Today -100: March 31, 1925: More difficult to manage

Ringling Brothers Barnum Bailey Circus will drop all wild animal acts (unless you count elephants, horses and such). They’ll continue to be displayed in the menagerie, but not perform or be walked across the street. Jack Ringling admits that people think the bears and giant cats are trained by cruel methods and name-calling (one of the black jaguars is called Nigger because of course it is), and that parents are afraid their children will see animal trainers eaten or whatever. Mabel Stark has transferred from performing with the 14 Bengal tigers to the equestrian side of things: “‘I find the horses more difficult to manage than the tigers,’ said Miss Stark, a trifle wistfully for one who has been clawed as often as she”.

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Today -100: March 30, 1925: Heh heh, 4 votes

Karl Jarres of the nationalist Deutsche Volkspartei (DVP) wins more than 10 million votes in the German presidential election (38%), but not a majority, so there will be a run-off in 4 weeks. Otto Braun (Social Democrat) comes in second with 7.8 million. Erich Ludendorff gets a little over 1%, so all that fuss about him being a spoiler was a waste of everyone’s time. In Coburg, and only there, ex-kaiser Wilhelm was on the ballot. He gets 4 votes. This is the first ever presidential election in Germany, by the way.

The Japanese Diet passes the suffrage bill, extending the franchise to about 14 million from 3 million, but only for men over 30 who are not dependent on charity.

Labour MPs in Britain oppose Vincent Lopez’s band being allowed into the country to perform when there are perfectly good British jazz musicians without jobs.

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Today -100: March 29, 1925: Of socialism, inferior babies, and words

The Socialist Party intends to contest the next NYC elections on a platform of 5¢ transit fare.

The international birth control conference being held in NYC is going seriously off the rails. Neuropathologist Max Schlapp says women who “go about getting themselves excited and overwrought in an emotional way” are producing inferior babies. Clarence Little, president of the University of Maine, compares the different races to soda flavors – strawberry, pineapple, chocolate, etc – and says mixing them together is just icky. Eugenic laws should guide races to blend desired racial characteristics (Little will spend the 1950s and ‘60s shilling for the tobacco industry, denying that smoking causes cancer or any other disease). The delegates pass a resolution calling on eugenic societies to recognize birth control as an essential part of eugenics.

The Oxford English Dictionary is adding phrases from the Great War, such as “strafe,” “dud,” “getting the wind up.” Strafe is defined here as “to punish,” used by British and American military prisoners for short sentences for disobedience. It derives from the German catchphrase “Gott strafe England,” meaning “May God punish England.” The later usage for planes machine-gunning ground positions is a World War II one.

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Today -100: March 28, 1925: Of ear fatigue and grade crossings

Sen. Burton Wheeler is indicted in D.C. on the charge, trumped up in retaliation for his work investigating Teapot Dome, of conspiring to use dummies to get prospecting permits on federal oil & gas lands in Montana beyond the number that individuals are allowed. A Senate committee already exonerated Wheeler on this; the grand jury only had the evidence the committee saw. It’s all a bit weird. The grand jury stopped sitting for 4 weeks, so Wheeler assumed the thing had been abandoned.

Psychologists at Princeton determine that radio produces “ear fatigue.”

NY Gov. Alfred E. Smith wins his 25% tax cut, but the Legislature refuses to increase the length of the gubernatorial term to 4 years from 2, restore direct primaries, restrict factory employment for women to 48 hours, or hold a referendum on the federal child labor constitutional amendment. There will be a referendum in November for a bond issue to eliminate grade crossings.

German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann makes clear that while Germany’s proposed security treaty with France, Britain and Belgium would confirm Germany’s western borders, it would not apply to its eastern borders, because fuck Poland anyway.

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Today -100: March 27, 1925: I’m sure it was a terrible smile

Mussolini’s return to public life after weeks of illness they’re claiming was ulcers and who knows, maybe it was, is celebrated in the Parliament with a fistfight between Fascist and Communist deputies, as was the custom. The Duck smiles as he watches, and The Duck never smiles.

Simplicio and Lucio Godino, Filipino Siamese twins, have learned to drive and seem to enjoy immunity to drive in excess of the Manila speed limit because the cops would have to arrest the innocent one along with the guilty one. The conjoined twins will later marry identical twins.

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Today -100: March 26, 1925: Come and take us

The Delaware Legislature votes 31 to 1 to retain the whipping post as a punishment.

The German right wing, pissed at Ludendorff continuing to run for president against their preferred candidate Karl Jarres, are rolling out his former colleague Hindenburg (who is not yet running) to endorse Jarres. Hitler’s newspaper in Bavaria claims industrialists backing Jarres offered the Hitlerites a bribe to endorse him rather than Ludendorff.

2 Wisconsin state senators, Bernhard Gettelman & James Barker (both R’s), support changing the state law to allow home brew and light wines for consumption at home, and in fact are both in violation of that law. “We make wine in our home and don’t care who knows it,” says Gettleman. “Here is my home address. Come and take us.”

The 6th international birth control conference opens in New York. Margaret Sanger apologizes that some of the delegates had difficulties with Immigration; she notes that US immigration quotas show the “crude method” used to deal with over-population. She suggests that the government should pay unfit parents not to reproduce. The current ban on birth control encourages, “with breakneck rapidity, of idiots, defectives, diseased, feeble-minded and criminal classes. The American public is heavily taxed to maintain an increasing race of morons which threatens the very foundation of our civilization.”

Oh good, she’s opened a new clinic specifically for black New Yorkers.

The Agriculture Dept studies how to eliminate garlic breath and determines that this can be accomplished by refraining from eating garlic.

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Today -100: March 25, 1925: Of friendly boers, beer halls, normal activities, alsatians, and pay rises

Lord Balfour, of Balfour Declaration fame, will visit Jerusalem and boy are the Arabs pissed. Students are going on strike and shops will be closed.

The Prince of Wales will visit South Africa, and is assured of a friendly visit from the Boers.

Erich Ludendorff refuses demands that he quit the German presidential race so as not to split the lunatic-right vote. Saturday he’ll have a rally in a Munich beer hall. Yes, that beer hall.

Éamon de Valera is elected to the Ulster Parliament for County Down, unopposed. He is however banned by decree from Northern Ireland, which you’d think being an elected (sort of) official would over-ride, but no.

Charles Hueber, a Communist deputy from Alsace, address the French National Assembly in Alsatian German (his French isn’t great) during a debate on Alsace-Lorraine administration, specifically whether the recovered provinces should be be fully integrated into the French state or have some sort of special status. Some deputies get annoyed that they can’t understand him, others ask to speak in Breton or Provençal.

A Soviet Union court invalidates the Sinclair Oil oil concession on Sakhalin Island, which is in theory divided between Russia and Japan but all of it is de facto occupied by the Japanese. The court says that isn’t an insurmountable obstacle and Sinclair should have begun work by the start of the year regardless. The reason Russia signed the deal with Sinclair was to induce the US government to support Sinclair’s little venture and by extension Russian control of its bit of Sakhalin. This did not happen because the Harding administration’s corrupt links to Sinclair either didn’t extend to the State Dept or didn’t override the US refusal to recognize the Soviet Union (the entity with which Sinclair had that contract), or its unwillingness to risk friction with Japan. By the end of the decade, Japan will be meeting its oil requirements from Sakhalin alone.

The House of Representatives recently raised its own pay by one-third to $10,000. Some pretended to object during the debate, but all but 8 are accepting the raise. The identify of the 8 is as yet unknown, except for Henry St George Tucker III (D-Virginia), whose grandfather, Rep. H St G T Senior, also refused a raise more than a century ago.

Headline of the Day -100:

One shudders to imagine what those might be.

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Today -100: March 24, 1925: So-called science

The Tennessee Legislature passes the Butler Act: “it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Gov. Austin Peay (D) signs the bill, calling it “a distinct protest against an irreligious tendency to exalt so-called science and deny the Bible in some schools and quarters – a tendency fundamentally wrong and fatally mischievous in its effects on our children, our institutions and country.” Anyways, he says, the Bible disproves the theory of evolution.

NYPD Commissioner Richard Enright issues secret orders to every beat cop and detective to “Arrest all known thieves and criminals and have them brought to the line-up at 9 o’clock March 24.” It’s unclear what will be accomplished by arresting people who would be serving prison terms if there had been actual evidence against them. They may just want new mug shots. Cops are stopping musicians on the streets to check that their musical instrument cases don’t contain burglary tools.

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Today -100: March 23, 1925: Of capitals

The Great Powers are keeping their Turkish ambassadors in Constantinople. Turkey insists they move to Ankara, which has been the capital for a year and a half.

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Today -100: March 22, 1925: Of candidates and passes

The 1928 presidential race is off to a start. Frank Willis, Republican senator from Ohio and former governor, starts campaigning, beginning with a series of 45 speeches in various states. He’ll continue this campaign right up through a Delaware County Willis-for-President Club rally in March 1928, at which he will drop dead.

The Indian viceroy bans Theodore Jr. and Kermit Roosevelt from taking the Hunza Pass into Turkestan for their rare-animal-hunting expedition, because there is a shortage of native porters; some Swedes hired them all. He suggests they do it next year. The boys say they’ll try to find another route.

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Today -100: March 21, 1925: Of the Christianity of bankers, stormy careers, firesides, and lynchings

The French National Assembly discusses religious matters in the traditional manner, with two hours of screaming matches and fistfights, which start after Prime Minister Édouard Herriot refers to “the Christianity of bankers,” which is a reference to a cardinal’s manifesto aimed at bankers and capitalists. He says the cardinals are trying to destroy the republic and inciting open rebellion, which is funny cuz it’s true.

I’m not following NY Gov. Al Smith’s fight with his Republican Legislature closely enough to understand why the R’s are fighting his attempt to cut income tax 25%.

Erich Ludendorff is running for German president under the imprimatur of the German Völkisch Freedom Party (that’s 2 words in German, because of course it is), which has so few deputies that it’s not entitled to its own seat in the Reichstag restaurant. The NYT says he can’t win but could take enough votes away from fellow rightie Karl Jarres (Deutsche Volkspartei) to make him lose. It also says “Ludendorff’s political career has been stormy,” which is one way to describe narrowly escaping prison after participating in a putsch.

Playwright George Bernard Shaw says of radio, “If I could see and hear a play from my fireside, I would never enter a theatre again.”

A black man is lynched in Waverly, Virginia.

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Today -100: March 20, 1925: Of viceroys, informants, and patents

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).

That tornado killed at least 823 people.

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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Today -100: March 19, 1925: Of tornadoes

A big-ass tornado wends through Illinois, Missouri & Indiana, killing hundreds.

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Today -100: March 18, 1925: Of blood-tasting, sargents, and “conditions”

Charles Warren declines Coolidge’s offer of a recess appointment to be attorney general after he lost two confirmation votes. While the NYT says “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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Today -100: March 17, 1925: Of attorneyz generalz, domes, school strikes, and antifa ulcers

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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Today -100: March 16, 1925: Of adjournments, kidnappings, and PJs

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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Today -100: March 15, 1925: Of recesses, school boycotts, and elections

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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Today -100: March 14, 1925: Of pines, protocols, opium, and firebrands

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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Today -100: March 13, 1925: Of re-nominations, Chaplins, and un-impeachments

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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Today -100: March 12, 1925: Of insurgent Republicans and surreptitious alliances

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”.

Sun Yat-Sen dies at 58.

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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