The building of the Coffeyville Kansas Ku Klux Klan newspaper The Daily Dawn is blowed up real good. It miiiiiiight be a gas leak. The explosion happened “early today,” but was it at dawn?
Headline of the Day -100:
Bruce Bruce-Porter, which is exactly the sort of name you’d expect in a doctor with strong opinions about rubber corsets.
The French police arrest 300 Communists, 70 of them foreigners who will be deported. Sounds like a lot of those are refugees from fascist Spain and fascist Italy; none are Russian. Prime Minister Édouard Herriot tells the Chamber of Deputies that the government “will defend the democratic republic against both the Clerical peril and the Communist peril which are threatening it in opposite directions but with the same methods of agitation.” He says of the foreign Communists: “They are indulging in political demonstrations, and we will not tolerate it, we will not let them meddle in our political life.”
Headline of the Day -100:
It’s State of the Union time (still not called that, not for another decade). Coolidge doesn’t deliver it in person this time. He says “every American should be satisfied with the present state of the Union.” He wants Congress to pass the tax cut they failed to pass in June. Why, he says, if taxes on the wealthy were “scientifically revised downward,” they might actually yield more revenue while stimulating investment. He has nothing much other than that, just joining the World Court and a lot of vague aspirations not attached to any proposed legislation.
Russia reduces the size of its military to 562,000.
After a minister refused to perform her marriage because it is illegal in Montana for Chinese people to marry white people, Evelyn Kendall Moy says, or her foster parents the Moys say, she’s actually white, born to Canadians.
René Clair’s short film “Entr’acte” premieres, as does Erich von Stroheim’s extremely not-short film “Greed”.
Estonia quickly crushes an attempted Communist coup, which was ordered by the Soviet Union. The coup is partly a response to last month’s trial of 149 Communists, which, however, removed many of the people who might have done a better job organizing a coup (one, Jaan Tomp, was executed).
Frenchwomen are made eligible to their first public body: the Chambers of Commerce.
“Lady, Be Good!,” a musical comedy by George & Ira Gershwin, their first Broadway show, is playing at the Liberty. The NYT review praises Adele Astaire’s performance, adding that her brother “Fred Astaire, too, gives a good account of himself”.
The mutinying Sudanese soldiers surrender.
Federal prohibition agents in Seattle are prevented by a court order from destroying a radio station broadcasting bedtime stories they claim were coded messages to bootleggers in Canada and Japan.
The only Protestant church for lepers in the US opens in Carville, Louisiana at the leper colony there (James Carville’s ancestors were in the leper biz).
Charles Ponzi is arrested by Immigration, who intend to deport him because when he first entered the US from Canada he failed to mention his conviction there for forgery. The question now is whether Canada would accept his being deported there or whether it’ll have to be Italy. It will actually take another decade for him to be deported. (Mea culpa: there was a mistrial in Massachusetts sometime after he was released from federal prison in August which I missed).
Composer Giacomo Puccini (La bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and the uncompleted Turandot) dies at 65 of throat cancer.
Charlie Chaplin, 35, marries his second wife, Lita Grey, 16, in Mexico. And yes, she’s pregnant. And yes, they’re doing it in Mexico to avoid possible statutory rape charges. And while there is indeed quite an age difference, his 4th wife, Oona O’Neil, hasn’t even been born yet.
Coolidge invites Charles Dawes to sit in on Cabinet meetings when he becomes vice president in March, as Coolidge did when he was veep, but Dawes declines. We don’t know why.
The Slovak, German, Hungarian and Ruthenian deputies in the Czech Parliament walk out in protest at infringements on their language, school, and property rights. The Slovaks claim there is no such thing as a Czechoslovakian nation.
The first Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, which they’re calling the Big Christmas Parade, will be tomorrow. Unless it rains, in which case it’ll be Friday. Animals & costumes & clowns but no giant balloons. What’s the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade without Snoopy?
Headline of the Day -100:
Lord Allenby, the British High Commissioner of Egypt, presents Saad Zaghlul, the Egyptian prime minister, with a note containing numerous demands in response to the assassination of Sir Lee Stack, the British governor-General of Sudan: a £500,000 fine, an “ample” apology, punishment of those responsible (the assassins have been arrested, presumably after this note was written), a ban on political demonstrations, the withdrawal of Egyptian troops from the Sudan within 24 hours, something about increased irrigation for cotton in the Gezira province of Sudan, and a bunch of other stuff. The Brits are exploiting the situation for all it’s worth and then some. The note says the murder “holds up Egypt as at present governed to the contempt of civilized peoples.” It calls the government “directly responsible” for the assassination, for which it is certainly not directly responsible, because of its “campaign of hostility to British rights and British subjects... founded upon a heedless ingratitude for benefits conferred by Great Britain”.
Arkansas Gov.-Elect Tom Terral says the Democratic Party won’t win national elections if it keeps talking about the Klan. Or, to put it another way, Terral is a member of the Klan.
The Soviet admin is circulating to various army, union etc committees a censure of Leon Trotsky for undermining Leninism.
The Italian Chamber of Deputies (which the opposition parties are boycotting) votes 337-17 for a motion of confidence in Mussolini’s domestic policy (they voted for his foreign policy last week).
Headline of the Day -100:
The test case on income tax publicity begins. A grand jury indicts the Baltimore Daily Post, part of the Scripps chain, which supported La Follette for president. The NYT story rather cheekily repeats the names and tax amounts from the story for which the Post is being prosecuted.
Baron Hans von Ringhausen, a German pilot shot down during the Great War, arrives at Omaha, Nebraska to marry Bertha Wendell, sister of Charles Cummings, the American pilot who shot him down. She was a Red Cross nurse who nursed him back to health. If this (front-page) story sounds made-up to you, it probably is. At any rate Cummings, who appeared in Omaha a few months ago, will shortly vanish, along with the money of everyone who invested in his furniture polish company or sold polish for it. Presumably the sister and the “baron” will also depart.
The Inyo County water insurgents release the LA Aqueduct water.
Gandhi telegrams the opium conference, calling for the suppression of opium traffic.
Headline of the Day -100:
But then he would say that, wouldn’t he?
George Bernard Shaw gives the first of a series of broadcasts of his work on the BBC, reading his play “O’Flaherty, V.C.,” doing all the voices and even a bit of singing. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a recording of this?
Sir Lee Stack, the British Governor-General of Sudan and Sirdar (that’s like commander-in-chief) of the Egyptian Army, is wounded, and will die tomorrow, after bombs and bullets are directed at his automobile in Cairo by 7 students, who escape, for the time being.
At the world opium conference in Geneva, the US proposes limiting the production of opium and coca to the amount required for medical and scientific purposes, and banning heroin altogether. There are details, which are obviously unworkable.
The British Columbia Legislature votes for whipping drug traffickers.
Headline of the Day -100:
For just a second I had a very different image in my mind of what “tong heads” might be. Possibly bad guys in “The Tick.”
The Philippine Legislature, in its alter ego as the Philippine Commission of Independence, adopts a resolution for “immediate, absolute and complete independence.”
Mary Kolus’s divorce suit is rejected in a Trenton court because her husband being jailed for life for murder doesn’t meet the legal definition of desertion. The court also rejected her charge of infidelity as not proven, despite his conviction being for murdering the husband of his lover.
