Today -100: May 31, 1926: Of coups, rich people, maledict courses, bands & bobs

The coup in Portugal succeeds in ousting the government, which resigns. There is supposedly no bloodshed. The coupsters say they want to form a democratic government (Spoiler Alert: they won’t) and save the country from politicians.

In front-page rich people with rich-people names dying while doing rich-people things news, NY banker Royall Victor drops dead while yacht-racing and NY insurance dude Elbridge Gerry Snow III is in a coma (from which he won’t recover) after a polo accident.

Sen. William Borah (R-Idaho), who hopes to ride a Prohibitionist wave into the White House in ‘28, addressing the Presbyterian General Assembly in Baltimore, attacks the states like New York which have no state law for Prohibition enforcement. “Whether sold in the open saloon or the brothel, its natural haunt, or secretly purveyed in defiance of law, the wicked stuff works its demoralization and ruin to individuals, communities and states. ... From the time it issues from the coiled and copper-colored worm in the distillery until it empties in the hell of crime, dishonor and death, misery and poverty and remorse mark its maledict course.” And people ignoring the dry law, whoa: “To disregard our Constitution, to evade it, to nullify it, while still refusing to change it, is to plant the seeds of destruction in the heart of the nation, is to confess before the world that we have neither the moral courage nor the intellectual sturdiness for self-government.” 

Germany says the Treaty of Versailles’s ban on foreign troops at the Rhine means it has to revoke permission for a Swedish military band to perform at Düsseldorf.

The big story in Kentucky this week is that a woman, Martha Bates, was sentenced to 40 days for slapping a Rev. Arlie Brown who criticized women who bob their hair. Gov. W.J. Fields defends her actions and orders her released. Bates says she told Brown that it’s not hair that makes the woman.

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Today -100: May 30, 1926: If you do not heed what I say, you will learn to feel my switch

Marshal Józef Piłsudski tells a meeting of top Polish politicians, demanding he be given dictatorial powers, “If you do not heed what I say, you will learn to feel my switch.” He does say that they’re free to pick another candidate for president. Well, free-ish: “You can elect whom you want, but I will decide if your choice is right. If not, the street will be heard from.” As president, he would want the Diet to grant him extraordinary powers, and then suspend itself for a year.

Texas’s former governor James Ferguson calls his wife’s competitor for governor, Attorney Gen. Dan Moody, “a blowed-up sucker and a gone fawnskin.” I think he’s just making up insults now. This was at a campaign event in Sulphur Springs, at which the actual candidate, “Ma” Ferguson, read off a short speech, which was followed by her husband’s lengthy “harangue.”

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Today -100: May 29, 1926: Of coups, tests of eugenics, and bombs

A military revolt begins in Portugal.

9,000 Slovak fascists meet and swear to fight for Slovak autonomy and the Catholic church. They want only the Slovak language to be used in elementary schools.

The International Woman Suffrage Alliance refuses to allow the National Woman’s Party to join.

The city of Berlin will open a bureau to give couples advice on whether they’re healthy enough to get married and breed. “This is the first real test of the eugenics theory to be tried out in Germany.” But not the last.

Asa Bartlett, head of the Blue Lake Township, Michigan Ku Klux Klan and town constable, is arrested for sending a package bomb to the home of town Supervisor August Krubaech. The bomb killed Krubaech, his 19-year-old daughter, and her fiancé. Bartlett will serve 36 years in prison before his sentence is commuted. He will die in 1982 at 85 years old.

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Today -100: May 28, 1926: Of bodies of representatives of different points of view, coal, pickles, and poles

Two competing American groups, the League of Women Voters and the National Woman’s Party, show up at the big International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) meeting in Paris. The League really really really doesn’t like the more radical NWP and says that the latter “is not a body of representatives of different points of view who meet to develop a common political theory,” which seems an odd argument to make about a group whose, you know, different points of view you’re trying to exclude altogether. Also, Britain, Holland, Romania & France are each already represented by multiple groups. A decision will be made tomorrow.

French suffragists hope this conference will spur the women’s suffrage cause in France. It won’t.

With the coal miners strike still going, Britain imposes rationing. Householders will need a permit to buy coal and then only 100 weight, which is the equivalent of who knows what, per fortnight. Lack of coal is limiting or shutting down factories and railways. Street lights are ordered shut off.

Headline of the Day -100:

3 cans of pickles fell on her in a New Jersey market. And for some reason her husband got $1,000.

Boy, everyone’s looking for Poles today

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Today -100: May 27, 1926: Of princes in prisons and rifs

Hungarian Prince Louis Windisch-Graetz is convicted in the counterfeiting-for-coups case. He and Police Chief Imre Nádosy are sentenced to 4 years and a fine of 10,000 gold crowns, which is the equivalent of some money. Both will be amnestied in 1928. Other participants receive shorter sentences.

The NYT notes that Prince Louis had a lot of fun in “the dives of New York City.”

Abd el-Krim surrenders to the French ending 5 years of war over the Rif in Morocco, first with Spain, then France. He will be exiled to Réunion for 21 years before escaping.

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Today -100: May 26, 1926: I wished to register a moral protest

Symon Petliura, who led the breakaway Ukrainian People’s Republic created in 1917 and fought both the Russian Bolshevik regime and the Whites from 1919 before leaving for exile in Poland and then Paris, is shot in the Latin Quarter by Russian-French Yiddish poet Sholem Schwarzbard, dying later in the day. Schwarzbard explains that he acted in revenge for pogroms by Petliura’s forces which killed thousands of Jews, including some of his family. He will be acquitted next year and live in the US and South Africa, where he’ll die in 1938.

Marshal Józef Piłsudski meets American reporters. Asked why he did the coup, he says “I wished to register a moral protest.” You know, with machine guns.

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Today -100: May 25, 1926: We might as well divide the State into Federal precincts at once

The Supreme Court rules unanimously in the case Corrigan v Buckley, permitting permit racial covenants in D.C. real estate deeds banning the future sale of properties to black people, keeping neighborhoods all-white and making such covenants legally enforceable. In this case, the agreement was made in 1921 among 30 families on a block of S Street NW, but the owners of number 1727 sold their house 

to a black family in 1922, pissing off the neighbors. The Court says private covenants are not prohibited by the 5th, 13th or 14th Amendments and, since they are private, the Court has no jurisdiction. In 1948 Corrigan will be reversed in  Shelley v. Kraemer, which determined (also unanimously) that racially restrictive covenants are prohibited under the 14th Amendment and not enforceable, indeed that enforcement by the state would negate the pretense that racial covenants are purely private.

Governors reply to a NYT question about Coolidge’s executive order allowing the federal government to offer state & local cops dual employment as Prohibition agents. 5 oppose it outright, 4 support it, 7 say there are legal/constitutional issues with their state cooperating, 15 say they’re still thinkin’ about it. Gov. Harry Moore of NJ (D) says “We might as well divide the State into Federal precincts at once”.

Attorney General John Sargent says that the exec. order doesn’t violate the Constitution, federal laws, or state laws. Evidently Coolidge asked for Sargent’s opinion on the legality of the E.O. only after issuing it.

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Today -100: May 24, 1926: Of mysteries, chivalrous coups, and servant shortages

Divers search off the coast of Santa Monica for the body of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, 35, who disappeared last week.

Marshal Piłsudski says the “civil war” in Poland, which is what he calls his coup, was “quite chivalrous”; soldiers often stopped shooting at each other to let children and little old ladies cross the road. But some officers aren’t very forgiving and there will probably be a few duels.

Former suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst (not “Miss Pankhurst,” NYT), continuing her move rightwards, says that if a secret ballot had been taken of miners’ wives, there would never have been a strike.

Oh non! France has a servant shortage. And the Poor Law Dept won’t even let rich Parisians take young orphan girls, saying it would no longer be able to exercise supervision over their welfare. But what about the welfare of rich Parisians? WHAT ABOUT THE WELFARE OF RICH PARISIANS??!!

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Today -100: May 23, 1926: Hazard by name...

Dry Tsar Lincoln Andrews says he’ll try out naming state officials as federal Prohibition agents in California, in accordance with that Coolidge executive order, as a test run. Only in California and only in rural counties and only deputy sheriffs. Sounds like the Coolidge Admin. is backing down.

Texas Gov. Miriam “Ma” Ferguson suggests that if she wins the Democratic gubernatorial primary in July by 25,000 votes, her opponent, Dan Moody, immediately resign as attorney general, but if he wins by a single vote, she’ll resign as governor.  (Update: he accepts).

Kentucky National Guard troops armed with machine guns guard the county jail in Hazard to prevent the lynching of a 17-year-old black youth who killed a constable.

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Today -100: May 22, 1926: On the other hand, if they use a trumpet *while* writing on a slate, that would be pretty impressive

Coolidge issues an executive order allowing state, county, and municipal officers to get dual authority as federal officers (for “a nominal rate of compensation,” maybe $1 a year) with the power to cross state and county lines to enforce Prohibition laws, including in the states – New York, Maryland and Nevada – which have no prohibition enforcement laws. New York has a law which strips the salaries of state officers taking a federal appointment. This executive order reverses one issued by Grant in 1873 forbidding executive branch employees holding state offices. Much outrage is expressed, including from dry members of both parties on the Senate Judiciary Committee, on constitutional grounds (Grant’s EO was more about keeping the graft down to a dull roar). Sen. William Bruce (D-Maryland) points out that just last week Coolidge was championing states’ rights and saying that “No plan of centralization has ever been adopted which did not result in bureaucracy, tyranny, inflexibility, reaction and decline.” Sen. Edwin Broussard (D-Louisiana) says compulsory enforcement in communities opposed to Prohibition is just like the Northern attitude during Reconstruction: “The president is merely invoking the policy of the North against the South with reference to slavery.” Maybe not as compelling an argument as he thinks it is.

Józef Piłsudski now says he’ll graciously permit the National Assembly to elect him president of Poland, although he claims “I don’t care to be elected president unless it is proved beyond a doubt that the great mass of the Polish people are behind me,” because nothing says I’m indifferent to power like leading a fucking coup. Also, the president is not elected by the Polish people but by the National Assembly, and some members of that body would be arrested if they showed up in Warsaw.

I’ve realized that I’m so pissed off at this coup because I’ve always resented that World War II started when Germany invaded a country with an authoritarian, anti-Semitic regime, Poland, rather than an actual democracy like, say, Czechoslovakia.

There’s a civil case running alongside the criminal trial of the Hungarians who forged French francs to fund a far-right/fascist coup. In the civil case, the Bank of France is demanding only one (1) franc... plus all the forging equipment.  Fascist leader Franz Ulain, who is the lawyer for Prince Louis Windisch-Graetz, points out that Napoleon counterfeited pounds and rubles. In the criminal case, the coupsters’ lawyers are hailing them as the greatest national heroes since Kossuth; I’m rather reminded of Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch trial.

Al Jolson resigns from the Westchester Biltmore Country Club after it objected to him bringing a Jew to play golf with him.

At the House of Representatives hearings about possibly banning mediums in the District of Columbia, Anna Fletcher, wife of Sen. Duncan Upshaw Fletcher (D-Florida) testifies that she’s been an “investigator” for 25 years, has never met a dishonest medium, and received a message from her dead father written on a slate in his handwriting. Harry Houdini calls her “sincere” but denies such a thing is possible: “Every medium who uses a trumpet or writes on slates is a fraud.”

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Today -100: May 21, 1926: Restful quiets are the best kind of quiets

The British coal strike continues, as both sides reject Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s proposals to end it.

In a speech to the New York City Bar Association, state Supreme Court Justice William Harmon Black calls for the death penalty for perjury in murder cases, like they did in ancient Rome. He also says jurors must be taught that they’re cowards if they acquit murderers because they are squeamish about the methods of the death penalty.

Thomas Edison says Americans don’t even want talking movies. “Americans require a restful quiet in the moving picture theatre.” Hearing the actors speak would just destroy the illusion. (Unlike seeing the actors in black and white?) Annoyingly for this blog, he refuses to answer a question about what the world will be like in 100 years.

The Jewish population of Poland supports Marshal Piłsudski’s coup, thinking they’ll be better off. Good luck with that.

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Today -100: May 20, 1926: Of vetoes and kings

NY Gov. Al Smith vetoes a Republican bill to redistrict State Assembly & Senate seats, giving R’s seats in Democratic Manhattan. He also vetoes a raise for public teachers, I think but am not wholly sure because it would come at the expense of other priorities, and approves a referendum calling for the loosening of Prohibition. He says this is needed because Prohibition’s popularity in the state has never been quantified. The Legislature approved the 18th Amendment in 1919 after refusing to put it to the voters and the issue has since found its way into low-level elections of officials who have nothing to do with Prohibition.

The military backers of Marshal Piłsudski’s coup want to make him King of Poland.

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Today -100: May 19, 1926: Of crooks, criminals and dupes

The House District of Columbia Committee is holding hearings on ... mediums, specifically whether to ban them in the District of Columbia. The result of which is the White House denying – officially denying, mind you – that any seances have been held at the White House since Coolidge became president. These hearings are becoming a combat between mediums, mostly women, and Harry Houdini, who calls them “crooks and criminals.” He also calls Arthur Conan Doyle a “dupe” of the spiritualists.

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Today -100: May 18, 1926: Cramp by name, cramp by nature

British Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill says the General Strike™ didn’t cost the government more than ₤750,000, so there’ll be no need to raise taxes.

The industrial secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen says the strike cost the union ₤1m and the railway companies ₤5.5m, which I’m mostly reporting in order to inform you that the industrial secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen is named Charlie Cramp.

A group is formed in Czechoslovakia to combat fascism. Former Cabinet minister Becyhne demands that Acting Chief of the Army General Staff Radola Gajda either deny being a card-carrying Fascist or resign. (Gadja will shortly be forced out and in a few months will found and head the National Fascist Community).

Headline of the Day -100:

Sigh.

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Today -100: May 17, 1926: Southern Baptists sound like fun

Bishop George Caruana denies having deceived Mexico when he entered the country. He says he told the immigration inspector that he was a teacher, “without, however, any intention of hiding any other titles that I have.” You know, Apostolic Delegate, that sort of other title.

Wilhelm Marx of the Zentrum party will be the next German chancellor, his second time in the job. He’ll retain Hans Luther’s Cabinet except for the justice minister and, er, Hans Luther. His Cabinet will only have minority support in the Reichstag and can be overturned by either the Socialists or the Nationalists or a strong breeze.

The Southern Baptist convention condemns beauty contests, card-playing, dancing, late-night joy-riding and “general mixed bathing.”

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Today -100: May 16, 1926: Dance, Hopis, Dance!

The Norge has reappeared. It has discovered no new land in the Arctic.

The Underwood Typewriter Company introduces the first typewriter with Chinese characters.

Polish president Stanisław Wojciechowski and the Cabinet resign, submitting to Piłsudski’s coup. Piłsudski won’t be prime minister, contenting himself with Minister of War and running things from behind the scenes, fooling no one.

Russia doesn’t seem to mind the near-fascist coup in its neighbor but France is rather concerned.

At a sesquicentennial event in Williamsburg, Coolidge says the states are the sheet anchors of the US and should stop giving up their powers to the federal government, which should contract.

The British Labour Party repudiates the General Strike™: “For the purpose of checking unconstitutional governments, and acting as a defensive weapon in the industrial battle of labour, the general strike has its place, but the emancipation of the people from capitalism and the re-establishment of Socialism must be achieved primarily by an educational and political organization.” Re-establishment?

Mexico has rejected the Vatican’s request to resume diplomatic relations, but the Vatican tries to sneak an envoy (official title: Apostolic Delegate), Rev. George Caruana (a US citizen, born in Malta, Bishop of Puerto Rico and the Antilles) into the country. Mexico is now deporting him.

Some Hopi Indians from Arizona do some of their religious dances on Capitol Plaza in D.C. before a crowd that includes senators, Supreme Court justices & VP Dawes. They have war bonnets, bear skins and dance with six Arizona black snakes. Their purpose is to demonstrate that Hopi rituals are not cruel or demonic or something, as claimed by people who want Congress to ban them. Sen. Ralph Cameron (R-Arizona) says the dance is not as bad as the Charleston. The NYT says it’s a bit like the hula.

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Today -100: May 15, 1926: Of dead spots, coups & kaisers, and charlestons

After passing over the North Pole, the Norge has disappeared. Or just wandered into a “radio dead spot.”

The searches by German cops investigating the far-right coup plot turned up letters from Heinrich Claß of the Pan-German League to former kaiser Wilhelm and his wife Hermine informing them of the coup plans. The cops also uncovered a hidden munitions dump in a forest near Berlin. Royalist newspapers explain this away as for hunting purposes, “though how hand grenades could be used in deer-stalking and why the whole supply was carefully buried is not explained.”

The Catholic Zentrum Party are angling for the chancellorship in the next coalition government, with some suggesting Cologne’s mayor Konrad Adenauer. He may have to wait a while.

Taking advantage of the coup in Poland, Lithuania invades, trying to recapture the part of Silesia held by Poland.

A world dancing master congress in Paris attacks that “immoral” “negro dance,” the Charleston, but some wish to “correct its faults” and make it into a decent dance. To that end, they set up a committee to carry out this purification. They complain that negro bands refuse to play the Boston, the Paso doble, and the Scottish Espagnole, preferring to play jazz.

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Today -100: May 14, 1926: Our resisting powers are unimpaired

British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin says he won’t “countenance” employers using the collapse of the General Strike™ to reduce wages or increase hours. Oh he’ll totally countenance that. Hell, he is totally countenancing that right now.

The Trades Union Congress says it will resist to the utmost “any attempt to impose humiliating terms” on returning workers; “Our resisting powers are unimpaired.” In other news: employers are totally imposing humiliating terms on returning workers, or not (so far) taking them back at all. And the TUC’s resisting powers are totally impaired.

Jesus, Marshal Józef Klemens Piłsudski’s coup required only 2,500 troops to seize Warsaw. Pres. Stanisław Wojciechowski is (falsely) reported to have been arrested.

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Today -100: May 13, 1926: Not as murderers but as radicals

The General Strike™ is over. Except for the coal miners, who have been abandoned by the Trades Union Congress, and will continue striking for another 7 months. A. J. Cook, secretary of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain points out that the decision of the TUC (which was never enthusiastic about the strike) was made without consulting the miners who, to be fair, have rejected every possible offer of compromise (as have the mineowners). The TUC gets nothing for its surrender, the government gives nothing, so that was a fun nine days for, to repeat, nothing. When a delegation arrives at Downing Street, Prime Minister Baldwin dickishly doesn’t let them in until he sends out the minister of labour to receive assurances that the strike has been called off.

King George recommends amnesia: “Let us forget whatever elements of bitterness the events of the past few days have created and only remember how steady and how orderly the country remained though severely tested.”

Baldwin says this was “a victory of the common sense of the best part of the whole of the United Kingdom” and likewise recommends looking forwards instead of backwards, which will be difficult for those workers on whom many industries will inflict revenge such as firings, loss of seniority and pension rights, reduced wages, being forced to sign statements admitting “guilt,” etc. On the BBC, Baldwin says, “our whole duty at the moment is to forget all recrimination.”

German Chancellor Hans Luther and his cabinet resign after the Democrats & Socialists withdraw from the coalition because of Luther’s attempt to compromise with the Nationalists over... flags. Specifically whether imperial flags – I believe it’s the navy flag, which has the old kaisery colors – will fly over Germany’s embassies alongside the real flag. They accuse Luther of coming under the influence of the reactionary right. I mean, they’re not wrong about the flag thing undermining the legitimacy of the Weimar Republic, but there was a literal fascist coup plot uncovered, you know, yesterday. 

The plans for that coup, in which involve Pres. Hindenburg would dissolve the Reichstag before being forced out himself, the end of freedom of the press, the right to meeting, strikes, etc., with executions ordered by court-martials, and, oh yeah, “The Jews were to be segregated in a concentration camp and their property seized.”

Marshal Józef Klemens Piłsudski, forced out as Poland’s chief of state in 1923, leads a coup. Soldiers occupy Warsaw.

The Massachusetts Supreme Court rules that Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were lawfully convicted. Their lawyer argued (in January) that they were tried “not as murderers but as radicals.”

Federal Judge Julian Mack orders the Fish Trust dissolved.

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Today -100: May 12, 1926: Of flag Poles, lynchings, labor solidarity, and royalists

Roald Amundsen flies over the North Pole in the semi-rigid (hey, it’s cold up there) airship The Norge and, unlike Richard Byrd a couple of days ago, he can actually prove it: the multi-national crew drop flags on the ice. Everyone on the Norge is pissed off that pilot Umberto Nobile’s Italian flag is larger than the Norwegian and American ones.

Henry Patterson, a black man, is lynched in LaBelle, Florida after he escapes from a cop car after being arrested for attacking a white woman. Except he hadn’t: the woman just started screaming when she saw a black man, as was the custom. He is shot by the mob and his corpse is hanged from a tree.

The British government, using emergency powers, diverts paper intended for the Times to that purveyor of bullshit, the British Gazette.

Pravda complains that the striking British miners’ union rejection of funds from the Soviet Union, which it says was done to demonstrate that the strike is purely economic and not revolutionary.  “But can’t they see that the general strike must be political and international. Labor solidarity is one of their strongest trumps.”

Spanish dictator Primo de Rivera wants to reform bullfights by... using younger horses. Ok, I stopped reading this article because, fuck. Seriously, blindfolded horses? WTF, Spain?

Berlin police raid the offices and homes of associates of right-wing newspaper baron Alfred Hugenberg (but not his?), as well as the Viking Bund, the United Fatherland Societies and other such organizations. They find evidence of a plot to overthrow the Weimar government and establish a military dictatorship (hint to plotters: maybe don’t leave memos titled “Dictatorship” lying around).

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