Today -100: October 22, 1924: Hurrah, German elections are always a good time

Germany’s Reichstag elections will be held on December 7th. Prussia and Bavaria will tag along with their own state elections, which they didn’t have to do but figured what the hell. Other states may follow, and there may be municipal and county elections in various locales.

The Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP) issues its election program, calling for the purging of pacifism and the November (1918) spirit, the restoration of the monarchy and repudiation of the Treaty of Versailles and the Dawes Plan.

Germany confiscates a French balloon competing in a race which landed in Germany. This after the ZR-3 zeppelin was permitted to fly over France on the way to the US, so this seizure, while allowed under the regs, looks a bit rude.

The Italian Communists suggest that all opposition deputies, who are still boycotting Parliament over the Matteotti assassination, form a rump anti-Fascist parliament. There is no chance in hell other parties will join them.

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Today -100: October 21, 1924: Of headless chickens

German Chancellor Wilhelm Marx having failed to bring Socialists and Nationalists into the government, the Reichstag will be dissolved and new elections held.

In the 3 years since the Volstead Act was passed, there have been 177,000 arrests just at the federal level, with prison sentences adding up to 7,000 years.

W.E.B. DuBois of the NAACP calls on blacks to vote for Robert La Follette and drop the Republicans.

Bobby Franks’s father Jacob establishes a trust fund to continue the fight against any effort to release Leopold n’ Loeb from prison, even after his own death (which will be in 1928).

Éamon de Valera has said he’ll go to Northern Ireland to campaign for republican candidates in the UK general election. NI says he’ll be arrested if he tries it.

Headline of the Day -100:  

That’s Henry MacCracken, president of Vassar.

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Today -100: October 20, 1924: Of slush, truancy, and matadors

In the absence of proper opinion polls, John W. Davis, like the Republicans, over-estimates the popularity of the Progressives, saying they’ll carry 6 to 8 states. He sees this as a revolt within the Republican Party, which will take votes only from it and result in Coolidge’s defeat.

The Republican slush fund is being used in Tennessee to pay the poll taxes of 25,000 or so Republican voters.

The Chicago superintendent of compulsory education says husbands of wives 16 years old or younger are legally responsible for their child-brides going to school and can be arrested for their truancy.

The “authorities” in Spain, whoever they might be, turn down a Señora Reverte who wants to be a matador. They say it’s dangerous and not fitting for a woman, although women can be picadors and banderillos (sic). (Update: This is María Salomé Rodríguez Tripiana, who fought as La Reverte and was actually born male, or so they claimed after the interior minister banned female matadors in 1908 as “an inappropriate spectacle and so contrary to culture and all delicate feelings” – you know, the delicate feelings of people who enjoy watching bulls stabbed.)

Trans matadors is not something I expected to be googling today.

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Today -100: October 19, 1924: Of electric coffee, assassins, and oases

Nominations close for the British general elections. 38 win their seats unopposed, including Tory leader Stanley Baldwin. The Liberals are contesting only 55% of the seats. 41 of the 1,405 candidates are women, of whom 12 are Tory, 6 Liberal and 22 Labour (Spoiler Alert: 4 will be elected).

NY Gov. Al Smith campaigns in Buffalo, where Mayor Francis Schwab (R), who was originally nominated by his friends as a practical joke – a brewer, he was under indictment at the time for possession of liquor – has been trying to make the names of Klan members public, fighting his police commissioner to do so. So the Klan is a big source of controversy in Buffalo, and Smith is here to help. He denounces Coolidge’s policy of silence.

The Klan holds a meeting in the fairgrounds outside Worcester, Massachusetts. As they leave, townies throw stones at their cars and beat up some of the kluxers.

Thomas Edison visits an electrical show, drinks “an electrically made cup of coffee,” and predicts that power will some day be transmitted by radio.

Heinrich Schulz (misidentified here as Foerster), one of the right-wing assassins of German former finance minister Matthias Erzberger in 1921, was captured in Hungary early this year. Hungary then refused to extradite him to Germany but expels him from the country as an undesirable. He will join the Turkish army, he says. He won’t actually do that, but will go to Spanish Guinea to oversee a plantation, where he’ll get malaria. He’ll return to Germany after Hitler comes to power and join the SS. Captured at the end of the war and questioned at Nuremberg, he’ll be returned to Germany for trial for the assassination. He’ll be convicted for manslaughter and serve 2 years of a 12-year sentence, living as a free man until his death in 1979.

Two Italian planes bomb the Gialo oasis in Libya. This is seen, by the Italians anyway, as a particularly audacious mission, given that the planes had to fly 373 miles to and from Benghazi and a while ago a pilot fell out of his plane in Libya and was eaten by hyenas, as was the custom.

The Texas Supreme Court rules that women, in this case Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, are eligible to hold office.

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Today -100: October 18, 1924: Of monolinguals and table manners

Former ambassador John W. Davis admits at a meeting of Poles in Chicago that he only speaks English.

Headline of the Day -100:  

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Today -100: October 17, 1924: The woman idea is here to stay

“Ma” Ferguson, the Democratic nominee for governor of Texas, says of the nomination of Nellie Taylor Ross for governor of Wyoming in the special election there, “The woman idea is here to stay.”

Matilde Pérez Molla becomes Spain’s first woman mayor, of Cuatretondeta. She is appointed, not elected. The first elected mayor, in 1932, will be María Domínguez Remón in Gallur, who will be killed by Francoists early in the Civil War. They weren’t big on the woman idea.

The ZR-3 zeppelin is supposed to be deflated and the hydrogen with which it crossed the Atlantic replaced with helium, which is a lot safer, but the US doesn’t have enough helium to inflate both the ZR-3 and the Shenandoah, so they may not do that.

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Today -100: October 16, 1924: There is no good in shutting your eyes to the portent of the Third Party movement

Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes continues to campaign for Coolidge (and Theodore Roosevelt Jr.) by focusing solely on Progressive candidate La Follette while ignoring Democratic candidate Davis. “The Third Party is a dangerous enemy to our form of government,” he says. He says Fightin’ Bob’s plan to give Congress a veto over Supreme Court decisions could lead to “any sort of dictatorship they please.”

Indiana Secretary of State Edward Jackson (R), who is running for governor, has been circulating photographs of Ku Klux Klan records to prove he is a member. As are almost all Republicans running for office in the state. Unclear why Jackson thought people needed reassurance on his klannishness.

The ZR-3 zeppelin completes its 5,000-mile trip from the factory in Germany that built it as part of war reparations to the US in 81 hours, circling New York City 5 times just above the skyscrapers and sailing high over Brooklyn (don’t we all) before landing in Lakehurst, New Jersey.

In Toronto, Prince Edward falls off his horse, as was the custom.

The Wahabis capture Mecca. No “excesses” have been reported.

Headline of the Day -100:  

New York Giants pitcher Walter Huntzinger, not a large vomiting man, although I suppose he could be both.

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Today -100: October 15, 1924: Of salient personages and widows

Sen. Frank B. Brandegee (R-Connecticut), 60, commits suicide by gas inhalation. He was ill and had made some bad real estate speculations. He leaves a note for the servants, along with $200 to divide among 3 of them, warning “beware of the gas.” The NYT says Brandegee “was no mediocrity, but a salient personage.” “‘Reactionaries’ have their value. Especially are they needed now when ‘progressives’ is the only word.”

At an emergency state convention Wyoming Democrats nominate the late governor William Ross’s widow Nellie to replace him.

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Today -100: October 14, 1924: Of cunning plans

Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes utters the conspiracy theory that Robert La Follette’s third-party presidential run is actually a plot to make his running mate Charles Bryan president.

The British Tory and Liberal parties come to non-compete agreements in some constituencies to prevent splitting the anti-Labour vote. Tories, for example, will not contest Liberal former PM Asquith’s Paisley (Scotland) seat or Ramsay MacDonald’s Aberavon (Wales) seat, to protect the former and threaten the latter.

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Today -100: October 13, 1924: Of Frances and navigators

Anatole France (born François-Anatole Thibault), Nobel-prize-winning French author, dies at 80.

Buster Keaton’s The Navigator premieres.

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Today -100: October 12, 1924: Coolidge, Then Chaos

Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis says the Coolidge slogan “Coolidge or Chaos” should be “Coolidge, Then Chaos.” In an Indianapolis speech, he talks a lot about Republican corruption and calls the R. record “a vast and unwholesome desert...” - that’s the worst kind of desert – “broken at great intervals by a few oases that Democratic votes were able to create”.

Pres. Coolidge addresses employees of the H. J. Heinz Company, the ketchup people, by radio. He says the public now wants business consolidation where it previously wanted monopolies broken up, because business now realizes that it owes service to the public. Oh, Republicans, aren’t they just adorable?

Coolidge’s secretary, C. Bascom Slemp, a name that will never stop being funny, recently said that Coolidge has “repeatedly” declared that he is not a member of, or in sympathy with, the Klan. One James Deery writes Slemp to ask just when it was that Cal said that. Deery replies refusing to give details but says “His attitude... has long been known to those who are in touch with him”. Slemp himself, by the way, was rumored to be a kluxer and, as congresscritter, led the effort to purge the Virginia Republican Party of black members.

Feminist birth-control activist Dora Russell is standing as a Labour candidate for Parliament for Chelsea, a constituency her husband Bertrand Russell twice failed to win.

Headline of the Day -100:  

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Today -100: October 11, 1924: Of blimps blowing up. What more do you need?

Winston Churchill is a Tory now. He is standing for Parliament for Epping (Essex).

Labour has recruited independent MP Oswald Mosley, the future British Union of Fascists leader, to run against Neville Chamberlain in Birmingham. Other Labour candidates include Malcolm MacDonald, son of the prime minister, and Oliver Baldwin, son of the Tory party leader. They will all (Spoiler Alert) lose, but they’ll all get into Parliament later in the decade.

Army blimp TC-2 is destroyed over Newport News, Virginia when one of its bombs explodes, killing 2.

Dr. Henry Fox, a biology professor at Mercer University, a Baptist institution, is asked to resign after it is found that he has been teaching evolution. He will refuse to resign and be fired and replaced with a high school teacher. The university will claim Fox was fired for theological differences rather than his teaching, but c’mon.

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Today -100: October 10, 1924: Of amps, dissolutions, and slush

Members of the United States World War Amps, a delightfully named organization of veteran amputees, and other disabled vets, accuse the Veterans’ Bureau of having been infiltrated by the Klan and discriminating on racial and religious grounds. One thing: were amputees really compensated by the inch?

The dissolution of Parliament is held off until a bill for the border between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland passes through the Lords, then it’s done and elections set for October 29th. The Tories and the Liberals are expected to make relations with Russia their primary attack issue on Labour. Liberals are rightly worried about their party’s survival.

Progressive presidential candidate Robert La Follette accuses the Republicans of raising a $4 or 5 million slush fund. He believes that the money is coming from the Mellons, J.P. Morgan, etc.

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Today -100: October 9, 1924: Cold and unaffected

So that’s it for Britain’s first Labour government. Parliament votes for the Liberal proposal for an inquiry into the withdrawal of incitement to mutiny charges against J. R. Campbell, the editor of the Communist Workers’ Weekly. The Labour government had said such a vote would be taken as an issue of confidence and result in the dissolution of Parliament. Every party is blaming every other party for a general election the public doesn’t want, the last one having been less than a year ago and the one before that a bit over a year before.

The pro-Fascist wing of Italy’s Liberal Party is considering breaking away to form a new party which would be ironically called the Constitutional Party. Mussolini’s organ the Popolo d’Italia informs the Libs that “their resolution leaves Mussolini cold and unaffected.”

The home of Powhatan, Ohio Mayor George Boger is bombed. He doesn’t know why.

The Swedish government bans killing eagles. Environmentalists are also working to save the Swedish beaver and European bison (visen). I am happy to report the latter two species – don’t know about the eagles – are doing fine now.

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Today -100: October 8, 1924: Nothing in common with us

The British Labour Party Conference rejects affiliation by the Communist Party of Great Britain and membership of individual Communists. Sez PM Ramsay MacDonald: “Communism as such has nothing in common with us. It is the product of Czarism and the war mentality.” He says the last thing the British people want is another general election but the Liberals are forcing it on them. He’s also not impressed that H.H. Asquith said he’d make the Labour government eat out of his hand.

Treasury Sec. Andrew Mellon and his brother are intimately involved with the monopolistic Aluminum Company of America  and its efforts to get tariffs on imported aluminum increased. Coolidge hasn’t bothered asking for a copy of the Federal Trade Commission’s report on the company.

The Italian Liberal Party conference ends, without coming to any decision about whether to collaborate with the Fascist government. The party is deeply divided.

Lady Nancy Astor, MP supports a bill to change the marriage laws: “I think it is appalling that a man cannot marry his niece,” she says appalledly.

Ireland names its very first ambassador, Timothy Aloysius Smiddy, who will be Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary to the US.

On Broadway:

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Today -100: October 7, 1924: Turn your weapons on your oppressors!

The minority Labour government in Britain is facing a Tory censure motion over the withdrawal of charges against J. R. Campbell, the editor of the Communist Workers’ Weekly, for incitement to mutiny. He called on enlisted military personnel to organize passive resistance against war (“Refuse to shoot down your fellow workers! Refuse to fight for profits! Turn your weapons on your oppressors!”). The Liberals are piling on, proposing a Select Committee to investigate, on which 7 of 10 members would be from the opposition parties. PM Ramsay MacDonald threatens that if either measure passes, there will be new elections. Don’t threaten us with a good time, say Tories & Libs. The opposition parties also object to the proposed treaty with Russia.

Coolidge says “ridding society of the very institution of war... is going to be done because men and women demand it. We are making more progress in this direction than we yet fully realize.”

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Today -100: October 6, 1924: Of controllers, moral codes, and waxworks

A lawsuit is filed (the plaintiff isn’t identified in the article) against the appointment of Walter Cohen as controller of the customs, on the grounds that a black man can’t be a citizen of the United States and the 14th Amendment was never really properly ratified.

Supreme Court Chief Justice William Howard Taft supports Collier’s attempt to formulate a moral code acceptable to all denominations that can be taught in public schools. He expresses regret that “religion itself” can’t be taught.

Paul Leni’s film Waxworks premieres in Austria.

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Today -100: October 5, 1924: Of klan kluries and world good-wll

Sheriff George Galligan, State’s Attorney Delos Duty, Judge Bowen of Herrin, Illinois, the owner of Herrin Hospital, and 8 others, are indicted for murder during the Klan-Anti-Kluxer gun battle last August. Since the grand jury are mostly kluxers themselves, indictments are not also issued for their hooded brethren.

Headline of the Day -100:  

The world says no.

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Today -100: October 4, 1924: Every tub must stand on its own bottom

Aviation Innovation of the Day -100: A plane is launched from a dirigible.

Theodore Roosevelt Jr. says he wants to be considered for the NY governorship on his own merits, not his father’s: “We’ve got a saying in our family that every tub must stand on its own bottom.” All the Roosevelt family sayings are about bathtubs, probably.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Sounds legit.

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Today -100: October 3, 1924: Every patriotic American has condemned the Ku Klux Klan but the president of the United States

All 47 League of Nations nations sign on to the compulsory arbitration protocol, or at least to recommend it to their home nations, and to the calling of an arms reduction conference.

China isn’t elected to one of the non-permanent seats on the League Council, so its delegates walk out. But hey, Uruguay got a seat.

William Butler, chair of the RNC, claims that in certain parts of the country the Democrats and La Follette Progressives are conspiring to deadlock the presidential election and throw it into the Congress, which he seems to think would result in Dem. running mate Charles Bryan becoming president (something about electing him vice president and then blocking a vote for president). He says he has evidence of this conspiracy but refuses to disclose it because reasons.

At Madison Square Garden, Dem. presidential candidate John W. Davis talks about the Republicans’ “alibi manufacturing industry,” such as former Sec. of the Interior Albert Fall’s claim that his $100,000 bribe was just a loan and former Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt Jr’s alibi that “he was nothing but a messenger boy” in the transfer of the Teapot Dome oil reserves to Interior. Davis takes a crack at the “Silent Cal” thing: Washington wasn’t silent, Lincoln wasn’t silent, “Roosevelt was not silent and the Lord knows Wilson was not silent.”

One of the speakers is Municipal Civil Service Commissioner Ferdinand Morton, not to be mistaken for Jelly Roll Morton. The first black man on the commission, Morton says black people consider the Republican Party faithless to them and are shifting to the Dems, regardless of what the D’s are doing in the South. “Every patriotic American has condemned the Ku Klux Klan but the president of the United States,” he points out.

Wyoming Gov. William Ross dies of complications of an appendectomy. The state doesn’t have lieutenant governors, so the secretary of state will take over until a special election, which will have an interesting result (no spoilers).

The French Academy bans the words “defeatism” and “defeatist.”

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