Today -100: July 18, 1923: Of crown princes

Former Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm sues the German government to get his estate in Silesia back. He says his son (17) wants to be a gentleman farmer.

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Today -100: July 17, 1923: Dr. Evil voice: 30 trillion marks

Magnus Johnson of the Farmer-Labor Party wins the special election to the US Senate from Minnesota. His son Francis will create the world’s biggest ball of twine.

Mussolini bans gambling.

Germany now has 30 trillion marks in circulation, which is the equivalent of, well, some amount of money that drops dramatically every single day.  The printing presses are running 24/7.

The Pasteur Institute claims to have created a vaccine against measles but I guess it really hasn’t.

In the British Parliament, the Independent Labour Party’s Philip Snowden introduces a motion calling for socialism. It loses 368-121.

There is a “cattle dipping war” going on in Amite County, Mississippi, with some stockmen in quarantined tick regions  resisting the mandatory but sometimes fatal process. Federal forces kill a man trying to dynamite a dipping vat.

The Philippine Cabinet resigns, along with the mayor of Manila and some prosecutors in a dispute with Governor-General Leonard Wood following his reinstatement of the chief of the Secret Service, Ray Conley, who has been accused over and over of taking bribes, I guess from gambling interests, but “cleared” each time.

Headline of the Day -100:  

The title of the next Star Wars movie, probably.

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Today -100: July 16, 1923: Northern exposure

Warren G. Harding, in Fairbanks, Alaska, is farther north than any president has ever been, and he’ll be dead soon. Coincidence?

The French military orders everyone in Essen & other Ruhr cities to keep all their windows shut between 9pm and 6am, despite the 100-degree heat.

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Today -100: July 15, 1923: Of putsches, bedbugs, and hypnotic radio

Nazis in Munich celebrate Hermann Erhardt’s escape from prison with a riot and a fight with the police, as was the custom. “Wild rumors are current about the size and strength of the ‘Hitler-Ludendorff army,’ crediting it with being able to start a ‘putsch’ with 100,000 to 150,000 armed men.”

I mentioned the Department of Agriculture bounty of 1¢ per bedbug for experimentation. They wanted 1,200, but so far have received just one (1). Yes, someone in Philadelphia mailed them a single bedbug.

Another follow-up: that hypnotist succeeded in putting a subject in a trance over radio station WHN on Long Island, from 10 miles away.

I once heard an exorcism on the radio, driving through California’s Central Valley.

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Today -100: July 14, 1923: Of putsches, lotteries, lynchings, panamas, and wireless chloroform

Hermann Erhardt, the Freikorps leader in the Kapp Putsch, escapes from prison, where he was awaiting trial for treason. Four hours after he asks for a bath, the guards begin to get suspicious...

It’s taking Harding and his party 48 hours to sail from Skagmore to Sewart, Alaska. He’s been playing bridge and shuffleboard. Also, there are movies, but the NYT fails to tell us which ones.

A French sergeant wins 1 million francs, which is the equivalent of some money, in a lottery, but he’s stuck in the army for the next 4 years.

In Columbia, Missouri, George Barkwell is acquitted of murder for his part in a lynching. Rep. Leonidas Dyer suggests that this shows the need for his always-thwarted federal anti-lynching bill.

I’m afraid the song “Yes, We Have No Bananas” slipped into the musical scene earlier this year without proper acknowledgment here, but in today’s paper we have 1) a Yale professor (admittedly of poly sci) in a sanitarium who says the title is indeed grammatically correct, if misleading, and 2) this ad one page earlier:

Scientific Breakthrough of the Day -100:  Hypnotism broadcast by radio, used as anaesthesia. It’s perfectly safe for other listeners-in, though: only people mesmerist/mind-reader Joseph Dunninger has worked with before in person will be affected.

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Today -100: July 13, 1923: Or rising radical tides and prosperous farmers, injunctions, colonies, and diabolical wheat

In Alaska, Pres. Harding takes an oath against mistreating dogs or horses.

Mussolini issues a long list of things, some quite vague – “distortion of the truth,” etc –  which could result in newspapers being censored or suppressed. Also, deputies and senators will be banned from acting as editors, because they have parliamentary immunity and he really wants to put some editors in jail.

Headline of the Day -100:  

The federal district court in Chicago makes permanent the injunction issued last October against railroad workers, 400,000 of them, doing strike stuff – interfering with RR company property, taunting, jeering or threatening scabs, being unnecessarily near to workers’ entrances, holding meetings or parades, making phone calls encouraging strikes, going to scabs’ homes, etc etc. Judge James Wilkerson says these peaceful acts aren’t peaceful: “The peaceful words of pickets, the peaceful exhortations of strike leaders, take on, by virtue of the atmosphere of lawlessness and violence in which they are spoken, a force not inhering in the words themselves, and therefore transcending right of free speech.”

Unable to get the US to open itself up to large numbers of Italian immigrants, Mussolini sends a delegation to Mexico to discuss establishing Italian colonies there. Labor unions are strongly opposed to dealing with Fascists. Or Rotarians, for some reason.

Headline of the Day -100:  

This sign goes up in Hollywood, uh, land.

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Today -100: July 12, 1923: Of klan acts and bedbugs

New York finds the Walker Anti-Klan Act to be useless against the Klan and will let the KKK get away with failing to file its membership list and other info.

And a cross is burned in New York itself, near a negro cabaret, believed the first such event in the city.

The Department of Agriculture is offering 1¢ per bedbug sent to its experiment station in Vienna, Virginia, which is developing insecticides. I can see no way in which this can go wrong.

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Today -100: July 11, 1923: Armed with blackjacks to enforce their whims

Egyptian prince Ali Kamel Fahmy Bey is shot dead by his wife of six months, the former, um, courtesan Marguerite Alibert, in the Savoy Hotel in London, after they had a night at the theatre, seeing, um, The Merry Widow. No doubt we will be hearing more of this...

NY Republican State Committee chair George Morris responds to a rather imperial demand from the Anti-Saloon League that the state party be more dry and end its “subservience” to the wet minority. Morris says it’s too early to talk about the 1924 election and “we are not going to submit to dictation of that sort from any quarter or as a party be driven into action by persons or groups who come armed with blackjacks to enforce their whims.” The fall Republican convention has been called off, presumably for fear of a public squabble over liquor.

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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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