Today -100: July 31, 1925: Putting industry on its feet

Intervention by British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin may have postponed an imminent coal strike, with the 13% wage reductions the owners are trying to impose (or longer hours for the same wages, they’d be happy with that too) also being postponed, pending a 9-month government inquiry into coal industry efficiency and shit (the inquiry will side with the owners over wages and hours and seems to have been a delaying action so the owners could prepare for a fight). Baldwin, we are told, “labored so manfully that... he was forced to content himself with a hurried midday snack instead of a leisurely lunch”. Baldwin says (not quoted by the NYT), “All the workers in this country have got to take reductions in wages to help put industry on its feet.”

In Taizhou, Zhejiang province, China, the top general is asked to do a rain ceremony involving a kowtow to a frog. He says he’ll do it later at the temple, the crowd refuses to leave until he does it, a riot ensues in which the poor frog is trampled, and soldiers fire into the crowd, killing 8.

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Today -100: July 30, 1925: Of quacks and evolution

Sigmund Freud will head an international psychoanalytical foundation, aimed in part at stopping “the practice of psychoanalysis by quacks.” Insert your own joke here.

The lower house of the Georgia Legislature rejects a measure to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools.

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Today -100: July 29, 1925: Simple folk

Sub-Hed of the Day -100:

William Jennings Bryan’s body on display in Dayton, land of the simple folk.

The text of his undelivered closing speech from the Monkey Trial is released.

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Today -100: July 28, 1925: Of widows and dried-up friendly sources

Isabelle La Follette, widow of Fightin’ Bob, declines to stand for his vacant Senate seat. Fightin’ Bob Jr. probably will run.

The Italian Foreign Office asks the US ambassador to facilitate the expulsion from Italy of Chicago Tribune reporter George Seldes for writing bad things about Mussolini, including that he was involved in the murder of Giacomo Matteotti. This will be the second country to deport him, after Russia. The Trib protests that censorship of its correspondents will result in it having to get its Italian news from the opposition, “the friendly sources being all dried up.” 

According to his 1987 memoirs Witness to a Century, the train taking Seldes to France (involuntarily) was stopped at the border and a Blackshirt squad entered to beat him up/kill him. He found a compartment with some British admirals who confronted the Blackshirts and saved him.

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Today -100: July 27, 1925: Commoner as dirt

William Jennings Bryan, 65, dies in his sleep in Dayton, napping after church. He’s been making soooo many speeches since the end of the trial, in the hot Tennessee sun. In fact, he was scheduled to finally deliver the closing speech that he was precluded from giving during the trial. Bryan was the Democratic presidential candidate in 1896, 1900 and 1908, losing to McKinley twice and Taft once, his share of the popular vote declining with each election. He was secretary of state under Wilson and more recently promoted real estate in Florida.

Clarence Darrow expresses sorrow, saying he’d supported Bryan for president – twice.

H. L. Mencken, writing about William Jennings Bryan in The Baltimore Evening Sun: “His one yearning was to keep his yokels heated up – to lead his forlorn mob against the foe. That foe, alas, refused to be alarmed. It insisted upon seeing the battle as a comedy.”

German nationalists will put on Aryan plays, whatever that means, with Aryan actors.

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Today -100: July 26, 1925: Of ethnic cleansings, geniuses in the air, and... there are odors in New York?

Poland will force out the 15,000 ethnic Germans who voted for German citizenship in the plebiscite in Upper Silesia in 1921 (no secret ballot, I guess), with 20,000 more to come. Germany retaliates against Poles living in Germany who voted for Poland (10,000). Warsaw bans German-language plays. (Update: it’s not actually based on voting in the plebiscite; it’s Germans who retained their German nationality after the plebiscite).

Albert Einstein takes his first plane ride. 

Headline of the Day -100:

Rude.

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Today -100: July 25, 1925: Make good?

Count Antonio Cippico, an Italian Fascist senator and Italian delegate to the League of Nations, lectures at the Institute of Politics, defending the “cruel necessity” of war. I mean, a nation might need to do war to “remedy the defects of its geographical, political or economic situation in the world or to make good its own civilization as opposed to the inferior civilization of other people.”

William Jennings Bryan writes a letter to the NYT saying Clarence Darrow’s accusation that he is an ignoramus unfairly took advantage of the fact that he doesn’t know shit about shit.

The California Board of Education disappoints Fundamentalists by accepting biology textbooks that include the e-word.

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Today -100: July 24, 1925: Of dead PMs

Earlier this month, Russia executed Prince Nikolai Golitsyn, 75, the last prime minister before the February Revolution, for alleged monarchist counter-revolutionary activity.

Golitsyn will be “rehabilitated” in 2004.

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Today -100: July 23, 1925: This comedy cannot last longer

New York City Mayor John Hylan vehemently rejects the offer from fellow Democrats of a state Supreme Court seat in exchange for ending his re-election campaign, adding that he hasn’t actually received that offer from anyone with the power to get him on the court.

The appropriation bill for Washington D.C. includes a provision against paying the salary of any school superintendent who permits a teacher (who can’t be paid either) “who teaches disrespect for the Holy Bible,” which slipped through unnoticed. So Bureau of Internal Revenue employee Loren Wittner (not acting in his official capacity) files a petition under that provision because, you guessed it, evolution is being taught. One of the 11 counts of anti-Biblical teaching he cites (and it took me longer than I care to admit to realize this is a joke; I’m not sure whether the NYT has realized it) is that blood is required to keep human beings alive. Another is that rainbows are caused by natural reflection and refraction of light, instead of God reminding us of The Flood. Also, DC schools are teaching that the Earth isn’t flat and the law of gravity, which conflicts with the story of Elijah ascending to Heaven.

Italian anti-Fascist deputy Giovanni Amendola, who defined the concept of totalitarianism, was attacked by Blackshirts a few days ago, beaten with clubs. Fascist Party Secretary General Roberto Farinacci says he can’t “conscientiously deplore” the violence, saying “It is time anti-Fascists should know that this comedy cannot last longer. We cannot continue to tolerate provocations whereof we are the victims.” (Farinacci would later lose a hand fishing with a hand grenade, as you do. And he’ll be executed by partisans in 1945, which he probably conscientiously deplored.) Fascist newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia asks, if Fascismo is no longer supported by the majority of the Italian people, as Amendola has claimed, why did no one defend him from the attack? Anyway, although this article suggests he’s not too seriously injured, he will never recover and will die in April.

Race rioting in Pittsburgh, broken up by the police. The article doesn’t say how it started.

Will Hays is now telling motion picture companies what plays they can’t turn into movies, including Sidney Howard’s “They Knew What They Wanted,” which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize.

Headline of the Day -100:

William Jennings Bryan, who has opinions, says the best name for a girl is Mary and the best name for a boy is Paul.

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Today -100: July 22, 1925: He is our Exhibit A

The Scopes trial was supposed to resume today with a continuation of Clarence Darrow’s questioning of William Jennings Bryan, but Judge Raulston announces that it won’t and that Bryan’s testimony will be stricken from the record because it “can shed no light on any issues that will be pending before the higher courts.” Darrow admits that he’s not sure Bryan’s testimony would help the state Supreme Court “or any other human being,” but says he wasn’t done. Now Bryan won’t be able to get his heart’s desire to put Darrow on the stand to expose his “religious attitude” (or maybe Attorney General Tom Stewart vetoed the silly idea).

With that, Darrow says screw it and asks for a directed verdict of guilty. The jury duly convicts and Scopes is fined $100. Which he will never pay.

Bryan’s been working on his closing speech for 3 months, and now won’t be able to give it.

Outside the court, Bryan sends Darrow the questions he wanted to ask him on the stand, related to Jesus’s divinity, the immortality of the soul, etc. Darrow mostly responds with longer versions of “Dunno, I’m an agnostic, dude.” Bryan says the Scopes trial has proved that the Bible is true. Um, sure. He says the issue of whether the Bible is true “dwarfs all other issues now under consideration by the people of the United States and of the world.” Christians, he says, “are at last awakened to the insidious attacks which have been made, under cover of scientific hypothesis, upon the authority of the Bible by unbelievers of every grade and class. The attack upon the authority of the Bible is organized, deliberate and malignant, and had only to be uncovered to be understood.” Bryan calls Darrow “the finished product of evolution... he embodies all that is cruel, heartless and destructive in evolution. He is our Exhibit A.” 

Darrow, referring to Bryan’s statement as “rabies,” responds that Bryan is not a product of evolution, but a reversion to type.

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Today -100: July 21, 1925: What is the meaning of all this harangue?

At the Monkey Trial, Clarence Darrow surprises William Jennings Bryan by calling him to the stand as a witness for the defense as an alleged expert on Christianity and the Bible. Bryan being Bryan doesn’t object, but proves (partial transcript) unable to answer questions about where Cain’s wife came from (“I leave the agnostics to hunt for her”), the nature of Jonah’s whale, Adam’s rib, how old the Earth is, whether Chinese or Egyptian civilization is older than he thinks the Earth is, etc.  At one point Attorney General Tom Stewart tries to intercede, asking “What is the meaning of all this harangue?”, to which Darrow responds, “preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the educational system of the United States” (hey Linda McMahon, I think he’s talking about you). Bryan jumps up and yells, “To protect the word of God from the greatest atheist or agnostic in the United States.” He accuses Darrow of casting slurs on the Bible; Darrow says he’s just “showing up your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on Earth believes.”

Typical exchange: “Have you ever investigated to find out how long man has been on the earth?” “I have never found it necessary.”

Awesome exchange: “I do not think about things I don’t think about.” “Do you think about things you do think about?” “Well, sometimes.”

Bryan demonstrates that he is not only ignorant, even about the Bible, but profoundly uncurious.  But what will really damage his reputation among Fundamentalists is that he allows for non-literal readings, admitting that the 6 days in which God created shit were “Not six days of twenty-four hours” but could be millions of years.

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Today -100: July 20, 1925: These people are all right

John Scopes says the Fundamentalists also don’t like him because he smokes and (gasp) dances. He says the trial is defeating the purpose of the Butler Act by making people think about science and religion. “These people are all right. They’re intelligent, but hitherto uninformed.”

Former Vermont governor (1896-8) and possessor of The Most Vermont Governor Name Ever, Josiah Grout, dies at 84.

New York Supreme Court Justice Salvatore Cotillo, head of the New York State branch of the Sons of Italy in America and son of the man who introduced spumoni to the US, accuses John (Giovanni) Di Silvestro of being a “tool of Mussolini” (Fact Check: Correct) and trying to subordinate the body to the Fascist Party in Italy (Fact Check: Correct). Not that Cotillo doesn’t love him some Duce too, he just thinks that Fascism shouldn’t be imported into the US and believes Italian immigrants in the US should assimilate. The Mussoliniists accuse Cotillo of being a Bolshevik, as is the custom. Di Silvestro will win this battle (which is also about who gets to steal the Sons’ pension fund), but the friendly dialogue over links with Italy will continue. For example, in 1933 a bomb will destroy Di Silvestro’s Philadelphia home, killing his wife and 4 of his children.

Failed coup attempt in Portugal.

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Today -100: July 19, 1925: Of konflicts, vaccines, and race in Staten Island

The Colorado Ku Klux Klan is in conflict with the national Klan, which is trying to force out its grand dragon. 40,000 kluxers have resigned and joined the Minute Men of America.

British doctor William Ewart Gye has developed a vaccine against the cancer, um, germ.

The Scopes trial is in recess for the weekend, so the duel of wits in Dayton is confined to written statements. William Jennings Bryan has found what he thinks is a devastating argument against evolution: Darwin was religious when he was young but died an agnostic, demonstrating the effects of the theory of evolution on the mind. Bryan thinks there’s been a major cover-up about this.

French and Belgian soldiers start leaving the Ruhr. The occupation should be over by the end of the month. They depart quietly in the early morning to avoid any sort of response by the locals, sarcastic applause or whatever.

80 young members of the Hakenkreuzler, an Austrian Nazi-adjacent group, invade a Viennese restaurant and attack the guests, yelling “Out with the Jews!” A hakenkreu, by the way, is a swastika, which is a word the Nazis never used and which won’t make its way into English for a few years.

A bunch of white men attack the home of Samuel Browne, a black mailman in Staten Island, the only black-owned house in the neighborhood. The Brownes have been offered substantial amounts to sell the house they bought last year and were “rude” when a “citizens’ committee” explained to them that property values in the neighborhood depended on its “exclusiveness.” The KKK will take credit for the attack, for whatever that’s worth. There have been numerous acts of vandalism, letters threatening that Mrs. Browne will be shot on her way home from the school where she teaches by an ex-serviceman (unnamed), and an attempt to get the Brownes’ fire insurance cancelled. There will be indictments and a lawsuit, which will not come to much of anything. (Update: oo, there’s a blog post on all this). Browne will soon start the first Staten Island NAACP chapter. According to their grandson, they lived in that house until they died in the early 1970s.

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Today -100: July 18, 1925: Evidence

Scopes trial judge John Raulston rules out expert testimony on evolution, saying the only question is whether Scopes taught evolution. He offers to let the defense put on their witnesses out of the presence of the jury and have them be cross-examined by the prosecution, solely to make a record for the inevitable appeal. That’s just not a thing that courts do, and the defense refuses to take the bait. They will, however, put in affidavits of what they’d hoped to demonstrate, for the upper courts. Bryan is pissed that this will eliminate his ability to cross-examine or rebut. The judge points out that it was the prosecution’s position that none of the evidence about evolution was relevant and he had ruled in their favor, so shut up.

The first part of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf is published.

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Today -100: July 17, 1925: The truth does not need Mr. Bryan

Walter White (ahem), the superintendent of schools of Rhea County, Tennessee, which contains Dayton, proposes a Fundamentalist college to be named Bryan University. Fund-raising has begun. (William Jennings Bryan University will be founded in 1930; now called Bryan College, it’s still around).

At the Scopes trial, much of the day is spent on arguments over whether scientists should be allowed to testify, but the arguments aren’t exactly focused on the law:

Attorney General Tom Stewart: “Would they have me believe that I was once a worm and writhed in the dust? Will they take from me my hope of a hereafter?”

Dudley Field Malone: “Are preachers the only ones in the country who care about our youth? Are churches the only teachers of morality?”

William Jennings Bryan, describing yesterday’s testimony by zoologist Maynard Metcalf: “Did he tell you where life began? Did he tell you that back of all that was God?” The Commoner says evolution isn’t even a theory, it’s a hypothesis. That puts you in your place, evolution! And, he says, evolution eliminates the Virgin Birth and gives us Nietzsche.

Malone, again, responding to Bryan’s statement that this was a duel to the death: “There is never a duel with the truth. The truth always wins. The truth is no coward. The truth does not need the law. The truth does not need the forces of government. The truth does not need Mr. Bryan.”

H. L. Mencken, writing about William Jennings Bryan in The Baltimore Evening Sun: “His own speech was a grotesque performance and downright touching in its imbecility. Its climax came when he launched into a furious denunciation of the doctrine that man is a mammal.”

Daytonihoovians, by the way, have finally found out what Mencken’s been writing about them: Babbitts, morons, peasants, hillbillies, yokels, etc. Sounds like there are meetings on every street corner on driving him out of town or beating him up.

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Today -100: July 16, 1925: It is a tragedy to begin life as a hero and to end it as a buffoon

At the Scopes trial, Dudley Field Malone denies that the theory of evolution conflicts with the Bible. 

Since only one member of the Scopes jury admits to having read anything about evolution ever, Clarence Darrow suggests they should be allowed to hear about what evolution is before they decide whether the thing that John Scopes taught was evolution. So he calls zoologist (and Christian) Prof. Maynard Metcalf. After objections, Judge Raulston hears from the prof in the absence of the jury (who are told to stay away from the loudspeakers outside the courthouse). At his assertion that life on Earth began at least 600 million years ago, “There was an incredulous laugh among the spectators in court.”

Attorney General Tom Stewart feels the need to counteract whatever effect the reading from a (state-mandated) biology textbook had by reading the Book of Genesis to a bored jury. A 14-year-old student is asked what Scopes taught and gave a 14-year-old student answer, after which Darrow asks, “It hasn’t hurt you any, has it?” “No.”

H. L. Mencken, writing about William Jennings Bryan in The Baltimore Evening Sun: “This old buzzard, having failed to raise the mob against its rulers, now prepares to raise it against its teachers. He can never be the peasants’ President, but there is still a chance to be the peasants’ Pope. ... One somehow pities him, despite his so palpable imbecilities. It is a tragedy, indeed, to begin life as a hero and to end it as a buffoon.”

Women in Detroit will be allowed to smoke in street cars.

The sheriff of Frederick County, Maryland carries out a sentence of 10 lashes for a convicted wife-beater, the first judicial whipping for years. That is, the first judicial whipping of a white man.

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Today -100: July 15, 1925: This is a god-fearing country

The Scopes defense team objects again to the prayers opening the trial. Judge Raulston says he’ll leave the choice of preachers up to the local Pastors’ Association. It’s pointed out that that group consists entirely of Fundamentalists. Attorney General Tom Stewart “advises” – his word – Dudley Field Malone “this is a god-fearing country.” And that’s all the business the court seems to have conducted today.

William Jennings Bryan writes to the NYT to deny reports that he advocates putting religion in the Constitution. 

Sen. Coleman Blease of South Carolina wants SC to go beyond a proposed anti-evolution law and require all teachers to declare their support for the divinity of that Jesus guy.

Gloria Swanson denies having had a face-lift. She had a sunburn, she says.

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Today -100: July 14, 1925: Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding

Clarence Darrow (after objecting to the prayer at the opening of the court) “thunders” his first speech (transcript) of the Scopes Monkey Trial, an argument to quash the indictment. Like pretty much all the big moments that will come in this trial, the jury isn’t present. “This is as brazen and bold an attempt to destroy liberty as was ever seen in the Middle Ages,” he says of the Butler Act, “Of all the strange, weird, impossible and medieval things, of all the combinations of bigotry and ignorance brought together to make this statute, I can’t conceive of anything greater.”  “Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always they are feeding and gloating for more. Today, it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.” Darrow is on a roll.

H. L. Mencken, writing in The Baltimore Evening Sun, says Darrow’s speech “was not designed for reading, but for hearing. The clanging of it was as important as the logic. It rose like a wind and ended like a flourish of bugles.” Still, Mencken says, Bryan has the local people behind him: “These are his people. They understand him when he speaks in tongues.” Mencken is on a roll.

Standard Oil of New Jersey adopts an 8-hour day on its oil fields, down from 12, evidently John D. Rockefeller’s initiative. They will be paid something like 20% less for the shorter day’s work.

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Today -100: July 13, 1925: The breakdown of the reasoning powers

Tennessee hill folk (“queer fish,” the NYT calls them) flock into Dayton from all over the state to listen to William Jennings Bryan as he teaches Sunday school and gives an outdoor speech. He says “It is possible to carry education so far that a person will look down upon religion as a superstition.”

H. L. Mencken, who definitely looks down on religion as superstition, writes in The Baltimore Evening Sun: “It is the four Methodists on the jury who are expected to hold out for giving Scopes Christian burial after he is hanged.” But back to the NYT: “No one can yet measure the impulse and encouragement to erratic thinking which the Dayton trial is giving. It is a sort of notice, posted up so that the whole nation can read it, of the breakdown of the reasoning powers.”

Assistant Treasury Secretary (and former army general) Lincoln Andrews, the dude in charge of the federal Prohibition effort, is reorganizing that system into 22 regions, disregarding state lines. This means 22 administrators to be hired, and Republicans are determined to see 22 patronage appointments. The NYT seems to think Coolidge & Treasury Sec Andrew Mellon will back up Andrews against these pressures.

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Today -100: July 12, 1925: Foreign scientists should be barred from Dayton

NYC Mayor John Hylan denies that it’s New York garbage washing up on NJ beaches, says it’s garbage dumped by ships.

On Monday (this is Saturday), the Scopes trial will take up the question of whether scientists may testify about the theory of evolution. The state of Tennessee says the Butler Act plainly forbids the teaching of evolution, so what’s the point? But the poorly written act bans the teaching of “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.” The defense says these are two distinct things, so evidence is required to prove that teaching evolution does not necessarily deny religion. William Jennings Bryan, who resides in Florida, trumpets, “Foreign scientists should be barred from Dayton.” Clarence Darrow accuses the prosecution of “a plain effort to run away from the facts, and is doubtless on account of their inability to get any scientific man in the world to deny the facts that prove the correctness of evolution.” He also notes that “Science is the same everywhere.” “We have no doubt that some scientists will be called from Tennessee, as the statute is so recent that there are some scientists left here.”

John Scopes says he won’t be returning to teaching in Dayton. “It wouldn’t be pleasant.”

The Metric Association, meeting in Lake Placid, passes a resolution asking Tennessee to ban the metric system, which they snarkily suggest would be a boost to their attempt to get it adopted.

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