Today -100: March 11, 1925: Of non-confirmations, a city with one fewer Jew, social registers, and Savannah, can it be, justice?

The Senate confirmation vote for Charles Warren for attorney general ties at 40 to 40, and therefore fails. VP Dawes, who’d been told there wouldn’t be a vote today, arrives too late to break the tie, heh heh. Warren, considered by many to be too close to the Sugar Trust, which is maybe not a good look for a Republican Party trying to get past the corruption of the Harding years, is just the 7th Cabinet nominee rejected by the Senate in the history of the republic. The previous confirmation failure was Henry Stanbery in 1868 (he had stepped down as Andrew Johnson’s attorney general to help defend him during his impeachment trial, and was rejected when Johnson nominated him to resume the post). The most recent rejection was John Tower in 1989, the 9th ever.

Austrian-Jewish newspaper editor & novelist Hugo Bettauer, author of The City Without Jews (1922), a satire on anti-Semitism, is shot in Vienna by Nazi dentist Otto Rothstock, who didn’t like the book. Everyone’s a fucking critic. Bettauer will die 16 days later. Rothstock will plead insanity and be put in an asylum, then released a year and a half later. He died in 1990 at 86, still bragging about the murder.

Headline of the Day -100:

That “despite” is doing a lot of work here. Yes, Alice Rhinelander is included in the Social Register supplement by virtue of the marriage which her husband is trying to get out of because she might be a negro.

The Flatiron Building, you know, that triangular New York one, which was opened in 1902, is sold to an investment syndicate for something like $2 million.

The League of Nations Council responds to Germany’s conditions for joining, which are: 1) Germany gets a seat on the Council, 2) no military duties, given that Germany is disarmed, 3) no passage through Germany for troops under League orders. The Council says 1 is ok but not 2 & 3.

Astonishingly, a Savannah, Georgia jury not only convicts a white man, Lewis Lightfoot, 18, to life for murdering a black man, but sentences him to life, possibly because Lightfoot was a bootlegger who shot a customer who tried not to pay. 

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Today -100: March 10, 1925: Of presents, masks, southbound oil tycoons, and... a woman! Imagine that, a woman!

During the Senate votes on committee assignments in which the Republican leadership demotes R’s who supported La Follette, Democrats vote “present,” or possibly “present and snickering.”

Texas bans masks (as in Klan masks).

At the Teapot Dome lawsuit trial, the vice president of Standard Oil of Indiana admits that Chairman Robert W. Stewart is “southbound,” or as the NYT puts it, “safely outside the process-serving zone.” They say he’s on a super-secret super-important deal, so they had to keep his movements secret.

Headline of the Day -100:

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Today -100: March 9, 1925: Insert that Will Rogers joke here

Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposes having a permanent Democratic Party structure, instead of creating one from scratch every presidential election year.

The federal lawsuit to cancel the Teapot Dome oil leases to Harry Sinclair’s company is about to start, but process servers have been unable to find Robert W. Stewart, the chairman of the Board of Standard Oil Company of Indiana. I mean, the chair of Amoco (as it may or may not have been called yet) has disappeared for the last two months (Standard will admit tomorrow that he left the country, possibly for Mexico). A couple of other potential witnesses, Henry Blackmer, the chairman of the Midwest Refining Company, and James O’Neil, the former president of Prairie Oil & Gas, fled to France more than a year ago and are refusing to give depositions there about their role in bribing Interior Sec. Albert Fall to... facilitate... the Teapot Dome leases. Blackmer will actually stay in exile for the rest of his life, except for a brief visit in 1949. He took his companies’ books and something like $25 million with him when he absconded, leading to fines in 1928 for tax evasion, perjury, & then for contempt for his continued refusal to return to the US to face the music. He died in Geneva in 1962 at 92.

Bavaria imposes a two-year ban on Adolf Hitler giving public speeches, although he can still address private meetings.

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Today -100: March 8, 1925: What is a Republican?

Gaudenz Canova, a Socialist member of Switzerland’s National Council (the lower house of the Swiss parliament) (I just mis-typed that as Swizz, which is a lot cooler), is convicted of blasphemy for writing in Volkswacht that God is a scoundrel. His defense at trial was that you can’t blaspheme against something that doesn’t exist. He is fined 200 francs, which is the equivalent of some money.

Britain rejects a proposed mutual-protection protocol at the League of Nations, viewing it as having too many obligations. British Foreign Minister Austen Chamberlain has been discussing with French Prime Minister Édouard Herriot a German proposal for a security compact of which Germany would be a member, which Chamberlain supports, Herriot not so much.

Democratic senators as well as some of the R’s (I’m guessing the Progressives thrown off their committees) reject the Administration’s demand that Charles Warren’s nomination for attorney general be considered behind closed doors. It seems the Republicans controlling both houses of Congress will not mean Coolidge getting his own way on everything.

There’s also discussion of the Republican Committee on Committees’ demotion of senators to the bottom of Senate committees when, as William Borah points out, the Committee claims they are no longer Republicans, so how does the Committee have jurisdiction? He asks repeatedly, “What is a Republican?”

Japan’s Diet passes a “Peace Preservation Act” to ban Communist activities – organizations, discussions in meetings, bribing people to advocate Communism, etc.

There are 21,360,779 automobiles in the world, of which 17,726,507 are in the US. Of the latter, 15,525,733 are passenger cars and the rest commercial vehicles. California, NY, Ohio, and Pennsylvania each have more than 1 million cars.

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Today -100: March 7, 1925: Of colonels, top hats, and missing dogs

Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell is fired as assistant chief of the Army Air Service and demoted to colonel in retaliation for expressing his, you know, opinions about the future of air power and of battleships. Mitchell vows to continue fighting for the creation of an Air Force.

The new Cabinet meets for the first time, and are there ripples? You bet your ass there are ripples!

He says it’s ‘cause he’s going to a funeral and a diplomatic reception later.

Vice President Dawes’s dog is found, although he’s been in a fight.

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Today -100: March 6, 1925: Of banishments, goiters, and prince-presidents

Congressional Republicans demote Republicans who supported La Follette in the presidential election to lower places in their committees, declaring they are no longer Republicans.

The Roosevelt boys Kermit & Ted Jr. will go to Asia to shoot rare animals for the Field Museum in Chicago, which will pay for the expedition. There’s no hint in the story that they’ve asked permission from these countries to hunt their rare animals (and presumably the animals don’t much care for it). The brothers are especially interested in slaughtering a type of sheep mentioned by Marco Polo, but also the long-haired tiger and the... goitered gazelle?

I’ve looked it up: “goitered gazelle” is a thing.

Right-wing German nationalists are suggesting Crown Prince Wilhelm be named to replace the late Friedrich Ebert as president.

While the Kansas State Senate voted last month to allow the Ku Klux Klan to operate without a charter, the House votes against it.

Vice President Dawes’s dog runs away from home.

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Today -100: March 5, 1925: More and more American

Calvin Coolidge is sworn in as president for a term to which he was actually elected. He makes a speech declaring that the US is entering “an era of prosperity.” He doesn’t say how long an “era” is. He says that even as the US expanded its territorial holdings, entered the Great War, then withdrew from Europe “unrecompensed save in the consciousness of duty done,” we “have enlarged our freedom, we have strengthened our independence. We have been, and propose to be, more and more American. We believe that we can best serve our own country and most successfully discharge our obligations to humanity by continuing to be openly and candidly, intensely and scrupulously American.”

Breaking News

He calls, as always, for reducing government expenditure, “not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people. ... Economy is idealism in its most practical form.” Naturally, he wishes to cut taxes on the wealthy, calling high taxation “wrong. We cannot finance the country, we cannot improve social conditions, through any system of injustice, even if we attempt to inflict it upon the rich.” Well, not with that attitude, mister.  He says “The result of economic dissipation to a nation is always moral decay.” He says the “rights and duties” of property “have been revealed, through the conscience of society, to have a divine sanction.”

He insults people who break the law – he doesn’t say which laws, but he can only be talking about prohibition – as barbarians & defectives who “are not following the path of civilization, but are displaying the traits of ignorance, of servitude, of savagery, and treading the way that leads back to the jungle.”

Well, that was a fun insight into Coolidge’s thinking, which is odd in ways I can’t quite put my finger on.

Headline of the Day -100:

The president’s speech is overshadowed by the speech Vice President Charles Dawes gave earlier in the day after he was sworn in in the Senate Chamber, where he is now presiding officer (a reminder: there has been no VP for the last year and a half). He attacks the filibuster and accuses the senators of wasting time and failing in their duty. He pounds the desk and he shouts and waves his arms and wags his finger at the senators – WAGS HIS FINGER! – which I’m guessing Coolidge did not do (the NYT describes Cal as “never resorting to the dramatic”). He gets bored with administering the oath to senators a few at a time and does all the rest at once. There is much harrumphing from senators about this perceived disrespect. And now they have to deal with Dawes as their presiding officer, a position that was much more hands-on in those days than it is now. It is true that the in the dying days of the 68th Congress the Senate did not cover itself in glory, with many bills being killed by filibusters, but presumably Dawes’ biggest complaint about filibusters is that he’ll have to sit through them and we can see that he gets bored rather easily.

19 governors took part in the procession to the White House, but only Gifford Pinchot of Pennsylvania rode a horse, like God intended, wearing a sombrero, like God did not intend (I can’t find a picture that shows enough of his hat to determine if it’s actually a sombrero, and I’m suspicious about whether the NYT really knows what a sombrero is).

Film of the inauguration (there’s more horsies):

 

Mae Nolan finishes her only term as congresscritter (R-California), replacing her dead husband. She didn’t run for re-election, finding politics “entirely too masculine to have any attraction for feminine responsibilities.” In two years, she never made a speech.

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Today -100: March 4, 1925: Of extensive hook-ups, assassinations, probations, and human sacrifice

Headline of the Day -100:

Kinky.

His inaugural address will be broadcast on the radio, which is a first (if there’s a recording of it, I can’t find it). “Plans for broadcasting of the ceremonies call for a hook-up described as the most extensive yet tried.” Kinky.

Luigj Gurakuqi, Albanian minister of economy in the deposed Fan Noli government, is assassinated in Bari, Italy, where he was living in exile since the coup. His killer, Balto Stambolla (or Scamola, as the NYT puts it), is captured. He was sent by the Zog regime. He’ll be returned to Albania during World War II where he’ll be killed by his guards in 1942.

The House of Representatives votes 301 to 28 that the US should join the World Court.

A new law allows federal courts to sentence defendants to probation instead of prison.

Sir Harcourt Butler, Governor of Burma, touring the remote lands occupied by the Naga people, faces some opposition when he requests that they end slavery and human sacrifice. They say both practices have existed since time immemorial, they can’t raise their crops without slave labor, and the spirits wouldn’t like it if they stopped the sacrifices.

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Today -100: March 3, 1925: I still believe in natural beauty

Headline of the Day -100:

Plastic surgeon J. Paul Fernel tells the convention of the American Master Hairdressers’ Association, “There is no longer any excuse for not being beautiful. ... There will be no excuse for a crooked nose or a weak chin. The girl will be turned over to the plastic surgeon and all will be well.” He says Flo Ziegfeld and other impresarios will soon have “beauty choruses made to order.” (Update: Ziegfeld will respond that he can find plenty of pretty girls without anyone resorting to plastic surgery: “I still believe in natural beauty.”)

The Japanese Diet passes a bill for universal manhood suffrage, repealing the minimum-tax-paying qualification and increasing the electorate from 3 million to 19 million, excluding the homeless, “paupers,” and former prisoners. Oh, and it’s only men over 30. (I think the final bill will be far less generous).

The South Dakota Legislature rejects women jurors. (I may have mentioned this before, but NY didn’t require jury service by women, though they could volunteer for it, until the 1970s, which is why there were Twelve Angry Men).

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Today -100: March 2, 1925: America snapped it up

A federal dry agent, Orville Preuster, is blown up in his car in Niagara Falls. His friend Elmer Whitaker, who was cranking the car, is blown 40 feet away, injured, perhaps mortally. Bootleggers are suspected, but no one will ever be caught. As is often the case, the level of graphic detail in these stories is jarring: “Part of Preuster’s head was blown off and both legs were torn from the body.”

As part of his obsessive economy drive, Coolidge replaced paper cups at White House coolers with common drinking glasses, you know, one glass used by everyone. Rep. Allard Gasque (D-SC) asks if that doesn’t violate DC sanitary laws and, also, ick. Further, they’ve reduced the number of towels in the bathrooms, which might mean they aren’t being “sterilized” between users, which is also illegal.

Two Turkish women are running for the National Assembly, attempting to bring publicity to the cause of women’s suffrage (women will get the local vote in 1930, the national suffrage in 1934).

Cars in Rome will henceforth drive on the right side instead of the left. I think that’s just Rome.

French Guinea (West Africa) executes 6 medicine men (including one woman) convicted of cannibalism. They were all old, the woman saying she had hoped it would restore her youth but it didn’t so she was happy to be executed.

English inventor slash con man H. Grindell Matthews says he has sold his Diabolical Ray™ – no, wait, I guess he’s finally calling it a Death Ray. He says he gave England first chance to buy it but now “America snapped it up.” He’s no more specific than “America.” I guess this settles the fight in the Navy and Congress over whether planes or warships are the future of warfare, since Matthews claimed his ray can destroy both.

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Today -100: March 1, 1925: Of eberts, earthquakes, and Harlem

German President Friedrich Ebert dies of peritonitis several days after an appendectomy. He was 54 and is survived by wife Louise Rump (!) and some kids, including Freddie Jr., who will be mayor of East Berlin for nearly 20 years.

An earthquake is felt in New York City and a bunch of eastern states. We don’t know what it is on the Richter scale because Charlie Richter hasn’t invented it yet, and we don’t know where the epicenter was because the recording pin fell off the seismograph at Fordham. New York cops advise people to stay in their homes to prevent opportunistic burglaries.

Headline of the Day -100: 

The NYT finally notices the Harlem Renaissance (as it was not yet called), although it mostly focuses on jazz. It also points out (warns?) that some among the “swarthy races” practice a thing called “passing.”

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Today -100: February 28, 1925: Of American branches of dictatorships, speakers, and beer halls

Count Mihály Károlyi, who was president of Hungary for 4 months in 1918-19 and then fled into exile, is currently in the US. When he came last year when his wife Katalin contracted typhoid fever while in New York, the State Department imposed a condition on his visa that he not talk about Hungarian politics while in the country. Now they’re allowing him to respond at a lunch in his honor (organized by the ACLU) to attacks made on him in Hungarian newspapers about money he raised in 1914 for Hungarian separatism. His lawyers say that’s not enough. The ACLU says the US is “muzzling a foreign visitor on behalf of a foreign Government... [acting] as the American branch of the Hungarian dictatorship.”

House Republicans elect as speaker of the House Nicholas Longworth, who is married to Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter Alice.

Adolf Hitler loses a libel suit he launched against another right-winger, Otto Pittinger, for saying the Nazi movement was financed by French money. 

Odd that the NYT has that story but doesn’t mention that Hitler relaunched the no-longer-banned Nazi party yesterday. In a beer hall. Yes, that beer hall. He gives his first public speech since he was released from prison, two hours long, to a crowd of 3,000.

Joshua E. Russell, the federal prohibition director for Ohio, and 9 others, including Youngstown and Columbus politicians, are indicted for illegally withdrawing whisky from a distillery.

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Today -100: February 27, 1925: We are better off in the Philippines than a lot of people think

The House Aircraft Committee hearings continue. Rear Adm. Hilary Jones of the Navy General Board denies the claim of Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell of the Army Air Service that the Philippines could be taken in two weeks. He won’t say how long it might take but says it would require more than air power alone; “We are better off in the Philippines than a lot of people think.” The Committee also questions retired Lt. Clifford Tinker about an article he wrote blaming Congress for failing to supply helium to the dirigible Roma, which crashed in 1922 with 34 dead, but then strike his testimony from the record.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa is leaning more than it used to.

The Democratic Indiana state senators who fled the state have won: the gerrymander bill has been withdrawn. They won’t even be arrested when they return.

Charles Ponzi is convicted, again, in Boston.

A black man, Joe Airy, is lynched when he draws his gun after being surrounded by a posse after killing a Louisiana highway officer.

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Today -100: February 26, 1925: Of gerrymanders and charters

As Republicans in the Indiana State Senate attempt a gerrymander of Congressional seats, 14 Democrats flee for Dayton, Ohio to prevent a quorum being present (4 more remain in Indiana, but in hiding, I guess). The doorkeeper is to be sent to try to arrest them; he’s enlisting the Marion County Horse Thief Detective Association to find them. Indiana Republicans say the D’s can be indicted and extradited; Ohio officials say there’s no law allowing for such an extradition or for the Indiana sgt-at-arms of the General Assembly to arrest anyone in Ohio.

The Kansas State Senate votes to allow the Ku Klux Klan to operate in the state without a charter.

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Today -100: February 25, 1925: Of Desire Under the Fleurs du Mal, or something

New York City will implement “play juries,” which will determine whether plays are dirty or not. There’s a jury pool of 130 persons, I forget how it was chosen, from which juries will be picked (in secret) by the police chief. They won’t have direct enforcement powers, but if they find a play unduly salacious, Actors Equity will pull its members from the production.  District Attorney Joab Banton is trying to extricate himself from the machinery of censorship, saying he’ll no longer make announcements about individual plays, like he did about Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms,” but if any press agent uses complaints for publicity, he might retaliate by bringing their plays before the Grand Jury. The producers of “Desire” are happy that the play jury might actually see the play before making a decision on it, unlike Banton, who didn’t even bother to read it (he says he based his decision on reports from “seasoned playgoers” and others).

As NY book publishers are developing their own self-censorship program, in France the Baudelaire Society demands the retraction of the 1857 censorship of his “Fleurs du Mal.” The cops recently seized a first edition which was to be sold by auction on the grounds that it should have been destroyed 68 years ago.

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Today -100: February 24, 1925: Of reparations and over-excited actors

Con men in the occupied Rhine have been going around convincing businessmen that they work for the Allied occupation authorities and collecting “reparations.”

Headline of the Day -100:

85-year-old Fanny Weintraub, recruited from a Jewish old age home for “Salome of the Tenements.” A lost film.

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Today -100: February 23, 1925: Oh, cross/crossing, I just got that

The Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold celebrates its one-year anniversary in Magdeburg. I don’t really understand this group – largely veterans, organized along military lines to defend the Weimar Republic, but unarmed. They claim 3 million members.  Anyway, there are lots of Austrians present, and a bunch of boundary posts are burned.

The Ku Klux Klan re-enact Washington’s crossing the Delaware, in full regalia (robes, anyway, doesn’t say if they had hoods), with a red electric cross.

The ban on oysters in Chicago, spurred by that lethal typhoid outbreak, has been lifted and Chicagohoovians will no longer have to resort to oyster bootleggers, and I don’t know if that’s a real thing or a joke because, you know, Chicago.

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Today -100: February 22, 1925: Of vetoes and boycotts

Gov. Miriam Ferguson of Texas vetoes a bill allowing legislators and their families to accept free railroad tickets. It’s the historic first veto by a woman governor.

The anti-Fascist deputies who’ve been boycotting the Italian Parliament since the Matteotti assassination will resume their seats so they can be ineffective closer to the center of the power they don’t have.

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Today -100: February 21, 1925: I do not propose to be a goat

Former kaiser Wilhelm comes out against Germany having to pay reparations. Every combatant should pay its own expenses, he says.

NYC District Attorney Joab Banton has been pressuring theatre owners to rewrite or cancel “bad” plays. But after hearing that David Belasco was allowed to rewrite “The Harem” and “Ladies of the Evening” while he had been forced to withdraw “A Good Bad Woman,” William Brady says he’ll do the same and retracts his promise to cancel it. “I do not propose to be a goat.” The producers of Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms” are refusing to give in to Banton, who threatened them with the grand jury. Banton says the play is so icky no changes would suffice to make it meet his exacting standards (the only standard alluded to in the article clearly enough to be deciphered is the word “bastard,” which Banton ordered excised from one of Belasco’s productions).

Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell, assistant chief of the Army Air Service, deprecates the Navy’s claims that battleships can’t be sunk by airplanes and says the so-called test of this proposition with the Washington didn’t use real bombs, just dummies filled with sand. He proposes that he be given the battleship North Dakota to play with and says he’ll “blow it out of the water.”

The British Tory government gets Parliament to reject a Labour proposal to allow women to vote at 21 instead of 28 by promising to bring in a government bill for equal suffrage before the next general election. But the refusal of Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks (Jix to his friends, if any) to commit to that being at 21 raises suspicions because some Tories want to raise the voting age to 25.

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Today -100: February 20, 1925: Of confiscation, evolution, and fakes

Pres. Coolidge calls for ending federal inheritance taxes, saying combined with state taxes “the total burden approaches, if it is not actually, confiscation.” He says it’s socialism “under the guise of a law to collect revenue.”

The North Carolina Legislature kills a resolution against the teaching of evolution in state schools.

Charlie Chaplin is in court, suing one of his imitators, Charles Amador, who performs on film as Charles Aplin, using such Little Tramp signatures as baggy pants, under-sized derby, and the walk. Chaplin testifies that it’s the combination of these elements that creates a character who is “a symbol, a satire on humanity.” He says people have been fooled into seeing the pretender’s movies.

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