The right-wing German parties unite behind Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg for the 2nd round of the presidential election. He was not in the first round and in fact has not dabbled in politics since the end of the war, but he is thought to be a stronger candidate than Karl Jarres, who won a plurality in the 1st round. Also, some Bavarian monarchists wouldn’t get behind Jarres. Hindenburg is 77.
One source of chaos in the German right has retreated, a bit: Bavaria’s Prince Rupprecht
backs off his claim to the German throne (but will retain his claim to be King of Bavaria until his death in 30 years). He admits that the north wouldn’t put up with a Catholic kaiser. So the monarchists are now united behind former crown prince Friedrich Wilhelm.
Atlantic City Mayor Edward Bader says this summer women won’t be required to wear hosiery on the beach, though their skirts must be at least 11 inches long. He sees his as a concession to “contrary” “fair bathers.”
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D.C. Stephenson, former Grand Dragon of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan but not an ex-klansman, having formed his own Klan in the mid-western states, which have the largest number of kluxers. Also, “prominent in Republican circles” downplays his power; he has the same relationship to the Republican Indiana government as Elon Musk has to the Republican national government. Anyway, Stephenson has been indicted for the kidnapping and assault & battery (rape) of Madge Oberholtzer last month. More on this anon.
The chief justice of the DC Supreme Court throws out the indictments against former interior secretary Albert Fall and oil barons Sinclair & Doheny for bribery and defrauding the US government, on the grounds that Assistant Attorney Gen. Oliver Pagan (!) was in the room with the special grand jury investigating the Tea Pot Dome leases.
Some of the striking university students in Paris are tried for rioting. Students sentenced to brief prison sentences will be given political-prisoner status.
The NAACP will challenge the 1923 Texas law banning negroes voting in the Democratic primary (I didn’t mention it here, which I suspect means the NYT didn’t cover it). It will sue on behalf of a black doctor, Lawrence Nixon. In 1927 the US Supreme Court will rule that the law violated the 14th Amendment, so Texas will change the law so that parties, rather than the Legislature, could set their own racist rules. The Supreme Court (1935) will have no problem with this, though it will reverse itself in 1944 (when Dr. Nixon will vote in the Democratic primary).
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French Finance Minister Etienne Clémentel resigns after announcing without authorization that the government will increase the number of bank notes in circulation (which the Cabinet had decided on) (this is about a genuine practical need for more notes, not a Weimar-type inflationary thing). This is more important than it sounds. Probably.
There’s a fistfight in the Italian Parliament, as was the custom. First an ex-Fascist deputy complains about Fascist violence at a local election, then punches a Fascist who yells “Idiot” at him. Then yadda yadda yadda, biff bash boom, resulting in 6 challenges to duels.
The German Social Democrats (SPD), Democrats (DDP), and the Catholic Zentrum party agree to unite as the “Weimar Coalition” behind Wilhelm Marx (Zentrum) in the 2nd round of the presidential election, although the SPD is holding off making it official to ensure the other 2 parties back Otto Braun in tomorrow’s vote for PM of Prussia.
The New Jersey attorney general says deaf people can get driving licenses.
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The federal Prohibition Unit and the enforcement units of the Coast Guard and Customs will be consolidated under Ass’t Treasury Secretary Col. Lincoln Clark Andrews.
French university students declare a strike in 18 universities over the suspension of the dean of the Paris Law Faculty, who doesn’t want a strike and says his suspension was kinda justified. Sometimes I think French students just like to strike.
The House of Commons votes 320-156 to reject an amendment offered by a Labour MP with the unfortunate name Ernest Thurtle (Angela Lansbury’s uncle) to abolish capital punishment in the army. Mr. Thurtle points out that the argument that the threat of execution is needed to keep the troops in line under fire is refuted by the exemplary performance during the Great War of soldiers from Australia, whose government blocked capital punishment. Secretary of State for War Sir Laming Worthington-Evans responds... you know, I don’t care what he said, I just wanted to get that name in here.
The House of Assembly of Bermuda, which still has a property-owning qualification for the franchise, rejects an act to establish women’s suffrage.
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Rumors from Russia, of the sort that the NYT loves to publish with no collaboration, say that Trotsky has been permanently disappeared. The government is putting out a story that he’s escaped the country, but those rumors say this is just a smokescreen. None of this is true.
Curious just which North Dakota Indian tribe adopted Pres. Coolidge under the name “Bear Ribs,” I quickly gave up when my web search turned up actual recipes.
There’s been rioting, actual rioting, in the Latin Quarter of Paris – I assume the slogans were all shouted in Latin – over the Ministry of Education appointing Georges Scelle to a lectureship on international law at the Paris Law Faculty, slightly bypassing seniority. SLIGHTLY BYPASSING SENIORITY! His lectures have been disrupted by the proto-fascist Action Française’s student group, who claim favoritism and of course that the Masons were behind the appointment, leading the Ministry to close the faculty and suspend the dean for failing to keep order. In the National Assembly discussion of this, Prime Minister Édouard Herriot loudly comments about a deputy who is shouting and “gesticulating freely,” calling him “epileptic,” without, he claims, realizing it’s a guy who had a head injury during the war. Hilarity ensues.
Sen. Burton Wheeler says the witnesses against him at the grand jury were “herded into a hotel by Government agents who fed them booze and drank with them to a state of debauchery” for 3 weeks, during which the foreman was arrested for drunk driving. I guess that explains the odd pause in the hearings.
The 6th International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference closes with a resolution that “persons whose progeny give promise of being of decided value to the community should be encouraged to bear as large families, properly spaced, as they feasibly can.” Roswell Johnson, the geologist who offers the resolution, says “super-persons” have a moral responsibility to have children. Margaret Sanger criticizes Theodore Roosevelt Jr. for calling birth control advocates hoggish, selfish and bad citizens (I can’t verify Tee Arr Jay Arr’s exact original words).
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Ringling Brothers Barnum Bailey Circus will drop all wild animal acts (unless you count elephants, horses and such). They’ll continue to be displayed in the menagerie, but not perform or be walked across the street. Jack Ringling admits that people think the bears and giant cats are trained by cruel methods and name-calling (one of the black jaguars is called Nigger because of course it is), and that parents are afraid their children will see animal trainers eaten or whatever. Mabel Stark has transferred from performing with the 14 Bengal tigers to the equestrian side of things: “‘I find the horses more difficult to manage than the tigers,’ said Miss Stark, a trifle wistfully for one who has been clawed as often as she”.
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Karl Jarres of the nationalist Deutsche Volkspartei (DVP) wins more than 10 million votes in the German presidential election (38%), but not a majority, so there will be a run-off in 4 weeks. Otto Braun (Social Democrat) comes in second with 7.8 million. Erich Ludendorff gets a little over 1%, so all that fuss about him being a spoiler was a waste of everyone’s time. In Coburg, and only there, ex-kaiser Wilhelm was on the ballot. He gets 4 votes. This is the first ever presidential election in Germany, by the way.
The Japanese Diet passes the suffrage bill, extending the franchise to about 14 million from 3 million, but only for men over 30 who are not dependent on charity.
Labour MPs in Britain oppose Vincent Lopez’s band being allowed into the country to perform when there are perfectly good British jazz musicians without jobs.
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The Socialist Party intends to contest the next NYC elections on a platform of 5¢ transit fare.
The international birth control conference being held in NYC is going seriously off the rails. Neuropathologist Max Schlapp says women who “go about getting themselves excited and overwrought in an emotional way” are producing inferior babies. Clarence Little, president of the University of Maine, compares the different races to soda flavors – strawberry, pineapple, chocolate, etc – and says mixing them together is just icky. Eugenic laws should guide races to blend desired racial characteristics (Little will spend the 1950s and ‘60s shilling for the tobacco industry, denying that smoking causes cancer or any other disease). The delegates pass a resolution calling on eugenic societies to recognize birth control as an essential part of eugenics.
The Oxford English Dictionary is adding phrases from the Great War, such as “strafe,” “dud,” “getting the wind up.” Strafe is defined here as “to punish,” used by British and American military prisoners for short sentences for disobedience. It derives from the German catchphrase “Gott strafe England,” meaning “May God punish England.” The later usage for planes machine-gunning ground positions is a World War II one.
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Sen. Burton Wheeler is indicted in D.C. on the charge, trumped up in retaliation for his work investigating Teapot Dome, of conspiring to use dummies to get prospecting permits on federal oil & gas lands in Montana beyond the number that individuals are allowed. A Senate committee already exonerated Wheeler on this; the grand jury only had the evidence the committee saw. It’s all a bit weird. The grand jury stopped sitting for 4 weeks, so Wheeler assumed the thing had been abandoned.
Psychologists at Princeton determine that radio produces “ear fatigue.”
NY Gov. Alfred E. Smith wins his 25% tax cut, but the Legislature refuses to increase the length of the gubernatorial term to 4 years from 2, restore direct primaries, restrict factory employment for women to 48 hours, or hold a referendum on the federal child labor constitutional amendment. There will be a referendum in November for a bond issue to eliminate grade crossings.
German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann makes clear that while Germany’s proposed security treaty with France, Britain and Belgium would confirm Germany’s western borders, it would not apply to its eastern borders, because fuck Poland anyway.
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Mussolini’s return to public life after weeks of illness they’re claiming was ulcers and who knows, maybe it was, is celebrated in the Parliament with a fistfight between Fascist and Communist deputies, as was the custom. The Duck smiles as he watches, and The Duck never smiles.
Simplicio and Lucio Godino, Filipino Siamese twins, have learned to drive and seem to enjoy immunity to drive in excess of the Manila speed limit because the cops would have to arrest the innocent one along with the guilty one. The conjoined twins will later marry identical twins.
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The Delaware Legislature votes 31 to 1 to retain the whipping post as a punishment.
The German right wing, pissed at Ludendorff continuing to run for president against their preferred candidate Karl Jarres, are rolling out his former colleague Hindenburg (who is not yet running) to endorse Jarres. Hitler’s newspaper in Bavaria claims industrialists backing Jarres offered the Hitlerites a bribe to endorse him rather than Ludendorff.
2 Wisconsin state senators, Bernhard Gettelman & James Barker (both R’s), support changing the state law to allow home brew and light wines for consumption at home, and in fact are both in violation of that law. “We make wine in our home and don’t care who knows it,” says Gettleman. “Here is my home address. Come and take us.”
The 6th international birth control conference opens in New York. Margaret Sanger apologizes that some of the delegates had difficulties with Immigration; she notes that US immigration quotas show the “crude method” used to deal with over-population. She suggests that the government should pay unfit parents not to reproduce. The current ban on birth control encourages, “with breakneck rapidity, of idiots, defectives, diseased, feeble-minded and criminal classes. The American public is heavily taxed to maintain an increasing race of morons which threatens the very foundation of our civilization.”
Oh good, she’s opened a new clinic specifically for black New Yorkers.
The Agriculture Dept studies how to eliminate garlic breath and determines that this can be accomplished by refraining from eating garlic.
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Lord Balfour, of Balfour Declaration fame, will visit Jerusalem and boy are the Arabs pissed. Students are going on strike and shops will be closed.
The Prince of Wales will visit South Africa, and is assured of a friendly visit from the Boers.
Erich Ludendorff refuses demands that he quit the German presidential race so as not to split the lunatic-right vote. Saturday he’ll have a rally in a Munich beer hall. Yes, that beer hall.
Éamon de Valera is elected to the Ulster Parliament for County Down, unopposed. He is however banned by decree from Northern Ireland, which you’d think being an elected (sort of) official would over-ride, but no.
Charles Hueber, a Communist deputy from Alsace, address the French National Assembly in Alsatian German (his French isn’t great) during a debate on Alsace-Lorraine administration, specifically whether the recovered provinces should be be fully integrated into the French state or have some sort of special status. Some deputies get annoyed that they can’t understand him, others ask to speak in Breton or Provençal.
A Soviet Union court invalidates the Sinclair Oil oil concession on Sakhalin Island, which is in theory divided between Russia and Japan but all of it is de facto occupied by the Japanese. The court says that isn’t an insurmountable obstacle and Sinclair should have begun work by the start of the year regardless. The reason Russia signed the deal with Sinclair was to induce the US government to support Sinclair’s little venture and by extension Russian control of its bit of Sakhalin. This did not happen because the Harding administration’s corrupt links to Sinclair either didn’t extend to the State Dept or didn’t override the US refusal to recognize the Soviet Union (the entity with which Sinclair had that contract), or its unwillingness to risk friction with Japan. By the end of the decade, Japan will be meeting its oil requirements from Sakhalin alone.
The House of Representatives recently raised its own pay by one-third to $10,000. Some pretended to object during the debate, but all but 8 are accepting the raise. The identify of the 8 is as yet unknown, except for Henry St George Tucker III (D-Virginia), whose grandfather, Rep. H St G T Senior, also refused a raise more than a century ago.
The Tennessee Legislature passes the Butler Act: “it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Gov. Austin Peay (D) signs the bill, calling it “a distinct protest against an irreligious tendency to exalt so-called science and deny the Bible in some schools and quarters – a tendency fundamentally wrong and fatally mischievous in its effects on our children, our institutions and country.” Anyways, he says, the Bible disproves the theory of evolution.
NYPD Commissioner Richard Enright issues secret orders to every beat cop and detective to “Arrest all known thieves and criminals and have them brought to the line-up at 9 o’clock March 24.” It’s unclear what will be accomplished by arresting people who would be serving prison terms if there had been actual evidence against them. They may just want new mug shots. Cops are stopping musicians on the streets to check that their musical instrument cases don’t contain burglary tools.
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The Great Powers are keeping their Turkish ambassadors in Constantinople. Turkey insists they move to Ankara, which has been the capital for a year and a half.
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The 1928 presidential race is off to a start. Frank Willis, Republican senator from Ohio and former governor, starts campaigning, beginning with a series of 45 speeches in various states. He’ll continue this campaign right up through a Delaware County Willis-for-President Club rally in March 1928, at which he will drop dead.
The Indian viceroy bans Theodore Jr. and Kermit Roosevelt from taking the Hunza Pass into Turkestan for their rare-animal-hunting expedition, because there is a shortage of native porters; some Swedes hired them all. He suggests they do it next year. The boys say they’ll try to find another route.
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The French National Assembly discusses religious matters in the traditional manner, with two hours of screaming matches and fistfights, which start after Prime Minister Édouard Herriot refers to “the Christianity of bankers,” which is a reference to a cardinal’s manifesto aimed at bankers and capitalists. He says the cardinals are trying to destroy the republic and inciting open rebellion, which is funny cuz it’s true.
I’m not following NY Gov. Al Smith’s fight with his Republican Legislature closely enough to understand why the R’s are fighting his attempt to cut income tax 25%.
Erich Ludendorff is running for German president under the imprimatur of the German Völkisch Freedom Party (that’s 2 words in German, because of course it is), which has so few deputies that it’s not entitled to its own seat in the Reichstag restaurant. The NYT says he can’t win but could take enough votes away from fellow rightie Karl Jarres (Deutsche Volkspartei) to make him lose. It also says “Ludendorff’s political career has been stormy,” which is one way to describe narrowly escaping prison after participating in a putsch.
Playwright George Bernard Shaw says of radio, “If I could see and hear a play from my fireside, I would never enter a theatre again.”
Lord Curzon, former viceroy of India, foreign secretary, and co-president of the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage, dies at 66. I guess the NYT is right that he would have been prime minister but by the time he reached that stage in his career prime ministers no longer came from the House of Lords. Eventually the Tories changed the law to allow inherited lords to renounce their titles and seats in the House of Lords so that Alec Douglas-Home could become PM (1963-4).
The Dáil Éireann, working on a treason bill, votes to impose 5 years in prison for failure to inform the authorities of designs against the state (“designs against the state” is a fun thing to say in a bad Irish accent). Justice Minister Kevin O’Higgins says odium should no longer attach to informers in a state based on universal suffrage.
Coolidge increases Herbert Hoover’s power at the Commerce Dept, again, by moving the Patent Office to it from Interior.
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Charles Warren declines Coolidge’s offer of a recess appointment to be attorney general after he lost two confirmation votes. While the NYTsays “The White House raised the white flag in its fight with the Senate” (“Now that he has allowed the Senate to taste blood, what Presidential policies it will next set out to devour no man can foretell”, it’s not clear whether the decision was really Warren’s or Coolidge’s.
Coolidge immediately nominates John Garibaldi Sargent, a former Vermont attorney general (1908-12) and a partner in the law firm of Coolidge’s cousin. He and Cal were childhood friends. The Senate immediately confirms him by voice vote. Without hearings or, I have to assume, knowing much of anything about Sargent, whose work until now has been confined to Vermont.
At the Supreme Court hearings on Oregon’s anti-parochial-school measure, the state keeps mentioning the “conditions” prevailing in Oregon as a reason for the federal government to butt out, without ever specifying what those conditions are.
The British Fascisti deny kidnapping Harry Pollitt to keep him from his conference, but say it might have been members of theirs, who even knows. In Parliament, Home Sec. Joynson-Hicks admits that the stationmaster saw the abduction happening, but just assumed Pollitt was some lunatic being taken back to the local insane asylum.
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Charles Warren loses his second confirmation vote for attorney general by a wider margin, 46 to 39.
At the trial in the federal government’s lawsuit to revoke the corruptly awarded Teapot Dome oil leases, the federal court judge blocks the government lawyers from tracing the Liberty Bonds used to pay off Interior Sec. Albert Fall. They’re only allowed to trace them from Harry Sinclair to Fall, not to trace them back from Fall to Sinclair, or something. Fall’s son-in-law Milton Everhart, who acted as Fall’s bagman, takes the Fifth.
The strike in Alsace against public schools ordered by Archbishop Ruch begins. Village priests stand in school doorways to prevent children attending. Some delay morning mass until after the start of the school day.
Coincidentally, the US Supreme Court hears arguments in the case against Oregon’s Klan-backed law requiring children aged 8 to 16 to attend public, rather than Catholic parochial, schools. Oregon Assistant AG Willis Moore ignores the religious aspect of the law and the whole Klan thing and says the people (the law is a 1922 referendum) were exercising their police power in regulating schools. He also argues that since the Supreme Court ruled that child labor could only be regulated by the states and not the federal governments the same logic applies here.
The secret illness which has kept Mussolini out of public sight for weeks is revealed to be an ulcer.
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Democratic senators are planning to prevent the Senate from adjourning for a couple of days so that, after Charles Warren’s nomination to be attorney general is rejected a second time, there will be time in which Coolidge has the ability to nominate someone else; if he fails to do so he cannot legally make a recess appointment. In theory, anyway.
Harry Pollitt of the Communist Party of Great Britain is kidnapped off a train by 8 members of the British Fascisti, preventing him reaching the conference of the National Minority Movement.
Atlantic City Mayor Edward Bader says any attempt to wear pajamas on the beach, evidently a trend in Europe and Florida, will not be tolerated.
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Coolidge says if his nomination of Charles Warren to be attorney general fails again, he will give him a recess appointment. Now everyone is pissed at everyone else. Coolidge thinks the Senate is interfering with his right to name his own Cabinet; senators think he is invading their constitutional powers (it doesn’t help that he’s announcing this before the 2nd vote on Warren).
The re-absorption of Alsace into France is not going as smoothly as it might. The laicist French government is imposing secular schools in Colmar, that is, removing Catholic teaching from public schools (4 hours a week, I believe). So Archbishop Ruch orders children to boycott schools for 3 days from tomorrow to “break down the plans of the Freemasons.” The government points out that this would be illegal and expose parents to prosecution.
The Hungarian government may have difficulties pushing through an election bill whose details are odd enough to be worth mentioning: deputies who explain their votes to anyone, especially foreigners, can lose their seats; men can vote at age 24 if they have 4 years of school, women at 30 if they have 6 years; secret ballots only in Budapest and 5 other places; no parades or placards or meetings 30 days before elections; the creation of a new upper house.
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After it’s been pending more than 20 years, the US Senate finally ratifies the Isle of Pines Treaty recognizing the island as part of Cuba, but kicks a vote on ratification of the Lausanne Treaty with Turkey down the road for what will turn out to be a couple of years.
The British rejection of the Geneva Protocol banning chemical & biological weapons as a first step to general disarmament means, or seems to mean, that that goal is effectively dead. The US may propose its own disarmament conference.
The Indian Assembly votes a resolution for the reduction of opium, even after alliterative Finance Minister Sir Basil Blackett informs them that British policy is to derive the maximum revenue from the minimum output of opium. One assemblyperson says opium helps coolies mitigate the effects of hard work and illness. Another says the statistics fail to take into account the large consumption of opium by elephants.
The NYC play juries issue their first rulings, acquitting Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms” and Sidney Howard’s “They Knew What They Wanted” (filmed several times, including in 1940 with Carole Lombard and Charles Laughton – how is it I’ve never seen this?), while Edwin Justus Mayer’s “The Firebrand” is ordered to shorten a kiss (with Joseph Schildkraut, not Edward G. Robinson, who’s also in the play, and definitely not the two of them together).
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Coolidge re-nominates Charles Warren to be attorney general. Just being stubborn, or reckoning on some of the absent senators from the last vote showing up this time?
The US government is trying to expel Hannah Chaplin, mother of Charlie, from the country. I guess Labor Secretary James Davis made this decision personally, for some reason? As I understand it, she came to the US ostensibly for medical treatment, and is now being expelled because of her medical (really, mental) condition.
The Texas Legislature passes an amnesty for former governor James Ferguson, the husband of current governor Miriam “Ma” Ferguson who was impeached in 1917. This will restore his citizenship rights.
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Several Republican senators meet Coolidge (showing up at the White House uninvited) to suggest that if he tries to re-nominate Charles Warren to be attorney general he’ll just lose again.
Warren complains that the Democrats “made use of the insurgent Republican group”.
The British Labour Party warns against secret treaties, saying future Labour governments won’t honor them. Former Labour Education Minister Charles Trevelyan suggests that “surreptitious alliances” against the Soviet Union might be being forged right now.
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The Senate confirmation vote for Charles Warren for attorney general ties at 40 to 40, and therefore fails. VP Dawes, who’d been told there wouldn’t be a vote today, arrives too late to break the tie, heh heh. Warren, considered by many to be too close to the Sugar Trust, which is maybe not a good look for a Republican Party trying to get past the corruption of the Harding years, is just the 7th Cabinet nominee rejected by the Senate in the history of the republic. The previous confirmation failure was Henry Stanbery in 1868 (he had stepped down as Andrew Johnson’s attorney general to help defend him during his impeachment trial, and was rejected when Johnson nominated him to resume the post). The most recent rejection was John Tower in 1989, the 9th ever.
Austrian-Jewish newspaper editor & novelist Hugo Bettauer, author of The City Without Jews (1922), a satire on anti-Semitism, is shot in Vienna by Nazi dentist Otto Rothstock, who didn’t like the book. Everyone’s a fucking critic. Bettauer will die 16 days later. Rothstock will plead insanity and be put in an asylum, then released a year and a half later. He died in 1990 at 86, still bragging about the murder.
That “despite” is doing a lot of work here. Yes, Alice Rhinelander is included in the Social Register supplement by virtue of the marriage which her husband is trying to get out of because she might be a negro.
The Flatiron Building, you know, that triangular New York one, which was opened in 1902, is sold to an investment syndicate for something like $2 million.
The League of Nations Council responds to Germany’s conditions for joining, which are: 1) Germany gets a seat on the Council, 2) no military duties, given that Germany is disarmed, 3) no passage through Germany for troops under League orders. The Council says 1 is ok but not 2 & 3.
Astonishingly, a Savannah, Georgia jury not only convicts a white man, Lewis Lightfoot, 18, to life for murdering a black man, but sentences him to life, possibly because Lightfoot was a bootlegger who shot a customer who tried not to pay.
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During the Senate votes on committee assignments in which the Republican leadership demotes R’s who supported La Follette, Democrats vote “present,” or possibly “present and snickering.”
At the Teapot Dome lawsuit trial, the vice president of Standard Oil of Indiana admits that Chairman Robert W. Stewart is “southbound,” or as the NYT puts it, “safely outside the process-serving zone.” They say he’s on a super-secret super-important deal, so they had to keep his movements secret.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposes having a permanent Democratic Party structure, instead of creating one from scratch every presidential election year.
The federal lawsuit to cancel the Teapot Dome oil leases to Harry Sinclair’s company is about to start, but process servers have been unable to find Robert W. Stewart, the chairman of the Board of Standard Oil Company of Indiana. I mean, the chair of Amoco (as it may or may not have been called yet) has disappeared for the last two months (Standard will admit tomorrow that he left the country, possibly for Mexico). A couple of other potential witnesses, Henry Blackmer, the chairman of the Midwest Refining Company, and James O’Neil, the former president of Prairie Oil & Gas, fled to France more than a year ago and are refusing to give depositions there about their role in bribing Interior Sec. Albert Fall to... facilitate... the Teapot Dome leases. Blackmer will actually stay in exile for the rest of his life, except for a brief visit in 1949. He took his companies’ books and something like $25 million with him when he absconded, leading to fines in 1928 for tax evasion, perjury, & then for contempt for his continued refusal to return to the US to face the music. He died in Geneva in 1962 at 92.
Bavaria imposes a two-year ban on Adolf Hitler giving public speeches, although he can still address private meetings.
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Gaudenz Canova, a Socialist member of Switzerland’s National Council (the lower house of the Swiss parliament) (I just mis-typed that as Swizz, which is a lot cooler), is convicted of blasphemy for writing in Volkswacht that God is a scoundrel. His defense at trial was that you can’t blaspheme against something that doesn’t exist. He is fined 200 francs, which is the equivalent of some money.
Britain rejects a proposed mutual-protection protocol at the League of Nations, viewing it as having too many obligations. British Foreign Minister Austen Chamberlain has been discussing with French Prime Minister Édouard Herriot a German proposal for a security compact of which Germany would be a member, which Chamberlain supports, Herriot not so much.
Democratic senators as well as some of the R’s (I’m guessing the Progressives thrown off their committees) reject the Administration’s demand that Charles Warren’s nomination for attorney general be considered behind closed doors. It seems the Republicans controlling both houses of Congress will not mean Coolidge getting his own way on everything.
There’s also discussion of the Republican Committee on Committees’ demotion of senators to the bottom of Senate committees when, as William Borah points out, the Committee claims they are no longer Republicans, so how does the Committee have jurisdiction? He asks repeatedly, “What is a Republican?”
Japan’s Diet passes a “Peace Preservation Act” to ban Communist activities – organizations, discussions in meetings, bribing people to advocate Communism, etc.
There are 21,360,779 automobiles in the world, of which 17,726,507 are in the US. Of the latter, 15,525,733 are passenger cars and the rest commercial vehicles. California, NY, Ohio, and Pennsylvania each have more than 1 million cars.
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Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell is fired as assistant chief of the Army Air Service and demoted to colonel in retaliation for expressing his, you know, opinions about the future of air power and of battleships. Mitchell vows to continue fighting for the creation of an Air Force.
The new Cabinet meets for the first time, and are there ripples? You bet your ass there are ripples!
He says it’s ‘cause he’s going to a funeral and a diplomatic reception later.
Vice President Dawes’s dog is found, although he’s been in a fight.
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Congressional Republicans demote Republicans who supported La Follette in the presidential election to lower places in their committees, declaring they are no longer Republicans.
The Roosevelt boys Kermit & Ted Jr. will go to Asia to shoot rare animals for the Field Museum in Chicago, which will pay for the expedition. There’s no hint in the story that they’ve asked permission from these countries to hunt their rare animals (and presumably the animals don’t much care for it). The brothers are especially interested in slaughtering a type of sheep mentioned by Marco Polo, but also the long-haired tiger and the... goitered gazelle?
I’ve looked it up: “goitered gazelle” is a thing.
Right-wing German nationalists are suggesting Crown Prince Wilhelm be named to replace the late Friedrich Ebert as president.
While the Kansas State Senate voted last month to allow the Ku Klux Klan to operate without a charter, the House votes against it.
Calvin Coolidge is sworn in as president for a term to which he was actually elected. He makes a speech declaring that the US is entering “an era of prosperity.” He doesn’t say how long an “era” is. He says that even as the US expanded its territorial holdings, entered the Great War, then withdrew from Europe “unrecompensed save in the consciousness of duty done,” we “have enlarged our freedom, we have strengthened our independence. We have been, and propose to be, more and more American. We believe that we can best serve our own country and most successfully discharge our obligations to humanity by continuing to be openly and candidly, intensely and scrupulously American.”
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He calls, as always, for reducing government expenditure, “not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people. ... Economy is idealism in its most practical form.” Naturally, he wishes to cut taxes on the wealthy, calling high taxation “wrong. We cannot finance the country, we cannot improve social conditions, through any system of injustice, even if we attempt to inflict it upon the rich.” Well, not with that attitude, mister. He says “The result of economic dissipation to a nation is always moral decay.” He says the “rights and duties” of property “have been revealed, through the conscience of society, to have a divine sanction.”
He insults people who break the law – he doesn’t say which laws, but he can only be talking about prohibition – as barbarians & defectives who “are not following the path of civilization, but are displaying the traits of ignorance, of servitude, of savagery, and treading the way that leads back to the jungle.”
Well, that was a fun insight into Coolidge’s thinking, which is odd in ways I can’t quite put my finger on.
The president’s speech is overshadowed by the speech Vice President Charles Dawes gave earlier in the day after he was sworn in in the Senate Chamber, where he is now presiding officer (a reminder: there has been no VP for the last year and a half). He attacks the filibuster and accuses the senators of wasting time and failing in their duty. He pounds the desk and he shouts and waves his arms and wags his finger at the senators – WAGS HIS FINGER! – which I’m guessing Coolidge did not do (the NYT describes Cal as “never resorting to the dramatic”). He gets bored with administering the oath to senators a few at a time and does all the rest at once. There is much harrumphing from senators about this perceived disrespect. And now they have to deal with Dawes as their presiding officer, a position that was much more hands-on in those days than it is now. It is true that the in the dying days of the 68th Congress the Senate did not cover itself in glory, with many bills being killed by filibusters, but presumably Dawes’ biggest complaint about filibusters is that he’ll have to sit through them and we can see that he gets bored rather easily.
19 governors took part in the procession to the White House, but only Gifford Pinchot of Pennsylvania rode a horse, like God intended, wearing a sombrero, like God did not intend (I can’t find a picture that shows enough of his hat to determine if it’s actually a sombrero, and I’m suspicious about whether the NYT really knows what a sombrero is).
Film of the inauguration (there’s more horsies):
Mae Nolan finishes her only term as congresscritter (R-California), replacing her dead husband. She didn’t run for re-election, finding politics “entirely too masculine to have any attraction for feminine responsibilities.” In two years, she never made a speech.
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His inaugural address will be broadcast on the radio, which is a first (if there’s a recording of it, I can’t find it). “Plans for broadcasting of the ceremonies call for a hook-up described as the most extensive yet tried.” Kinky.
Luigj Gurakuqi, Albanian minister of economy in the deposed Fan Noli government, is assassinated in Bari, Italy, where he was living in exile since the coup. His killer, Balto Stambolla (or Scamola, as the NYT puts it), is captured. He was sent by the Zog regime. He’ll be returned to Albania during World War II where he’ll be killed by his guards in 1942.
The House of Representatives votes 301 to 28 that the US should join the World Court.
A new law allows federal courts to sentence defendants to probation instead of prison.
Sir Harcourt Butler, Governor of Burma, touring the remote lands occupied by the Naga people, faces some opposition when he requests that they end slavery and human sacrifice. They say both practices have existed since time immemorial, they can’t raise their crops without slave labor, and the spirits wouldn’t like it if they stopped the sacrifices.
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Plastic surgeon J. Paul Fernel tells the convention of the American Master Hairdressers’ Association, “There is no longer any excuse for not being beautiful. ... There will be no excuse for a crooked nose or a weak chin. The girl will be turned over to the plastic surgeon and all will be well.” He says Flo Ziegfeld and other impresarios will soon have “beauty choruses made to order.” (Update: Ziegfeld will respond that he can find plenty of pretty girls without anyone resorting to plastic surgery: “I still believe in natural beauty.”)
The Japanese Diet passes a bill for universal manhood suffrage, repealing the minimum-tax-paying qualification and increasing the electorate from 3 million to 19 million, excluding the homeless, “paupers,” and former prisoners. Oh, and it’s only men over 30. (I think the final bill will be far less generous).
The South Dakota Legislature rejects women jurors. (I may have mentioned this before, but NY didn’t require jury service by women, though they could volunteer for it, until the 1970s, which is why there were Twelve Angry Men).
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A federal dry agent, Orville Preuster, is blown up in his car in Niagara Falls. His friend Elmer Whitaker, who was cranking the car, is blown 40 feet away, injured, perhaps mortally. Bootleggers are suspected, but no one will ever be caught. As is often the case, the level of graphic detail in these stories is jarring: “Part of Preuster’s head was blown off and both legs were torn from the body.”
As part of his obsessive economy drive, Coolidge replaced paper cups at White House coolers with common drinking glasses, you know, one glass used by everyone. Rep. Allard Gasque (D-SC) asks if that doesn’t violate DC sanitary laws and, also, ick. Further, they’ve reduced the number of towels in the bathrooms, which might mean they aren’t being “sterilized” between users, which is also illegal.
Two Turkish women are running for the National Assembly, attempting to bring publicity to the cause of women’s suffrage (women will get the local vote in 1930, the national suffrage in 1934).
Cars in Rome will henceforth drive on the right side instead of the left. I think that’s just Rome.
French Guinea (West Africa) executes 6 medicine men (including one woman) convicted of cannibalism. They were all old, the woman saying she had hoped it would restore her youth but it didn’t so she was happy to be executed.
English inventor slash con man H. Grindell Matthews says he has sold his Diabolical Ray™ – no, wait, I guess he’s finally calling it a Death Ray. He says he gave England first chance to buy it but now “America snapped it up.” He’s no more specific than “America.” I guess this settles the fight in the Navy and Congress over whether planes or warships are the future of warfare, since Matthews claimed his ray can destroy both.
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German President Friedrich Ebert dies of peritonitis several days after an appendectomy. He was 54 and is survived by wife Louise Rump (!) and some kids, including Freddie Jr., who will be mayor of East Berlin for nearly 20 years.
An earthquake is felt in New York City and a bunch of eastern states. We don’t know what it is on the Richter scale because Charlie Richter hasn’t invented it yet, and we don’t know where the epicenter was because the recording pin fell off the seismograph at Fordham. New York cops advise people to stay in their homes to prevent opportunistic burglaries.
The NYT finally notices the Harlem Renaissance (as it was not yet called), although it mostly focuses on jazz. It also points out (warns?) that some among the “swarthy races” practice a thing called “passing.”
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Count Mihály Károlyi, who was president of Hungary for 4 months in 1918-19 and then fled into exile, is currently in the US. When he came last year when his wife Katalin contracted typhoid fever while in New York, the State Department imposed a condition on his visa that he not talk about Hungarian politics while in the country. Now they’re allowing him to respond at a lunch in his honor (organized by the ACLU) to attacks made on him in Hungarian newspapers about money he raised in 1914 for Hungarian separatism. His lawyers say that’s not enough. The ACLU says the US is “muzzling a foreign visitor on behalf of a foreign Government... [acting] as the American branch of the Hungarian dictatorship.”
House Republicans elect as speaker of the House Nicholas Longworth, who is married to Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter Alice.
Adolf Hitler loses a libel suit he launched against another right-winger, Otto Pittinger, for saying the Nazi movement was financed by French money.
Odd that the NYT has that story but doesn’t mention that Hitler relaunched the no-longer-banned Nazi party yesterday. In a beer hall. Yes, that beer hall. He gives his first public speech since he was released from prison, two hours long, to a crowd of 3,000.
Joshua E. Russell, the federal prohibition director for Ohio, and 9 others, including Youngstown and Columbus politicians, are indicted for illegally withdrawing whisky from a distillery.
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The House Aircraft Committee hearings continue. Rear Adm. Hilary Jones of the Navy General Board denies the claim of Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell of the Army Air Service that the Philippines could be taken in two weeks. He won’t say how long it might take but says it would require more than air power alone; “We are better off in the Philippines than a lot of people think.” The Committee also questions retired Lt. Clifford Tinker about an article he wrote blaming Congress for failing to supply helium to the dirigible Roma, which crashed in 1922 with 34 dead, but then strike his testimony from the record.
The Leaning Tower of Pisa is leaning more than it used to.
The Democratic Indiana state senators who fled the state have won: the gerrymander bill has been withdrawn. They won’t even be arrested when they return.
As Republicans in the Indiana State Senate attempt a gerrymander of Congressional seats, 14 Democrats flee for Dayton, Ohio to prevent a quorum being present (4 more remain in Indiana, but in hiding, I guess). The doorkeeper is to be sent to try to arrest them; he’s enlisting the Marion County Horse Thief Detective Association to find them. Indiana Republicans say the D’s can be indicted and extradited; Ohio officials say there’s no law allowing for such an extradition or for the Indiana sgt-at-arms of the General Assembly to arrest anyone in Ohio.
The Kansas State Senate votes to allow the Ku Klux Klan to operate in the state without a charter.
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New York City will implement “play juries,” which will determine whether plays are dirty or not. There’s a jury pool of 130 persons, I forget how it was chosen, from which juries will be picked (in secret) by the police chief. They won’t have direct enforcement powers, but if they find a play unduly salacious, Actors Equity will pull its members from the production. District Attorney Joab Banton is trying to extricate himself from the machinery of censorship, saying he’ll no longer make announcements about individual plays, like he did about Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms,” but if any press agent uses complaints for publicity, he might retaliate by bringing their plays before the Grand Jury. The producers of “Desire” are happy that the play jury might actually see the play before making a decision on it, unlike Banton, who didn’t even bother to read it (he says he based his decision on reports from “seasoned playgoers” and others).
As NY book publishers are developing their own self-censorship program, in France the Baudelaire Society demands the retraction of the 1857 censorship of his “Fleurs du Mal.” The cops recently seized a first edition which was to be sold by auction on the grounds that it should have been destroyed 68 years ago.
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Con men in the occupied Rhine have been going around convincing businessmen that they work for the Allied occupation authorities and collecting “reparations.”
The Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold celebrates its one-year anniversary in Magdeburg. I don’t really understand this group – largely veterans, organized along military lines to defend the Weimar Republic, but unarmed. They claim 3 million members. Anyway, there are lots of Austrians present, and a bunch of boundary posts are burned.
The Ku Klux Klan re-enact Washington’s crossing the Delaware, in full regalia (robes, anyway, doesn’t say if they had hoods), with a red electric cross.
The ban on oysters in Chicago, spurred by that lethal typhoid outbreak, has been lifted and Chicagohoovians will no longer have to resort to oyster bootleggers, and I don’t know if that’s a real thing or a joke because, you know, Chicago.
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Gov. Miriam Ferguson of Texas vetoes a bill allowing legislators and their families to accept free railroad tickets. It’s the historic first veto by a woman governor.
The anti-Fascist deputies who’ve been boycotting the Italian Parliament since the Matteotti assassination will resume their seats so they can be ineffective closer to the center of the power they don’t have.
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Former kaiser Wilhelm comes out against Germany having to pay reparations. Every combatant should pay its own expenses, he says.
NYC District Attorney Joab Banton has been pressuring theatre owners to rewrite or cancel “bad” plays. But after hearing that David Belasco was allowed to rewrite “The Harem” and “Ladies of the Evening” while he had been forced to withdraw “A Good Bad Woman,” William Brady says he’ll do the same and retracts his promise to cancel it. “I do not propose to be a goat.” The producers of Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms” are refusing to give in to Banton, who threatened them with the grand jury. Banton says the play is so icky no changes would suffice to make it meet his exacting standards (the only standard alluded to in the article clearly enough to be deciphered is the word “bastard,” which Banton ordered excised from one of Belasco’s productions).
Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell, assistant chief of the Army Air Service, deprecates the Navy’s claims that battleships can’t be sunk by airplanes and says the so-called test of this proposition with the Washington didn’t use real bombs, just dummies filled with sand. He proposes that he be given the battleship North Dakota to play with and says he’ll “blow it out of the water.”
The British Tory government gets Parliament to reject a Labour proposal to allow women to vote at 21 instead of 28 by promising to bring in a government bill for equal suffrage before the next general election. But the refusal of Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks (Jix to his friends, if any) to commit to that being at 21 raises suspicions because some Tories want to raise the voting age to 25.
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Pres. Coolidge calls for ending federal inheritance taxes, saying combined with state taxes “the total burden approaches, if it is not actually, confiscation.” He says it’s socialism “under the guise of a law to collect revenue.”
The North Carolina Legislature kills a resolution against the teaching of evolution in state schools.
Charlie Chaplin is in court, suing one of his imitators, Charles Amador, who performs on film as Charles Aplin, using such Little Tramp signatures as baggy pants, under-sized derby, and the walk. Chaplin testifies that it’s the combination of these elements that creates a character who is “a symbol, a satire on humanity.” He says people have been fooled into seeing the pretender’s movies.
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