the Fascists they will take it by force.

The British Labour Party issues its election manifesto: reducing German reparations, a stronger League of Nations, self-government for India, independence for Egypt, shifting taxation to the rich, nationalization of the mines, etc. It denies being for revolution, saying that indeed the Labour program “is the best bulwark against violent upheaval and class wars.”

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Today -100: October 25, 1922: Either we are allowed to govern, or we will seize power by marching on Rome

Mussolini tells the 1st annual convention of the Fascist Party that the government has given in to his demands for elections, soon, under new rules. He says he wouldn’t join the cabinet himself, but has demanded for the Fascists the ministries of war, the navy, foreign affairs, labor, and public works. He says democracy needs to be superseded by super-democracy, whatever that means.

The US is banning ships entering US ports with alcohol onboard, but British law requires steamers to carry a gallon of brandy for every 100 steerage passengers. For medicinal purposes, obvs.

Boy, Bonar Law’s Cabinet sure contains a lot of viscounts this and marquises that and dukes of whatever. Which means that the colonial secretary, for example, won’t be in the Commons to defend the government’s colonial policies.

Ten IWW members are being tried in Sacramento under California’s Criminal Syndicalism Law. A former aide to Big Bill Haywood claims that during the war Wobblies tried to send poisoned canned goods to American soldiers in France.

Woodrow Wilson will be able to vote in next month’s election after all. New Jersey, a state in which he no longer resides, will allow him to vote as a (very) absentee voter. He’s registered at a one-room apartment in Princeton he once lived in but which is now occupied by a student.

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Today -100: October 24, 1922: Of mad counsels, Communists v. Restaurants, and klandidates

Andrew Bonar Law (who lived the first 12 years of his life in New Brunswick) is now prime minister of the United Kingdom. There will be a general election on November 15th. That’s a Wednesday. The Labour Party justifiably thinks that the choice of a weekday is intended to suppress the Labour vote; Conservatives say Wednesday is more convenient for small shopkeepers.

Lord Arthur Balfour praises Lloyd George and says the Conservative MPs who voted to break up the Coalition took “mad counsels.” Balfour was the last Tory prime minister.

A rumor, which the Berlin Police took seriously, spread that “Communist gangsters” would attack fancy restaurants. They didn’t. Another rumor is that there will be a Red Revolution™ on November 9th. (Spoiler Alert: there won’t be).

When Klan-backed Earle Mayfield won the Texas Democratic primary for US senator, anti-kluxers quickly adopted George Peddy as a fusion candidate (independent D’s plus R’s), but the Democratic secretary of state refused to let his name appear on the ballot. Peddy’s lawyers say the Klan has absorbed the D. party in Texas, so Mayfield is not the D. candidate. Federal judges uphold the secretary of state’s decision. A second lawsuit aims to keep Mayfield’s name from appearing as the Democratic candidate, Mayfield claims he only attended one Klan meeting in Dallas, not 3 like a witness had said. So that’s okay then.

Harding endorses Peddy in a statement that condemns the Klan without specifically naming them.

German Chancellor Joseph Wirth suggests responding to the collapse of the mark by defaulting on reparations. He has taken to repeating the slogan “First bread, then reparations.” Speaking of bread, the price is about to double, thanks to the centrist bourgeois parties in the Reichstag caring more about Prussian landowners and other agrarian types than they do about workers.

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Today -100: October 23, 1922: Of Liberal Free Traders, and what it’s okay and not okay to do on a Sunday

The realignment of parties in Britain is confusing to the electors, but also to some politicians. It’s more than a little unclear what party or party splinter Prime Minister David Lloyd George is representing or leading. Will he create a new Center Party? (Spoiler Alert: he won’t). Churchill (in bed recovering from appendicitis surgery) says he will “stand as a Liberal and a Free Trader, but I shall ask the electors to authorize me to co-operate freely with the sober-minded and progressive Conservatives in defending the lasting and central interests of this realm and its wide empire against the very dangerous attacks now about to be leveled upon them by the Socialist and Communist forces, as well as against the almost equally serious menace of downright reaction from the opposite quarter.” We’ll see if the good people of Dundee want to be represented by a member of the Liberal/Free-Trader/Free-Cooperater-with-sober-Tory Party (Spoiler: they won’t). Within a couple of years he’ll rejoin the Tories, performing the rare death-defying double-ratting (having left the Tories for the Liberals in 1904).

And no one knows how strong the Labour Party, which not having been part of the Coalition doesn’t face the messy splits in the Lib & Tory parties,  might be, and it’s creating a lot of anxiety. They’ve won a lot of by-elections, suggesting they’re much more popular than in the last election, they’re much better organized, and they plan to put up candidates in 400 constituencies.

Seven hooded and masked Ku Kluxers invade the First Baptist Church in Paterson, New Jersey and ask the pastor to read their platform – patriotism, pure womanhood, etc. Which he does. After they leave, the pastor says he agrees with the Klan platform and is fine with the incursion.

Samuel Rzeschewski, 10-year-old chess prodigy, is arrested as a juvenile delinquent for taking part in a Sunday entertainment, a benefit for the National Hebrew Orphanage in which he was to play 5 opponents simultaneously.

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Today -100: October 22, 1922: Of radios, days, fish, and fairies

Henry  Ford plans to establish 400 radio stations throughout the US, so he can disseminate his anti-Semitic opinions, I’m assuming.

San Francisco electrician Charles Buckley, who killed a 4-year-old girl while driving drunk, offers her parents his own 5-year-old girl. They decline the offer.

Supreme Court Justice William R. Day (a Roosevelt appointee) will resign in order to be umpire (I guess that’s the official term) on the German-American claims commission.

Headline of the Day -100:  

They only find out it was the king and two princesses who rescued them after giving them the fish.

A review of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Coming of the Fairies. Dude still believes in the obviously fake Cottingley Fairies photos, years later.

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Today -100: October 21, 1922: The burden is off my shoulders and my sword is in my hand

Lloyd George tells a crowd seeing him off at the train station, “I am a free man. The burden is off my shoulders and my sword is in my hand.” He portrays his position as country v. party: “When the country gets through its troubles we will have the dog fight, but until then let us stand by the old country.”

German Chancellor Joseph Wirth tells the Reichstag that there are at least two murder plots against him.

A mob in Camden, Tennessee seizes a father and son who were convicted of manslaughter and lynches them. The article fails to mention their race.

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Today -100: October 20, 1922: Of coalitions and enigmas

Lloyd George is out. Many had thought that LG, slippery weasel that he is, would figure out a way to hang on a bit longer. The Tories worried that they wouldn’t be able to pull out of the Coalition without splitting their party between Cexiters (a term I have just made up) and those, like their leader Austen Chamberlain, who wanted the Coalition to continue. But the vote of Tory MPs at the Carlton Club to withdraw is unexpectedly overwhelming. Chamberlain will soon resign as party leader if he hasn’t already. Lloyd George recommends to the king that he call on Andrew Bonar Law to form a government, but Law isn’t yet his party’s leader and says he can’t do it until he’s sure the Unionist Party is behind him. I mean, Tory MPs might not want to form a solely Tory government, who knows, gonna have to ask them. Once ensconced in Number Ten, Law might call a general election, but isn’t obliged to do so (see also Johnson, Boris).

Negotiations between Mussolini and former prime minister Giovanni Giolitti fail, and Mussolini and poet-aviator Gabriele d’Annunzio sign an agreement uniting their forces.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Yup, that’s Ohio, sooooooo enigmatic.

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Today -100: October 19, 1922: Of hateful, venomous by-products, disenfranchisements, and hoods & nighties

Friedrich Ebert was elected provisional president of Germany in 1919, provisional because the Weimar constitution hadn’t gone into effect yet, and he’s still provisional. The Reichstag was supposed to set an election, but never did. Now, it decides to extend Ebert’s term until 1925. Ebert actually wants the election that was supposed to occur in December, which he’d certainly win, to go ahead but some centrists are afraid of a campaign, “with all its hateful, venomous by-products” (hateful, venomous by-products are the worst kind of by-products). Skipping the election will take a constitutional amendment. They’ll do that next week; evidently amending the constitution isn’t that difficult.

Woodrow Wilson is no longer able to vote since he lives in D.C. and the New Jersey election laws that let him vote in Princeton while he was president have been changed.

Harding tells the Allied Christian Societies that the US will never depart from the 18th Amendment.

Milwaukee’s Socialist mayor Daniel Hoan responds to Charles Fowler, founder of Lanier University in Atlanta, which he sold to the Ku Klux Klan, rejecting Fowler’s kind offer to help Milwaukee maintain law and order (why Milwaukee ? fuck if I know), saying he’d make Milwaukee the “hottest place this side of hell” for any Kluxer who attacked anyone in his town, adding “for you to come here from the State where lynching is the most popular outdoor sport to tell our people that they need this organization, with its hoods and nighties, to insure law and order is in itself ridiculous.”

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Today -100: October 18, 1922: Of absent professors, burning blimps, beebs, and robins hood

Italian PM Luigi Facta is standing on the railroad station waiting for a train to take him to the king where he plans to hand in his resignation when he receives a mysterious phone call that causes him to change his mind. His minister of war has been talking to people and it is believed either that former prime minister Giovanni Giolitti has said he won’t take the job again or that the Fascists have refused to participate in a coalition government. 

Belgian historian Henri Pirenne has just discovered that he’s been a Princeton professor of history for the last 6 years. Princeton appointed him in the hopes that it would get Germany to release him from captivity, which it did not. But it never told him. Or paid him.

Another US Army airship, the C-2, the army’s largest blimp, catches on fire in San Antonio after experiencing an unexpected “strong puff” of wind on takeoff. The C-2 previously made the first transcontinental trip by an airship. Most of its crew injure themselves jumping to the ground, but no one’s killed this time. Once again, hydrogen and airships prove not to be a good combination.

The BBC is founded, sort of.  British Broadcasting Company Ltd. Financed by a royalty on BBC radios, but radioheads (wirelessheads?) built their own, so it will go bankrupt and the British government will use its assets to create the Beeb we know today. It will go on the air next month.

Robin Hood, starring Douglas Fairbanks, premieres. Too much “Earl of Huntingdon” and the Crusades, not enough “Robin Hood” and Sherwood Forest, if you ask me.

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