Lord Curzon, former viceroy of India, foreign secretary, and co-president of the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage, dies at 66. I guess the NYT is right that he would have been prime minister but by the time he reached that stage in his career prime ministers no longer came from the House of Lords. Eventually the Tories changed the law to allow inherited lords to renounce their titles and seats in the House of Lords so that Alec Douglas-Home could become PM (1963-4).
The Dáil Éireann, working on a treason bill, votes to impose 5 years in prison for failure to inform the authorities of designs against the state (“designs against the state” is a fun thing to say in a bad Irish accent). Justice Minister Kevin O’Higgins says odium should no longer attach to informers in a state based on universal suffrage.
Coolidge increases Herbert Hoover’s power at the Commerce Dept, again, by moving the Patent Office to it from Interior.
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Charles Warren declines Coolidge’s offer of a recess appointment to be attorney general after he lost two confirmation votes. While the NYTsays “The White House raised the white flag in its fight with the Senate” (“Now that he has allowed the Senate to taste blood, what Presidential policies it will next set out to devour no man can foretell”, it’s not clear whether the decision was really Warren’s or Coolidge’s.
Coolidge immediately nominates John Garibaldi Sargent, a former Vermont attorney general (1908-12) and a partner in the law firm of Coolidge’s cousin. He and Cal were childhood friends. The Senate immediately confirms him by voice vote. Without hearings or, I have to assume, knowing much of anything about Sargent, whose work until now has been confined to Vermont.
At the Supreme Court hearings on Oregon’s anti-parochial-school measure, the state keeps mentioning the “conditions” prevailing in Oregon as a reason for the federal government to butt out, without ever specifying what those conditions are.
The British Fascisti deny kidnapping Harry Pollitt to keep him from his conference, but say it might have been members of theirs, who even knows. In Parliament, Home Sec. Joynson-Hicks admits that the stationmaster saw the abduction happening, but just assumed Pollitt was some lunatic being taken back to the local insane asylum.
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Charles Warren loses his second confirmation vote for attorney general by a wider margin, 46 to 39.
At the trial in the federal government’s lawsuit to revoke the corruptly awarded Teapot Dome oil leases, the federal court judge blocks the government lawyers from tracing the Liberty Bonds used to pay off Interior Sec. Albert Fall. They’re only allowed to trace them from Harry Sinclair to Fall, not to trace them back from Fall to Sinclair, or something. Fall’s son-in-law Milton Everhart, who acted as Fall’s bagman, takes the Fifth.
The strike in Alsace against public schools ordered by Archbishop Ruch begins. Village priests stand in school doorways to prevent children attending. Some delay morning mass until after the start of the school day.
Coincidentally, the US Supreme Court hears arguments in the case against Oregon’s Klan-backed law requiring children aged 8 to 16 to attend public, rather than Catholic parochial, schools. Oregon Assistant AG Willis Moore ignores the religious aspect of the law and the whole Klan thing and says the people (the law is a 1922 referendum) were exercising their police power in regulating schools. He also argues that since the Supreme Court ruled that child labor could only be regulated by the states and not the federal governments the same logic applies here.
The secret illness which has kept Mussolini out of public sight for weeks is revealed to be an ulcer.
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Democratic senators are planning to prevent the Senate from adjourning for a couple of days so that, after Charles Warren’s nomination to be attorney general is rejected a second time, there will be time in which Coolidge has the ability to nominate someone else; if he fails to do so he cannot legally make a recess appointment. In theory, anyway.
Harry Pollitt of the Communist Party of Great Britain is kidnapped off a train by 8 members of the British Fascisti, preventing him reaching the conference of the National Minority Movement.
Atlantic City Mayor Edward Bader says any attempt to wear pajamas on the beach, evidently a trend in Europe and Florida, will not be tolerated.
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Coolidge says if his nomination of Charles Warren to be attorney general fails again, he will give him a recess appointment. Now everyone is pissed at everyone else. Coolidge thinks the Senate is interfering with his right to name his own Cabinet; senators think he is invading their constitutional powers (it doesn’t help that he’s announcing this before the 2nd vote on Warren).
The re-absorption of Alsace into France is not going as smoothly as it might. The laicist French government is imposing secular schools in Colmar, that is, removing Catholic teaching from public schools (4 hours a week, I believe). So Archbishop Ruch orders children to boycott schools for 3 days from tomorrow to “break down the plans of the Freemasons.” The government points out that this would be illegal and expose parents to prosecution.
The Hungarian government may have difficulties pushing through an election bill whose details are odd enough to be worth mentioning: deputies who explain their votes to anyone, especially foreigners, can lose their seats; men can vote at age 24 if they have 4 years of school, women at 30 if they have 6 years; secret ballots only in Budapest and 5 other places; no parades or placards or meetings 30 days before elections; the creation of a new upper house.
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After it’s been pending more than 20 years, the US Senate finally ratifies the Isle of Pines Treaty recognizing the island as part of Cuba, but kicks a vote on ratification of the Lausanne Treaty with Turkey down the road for what will turn out to be a couple of years.
The British rejection of the Geneva Protocol banning chemical & biological weapons as a first step to general disarmament means, or seems to mean, that that goal is effectively dead. The US may propose its own disarmament conference.
The Indian Assembly votes a resolution for the reduction of opium, even after alliterative Finance Minister Sir Basil Blackett informs them that British policy is to derive the maximum revenue from the minimum output of opium. One assemblyperson says opium helps coolies mitigate the effects of hard work and illness. Another says the statistics fail to take into account the large consumption of opium by elephants.
The NYC play juries issue their first rulings, acquitting Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms” and Sidney Howard’s “They Knew What They Wanted” (filmed several times, including in 1940 with Carole Lombard and Charles Laughton – how is it I’ve never seen this?), while Edwin Justus Mayer’s “The Firebrand” is ordered to shorten a kiss (with Joseph Schildkraut, not Edward G. Robinson, who’s also in the play, and definitely not the two of them together).
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Coolidge re-nominates Charles Warren to be attorney general. Just being stubborn, or reckoning on some of the absent senators from the last vote showing up this time?
The US government is trying to expel Hannah Chaplin, mother of Charlie, from the country. I guess Labor Secretary James Davis made this decision personally, for some reason? As I understand it, she came to the US ostensibly for medical treatment, and is now being expelled because of her medical (really, mental) condition.
The Texas Legislature passes an amnesty for former governor James Ferguson, the husband of current governor Miriam “Ma” Ferguson who was impeached in 1917. This will restore his citizenship rights.
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Several Republican senators meet Coolidge (showing up at the White House uninvited) to suggest that if he tries to re-nominate Charles Warren to be attorney general he’ll just lose again.
Warren complains that the Democrats “made use of the insurgent Republican group”.
The British Labour Party warns against secret treaties, saying future Labour governments won’t honor them. Former Labour Education Minister Charles Trevelyan suggests that “surreptitious alliances” against the Soviet Union might be being forged right now.
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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.
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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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.”
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.
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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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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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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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.
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.”
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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.
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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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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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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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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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.
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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