Today -100: April 13, 1924: Of immigration and investigations

The House passes the Johnson Immigration Act, including the provision banning Japanese people. Not even a roll call on that part.

Treasury Sec. Andrew Mellon complains that Senate investigations of the Bureau of Internal Revenue have destroyed its morale and work has ground to a halt. He says that like it’s a bad thing.

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Today -100: April 12, 1924: Unwarranted intrusion is the worst kind of intrusion

Pres. Coolidge complains to the Senate that its investigation of Treasury Sec. Andrew Mellon is “government by lawlessness” and “unwarranted intrusion.” Cal says the Committee’s demands go beyond “legitimate requirements” – it wants a list of companies Mellon is involved with. Mellon is especially worried about the Finance Committee hiring Francis Heney as investigator. Heney is famous for rooting out corruption in San Francisco and elsewhere, but the controversy is that his expenses will be paid personally by Sen. James Couzens (R-Michigan), who will also pay for lawyers and accountants, because no one had allocated funds for them and Couzens is quite rich. Mellon, who is also quite rich, calls it a “private inquisition.” Dems are suggesting that Coolidge is trying to scupper the investigations altogether and are resentful of his scolding tone.

There’s a hung jury in Indiana Gov. Warren McCray’s embezzlement trial.

Japan protests the US immigration bill, which passed the House and is pending in the Senate The note marks the first time the terms of the 1907 “Gentlemen’s Agreement” are made public (Japan agreed to restrict emigration to the US, the US to allow families of existing immigrants to come and not to segregate Japanese children in schools).

Japan will extend military conscription to South Sakhalin and then to other colonies, but not to Korea or Formosa, because Koreans and Formosans aren’t ethnic Japanese.

John Sloan, believed to be the last survivor of the Mexican-American War, dies at 95. According to Wikipedia, he’s not.

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Today -100: April 11, 1924: Five million free Italian citizens rallied as one man around the symbol of Fascismo

Bureau of Investigation chief William Burns admits sending 3 agents to Montana to investigate Sen. Burton Wheeler, contradicting former attorney general Harry Daugherty’s denial last week.

People like the Dawes Report so much that it’s being suggested that if Coolidge’s candidacy implodes because of all the Harding scandals, Charles Dawes might be a better candidate.

Mussolini’s electoral victory is celebrated in Rome by a crowd of 100,000, probably some of whom are not assholes, probably. He addresses them from the balcony – where else? – of the Foreign Office. “Five million free Italian citizens rallied as one man around the symbol of Fascismo, and I do not allow and we will not allow the Italian people to be insulted by attempts to make the world believe that they were herded to the polls like a flock of conscienceless beasts.” No, the flock of conscienceless beasts didn’t need any herding.

Hiram Johnson denies that he will drop out of the Republican presidential race. He says the party’s reaction to Teapot Dome shows it is “dominated by the unholy alliance between crooked big business and crooked politics.”

Aliens aren’t allowed to own dogs in Pennsylvania, I guess?

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Today -100: April 10, 1924: Just the facts, ma’am

Just one day after that Federal Grand Judy (sic) (the NYT is really surpassing itself with the typos lately) indicted Sen. Burton Wheeler (D-Montana), the Senate votes unanimously to form a committee to investigate “the facts.” Wheeler says the foreman of the grand jury is one of his most bitter enemies and the federal DA is a guy Wheeler refused to endorse for a judgeship. It’s certainly the case that the DOJ presented “evidence” to the grand jury, presumably under then-Attorney Gen. Harry Daugherty’s orders.

Coolidge victories in primaries in Michigan, Illinois and Nebraska seem to doom Hiram Johnson’s campaign.

The Dawes Committee reports its plan for German reparations, which will be paid on a sliding scale depending on the German economy (so it doesn’t set an actual amount). France and Belgium should end their economic control over the Ruhr but can maintain the military occupation.

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Today -100: April 9, 1924: Selfish political partisanship it is then

Sen. Burton Wheeler (D-Montana) is indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly taking money, after he was elected but before his term started, to influence the granting by the Interior Dept of oil and gas prospecting permits. This looks very much like an attempt by the RNC and the DOJ to ratfuck Wheeler’s investigations into Harry Daugherty’s Justice Department. Wheeler says it’s “a pure and unadulterated frame-up,” which is the worst (or possibly best?) kind of frame-up. Daugherty denies the “evidence” wasn’t dug up by those Bureau of Investigation agents he sent to Montana to look into Wheeler, but by the Post Office.

NY Gov. Al Smith (D) asked the R-dominated State Assembly to put aside “selfish political partisanship” and pass his proposals for four-year gubernatorial terms, an 8-hour day for women, an executive budget, etc. All of which they vote down.

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Today -100: April 8, 1924: We don’t know much about the ether

Prohibition agent Brice Armstrong – which is a very prohibition-agent name – testifies before the Senate DOJ investigating committee that Chicago and federal officials’ interference has kept Chicago wet by preventing prosecutions of saloon keepers and licensing brewing companies known to violate the law.

The minority Labour government is defeated in Parliament on a bill to prevent evictions of unemployed people and their families. It’s not being treated as a confidence vote, so Labour stays in power.

The Fascist-dominated coalition wins the Italian parliamentary elections with 65% of the vote on a high turnout. So The Duck didn’t even have to rig the electoral law and he didn’t see a need to unleash his thugs on opposition voters this time. Well, two dead in election clashes, but by Italian standards... This, the first election since 1921, puts a democratic imprimatur on Mussolini’s March on Rome.

The Senate passes a bill limiting radio licenses to 2 years. The bill says that the “ether” is the “inalienable possession of the people of the United States and their Government.” What does ether mean? The bill’s author, Robert Howell (R-Neb.), has no idea: “We don’t know much about the ether. We haven’t been able to investigate it.”

Sen. Samuel Shortridge (R-Cal.) says immigration is the most important issue facing the nation. By which he means excluding Asians, who are “neither racially, industrially nor socially desirable.”

Columbia U. rejects the request of obnoxious law students to eject negro law student Frederick W. Wells from the dorms. There’s been something of a backlash among students against the racists. The burning cross didn’t help.

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Today -100: April 7, 1924: Of captives and plebiscites of devotion

Pope Pius is thinking about attending a Knights of Columbus event in Rome. This would be the first time a pope has left the Vatican since 1870; they’ve been proclaiming themselves “captives” of the Italian state. (Update: it won’t happen. The pope will make his way to the K of C building via a circuitous route through various buildings, some of which they’ll cut entrances into so he doesn’t have to cross into Rome proper).

Italy’s parliamentary elections, or as the Fascists term them, “the nation’s plebiscite of devotion to Mussolini,” are carried out with almost no violence.

Germany is also holding federal and state elections. In Bavaria, the Völkisch-Sozialer Block, which the NYT thinks is run by Hitler (or “August Hitler,” as they call him) but which is more like Nazi-adjacent although the followers of ol’ August are voting for it in the absence of the National Socialist Party from the ballot, comes in just a few votes behind the Social Democrats but well behind the Bavarian People’s Party which nevertheless shed a lot of votes to the far-right.

Romania puts the universities under martial law to stop anti-semitic attacks. Student and prof pogromists will now be tried by military courts – civilian courts have tended to acquit.

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Today -100: April 6, 1924: Kluxers vs. townies

The Ku Klux Klan holds a little spook-a-thon outside Lilly, Pennsylvania. Afterwards 500 kluxers go to the train station to take a special train to Johnstown. Locals turn a fire hose on them, and they shoot into the crowd, killing 4. Then they get on their train; 60 are arrested in Johnstown for carrying concealed weapons. I’m not sure why the Klan picked Lilly, a mining town, for their shindig. It doesn’t sound like any of the  kluxers are from there.

Bulgaria’s supreme court orders the Communist Party & the Labor Party dissolved. Well, they did try an uprising last year. The state will get their property.

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Today -100: April 5, 1924: Of jams and comparative clams

William Burns, head of the Bureau of Investigation, testifies to the Senate DOJ Committee that Heber Votaw, Pres. Harding’s brother-in-law, who was appointed superintendent of prisons by Harry Daugherty, stifled an investigation into the smuggling of drugs into Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. The former warden, J.E. Dyche, also testifies to this and says the smuggling is still going on. He was fired by the inspector of prisons, who told him it was because Daugherty was in a “jam.”

Burns also accuses the former attorney general of ordering him to cease investigations into whisky deals that would have led to prominent men.

The NYT finds Italians apathetic about next week’s elections. Thanks to Mussolini having altered the electoral law, the Fascists are a shoo-in, so the campaign “take[s] place in comparative clam” [sic]. With comparative linguine, presumably. The violence this time is sporadic, unlike the wide-scale organized violence of previous elections.

In Bucharest, a group of student anti-semites assault Aristide Blank, a big Romanian banker.

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Today -100: April 4, 1924: Of beer halls, cover-ups, bobbed hair, lynchings, and ormsbees

Erich Ludendorff, who just this week escaped legal consequences for his part in the Beer Hall Putsch, is running for a seat in the Reichstag. Just to rub it in, he launches his campaign in the Bürgerbräukeller, the very beer hall which was the site of the aforementioned putsch. He’s running under the German National Liberal Party, the National Socialists being currently banned.

Secretary of War John Weeks orders documents seized from Thomas Lane, legal adviser to the War Department, who he also fires. Lane was investigating aircraft companies’ fraudulent over-billing of the military during the Great War. Weeks now has the documents relating to that investigation under his personal control. The papers were seized from Lane the day after the Senate DOJ Committee announced that he would be called as a witness.

Headline of the Day -100: 

More than 40 Indiana bankers (the plural of bankers is an overdraft of bankers) testify that Gov. Warren McCray was nearly a million dollars in debt when he allegedly embezzled $155,000 from the Ag Board.

A mob in Woodbury, Georgia lynches a 15-year-old black lad named Beach Thrash who shot the police chief who was trying to arrest him for stealing from the bank he worked at.

Former Vermont governor Ebenezer Jolls Ormsbee, who has the most nineteenth-century-Vermont-governor name of all, dies at 89 of apoplexy, which is the most nineteenth-century-Vermont-governor way to die.

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Today -100: April 3, 1924: There are three generations from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves

Coolidge nominates Columbia Law School dean Harlan Fiske Stone to be attorney general. He & Coolidge were college buds.

Speaking of Columbia Law School, white students there are protesting black law student Frederick W. Wells being allowed to live in a dorm (it took them a while to realize he wasn’t an elevator “boy”). Wells says he won’t be bullied into moving out, but will do so if requested by university authorities. A cross is burned outside the dorm after midnight, which seems to be Klan rather than law students.

The Ku Klux Klan was a big issue in Missouri’s municipal elections Tuesday. Klan-supported candidates won more often than not.

Treasury Sec Andrew Mellon tells the Senate Finance Committee that increasing the tax on estates worth more than $10 million would be “economic suicide.” Anyway, he says, inherited fortunes fail to continue: “There are three generations from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves.”

H.L. Scaife, a lawyer and former Bureau of Investigation agent, testifies to the Sen. committee investigating the DOJ that Secretary of War John Weeks, former Attorney Gen. Harry Daugherty and others conspired to quash a $5 million claim against the Wright-Martin Aircraft Corp.

German right-wingers – monarchists, Nazis & the like – riot in Berlin at the funeral of Willy Dreyer, who died in a French prison. He was there for dynamiting a train in the occupied Ruhr (a detail missing from the NYT story), but the nationalists are spinning him as a martyr.

Assistant Treasury Secretary McKinzie Moss asks for a cost estimate for a fence along the entire California-Mexican border.

Headline of the Day -100:  

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Today -100: April 2, 1924: Of unserious crimes in Bavaria, symptoms of intelligence, and scarfaces

Erich Ludendorff is acquitted of all the treason he totally treasoned during the Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler and 3 other defendants get 5 years – which could mean  as little as 6 months with good behaviour, and the pre-trial time in custody counts. In theory Hitler could be released in 6 weeks; he will be released December 20th from his pretty cushy cell in Lansberg Prison. The remaining 5 defendants are sentenced to 15 months and are immediately paroled or released outright. As the sentences are read, spectators shouted “Heil Hitler” and the less alliterative “Heil Ludendorff.” Ludendorff tells the court it’s a scandal that he’s acquitted and his comrades condemned. Yes it is, general, yes it is, but not in the way you mean.

And yes, those ridiculous sentences were passed on April Fools’ Day.

Ludendorff is cheered in the streets: “To plot against the Constitution of the Reich is not considered a serious crime in Bavaria,” the NYT observes.

The NYT editorial page has been pushing for an end to all those investigations of Cabinet officials now that Daugherty is out. The Democrats, the paper  says in today’s smugly headlined “Symptoms of Intelligence,” “have begun to understand that the mania of investigation has carried them too far.” And the Republicans, who have “run like hares before the Democratic hounds”, “are recovering from a state of dazed and abject panic.”

Tulsa municipal elections are won by the Democrats, with highly visible Klan backing.

The Cicero, Illinois (a suburb of Chicago) municipal elections are a tad rambunctious, with interference in the voting by gangsters with sub-machine guns and sawed-off rifles closing polling places, kidnapping election workers and threatening voters. Chicago cops arrive late in the day to restore order. A shootout with the police results in the death of “Frank Camponi,” whose brother “Tony Camponi” “escaped after emptying two guns at half a dozen detectives.” These are actually Frank and Al Capone (who did not shoot at cops that day, that was someone else) in what I believe is the latter’s first mention in the NYT, which does at least get his nickname, Scarface, right. The gangsters who control Cicero succeed in returning a Republican administration.

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Today -100: April 1, 1924: Of education, pleasant & profitable work, people’s kaiserdoms, and protectorates

The Federal District Court in Oregon strikes down the state’s law for compulsory education in public schools, which is a Klan-backed referendum passed in 1922 aimed at destroying Catholic parochial schools. Gov. Walter Pierce says the state will appeal to the Supreme Court, where (Spoiler Alert) it will lose.

John W. Davis, the former US ambassador to Britain, says it wouldn’t be worth it to run for president if he had to give up his legal work for financial interests like Morgan Bank, work he finds pleasant and profitable. He will (Spoiler Alert) wind up running for president, and he will find it neither pleasant nor profitable.

A DC grand jury indicts Harry Sinclair for refusing to answer the Senate Teapot Dome Committee’s questions.

Heading into elections, German right-wing parties are moving in the direction of monarchism, or, as Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann’s German People’s Party (DVP) is now calling it, for “People’s Kaiserdom.” Whatever that means. Stresemann says he has nothing in common with the Weimar constitution.

Oswald Mosley, independent MP for Harrow (and a Tory when he first entered Parliament), switches to the Labour Party.

Control of Northern Rhodesia (present-day Zambia) is taken from the British South Africa Company, founded by Cecil Rhodes, and the colony becomes a British “protectorate.” The BSAC’s authority over Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) was removed last year. The company will continue to receive royalties from mining operations until independence.

Sometime this month Ford Madox Ford’s Some Do Not …, the first book of the Parade’s End tetralogy, is published.

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Today -100: March 31, 1924: Of leaguers, women’s platforms, and highly colored handkerchiefs

French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré is ready to allow Germany into the League of Nations. He has conditions, of course, including accepting the Dawes Commission’s plan on reparations and inspections of its military.

Awkwardly, Harry Daugherty is still running to be a Coolidge delegate to the Republican National Convention. He says he has no personal feelings against Coolidge for firing him.

At the Democratic National Convention, Eleanor Roosevelt will head the committee writing the planks on welfare legislation, a “woman’s platform.”

Bavaria threatens the death penalty for anyone who reacts to the imminent verdict of the Hitler-Ludendorff trial with rioting, unlawful assembly etc. Oddly, displaying the verdicts in cafés, shop windows etc is also verboten. Do they expect to keep it a secret?

Fad of the Day -100:  

I wonder if “young bloods” are also copying Prince Edward by falling off horses?

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Today -100: March 30, 1924: Of hangmen, bombing cannibals, and well-behaved women

John Ellis retires as Britain’s Chief Executioner after 23 years. He’s officiated at 203 hangings. His fee was 50 shillings, plus another 50s for good conduct, meaning he wasn’t allowed to stay at a public house when traveling to an execution as previous executioners did, charging a commission for attracting custom to pubs. Ellis, 49, gives no reason for quitting, but will attempt suicide later in the year. Suicide being illegal, he will be criminally charged. He’ll succeed in 1932. For now, he breeds chickens, but has to get someone else to wring their necks.

New laws passed in 1923: South Dakota bans peyote & mescal. Pennsylvania bans archeological fakes. Oregon bans schoolbooks which undervalue the contributions of the Founding Fathers while North Carolina requires school courses in “Americanism.” Oregon requires aliens who own butcher shops, run hotels, resorts, etc etc to display a card showing their nationality and those of their employees. North Carolina has a Peeping Tom act. Several states ban KKK-like masks and hoods, and there are a shitload of new prohibition laws.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Dr. Alexander H. Rice will lead an expedition, including his wife Eleanor, into parts of South America never seen by the white man (if a tree falls in a rain forest and no white man hears it, does it make a sound?). He won’t actually bomb any cannibals, no doubt to his disappointment.

The NYT Sunday Book Review has a review of Della Thompson Lutes’s The Gracious Hostess. Is the review by a man? Of course it is. Is the headline for the review “Compendium of Information for Well-Behaved Women”? Of course it is. Did I stop reading the review after I realized that headline wasn’t the title of the book? Yes I did.

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Today -100: March 29, 1924: I’d rather be right here in Atlantic City than anywhere else

Pres. Coolidge finally fires Attorney General Harry Daugherty, who writes an open letter defending himself. He warns of “government by slander, by terrorism and by fear” and calls the campaign against him a conspiracy of “powerful individuals and organizations” (which he does not name) responsible for violent strikes and of other “powerful individuals and organizations” he was investigating for graft during the Great War.

Coolidge had been planning to let the investigation play out and letting Dirty Harry having his say, but the final straw was his refusal to turn over documents to that Senate DOJ committee investigation, documents relating to his siccing the Bureau of Investigation on Sen. Thomas Walsh after he started investigating Teapot Dome (I’m not sure, but I don’t think it’s been revealed to the public which documents Daugherty withheld). Bureau of Investigation head William Burns is also expected to be ousted (he will be; incidentally, Burns has continued running his own private detective agency all the time he has headed the proto-FBI).

Where does a disgraced former attorney general go? Atlantic City baby! He tells reporters there that everything said about him was a lie, and anyway the Senate committee didn’t have legal authority to investigate them. He doesn’t use the words “rigged” or “witch hunt,” but you get the idea.

Sen. Kenneth McKellar (D-Tenn.) introduces a resolution for the Judiciary Committee to investigate whether Treasury Sec Andrew Mellon is holding that office in violation of the law forbidding treasury secs to engage in trade or commerce. The law applies to several Treasury positions. They also can’t own a sea vessel. Republicans complain that the D’s are going after the Cabinet one by one by one.

Headline of the Day -100:  

J. Van Vechten Olcott, former NY congresscritter (1905-11) and current lawyer, tells the Senate DOJ Committee that he was offered a federal judgeship – for $35,000, to be distributed “among the boys.” It’s not clear that the lawyer he spoke with actually had the ability to make him a judge, or who “the boys” might be. Anyway, he turned him down. Olcott is in the witness seat when the news of Dirty Harry’s resignation is heard.

The US Senate Committee on Territories and Insular Possessions is considering holding a plebiscite in the Philippines on independence – in 1935.

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Today -100: March 28, 1924: Not to prison but to Valhalla

Rep. John Langley (R-Kentucky) is indicted for his part in a large bootleg operation, getting the prohibition commissioner to authorize the release of whisky.

French PM Raymond Poincaré unresigns a day after resigning.

Gen. Erich Ludendorff, giving his closing statement at the Beer Hall Putsch trial: “The world’s history sends me, who has fought for the Fatherland, not to prison but to Valhalla.” He says if the nationalistic movement fails, Germany will face “the menace of enslavement to France.” He is followed by Hitler, who compares himself to Bismarck and Wilhelm I.

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Today -100: March 27, 1924: Rules rules rules

NYPD Commissioner Richard Enright puts out a booklet of do’s and don’ts for cops: don’t discuss police business with your family; don’t talk to females except on official business; don’t lean against walls; don’t shoot too many people, etc.

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Today -100: March 26, 1924: Of war criminals, impeachments, and tiges

A French court-martial in Nancy sentences a bunch of German military people to death for ordering arson, pillaging and/or assassinations at the start of the Great War.

The Senate votes unanimously for a resolution to impeach Clarence Chase, collector of customs at the Port of El Paso, a day after he took the Fifth before the Teapot Dome Committee. Chase is former Interior Sec. Albert Fall’s son-in-law. Chase tried to get Price McKinney to say falsely that he’d lent Fall $100,000 to cover up Fall’s bribe-taking. While the Senate is debating impeaching him, Chase resigns, but Treasury Sec Andrew Mellon refuses to accept the resignation. (He’ll accept it tomorrow).

The Coolidges’ lost cat Tiger (aka Tige) is found at the Navy Building.

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Today -100: March 25, 1924: Of contumacy, tigers, pretty good-sized navies, and swirrflügers

The Senate votes 72-1 to pursue contempt (contumacy) charges against Harry Sinclair for refusing to answer questions.

The Coolidges’ cat Tiger (aka Tige) has disappeared and the Secret Service has gone on the DC and, for some reason, NYC radio stations to ask for the public’s help. More as it develops.

Curtis Wilbur, the new secretary of the Navy, is asked if he’s a Big Navy man; “Well, I am for a pretty good sized navy.”

Raimund Nimführ, an Austrian inventor, says he’s invented a plane with pulsating wings which can take off and land vertically. Now he just needs someone to finance his giant flying vibrator. It will be started in the 1930s but never completed. It will be pleasingly called Swirrflüger (say it out loud: Swirrflüger, Swirrflüger, Swirrflüger), meaning whirlwings.

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