Cheer up, Donnie, there are worse ways to be removed from public life

(I originally composed this post, prematurely, on November 2, 2004. I was very cross that I didn't get to use it.)

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Today -100: November 7, 1920: We can’t do much worse than the men

Asquith calls for a truce in Ireland, which “has become the worst form of civil war.” Opposition to the policy of reprisals is growing, including from Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat).

Yoncalla, Oregon, pop. 323, votes out the city council in favor of an all-women ticket. They organized secretly, so the election results are a complete surprise, including to Mayor Jess Lasswell, whose wife is elected to the council. Another council member is also displaced by his wife. (A recent Atlantic article finds this story a little too pat to be true). Mayor-elect Mary Burt says “At the worst, we can’t do much worse than the men.”

Fess Whitaker, a county jailer in Letcher County, Kentucky, currently serving time in his own jail for a street fight, is elected county judge, so Gov. Morrow pardons him.

Alexander Woollcott reviews Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, which opened last week at the Provincetown Playhouse, NYC. He likes the play, hates the clumsy production, but likes the actor playing Brutus Jones, Charles Gilpin. Who is black. Eventually Gilpin will clash with O’Neill over the latter’s insistence on using the n–word (a lot), and will be replaced by Paul Robeson, who also starred in the abbreviated 1933 film version (which deployed the word 29 times). There’s a good but not great recent movie about the play and Gilpin, The Black Emperor of Broadway (could have used a different actor as O’Neill).

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Today -100: November 6, 1920: Of cycling, hip flasks, show trials, spheres of influences, and samoas

Disappointing Headline of the Day -100:  

Actually MOTORcycling, which is somehow so much less interesting a story. Anyway, 4 men are arrested and two are shot dead “attempting to escape,” as was the custom.

Chicago District Attorney Charles Clyne – which is a Chicago district attorney kind of name – threatens to close down cabarets that allow customers to bring in hip flasks.

The Russian government is collapsing, because the Russian government is always collapsing. The NYT claims that Lenin was put on trial, or a sort of trial in a theatre (yes, we’re all thinking it), by Bolsheviks who accuse him of graft and trying to make himself absolute ruler. This is supposed to have happened last month, but the outcome is not known. Another totally true report says 100 to 300 people are executed every day in Moscow.

France, Britain and Italy sign an agreement setting out their spheres of influence in Turkey. How very nineteenth-century of them. Oh wait, they signed it 3 months ago and it’s not a secret treaty but just happens to have been kept secret since August, got it.

Warren Terhune, governor of American Samoa, was suspended pending an investigation into his heavy-handed approach to the natives. Three days before a battleship bringing a Naval Board of Inquiry is due to arrive, he kills himself.

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Today -100: November 5, 1920: Of deceased leagues, evaders not crusaders, pardons, pot-pourris of indiscretions, and ethnic cleansings

Harding says the League of Nations is “now deceased.”

Massachusetts voted Tuesday to legalize the sale of light wines and beer.

William Jennings Bryan, ever full of helpful advice, suggests that Woodrow Wilson should resign immediately, then Veep Whatsisname should appoint Harding as his secretary of state and then resign so that Harding becomes president next month instead of in March (the order of succession was different in 1920 than it is now). Then Harding could get on with that “association of nations” and world peace would be assured. Bryan is an idiot. He says that the reason he made no speeches during the campaign season was that the Democratic Party “has become a party of evaders and not crusaders.” He says Cox’s problem was that he was a prohibitionist in the West and a wet in the East.

Former Vermont Governor Horace F. Graham is convicted of embezzling state funds (when he was state auditor, before he was governor), and sentenced to 5-8 years. By the end of the day, his successor Gov. Percival Clement pardons him. They’re both Republicans. 

Margot Asquith, wife of the former prime minister, has written an autobiography, which has to be a first. Supposedly when she told Herbert she was getting £13,000 for it, he said “I hope they’re not worth all that!” Winston Churchill writes a review for The Daily Mail and questions are asked in the House about whether the secretary of state for war doesn’t have more important duties to attend to. The London Times calls the book “a scandal which cannot be justified or excused.” A “pot-pourri of indiscretions,” the Daily Chronicle calls it.

Cork Deputy Lord Mayor Donal O’Callaghan replaces the late Terence MacSwiney as lord mayor. Don’t know much about him, except he’s also Sinn Féin and doesn’t die in office, which must have made a nice change.

Blacks are fleeing Ocoee, Florida. White people are having to harvest the citrus crop, which is what happens when you drive the cheap labor out.

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Today -100: November 4, 1920: Of extreme voter suppression, and radium

In Ocoee, Florida, a black man is prevented from voting because he hasn’t paid the poll tax. He returns with a shotgun but is fought off. He comes back at night with a few of his friends, and a race war commences. A couple of the white posse are shot dead and 20+ buildings burned down with black people inside. The prospective voter, July Perry, is lynched. Several dozen blacks will be murdered and the remaining ones will be driven out of the town, never to return.

Headline of the Day -100:  

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Today -100: November 3, 1920: Pleased but not exultant

Headline of the Day -100:  

Harding gets 60.2% of the popular vote, a record, 16,152,200 votes to Cox’s 9,147,353.  Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs gets nearly 1 million votes, 3.4%.

Harding says he is “more given to prayer to God to make me capable of playing my part.” Spoiler Alert: God will say no.

Debs, from prison, says Socialists will sweep the 1924 elections. Spoiler Alert: yes, that will totally happen.

It’s a landslide for Republicans everywhere.

Thirty-four governorships were up for grabs. Republicans capture twenty-five. Alfred E. Smith, future Democratic candidate for president, loses his re-election bid for governor of New York to Nathan Miller (he’ll get it back in ‘22). 4 of the 5 Socialists the NY Legislature keeps refusing to take their seats are elected again (um, I think this is wrong), but the state senate gets its first Socialist ever, Edmund Seidel. The strong opposition of women who remembered US Sen. James Wadsworth Jr (R)’s vociferous opposition to women’s suffrage does not prevent his re-election.

In the House of Representatives, R’s gain 61 seats. They will have 299 v. 131 for the D’s. Socialist Victor Berger, expelled by the House in 1919, loses for re-election, but will be back. Meyer London of Manhattan is now the only Socialist. Other D’s losing their seats: former Speaker of the House Champ Clark, future secretary of state Cordell Hull.

Rep. Andrew Volstead (R-Minn.) of Volstead Act fame is re-elected. I must have missed this: he actually lost his primary, but the winner was disqualified for having libeled Volstead.

There’s a woman in the House again, the second after Jeanette Rankin, Oklahoma’s Alice M. Robertson, a 66-year-old spinster former teacher in Indian boarding schools and, um, president of the state Anti-Suffrage Association. Campaign motto: “I am a Christian. I am an American. I am a Republican.” She will serve one term.

The Republican majority in the Senate, slight in the 66th Congress, expands to 59-37.

In New Jersey, only one Democrat, Harry Runyon of Warren County, is elected to the Legislature’s lower house, meaning he’ll be on every single committee.

Eleanor Roosevelt casts her first vote.

Election judges in Savannah, Georgia, ignore the ruling that the registration period doesn’t apply to women this time and refuse to let black women vote. Why just black women, beyond the obvious? Evidently no white women showed up at the polls.

KDKA Pittsburgh begins operating, the first commercially licensed radio in the US (give or take), whose first broadcast is the election results.

California overwhelmingly passes the racist Alien Land initiative, making it illegal to lease to Japanese people or companies owned by them. It will be overturned by the US Supreme Court in 1952. A California ballot measure to ban vivisection fails. One to add kindergartens to the public school system succeeds.

Baron Pyotr Wrangel, the last White general standing, is carrying out a “strategic retreat.”

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Today -100: November 2, 1920: Of the civilization of the world, complacency, crude work, and opera

Gov. James Cox says if ever a campaign was based entirely on a great moral issue, it’s definitely his, “because the thing to be decided is whether the civilization of the world shall tie itself together into a concerted purpose to prevent the tragedies of war”.

Harding says he awaits the vote with complacency.

Harding’s father accosts Judge W.S. Spencer of the Marion County Probate Court on the streets of Marion, accusing him of spreading stories (yes, the secret negro thing, not that you’d know it from the NYT). Spencer denies it and knocks down a farmhand who claims to have heard him do so. Later in the day, Spencer signs an affidavit denying having spread the rumor and Dr. Harding apologizes.

Eight die in fights during Cuban elections.

Six cops are killed in Ireland, presumably in retaliation for Lord Mayor MacSwiney’s death. And Kevin Barry, an 18-year-old who killed a cop in September and was convicted by a military court-martial, is hanged. This will be a big deal because of his age. It’s the first execution of the Sinn Féin disturbances, unless you count the people killed by Black and Tans and other government hit squads.

Montgomery, Alabama cops, assisted, if I interpret the article correctly, by Klansman, have killed 3 black men and arrested 13 in an alleged gang that burned cotton mills, 3 black churches, and a couple of homes. The chief of the state Law Enforcement Department says “White men are not back of the lawlessness because the work is too crude.”

Although the Georgia attorney general ruled that the 19th Amendment overrode for the new women voters the state’s normal 6-month voter registration period, some precincts might reject women’s ballots anyway.

Paris Opera musicians are on strike. Musicians want to be paid according to the rarity and difficulty of their instruments, with extra pay, for example, for players of the heckelphone and sarrusophone. Also extra pay for musicians playing the French horn call in “Siegfried.” Male actors who put on blackface are to get an extra 5 francs, women 3 francs. Blueface (as in Salome) is also 5 francs.

(2020 Update: the Paris Opera is considering banning blackface, probably because they don’t want to pay that 5 francs.)

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Today -100: November 1, 1920: Suffering humanity waits upon the voice of America

Today’s betting odds are still 6:1 in favor of Harding.

Cox says the fight for the League is over. Harding says the League is dead.

Cox says “Suffering humanity waits upon the voice of America. The vote on Nov. 2 means joy or despair, worldwide.”

The Italian government claims to have seized documents proving that the anarchist movement there is receiving huge sums of money from abroad.

Prince Paul says he’ll only accept the Greek throne if The People don’t prefer his dethroned father or elder brother. He doesn’t seem to have said how the populace are to make their wishes on this subject known.

Headline of the Day -100: 

This article comes the closest the NYT has yet come to explaining the nature of the whisper campaign (do pamphlets whisper?): “anonymous circulars giving ‘fake’ family trees, easily disproved by consulting the Harding genealogy”. I think the scare quotes around the word fake just indicate that the NYT considers the word to be slang.

KKK Imperial Wizard William Simmons orders all Klansmen to suppress the night riders burning cotton gins. Mostly because people think they’re Klansmen because they’re wearing similar clothes, which pisses Simmons off, probably because he gets a hefty cut from each set of Klan regalia sold.

Catholics march in Detroit to oppose a proposed amendment to the Michigan State Constitution banning parochial and other private schools (and compulsory attendance of children until 16 at public schools). Spoiler Alert: It will lose.

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Today -100: October 31, 1920: The true patriot wants his country to be first in service, not first in selfishness

Cox’s odds have improved; betting is now 6:1 in favor of Harding.

Headline of the Day -100:  

I guess this RNC ad is how Republicans think the new women voters should be appealed to:

The Dayton Journal, owned by a former Republican governor of Ohio, publishes a refutation of the “unthinkable assault” on Warren G. Harding. What is the nature of that unthinkable assault? Maybe the Journal says, I don’t know, but the NYT does not, although the fact that rebutting it requires a complete investigation into Harding’s genealogy, dating back to the early 17th century, might give a hint. An editorial entitled “An Odious Attack” also fails to elucidate the nature of the attack.

Berks County, Pennsylvania Republican County Chair Thomas Seidel has Democratic court clerk Harvey Bausher arrested for criminal libel for circulating the circular about Harding’s supposed racial ancestry.

In Chicago, Gov. Cox tells the Good Samaritan story. Evidently Europe is the “broken and bleeding” wayfarer and the US should be the good Samaritan. “The true patriot wants his country to be first in service, not first in selfishness.”

500 Klansmen march through Jacksonville, Florida (and a couple of other Florida cities), at night, with torches, “supposedly as a warning to negroes to attempt no lawlessness at the polls Tuesday.”

The Bishop of Cork visits Cork Gaol and orders the hunger strikers to knock it off. They tell him no. He orders the nuns attending them to prepare food for them. They do not eat it.

I haven’t mentioned it because I haven’t been able to find it online, but the furor over a pro-Republican cartoon in Harvey’s Weekly that offended Catholics with a parody of a painting of the immaculate conception has been going on and on for days.

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Today -100: October 30, 1920: You have murdered our brother and you are not going to arrest his body

Prof. William Estabrook Chancellor is fired by Wooster College for allegedly writing pamphlets about Harding supposedly having black blood. Chancellor didn’t write them, probably, but the anonymous author had access to his extensive research, i.e.,  interviewing everyone who would talk to him in Marion, Ohio. Stories about Harding’s ancestry have circulated around Marion for years, mostly by his father-in-law, now dead, who really didn’t like him. This NYT article, published on the front page three days before the election, is very mysterious about the actual content of the pamphlets, without knowledge of which the story would be rather confusing. The closest it comes is a quote from a statement put out by the Ohio Republican Party about “malicious propaganda” being circulated by the Democrats “in the most malicious and cunning matter [sic]”, “the purpose of which is to arouse group against group, race against race, religion against religion.” Today’s Chicago Tribune is more informative: “some of his ancestors were colored”. The pamphlets have been circulating widely and in large numbers, suggesting serious money and organization.

The struggle over Terence MacSwiney’s body continues. Police drag family members off the train carrying the body in Wales, his sisters crying “You have murdered our brother and you are not going to arrest his body.” In Ireland, train employees refuse to run a train with the coffin since it’s accompanied by police and soldiers, so a navy launch is used. When it reaches Cork, no one – city officials, church officials – is willing to take charge of the body. The family eventually does so after a threat that they’ll just bury him in the barracks yard.

Vice presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt makes 12 speeches in one day in New York and Connecticut, mostly on the subject of the League of Nations, an issue he says is “above party and above candidates.” The deluded soul evidently thinks pro-League Republicans will vote Cox-Roosevelt in large numbers. He says “there is no doubt about” Cox winning the election. Wall Street betting odds are 7:1 in favor of Harding, so there might be some doubt.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Cooperative rows are the best kind.

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Today -100: October 29, 1920: Of zinc, wild birds, coffin fights, regents, and perverted minds

Harding calls for tariffs on zinc, in case you thought he didn’t have any concrete policies.

Also birds. He’d protect wild birds, he tells the Audubon Society.

FDR sues John Rathom, editor of the Providence Journal, and a couple of RNC publicity bureau officials to the tune of $500,000 for libel for saying he intervened in favor of sailors convicted of “unnatural crimes” when he was assistant secretary of the Navy. The Justice Dept is trying to discredit Rathom by releasing a letter he wrote in 1918 which they characterize as a “confession,” given in order to avoid testifying before a grand jury, about the many claims he made during the war to have thwarted German sabotage plots (which he did by publishing every piece of bullshit that British Intelligence handed him).

Headline of the Day -100:  

The police seize it to make sure it goes from England straight to Cork and not through Dublin. Before that, a requiem mass is held at St George’s Cathedral, Southwark, where the coffin is guarded by men in Irish Volunteer uniforms. There’s a procession, observed by many police.

The Greek parliament chooses Admiral Coundouriotis, the Minister of Marine, as regent for the vacant throne.

Cox really is very pleased with the “wiggling and wabbling” thing about Harding, judging from the number of times he’s repeated it.

Sylvia Pankhurst is sentenced to 6 months for printing seditious articles. She says she will go on preaching revolution. The judge says her ideas are those of a perverted mind (curiously, Lenin will say something similar next month). She’s considering hunger striking, but thinks that weapon has been destroyed, since the government is just letting Irish hunger-strikers die.

Der Golem, directed by and starring Paul Wegener as the golem, premieres. An early monster movie, not great in terms of plot but really interesting visually. Make sure you’re watching a tinted version.

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Today -100: October 28, 1920: Make Good or Quit

I was wondering about this: the monkey that bit Greek King Alexander is still alive. The news today about possible next king Paul: he is an excellent dancer.

The inscription on Terence MacSwiney’s coffin reads “Murdered by the foreigner in Brixton Prison”. At the coroner’s inquest there is a back and forth between the coroner and MacSwiney’s widow Muriel over his occupation, which she insists was “volunteer officer of the Irish Republican Army.”

Pres. Wilson meets 15 pro-League of Nations Republicans. He reads them an address beginning “My fellow country-men.” What was it Queen Victoria said about Gladstone, he always speaks to me as if I was a public meeting? Anyway, Wilson is pretty feeble, doesn’t seem to recognize people he knows, and reads to them from a wheelchair. “[T]he whole future moral force of right of the world depends upon the United States rather than upon any other nation,” he says, so no pressure. “[W]e have now to choose whether we will make good or quit.”

Marriage of the Day -100:  

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Today -100: October 27, 1920: There are some classes of social equality which cannot be

Terence MacSwiney’s family and Sinn Féin plan to hold a really big funeral.

Ohio Gov. James Cox says MacSwiney “died as a martyr.”

Harding denies that financier Washington D. Vanderlip is representing him in negotiating with Lenin for oil and coal concessions in Siberia in exchange for recognition of the Bolshevik government, as Vanderlip reportedly told Lenin. “I have never heard of Mr. Vanderlip,” Harding says. The State Dept heard about Vanderlip’s activities from its commissioner in Riga, who heard about them from H.G. Wells, who heard about them from Lenin during a recent trip to the Soviet Union. It would be nice to know when exactly the State Dept heard this, since Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby is releasing the “news” suspiciously close to election day. (Update: Wells will deny ever having spoken with the US commissioner in Riga, or indeed ever having been in Riga, but says he did meet Vanderlip and talked about him with Lenin).

Cox accuses Republicans of making promises to the “Afro-American Party” which they don’t intend to carry out. “There are some classes of social equality which cannot be, to quote the words of the immortal Lincoln, ‘We do not want the negroes to be slaves, but that does not mean that we want negro women for our wives.’” (Don’t know if that’s a real quote.)

The League of Nations adopts a plan for a World Court, although a case can only reach the Court if both sides consent. And the cases won’t establish precedents.

After next month’s elections the Greek cabinet will, assuming they win, offer the throne to monkey victim Alexander’s little brother Paul, who is 18. They’ll appoint a regent until Paul returns from exile to take the throne, which I suspect they believe he won’t do. Paul says he’ll have to ask his dad, deposed king Constantine. One condition the government is putting on this offer is that Constantine finally formally abdicates and renounces the throne, and that Paul’s older brother George, Duke of Sparta, do the same. It might be easier just to crown the monkey.

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Today -100: October 26, 1920: Monkeys:1, Monarchs:0

Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, dies in Brixton Prison on the 74th day of his hunger strike, at the age of 41. And in Cork Gaol, a second hunger striker, Joseph Murphy, dies after 76 days, not that it’s a competition or anything.

The London Evening Standard says MacSwiney “persisted in his design of suicide” and no one else bears any responsibility. But the Westminster Gazette says MacSwiney has beaten the government.

Pope Benedict, helpful as always, has referred the question of whether hunger strikers are suicides to a committee.

Also dead: King Alexander of Greece dies of blood poisoning from a monkey bite, as one does, at the age of 27. He tried to break up a fight between his dog and his monkey earlier this month. This leaves a succession problem. Alexander was placed on the Greek throne in 1917 by the Allies after they deposed his father Constantine for being too pro-German. Constantine never officially abdicated, just fled the country, as was the custom, so most of the royal family would refuse the crown. Constantine himself is considering trying to return to Greece and the Greek throne, which would be resisted by the Allies and by Prime Minister Venizelos, who after all was nearly assassinated earlier this year by pro-Constantine monarchists. Alexander has no offspring... yet. His wife is pregnant, but she’s a filthy commoner so their daughter Alexandria won’t be officially royal, at least until World War II when she will meet and marry another exiled royal in London, Prince Peter of Yugoslavia. Tito deposed them, so she never actually set foot in Yugoslavia.

Gov. James Cox says he would consult with the Senate about the League of Nations and “merely the executive will” will not control the terms of admission. He says he will accept reservations. He thinks that after election day the partisan spirit that has infected discussions of the League will go away. He also thinks there’s been a “psychological change” in the people in favor of the League, especially among women voters. “The people have come to realize that the fight against the League is a conspiracy.”

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Today -100: October 25, 1920: We must defend our national culture when we see it endangered

Headline of the Day -100: 

There are rumors about a plot, which is stupid enough to be entirely plausible, for Poet-Aviator Gabriele d’Annunzio to descend from the clouds into Rome on November 4, in a plane presumably, and declare himself dictator, with the support of various generals and admirals and, of course, Lenin.

Rabbi Joseph Louwisch, principal of the Poughkeepsie, NY Hebrew School, is mobbed by members of his congregation demanding information about the death of his wife. He recently brought over his childhood sweetheart from Russia and married her, then had the marriage annulled when he found out she was a Bolshevik. She then committed suicide.

The Hungarian National Assembly is debating a bill to restrict the number of Jewish college students. The (Catholic)  Bishop of Stuhlweissenburg, Ottokár Prohászka, who I guess is also a deputy? says it’s not about anti-Semitism but “racial self-defense.” Prohászka is a big ol’ anti-Semite, and his book “The Jewish Question in Hungary” (1920, not sure if it’s out yet) has a big honking swastika on its cover. He continues: “Our attitude of defense must not be looked upon by the Jews as an act of hatred. Merely for the sake of liberalism we must not suffer that half the lawyers and the majority of medical men in the country be Jews. ...Hungarian literature is saturated with the Jewish atmosphere. We must defend our national culture when we see it endangered.”

John Rathom, editor of the Providence Journal, accuses Franklin Roosevelt of having, when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, tried to return to active service sailors who were convicted of unnatural crimes, you know, gay stuff. I presume these were some of the sailors used in a sting operation ordered by Roosevelt in Newport, Rhode Island to investigate illicit gay sex between sailors and townies, some of them prominent. And by sting operation, I mean FDR sent young sailors out to entrap civilians by having sex with them.

Hugh Lofting’s The Story of Doctor Doolittle, the first in the series, is published.

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Today -100: October 24, 1920: Of reservations, pink ballots, underwear, and mysterious affairs

Cox says he’d accept a reservation to the League of Nations Covenant stating that the US would only send its military if Congress voted for it.

The National American Woman’s Suffrage Association is watching out for states obstructing the 19th Amendment. For example, Arkansas Attorney General John Arbuckle thinks women are ineligible to hold public office, and refused to certify Dr. Ida Brooks as candidate for superintendent of public instruction. Missouri Attorney General Frank McAllister thinks the same, but overturned a law requiring women to vote on separate ballots. Pink ballots, naturally.

Headline of the Day -100: 

If your interest in the Roaring 20's leans more towards preferences in male underwear than mine does, this is the article for you.

Agatha Christie’s first Poirot novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, is published. In the US; its British publication will be in 1921.

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Today -100: October 23, 1920: It is dullness made God

The NYT expects bitterness in the last week of the presidential campaign, “owing to the use that is being made [in Ohio] by the Democrats of the ‘negro social equality’ issue and scurrilous attacks from anonymous sources on Harding, in which the Democrats say they have had no part.” The Times is still not willing to explain the “Harding is an octoroon” rumors. The R’s have 6 black candidates running for the Ohio Legislature, and the D’s won’t shut up about it (fun fact, for certain definitions of fun: the Ohio Constitution officially limited the vote to white males from 1802 to 1923, although superceded by the 15th federal Amendment; a referendum to remove the word “white” failed in 1912) (other fun fact: the 1851 Ohio constitution allowed slavery as punishment for crime – and it still does).

Yugoslavia is now officially a hereditary monarchy.

One of King Alexander of Greece’s doctors, Georges Vidal of Paris, says the monkey bite which afflicted his majesty was from a monkey which had been injected with rabies, so this was obviously an assassination attempt.

Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street is published. Here are some of the bits I underlined whenever I read it:

In shame she knew that they glanced appraisingly at her snowy overshoes, speculating about her legs. Theirs were not young eyes—there was no youth in all the town, she agonized. They were born old, grim and old and spying and censorious. 

she ordered porridge for breakfast, which was his symbol of morality.  

It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment . . . the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God. 

A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world. 

But a village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to dominate the earth, to drain the hills and sea of color, to set Dante at boosting Gopher Prairie, and to dress the high gods in Klassy Kollege Klothes. Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicate to the sayings of Confucius. 

Such a society functions admirably in the large production of cheap automobiles, dollar watches, and safety razors. But it is not satisfied until the entire world also admits that the end and joyous purpose of living is to ride in flivvers, to make advertising-pictures of dollar watches, and in the twilight to sit talking not of love and courage but of the convenience of safety razors.

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Today -100: October 22, 1920: Of the threat of negro domination in Ohio, Harding’s 14 Positions, bluebeards, and breakdowns

Headline of the Day -100:  

The “problem” is that lots of unskilled blacks came from the South during the war to replace whites who had moved into higher-paid war work, and “These black immigrants from south of the Mason and Dixon Line do not begin to compare in intelligence with the Northern negroes” and the Republicans have “coddled” them since they will mostly vote R. The Democratic State Committee sent out a circular letter to white Ohioans warning about “the threat of negro domination in Ohio,” just as in the South during the days of Reconstruction, when indignities were heaped on white women and children and the “South Carolina negro Legislature” made a “vicious attempt” to give every negro 40 acres and a mule.

Harding has offered a prize if anyone can prove that he’s changed positions on the League of Nations. Cox accepts the challenge (what else did Harding think would happen?) and names all of Harding’s 14 positions. He even points out that that day’s Philadelphia Public Ledger reports Harding’s meeting with Hiram Johnson under the headline “Insist Harding Rejected League” and his meeting with Taft under the headline “Harding Favors League, Says Taft.”

Henri Landru, the French Bluebeard, is on trial for swindling in his garage and automobile business. Landru keeps asking the judge why he’s not being charged with the eleven counts of murder for which he was initially arrested.

Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby says Bolshevik rule in Russia is experiencing a “breakdown.”

A referendum in British Columbia repeals prohibition.

Belgium extends the franchise to women, at the municipal level only, except for registered prostitutes.

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Today -100: October 21, 1920: Well that’s just dickish

Terence MacSwiney lapses into unconsciousness and the prison doctor feeds him, or inserts food into his unconscious body might be a better way of phrasing it, against his wishes.

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Today -100: October 20, 1920: Of vacillation of mind, sedition, felonious suicide, and crowd control

Harding’s handlers deny that his mysterious French contact was writer Maurice Dekobra, but still won’t give a name. They are claiming that Dekobra, who was refused an interview with Harding, had been sent by Cox as part of some sort of elaborate sting operation. Franklin Roosevelt says Harding “either by accident or design tried to fool the American people into believing that France is ready to negotiate a new League of Nations. ...It is simply another glaring example, either of looseness of tongue or of vacillation of mind”.

Sylvia Pankhurst is arrested for publishing allegedly seditious articles in her newspaper The Workers’ Dreadnought (formerly The Womens’ Dreadnought in the suffragette days).

A military court rules that Michael Fitzgerald, the first Irish hunger striker to die, “did feloniously kill himself.” As his funeral begins, soldiers enter the church, gun in hands, to ban a public funeral and limit the number of people accompanying the coffin to 100. An officer threatens to fire on the crowd if it exceeds 100.

In Parliament, former Labour leader Arthur Henderson denounces the “policy of military terrorism” in Ireland, comparing it to the “policy of frighfulness” practiced by the Germans during the Great War. A motion of censure is defeated 79-346.

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