Today -100: August 9, 1923: We refuse to work under the bayonets of our oppressors

German Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno addresses the Reichstag, to jeers of “deceiver” and “living corpse” from the Communists. “Germany must and will continue passive resistance” in the Ruhr, he says. “What we cannot do and will not do is to abandon a German land and betray fellow-countrymen. We refuse to work under the bayonets of our oppressors.”

Some members of the Italian Socialist Party have broken off in order to collaborate with Mussolini. The Catholic Party had a similar split.

The Spanish bull-fighting season ends, with 6 dead matadors and 2 picadors. And the great matador Bombita crashes his car on the way to a match, fracturing his skull. Good. (There are several related matadors named Bombita. One of them, the Google Translate of his Spanish-language Wikipedia page informs us, “Sick of gravity, the bullfighter died in Seville on January 19 from 1947.”)

Miners take over the Recklinghausen coal mines in the Ruhr after they are told there isn’t enough paper money to pay their wages. They erect a gallows, and the money appears as if by magic.

Headline of the Day -100, or Title on Pornhub?

That’s new American ambassador Robert Woods Bliss, which is also his porn name. Okay, I’ll stop now.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: August 8, 1923: Yup, that’s a train alright

People are turning out in large numbers all along the route to look at the train carrying Harding’s body. Which delays its arrival in D.C. until the dead of night.

The Klan hold a parade in Tampa in honor of Harding.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: August 7, 1923: Of treaties, gomperses, and fine lots of fools

At Lausanne, the US & Turkey sign their treaty on trade & shit (it’s not a peace treaty; the US didn’t declare war on Turkey during the Great War).

Pres. Coolidge has been meeting almost exclusively with Republicans, with the exception of Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor, who tells him that organized labor wants the continuance of strict limits on immigration.

The former king of Saxony Friederich August III has no desire to return to the throne, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t Saxon monarchists. A mob of them show up at the railway station in Plauen chanting for him, but he doesn’t open his carriage window. Finally they knock at the window, and he lowers it, berating them: “You call yourselves republicans! Fine lot of fools you are!” (Back in Saxony, Dresden police attack demonstrators demanding bread).

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: August 6, 1923: Deranged

A lot of talk about how to make the presidency less damaging to its occupant’s health. Assistant president? Single term? (The assistant president idea because there isn’t always a vice president. Like now -100).

Headline of the Day -100:  

Also his lungs, intestines...

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: August 5, 1923: Of room 333, doctors, high souls, and kimonos

Coolidge is running the country from the $8-a-day suite in the Willard Hotel (room 333) that he’s been occupying (except after a fire) since taking the veepship. He took 333 over from the previous vice president, Whatsisname. He names Friday the 10th, the day Harding will be buried in Marion, Ohio, a national day of mourning.

Coolidge is probably keeping all of Harding’s cabinet, and he’s also keeping Charles Elmer Sawyer as White House physician, despite the manifestly poor job the homeopathist did in keeping the previous president alive. Sawyer, like Harding a resident of Marion, no doubt got the job because he once helped Harding’s mother, a midwife with a doctor’s license, refute charges that she accidentally killed a baby. Bill Clinton likewise protected an outrageously incompetent state medical examiner who covered up Clinton’s mother’s lethal mistakes as a nurse-anesthetist. 

Finishing up his lecture tour of North America, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 

says it might be difficult to contact Harding’s spirit, since he is one of the high souls, not an earthbound spirit. And it usually takes 3 days after death before spirits can communicate (because of the Jesus thing). But after that he might advise Coolidge if asked.

Revolt of the Day -100:  

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: August 4, 1923: Of private qualities and horses

Coolidge says he’ll carry out Harding’s policies, including pushing for the US to join the World Court.

NYT: “It seems probable that the memory of President Harding will be cherished longer for his private qualities than for his public acts.”  Sex in the White House coat closet, multiple young mistresses, that secret daughter – you know, private qualities. Or perhaps that’s what the Times means by “that spirit of simple human friendliness and sympathy”. It’s hard to cherish him for his public acts because, well, they’re finding it really difficult to name any actual accomplishments. Personally, I think his greatest accomplishment was to orate the most alliterative speech ever orated at a party convention when he nominated Taft in 1912: “Progression is not proclamation nor palaver.  It is not pretense nor play on prejudice.  It is not of personal pronouns, nor perennial pronouncement.  It is not the perturbation of a people passion-wrought, nor a promise proposed” etc.

Prince Henry, the Duke of Gloucester, is thrown from a horse, as was the custom.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: August 3, 1923: Of dead presidents

President Warren Gamaliel Harding dies at age 57 of a stroke or heart attack in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, as Florence Harding reads the newspaper to him.

Harding is the 6th president to die in office. Of those, 3 were from Ohio.

VP Calvin Coolidge, 51, is sworn in by his father, a notary public.

What’s a “farmer’s line telephone,” which is the type of phone Coolidge’s father has?

Coolidge is the first president from New England since Franklin Pierce 70 years ago.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: August 2, 1923: These boys are not real murderers

Pres. Harding’s health continues to improve, although a long recuperation is expected.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Ohio’s Gov. A. Victor Donahey is on a fishing trip along with his sons, a prison warden, and two trustee convicts acting as servants. The party crossed into Canada, which is not best pleased, because it doesn’t usually allow convicted murderers into the country. Donahey calls the furore “political bunk,” and says he pardoned one of them. “These boys are not real murderers,” he says, but were only convicted of second-degree murder and anyway he has a murderer-slash-gardener and a murderer-slash-housekeeper at the executive mansion. Canada will deport them in a couple of days, and Donahey will go with them. I’d have thought he would have returned before then anyway, Ohio being Warren G. Harding’s home state and all.

The Irish Court of Appeals rules that there is no state of war in Ireland, therefore the 12,000 IRA prisoners being held without trial can be granted release under habeas. The Dáil Éireann responds by passing, in a single day, a bill allowing the government to hold them 3 more months.

France threatens to crack down on obnoxious racist American tourists. There have been reports of Americans objecting to sharing restaurants, cafés, etc with black French citizens or colonials, including former and present soldiers, trying to impose Jim Crow in Paris.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: August 1, 1923: Elimination is improving

Pres. Harding is feeling much better. Phew.

In fact, Harding is well enough to read the newspapers with their big headlines about how sick he was.

I’ve spent too much time trying to figure out what “elimination is improving” means, but I’m now fairly sure that the appearance of the phrase on page 1 of the Paper of Record is not a reference to the presidential poop. Fairly sure.

Vice Pres. Coolidge only just found out about Harding’s illness. He’s vacationing at his father’s house in a tiny Vermont town with one telephone and no Sunday stage, hence no Sunday newspapers arriving before Monday. He doesn’t intend to go to D.C.

The NYT suggests maybe not sending presidents out on arduous cross-country trips in the future.

Sen. Oscar Underwood (D-Alabama) says he’s running for president. He says it’s time for a Southerner to again “bear the banner of democracy”. He calls for more international involvement. He doesn’t apologize for having opposed Prohibition.

German Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno plans to introduce “Rhine-Ruhr sacrifice” taxes. Given the collapse of the mark, he’d have been ejected from office by now if someone else was willing to take the job. The Cabinet supports doubling the income tax.

You know who don’t want to be paid in useless marks? The printers in the plants that print useless marks, who go on strike.

In the Ruhr, the French occupy 5 more mines whose workers go on strike, and the Belgians expel (from office or from the territory? unclear) the burgomaster and 5 city councilmembers in Aix-la-Chapelle.

An Uxbridge (Massachusetts) court judge orders home-brewed beer returned to Catherine Pramere, a nursing mother who insists beer is necessary for her diet. She doesn’t try to get the cops to return the moonshine whiskey they seized along with the beer.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 31, 1923: The president is having a hard fight

Pres. Harding has pneumonia, as shown by an x-ray taken in his room at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. He responds to the x-ray people showing up, “Bring them in, I have nothing to conceal.” Fact Check: He has many things to conceal, but probably not in his chest cavity. He has breathing and heart problems and his doctors describe his condition as “grave.” But evidently he is “bearing his affliction with courage.”

The Salvation Army gifted a radio to Sing Sing for use on death row, but the authorities ban its use there.

A NYT reporter accosts ex-kaiser Wilhelm as he walks the streets of Doorn and asks about royalist plots to restore him to the German throne. He disclaims any knowledge of anything happening outside Holland.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 30, 1923: Of ptomaine, lychings, and dictographs

Pres. Harding’s staff admit that his “ptomaine poisoning” is worse than they’d previously suggested. He’ll be cancelling all of his California events. It’s undecided whether he’ll return to D.C. via the Panama Canal as planned or take a less arduous route.

A black man is burned at the stake in a swamp in Mississippi.

A French court-martial sentences 3 former German police in Essen to death for espionage, to wit, placing a dictograph near a French officer’s villa.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 29, 1923: Of ptomaine, pie fights, and jelly balls

Pres. Harding has “ptomaine poisoning,” which they’re blaming on bad crabs. Harding denies that; he thinks it was bad canned food but refuses to name the product for fear of doing it economic harm. He cancels a planned trip to Yosemite and all his scheduled appearances in Oregon and his train is now moving south towards San Francisco, where he will rest in his hotel for a couple of days. Or, you know, whatever.

Incidentally, the food poisoning mis-diagnosis gave credibility to the theory that the president was poisoned by Florence Harding. That and her refusal to allow an autopsy.

Charlie Chaplin and Pola Negri call off the “engagement” I refuse to believe was ever a thing. Negri says Chaplin is too temperamental.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Yet more proof that silent movies were documentaries. 

Headline of the Day -100:  

Astronomer Willem de Sitter, inventor of Sitter Space.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 28, 1923: Of territories and opium

Pres. Harding is in Seattle after his ship rams a destroyer in Puget Sound in a heavy fog. His trip through Alaska has impelled him towards a more conservationist position on the territory. He thinks part of the territory can be a state in a few years, but he doesn’t say what should happen to the rest of it (is this division based on “where da white folks at?” Of course it is).

The US is upset that the Lausanne Treaty did not include the Hague Opium Convention (there ain’t no convention like an opium convention), given that most of the US’s smuggled opium comes from Turkey via, of all places, Switzerland.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 27, 1923: His Canadian girlfriend

Warren G. Harding is in Vancouver, the first sitting US president to visit Canada. And he’ll be dead soon. Coincidence?

Headline of the Day -100:  

More proof that silent movies were documentaries. 

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 26, 1923: Dr. Evil voice: 5 million marks

British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin does not agree with the French and Belgian position that the only reply to Germany should be a demand that all resistance in the Ruhr should end, with terms set by them after Germany surrenders. France is complaining that it has to maintain a big army but Germany is barely allowed any army, so its capacity to pay reparations is bigger than it claims. Something like that.

Germany is going to print a 5 million mark note. It presumably won’t show up in the Ruhr, where the French are grabbing any German cash they can find. 

The cashier at the Essen branch of the Reichsbank is fined 5 million marks, which he’ll be able to pay off with one of those notes, and given a 2-month sentence for giving the French the wrong key when they demanded access to the vaults, a key that instead of opening it activated some security thing, and the French can’t figure out how to break in.

Manuel Quezon, who resigned as president of the Philippine Senate, says the demand for the recall of Gov.-Gen. Leonard Wood is nothing personal (sure it is, he’s an autocratic jerk), and Harding should replace him with someone who could work in harmony with the Filipino people. An actual Filipino, for example.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 25, 1923: Peace at last, peace at last

The Treaty of Lausanne is signed between Turkey and the Allies. The Great War is finally officially over, as is the Ottoman Empire. The Allies will remove their occupation troops from Constantinople; Britain will get Cyprus; the Allies’ merchant ships can go through the Turkish Straits; peace between Greece & Turkey with massive ethnic cleansing. The Allies (and the US) don’t get special treatment or outright exemption from the Turkish courts for their nationals.

Yugoslavia (which seems finally to be spelled that way rather than Jugoslavia) refuses to sign, because the Ottoman Empire’s reparations are to be paid by all the territories that are no longer in the Empire, including those Yugoslavia now holds, but it’s claiming it actually acquired them from the Balkan Wars.

The NYT says the real winners from the Lausanne Conference are the Swiss: “Six months of hotel bills for the diplomatic delegations of a dozen States is a bigger indemnity than Turks or Greeks vainly hoped for.”

Headline of the Day -100:  

Literally. During Communist/Social Democrat riots in Frankfort against “usury and Fascism.” One placard: “No justice without blood.”

George Baker was hanged last year for murdering a deputy sheriff in Georgia. County officials plan to charge his father with criminal libel for inscribing on George’s tombstone that he was “unjustly” executed.

The French Cabinet decrees that the only political material broadcast on radio will be government announcements, ministerial speeches and such; opposition politicians are banned from the airways.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 24, 1923: Of governors-general, duels, and pogroms

Both houses of the Philippines Legislature ask Pres. Harding to remove Governor-General Leonard Wood. Unanimously. 

Hungarian Prime Minister István Bethlen challenges Col. Pál Prónay, leader of a Freikorps-type group, to a duel. Duels are illegal in Hungary.

Pogrom in Vilna.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 23, 1923: Of the perilous voyage of unprepared autonomy

Turkey’s Dept of Religious Affairs issues a decree allowing Muslims to get fillings in their teeth.

Five women are claiming to be Pancho Villa’s widow.

Pres. Harding leaves Alaska.

Éamon de Valera asks American Irish for $100,000 to fight the Irish elections.

The NYT editorializes that all those Filipino politicians who resigned over Governor-General Leonard Wood’s insistence on employing the corrupt Ray Conley as chief of the Secret Service were using it as a pretext: “This is not a conflict between Leonard Wood and the Filipino leaders, but between the American forces believing in a thorough preparation for eventual independence and the Filipino politicians who wish to embark by themselves upon the perilous voyage of unprepared autonomy.”

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 22, 1923: Of blacks & Republicans and movies & churches

A conference of black leaders from 18 states in Atlantic City calls for passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, enforcement of the 14th and 15th Amendments, and more or less threatens to withhold black votes from the Republican Party until it cleans up its act.

The Church of Saint Matthias in Budapest, where the kings of Hungary were traditionally crowned, has been deconsecrated and will be closed until it can be reconsecrated, because it was used to film a historical movie depicting one of those coronations. A bishop played an archbishop (they were going to put an actor in the archbish’s coronation robes, but they found a wafer blessed by the pope sewn into it, so they had to use someone holier than a mere actor).

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 21, 1923: Viva Pancho Villa, or not so much

Francisco “Pancho” Villa, who has been out of the public eye for the last 3 years, is assassinated, along with his secretary and 3 of his entourage. 7 men shoot up his car. Although most of them will be captured, and punished lightly or not at all, it remains unclear who gave the order – there are so many possibilities. People he crossed in the past, government leaders worried he might re-enter politics in the 1924 elections or lead another revolution, etc. The government will of course push the “feud” line. Villa had spent the 3 years of his retirement learning how to read and write.

The National Woman’s Party, in a convention held in Seneca Falls to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the 1848 convention there, chooses wording for an Equal Rights Amendment: “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.” They’re calling it the Lucretia Mott Amendment. 

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 20, 1923: Of the pleasure, the exhilaration, the happiness, and the gaiety of life, and bones

Nancy Astor’s bill banning liquor sales in pubs to those under 18 is being debated in the House of Lords. Lord Dawson of Penn, physician to King George (who he will later euthanize), sings the praises of alcohol, which “adds to the pleasure, the exhilaration, the happiness, and the gaiety of life,” although he thinks up to age 18 practically no alcohol is really needed.

One of St Martin’s bones is stolen. Fortunately, he’s dead and probably doesn’t need it (which bone is not specified).

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 19, 1923: Of wood and paying propositions

Headline of the Day -100:  

Lord Alfred Douglas, “a former friend of Oscar Wilde,” has sued the Morning Post for libel after it celebrated the demise of Bosie’s Plain English, saying “It must no longer be a paying proposition... to invent vile insults against the Jews.” They note that the paper claimed that during the Great War, Churchill put out a false report about the Battle of Jutland as part of a scheme by a Jewish financier to manipulate the stock market, for which Churchill was paid off with a bunch of furniture. Churchill testifies that lawyers including the current lord chief justice advised him that suing Douglas & Plain English was unnecessary because they were too contemptible for any decent man to take notice of their libels. Ouch. Douglas also claims the Jews killed Lord Kitchener in 1916 to prolong the war. The jury is directed to bring in a verdict of technical libel and awards Douglas one (1) farthing and he has to pay his own lawyers. He’ll keep pushing the Jutland story and Churchill will come after him in a few months, sending him to jail.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 18, 1923: Of crown princes

Former Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm sues the German government to get his estate in Silesia back. He says his son (17) wants to be a gentleman farmer.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 17, 1923: Dr. Evil voice: 30 trillion marks

Magnus Johnson of the Farmer-Labor Party wins the special election to the US Senate from Minnesota. His son Francis will create the world’s biggest ball of twine.

Mussolini bans gambling.

Germany now has 30 trillion marks in circulation, which is the equivalent of, well, some amount of money that drops dramatically every single day.  The printing presses are running 24/7.

The Pasteur Institute claims to have created a vaccine against measles but I guess it really hasn’t.

In the British Parliament, the Independent Labour Party’s Philip Snowden introduces a motion calling for socialism. It loses 368-121.

There is a “cattle dipping war” going on in Amite County, Mississippi, with some stockmen in quarantined tick regions  resisting the mandatory but sometimes fatal process. Federal forces kill a man trying to dynamite a dipping vat.

The Philippine Cabinet resigns, along with the mayor of Manila and some prosecutors in a dispute with Governor-General Leonard Wood following his reinstatement of the chief of the Secret Service, Ray Conley, who has been accused over and over of taking bribes, I guess from gambling interests, but “cleared” each time.

Headline of the Day -100:  

The title of the next Star Wars movie, probably.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 16, 1923: Northern exposure

Warren G. Harding, in Fairbanks, Alaska, is farther north than any president has ever been, and he’ll be dead soon. Coincidence?

The French military orders everyone in Essen & other Ruhr cities to keep all their windows shut between 9pm and 6am, despite the 100-degree heat.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 15, 1923: Of putsches, bedbugs, and hypnotic radio

Nazis in Munich celebrate Hermann Erhardt’s escape from prison with a riot and a fight with the police, as was the custom. “Wild rumors are current about the size and strength of the ‘Hitler-Ludendorff army,’ crediting it with being able to start a ‘putsch’ with 100,000 to 150,000 armed men.”

I mentioned the Department of Agriculture bounty of 1¢ per bedbug for experimentation. They wanted 1,200, but so far have received just one (1). Yes, someone in Philadelphia mailed them a single bedbug.

Another follow-up: that hypnotist succeeded in putting a subject in a trance over radio station WHN on Long Island, from 10 miles away.

I once heard an exorcism on the radio, driving through California’s Central Valley.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 14, 1923: Of putsches, lotteries, lynchings, panamas, and wireless chloroform

Hermann Erhardt, the Freikorps leader in the Kapp Putsch, escapes from prison, where he was awaiting trial for treason. Four hours after he asks for a bath, the guards begin to get suspicious...

It’s taking Harding and his party 48 hours to sail from Skagmore to Sewart, Alaska. He’s been playing bridge and shuffleboard. Also, there are movies, but the NYT fails to tell us which ones.

A French sergeant wins 1 million francs, which is the equivalent of some money, in a lottery, but he’s stuck in the army for the next 4 years.

In Columbia, Missouri, George Barkwell is acquitted of murder for his part in a lynching. Rep. Leonidas Dyer suggests that this shows the need for his always-thwarted federal anti-lynching bill.

I’m afraid the song “Yes, We Have No Bananas” slipped into the musical scene earlier this year without proper acknowledgment here, but in today’s paper we have 1) a Yale professor (admittedly of poly sci) in a sanitarium who says the title is indeed grammatically correct, if misleading, and 2) this ad one page earlier:

Scientific Breakthrough of the Day -100:  Hypnotism broadcast by radio, used as anaesthesia. It’s perfectly safe for other listeners-in, though: only people mesmerist/mind-reader Joseph Dunninger has worked with before in person will be affected.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 13, 1923: Or rising radical tides and prosperous farmers, injunctions, colonies, and diabolical wheat

In Alaska, Pres. Harding takes an oath against mistreating dogs or horses.

Mussolini issues a long list of things, some quite vague – “distortion of the truth,” etc –  which could result in newspapers being censored or suppressed. Also, deputies and senators will be banned from acting as editors, because they have parliamentary immunity and he really wants to put some editors in jail.

Headline of the Day -100:  

The federal district court in Chicago makes permanent the injunction issued last October against railroad workers, 400,000 of them, doing strike stuff – interfering with RR company property, taunting, jeering or threatening scabs, being unnecessarily near to workers’ entrances, holding meetings or parades, making phone calls encouraging strikes, going to scabs’ homes, etc etc. Judge James Wilkerson says these peaceful acts aren’t peaceful: “The peaceful words of pickets, the peaceful exhortations of strike leaders, take on, by virtue of the atmosphere of lawlessness and violence in which they are spoken, a force not inhering in the words themselves, and therefore transcending right of free speech.”

Unable to get the US to open itself up to large numbers of Italian immigrants, Mussolini sends a delegation to Mexico to discuss establishing Italian colonies there. Labor unions are strongly opposed to dealing with Fascists. Or Rotarians, for some reason.

Headline of the Day -100:  

This sign goes up in Hollywood, uh, land.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 12, 1923: Of klan acts and bedbugs

New York finds the Walker Anti-Klan Act to be useless against the Klan and will let the KKK get away with failing to file its membership list and other info.

And a cross is burned in New York itself, near a negro cabaret, believed the first such event in the city.

The Department of Agriculture is offering 1¢ per bedbug sent to its experiment station in Vienna, Virginia, which is developing insecticides. I can see no way in which this can go wrong.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 11, 1923: Armed with blackjacks to enforce their whims

Egyptian prince Ali Kamel Fahmy Bey is shot dead by his wife of six months, the former, um, courtesan Marguerite Alibert, in the Savoy Hotel in London, after they had a night at the theatre, seeing, um, The Merry Widow. No doubt we will be hearing more of this...

NY Republican State Committee chair George Morris responds to a rather imperial demand from the Anti-Saloon League that the state party be more dry and end its “subservience” to the wet minority. Morris says it’s too early to talk about the 1924 election and “we are not going to submit to dictation of that sort from any quarter or as a party be driven into action by persons or groups who come armed with blackjacks to enforce their whims.” The fall Republican convention has been called off, presumably for fear of a public squabble over liquor.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 10, 1923: Of totem poles

Sub-Headline of the Day -100:  

And he’ll be dead soon. Coincidence?

The NYT notes that Harding’s speeches on his travels seem to be detailing the Republican platform for 1924. As such, they are “benevolent but vague, full of indefinite promises, and calculated to please the greatest possible number.”

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 9, 1923: Of easy surrenders, salmon, and Michelin monsters

Headline of the Day -100:  

Asking French PM Raymond Poincaré to say what his terms will be if Germany stops passive resistance; he’s been calling for unconditional surrender first.

In Alaska, Pres. Harding meets “Indians in the conventional dress of civilized communities”. They’re complaining about white salmon fishers driving them out through modern fishing techniques.

The Michelin Man used to be a lot creepier.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 8, 1923: Of whipping bosses and the excitement of a tortured people

Thomas Higginbotham, the “whipping boss” in the Florida peonage labor camp who beat a prisoner convicted of hopping a train to death, is convicted for second degree murder. He will be sentenced to 20 years.

German Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno tells the Vatican that “Sabotage in the Ruhr can be explained as growing out of the excitement of a tortured people and as a questionable attempt at self-defense.”

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 7, 1923: Of farmer-laborers, booze prescriptions, 12-hour bluff and insincerity, and resistance

The Farmer-Labor Party has split into two parties. Oh noes!

Federal Judge George Bourquin invalidates the parts of the Volstead Act limiting how many alcohol prescriptions doctors may write and the quantity of alcohol they may prescribe.

Steel manufacturers promised Pres. Harding they’d end the 12-hour day, and then it took, what, two days? for Elbert Gary of US Steel to walk it back, saying they’ll do it if and when there’s a surplus of labor. AFL Pres. Samuel Gompers says the promise is “tainted with bluff and insincerity.”

France and Belgium threaten to cut off diplomatic relations with Germany unless Chancellor Cuno repudiates Ruhr resistance.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 6, 1923: Of cruises and kluxers

Warren G. Harding sails for Alaska, the first president to visit the territory.

The Indiana KKK claims 85,000 members, more than any other state (Texas is #2) (but you knew that).

The NAACP asks Pres. Harding to send federal troops to Tuskegee, Alabama to protect black doctors at the Negro War Veterans’ Hospital from the Klan.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 5, 1923: We should have built up the country together

In Oregon, which is celebrating the 80th anniversary of the area being invaded by white people, Pres. Harding meets an old Indian chief and suggests that all the genocide and whatnot was just a silly misunderstanding: “if the Indian had known of the purposes of the nation and the nation had understood the Indian we need never have had any warfare between the races, but we should have built up the country together.” Harding is initiated into the Cayuse tribe and he’ll be dead soon. Coincidence?

A new invention to remotely control unmanned airplanes through a player-piano-type mechanism directed by wireless is demonstrated for French army officers including Maréchal Pétain, who will himself be remote-controlled from 1940.

A lynch mob 200 strong hangs a black man from a tree on Main Street, Schulenberg, Texas.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 4, 1923: Of dueling and kluxers

Russia is trying a Red Army officer who killed another officer in a duel over a woman, who witnessed the duel so she’ll also be prosecuted. He’s charged with murder and “action derogatory to the honor of the Red Army” in reviving “the feudalistic custom of officers of the Czarist regime.”  (Update: he gets just 18 months, benefiting from a general amnesty for Red Army soldiers with medals. The woman is acquitted).

1,000 Ku Klux Klansmen, in full regalia, parade in Tuskegee, Alabama to protest the hiring of black people at the Negro War Veterans’ Hospital.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 3, 1923: Did he make choo choo noises?

In Spokane, Pres. Harding calls for development of natural resources because, after all, the US’s population will rise to 300 million within a century. He says development of natural resources won’t exhaust them but, somehow, multiply them.

Pope Pius, after pissing off the French, now calls for Germany to end passive resistance – excuse me, “criminal resistance” – in the Ruhr.

Headline of the Day -100:  

The Italian Fascist government refuses passports to 2 Socialist deputies to attend a London conference, because they have dared to oppose Fascism. One of them is Giacomo Matteotti, who will be murdered next year.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 2, 1923: Of bears, corvées, and Tolstoys

Pres. Harding feeds gingerbread to bears in Yellowstone Park.

Bulgaria introduces compulsory work for the government. 8 months for men aged 20-40, 4 months for women aged 16-30, any time the government calls them up, and it could be all at once or not. And additionally communes may conscript people for “work of common interest” for up to 21 days a year.

Leo Tolstoy’s daughter is resisting the Soviet government’s demand that she turn over his unpublished writings. They’re threatening to banish her to Siberia if any more of them are published abroad. She is trying to keep to his principles in publishing them without copyright.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: July 1, 1923: As crazy as usual

Gen. Juan Crisóstomo Gómez, brother of Venezuelan dictator Juan Vicente Gómez and also vice president and governor of the Caracas Federal District, is assassinated in Miraflores Palace.

The Ku Klux Klan opposes joining the World Court. They prefer kangaroo courts.

Immigration quotas reset today, spurring the ridiculous ritual created by current immigration laws of steamships – 12 of them – racing towards NY Port today.

8 or possibly 10 Belgian soldiers are killed by the bombing of a train in Buer. So hostages are seized, curfews imposed, etc in various towns controlled by the Belgians.

Former Crown Prince Frederick William will, purportedly, run for president of Germany.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: June 30, 1923: Aglow with unsullied patriotism

In Helena, Montana, Harding says that during the next war it will be necessary to conscript capital as well as labor, so that the war will be “aglow with unsullied patriotism, untouched by profiteering in any service.”

A French court-martial in the Ruhr sentences 7 Germans to death for sabotage.

Éamon de Valera, still on the run, calls for Republican candidates to stand in the forthcoming Irish elections, “to give the people the opportunity to record by vote their detestation of allegiance to a foreign kind, their repudiation of partition and their desire for a Government, not an instrument of British domination.”

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: June 29, 1923: Much less the details

In a speech in Idaho Falls, Pres. Harding throws out a thought about consumers uniting in some sort of cooperative movement under federal supervision. “I have not attempted to work out even an outline, much less the details, of such a system,” he admits.

Pope Pius proposes that German reparations be determined by arbitrators and the occupation of the Ruhr quickly ended, warning of a path to the “final ruin of Europe.” France is not impressed.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: June 28, 1923: Resign yourselves, gentlemen, to having to allow us to act

Yugoslav Prime Minister Nikola Pašic/Pachitch is shot at by a Serb. 5 bullets miss, 1 wounds his left hand.

Pennsylvania Gov. Gifford Pinchot says he will only appoint people who swear they will “support, defend and personally obey” Prohibition.

Illinois enacts a law against the Ku Klux Klan making it illegal to appear in public “with evil or wicked purpose” while wearing a hood or mask. It also increases the penalties for kidnapping, assault, disturbing the peace etc while so clothed.

The Belgian occupiers have been trigger-happy since that attack on soldiers in the Ruhr. They’ve shot dead someone breaking curfew in Buer and someone who “insulted and attacked” a soldier.

France: After 3 royalist thugs were arrested for attacking Socialist deputies, royalist asshole Charles Maurras came forward and said he should be tried as well, since he ordered the attacks. So they do. At his trial, he says that since the government isn’t stopping the spread of Bolshevism, the social contract has been broken and France has returned to a state of nature. “Resign yourselves, gentlemen, to having to allow us to act.” He is sentenced to 4 months in prison.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: June 27, 1923: Playing her part

Pres. Harding, in the Salt Lake City Mormon Tabernacle, calls for the US to join the World Court: “I want America to play her part in helping the world to abolish war.” It’s like he doesn’t even know America. 

Oklahoma Gov. Jack Walton puts Okmulgee County under martial law. The articles cite “a state of lawlessness” and the arrests of a former sheriff for drunkenness and a justice of the peace for forgery as reasons. Two articles tomorrow, after which the county drops off the NYT’s radar entirely, cover the martial-law authorities banning an anti-Catholic meeting and a threat by Gov. Walton to also declare martial law in 4 other counties with “mob rule and mob violence,” but fail to mention the Ku Klux Klan. Anyway, in September Walton will put the entire state under martial law and then be impeached.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: June 26, 1923: Of elevateds, lynchings, and unveilings

Pres. Harding says Prohibition will never be repealed. He warns that if states fail to enforce it, which “amounts to a confession by the State that it does not choose to govern itself,” there will need to be an expensive, intrusive federal police. He doesn’t utter NY Gov. Alfred E. Smith’s name, but he doesn’t have to.

Smith refuses to respond.

An elevated train jumps the tracks in Brooklyn, falling 35 feet to the ground, killing 7.

See that car the carriage fell on? Its owner, one Douglas Fonda, and his passenger got out without a scratch. One of the passengers of the first carriage that fell, Lewis Awell, president of a paint company, wandered home badly injured. He was carrying $200,000 worth of securities. Another survivor was worried about some diamonds she left on the train. There was a whole lot of money for a, you know, El train.

The blame game begins, with Mayor John Hylan rushing to the scene within 15 minutes and blaming the wreck on old wooden guard rails and the Transit Commission should be fired. Commissioner Le Roy T. Harkness says

Hylan’s claim that the rails were 25 years old is nonsense.

The NAACP reports that the number of lynchings is way down, 11 in the first 6 months of 1923 compared to 33 in the first 6 months of 1922. 3 in Florida, 2 in Georgia, 1 each in Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri and Texas.

A fight in Eisleben, Saxony between “Nationalists” (Nazis? maybe) and Communists at the unveiling of a statue to assassinated foreign minister Walter Rathenau leaves 2 dead.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: June 25, 1923: A sordid people

In Colorado Springs, Pres. Harding bemoans the loss of religion and the increase of materialism in the US. “It tends to make us a sordid people.”

One of Harding’s party, Sumner Curtis of the RNC, is killed when his car goes over an embarkment into Bear Creek Canyon. The driver also dies.

Harding drives a reaper around a Kansas wheat field.

The Third Internationale rejects the suggestion of some members that religion is a matter of private conscience, saying that might be the case in a bourgeois state but religion is incompatible with Communism.

The US Navy is experimenting with having aviators hear wireless codes over headphones while they are asleep. Evidently they can learn to process codes at a much faster rate.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: June 24, 1923: In which is revealed what would mean the death of the Democratic Party in 1924

The Treasury seizes the sealed alcohol of the White Star liner Baltic and another ship, leaving behind only the amount of wine the ships’ home countries consider essential for the medical well-being of passengers and crew.

William Jennings Bryan says “it would mean the death of the Democratic Party to espouse a wet platform in 1924.”

King Albert of Belgium falls off his horse, as is the custom, breaking his wrist.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: June 23, 1923: Of fords, coal, Ruhr deaths, boycotts, and sunburns

Adolf Hitler is suing the editor of Das Tagebach for saying the NSDAP is funded by Henry Ford and German industrialists. The party acknowledges the testimony of Socialist Party (SPD) leader Erhard Auer that if Ford visited Munich (I seem to remember he’d planned a European tour, then cancelled it), he’d be treated like royalty, but says that’s just because of his anti-Semitism.

The United Mine Workers (UMW) have reportedly negotiated with miners in unnamed foreign countries not to dig up coal for shipment to the US during a possible UMW strike, and Attorney General Harry Dougherty is not best pleased, threatening “prompt” and “forceful” measures. Not sure what law he thinks is being broken.

In the Ruhr, French soldiers kill:  1) someone trying to sabotage railroad tracks in Linthrop, 2) one of a group attacking a German who works for the French, 3) one of the Germans who attacked Belgian soldiers yesterday, killing one. In response to that event, the Belgians have taken hostages, including the burgomasters of Mari and Buer and banned the use of telephones for 2 weeks and street cars, restaurants, saloons & coffee houses for 3 months.

In retaliation for the assassination of Vatslav Vorovsky at the Lausanne Conference, Russia bans all business with Switzerland and will refuse visas to all Swiss – except workers, of course.

Pres. Harding gets a sunburn. In Kansas.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: June 22, 1923: Of world courts and garveys

Pres. Harding announces the conditions on which the US might join the World Court: 1) it has to sever any links with the League of Nations (this would entail a scheme where new judges would be appointed by the old judges, on and on until the end of time, rather than be named by member nations); 2) the US would join on terms of equality (that’s a knock at the British Empire’s constituent parts having separate L of N seats). This in a speech in the heart of anti-League sentiment, Missouri. Harding says he’s not going to try very hard on this policy – won’t “coerce” the Senate, will “embark on no crusade,” etc. Hard to tell why he even bothered giving the speech.

Marcus Garvey is sentenced to 5 years.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.