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

Sub-Headline of the Day -100:  

And he’ll be dead soon. Coincidence?

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

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

Headline of the Day -100:  

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

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

The Michelin Man used to be a lot creepier.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Headline of the Day -100:  

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

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

Pres. Harding feeds gingerbread to bears in Yellowstone Park.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Headline of the Day -100:  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smith refuses to respond.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harding drives a reaper around a Kansas wheat field.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pres. Harding gets a sunburn. In Kansas.

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

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

Marcus Garvey is sentenced to 5 years.

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Today -100: June 21, 1923: Of seizures, stars, commutations and vicious talk, ridicule, and false imitations

France says it will seize all industries in the Ruhr and any Germans refusing to work in them will be sentenced to jail for up to 15 years. Which sounds like an admission that they plan to occupy the Ruhr for at least 15 years, else how will they keep them in jail? Anyway, anyone found guilty by a French military court of sabotage can be executed.

Harding gives up control of his Marion Star, which he bought 39 years ago when he was too young to vote.

Harding commutes the sentences of 27 political prisoners who opposed the Great War. 24 prisoners, mostly Wobblies or people who did shit instead of just saying shit, remain. 2 of the commutees will be deported to Britain and Italy – the Justice Department  says they were “guilty of vicious talk and were weak men influenced largely by their associations.” The rest are released only on condition of being good little boys. (Update: the IWW and the ACLU will object to those conditions, since they can be returned to jail whenever some official decides they’ve committed a crime, without a, you know, jury trial.)

Headline of the Day -100:  

Man, I can’t wait for the Scopes trial.

Radcliffe College President Le Baron Russell Briggs warns the graduating class against “false imitation of man by woman.”

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