Today -100: September 3, 1925: The eternal question: dogs or opera

NY Gov. Al Smith tells William Randolph Hearst to stop interfering with the politics of New York City. 

A “Communist agitator” whose name and perhaps nationality the NYT seem not to know (French?) was deported by the US 9 months ago and put on a passenger ship – third class – to Cherbourg, France. Which sent him back. So without ever being allowed off the shp, he’s been going back and forth for those 9 months, back and forth, back and forth, with no end in sight.

New York City has 1/8th of the federal income tax payers in the country; they pay 1/3rd of the total tax of the US.

Doctors in Hawaii are treating leprosy with radium. Successfully, they claim.

Berlin is considering raising the dog tax to support opera, although they are worried about pissing off dog owners. One newspaper says, “It is a question of whether raising a dog or attending the opera is the more cultural.”

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Today -100: September 2, 1925: Of taxes

I guess Congress didn’t reverse the release of income tax payment info after the hubbub last year, so they are released for the second year in a row and this time there’s no legal question about the right of newspapers to publish them, which the NYT does gleefully, listing the taxes of bankers, actors (Douglas Fairbanks pays the most), Jack Dempsey, baseball players, etc. Ford Motor Company paid $16 million, John D. Rockefeller Jr. $6,277,669, the most of any individual in the US. Pres. Coolidge paid $14,091.

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Today -100: September 1, 1925: Of strikes, crashes, and morphine

The anthracite coal mine strike begins, with 828 mines and 272 collieries shut down and 150,000 miners on strike. There has been no violence as the United Mine Workers are eschewing picket lines this time. 

Col. Billy Mitchell, who was forced out of the Army Air Service earlier this year and will be court-martialed for insubordination later in the year for uttering his opinions (airplanes good, battleships bad), is flying a plane when its engine quits at 100 feet. He steers it into the ground, where it hits a ditch, upends. He crawls out from underneath it, then drives to Fort Sam Houston to do his job, catching up on paperwork.

Hermann Göring is committed to a psychiatric hospital in Sweden. He acquired a morphine addiction after being shot during the Beer Hall Putsch and it’s making him erratic and violent. If only there were some job for which those traits...

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Today -100: August 31, 1925: Of great excitement and bringing the priesthood into disrepute

There are anti-Chinese outbreaks all over Mexico, including the kidnapping of 40 in Sonora, “causing great excitement among the yellow race.” Will there be a follow-up on the kidnapping? I suspect not.

Lithuania bans George Bernard Shaw’s “Saint Joan” for being “irreligious and calculated to bring the priesthood into disrepute.” Reminds me of the movie “The Sound of Music” being banned in the 1970s in at least one Latin American country run by a military junta (Argentina? Chile?) for bringing the military into disrepute.

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Today -100: August 30, 1925: Old fogy ideas are holding back the inevitable

Germany, wanting to join the League of Nations but worried about incurring military obligations given that it has basically no (official) military, will ask to have the same exemptions the League grants neutral Switzerland.

Col. Billy Mitchell, who was forced out of the Army Air Service, says the government is refusing to allow him to test a super-airplane capable of flying non-stop from the US to Paris carrying a ton of explosives. “Old fogy ideas are holding back the inevitable,” he says. Officers in the Air Service say they don’t know what the hell he’s talking about.

William Stoddard, author of over 100 books and assistant private secretary to Abraham Lincoln, dies at 89.

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Today -100: August 29, 1925: Of fighters

NYC Mayor John Hylan responds to Gov. Alfred E. Smith, denying his accusation that he negotiated with the Klan at the 1924 Democratic Convention. Hylan says he’s a fighter. Smith retorts, sure, ‘cuz he fights with fucking EVERYONE. He says Hylan doesn’t understand his grade-elimination program in Queens.

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Today -100: August 28, 1925: Of coal and secret conferences

Anthracite coal miners will begin a major strike Monday. 

In a speech in Brooklyn, New York Gov. Al Smith accuses NYC Mayor John Hylan of having been “in secret conference with the Klan, with the representative of the Klan” during the 1924 Democratic Convention. I gather by that he means William Gibbs McAdoo.

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Today -100: August 27, 1925: Of souls, radio teas, hooting, dwarfs, and wouldn’t it be cool if there actually were a baseball team called the Cads?

Prof. Charles Henry of the Sorbonne says he has proof that humans have a soul that survives death.

Carrie Chapman Catt’s speech on the 5th anniversary of the 19th Amendment (women’s activism is all about abolishing war now, she says) is broadcast on WEAF radio. In Westchester County, there are maybe 100 “radio teas” where women gather to listen to the speech.

At the World Zionist Congress, a call for a Jewish army in Palestine provokes anti-militarist “violent hooting” and militarist “counter-hooting.”

The Philadelphia Sesquicentennial Exposition next year will feature “the largest collection of dwarfs ever assembled.” The article (for which there seems to be no link) fails to explain why dwarfs are required. Was Philadelphia originally founded by dwarfs? That would explain a lot, probably. 

That’s “dwarfs,” by the way. The plural “dwarves” was coined by J.R. Tolkein to distinguish his characters from Disney’s Snow White dwarfs.

NYT Index Typo of the Day -100:

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Today -100: August 26, 1925: Of devoted mothers, motorless flying machines, tongs, and watermelons

Texas Gov. Miriam “Ma” Ferguson denies New York’s extradition request for Virginia Canaday, who kidnapped her son Roscoe Jr. from her ex-husband last month and fled the state. Ferguson calls Ms. Canaday a “devoted mother.” The ex kidnapped his kid from San Antonio first, back in April, removing him to Forest Hills, Long Island. There’s also a daughter, but no one seems to be mentioning her. I think she’s still with her father.

Inventor Alphonse Dube commits suicide by hanging himself after years of failing to get a motorless flying machine to work. And by “motorless flying machine,” I mean wings. That he flapped. Broke his leg last time he tried it.

A gang war between the On Leong Tong and the Hip Sing Tong erupts in shootings in New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, St Louis and Minneapolis, despite the fact that “Hip Sing Tong” is objectively fun to say out loud. Do it now.

A farmer sends Pres. Coolidge a 100-pound watermelon.

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Today -100: August 25, 1925: Of unheard-of impudence and charlestons

At the World Zionist Congress in Vienna, Hungarian delegate Dr. Kahan points out that Hungary is the only country besides Russia where it is illegal to belong to a Zionist organization.

US Secretary of State Frank Kellogg, responding to a complaint by a Zionist organization against the violence in Vienna directed at that Congress, passed on the complaint to the Austrian government (er, maybe). The Hakenkreuzler (Austrian Nazis) newspaper Deutschösterrichische Tageszeitung attacks Kellogg’s “unheard-of impudence”: “As a private person he may serve his beloved Jews as much as he likes, but as Secretary of State it is none of his concern if the native population of Vienna thinks about the Jews differently from him.”

Headline of the Day -100:

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Today -100: August 24, 1925: Of non-engagement

Well, in the absence of any interesting substantive news today -100, let’s go with Royal Rumours™! Prince Henry of Britain, 25, the third son of King George, is reportedly (“again”) engaged to Lady Mary Scott, 21, daughter of the Duke & Duchess of Buccleuch. “If the rumors turn out to be correct, the engagement will be very popular.” They aren’t.

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Today -100: August 23, 1925: Of kluxers and racialists

Pres. Coolidge appoints M.O. Dunning, the paid lobbyist of the Ku Klux Klan, as collector of the port of Savannah, Georgia.

In Vienna, 20,000 “racialists,” many of them veterans in uniform and Hakenkreuzler in “‘Hitler’ shirts,” whatever those might be, hold a protest demonstration against the World Zionist Congress.

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Today -100: August 22, 1925: Metaphor of the Day -100

New York City is undergoing an unusually large mosquito invasion this year, including City Hall, where they’re breeding in the pools around the statue of Civic Virtue.

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Today -100: August 21, 1925: A seat, not a strap

Trying again to defang NYC Mayor Hylan’s main issue, Jimmy Walker says he is not only in favor of the 5¢ car fare, but “I’m for the five-cent fare with a seat, and not for the five-cent fare with a strap.”

Musical... Comedy? ... of the Day -100:

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Today -100: August 20, 1925: A man usually carries a gun for a purpose

NY Gov. Al Smith says people shouldn’t carry guns: “I have walked in the lower sections of New York for years and have never felt the need of a weapon. A man usually carries a gun for a purpose.”

One Walter White suggests, in a letter to the NYT, that NYC reduce traffic fatalities by adopting a system he saw in practice in Mobile, Alabama in which pedestrians as well as vehicles are required to obey traffic lights. Mr. White don’t know New Yorkers very well, do he?

The leopard Zizi who escaped into the Bois de Boulogne and wandered the park for 3 days, gets into the courtyard of a nearby school and is shot dead. Fuck.

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Today -100: August 19, 1925: Of debt, anti-Semites, and segregation

Belgium agrees to pay back its war & reconstruction debt to the US over 62 years.

The Hakenkreuzler rioting against the World Zionist Congress in Vienna has caused $4 million in damage.

Maryland’s Court of Appeals recently, I guess, declared zoning laws enforcing racial segregation illegal. Also illegal: a white mob in “fine old residential sections of Baltimore” attack a black family who are trying to move into a house they just leased, as well as the white man who owns the house, who now says he’ll refund the family’s money and not lease it to black folks.

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Today -100: August 18, 1925: Mass cannot govern mass

Anti-Semites attack the Freiheit Platz in Vienna where the 14th World Zionist Congress has convened. The police are holding them back.

Mussolini tells the Daily Press, “mass cannot govern mass; quantity cannot govern quantity.” Also, “there can be no such thing as liberty, which exists but in the imagination of philosophers who seek their unpractical philosophy from the skies... Is there such a thing as liberty? Civilization is the inverse of personal liberty.”  Also, too, “Julius Caesar is my ideal”.

Headline of the Day -100:

A couple of days ago a leopard escaped the Paris zoological gardens into the Bois de Boulogne, “rendering its beautiful nooks and paths unsuitable to lovers for moonlight strolls.” Cops pursue her on horses, bicycles and elephants, as was the custom. The leopard’s name is Zizi, because of course it is.

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Today -100: August 17, 1925: Of subs and Joisey Fashis

John Scopes, who resigned from Dayton’s High School after the Monkey Trial, will be replaced by someone who rejoices in the name Raleigh Valentine Reece, who does not believe in evolution. His brother is a member of Congress.

A meeting in Newark of Italians opposed to Fascism is invaded by the Fascisti League. A fight ensued involving stilettos and razors, with six stabbings, as was the custom. The Fascists claim to have gone to the meeting unarmed.

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Today -100: August 16, 1925: Of divorced Communists

To increase the number of women Communist agitators in Norway, male Norwegian Communists are marrying in Moscow (it is unclear if their new wives are Russian or Norwegian), and then divorcing them in Oslo, because divorcees in Norway don’t lose their citizenship and can’t be deported. The husbands then return to Moscow, rinse and repeat.

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Today -100: August 15, 1925: Of public praying and traffic lanes

Headline of the Day -100:

Striking (or locked-out) coal miners in Henryetta, Oklahoma, who had been ordered by the sheriff to stop praying near scabs, presumably intending to intimidate them. The ACLU is looking into it.

A letter to the Times suggests reducing traffic accidents by marking out lanes in the larger roads.

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