Today -100: February 17, 1925: O Klanada

The Ku Klux Klan applies for incorporation in Canada.

(Update: the application will be rejected and the Klan mothership in Atlanta will deny knowledge of these kluxers).

Bavaria lifts the ban on the Nazi Party imposed after the Beer Hall Putsch. It’s still banned at the federal level.

There is opposition in the South African Parliament to the government’s Colour Bar Bill, no details of which are revealed by the NYT.

The new program of theatre censorship in Cincinnati takes its first scalp, with police ordering the Shubert to remove posters for “The Passing Show” which showed the actresses striking poses. STRIKING POSES!

Addison Procter, 86, the last surviving delegate to the 1860 Republican convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln, gave a bunch of speeches on Lincoln’s birthday, then dropped dead.

Also dead: Edwin Harper Sampson, 82, the last survivor of the squad that buried John Wilkes Booth... somewhere. The location of that grave goes with Sampson to his own grave.

NY Republicans and Democratic Governor Al Smith both want to extend the term of governors from 2 years to 4, but R’s want to do it starting in 1928 and Smith wants gubernatorial elections to take place in even, non-presidential-election years so that state issues will dominate the elections.. Smith also wants to make the offices of secretary of state, state treasurer and state engineer, which are now elective, appointive.

The first issue of The New Yorker appears.

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Today -100: February 16, 1925: Doomed, I tells ya!

Filibusters threatened in the Senate! The French spoliation claims and the Isle of Pines Treaty are doomed! Doomed!

The nomination of Charles Warren, Sugar Trust lawyer extraordinaire, as attorney general is in trouble.

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Today -100: February 15, 1925: Of nominations and reverse-impeachments

Coolidge nominates Frank Kellogg, the ambassador to Great Britain, to be secretary of state, and William Jardine to be AgSec. Kellogg’s education ended before high school.

Cal also names George Parks the next governor of Alaska. Unlike every previous governor, he actually lives there. He’s a mining engineer, currently the Assistant Supervisor of Surveys of Public Lands for Alaska, but he had the luck to have shown Pres. Harding around on the Alaska wing of his last, fatal tour and made an impression with Harding’s entourage. No one is more surprised by the appointment than Parks.

Former Texas Gov. James Ferguson rejects the idea of a constitutional amendment to reverse his impeachment, because it would be expensive and would take place in the summer. No, he thinks the state senate should “resolve itself into a court” and undo the impeachment (which would allow him to run for state office again).

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Today -100: February 14, 1925: Of pardons, treasonable and seditious offences, and short people

Although the Texas State Senate passed a pardon for the impeachment of former governor James Ferguson, husband of the current governor, the attorney general says they can’t do that, it would require a constitutional amendment.

The Irish Free State’s Dáil Éireann considers a Treasonable and Seditious Offences Bill adding forty (40) crimes, six (6) carrying the death penalty. The latter include levying war on the Free State or harboring people doing so. Other crimes: trying to “overawe” MPs or the governor-general, calling oneself president or any other such title, belonging to secret societies in the police or military, etc.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Cue Randy Newman song.

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Today -100: February 13, 1925: Noble reasonableness is the best kind of reasonableness

Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes tells the Lincoln Birthday Dinner that the US’s position in the world, free of commitments and entanglements, is noble reasonableness.

Theatrical censorship in Cincinnati, hitherto the job of the mayor’s secretary Newbold Pierson, which is a very theatre-censory name, will now be exercised by 9 people whose names will be secret, even from each other: 3 women, a minister, a lawyer, a broker, a banker, a businessman, and a doctor. They will attend all first nights and decide if there’ll be a second night, but hey, free theater tickets. They will “pay particular attention to the exposure of bare legs and the employment of suggestive lines and situations.”

The Italian National Council of Women protests the decision to refuse women the vote even in municipal elections (which must have slipped past me).

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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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