Whatever It Is, I’m Against It

Special constables seize their barracks in Belfast to demand compensation for their units being disbanded under the Irish agreement. Other cops in Derry & elsewhere in Northern Ireland refuse to hand in arms and equipment.

The Texas Textbook Commission removes references to evolution from a biology textbook.

People in Edineţi, a town in Bessarabia, which was annexed by Romania in 1918, will be required to salute Romanian officers, “with a friendly smile, respectful bow and doffing of the hat.” In the meantime, the Town Commandant’s hat will be paraded through the streets on a stick so the Edineţihoovians can practice the smiling, bowing, and doffing.

The Nacionalista & Democratic Parties of the Philippines Legislature agree to join together to fight for Filipino autonomy, in response to Coolidge’s State of the Union call for strengthening the power of the governor-general against the Legislature (and also the veto by Gov.-Gen. Leonard Wood last week of a bill for an independence plebiscite, but the NYT kinda missed that one).

Kip and Alice Rhinelander have scattered to the winds. Not the same winds, of course. He’s making sure she can’t serve him to sue for support, she’s, I dunno, escaping reporters? Anyway, the Ku Klux Klan are searching for her in Florida hotels in which she’s thought to be staying. Not ominous at all. (Update: she’s actually still in New Rochelle; the NYT helpfully provides her address.)

The Republican Senate leadership decide not to ostracize newly elected young Robert La Follette Jr. after all. They recognize him as a Republican and put him on three Senate committees.

Harry Houdini’s new show opens at the 44th Street Theatre. The entire second act is devoted to exposing the ticks used by mediums. Some of the audience members are annoyed that he asked questions of them based on letters his assistant took from coats in the cloakroom.

Headline of the Day -100:

Oops. 9 years old. “Rose, he said, had always been his favorite.” His less-favored children must be wondering what’s in store for them.

Incidentally, Rudyard Kipling has been sick, but is now on the mend. This has been worth something like a dozen news articles over the last couple of weeks. It’s always a little weird when the NYT mounts a death-watch. Kipling won’t actually die anytime soon.

Yugoslav Prime Minister Nikola Pašić’s car runs over and kills a teacher. Later in the day, the acting foreign minister’s car also runs over a woman. Ice, they say, and definitely not some sort of sick competition.

Pennsylvania Gov. Gifford Pinchot sets an execution date for William Cavalier, who was 14 when convicted of murdering his grandmother.

It is hinted that Mussolini might promote Italy to an empire rather than a mere kingdom in the new year. The new emperor would, of course, be the spineless Victor Emmanuel, not Moose, perhaps the reason this never came to pass.

A mosque is being built in Paris, more or less the first in mainland France. The Grande Mosquée de Paris will open next year in the 5th arrondissement. 

The League of Nations invites the US (and other non-members Germany and Russia) to join a committee to prepare for a disarmament conference. 

NY Gov. Al Smith pardons Benjamin Gitlow, the former Socialist state assemblyperson convicted of “criminal anarchy” in 1920 for stuff published in a newspaper of which he was business manager. Smith says he’s been “sufficiently punished for a political crime”* and in prison “has meekly submitted to the sovereign power of the State,” which I’d consider an insult if anyone said it about me. Smith says “no additional punishment would act as a deterrent to those who would preach an erroneous doctrine of Government.” Gitlow will run for governor next year as the Workers Party candidate. The Comintern will expel him from the Communist Party in 1929 as insufficiently radical and yadda yadda yadda, he’ll turn anti-Communist by the late ‘30s and write I Confess: The Truth About American Communism in 1940.

*I failed to notice the significance of this, but Gitlow will point out next week that Smith “admitted in his pardon that there is such a thing in this country as imprisonment for political offenses.”

In Prussia, Robert Grütte-Lehder of Gen. Ludendorff’s Nazi-adjacent German Völkisch Freedom Party (DVFP) is on trial for murdering Heinrich Dammers of that same group in 1923 for supposedly passing party secrets to the Communists. This is the first Berlin trial for the “Feme murders” (Fememorde – punishment murders) in which far-right groups cleaned house. c.30 officers and such are said to be awaiting similar trials. Grütte-Lehder, “resembling an east side gangster,” accuses DVFP party leaders and Reichstag members of inducing him to kill Dammers, giving him a letter – an actual letter – authorizing it.  (Update: I think it actually just tells him to establish order in the Stettin branch of the party, which Grütte-Lehder says amounts to the same thing.)

The Italian Chamber of Deputies passes Mussolini’s labor law abolishing all labor unions except Fascist “syndicates,” which he says are different from Socialist labor unions in that they are based on class collaboration. Strikes will be banned in favor of mandatory arbitration. The Duck tells the Chamber that this should be considered a war measure “because I consider the Italian nation in a permanent state of war.” “Even as controversies are not permitted at the front in wartime, so now we must realize the maximum national efficiency.” A NYT editorial gives this, um, illuminating analysis: “Italy’s new labor laws would indicate that the hen of dictatorship has been brooding over the eggs of radicalism and, oddly enough, has hatched out chickens shaped in the Fascist image.”

Republicans in the House of Representatives who didn’t back Nicholas Longworth for Speaker or didn’t vote for a new House rule to kill bills not supported by the Republican Party leadership – mostly Wisconsin Progressives – are ousted from committee chairmanships; some are expelled from their committees.

 

Women’s organizations in New York want a minimum marriage age, which is currently 12 years old with parental consent under common law.

Lady Nancy Astor, MP offers to pay to send any British Communist (and his family) (she assumes it’s a he) who thinks Soviet Russia is so great to Russia if they will live there two years to enjoy “the joys of Bolshevist rule.” She is not offering to pay their return fare.

Coolidge calls for a budget of $3,494,222,308. This would include $76m for aviation and $22m for prohibition enforcement. But he wants states to pay for their own damn roads.

Calvin Coolidge sends Congress his State of the Union address (not yet called that). He calls for joining the World Court because “Wars do not spring into existence. They arise from small incidents and trifling irritations which can be adjusted by an international court.” He wants to send power from the federal government to the states, but mostly, he says, “we are going in the right direction. The country does not appear to require radical departures from the policies already adopted so much as it needs a further extension of these policies and the improvement of details.” He says negroes “should be protected from all violence,” without using the word “lynching.” One state he doesn’t want to send more power to is the Philippines, where he wants the governor general to have even more power “so that he will not be so dependent upon the local legislative body to render effective our efforts to set an example of the sound administration and good government, which is so necessary for the preparation of the Philippine people for self-government under ultimate independence.”

France arrests 3 Englishmen as leaders of a spy circle trying to steal French aviation secrets. This may or may not be retaliation after the British supposedly arrested French spies trying to steal British aviation secrets.

Headline of the Day -100:

Tick tick tick tick...

Russia arrests 15 Czarist-era executioners, who between them strangled 500+ revolutionaries secretly in a cellar. I’m surprised the arrests didn’t happen much earlier.

The 69th session of Congress opens (not counting the special session back in March). And the big thing you need to know about it, evidently, is that Robert La Follette Jr. took the oath of office wearing pearl-colored spats, which “were commented on smilingly by old Senators, who recalled that the elder La Follette also was partial to spats but of a less conspicuous shade.” Nicholas Longworth, husband of Alice Roosevelt, daughter of Theodore, takes over as speaker of the House. Alice looks on from the visitors’ gallery, wearing... oh, who cares what she was wearing. She is sitting next to Mary Borah, wife of Sen. William Borah, the actual father of the child Alice gave birth to in February. Awkward. 

The increasingly fascist Society of Awakening Hungarians adopts a uniform, much like the Italian Fascists, and adopts a battle axe as their emblem, this, I think:

Former Texas Gov. James Ferguson writes in his weekly newspaper Ferguson’s Forum, mostly known for featuring advertisements from companies wanting government contracts and other favors, “The war is on.”

Siegfried Wagner, son of composer Richard, calls jazz “barbaric noise” and “nigger rhythmics” turned out by “half-civilized negroes.” In 1913 Kaiser Wilhelm banned army officers from dancing the tango, “this nigger grotesque.” Everyone’s a critic.

At a meeting to protest “the dismemberment of Ireland,” Éamon de Valera calls the decision not to change the border between North & South Ireland the greatest outrage ever committed by England against the Irish people. Surely he can think of a few greater outrages committed by England against the Irish people.

Texas Attorney Gen. Dan Moody, who is not a fan of the governors Ferguson, seems to kill the idea of a special session to impeach Gov. Miriam, saying it’s against public policy to have a privately funded session. So a special session could only be held if the legislators pay their own expenses, and we know that ain’t gonna happen. But if the impeachment movement is sputtering, it’s probably because the governors Ferguson have been leaking that they won’t be running for re-election (she will, though, and will lose humiliatingly to Dan Moody). Also, the grand jury has yet to weigh in.

Mussolini calls for schools to be “inspired by the ideals of Fascism.” Aren’t they all? “It is not necessary to burden the mind with infinite notions which can never be remembered, which leave nothing worth while.”

German Chancellor Hans Luther and his Cabinet resign. No one else wants the job, so Luther will probably retain it.

The Rhinelander v. Rhinelander jury refuses to annul their marriage, denying Kip’s charge that Alice R. tricked him into marriage by racial fraud. Alice will now demand alimony and attorneys’ fees. A reporter asks if she still loves her husband and she says “I do and I don’t.” Jurors insist to reporters that racial prejudice did not enter into their deliberations.

So the Rhinelanders are still married but won’t, I think, ever meet again. His lawyers will appeal the ruling for a couple of year and fail. In 1929 she’ll sue Kip’s father Philip for alienation of affections (Kip was legally obligated to support his wife, but didn’t). He’ll try to get a Nevada divorce, but New York State won’t recognize it because she was not present. She will then file suit in NY for separation, finally forcing the family to negotiate with her, paying her $31,500 (most of which went to her lawyers, as is the custom) plus $3,800 a year in exchange for an NDA and giving up the right to use the name “Rhinelander” (it will, however, appear on her grave stone). Leonard died in 1936 at 32 of pneumonia. He didn’t re-marry; neither did Alice, who died in 1989.

W. E. B. DuBois will point out that “if Rhinelander had used this girl as concubine or prostitute, white America would have raised no word of protest; white periodicals would have printed no headlines, white ministers would have said no single word. It is when he legally and decently marries the girl that Hell breaks loose and literally tears the pair apart.”

There’s a detail I haven’t managed to shoehorn in yet: 40 years before all this, Kip’s uncle William (brother of Philip) married an Irish servant, to a horrified social and familial reaction that will sound familiar. The family sent a lawyer to try to bribe his wife to go back to Ireland. William shot the lawyer in the shoulder, which resulted in his death 6 months later, but William was never charged.

The jury in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander reaches a verdict! In 12 hours! We don’t know what it is!

NY Gov. Al Smith becomes a grandfather (assuming he wasn’t already one). The news is a surprise because no one knew that his son Arthur eloped last year when he was 17 and a student at the Christian Brothers Academy. His older brother Al Jr. also eloped last year.