Today -100: December 17, 1924: Of binghams and prohibition

Hiram Bingham III, a former Yale (and Harvard and Princeton) professor who was elected governor of Connecticut just last month, presumably on the basis of having the most Republican-governor-of-Connecticut name, is now elected to the US Senate in a special election to replace Frank Brandegee, who committed suicide. So he’s now both governor-elect & senator-elect as well as lieutenant governor. His senatorial term won’t start until after he’s inaugurated as governor and holds his... he won’t really hold a governor’s ball, will he? He’s threatening to hold off resigning until his appointments are confirmed. Beyond his record for shortest gubernatorial term ever, Bingham is an explorer, known for having “discovered” Machu Picchu.

Attorney Gen. Harlan Stone orders an inquiry into the supposed lax enforcement of Prohibition in New Jersey.

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Today -100: December 16, 1924: Of magnetic stations, airship hook-ups, kaiser-grinches, and lynchings

The Soviet Union has discovered a brass plate stuck to a rock in the Chukchi Peninsula in eastern Siberia proclaiming the existence of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey Magnetic Station, the station presumably consisting of a rock and the magnetic recordings made by a US Coast Guard cutter. The mark threatens a $250 fine or imprisonment for removing the mark, despite it being in the, you know, Bering Strait. The Soviets, who did remove the mark, protest the “gross violation” of their sovereignty by the placement of this plate. Can’t wait to see if this escalates and am thankful they didn’t have nukes in 1924.

Headline of the Day -100:  

The 1,500-foot club.

Former kaiser Wilhelm will omit the dispensing of his customary Christmas charity this year, because he is so very poor.

A smallish mob invades the Nashville General Hospital and seizes and lynches a 15-year-old black youth who had been shot trying to hold up a grocer.

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Today -100: December 15, 1924: Of dead governors and love letters

Former New York governor Martin Glynn (1913-4) “dies suddenly” of a reported heart attack. There’s even a detailed story released about his chronic back pain acting up and he was walking around his room to relieve it but he collapsed and a doctor was called but it was too late. Actually, in reality, he shot himself in the head because of unbearable spinal pain. The first Catholic governor of NY, Glynn inherited the job after William Sulzer was impeached, leading to a couple of months in which both claimed to be governor, operating from different rooms in the executive office building, which I remember as the source of many uproarious posts here. He failed to be elected in his own right in 1914. Giving the keynote at the 1916 Democratic convention, he coined the term “He kept us out of war.”

Trotsky has supposedly been exiled to the Crimea (but he’s still minister of war?), and there are, supposedly, riots in Moscow between followers & opponents of Mr. Trotsky.

The dancer Isadora Duncan is broke and considering selling the 1,000 love letters she received in what the NYT calls “her prime.” She can’t sell her Paris houses because France won’t let her go to Paris, and her husband has gone to the Caucasus to become a bandit so he can use the experience to write poems, as one does.

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Today -100: December 14, 1924: God bless our American institutions

American Federation of Labor president for 38 years Samuel Gompers dies at 74. His last words: “God bless our American institutions. May they grow better day by day.” Many tributes pour in, none acknowledging that “Gompers” is an objectively silly name.

Objectively silly.

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Today -100: December 13, 1924: Of tsars

There’s some dissent in the surviving members of the Romanov dynasty over Grand Duke Cyril declaring himself true Tsar of All the Russias. The Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna is especially miffed because, hey, her son Tsar Nicholas and the other royals might still be alive. Cyril’s wife the Grand Duchess Victoria Feodorovna will be touring the US soon, which will be a big deal for Russian exiles and will be ignored by the US government.

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Today -100: December 12, 1924: Of cabinets and anti-Semites

Representatives of the British, French and Italian governments will meet German Prez Ebert and Chancellor Marx to warn against the sort of nationalist Cabinet Stresemann is trying to impose.

Anti-Semitic riots at the University of Jassy, Romania cause the authorities to close the U., as was the custom.

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Today -100: December 11, 1924: If the white people do not want to degenerate....

German Chancellor Wilhelm Marx and his Cabinet will resign after he fails to put together a new post-election coalition. Marx wants to include more Socialists but Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann’s People’s Party wants a shift to the right, bringing in monarchist nationalist opponents of the Weimar Republic.

Japan is pissed that Britain plans to expand its naval base in Singapore. It doesn’t believe this is just about defending Australia.

Yotaro Sugimura, the Japanese delegate to the Opium Conference, pulls out, despairing at the deadlock. He says the greatest danger from opium is to the white races rather than the Orientals. The Japanese are the only Orientals not dominated by the West, because they don’t use opium. “If the white people do not want to degenerate, they must suppress drugs.”

There’s so much competition in the hangman trade now, at least in Manitoba, that the fee has been reduced from $250 to $100. Free market, baby!

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Today -100: December 10, 1924: To arms

The US accepts the League of Nations’s invitation to join in its conference on controlling the arms trade in May.

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Today -100: December 9, 1924: Of explosions and corsets

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.

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Today -100: December 8, 1924: Of German elections and negligible cranks

In the German Reichstag elections, the center parties do all right and the two extremes quite badly. Don’t get used to it. The moderate bourgeois DDP, DVP, Zentrum and BVP gain a few seats, but the Social Democrats (SPD) increase their vote from 20.5% to 26%. The Communist (KPD) vote drops from 12.9% to 9% and the coalition of Nazi & anti-Semitic Völkisch parties drop from 6.5 to 3%. The results could also be read as a strong victory for the Dawes Plan.

Izvestia asks George Bernard Shaw for his opinions on Russia. They may have asked the wrong dude. In his response, which he also sent to the Daily Herald, almost as if he thinks Izvestia might not print it, he suggests abolishing the Communist International since “the proposition that the world should take its orders from a handful of Russian novices who seem to have gained their knowledge of modern socialism by sitting over a drawing room stove and reading of the pamphlets of liberal revolutionists of 1848-70 makes even Lord Curzon and Mr. Winston Churchill seem extreme modernists in comparison.” Ouch. Until Socialism is treated as a living force “there will be nothing but misunderstandings in which the dozen most negligible cranks in Russia will correspond solemnly with the dozen most negligible cranks in England, both of them convinced that they are the proletariat and the revolution and the future and the International and God knows what else.”

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Today -100: December 7, 1924: We will not let them meddle in our political life

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:  

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Today -100: December 6, 1924: My past actions speak for themselves

The Italian Senate votes confidence in Mussolini 206-54, with 35 abstaining, a weaker showing than a few months ago. He refuses to make any pledges: “My past actions speak for themselves and clearly indicate the line I propose to follow.” He claims to have suppressed all illegalities, reined in his party’s excesses, restored Parliament, and he says he doesn’t need to do anything about the militia (Blackshirts) because there’s like eight of them.

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Today -100: December 5, 1924: Of plots

Lord Allenby, High Commissioner of Egypt, warns the British Cabinet that Egyptian nationalists have a plot to assassinate them. They’re getting armed cops for protection.

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Today -100: December 4, 1924: Of states of unions, non-Mongolians, and greed

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”.

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Today -100: December 3, 1924: Of immigration, tax returns, and Communist coups

Brazil will follow the US in banning Japanese immigration (in a few days it will change this to banning all immigration, just to show they weren’t being racist).

The federal court in Kansas City rules that newspapers may print tax return figures.

One day after the attempted Communist uprising in Estonia, 20 or 30 (depending on whether the sloppy NYT’s headline or its article is accurate) (tomorrow’s paper says 7) are tried by court-martial and executed.

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Today -100: December 2, 1924: Of coups, chambers, and good accounts

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”.

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Today -100: December 1, 1924: First the dance hall, then the gambling hell, then the vice resort...

The Egyptian government accepts the rest of Britain’s demands, including preserving the powers of British financial and judicial “advisers.”

German Minister of the Interior Karl Jarres bans wireless broadcasts of election speeches, leaving the radio “reserved for higher things in life and unsullied by political strife.”

Chicago Mayor William E. Dever complains about newspaper criticism of his focus on suppressing gambling, booze running, and other vice, going full after-school special: “In them the criminal gets his schooling. First the dance hall, then the gambling hell, then the vice resort, and by that time there is a desire for money, and the only way to get it is to take a gun and go out and hold up a respectable citizen.” He also complains about the positive coverage of the late florist-mobster Dion O'Banion.

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Today -100: November 30, 1924: Of bedtime stories, leper churches, ponzis, and Puccini

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.

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Today -100: November 29, 1924: Of mutinies and mandates, legal whites and princes

A couple companies of the Sudanese army mutiny and attack the military hospital in Khartoum, killing a British doctor and 2 Syrian orderlies. This has something to do with Britain forcing out their Egyptian officers. What that has to do with a hospital is unclear. Sudanese are being killed and the hospital is under siege. Meanwhile, British soldiers have been marching around Cairo, pissing on stuff to mark their territory, probably.

Former PM Ramsay MacDonald suggests asking the League of Nations to give Britain a mandate over the Sudan.

Alice Rhinelander will fight husband Leonard’s annulment suit by denying having any negro blood and asserting that she is legally – yes, “legally” – white since her mother is white. Her lawyer says her father didn’t notice that a clerk had designated him negro on his naturalization application form, which he – according to the lawyer – isn’t.

The princes of the various German states (Prussia, Bavaria, Hanover, etc) supposedly have made a secret agreement to overthrow the Weimar Republic and resume their thrones, burying their past differences.

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Today -100: November 28, 1924: Of blackshirts, duels, and heresy

In Cairo, the British military arrests 3 (4?) Egyptian aides to former PM Zaghul, including his under-secretary of the interior, for conspiracy against British officials, which makes you wonder about the so-called independence of Egypt. After some inter-governmental kerfuffle, they are handed over to the Egyptian authorities, who are supposed to do something to them, put them on trial or shoot them, I dunno.

Gen. Italo Balbo resigns as Commander-in-Chief of the Blackshirts because of that letter leaked of him ordering Bolgna Fascists to beat up Communists. Mussolini accepts, but it won’t particularly impact Balbo’s rise in the Fascist Party. He remains a deputy, and will soon be put in charge of the Italian air force and later governor-general of Libya. He’ll combine those two when his plane, flying into Libya during World War II, is accidentally shot down by his own side.

Incidentally, Balbo was the guy who earlier this month challenged Garibaldi’s son to a duel. And in Hungary, István Horthy, son of the Regent/Dictator, is sentenced to 4 days in jail for a duel. He’ll also die in a plane accident during the war.

Kamenov and Stalin’s denunciation of Trotsky, which they’ve been circulating among Party leaders, is released to the general public. Stalin accuses Trotsky of “heresy” to Bolshevism and of being a Menshevik. Note that Trotsky is still War Minister.

Speaking of heresy, there’s a debate within the Republican Party over whether to welcome back congresscritters who supported La Follette for president.

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