Today -100: November 10, 1924: Of fascisti, lodges, and building funds

British Fascisti (the not very successful group which was the first in Britain to use the name Fascist) occupy Trafalgar Square on Armistice Sunday to pre-empt Communists using the site (did they actually plan to or was this just a pretext? Dunno). BF President Brig. Gen. R. B. D. Blakeney makes a speech calling for the exclusion of aliens and a law against sedition.

Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge (R-Massachusetts) dies. Prostate.

At the annual meeting of negro Methodists at Huntington, Long Island, a group of Ku Klux Klan appear, without masks. They give $200 to the building fund and one of them makes a speech saying the Klan is not against black people, just against race-mixing. It stands for racial purity not racial oppression. So that’s okay then.

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Today -100: November 9, 1924: Of non-duels and slapping

Armistice Day in Italy (which they celebrate on the day of the armistice with Austria) was marked by clashes between Fascist militia and veterans, which in turn prompted militia Gen. Varini to challenge Giuseppe Garibaldi’s grandson Peppino to a duel. Garibaldi rejects the challenge, saying he was accusing Mussolini of funding the militias and Varini has no right to stand in for Mussolini.

“He Who Gets Slapped,” a film starring Lon Chaney and Norma Shearer, premieres. A scientist is betrayed by his wife and his friend, who slaps him in front of the whole Academy of Science. Naturally he becomes a circus clown whose act involves getting slapped. Also, there’s a lion.

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Today -100: November 8, 1924: Just governor, I guess

Irish Pres. W.T. Cosgrave announces an amnesty for political crimes committed during the Civil War.

“Ma” Ferguson continues to claim she’ll be the real governor of Texas, not a proxy for her disgraced husband: “I expect to be governor, just as any man.” Dealing with something that’s never been an issue in the US before, she decides against using the title Madame Governor: “Just governor, I guess.” Her daughter will do the “first lady” hosting stuff, while her husband will be “an interested spectator.”

With Franco-Russian relations re-established, Soviet Ambassador Christian Rakovsky takes possession of the old embassy, which has been occupied by anti-Soviet exiles for the last 7 years. His first question is where is the secret walled room where the secret documents are kept. He’s told there isn’t one – a likely story.

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Today -100: November 7, 1924: Of cabinets, empress dowagers, and legislatresses

New British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin appoints serial party-switcher Winston Churchill chancellor of the Exchequer, a position he has no particular qualifications for; Austen Chamberlain foreign secretary; Leo Amery colonial secretary; and William Joynson-Hicks, the undelightful human with the delightful nickname Jix, home secretary.

Denmark refuses Russia’s demand that it kick out Maria Feodorovna, the 76-year-old former empress of Russia (1881-94), who was born in Denmark.

The Nebraska Legislature will get its first 3 women members, two R’s and a D.

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Today -100: November 6, 1924: But one instrument

Coolidge says his victory “has been brought to pass through the work of a Divine Providence, of which I am but one instrument.”

Robert La Follette is not gracious in defeat (and why should he be?), saying “The American people have chosen to retain in power the reactionary Republican administration with its record of corruption and subservience to the dictates of organized monopoly” but “We have just begun to fight.” He’ll be dead in a few months. His running mate Sen. Burton Wheeler says the people voted for their own material gain and the “exposure of corruption in Washington apparently made no impression upon them.” The NYT is thrilled about the seeming end of the La Follette threat to the two-party system they so love. A second editorial insists that support for Fightin’ Bob in the Northeast “is not a convinced and permanent radicalism but largely a temporary discontent.”

The London Times says “The election, in short, is a vindication of the theory that the United States is under ordinary circumstances essentially a Conservative country.”

The Wisconsin Legislature will get its first women members, three of them, all Republicans.

The last state to elect a woman to its Legislature was South Carolina in 1945.

The new Chinese regime of warlord Feng Yuxiang invades the Forbidden City and kicks out former emperor Puyi, 15, stripping him of his remaining titles.

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Today -100: November 5, 1924: We must creep before we can walk

Calvin Coolidge is elected president. He is only the second veep to become president after the death of their president and then go on to be elected in their own right, the first being Theodore Roosevelt. John W. Davis gets 29% of the popular vote, the lowest of any Dem. candidate before or since – I mean, George McGovern got 37% in 1972. Davis wins every state of the Confederacy plus Oklahoma. La Follette gets 16.6% of the vote.

But the counts aren’t all in, and Davis refuses to concede, because he thinks La Follette votes will prevent Coolidge victories in the West (they won’t) and it could still be thrown into the House.

Republicans add to their majority in both houses of Congress. They will now hold 55 seats in the Senate and 246 in the House.

Al Smith is re-elected as governor of New York, with 3 points over Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who will never run for public office again. His overwhelming support in NYC did it. However the rest of the state government will be dominated by the R’s, who regain control of the State Senate, which the D’s had held by a single vote, increase their majority in the lower house, and take all the other state-wide offices.

That includes Florence E. S. Knapp, who is elected secretary of state, the first woman elected to state-wide office in NY, and the last for fifty (50!) years. She will oversee the census and hire a bunch of her relatives for the project, personally pocketing the salary of her stepdaughter, who didn’t know she was “employed” on the census. Knapp will be convicted of grand larceny and serve a 30-day sentence.

The number of women in the NY State Assembly has increased to one (1), Rhoda Fox Graves (R). There were 2 women elected in 1919, but it’s been a while. Graves will be the first woman elected to the State Senate in the ‘30s.

There will be 88 women in state legislatures.

Miriam “Ma” Ferguson (D) is elected governor of Texas with nearly 59% of the votes, as is Nellie Tayloe Ross in Wyoming, replacing her late husband. Because Ross’s is a special election to fill the remainder of his term, she’ll sneak past Ma to become the first woman governor in US history. The third woman governor in US history, Lurleen Wallace, hasn’t even been born yet. And it will be 50 years before there’s a woman governor who isn’t the wife or widow of a male governor.

Mary Norton (D) is elected to Congress from NJ, a seat she’ll hold until 1951. She’s the 5th congresswoman and the first Democratic one. During the campaign, she said women “ought not to have equal rights immediately. We must creep before we can walk.” She’ll be the sole woman in Congress until Florence Kahn (R) is elected from San Francisco in a special election next year to replace her husband Julius after he dies. And next year Edith Nourse Rogers (R) will also win a special election in Massachusetts to replace her dead husband John.

Klan-backed winners include William Pine (R) for Senate from Oklahoma; Rice “Puffed Rice” Means (R) for Senate from Colorado and Clarence Morley (R) for governor; Ben Paulen (R) for governor of Kansas; Ed Jackson (R) governor of Indiana.

Alabama votes to exempt veterans from the poll tax. California votes to allow prize fights. Massachusetts votes to allow women to occupy any state, county or city office and to change their name without losing their commission as a notary public. Oregon establishes a literacy test to vote. Texas levies a valuation tax to fund pensions for Confederate soldiers and their widows. Mandatory public school measures (i.e., banning parochial schools) fail in Washington and Michigan.

You know who didn’t vote? The 20 Rhode Island Republican state senators who fled the state in June to prevent the Senate getting anything done. I had no idea they were still in exile in Massachusetts, but they are. And RI doesn’t have absentee voting.

French composer Gabriel Fauré dies at 79.

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Today -100: November 4, 1924: Of dissension, radio, and extra naps

The state chair of the Democratic Party in Kansas says 2 party campaigners, including the president of the League of Young Democrats, were suspended by the Ku Klux Klan because of their work for the Dems. Grand Dragon Charles McBrayer (McBrayer! I know!) says they were actually suspended for “creating dissension among klansmen.”

Coolidge and Davis both give boring talks carried by a bunch of radio stations (26 for Coolidge, 11 for Davis).

Headline of the Day -100:  

“Takes extra nap” may be the most Coolidge thing ever. Or the most Biden thing.

Election day! Thus ending the 4th presidential race I’ve covered in this series! Results tomorrow.

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Today -100: November 3, 1924: Suuuuure they’ll win

Headline of the Day -100:  

Wilhelm von Hohenzollern, son of the German “crown prince” and grandson of former kaiser Wilhelm II, is part of a brawl between members of Stahlhelm, the monarchist veterans’ militia thing, and supporters of the Weimar Republic in Potsdam, although he and his fellow thugs flee after losing the struggle. Willy can, presumably, be a member of a veterans’ group even though he’s just 18 because his grandfather made him an army lieutenant at 10.

In Loup City, Nebraska, one Albert Duster is arrested for attempting to make a political, presumably election, speech in Polish, in violation of a wartime law against foreign languages.

Ohio KKK Grand Dragon Clyde Osborne blames the anti-kluxer violence in Niles on a “few hundred infuriated outsiders, largely of foreign birth” and “confessed enemies of the Republic, with the hidden forces of Sovietism and anarchy, which acknowledge no God. Now is the time for us to find out whether we are to have a free America or a country governed by mobs opposed to peaceful assemblage of law-abiding citizens.” Dude, we’re still trying to find that one out.

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Today -100: November 2, 1924: Of klarades, minority rule, creatures of foreign powers, and persuasion

The Klan parade in Niles, Ohio doesn’t come off after all. The anti-Klannies search cars, trolleys etc for people with kluxer regalia and/or weapons. The article’s unclear on who started the shooting. No one’s dead yet, but 3 are alleged to be dying. The National Guard is sent in. It bans the procession and any public assemblages and it closes the pool halls because of that whole “rhymes with P” thing.

This time it’s Attorney Gen. Harlan Stone claiming that a deadlock in the Electoral College would (somehow) lead to Davis’s running mate Charles Bryan being made president. He says such “minority control of government in a democratic country means chaos. I know of no attempt at such control comparable with this one, unless it be the minority rule of the Soviet government in distracted Russia.”

Éamon de Valera is sentenced by a Belfast court which he calls “the creature of a foreign power” to one month for entering Northern Ireland. I’m not sure from where the British home secretary’s power to ban people derives.

Headline of the Day -100:  

A little obscure here, but Fightin’ Bob says he used his senatorial franking privileges for a friend without reading what was being sent out. He is also accused of saying that the Great War was caused by “international financiers,” and we all know what that means.

The NYT says it’s been a boring presidential campaign because neither of the main parties is running a man people love to hate. So it’s been a campaign of persuasion. Boring, boring persuasion.

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Today -100: November 1, 1924: Of radio, golden streams, and non-denunciations

John W. Davis and Coolidge will both address the nation on a 23-station radio “chain” Monday, Coolidge following Davis.

Davis complains about the huge Republican slush fund (the RNC raised $3,742,962, which is the equivalent of some money, compared to the Democrats’ $552,368), but says the people will vote for a return to honest government even as R’s “pour a golden stream in every doubtful State.” So I guess Republicans liked golden showers well before Trump.

Sorry.

Not sorry.

Sen. George Wharton Pepper of Pennsylvania says if Coolidge denounced the Ku Klux Klan, he’d be breaking the law, somehow.

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Today -100: October 31, 1924: My party is up against a maximum reactionary movement

British elections: the Tories win a super-strong majority of 209, taking parliamentary seats mostly from the Liberals, who lose 3/4 of their seats; that’s them done. Party leader H.H. Asquith loses his Paisley seat to Labourite Edward Mitchell; he says he’ll stand again, but that’s him done as a member of Parliament. Labour loses 40 of its 191 seats, despite increasing its share of the popular vote.

Soon-to-be-former Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald (who does not lose his seat) sez: “My party is up against a maximum reactionary movement. Let ‘em all come.”

There will be 4 women MPs in the new Parliament, down from 8: Lady Nancy Astor, Katharine the Duchess of Atholl (who used to be an anti-suffragist and honestly still may be), Mabel Philipson, and a newcomer, Ellen Wilkinson.

Winston Churchill returns to Parliament, this time as a “Constitutionalist.”

Not a good election for sons of party leaders, the sons of Baldwin and MacDonald failing to get elected to Parliament and Lloyd George’s son Gwilyn losing his seat.

The test case on whether tax return information can be made public is tried in Cleveland, the judge ruling that it can. But many local collectors are still refusing to follow the law.

In a little Roosevelt-on-Roosevelt action, Franklin Delano R. (who used to be assistant secretary of the Navy) says Theodore R. Jr. (who also used to be assistant secretary of the Navy) sucked at the job and Navy morale has plummeted, with officers resigning, ships sinking, men deserting, etc. He says when TR Jr. testified to the Senate Teapot Dome Committee, he displayed “the most charming and complete ignorance about his job that any government official has ever displayed.” Charming and complete ignorance is the best kind of ignorance, er, probably.

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Today -100: October 30, 1924: Oh, c’mon, a mouse president would be AWESOME

Internal Revenue Commissioner David Blair orders local tax collectors to open income tax payment records to the public, but some of them are refusing.

Author Frances Hodgson Burnett dies at 74. She wrote Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess, and The Secret Garden. Er, those are three different books. She sued the producers of a play based on Little Lord F. that ran in England, establishing for the first time authors’ rights to control adaptations of their works, something Dickens tried repeatedly to do.

An explosion hits the home of Mayor H.L. Kistler of Niles, Ohio (the birthplace of William McKinley). Kistler had issued a permit for a Ku Klux Klan march for November 1st but denied one for the anti-Klan Knights of the Flaming Circle at the same time, because the Klan had firsties. Kistler & family are ok.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt says we need a man president, not a mouse president.

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Today -100: October 29, 1924: If you want to leave things as they are you must get people excited about something else

France recognizes the Soviet Union. Russian emigrés in France protest and say that if they should ever take power in Russia, they won’t recognize any agreements between France and the USSR.

The Georgia Ku Klux Klan is telling kluxers not to vote for Davis for president. The Klan paper Searchlight is claiming Davis recently called in Indianapolis for complete equality, which obviously means intermarriage. The Democrats reply that Davis obviously meant legal equality, not social equality, that would just be silly.

Attorney Gen. Harlan Stone says yeah, Congress made income tax returns public records but it’s still illegal to publish that information, and he has no idea what Congress had in mind there, so there’ll have to be a test case to punt the issue to the courts. In which any newspaper they prosecuted would presumably say, if the Justice Dept doesn’t know what’s illegal why should we? Stone says anyone who publishes returns before the test case does so at their peril.

British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald says he’s heard that the Zinoviev Letter was discussed in “a certain club in London” 4 days before the Foreign Office even heard of it, and that the clubsmen “were in a state of great jubilation ‘that the thing would come off.’” MacD still won’t say it’s definitely a forgery but he has “suspicions.” Other cabinet members, such as Colonial Sec. J.H. Thomas, are quite clear that it’s “a mean and contemptible fraud.” That’s the worst kind of fraud. The War Secretary says it will be proven a fake in a day or two. The general election is today.

George Bernard Shaw, in a speech in Luton – but for who or what? – points out the cleverness of the old governing class in always “preventing an English election from being fought on an English question” as opposed to an Irish or, in this case, Russian one. “If you want to leave things as they are you must get people excited about something else.”

The Navy secretary lifts the ban on soda pop on Navy ships.

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Today -100: October 28, 1924: Might have originated anywhere

British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald says that the Foreign Office thinks the Zinoviev Letter is real so he personally thinks it’s real but he hasn’t seen the evidence yet (he’s out in the country election-campaigning; this is a speech in Cardiff) and “so far as I know, the letter might have originated anywhere.” However, “it is a most suspicious circumstance that a certain newspaper [the Daily Mail, of course, which he later describes as “a certain London newspaper notorious for its false news,” which, you know, fair] and the headquarters of the Conservative Association seem to have had copies of it at the same time as the Foreign Office, and if that is true how can I, a simple-minded, honest person who puts two and two together, avoid the suspicion – I will not say the conclusion – that the whole thing is a political plot?” He says the Foreign Office’s letter of protest to Russia was a draft that had been prepared so it could be sent immediately if the letter were proven authentic, and it wasn’t supposed to have been sent when it was sent.

After his arrest at Newry for entering Northern Ireland, Éamon de Valera was put over the border and told not to come back. He came back, and is arrested at Derry/Londonderry.

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Today -100: October 27, 1924: Of speaking fees and forgeries

Supposedly Coolidge, last year when he was vice president, demanded $250 plus expenses to address a memorial meeting for veterans. The White House hasn’t denied the story, because it’s true. This is the man who opposes the Bonus because “patriotism can neither be bought not sold.”

Some Cabinet officers in Britain’s Labour government are saying the Zinoviev Letter is a forgery, while others are saying they just don’t know. PM Ramsay MacDonald hasn’t offered an opinion.

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Today -100: October 26, 1924: Of impudent forgeries

A Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) meeting denounces the Zinoviev Letter as an “impudent forgery,” which is the worst kind of forgery. They point out that the Z-Man supposedly signed using a job title he does not possess.

Tsao Kun resigns as president of China, a rather large country I’m mostly ignoring here.

Thomas Edison paid $9,787.83 in income tax.

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Today -100: October 25, 1924: Of crude forgeries, taxes, and exclusions

Headline of the Day -100: 

This is the “Zinoviev Letter” (full text), which is purported to be a directive from Grigori Zinoviev, the head of the Comintern, to the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), instructing it to stir up shit to put pressure on the government to ratify the trade agreement with Russia. Britain complains to Moscow. The British Secret Service (SIS) has strategically leaked the Letter to the Conservative Party, which in turn has leaked it to the Daily Mail 4 days before the general election. The Russian chargé d’affaires in London calls it a “crude forgery” and says even if it’s real Russia can hardly be held responsible for the actions of the Communist International. The Letter is indeed a forgery. It’s not very different from the sort of exhortations the Comintern routinely sends out, but the start of negotiations in April was accompanied by a moratorium on stirring shit up in Britain. Also, Zinoviev wasn’t in Moscow when he supposedly sent this letter. The CPGB claims never to have received the letter, and there is no evidence now, much less 1924, that it did. The probable source of the Letter is Vladimir Orlov, a tsarist exile and supplier of fake documents to the SIS and others from his forgery factory in Riga.

The British protest was sent by the Foreign Office “in the absence of the Secretary of State,” who happens to also be Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. He was off campaigning and did not authorize it. Deep State working against Labour? Simple mistake? The FO released the protest to the press less than 3 hours after handing it to the Russian embassy and without telling MacDonald.

The IRS makes tax payments open to public inspection, though local offices are obstructing release of the information to a greater or lesser degree. The Justice Dept confuses the situation further by asserting that publication of such information by newspapers is a crime. Nevertheless, the NYT publishes the tax paid by rich New Yorkers (plus Chicagohoovians, Angelinos, etc), noting that city and state government officials’ income is exempt from federal taxes, so their names won’t appear. Every businessman, banker etc is checking the lists already published to see if their name and tax payments have been released. Coolidge paid $6,643, John W. Davis over $84,000.

Corneliu Codreanu, head of Romania’s fascist Iron Guard, assassinates Constantin Manciu, the Jassy police chief. The story doesn’t seem to make it into the NYT, whose sole story from Romania in this period informs us that the country is adopting the metric system (spoiler alert). Codreanu will be acquitted after arguing that he shot Manciu – in the back – in self defense.

Northern Ireland arrests Éamon de Valera for... coming to Northern Ireland. In violation of an exclusion order. Specifically to Newry, where he came to speak to “my constituents” (he was elected to the UK Parliament in County Down in 1921 but didn’t take his seat) in favor of a Republican candidate.

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Today -100: October 24, 1924: Wherein is revealed what American standard of living cannot be maintained without

Pres. Coolidge gives an address “coast to coast” carried by 23 radio stations. He strongly opposes free trade: “American industry cannot exist, American wages cannot be paid, American standard of living cannot be maintained without a protective tariff.” He has nothing good to say about government spending, arguing that it needs to be slashed and taxes cut, especially for the rich: he claims that more tax can be collected from the rich at a moderate tax rate than at a high one. “I will call an agricultural conference” is where I personally checked out of reading this soporific speech.

The NYT tut tuts the rowdyism at British election meetings.

Tory leader Stanley Baldwin calls on women voters to “give themselves heart and soul to a policy of encouraging mutual trade within the empire by means of imperial preference.”

Italy: Gen. Emilio De Bono resigns as head of the Blackshirt militia. He has been accused, rightly, of using his day job as chief of police to cover up the Giacomo Matteotti assassination. Mussolini accepts what he calls De Bono’s “spontaneous” resignation and says he’ll appoint him governor of Somaliland (he won’t, but after De Bono is acquitted in a trial for the Matteotti thing, he’ll be made governor of Libya, which will not go well for Libyans).

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Today -100: October 23, 1924: Of generals and bungholes

Gen. Erich Ludendorff, who was acquitted earlier this year for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch, will run for the Reichstag, I assume representing Bavaria. Some of his admirers wanted him not to run because he belongs to the nation, not to any party (in this case a coalition party of far-right nationalists including Nazis who can’t run under the Nazi name) (which I’d like to point again isn’t a name the Nazis used).

Headline of the Day -100:  

I absolutely do not want to know what this means.

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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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