Today -100: June 16, 1920: Of Minnesota not so nice, log cabins, and bluebeards

Three black men, circus workers, are lynched by a large mob in Duluth, Minnesota, for supposedly attacking a 17-year-old white girl. Interestingly, the mock trial conducted by the mob acquitted three other black men and returned them to their cells.

Vice President Whatsisname says he is not only not a candidate for president but will be retiring from public life, which is a surprise to everyone who didn’t realize he was actually in public life.

Harding will not run for re-election to the Senate after all, but won’t resign his seat.

Harding denies having been born in a log cabin.

Heavyweight boxing champ Jack Dempsey is acquitted of evading the draft.

The French authorities are investigating Henri Désiré Landru for killing 11 (or more) women he met through matrimonial ads. And then selling their furniture.

Landru was fictionalized by Charlie Chaplin in his too-dark-for-1947 comedy Monsieur Verdoux. There’s also a 1963 Claude Chabrol film Landru (update: which I have now seen and I just had to check: yeah, that’s what he looked like, all right).

Also played by George Sanders in 1960’s Bluebeard’s Ten Honeymoons, which I haven’t seen.

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Today -100: June 15, 1920: Of front lawns and metal planes

Warren G. Harding celebrates his first day as nominee by playing golf, as is the custom. This will be followed by a week’s vacation, playing more golf. He’s planning a “front lawn” campaign in which he stays in Marion, Ohio and does not go around the country making speeches and kissing babies.

The US Army thinks all-metal airplanes, now being tested, might be the wave of the future.

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Today -100: June 14, 1920: Congratulations to you

If elected, Harding will be the first Baptist president.

Republicans are worrying that Sen. Robert La Follette will bolt the party for an independent run for the presidency, to the left of Harding on many issues but also strongly anti-League of Nations. Fears that Hiram Johnson would do the same are alleviated when he sends Harding a fulsome message which I now present verbatim: “Congratulations to you. Hi Johnson.”

The first assistant postmaster general rules that children cannot be sent by parcel post as live animals. Which is a thing that had actually happened.

A bomb explodes at Enrico Caruso’s farewell performance at the National Theatre in Havana. No one killed. It may have been a protest against the high ticket prices for Caruso’s shows ($35 and up!).

Gen. Essad Pasha, the Ottoman official who sometimes ran Albania and was scheming to return from exile as its ruler, is assassinated in Paris by an Albanian nationalist, Avni Rustemi. Rustemi says he didn’t plan it; he always carries a revolver, saw Pasha Essad and just couldn’t help himself. “I have killed for Albania,” he tells the French attorney general. He will be acquitted in a French court in December, return to Albania in glory, enter its National Assembly, and of course be assassinated himself in 1924.

Germany: Hermann Müller fails to form a new cabinet. Pres. Ebert calls on the People’s Party (DVP)’s Rudolf Heinze to also fail to form a cabinet.

The Irish Republican Army issues a boycott against the Irish constabulary, ordering that they not be sold food, milk, etc.

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Today -100: June 13, 1920: What can happen when you’re bleary eyed with loss of sleep and perspiring profusely

Headline of the Day -100: 

The Republican National Convention nominates Sen. Warren Gamaliel Harding of Ohio for president on the 10th ballot. By the 8th ballot, Gen. Leonard Wood and Illinois Gov. Frank Lowden were still in the lead, and then there was a little recess, and...

Some time back, Harry Daugherty, Harding’s campaign manager predicted what would happen. (The NYT puts this in quotes, but it’s really a paraphrase): “At the proper time after Republican National Convention meets some fifteen men, bleary eyed with loss of sleep and perspiring profusely with the excessive heat, will sit down in seclusion around a big table. I will be with them and will present the name of Senator Harding to them, and before we get through they will put him over.” This indeed happens in the proverbial smoke-filled room in the Blackstone Hotel (in fact, this is the origin of the phrase “smoke-filled room,” coined by UP reporter Raymond Clapper), where senators decide on Harding as a compromise candidate, despite his poor performance in primaries. They might have gone for Philander Knox if they’d been able to get Hiram Johnson to drop out in his favor, but they couldn’t.

The NYT describes Harding as “a very respectable Ohio politician of the second class. He has never been a leader of men or a director of policies.” The editorial says his nomination is “the fine and perfect flower of the cowardice and imbecility of the Senatorial cabal that charged itself with the management of the Republican Convention”. The Times is much happier with the choice of Gov. Calvin Coolidge as his running mate, saying his actions against the Boston police strike showed him to be “a man.”

That choice was evidently a much easier one for the boys in the Blackstone (Harding had no input in the decision, as far as I know).

A Japanese newspaper reports that Trotsky is dead and Lenin has fled.

France and Belgium agree a military alliance. I guess the idea of Belgian neutrality is done.

Headline of the Day -100:  

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Today -100: June 12, 1920: Of president-picking, and whist experts

The Republican National Convention holds its first 4 ballots. Gen. Leonard Wood topped all 4, with Illinois Gov. Frank Lowden not too far behind, and Hiram Johnson and Warren G. Harding well behind. Wood has the Old Guard Republicans strongly opposed to him, I guess because of his close military and political association with Theodore Roosevelt, so his potential support in the convention has a natural ceiling. And more and more information is leaking out about how much money Lowden is spending to buy the nomination, which doesn’t look good (a lot of it is his own money, or his wife’s – he married into the Pullman railroad family).

One tricky thing for Harding is that the deadline for filing for re-election to the Senate was yesterday. He filed.

Austria’s government, led by Karl Renner, resigns.

Agatha Christie Pastiche of the Day -100:

Actually, looking it up, I find that this case is considered the inspiration for the genre of locked-room mysteries. It was never solved.

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Today -100: June 11, 1920: That word is tragedy

The Republican platform says Wilson & the Dems were unprepared for war and unprepared for peace. It promises to end “executive autocracy” and restore constitutional government; it attacks Wilson’s “vindictive vetoes.” It calls for tightening immigration and naturalization, and for continuing the exclusion of Asians. Calls for “Americanizing” the foreign population of Hawaii and the “rehabilitation of the Hawaiian race,” whatever that means. It vaguely calls for Congress to “consider the most effective means to end lynching”. Calls for states with Republican legislatures to ratify the women’s suffrage Amendment in time for this election. On the League, it says it supports “agreement among the nations to preserve the peace of the world” buuuuut without compromising national independence or the US people’s “right to determine for themselves what is just and fair when the occasion arises without involving them as participants and not as peacemakers in a multitude of quarrels, the merits of which they are unable to judge.” It accuses Wilson of being a “dictator” in demanding the Senate ratify the covenant without any changes.

Hiram Johnson declares victory on getting that anti-League plank. Victory over whom? International bankers, of course.

Florence Harding says she’d rather Warren not be president: “I can see but one word written over the head of my husband if he is elected, and that word is ‘Tragedy.’”

The American Federation of Labor’s annual convention warns affiliated unions, specifically the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks, against excluding blacks. Black delegates objected to being referred to during the debate as “nigger freight handlers,” as well they might.

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Today -100: June 10, 1920: So that’s when California went wrong

The census shows that Los Angeles’s population now surpasses San Francisco’s.

The Republican National Convention is having trouble agreeing on its planks on foreign relations, peace, and the League of Nations. Hiram Johnson in particular is fighting any move short of complete rejection of the League. That issue is pretty much his whole campaign now. Some are worried he’ll do a third-party run if he loses the nomination. Also, there will be no planks dealing with the soldier bonus or prohibition.

Yet another horse-race story insists that “Senator Harding was eliminated from the contest some time ago, according to the general view.”

Italy: Francesco Nitti’s government resigns (again), brought down by its decision to lift the cap on bread prices because the government subsidies were too expensive. Fighting this is an issue on which the Catholics and the Socialists can (finally) agree.

Another country with a squabbling coalition government, Germany, held parliamentary elections this week. The Social Democrats remain the largest party but lost a bunch of seats to the further-left Independent Social Democratic Party. Right-wing parties also picked up support. Ebert is trying to put together a workable coalition with parties to his right.

More anti-Semitic riots in Vienna.

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Today -100: June 9, 1920: Of enthusiasm and suffrage

The Republican National Convention opens “with an impressive lack of enthusiasm.” To be fair: 81-minute speech by Henry Cabot Lodge. Also: fewer of the delegates than in past conventions are boozed up (liquor in Chicago is going for $6 to $9 a pint). 21 searchlights are turned on so that a film crew can preserve the convention in (silent) posterity, and delegates find that a bit too bright.

The Louisiana State Senate votes down ratification of the federal women’s suffrage Amendment 22-19.

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Today -100: June 8, 1920: Of enthusiasm, prohibition, negro martyrs, and anti-Semitism

In Chicago a day before the opening of the Republican convention, Sen. Harry New of Indiana puts his finger on it:  “there is little real enthusiasm for any candidate”. The whole field is made up of Bidens.

Ruling on several cases, the Supreme Court unanimously upholds the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act. It says prohibition applies even to liquors produced before it was adopted. Also, Congress gets to decide what constitutes “intoxicating,” not the states.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Well, which of us hasn’t been fatigued by the beatification of negro martyrs? That shit’s just fatiguing.

Posters appear in Vienna calling for the expulsion of non-Austrian Jews from the country, and all Jews from the army.

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Today -100: June 7, 1920: Nobody is talking Harding in Chicago

With the British due to hold talks with a Russian envoy about resuming economic relations, France, which wants a much harder line against the Soviets, claims to have foiled a Russian plot to start revolution throughout Europe on May Day. They have the proof in Trotsky’s own handwriting, says Le Matin. And naturally, this is all funded with jewels taken from Russian churches.

According to the NYT, “Nobody is talking Harding in Chicago.”

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Today -100: June 6, 1920: Of candidates, political expediency, aliens, and spinsters

The Republican presidential nomination is

In the lead: Gen. Leonard Wood, Illinois Gov. Frank Lowden, Sen. Hiram Johnson of California, and Sen. Warren G. Harding of Ohio, in that order, with dark horses including Gov. William Sproul of Pennsylvania, former Supreme Court Justice and former NY governor Charles Evans Hughes, Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler, Gov. John Calvin Coolidge Jr. of Massachusetts, former Food Tsar Herbert Hoover, and Senators Philander Knox of Pennsylvania, Miles Poindexter of Washington, and Irvine Lenroot of Wisconsin. It’s “taken for granted that Harding, [Ohio’s] favorite son, is already out of the contest”.

Congress adjourns for six months. Wilson accuses it of having failed to work for the public welfare, saying it was instead motivated by “political expediency.” He points to its failure to do anything about the cost of living, railroads, the merchant marine, and of course, peace. A lot of bills are left hanging by the adjournment, including the Soldier Bonus and the budget.

One thing Congress did complete: a bill allowing deportation of aliens for simple membership in (or giving money to) any organization advocating sabotage, destruction of property, or revolution, such as the Communist Party, Communist Labor Party, or IWW. Also: aliens who write stuff advocating those things, or distribute such literature.

Having already passed a tax on bachelors, the French National Assembly is considering a tax on spinsters.

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Today -100: June 5, 1920: Of mayo, pickets, and not banned in Boston

The White House denies rumors that Wilson is to undergo an operation – by the Mayo brothers, no less.

With the Republican National Convention imminent, no one knows whether it will name Johnson, Wood, or Lowden as its presidential candidate.

Alice Paul’s National Women’s Party will picket the Republican convention, blaming the R’s for the delay in ratification of the federal women’s suffrage Amendment.

A French airplane sets the record for longest continuous flight, more than 24 hours.

Someone “in a position to know the President’s views” tells the NYT that Woodrow Wilson has no preference for Democratic presidential candidate. In fact, Wilson still hasn’t said whether he’d accept the nomination for a third time if he was, you know, asked nicely.

British Secretary of War Winston Churchill says there are 40 tanks and 28 aeroplanes stationed in Ireland.

Hungary signs its peace treaty.

Massachusetts Gov. Calvin Coolidge vetoes a bill establishing movie censorship, saying it violates federal rules on interstate commerce and eliminates jury trials. The House votes to override.

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Today -100: June 4, 1920: Of beeckmans, segregation, and war laws

Rhode Island Gov. R. Livingston Beeckman, which is the most Republican-Rhode-Island-Governor name imaginable, in Chicago for the Republican National Convention, complains that the Republican senators plan to take complete control over the convention. Chairman of the Prohibition National Committee Virgil Hinshaw, which is the most Chairman-of-the-Prohibition-National-Committee name imaginable, wants to question the candidates about prohibition.

For the first time the two parties’ conventions will have “electrical sound amplifying devices,” courtesy of Ma Bell.

The RNC passes a motion that no delegations be seated in the future if elected at places (hotels etc) in the South from which blacks are banned.

The House of Representatives votes 343-3 to repeal most war laws. Not included: food and fuel control acts, which R’s like because they can be used against strikes. R’s claim it’s actually about punishing profiteering.

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Today -100: June 3, 1920: Of grammar, keeping abreast of the world, and prescriptions

Pres. Wilson vetoes a bill criminalizing the transporting across state lines of licentious movies because it has bad grammar (which turns out to be a clerk mistakenly putting the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the wrong place. The House corrects and re-passes it.

A Senate committee has been investigating campaign spending in the Republican primary, and some candidates, notably Illinois Gov. Frank Lowden, whose campaign paid delegates to the national convention large sums without any stipulation about how they were to spend it, are seeing their campaigns tank as their spending practices are revealed. Which upends the plans of the Republican Old Guard to use Lowden to undercut the Wood & Johnson campaigns.

Wall Street betting odds favor Johnson 6:5, with both Wood & Lowden at 3:1. On the Democratic side, William Gibbs McAdoo is favored 8:5, followed by Edward Edwards, the New Jersey governor so nice they named him twice.

At the NAACP conference in Atlanta, W.E.B. DuBois (whose first initial the NYT gives as N) calls for black people in the South to be given the vote “if the South wishes to be abreast of the world”. I can’t imagine where he’d get the idea that the South wants to be abreast of the world.  When the conference ends, delegates going north will be provided special Pullman cars in which Jim Crow rules will not be enforced.

Hubert Howard, federal Prohibition Director for Illinois, says that since prohibition went into effect, Chicago doctors have issued 300,000 spurious prescriptions for liquor (out of 500,000). Conditions evidently requiring alcoholic treatment include: fainting, insomnia, stomach ache, toothache, headache, runny nose, lumbago, menstrual cramps, bronchitis, ptomaine poisoning, gastritis, gaseous eructations, hay fever, asthma, grip, and of course, alcoholism. The usual prescription is for one ounce three times daily.

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Today -100: June 2, 1920: Of expert treatment and artificial stimulation, ratifications, and daring raids

A week before the Republican national convention, Sen. Warren G. Harding’s campaign, which was considered moribund, is picking up again, the beneficiary “expert treatment and artificial stimulation” from party elders using him in order to stop Gen. Leonard Wood, and definitely not because they intend to make him president. The plan is to keep Wood from winning for several ballots, in part by depriving him of the votes of delegates from Ohio, Harding’s home state, and then choosing the candidate behind closed doors.

Even though the Ohio State Constitution says that the state can only ratify federal Amendments after a popular referendum, the US Supreme Court rules that the Legislature’s ratification of the 18th Amendment was final, despite prohibition losing in the subsequent referendum last November.

That ruling also means that Ohio’s ratification of the women’s suffrage Amendment stands.

Sinn Féiners raid a military barracks, in central Dublin no less, take 25 soldiers captive, make off with a whole bunch of weapons and ammo, and melt into a cheering crowd.

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Today -100: June 1, 1920: Of provisional presidents and quaint Memorial Day traditions

Mexican Provisional President Adolfo de la Huerta, just appointed and already suffering from appendicitis, pledges that any candidates in the upcoming elections won’t be killed, probably.

Sen. Albert Fall (R[acist dickhead]-New Mexico)’s Foreign Affairs sub-committee demands that the new Mexican government be made to sign a new treaty and rewrite its Constitution to safeguard the property and lives and property of Americans living in Mexico (i.e., oil companies). American citizens should be exempted from the rules regarding land and mineral ownership, religious activities and schools that mere Mexicans have to abide by and not be subject to summary expulsion from the country like every other non-Mexican. Failing that, the committee recommends sending troops to “open and maintain open every line of communication between the City of Mexico and every seaport and border port in Mexico.” It also expresses concern about the number of Japanese in Mexico without, near as I can tell, explaining its problem with them.

At a Memorial Day event in Liscomb, Iowa, veterans firing a salute accidentally shoot 42 members of the crowd.

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Today -100: May 31, 1920: Of fools and socks

Ahead of its general election, Germany is rife with rumors of coups by nationalists, communists, or both. Chancellor Hermann Müller says Germany must show “that she has had enough of war for all eternity, and that no fool, crowned or uncrowned, shall drag Germany into a war of revenge.”

Coney Island bathing suit censors, out in force this Memorial Day weekend, go after women wearing socks and men wearing one-piece bathing suits, because too sexy for 1920, I guess.

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Today -100: May 30, 1920: What the Well-Dressed Opera-Goer and Presidential Candidate Are Wearing

US Attorney Annette Adams is nominated to be assistant attorney general. She will be the first woman assistant attorney general, the highest federal office occupied by a woman so far.

The House of Representatives passes a bonus bill for veterans through an extraordinary suspension of the rules to limit debate, so much of the argument was about that. Robert Evans (R-Neb.) says “It is an outrage that 425 members are only eunuchs in the harem of the Steering and Rules Committee.” Most of the funding would come through various taxes on Wall Street and tobacco. Vets could choose one of the following: cash, or a 20-year bond, or vocational training, or farm or loan aid, or land settlement. The cash would be $1.25 per day of service overseas or $1 at home, to a max of $625. The bill is expected to die in the Senate.

Pres. Wilson commutes the sentence of Kate Richards O’Hare, who was convicted under the Espionage Act for opposing the war.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Headline of the Day -100:  

Tomas Masaryk is chosen as president of Czechoslovakia by the country’s first elected parliament. During the proceedings, ethnic German deputies (think Sudetenland) complain that the Speaker spoke Czech rather than German. They later storm out.

The Indian National Congress has its own commission on the Amritsar Massacre, including Gandhi, which issues its own report. It suggests that the actions of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, Lt. Gov. of the Punjab, invited violence to justify a violent crackdown. It distances the actions of the Indian mob from Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement. It describes the massacre as “a calculated piece of inhumanity unparalleled in its ferocity.”

The NYT continues to push John W. Davis for the Democratic nomination for president. It thinks he’d be a really strong candidate. Ambassador Davis will have a chance to prove them woefully wrong, but not just yet. The Times also suggests that the Republicans, who “boast that they are the party of intelligence” (cough), not nominate Hiram Johnson; it does not suggest an alternative candidate.

News that Hungary will sign the peace treaty has supposedly led to many suicides being fished out of the Danube. And the army may refuse to evacuate territories as required by the treaty.

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Today -100: May 29, 1920: Of sentimental idealism, women’s suffrage, and Willy’s new suit

The House fails to override Pres. Wilson’s veto of the Knox Resolution to end the war. Stephen Porter (R-Penn.), chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, accuses Wilson of attempting , in his veto message, to lead the American people “into the underbrush of sentimental idealism, which is beautiful and attractive in theory, but is extremely dangerous in these days.” D’s point out that if the R’s were really so concerned with repealing wartime regulations, they could just do that.

Women’s suffrage Amendment ratification dies in the Delaware Legislature.

Former czar Wilhelm II has taken up tailoring as a hobby, because why not.

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Today -100: May 28, 1920: Of ineffacable stains

Pres. Wilson vetoes the Knox resolution to end the war. He says it would ignore the moral obligations which the US assumed when it went to war and would “place ineffacable stains on the gallantry and honor of the United States.” He says “The resolution seeks to establish peace with the German Empire without exacting from the German Government any action by way of setting right the infinite wrongs which it did to the peoples whom it attacked,” nor would it reduce armaments or establish freedom of the seas. The US would be announcing its unwillingness to assume “responsibilities with regard to the freedom of nations or the sacredness of international obligation or the safety of independent peoples.” “Have we sacrificed the lives of more than 100,000 Americans and ruined the lives of thousands of others and brought upon thousands of American families an unhappiness that can never end for purposes which we do not now care to sate or take further steps to attain?” I think that’s a trick question.

Rep. Nicholas Longworth (R-Ohio) points out an interview during the war in which Wilson was unconcerned with the freedom of the seas. Longworth asks “did the same man who gave the interview write the message?”, which I take to be suggesting not so subtly that someone else wrote the veto message. And while someone else (Mrs Wilson comes to mind) might easily have done so, it sounds very much like Wilson’s sentiments.

Canada puts in a rather belated claim for reparations from Germany of $1,871,000,000. Evidently it expects Germany to pay the whole cost of the war against it as well as $30 million for the explosion of a munitions ship in Halifax harbor in 1917 after it bumped another ship, which Canada is still pretending was a German plot of some kind.

Republican party leaders intend to keep the issue of prohibition out of the national convention.

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