Today -100: February 12, 1925: Stand back there, you coyotes

A performance of Barry Conners’ farce “Hell’s Bells” at Wallack’s Theatre on Broadway is interrupted when Eddie Garvie, finding he’d left his stage gun in his dressing room, picks up another gun, which he discovers to be filled with real bullets when he shoots Clifton Self in the arm (nearly taking out Shirley Booth) while shouting his line “Stand back there, you coyotes!” The police arrest Garvie (for having an unlicensed gun, actually the property of the stage carpenter, not for shooting a dude; he’ll be acquitted) but allow him to finish the play, which resumes after 20 minutes (Self wasn’t due to appear after that point anyway). Humphrey Bogart is in this production, but is not mentioned in the article. The play’s run will conclude in May.

The Irish Free State Dáil Éireann bans itself from considering any future bills legalizing divorce.

Greece appeals to the League of Nations against Turkey’s expulsion of the Greek Orthodox Church’s Patriarch Constantinos from Constantinople. Turkey says the expulsion does not violate the Lausanne Treaty and is purely a domestic matter.

I see in the entertainment ads that there’s a movie version of the play “Charley’s Aunt” starring Syd Chaplin, Charlie’s brother, which I’d never heard of, much less seen. Evidently it’s “The World’s Funniest Motion Picture.”

Headline of the Day -100:

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Today -100: February 11, 1925: Typhoid oysters are the worst kind of oysters

Coolidge reduces the cost of his inauguration of just a few thousand dollars, so a lot of donations are gonna have to be returned. There probably won’t even be fireworks.

The feds think they’ve tracked “typhoid oysters” to a company on Long Island. The oysters were kept in polluted waters. The feds think oysters are safe now, if people feel like a gamble. Something like 150 people died, which is still the most lethal outbreak of food-borne illness in the US.

Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson shows up in Parliament wearing a “startling” green dress, which is evidently a big deal. At some point this week she will rise to speak without wearing a hat, and that’ll be a big deal too.

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Today -100: February 10, 1925: Of internationals, non-uprisings, and wheelers

The Italian Fascists consider establishing a Fascist International.

Stalin gives what is supposedly his first-ever press interview. He pooh-poohs the idea that Germany is ripe for a Communist uprising. That would require the German workers shifting from socialism to Communism, some sort of economic crisis, and something going wrong in the nations (France) opposed (France) to Germany to prevent them intervening.

NY politician Everett P. Wheeler dies at 84. He once ran for governor, but is best-known for his long opposition to women’s suffrage and his frequent letters to the editor. Here he is deploring the 1912 NYC suffrage parade: 

And so 20,000 women paraded down Fifth Avenue to the sound of the trumpet and in the glare of the electric lights.  Did their leaders really think that any sensible man likes to have his wife, or his mother, or his daughter thus parade the streets?  It seems to me that this parade is one of the strongest arguments against universal suffrage for women that has yet been presented.  It shows such a failure to adopt means reasonable to a desired end that it destroys the confidence any of us may have had in the good sense and sound judgment of the leaders of this movement.

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Today -100: February 9, 1925: Of debts

Britain offers to forgive 2/3 of France’s wartime debt to it.

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Today -100: February 8, 1925: Dino Fight! Dino Fight!

Nepal’s Maharajah Tribhubana Bir Bikram issues a decree to abolish slavery and free the country’s 51,000 slaves. Wait, actually he made this speech more than two months ago, but news of it has only just now reached India and from there the rest of the world.

Rep. Mary Norton (D-NJ) tells a meeting of the National Democratic Club that her husband isn’t thrilled about her being in Washington. Elizabeth Marbury introduced her thus: “She is not hard, dried-up and vindictive, but possesses that rarest combination, the heart of a woman and the brains of a man.” Oy.

The Williamson County, Illinois Board of Supervisors votes for a “peace plan” for Herrin’s Klan-anti-Klan war, including the literal exile of Sheriff George Galligan and the revocation of the gun permits that have been handed out profligately. The kluxers aren’t happy about losing their guns.

The Lost World, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel, premieres in New York. It’s the first dinosaur movie. Wallace Beery is rather more beardy than I pictured Prof. Challenger when I read the book, and it’s impossible to watch him silently bellowing without imagining the voice of Brian Blessed. The special effects are... what they are.

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Today -100: February 7, 1925: Of opium, radium, jixes, and coal

The US delegates quit the Opium Conference after opium-producing countries refuse to agree to the US’s plans to limit production, saying it’s more of a demand-side problem.

Headline of the Day -100:

British Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks (Jix to his friends, if any) tells a Jewish deputation objecting to the registration of long-time immigrants, delays in naturalization, and deportations based on petty shit, that Britain has the right to exclude any aliens it wants, just like the US does with its racist anti-Asian laws. He hastens to add that he is “not in any sense an anti-Semite.” Indeed he is an anti-Semite in every sense (see David Cesarani, “The Anti-Jewish Career of Sir William Joynson-Hicks,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 24, No. 3, 1989).

For a few days, the NYT has been making fun of the Reformed Seventh Day Adventists, a small church on Long Island, whose prophetess predicted the world would end yesterday -100. It did not. The organizer of the group, Catherine Kennedy, even laid in a ton of coal. “She did not say to what use the ton of coal would be put if the prophecy was fulfilled.”

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Today -100: February 6, 1925: Where he will doubtless gather moss

Harlan Fiske Stone is confirmed as Supreme Court justice 71-6.

France recently amnestied some WW I army deserters, so Paul Grappe comes forward to claim his amnesty. He deserted in November 1914 and has been living as a woman since then. He says he’s tired of wearing women’s clothes.

The USSR will purge the military of active Trotskyites but soldiers who are just Trotsky sympathizers will merely be transferred.

As the 69th Congress winds down, a bunch of bills die from lack of time, including the measure to join the World Court. And some farm stuff.

Outgoing Congresscritter J. Scott Wolff (D-Missouri) is arrested for verbally abusing a black bellboy, claiming he gave the wrong change. Wolff is a dentist and a lawyer.

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Today -100: February 5, 1925: The Malice of Mortimer

The Senate will consider the Supreme Court nomination of Harlan Fiske Stone in open session.

Former director of the Veterans’ Bureau Charles Forbes and contractor John Thompson are sentenced to 2 years in prison and fined $10,000. Forbes and Thompson claim to be the victim of the “malice of Mortimer,” the informer Elias Mortimer, who was a middleman in the bribe deal and claims Forbes slept with his wife.

VP Charles Dawes finally explains why he refused Coolidge’s offer to sit in on Cabinet meetings: the president should only have people there who he trusts, so establishing a precedent that veeps sit in the Cabinet might prove embarrassing for a future president who doesn’t trust his veep.

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Today -100: February 4, 1925: Undesirable

Headline of the Day -100:

A bill before the Indian Legislative Assembly would treat as inferior races all countries that treat Indians as an inferior race. Meaning the United States, of course. And Japan, working on legalizing land ownership by foreigners, is considering whether it’s practical to exclude from that right people from US states that ban Japanese people owning land.

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Today -100: February 3, 1925: Of serums and amnesties

Well, the dog-sleds with the diphtheria antitoxic finally reach Nome, but it’s frozen solid.

Prussian Minister-President (prime minister) Otto Braun resigns again, after failing to construct a coalition or at least get neutrality from the People’s Party.

The USSR amnesties those who fought on the other side in the Civil War. In the Northern Caucasus anyway. The government says they’ve all realized their mistake.

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Today -100: February 2, 1925: The glory that was Hapsburg is gone

Headline of the Day -100:  

The second Edwin James front-page article in two days shitting on Austria.

A blizzard prevents the dog-sleds carrying diphtheria antitoxic reaching Nome, Alaska.

Sears, Roebuck & Co. open their first store, in Chicago, 33 years after starting life as a mail-order company.

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Today -100: February 1, 1925: Of patriarchs and man’s faith in his superiority

Greece protests Turkey’s expulsion from Constantinople of the Greek Orthodox Church’s Patriarch Constantinos, saying it’s a treaty violation. Greece implicitly threatens war by not releasing the 1923 class of conscripts.

Headline of the Day -100:  

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Today -100: January 31, 1925: Of fraud, renegades, and bananas

Former director of the Veterans’ Bureau, Charles Forbes, the biggest crook in the Harding Administration, is convicted, along with contractor John Thompson, of defrauding the government in contracts for vets’ hospitals.

Coolidge supports the Congressional Republican decision not to allow supporters of La Follette in the 1924 election back into the caucus. Fiorello La Guardia is particularly defiant.

Otto Braun (Social Democrat) is back as Minister-President (prime minister) of Prussia after the (Catholic) Zentrum Party fails to come to a coalition agreement with the right-wing and fascist parties.

Honduras will ban black immigrants. Banana companies have been using them to undercut wages. It doesn’t say where they’re importing them from.

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Today -100: January 30, 1925: But mostly the assassination thing

New York City Comptroller/Controller Charles L. Craig has been feuding with mayors for 8 years because he is an obnoxious petty little bitch (here’s his 1935 obituary). Anyway, at a Sinking Fund Commission meeting, he tries to have NY Mayor John Hylan arrested for disorderly conduct (i.e., calling him a liar). Hylan’s bodyguard declines Craig’s order to arrest him.

Before sending Trotsky to southern Russia for his, um, health, after firing him as war minister, Stalin has all his papers confiscated.

Albania keeps trying to get foreigners to come and be king. The latest to turn them down: Sir Charles Edward Archibald Watkin Hamilton (that’s just one person, I think) and Lord Rowland George Allanson Allanson-Winn Headley (probably 3 or 4 people). Headley, whose title is Irish, is the president of the British Moslem Society. He notes that the monarch position has no salary “and the almost certainty of assassination.” Also, they didn’t meet his financial terms.

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Today -100: January 29, 1925: Oh I think it made some difference

The president of the British Optical Association, W.R. Baker, warns against eyestrain from doing crossword puzzles.

Harlan Fiske Stone’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee is held in open session. He answers questions about the DOJ prosecution of Sen. Burton Wheeler for “conspiracy,” including why a 2nd prosecution was in DC when the first was in Montana, where all the witnesses are. The NYT, at least, is entirely satisfied with Stone’s answers, asserting, “Whether the man whose prosecution he thought necessary was a Senator or a colored janitor made no difference to him.”

Nome, Alaska has a diphtheria outbreak. Antitoxin is being rushed there by dog sled. Should take a couple of weeks. 

Gloria Swanson marries Henri, the Marquis de la Falaise, her translator on “Madame Sans-Gêne,” a lost film which is being shot in France. This is the 25-year-old Swanson’s third marriage, but by no means her last.

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Today -100: January 28, 1925: Of child labor

The Constitutional Amendment permitting Congressional regulation of child labor has now been defeated by enough states that it cannot be ratified. Arguments against: it goes against states’ rights; it goes against parental rights; kids are perfectly well protected already; cotton mills need child labor; farms need child labor.

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Today -100: January 27, 1925: A Harlan Stone gathers no... no, that doesn’t really work, does it?

The Senate, in a secret session, an hour of which was spent complaining about all the leaks from the last secret session, which we know because of, you know, leaks, sends Harlan Fiske Stone’s Supreme Court nomination back to the Judiciary Committee. He will be called before the committee to explain his indictment of Sen. Burton Wheeler. It will be the first time a nominee to the Court ever had to testify, which is why we don’t know if the first 72 justices liked beer.

Coolidge wants the budget reduced to $3 billion, with all the savings going to tax cuts.

The Texas Senate rejects ratification of the Amendment to the US Constitution allowing Congress to regulate child labor, by a vote of 19 to 2.

Arthur Conan Doyle is opening a psychic bookshop. Near Westminster Abbey.

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Today -100: January 26, 1925: Of shoot-outs and immunity

Remember Herrin, Illinois, the location of so much Klan-related violence and nonsense last year? A shoot-out takes the lives of 6, evenly from both sides I think, including Glenn Young, the man employed by the Klan as a dry-raider who was briefly chief of police (I don’t think I knew at the time that that was during a day when the real chief of police had been kidnapped), and Deputy Sheriff Ora Thomas, the head of the anti-Klux faction, who shoot each other to death. It’s not clear which side fired first.

Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone is messing up his nomination to the Supreme Court by pursuing an obviously partisan, groundless conspiracy prosecution of Sen. Burton Wheeler, who led the investigation of the Teapot Dome scandal. Stone has offered to allow Wheeler to testify and to have his own witnesses at the DC Grand Jury – if, and only if, he waives his congressional immunity.

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Today -100: January 25, 1925: Of eclipses, the moral opinion of the community, wide-bottom trousers, earls, and torrios

There’s an eclipse. Which is evidently a huge deal. Someone needs to hurry up and invent television.

Pres. Coolidge repeats his support for the US joining the World Court. He says the Court doesn’t even need a military to enforce its decrees because it can do so through “intelligence of the mass of individuals and the moral opinion of the community.” Sure, let’s try that.

Coolidge also expresses his opinion on wide-bottom trousers, which college men are wearing these days, and he does not approve. DOES NOT APPROVE.

Former Prime Minister Herbert Asquith is made an earl, the first Earl of Oxford and Asquith, which is another way of saying he’s given up on leading the Liberals back into power, which he can’t do from the House of Lords. Or from the Commons, where he lost his seat at the last election.

Chicago mob boss Johnny Torrio is shot five times in front of his home, a week after being convicted of Prohibition law crimes. This will precipitate his decision to retire, for a time anyway.

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Today -100: January 24, 1925: Covering his Butt

Prussian Minister-President (prime minister) Otto Braun and his cabinet resign, despite still holding a majority of the Diet, under an onslaught from the Communists and the Monarchists.

There’s a military coup in Chile, as was the custom.

A visiting British theatrical producer says American plays need a censor to curb their “daring outspokenness.” That producer: Sir Alfred Butt.

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