Today -100: June 3, 1924: Tuberculosis. Not exactly Kafkaesque.

The Chicago PD are trying to pin another murder and another kidnapping on Leopold n’ Loeb.

Japan says the US’s new immigration act abrogates the 1911 Gentlemen’s Agreement, so Japan is now free allow Japanese to emigrate to Mexico and Canada and if they happen to sneak across the border, hey, whaddaya gonna do.

Pres. Coolidge signs the tax bill, reducing income taxes 25%, while complaining about many of its provisions and its lack of “real” tax reforms.

The Senate votes 61-23 for a Constitutional amendment to allow the federal government to regulate child labor. The ratification process now begins in state legislatures without, I have to say, a lot of hoopla. It’ll get 28 states by 1937 and then... crickets.

Franz Kafka dies, at age 40. He is unknown in the English-speaking world (so no obit) and everywhere else, really. Some of his best stuff, including The Trial and The Castle, will be published posthumously.

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Today -100: June 2, 1924: I was never more profoundly impressed by a suicide

Austrian Chancellor Ignaz Seipel (who is also a Catholic priest) is shot in the chest by a railroad employee, Karl Jaworek, identified as a Socialist, although his motive is that he is poor. Jaworek then shoots himself, but not fatally (also, 2 of the 3 bullets he fired at Seipel point-blank missed; some people are just not gun people).

The 4 French left-wing parties are trying to force Pres. Alexandre Millerand out of office by saying they will accept no prime minister candidate he offers. Raymond Poincaré once again offers his resignation and that of his cabinet, and is told by Millerand to stay in office until a new government is formed.

Leopold n’ Loeb are now accusing each other of being the one who killed Bobby Franks, each claiming to have just driven the car. Leopold says it was just an “experiment,” you know, like an entomologist killing a beetle. I’m thinking if he’d completed his legal studies he would have been a crap lawyer – no Clarence Darrow, you might say.

The Russian Communist Party Congress reverses itself and bans anti-religious propaganda aimed at peasants.

A revolutionary movement is roiling Albania, and beginning to march on Tirana. Greece, Yugoslavia and Italy are all looking to intervene.

The ritual suicide of a Japanese man outside the ruins (from the earthquake) of the US Embassy to protest the exclusionist immigration bill has stirred up great anti-American feeling. Says the head of the Tokyo Police: “I was never more profoundly impressed by a suicide ... He will probably be shown the honors due to a soldier who died on the battlefield.”

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Today -100: June 1, 1924: I have a hanging case

Leopold n’ Loeb confess to kidnapping and killing Bobby Franks. “I have a hanging case,” State’s Attorney Robert Crowe crows. The two self-described geniuses forgot to coordinate their alibis.

We’re already hearing crap psychological theories about how it was their very precocity that lead to “mental and moral perversion.”

A fire kills 22 girl inmate at the Hope Development School for Subnormal Girls in Playa del Rey, California.

“Perversion,” “subnormal.” They weren’t exactly Politically Correct in 1924, were they? (Update: it was actually called the Hope Development School for Deficient Girls. And all its doors were locked.)

In the Italian Parliament, a speech by Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti attacking the legitimacy of the recent parliamentary elections, which were conducted in an atmosphere of violent Fascist intimidation, sets off a free-for-all. Franceso Giunta (Fascist) calls Socialist deputies “that gang,” which is evidently more insulting in Italian than it sounds in English.  Opposition deputy Gen. Roberto Bencivenga, “shouting incoherent threats,” is attacked by a bunch of Fascists, as was the custom. Later Bencivenga challenges Giunta to a duel.

Japan protests the anti-Japanese provisions of the new US Immigration Act as violating the 1911 treaty.

Irving Berlin has composed an election song for Alfred E. Smith, called “We’ll All Go Voting for Al.” I can’t find a recording of it online, but that’s not a very promising start, is it? The first lines are “The bands will all be playing / As we go ‘Hip Hooraying,’” and it just goes on like that. Don’t give up your day job, Irving. Oh that is your day job, you say?

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Today -100: May 31, 1924: Of checks, franks, and klan wreaths

Headline of the Day -100:  

If by “check” you mean “death.” But he’s a Gurkha, thus the lack of dismay. Shamsherpun by name. He won’t be the last check.

Nathan Leopold, 19, and Richard Loeb, 18, are arrested for the murder of Bobby Franks, 14 (the murderers’ ages are reported correctly, but the NYT can’t make up its mind about Franks, despite having had days to get it right). Leopold, who doesn’t seem to know when to shut up, says the state’s attorney asked him if he’d ever read any works dealing with perversion; he answered that he’d read 16th-century bad boy and renowned homosexualist Pietro Aretino’s I Ragionamenti, which is about prostitution.

The Allies demand that Germany allow the resumption of inspections of its military, which Germany ended at the start of the Ruhr occupation. Germany says the provision of the Versailles Treaty allowing inspections has expired since Germany has toooootally disarmed, and inspections should now shift from the Allies to the League of Nations. The Allies refuse to believe that Germany has toooootally disarmed, with good reason, and say it’s up to them and not Germany to decide when the conditions have been fulfilled.

The German Nationalists give up their attempt to form a government in which they would have control over all the major positions and impose their own foreign policy and get control of Prussia. For some reason the moderate parties didn’t want to go along with that. So Pres. Ebert asks Wilhelm Marx to try again to form a new government.

In KKK Memorial Day news, a K.K.K. wreath is placed at the war memorial in Hicksville, Long Island, causing a kerfuffle since the parade there was organized by the Knights of Columbus, the 3 Hicksville Great War dead all having been members. That wreath was placed furtively during the parade, but in Binghamton, kluxers in kluxer regalia (but without masks) attempt to place a wreath on the local monument and are dispersed by a single Civil War vet, who threatens them with his cane, which is made from wood from the Andersonville prisoner of war camp.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Same.

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Today -100: May 30, 1924: Of advanced thinkers, veeps, and kampfs

At the Senate DOJ Committee, Gaston Weeks, former Bureau of Investigation agent and con man, accuses Treasury Sec Andrew Mellon of large-scale authorizations of withdrawal of liquor from bonded warehouses, partly to fund the Republican Party’s deficit, and partly so banks could liquidate their frozen credits. And some other shit, but I stopped reading when I decided nothing Weeks says is worth giving credence to.

After having released a couple of teachers who were suspected of killing Bobby Franks (because of how well-written the ransom notes were), the Chicago PD arrest 5 more suspects, including Nathan Leopold Jr., who left his glasses behind at the dump spot. He immediately admits that those are indeed his glasses, but says he left them in the area, where he often roamed for ornithological reasons, the week before the murder. “Examination developed the fact that he considered himself an advanced thinker and that he professed atheism.”

Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover says he is not a candidate for the vice presidency.

Adolf Hitler announces that he is writing a book in his prison cell. He says his Beer Hall Putsch saved Germany from a dictatorship led by Gen. Hans von Seeckt but with industrial magnate Hugo Stinnes (who died last month) running things behind the scenes. Given that Stinnes was a major financial backer of the Nazis, I don’t know what the hell Hitler is doing here.

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Today -100: May 29, 1924: Take the C Out of Cal

Fightin’ Bob La Follette strongly hints that he will run as a third-party candidate for president unless the D’s & R’s “cleaned house.” And the Farmer-Labor Progressive Party, which just allowed Communist delegates into its national convention, should also clean house. That’s a lot of clean houses.

The House votes 166-138 for a Navy bill that will build a bunch of new warships, the US having fallen behind the 5:5:3 ratio with Britain and Japan established by the Washington Treaty. Thomas Butler (R-Penn.), chair of the Navy Committee and sponsor of this bill, says “This navy of ours has run down,” so he had to violate the Republican commitment to economy. Also, everyone expects Coolidge to call another arms limitation conference after the whole Ruhr/German reparations thing is fixed, and, Butler says, we need to build more ships to force Britain to give up some of its ships, which would also mean scrapping US ships.

Rep. Sol Bloom (D-NY), who used to be in the sheet music business, demonstrates why he is no longer in the sheet music business by composing a campaign song for Al Smith entitled “Take the C Out of Cal and That Leaves Al (And Al Means Smith).”

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Today -100: May 28, 1924: This must be a Parliament and not the degenerate successor of Parliament

The new Reichstag’s opening session concludes with a sing-a-long, competing strains of The Internationale and Deutschland Über Alles (one point to the NYT for knowing that the latter’s melody was composed by Haydn). The Communists are especially loud (with cowbells and everything) when Ludendorff’s name is called.

There’s also a new Italian Parliament. Mussolini tells it that it’s the “very last parliamentary experiment.” If it “fails,” it will be replaced by something better. He does offer the possibility that Fascismo “may lead to a new period of splendor of Parliament,” but “This must be a Parliament and not the degenerate successor of Parliament.” Degenerate successors are the worst kind of successor. Or possibly the best kind.

The Methodist General Conference lifts the ban on dancing, theater- and circus-going, card-playing etc. Not that the Methodists now approve that sort of thing, mind you.

Grindell Matthews is going to France to discuss selling his Diabolical Ray, after Britain made him an offer, contingent on his proving its efficacy by halting a motor engine, a condition he finds insulting. His business partners attempt to serve him an injunction, but their lawyer arrives after Matthews’ plane has taken off. The US is also trying to get its grubby hands on the device, but they can’t find Matthews.

Russia is also said to have a death ray that can blow planes out of the sky, which explains the bellicosity of War Minister Leon Trotsky’s recent speeches.

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Today -100: May 27, 1924: Of exclusions, lynchings, and ostriches

Coolidge signs the immigration bill but says he’d have vetoed the Japanese exclusion provision had it been a stand-alone bill. So he dislikes racism, but not THAT much.

There’s still no deal on a new German cabinet. The Nationalists are demanding that Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz (who was just elected to the Reichstag) be made chancellor, that a new president be elected, that participants in the Beer Hall and Küstrin putsches be amnestied, that all Jews who have entered Germany since 1914 be expelled, all German Jews to be put under special legislation, etc.

Two young black men are lynched in Fort Meyers, Florida after being accused of attacking white girls.

Headline of the Day -100:  

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Today -100: May 26, 1924: Of Leagues and parties unknown

Edouard Herriot, who takes over as French PM next week, says French foreign policy will be built on the League of Nations, the one sure hope for peace.

As reported here a couple of days ago, shots were fired in Herrin, Illinois at the car of KKK-paid dry raider Glenn Young’s car, wounding him and his wife. Now an alleged “gangster” (I assume meaning bootlegger), Jack Skelcher (which is a very bootleggery name), believed to be one of the would-be assassins, is shot dead by... well, none of the many witnesses to the shooting saw nuthin’, so the coroner’s jury rules he was killed by “parties unknown,” which are the worst kind of parties. One cop says he deputized 10 or 12 men to “investigate suspicious characters,” but won’t say who the deputies were.

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Today -100: May 25, 1924: Of Marxist corpses, death rays, true liberty, and colonies

Karl Marx’s grandson Jean Longuet rejects Soviet Russia’s request to transfer KM’s body from London to Moscow, saying Russia is totally misinterpreting his work.

Dr. T.F. Wall, lecturer in electrical research at Sheffield University, has also invented a death ray. We are entering a golden age of death rays. British newspapers have been demanding that Grindell Matthews not be allowed to hawk his own Diabolical Ray to a French company, so he has been called back for talks with the military. And Reinhold Wulle, the near-fascist German deputy, claims that there are no fewer than three German death ray patents.

Speaking of German inventions, the hot new thing in Berlin is mini-radios suitable for pockets, with headphones and an antenna in one’s hat.

Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III, wearing a general’s uniform, opens the Parliament with a speech praising Fascism, Mussolini’s militia, and the crackdown on The Duck’s enemies: “The Italian people wish liberty, true liberty, to be left intact, but they have clearly shown that they repudiate every form of degeneration of liberty and every form of license, just as they repudiate all weakness or tolerance because they wish all special individual and class interests to be subordinated to the general interests of the community.”

Duke Adolf Friedrich of Mecklenburg, the former governor of Togoland, is head of a colonization company aiming to establish a feudal dukedom in Dutch New Guinea, in which the Dutch colonial government would have no say and all laws protecting the 200,000 natives in the 200,000 square mile concession would be abrogated. However, the plan seems to have been scuppered by... people finding out about it.

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Today -100: May 24, 1924: This is a strictly commercial proposition

Bobby Franks was already dead when his kidnappers made their ransom demands, probably killed accidentally when he was gagged. The ransom letter resembles one in a recent (unnamed) detective story.

NYC Mayor John Hylan orders an inquiry into why John D. Rockefeller Jr’s daughter Abby received only a suspended sentence for speeding (29 mph on 10th Avenue).

Glenn Young, who was paid by the Ku Klux Klan as a dry raider in and around Herrin, Illinois, and his wife are wounded in a drive-by shooting.

The Senate votes 56-5 to approve the Borah report confirming that the indictment of Burton Wheeler (D-Montana) was a frame-up designed to derail his investigation of then-attorney general Harry Daugherty and that he was never paid to lobby the Interior Dept.

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Today -100: May 23, 1924: As you no doubt know by this time, your son has been kidnapped

Headline of the Day -100:  

Bobby was actually 14. More on this later....

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Today -100: May 22, 1924: Of fishy rays and chlorine

Columbia U. physicist W.L. Severinghaus says the story about the “diabolical ray” invention sounds “fishy.”

Coolidge enjoyed the chlorine yesterday so much he does it again. His wife Grace joins him, although she doesn’t have a cold, just for shits and giggles.

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Today -100: May 21, 1924: Of diabolical rays, klunerals, chlorine gas, and Jewish dissection

Headline of the Day -100:  

Grindell Matthews, less a Mad Scientist Extraordinaire than a British con man with a history of “inventing” devices that he won’t explain and can’t demonstrate, claims to have invented a Diabolical Ray (It’s not a death ray or an ice beam, that’s all Johnny Snow) that can direct (somehow) an electric current that can destroy enemy planes, making them burst into flames, and paralyze warships (and their crews) within a radius of 4 miles.

In Long Island, NY, the Ku Klux Klan hold a large funeral for a Southampton constable killed in a shootout with bootleggers.

Pres. Coolidge, still suffering from a cold/hay fever, is put in an airtight room into which chlorine gas is pumped for 45 minutes. Sure, why not.

There have been pogroms in Transylvania, with a dozen Jews allegedly killed. Students government officials and secret police are said to have been involved.

At Budapest University, med students demand, maybe not seriously, that 4 Jewish med students be killed and dissected. The complaint is that the Jewish students have benefited from the dissection of dead Christians but Jewish communities bury their dead poor rather than making them available to med schools.

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Today -100: May 20, 1924: Meat juice

Under the Bonus Bill, which has just gone into effect after the Senate overrode Coolidge’s veto 59-26, 3 million+ veterans would receive insurance policies and 389,000 cash of $50 or less. Only vets ranked captain or below in the Army & Marine Corps or lieutenant in the Navy are eligible. What Congress hasn’t done is come up with a way to pay for all this. Rep. Victor Berger (Socialist-Wisc.) suggests making France pay its war debt.

AT&T has figured out how to send photographs over the phone wires. A picture taken in Cleveland was reproduced in New York in a mere 44 minutes (the photo had to be developed at each end).

Medical science is gaining in leaps and bounds. The latest cure is for tuberculosis, and it’s... meat juice!

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Today -100: May 19, 1924: If ever I get the chance to tell my story, I’ll rip the innermost circles of Washington wide open

Charles Forbes, the incredibly corrupt former director of the Veterans’ Bureau, now under indictment, says he’s being “framed” and now “they” are literally trying to murder him. “If ever I get the chance to tell my story, I’ll rip the innermost circles of Washington wide open.” Or go to prison, one or the other.

Pres. Coolidge has hay fever, or “rose fever” as they’re calling it.

Newly elected Reichstag deputy Reinhold Wulle of the National Socialist Freedom Party, the party standing in for the banned Nazi Party, claims that former kaiser Wilhelm approves the election gains of the fascists and gives visitors to Doorn silver swastikas and copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and a translation of Henry Ford’s anti-semitic writings. Dunno if any of this is true.

Hanover voters reject a plebiscite on whether to call a referendum to become a separate province independent of the state of Prussia.

At the Paris Olympics, French spectators hiss the American flag and are “unjustly incensed” when the US rugby team beats the French team, despite the former being mostly college students new to the sport. American spectators are attacked with canes, as was the custom.

Headline of the Day -100: 

 

Now playing:

The Marx Brothers open on Broadway for the first time. Groucho plays Napoleon, I guess. The four brothers are all billed under their real names (Julius, Adolph, Leonard, Herbert), but their stage names are pretty well known from vaudeville. The “She” is Lotta Miles, a name Florence Reutti adopted when she was doing tire ads. Lotta Miles, geddit?

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Today -100: May 18, 1924: Incidentally

The incoming French government, whenever it does come in, plans to reduce military service from 18 months to 9 (this doesn’t affect the 1/3 of the French military that comes from the colonies).

The House of Representatives votes to override Coolidge’s veto of the Bonus Bill 313-78, with 3/4 of the Republicans voting for the bonus.

Russia will expel 100,000 bourgeois high school and college students to make room for proletarian and peasant kids.

Mussolini and Czech Foreign Minister Edvard Beneš agree on a treaty of friendship and whatnot between Italy and Czechoslovakia. Mussolini was worried that France has been gaining too much influence in the Little Entente.

Headline of the Day -100:  

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Today -100: May 17, 1924: Of taxes and dead suns

Coolidge threatens to veto the tax-cut bill if his veto of the Bonus Bill is overridden.

German Chancellor Wilhelm Marx and Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann refuse to resign, denying that Nationalists opposed to the Dawes reparations plan represent a majority.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Phew.

Okay, that’s not the astronomical body, but South China President Sun Yat-sen, whose death has been reported, wrongly, for days.

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Today -100: May 16, 1924: Patriotism which is bought and paid for is not patriotism

Pres. Coolidge vetoes the Bonus Bill. He points to its considerable commitment of funds for years to come and the threat to tax cuts. He says “Our first concern must be the nation as a whole. This outweighs in its importance the consideration of a class [i.e., veterans] and the latter must yield to the former.” Vets might argue that they’ve already “yielded” quite a bit to the nation as a whole. He says nothing is owed to able-bodied vets because they were just doing every citizen’s “first duty.” “The gratitude of the nation to these veterans cannot be expressed in dollars and cents.” Well not with that attitude, mister. In fact, even trying to pay money for patriotism is an “unworthy indignity which cheapens, debases and destroys it.  ... Patriotism which is bought and paid for is not patriotism.” Veterans, he says, don’t even want it, “All our American principles are opposed to it. There is no moral justification for it.”

I especially like how he refers to a bonus for vets as a “gratuity.” And how he presents stiffing them as a matter of principle.

James Foley says he can’t be Boss of Tammany Hall after all after suffering a not-at-all-fake nervous collapse and getting a doctor’s note.

NYC Mayor John Hylan refuses a licence for child actors in Eugene O’Neill’s “All God’s Chillun Got Wings,” which I’m sure has nothing at all to do with the play’s inter-racial marriage . So the director reads out the scene. The demonstration some thought might protest the opening night does not occur, although one audience member leaves behind a pamphlet entitled “The Ku Klux Klan.”

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Today -100: May 15, 1924: Of wheelers, zebras, Bosses, and toughs

The Senate committee investigating the indictment of Sen. Burton Wheeler (D-Montana) exonerates him, saying the legal services he contracted to provide Gordon Campbell of Montana were related only to lawsuits and not to any matter before government agencies. The charges against Wheeler were trumped up by then-attorney general Harry Daugherty to derail his investigations of Dirty Harry’s shenanigans.

Abyssinia’s Prince Regent Ras Tafari, the future Emperor Haile Selassie, arrives in France, bearing gifts: lions and zebras. Pres. Millerand plans to keep 2 of the zebras at his country house.

James Foley is elected new Boss of Tammany Hall, whether he likes it or not.

Smith College suspends 3 students for smoking. In a tea room. Not even on campus.

The inquiries into both Teapot Dome and Dirty Harry Daugherty’s Justice Department are winding down. The last witness at the former, the chief petroleum engineer of the Bureau of Mines, is named Frederick B. Tough.

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