Today -100: January 7, 1925: Of postal pay, plane sizess, and political prisoners

The Senate sustains by one vote Coolidge’s veto of a bill raising the pay of postal workers.

Germany tells Allied ambassadors that their decision not to end the occupation of Cologne on schedule violates the Treaty of Versailles. It also says that unless they remove the restrictions on German commercial planes, whose size and power is limited in order to prevent them potentially being turned into military planes, then Germany will put the same restrictions on French planes overflying Germany, and shoot down any that violate those restrictions.

Repression continues in Italy: the government says it has closed 95 clubs, 25 subversive organizations, and 150 cafés, and arrested 111 revolutionaries. 

Germany also has political (Communist) prisoners. Albert Einstein comes out for amnesty.

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Today -100: January 6, 1925: Of explosions of Fascist joy, justices, and resumed administrations

Mussolini purges the last non-Fascist members from his Cabinet, the Liberals Gino Sarrocchi (Minister of Works) and Alessandro Casati (Education). The Liberal Party is now split, with some MPs following former PM Antonio Salandra into opposition, some saying they’ll continue voting with the Fascist government. 

The obnoxious NYT Italian correspondent says Saturday’s “explosion of Fascist joy” – surely the worst kind of joy – has died down.

80-year-old Supreme Court Justice Joseph McKenna retires after 27 years on the bench. When McKinley appointed him, he had no legal experience, much less judicial, so in the 5 weeks between his nomination and his confirmation he took a crash course at Columbia Law School. Coolidge nominates Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone to replace him. Stone went to Columbia for realsies.

Wyoming Gov. Nellie Taylor Ross tells the state Senate that hers is not a new administration but the resumption of her late husband’s.

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Today -100: January 5, 1925: Of women governors, fucking Fascists, and flesh color

Mrs. Nellie Taylor Ross takes office. The first woman governor in the US. In Wyoming, the first state to give women the vote 35 years before, and the first territory 20 years before that.

Mussolini orders prefects to break up opposition political associations and to close meeting places. Fascists hold parades in many cities joyfully celebrating The Duck’s return to thuggery. Fascist crowds gather outside opposition newspapers to express their displeasure (what’s wrong with a letter-to-the-editor? on some nice stationery?), but police are preventing violence, for now. Officials are confiscating opposition papers regardless of content – including the Milan Giustizia, which appears blank except for ads. 

Palm Beach’s Casino Beach, which presumably already bans the display of women’s legs, adds a ban on white or “flesh”-colored stockings. Also, one-piece bathing suits. The beach censor, which is a real position that someone occupies, is armed with a color chart to determine just what constitutes flesh color.

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Today -100: January 4, 1925: Chivalrous?

Republicans in the New York Legislature are considering abolishing the Motion Picture Censorship Commission, not from any sudden opposition to censorship, but because a Republican member’s term just expired and when Gov. Al Smith replaces them it would have a Democratic majority.

Mussolini says he will “clear up the political situation” within 48 hours so that “the air will again be breathable in Italy.” Well that isn’t ominous-sounding. He says only force can decide between Fascism and the opposition, of whom he says, “We have swallowed their insults and allowed them to call us brigands and assassins. Now before the Chamber, before the whole nation and before God, I alone assume full personal, political, moral and historical responsibility for everything that has occurred in Italy. If Fascism is an association of malefactors [Fact Check: It is] then let it be known that I am head of this association of malefactors.” He denies having created the Italian equivalent of the Cheka [Fact Cheka: He has]: “If I had founded such an organization I would have seen to it that its violence was always intelligent, timely and chivalrous, while the violences attributed to the Cheka which I am accused of founding always have been unintelligent, untimely and stupid.” He says “Please spare me the insult of believing me so stupid as to have ordered” the assassination of Matteotti. The moment has come, he says, to “pass to the counter-offensive.” It’s unclear what this means or what he will do in the next 48 hours. He’s already cracking down on opposition newspapers, which he blames for anti-Fascist violence, and it’s assumed he’ll make some move against the “Aventine” MPs boycotting Parliament, maybe declare a state of siege? Il Popolo d’Italia, Mussolini’s newspaper, says “Oppositions are a thing of the past.”

German Chancellor Wilhelm Marx has failed, again, to form a new cabinet containing the center and right-wing parties, will now try to form a non-partisan cabinet which would just kind of hope for the best in getting majority Reichstag support for its various policies.

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Today -100: January 3, 1925: We must correct our blunder here

France asks the US for a ten-year moratorium on paying its war debt and then 80 years to pay it off.

French oncologist Jean Alban Bergonié dies. He experimented with radiation as a treatment for cancer, irradiating rat testicles (that wasn’t science, that was just for fun, probably) and gave himself cancer. All sorts of cancer. One hand had to be amputated, then the arm, then 3 fingers on the other hand. He dies of lung cancer.

Mikhail Kalinin, chair of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union, signs a decree telling the USSR’s constituent republics to re-do elections at the local level that “gave undesirable results.” “We must correct our blunder here.”

Those 15 Republican state senators who fled Rhode Island in June will end their exile as the General Assembly term expires. They were successful in their goal of preventing the Legislature accomplishing anything, including paying state employees.

The Italian government seizes a bunch of newspapers that printed that a Fascist army was marching on Rome, like that could ever happen. There are violent incidents in various cities, about which the NYT is somewhat vague, not that I’d believe its correspondent after they referred to anti-Fascists as “subversives.”

Bartolomeo Vanzetti of Sacco & Vanzetti fame is sent to an insane asylum.

Headline of the Day -100:  

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Today -100: January 2, 1925: Of rhinos

The Duke of York (grandfather of King Charles) shoots a charging rhinoceros.

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Today -100: January 1, 1925: Party like it’s 1624

Italian police seize issues of at least 11 newspapers and raid the houses of opposition leaders. The government is claiming it’s searching for secret arms caches and for money sent from France to overthrow the Fascist regime.

Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone says the Justice Dept concluded 80,000 cases in 1924, 46,000 of which were Prohibition cases.

The Tuskegee Institute says there were only 16 lynchings in the US in 1924. 5 in Florida, 2 in Georgia, 1 each in Illinois, Kentucy, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. All 16 lynchees were black.

The capital of Norway, Christiania, is renamed Oslo, which was the name used until 1624.

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Today -100: December 31, 1924: Of total bankruptcies and debt

German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann says “If the Entente persists in the policy indicated by the refusal to evacuate the Cologne zone on Jan. 10 it will mean the total bankruptcy of the Dawes plan.” He asserts that Germany is now fully disarmed: “All statements to the contrary are fairy tales.” They have some weird-ass fairy tales in Germany.

Congresscritters think France means to repudiate its war debt to the US. The Senate is thinking of advising banks not to make any more loans to France until it makes arrangements to pay up.

Turkey will confiscate the property of Greeks, whether citizens of Greece or of Turkey itself, in retaliation for alleged mistreatment of Muslims in Thrace and something or other about Muslim property in Greece.

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Today -100: December 30, 1924: When jury duty is jury pleasure

A San Juan, Puerto Rico prohibition case ends in a mistrial after the quart bottle of evidence mysteriously disappears. And by mysteriously disappears, I mean the jury... evaluated... whether it met the 0.5% alcohol threshold, until it was all gone.

Mussolini is again implicated in Fascist violence, including the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, by the leak of a memo from one of his top lieutenants, Cesare Rossi.

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