Today -100: June 23, 1924: Of invisible governments and junkmen & cockchafers

William Gibbs McAdoo gives a speech calling for the “restoration of the administration of national affairs to the people from the control of a sinister, unscrupulous, invisible government, which has its seat in the citadel of privilege and finance in New York City.” Not sure if that’s the euphemism for Jews it sounds like. He’s also not too thrilled with New York newspapers.

Oh, and there’s a new slogan: McAdoo’ll do. Which sounds to me like a rooster crowing. Maybe that’s the idea?

The Illinois Democratic State Committee picks lawyer Earl Dickerson as its candidate for Congress in the First District. He is the first black person so chosen by the Democratic Party. Dunno what happened, but Dickerson will not wind up being the D. candidate.

An American, Edwin Hawley, was killed by Chinese junkmen who objected to him shipping goods by steamer rather than junks. So the commander of the British gunboat Cockchafer threatens to bombard the city of Wanshien unless Chinese military leaders march to Hawley’s funeral in full uniform, arrest the two junkmen, and execute them. Which is done.

Yes, “Cockchafer.”

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Today -100: June 22, 1924: The real people of the country want to see me nominated

William Gibbs McAdoo still refuses to express an opinion on the KKK or prohibition, saying he wouldn’t presume to dictate to the Convention on platform planks. Honestly, I’m not sure how much the move for an anti-Klan plank is genuine and how much is an attempt to force McAdoo to take a position that would alienate his many klannish supporters. His people are also refusing to take any position on who his running mate should be.

By the way, McAdoo’s people are referring to a “wet reactionary clique” supporting Smith. I tend to forget that prohibition supporters thought of their position as progressive.

Al Smith says his real strength is that “the real people of the country want to see me nominated.”

Filippo Filippelli has supposedly confessed to ordering the kidnapping of Giacomo Matteotti, but says he wasn’t supposed to be killed, just kidnapped.

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Today -100: June 21, 1924: Fascismo will come out of this storm stronger and more respected than ever

The third British Everest expedition ends when George Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappear somewhere on the mountain.

William Gibbs McAdoo’s campaign manager refuses to pass on to McAdoo a reporter’s question about the proposal for a plank condemning the Ku Klux Klan by name. 

Italy’s ambassador to the US Gelasio Caetani says “merciless justice will be meted out to the dastardly murderers” of Giacomo Matteotti. Dastardly murderers are the worst kind of murderers. Merciless justice is the... best?... worst? kind of justice. “Fascismo will come out of this storm stronger and more respected than ever,” he says, after the purging of “extremist elements” from the Fascist Party. “It will come out purer and stronger.”

High Sheriff Andrews, who was ordered to arrest the Republican Rhode Island state senators boycotting the Senate, let them all go after they produced doctor’s notes that they were too ill from the gas attack in the chamber yesterday. If they all then fled the state that’s certainly not his fault, says Andrews. Democratic senators seem to be mysteriously immune to gas. R’s claim they are in fear of their lives from thugs roaming the corridors of the Senate.

The Turkish Ministry of Agriculture will send 30,000 guns to Smyrna to fight off hailstorms.

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Today -100: June 20, 1924: I will not even acknowledge the existence of a second choice

Commendatore Giovanni Marinelli, treasurer of the Italian Fascist Party, is arrested for ordering the kidnapping murder of Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti. Fascist editor Filippo Filippelli is also under arrest (he supplied the car Matteotti was forced into) and is singing like a canary. Also, his name is Filippo Filippelli, which is the most Italian name possible.

Democrats in the Rhode Island State Senate have been filibustering since January, demanding, among other things, a referendum on a constitutional convention, a 48-hour week, and the abolition of the property qualification to vote in city council elections (RI tended to be massively behind the times constitutionally – look up the Dorr Rebellion when you’ve got some free time). Person or persons unknown decide to end the filibuster with bromine gas, placed behind the rostrum. 4 senators go to hospital (the 3 R’s may be faking it). Some Republican senators say they will boycott tomorrow’s session, so Democratic Lt. Gov. Felix Toupin, who has been leading the filibuster, reading Shakespeare and the Encyclopedia out loud for 42 hours but who escapes ill effects from the bomb because he was being shaved at the rostrum and had a towel over his face, orders the high sheriff (that’s the best kind of sheriff) to arrest them and drag them back to the Senate.

Former ambassador to Britain John Davis says he’s not a candidate for president, but if the Dem. convention drafted him...

Al Smith says he would refuse the vice presidency. “I will not be a second choice,” he says, “I will not even acknowledge the existence of a second choice.” Dude, NO ONE acknowledges the existence of a vice president.

The feds claim that the Wobblies are deliberately spreading foot and mouth disease in California.

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Today -100: June 19, 1924: Of assassins, truces, smuts, and ma’s

Mussolini claims that almost everyone involved in the kidnapping and presumed murder of Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti has been arrested. One was caught by a submarine chaser, one was apprehended in the Alps trying to reach Switzerland, and 3 were caught on a steamer about to leave for Albania.

The Royal Ascot horsie race bans women smoking in the royal enclosure in response to the scandal of one woman breaking that unwritten rule of etiquette.

Democrats have reportedly negotiated a “truce” whereby William Randolph Hearst and his newspapers won’t attack Al Smith anymore.

South African PM Gen. Jan Smuts’s South African Party badly loses parliamentary elections. Smuts loses his own Pretoria seat. But at least the country will still have a Boer War general as PM. J.B.M. Hertzog of the National Party will become the new PM on a platform of disfranchising the black voters in the Cape Province.

Miriam Ferguson, wife of former Texas Gov. James Ferguson (1915-7), is herself running for governor. He can’t do it because he was impeached and barred forever from holding state office for acts of embezzlement, corrupt banking practices, trying to bribe the speaker of the house to prevent the impeachment, and threatening the University of Texas. “Ma” Ferguson is running on “Pa”’s old platform and says she’s running to clear the family name so that her grandson might one day be able to run for office with the stigma of grandpappy’s impeachment wiped out by the “rebuke” to it of her being elected. She is the first woman to run for governor in the US.

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Today -100: June 18, 1924: We can beat ‘em anyway

William Gibbs McAdoo says he doesn’t care about the 2/3 presidential nomination rule: “We can beat ‘em anyway.”

Al Smith records a 6-minute “talking movie,” the first use of that technology in a presidential campaign.

Sen. Pat Harrison of Mississippi will give the keynote speech to the Dem. convention. Former Miss. senator LeRoy Percy accuses him of leading “a Ku Klux Klan delegation.” Percy was on one of the anti-Klan delegations that wasn’t seated at the state convention. He doesn’t accuse Harrison of being a kluxer, but says most of the state’s delegates are.

Lawyers boycott courts in Naples & Palermo to protest the probable murder of Giacomo Matteotti. Police disperse various anti-Fascist protests. Supposedly Pope Pius met Matteotti’s widow, for half an hour no less.

The NYT suggests that the Matteotti kidnapping threatens Mussolini’s grip on power and has damaged “the prestige of Fascismo”: “The Government of Mussolini may go down in history with the Government of the Tarquins and of Appius Claudius to testify that a people which will endure loss of liberty may rise on an issue of personal outrage.” The murder “is of a kind that may kill a movement by depriving it at a stroke of its moral content.” You know, that celebrated Fascist moral content.

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Today -100: June 17, 1924: Out of the mouths of babes

Babe Ruth comes out in favor of Al Smith for president, after campaign manager Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote him asking for his endorsement.

Some delegates to the Democratic Convention want to do away with the rule requiring a 2/3 vote to nominate a presidential candidate. Reducing that to a simple majority would most likely benefit William Gibbs McAdoo, but his followers are worried that they’d alienate delegates by pushing it. Ah, should be okay.

Oh, this can’t be true: the ancestors of Coolidge & Dawes ran a grocery store called Dawes & Coolidge in Worcester, Massachusetts in the 18th century. William Dawes was part of the Ride of Paul Revere.

The analysts working for Leopold & Loeb’s lawyers determined that they are abnormal and should not be held responsible for their actions. Now the State’s analyst says no, they are in fact “smart alecks.”

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Today -100: June 16, 1924: Of finzis, acting governors, and abnormals

Ah, now I understand why Italian Under-Secretary of the Interior Aldo Finzi had to resign over the Matteotti disappearance: Matteotti had been about to give a speech attacking Finzi for various forms of corruption, including taking bribes from Harry Sinclair’s oil and bribery biz.

New Mexico Gov. James Hinkle will be a delegate at the Democratic National Convention. While he is out of the state, Secretary of State Soledad Chacón, a woman-type person and a Hispanic-type person, will be acting governor (the lt. governor died). The NYT gets her name and age wrong, because of course it does. She’s not the first US woman temporary governor (we’ll get some real ones soon, for better or worse), that would be Carolyn Shelton in Oregon in 1909. While Chacón is acting governor, the acting secretary of state will be the assistant director, who is her husband.

Headline of the Day -100:  

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Today -100: June 15, 1924: Of radicals, boycotts, assassintions, and lillies

France has another prime minister. Seems like only a week ago... This is Édouard Herriot (Radical) (that is, from the not-actually-radical Radical Party).

The US Embassy in Japan complains about the boycott of American movies in protest at the racist Immigration Act.

Aldo Finzi, under-secretary at the Italian Interior Ministry (and vice commissioner for aeronautics), resigns over the disappearance of Giacomo Matteotti so that he can fight these “libelous attacks” full time.

The first of 31 trials for the Lilly, Pennsylvania battle between Klansmen and townies (18 of the former and 13 of the latter are facing charges) ends with an acquittal for a kluxer tried for murder.

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Today -100: June 14, 1924: Of Tammany hospitality, horrified & exasperated, and court exhibits

Orville Poland of the Anti-Saloon League claims, in a letter to every delegate to the  Democratic Convention in New York, that there are plans to open a convention barroom to dispense “Tammany hospitality” in support of Alfred Smith. Franklin Delano Roosevelt says the letter is “an insult to the whole city.”

Mussolini is making a very good show of being shocked at the disappearance of Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti, which there is now ample evidence was a kidnapping. It’s assumed he’s dead, but it’ll take a couple of months for the body to be discovered. The name of the man who led the kidnappers, Amerigo Dumini, is now known, because he rented the kidnap car (the classic Leopold & Loeb mistake). Dumini is an Italian-American who renounced his US citizenship in 1913. The Duck says, “If there is anyone in this hall who has the right to be horrified and exasperated it is I myself.” In fact, only Fascists are in the hall as opposition MPs are boycotting.

The Bloc des gauches in the French National Assembly ousted President Alexandre Millerand a few days ago, but fail to profit from it, proving unable to put their candidate Paul Painlevé in his place. I believe the French word for such an occurrence is a whoopsé. Instead, the right-wing parties in the Assembly manage to elect Gaston Doumergue, former prime minister, education minister, foreign minister, colonies minister, and magistrate in Algeria and Vietnam. Not necessarily in that order. He is a Protestant.

A Tijuana judge demonstrating to a jury in a shooting case how a gun could have been used shoots himself in the head. He thought his staff had unloaded the exhibit.

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Today -100: June 13, 1924: Of final & irrevocable refusals, battleships, and (spoiler alert) assassinations

Headline of the Day -100:  

 

Calvin Coolidge is nominated for president on the first ballot. He’s been listening to every word of the convention on the White House radio, presumably silently.

Former Illinois governor Frank Lowden is selected as his running mate, by acclamation no less. At this point a friend reads a letter from Lowden, written just in case the Convention ignored his repeated statements that he didn’t want the job, saying his refusal is “final and irrevocable.” So a late-night session names Charles G. Dawes, who was a general during the Great War but is mostly known for the Dawes Plan for German reparations, which seems like an odd qualification for vice president, but then Coolidge was known only for breaking a police strike. Dawes was also comptroller of the currency under McKinley, a post currently held by his brother Henry. Dawes evidently had no idea this was coming – a lot of other candidates, some of them even willing, were considered before they worked their way down the list to him. It’s also a surprise to Coolidge, who presumably found out from the radio.

A lot of the drama behind the veepship struggle is caused by resentment of RNC chair William Butler’s heavy-handed attempts to force first Borah and then Judge William Kenyon and then Herbert Hoover on the Convention.

The USS Mississippi blows up in San Pedro Harbor, killing 48.

Italian Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti is missing. “Mussolini is taking the greatest personal interest in the case”. I’ll bet he is.

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Today -100: June 12, 1924: Of platforms & pleas

The Republican Convention adopts a platform by a vote of 13,000 to 28. It includes joining the World Court, Treasury Sec Andrew Mellon’s tax plan, and a federal anti-lynching law. It fails to mention the Ku Klux Klan by name or the Bonus, omits the Equal Rights Amendment, and opposes Philippines independence.

Republican leaders – congresscritters, Cabinet members, etc – choose Sen. William Borah of Idaho as Coolidge’s running mate (this looks very much like Coolidge doing what he said he wouldn’t do – intervening in the choice of veep). Informed of the decision, Borah again says fuck no.

Leopold n’ Loeb plead not guilty to kidnapping and murdering Bobby Franks (that’s two charges, both subject to the death penalty). It’s Richard Loeb’s 19th birthday.

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Today -100: June 11, 1924: Of premature climaxes

The Republican National Convention opens. Rep. Theodore Burton (Ohio) gives the keynote speech, saying most people “look to President Coolidge rather than to Congress for leadership.” That would be the Republican Congress, whose lack of complete subservience to Coolidge is pissing him off. And evidently also the delegates in the hall, who receive the speech enthusiastically.

Sen. William Borah of Idaho rules out being Coolidge’s running mate, this time without caveats.

Will Rogers is calling this the “Republican Vice President conscription convention.” Rogers is in the press gallery, palling around with William Jennings Bryan. Bryan asks him if he’s the one who writes a humorous column and says he himself is writing a serious article, but if he thinks of something comical, he’ll pass it on to Rogers. Rogers says he’ll do the same if he happens to think of something of a serious nature. Another version  of the story of the meeting of this surprise comedy double act has WJB telling Rogers “I believe you write laughable things, while I write serious things,” to which Rogers replies, “It may be that each of us has a wrong opinion of his own work.” Listening to Burton’s keynote speech, they both think he peaked in the middle, when he called on La Follette’s followers not to bolt the party; Bryan says “The speaker suffered from a premature climax.”

Coolidge’s father declines to attend the Convention – he has potatoes to plant.

Headline of the Day -100:  

 

French Prez Alexandre Millerand resigns after both houses of the National Assembly vote against him (what they voted on specifically is unclear to me). Millerand is a little over halfway through his 7-year term and argues that it’s unconstitutional to vote him out, while his Left-wing (Bloc des gauches) opponents argue that it was unconstitutional for him to violate the neutrality of his office by siding with Poncaré. The left refuses even to debate the matter or to “enter into relations with a Cabinet which by its composition is the negation of the rights of Parliament”.

Detroit quarantines and cordons off a 15-block section of the city after a smallpox outbreak. The quarantine is lifted after 15,000 people are vaccinated.

The LA Dry Squad raids Charlie Chaplin’s Beverly Hills home and find a boiler in the basement that turns out to be a water softener rather than a still. Who called the fuzz on the Little Tramp?

I don’t know what says “air of careless smartness” more, the knickers or the socks.

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Today -100: June 10, 1924: Of veeps, elrods, and the Chicago Way

Fightin’ Bob La Follette begins his campaign to pick a fight in the Republican Convention justifying a walkout. The Wisconsin delegation demands that Harry Daugherty & Albert Fall be condemned, expelled from the party, and banned from holding any position under a Republican administration. Daugherty, by the way, will be one of the Ohio delegates.

Sen. William Borah of Idaho says he’s not a candidate for VP, but neglects to say whether he’d accept the nomination if he was drafted. It’s widely believed he is Coolidge’s preferred choice, were Cal not remaining Silent on the subject.

60 members of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan open a headquarters in Cleveland to fight a possible anti-Klan plank in the Republican platform. There is some dispute over whether the national Klan is endorsing Indiana Sen. James Watson for veep, as is claimed by former Klan publicity agent Milton Elrod, which is a very Ku-Klux-Klan-publicity-agent kind of name. Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans denies the existence of any endorsement.

Before the cops alighted on Leopold n’ Loeb, they arrested two teachers at Bobby Franks’s school they suspected of having killed him. One of the teachers says he was beaten with rubber hoses and put in a cell with a black man who then claimed he confessed, as was the Chicago custom.

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Today -100: June 9, 1924: Hats!

Al Smith, in a letter to the chair of the Self-Determination League of Liberty – I don’t know what that is but I find the name kind of hilarious – says states should be allowed to set their own rules on light wines & beer up to a maximum alcohol content which Congress would set.

Former Illinois governor Frank Lowden says he absolutely will not accept the nomination to be Coolidge’s running mate. He says he can do more for farmers in the ag organizations he leads.

Women in Ecuador get the vote, the first country in Latin America.

The Republican convention hasn’t started yet, but we’re already invited to get excited by photographs sent over the telephone wires from Cleveland, such as this dynamic shot displaying the many varieties of hat in the NY delegation.

 That’s Teddy Roosevelt Jr on the left.

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Today -100: June 8, 1924: If government extravagance, hartebeests, ronin gangs, and dry and radiated conventions

Pres. Coolidge vetoes a bill to increase the salary of postal workers, saying “Government extravagance must stop” and that taxpayers are “paying all that it is possible for them to pay.” I hope he isn’t expecting anything important in the mail anytime soon.

The Earl of Athlone, the governor-general of South Africa and, of course, a member of the extended royal family, is wounded by a hartebeest while hunting. Princess Alice kills it. The hartebeest, not the earl, although that would be a great Agatha Christie novel. Death on the Veldt.

Japanese protesting the US’s racist immigration law break up a dance held by foreigners at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, and others – “gangs of ronin” – stop cinemas showing American films.

The NYT expects its readers to know the word ronin without an explanation. I wonder where they would have come across it.

Republican leaders are unable to quell efforts to force the National Convention to take a position on the Klan next week. There may also be a fight over watering down, er, light wine & beering down Prohibition.

Federal and Ohio prohibition agents are working to keep the Republican National Convention in Cleveland dry. The NYPD plan to do the same for the Dems and have already started arresting suspicious characters, who judges will hold without bail until the Dem convention is over.

Former Republican Louisiana Gov. H.C. Warmoth (elected 1868 at 26 years old, impeached 1872) tries to have the R. Convention unseat the Louisiana delegation, saying there is no real R. party in the state: fewer than 1% of registered voters are R’s and there are no R elected officials. He loses, but threatens to bring it up on the floor.

The convention will be the first to feature microphones and to be broadcast on radio (18 stations as far west as Kansas City, with commentary on WEAF by Graham McNamee, the guy who invented play-by-play sportscasting) and to have photos sent over the wire.

French President Alexandre Millerand has been trying to pick a new prime minister, only to be turned down by several people. Finally, he’s found someone willing to take the job: former finance minister Frédéric François-Marsal. Congratulations, Freddy!

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Today -100: June 7, 1924: Of honest brokers, unsightly legal battles,, running mates, and strange and long inscrutable purposes

The Reichstag votes to accept the Dawes report 247-183 after a speech by Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann in which he says Germany has to get on the United States’s good side: “in the long run, the post of honest broker in European matters is certain to fall to the United States. America is too wealthy to feel any interest in weakening Germany. It is far enough away from Europe to see things correctly.”

The parents of Leopold n’ Loeb deny that they have set up a million-dollar defense fund or want “to stage an unsightly legal battle with an elaborate array of counsel and an army of high-priced alienists in an attempt to defeat justice.” Of course Clarence Darrow is an elaborate array of counsel all by himself. They do intend to go for an insanity plea.

The White House denies that Coolidge wants former Illinois governor Frank Lowden as his running mate. In fact, he has no preference at all.

The Prohibition Party’s convention nominates H.P. Faris (or H.P. Farts as the NYT index calls him, and I am WAY too old to laugh at that) for president and Dr. A.P. Gouthey of Seattle as his running mate. Gouthey immediately withdraws, so they nominate Marie Brehm, who will be the first woman to run for VP in the US. The convention declines to adopt a plank against tobacco use.

At Howard University, Coolidge praises the negro race and credits, um...: “The accomplishments of the colored people in the United States in the brief historic period since they were brought here from the restrictions of their native continent cannot but make us realize that there is something essential in our civilization which gives it a special power.” That something essential is of course Christianity. “But for the strange and long inscrutable purpose which in the ordering of human affairs subjected a part of the black race to the ordeal of slavery, that race might have been assigned to the tragic fate which has befallen many aboriginal peoples when brought into conflict with more advanced communities.” So that’s okay, then. If some negroes “have suffered, if some have been denied, if some have been sacrificed, we are able at last to realize that their sacrifices were borne in a great cause.”

The NYT finally mentions the Indian Citizenship Act, which passed into law days ago, granting US citizenship to Native Americans. An editorial reassures us that citizenship is “not considered inconsistent with wardship”.

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Today -100: June 6, 1924: Utter disregard of the law is the worst kind of disregard of the law

The Indiana Democratic Convention nominates Carleton McCulloch for governor, bucking the strident Klan opposition to him (the Klan in Indiana, unlike most states, is mostly Republican). McCulloch lost to Warren McCray last time. McCray is now in prison, a testament to what happens when you don’t do exactly what the Klan tells you to do (also, he was pretty corrupt). Edward Jackson, the Klan choice, will be the Republican nominee.

The Senate Teapot Dome Committee releases its report. It says former interior sec. Albert Fall made the contracts with the Sinclair and Doheny oil companies with “utter disregard of the law.” The committee seems to think there was something wrong with Doheny loaning $100,000 to Fall while the negotiations were going on.

The Senate votes 70-2 to ask the Supreme Court to rule on whether the Brookhart Committee has the authority to subpoena former attorney general Harry Daugherty, who has refused to testify.

There is a “movement” to name Nebraska Gov. William Bryan, brother of 3-time presidential loser William Jennings Bryan, as the running mate of Al Smith if he gets the Democratic nomination.

The Chicago grand jury indicts Leopold n’ Loeb and the former’s confession is released; you can read it at the link. The families have supposedly raised a million-dollar defense fund, run by Clarence Darrow.

The under secretary of the British Air Ministry tells Parliament that the Ministry tested a death ray, presumably Grindell Matthews’s “diabolical ray,” on one of its experts (death ray expert, I guess) at ten yards, and he wasn’t even slightly vaporized.

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Today -100: June 5, 1924: Of super-intellects, enlistment mania, racial insults, and bitter personal feeling

The grand jury hears evidence against the “19-year-old graduates of super-intellect,” Leopold n’ Loeb, including the testimony of an employee of the company that rented them the murder car; the optician who traced the rare model of spectacles Leopold left by the body; the stationer who sold him the paper and envelope he used for the ransom note...

The American Psychiatric Association convention in Atlantic City has a ball discussing the Leopold n’ Loeb case. They blame the parents.

There’s a guy who has enlisted in the army 12 times in 6 states in the last 6 months under different names. He is said to have “enlistment mania.”

Four more Japanese commit ritual suicide to protest the US immigration law, according to provincial newspapers, although only one of the suicides is for-suresies a protest, the man leaving a letter protesting the “racial insult.”

Disgraced former attorney general Harry Daugherty’s lawyer tells the Senate Committee that Dirty Harry will refuse to testify and his lawyers will stop showing up too. DH complains that they didn’t call any of the witnesses he suggested and conducted their inquiry “with such bitter personal feeling toward me”.

The RNC will probably recommend that women be allowed to vote at next week’s national convention.

Austrian Chancellor Ignaz Seipel offers his resignation on account of the long recovery time expected after that assassination attempt, but it is rejected.

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Today -100: June 4, 1924: Or running mates, dudes, politburos, and passages

Coolidge will leave the choice of his running mate to the R. Convention. The top choices seem to be Sen. William Borah and Commerce Sec. Herbert Hoover, both of whom say they don’t want the job.

Fightin’ Bob La Follette is preparing his 3rd-party run, which would commence after the Republican Convention fails to pick him (the same sort of walk-out Theodore Roosevelt followers staged in 1912). There is some talk that at 68 he’s just too old. He’ll be picking his own running mate. He may pick Sen. Burton Wheeler, a Democrat, but Wheeler doesn’t want the job either.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt says Al Smith’s New York delegates to the Dem. Convention won’t push for modification of the Volstead Act.

Leopold n’ Loeb are not speaking to each other in the county jail, even during exercise period, which Loeb spent teaching a negro prisoner how to read. One prisoner complains that Leopold thinks he’s too good for us. Loeb, though, is considered a “good fellow.” They’re both ignoring their cellmates, who in turn look down on them as “dudes.”

Germany: Helmut Marx’s old cabinet will be his new cabinet, negotiations to bring in the Nationalists having failed after the over-reached with their demands. This despite the head of the army, Gen. Hans von Seeckt, saying that he couldn’t be held responsible for the safety of the government without the inclusion of the Nats. Marx won’t seek a new vote of confidence, but will be relying on the tacit support of the Socialists in the Reichstag.

The Lenin-era Politburo is re-elected, including Trotsky.

E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India is published.

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Today -100: June 3, 1924: Tuberculosis. Not exactly Kafkaesque.

The Chicago PD are trying to pin another murder and another kidnapping on Leopold n’ Loeb.

Japan says the US’s new immigration act abrogates the 1911 Gentlemen’s Agreement, so Japan is now free allow Japanese to emigrate to Mexico and Canada and if they happen to sneak across the border, hey, whaddaya gonna do.

Pres. Coolidge signs the tax bill, reducing income taxes 25%, while complaining about many of its provisions and its lack of “real” tax reforms.

The Senate votes 61-23 for a Constitutional amendment to allow the federal government to regulate child labor. The ratification process now begins in state legislatures without, I have to say, a lot of hoopla. It’ll get 28 states by 1937 and then... crickets.

Franz Kafka dies, at age 40. He is unknown in the English-speaking world (so no obit) and everywhere else, really. Some of his best stuff, including The Trial and The Castle, will be published posthumously.

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Today -100: June 2, 1924: I was never more profoundly impressed by a suicide

Austrian Chancellor Ignaz Seipel (who is also a Catholic priest) is shot in the chest by a railroad employee, Karl Jaworek, identified as a Socialist, although his motive is that he is poor. Jaworek then shoots himself, but not fatally (also, 2 of the 3 bullets he fired at Seipel point-blank missed; some people are just not gun people).

The 4 French left-wing parties are trying to force Pres. Alexandre Millerand out of office by saying they will accept no prime minister candidate he offers. Raymond Poincaré once again offers his resignation and that of his cabinet, and is told by Millerand to stay in office until a new government is formed.

Leopold n’ Loeb are now accusing each other of being the one who killed Bobby Franks, each claiming to have just driven the car. Leopold says it was just an “experiment,” you know, like an entomologist killing a beetle. I’m thinking if he’d completed his legal studies he would have been a crap lawyer – no Clarence Darrow, you might say.

The Russian Communist Party Congress reverses itself and bans anti-religious propaganda aimed at peasants.

A revolutionary movement is roiling Albania, and beginning to march on Tirana. Greece, Yugoslavia and Italy are all looking to intervene.

The ritual suicide of a Japanese man outside the ruins (from the earthquake) of the US Embassy to protest the exclusionist immigration bill has stirred up great anti-American feeling. Says the head of the Tokyo Police: “I was never more profoundly impressed by a suicide ... He will probably be shown the honors due to a soldier who died on the battlefield.”

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Today -100: June 1, 1924: I have a hanging case

Leopold n’ Loeb confess to kidnapping and killing Bobby Franks. “I have a hanging case,” State’s Attorney Robert Crowe crows. The two self-described geniuses forgot to coordinate their alibis.

We’re already hearing crap psychological theories about how it was their very precocity that lead to “mental and moral perversion.”

A fire kills 22 girl inmate at the Hope Development School for Subnormal Girls in Playa del Rey, California.

“Perversion,” “subnormal.” They weren’t exactly Politically Correct in 1924, were they? (Update: it was actually called the Hope Development School for Deficient Girls. And all its doors were locked.)

In the Italian Parliament, a speech by Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti attacking the legitimacy of the recent parliamentary elections, which were conducted in an atmosphere of violent Fascist intimidation, sets off a free-for-all. Franceso Giunta (Fascist) calls Socialist deputies “that gang,” which is evidently more insulting in Italian than it sounds in English.  Opposition deputy Gen. Roberto Bencivenga, “shouting incoherent threats,” is attacked by a bunch of Fascists, as was the custom. Later Bencivenga challenges Giunta to a duel.

Japan protests the anti-Japanese provisions of the new US Immigration Act as violating the 1911 treaty.

Irving Berlin has composed an election song for Alfred E. Smith, called “We’ll All Go Voting for Al.” I can’t find a recording of it online, but that’s not a very promising start, is it? The first lines are “The bands will all be playing / As we go ‘Hip Hooraying,’” and it just goes on like that. Don’t give up your day job, Irving. Oh that is your day job, you say?

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Today -100: May 31, 1924: Of checks, franks, and klan wreaths

Headline of the Day -100:  

If by “check” you mean “death.” But he’s a Gurkha, thus the lack of dismay. Shamsherpun by name. He won’t be the last check.

Nathan Leopold, 19, and Richard Loeb, 18, are arrested for the murder of Bobby Franks, 14 (the murderers’ ages are reported correctly, but the NYT can’t make up its mind about Franks, despite having had days to get it right). Leopold, who doesn’t seem to know when to shut up, says the state’s attorney asked him if he’d ever read any works dealing with perversion; he answered that he’d read 16th-century bad boy and renowned homosexualist Pietro Aretino’s I Ragionamenti, which is about prostitution.

The Allies demand that Germany allow the resumption of inspections of its military, which Germany ended at the start of the Ruhr occupation. Germany says the provision of the Versailles Treaty allowing inspections has expired since Germany has toooootally disarmed, and inspections should now shift from the Allies to the League of Nations. The Allies refuse to believe that Germany has toooootally disarmed, with good reason, and say it’s up to them and not Germany to decide when the conditions have been fulfilled.

The German Nationalists give up their attempt to form a government in which they would have control over all the major positions and impose their own foreign policy and get control of Prussia. For some reason the moderate parties didn’t want to go along with that. So Pres. Ebert asks Wilhelm Marx to try again to form a new government.

In KKK Memorial Day news, a K.K.K. wreath is placed at the war memorial in Hicksville, Long Island, causing a kerfuffle since the parade there was organized by the Knights of Columbus, the 3 Hicksville Great War dead all having been members. That wreath was placed furtively during the parade, but in Binghamton, kluxers in kluxer regalia (but without masks) attempt to place a wreath on the local monument and are dispersed by a single Civil War vet, who threatens them with his cane, which is made from wood from the Andersonville prisoner of war camp.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Same.

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Today -100: May 30, 1924: Of advanced thinkers, veeps, and kampfs

At the Senate DOJ Committee, Gaston Weeks, former Bureau of Investigation agent and con man, accuses Treasury Sec Andrew Mellon of large-scale authorizations of withdrawal of liquor from bonded warehouses, partly to fund the Republican Party’s deficit, and partly so banks could liquidate their frozen credits. And some other shit, but I stopped reading when I decided nothing Weeks says is worth giving credence to.

After having released a couple of teachers who were suspected of killing Bobby Franks (because of how well-written the ransom notes were), the Chicago PD arrest 5 more suspects, including Nathan Leopold Jr., who left his glasses behind at the dump spot. He immediately admits that those are indeed his glasses, but says he left them in the area, where he often roamed for ornithological reasons, the week before the murder. “Examination developed the fact that he considered himself an advanced thinker and that he professed atheism.”

Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover says he is not a candidate for the vice presidency.

Adolf Hitler announces that he is writing a book in his prison cell. He says his Beer Hall Putsch saved Germany from a dictatorship led by Gen. Hans von Seeckt but with industrial magnate Hugo Stinnes (who died last month) running things behind the scenes. Given that Stinnes was a major financial backer of the Nazis, I don’t know what the hell Hitler is doing here.

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Today -100: May 29, 1924: Take the C Out of Cal

Fightin’ Bob La Follette strongly hints that he will run as a third-party candidate for president unless the D’s & R’s “cleaned house.” And the Farmer-Labor Progressive Party, which just allowed Communist delegates into its national convention, should also clean house. That’s a lot of clean houses.

The House votes 166-138 for a Navy bill that will build a bunch of new warships, the US having fallen behind the 5:5:3 ratio with Britain and Japan established by the Washington Treaty. Thomas Butler (R-Penn.), chair of the Navy Committee and sponsor of this bill, says “This navy of ours has run down,” so he had to violate the Republican commitment to economy. Also, everyone expects Coolidge to call another arms limitation conference after the whole Ruhr/German reparations thing is fixed, and, Butler says, we need to build more ships to force Britain to give up some of its ships, which would also mean scrapping US ships.

Rep. Sol Bloom (D-NY), who used to be in the sheet music business, demonstrates why he is no longer in the sheet music business by composing a campaign song for Al Smith entitled “Take the C Out of Cal and That Leaves Al (And Al Means Smith).”

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Today -100: May 28, 1924: This must be a Parliament and not the degenerate successor of Parliament

The new Reichstag’s opening session concludes with a sing-a-long, competing strains of The Internationale and Deutschland Über Alles (one point to the NYT for knowing that the latter’s melody was composed by Haydn). The Communists are especially loud (with cowbells and everything) when Ludendorff’s name is called.

There’s also a new Italian Parliament. Mussolini tells it that it’s the “very last parliamentary experiment.” If it “fails,” it will be replaced by something better. He does offer the possibility that Fascismo “may lead to a new period of splendor of Parliament,” but “This must be a Parliament and not the degenerate successor of Parliament.” Degenerate successors are the worst kind of successor. Or possibly the best kind.

The Methodist General Conference lifts the ban on dancing, theater- and circus-going, card-playing etc. Not that the Methodists now approve that sort of thing, mind you.

Grindell Matthews is going to France to discuss selling his Diabolical Ray, after Britain made him an offer, contingent on his proving its efficacy by halting a motor engine, a condition he finds insulting. His business partners attempt to serve him an injunction, but their lawyer arrives after Matthews’ plane has taken off. The US is also trying to get its grubby hands on the device, but they can’t find Matthews.

Russia is also said to have a death ray that can blow planes out of the sky, which explains the bellicosity of War Minister Leon Trotsky’s recent speeches.

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Today -100: May 27, 1924: Of exclusions, lynchings, and ostriches

Coolidge signs the immigration bill but says he’d have vetoed the Japanese exclusion provision had it been a stand-alone bill. So he dislikes racism, but not THAT much.

There’s still no deal on a new German cabinet. The Nationalists are demanding that Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz (who was just elected to the Reichstag) be made chancellor, that a new president be elected, that participants in the Beer Hall and Küstrin putsches be amnestied, that all Jews who have entered Germany since 1914 be expelled, all German Jews to be put under special legislation, etc.

Two young black men are lynched in Fort Meyers, Florida after being accused of attacking white girls.

Headline of the Day -100:  

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Today -100: May 26, 1924: Of Leagues and parties unknown

Edouard Herriot, who takes over as French PM next week, says French foreign policy will be built on the League of Nations, the one sure hope for peace.

As reported here a couple of days ago, shots were fired in Herrin, Illinois at the car of KKK-paid dry raider Glenn Young’s car, wounding him and his wife. Now an alleged “gangster” (I assume meaning bootlegger), Jack Skelcher (which is a very bootleggery name), believed to be one of the would-be assassins, is shot dead by... well, none of the many witnesses to the shooting saw nuthin’, so the coroner’s jury rules he was killed by “parties unknown,” which are the worst kind of parties. One cop says he deputized 10 or 12 men to “investigate suspicious characters,” but won’t say who the deputies were.

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Today -100: May 25, 1924: Of Marxist corpses, death rays, true liberty, and colonies

Karl Marx’s grandson Jean Longuet rejects Soviet Russia’s request to transfer KM’s body from London to Moscow, saying Russia is totally misinterpreting his work.

Dr. T.F. Wall, lecturer in electrical research at Sheffield University, has also invented a death ray. We are entering a golden age of death rays. British newspapers have been demanding that Grindell Matthews not be allowed to hawk his own Diabolical Ray to a French company, so he has been called back for talks with the military. And Reinhold Wulle, the near-fascist German deputy, claims that there are no fewer than three German death ray patents.

Speaking of German inventions, the hot new thing in Berlin is mini-radios suitable for pockets, with headphones and an antenna in one’s hat.

Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III, wearing a general’s uniform, opens the Parliament with a speech praising Fascism, Mussolini’s militia, and the crackdown on The Duck’s enemies: “The Italian people wish liberty, true liberty, to be left intact, but they have clearly shown that they repudiate every form of degeneration of liberty and every form of license, just as they repudiate all weakness or tolerance because they wish all special individual and class interests to be subordinated to the general interests of the community.”

Duke Adolf Friedrich of Mecklenburg, the former governor of Togoland, is head of a colonization company aiming to establish a feudal dukedom in Dutch New Guinea, in which the Dutch colonial government would have no say and all laws protecting the 200,000 natives in the 200,000 square mile concession would be abrogated. However, the plan seems to have been scuppered by... people finding out about it.

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Today -100: May 24, 1924: This is a strictly commercial proposition

Bobby Franks was already dead when his kidnappers made their ransom demands, probably killed accidentally when he was gagged. The ransom letter resembles one in a recent (unnamed) detective story.

NYC Mayor John Hylan orders an inquiry into why John D. Rockefeller Jr’s daughter Abby received only a suspended sentence for speeding (29 mph on 10th Avenue).

Glenn Young, who was paid by the Ku Klux Klan as a dry raider in and around Herrin, Illinois, and his wife are wounded in a drive-by shooting.

The Senate votes 56-5 to approve the Borah report confirming that the indictment of Burton Wheeler (D-Montana) was a frame-up designed to derail his investigation of then-attorney general Harry Daugherty and that he was never paid to lobby the Interior Dept.

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Today -100: May 23, 1924: As you no doubt know by this time, your son has been kidnapped

Headline of the Day -100:  

Bobby was actually 14. More on this later....

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Today -100: May 22, 1924: Of fishy rays and chlorine

Columbia U. physicist W.L. Severinghaus says the story about the “diabolical ray” invention sounds “fishy.”

Coolidge enjoyed the chlorine yesterday so much he does it again. His wife Grace joins him, although she doesn’t have a cold, just for shits and giggles.

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Today -100: May 21, 1924: Of diabolical rays, klunerals, chlorine gas, and Jewish dissection

Headline of the Day -100:  

Grindell Matthews, less a Mad Scientist Extraordinaire than a British con man with a history of “inventing” devices that he won’t explain and can’t demonstrate, claims to have invented a Diabolical Ray (It’s not a death ray or an ice beam, that’s all Johnny Snow) that can direct (somehow) an electric current that can destroy enemy planes, making them burst into flames, and paralyze warships (and their crews) within a radius of 4 miles.

In Long Island, NY, the Ku Klux Klan hold a large funeral for a Southampton constable killed in a shootout with bootleggers.

Pres. Coolidge, still suffering from a cold/hay fever, is put in an airtight room into which chlorine gas is pumped for 45 minutes. Sure, why not.

There have been pogroms in Transylvania, with a dozen Jews allegedly killed. Students government officials and secret police are said to have been involved.

At Budapest University, med students demand, maybe not seriously, that 4 Jewish med students be killed and dissected. The complaint is that the Jewish students have benefited from the dissection of dead Christians but Jewish communities bury their dead poor rather than making them available to med schools.

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Today -100: May 20, 1924: Meat juice

Under the Bonus Bill, which has just gone into effect after the Senate overrode Coolidge’s veto 59-26, 3 million+ veterans would receive insurance policies and 389,000 cash of $50 or less. Only vets ranked captain or below in the Army & Marine Corps or lieutenant in the Navy are eligible. What Congress hasn’t done is come up with a way to pay for all this. Rep. Victor Berger (Socialist-Wisc.) suggests making France pay its war debt.

AT&T has figured out how to send photographs over the phone wires. A picture taken in Cleveland was reproduced in New York in a mere 44 minutes (the photo had to be developed at each end).

Medical science is gaining in leaps and bounds. The latest cure is for tuberculosis, and it’s... meat juice!

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Today -100: May 19, 1924: If ever I get the chance to tell my story, I’ll rip the innermost circles of Washington wide open

Charles Forbes, the incredibly corrupt former director of the Veterans’ Bureau, now under indictment, says he’s being “framed” and now “they” are literally trying to murder him. “If ever I get the chance to tell my story, I’ll rip the innermost circles of Washington wide open.” Or go to prison, one or the other.

Pres. Coolidge has hay fever, or “rose fever” as they’re calling it.

Newly elected Reichstag deputy Reinhold Wulle of the National Socialist Freedom Party, the party standing in for the banned Nazi Party, claims that former kaiser Wilhelm approves the election gains of the fascists and gives visitors to Doorn silver swastikas and copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and a translation of Henry Ford’s anti-semitic writings. Dunno if any of this is true.

Hanover voters reject a plebiscite on whether to call a referendum to become a separate province independent of the state of Prussia.

At the Paris Olympics, French spectators hiss the American flag and are “unjustly incensed” when the US rugby team beats the French team, despite the former being mostly college students new to the sport. American spectators are attacked with canes, as was the custom.

Headline of the Day -100: 

 

Now playing:

The Marx Brothers open on Broadway for the first time. Groucho plays Napoleon, I guess. The four brothers are all billed under their real names (Julius, Adolph, Leonard, Herbert), but their stage names are pretty well known from vaudeville. The “She” is Lotta Miles, a name Florence Reutti adopted when she was doing tire ads. Lotta Miles, geddit?

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Today -100: May 18, 1924: Incidentally

The incoming French government, whenever it does come in, plans to reduce military service from 18 months to 9 (this doesn’t affect the 1/3 of the French military that comes from the colonies).

The House of Representatives votes to override Coolidge’s veto of the Bonus Bill 313-78, with 3/4 of the Republicans voting for the bonus.

Russia will expel 100,000 bourgeois high school and college students to make room for proletarian and peasant kids.

Mussolini and Czech Foreign Minister Edvard Beneš agree on a treaty of friendship and whatnot between Italy and Czechoslovakia. Mussolini was worried that France has been gaining too much influence in the Little Entente.

Headline of the Day -100:  

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Today -100: May 17, 1924: Of taxes and dead suns

Coolidge threatens to veto the tax-cut bill if his veto of the Bonus Bill is overridden.

German Chancellor Wilhelm Marx and Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann refuse to resign, denying that Nationalists opposed to the Dawes reparations plan represent a majority.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Phew.

Okay, that’s not the astronomical body, but South China President Sun Yat-sen, whose death has been reported, wrongly, for days.

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Today -100: May 16, 1924: Patriotism which is bought and paid for is not patriotism

Pres. Coolidge vetoes the Bonus Bill. He points to its considerable commitment of funds for years to come and the threat to tax cuts. He says “Our first concern must be the nation as a whole. This outweighs in its importance the consideration of a class [i.e., veterans] and the latter must yield to the former.” Vets might argue that they’ve already “yielded” quite a bit to the nation as a whole. He says nothing is owed to able-bodied vets because they were just doing every citizen’s “first duty.” “The gratitude of the nation to these veterans cannot be expressed in dollars and cents.” Well not with that attitude, mister. In fact, even trying to pay money for patriotism is an “unworthy indignity which cheapens, debases and destroys it.  ... Patriotism which is bought and paid for is not patriotism.” Veterans, he says, don’t even want it, “All our American principles are opposed to it. There is no moral justification for it.”

I especially like how he refers to a bonus for vets as a “gratuity.” And how he presents stiffing them as a matter of principle.

James Foley says he can’t be Boss of Tammany Hall after all after suffering a not-at-all-fake nervous collapse and getting a doctor’s note.

NYC Mayor John Hylan refuses a licence for child actors in Eugene O’Neill’s “All God’s Chillun Got Wings,” which I’m sure has nothing at all to do with the play’s inter-racial marriage . So the director reads out the scene. The demonstration some thought might protest the opening night does not occur, although one audience member leaves behind a pamphlet entitled “The Ku Klux Klan.”

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Today -100: May 15, 1924: Of wheelers, zebras, Bosses, and toughs

The Senate committee investigating the indictment of Sen. Burton Wheeler (D-Montana) exonerates him, saying the legal services he contracted to provide Gordon Campbell of Montana were related only to lawsuits and not to any matter before government agencies. The charges against Wheeler were trumped up by then-attorney general Harry Daugherty to derail his investigations of Dirty Harry’s shenanigans.

Abyssinia’s Prince Regent Ras Tafari, the future Emperor Haile Selassie, arrives in France, bearing gifts: lions and zebras. Pres. Millerand plans to keep 2 of the zebras at his country house.

James Foley is elected new Boss of Tammany Hall, whether he likes it or not.

Smith College suspends 3 students for smoking. In a tea room. Not even on campus.

The inquiries into both Teapot Dome and Dirty Harry Daugherty’s Justice Department are winding down. The last witness at the former, the chief petroleum engineer of the Bureau of Mines, is named Frederick B. Tough.

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