Whatever It Is, I’m Against It

Today -100: October 31, 1926: Of colored citizens, racist immigration bans, and executioners

2026-10-31T00:00:00.000-07:00

The “Mills Colored Citizens’ Committee,” whoever they might be, calls on black people to vote for Republican Ogden Mills for NY governor. They say that in 3 terms as governor, Al Smith has failed to appoint a single negro to any job and his neglect of negro interests was in obedience to the Southern interests he’ll need for his 1928 presidential run.

Mexico bans entry by foreign negroes and deports 26 from British Honduras.

The name of the new state executioner of New York (official title: State Electrician) is revealed: Robert Elliott, who also does that job for Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. He’s performed 10 executions in NY since his appointment in January. He didn’t want his name made public, and his children are only just now finding out about his side hustle.

The Grand Lama’s palace in Llasa is now lit by electricity.

Today -100: October 30, 1926: Of standing and racist land laws

2026-10-30T00:00:00.000-07:00

Marshal Józef Klemens Piłsudski orders Polish Sejm (Parliament) deputies to stand while a presidential decree is read out tomorrow. This is understood as another sign of Piłsudski’s monarchism. (I don’t know what happened with this; there’s no followup story).

Floridians will vote on an amendment to the state constitution to ban land ownership by foreigners not eligible for citizenship, in other words Asians, and restrict it to suckers. It will pass with 58% of the vote. Voters will decline to repeal it in 2008 but will do so in 2018.

Today -100: October 29, 1926: Of kluxers and coal

2026-10-29T00:00:00.000-07:00

The Senate’s Campaign Fund Investigating Committee, investigating charges that the Ku Klux Klan and convicted murderer D.C. Stephenson used to run the state of Indiana, hears that Sen. James Watson was literally a kard-carrying member of the hooded order and that Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans worked to re-elect him in the May primaries.

British Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill says the ongoing coal strike means there won’t be a tax cut in the next budget.

Today -100: October 28, 1926: Mills just pulled a bone

2026-10-28T00:00:00.000-07:00

NY gubernatorial candidate Rep. Ogden Mills, in a speech to the Advertising Club, says Gov. Al Smith “cannot be trusted either in public or private life.” I don’t know what he’s implying about Smith’s private life, but Al, who also seems not to know, is super-pissed, and demands Mills retract, or else.

Gov. Al Smith says Dr. Pease’s statement on what his lab tests really showed about the quality of NYC milk “kind of puts the milk issue on the bum, doesn’t it?” “Mills just pulled a bone.” Republicans are suggesting that Tammany Hall pressured Pease to make the statement, which Pease denies (although he did break confidentiality with the R. Party that commissioned his report, until the Queens district attorney told him it was his “public duty” to go, um, public). Nevertheless, Mills continues to campaign on the “milk scandal,” saying “I suppose that if there were enough water in the milk so that a goldfish could swim in it, Dr. Pease and Dr. Harris [the health commissioner] would consider it good.”

Today -100: October 27, 1926: Hearst has hung a milk can around his neck and he cannot get away from it

2026-10-27T00:00:00.000-07:00

Dr. Herbert G. Pease, the lab dude that NY gubernatorial candidate Ogden Mills has been quoting about the poor quality of NYC milk, comes forward to say that his tests actually showed the milk to be perfectly fine and indeed of excellent quality. Mills, it seems, has been grossly misrepresenting his report. Gov. Al Smith says Mills was lying on William Randolph Hearst’s orders: “Hearst has hung a milk can around his neck and he cannot get away from it.”

Did you know there’s also a Socialist candidate for NY governor? It’s true! NYC Municipal Judge Jacob Panken.

Panken asks Smith & Mills to release the names of their contributors before the election. He suspects Wall Street interests are contributing to both the D & R parties, given their “single ultimate purpose, to serve faithfully the financial and commercial interests... Wall Street does not care which candidate is elected, as long as he is not a Socialist.”

Parliament censures Labour MP Alfred Salter after he refuses to retract his statement about having seen members drunk in the Houses of Parliament. He says if this is referred to a committee of privileges, he’s prepared to name the MPs in question. The House votes not to refer the matter to a committee of privileges. He is censured for making “a gross libel on the Members of this House and a grave breach of its privileges.”

Today -100: October 26, 1926: You don’t hear the words tomfoolery and humbuggery nearly often enough these days

2026-10-26T00:00:00.000-07:00

NY Gov. Al Smith calls on challenger Rep. Ogden Mills to “stop his tomfoolery” about milk.

Health Commissioner Louis I. Harris calls the lab tests that Mills commissioned on milk a “piece of conspirant humbuggery,” which is the worst kind of humbuggery, and says the tests are used “merely to alarm and befuddle those who have no technical knowledge” and they actually show that NYC milk is awesome. Also, the lab’s methods were faulty.

In Warsaw, it is widely believed that Marshal Józef Klemens Piłsudski, who led athe coup in May, is plotting to become king, which is all he’s wanted since a gypsy fortune-teller predicted he’d become king. He’s just met with a bunch of monarchists.

The Supreme Court upholds the president’s right to fire executive-branch officers without asking the Senate for permission, even where the posts required confirmation. This has evidently been a matter of dispute since Washington’s time.

The 4th anniversary of the Fascist coup in Italy this Thursday will be a national holiday and a day off, but government workers, and probably everyone else, will have to work on Sunday instead. There will be no speeches (except by The Duck, of course).

A German high court fines Wilhelm Jaenecke, the son-in-law of the late president Ebert and an attaché at the Foreign Office, for writing in the guest book of a hotel on Capri, where he was vacationing, “Here one feels so contented it is possible to forget a Hindenburg is President of Germany.” Hindenburg intervenes to remit the fine of 10 days’ pay, but Jaenecke will leave his government post for one in the Prussian civil service.

The House of Commons discusses whether Dr. Alfred Salter, Labour MP for Bermondsey, committed a gross breach of privilege (which is the worst kind of breach of privilege) when he said that he’d often seen MPs drunk in the House. Winston Churchill, of all people, says that if Salter’s charge is not repudiated it might injure Parliament’s reputation. Salter isn’t present, so further action is held over.

Today -100: October 25, 1926: Of interested minorities, matches, and booze

2026-10-25T00:00:00.000-07:00

Vice President Charles Dawes denounces primaries as creating “rule by an interested minority.” Selection of candidates by a nominating convention “would make possible an open fight by impartial delegates against possible corruption or a controlled candidate and better precipitates the issue before the people in the election.”

The steamship Falcon sets fire in England, coming ashore near Dover. Its cargo: 203 million matches.

Metropolitan Life Insurance Comp. says deaths from alcohol among its policy-holders increased 14% in the first 9 months of 1926, with the greatest increase in young persons.

W.C. Fields’s “So’s Your Old Man” premieres. I’ve not seen this one, and all the versions of it on YouTube are low-quality.

Today -100: October 24, 1926: Of confused and troubled dragons, milk evil, and shameless violations of party discipline

2026-10-24T00:00:00.000-07:00

Judge Webster Thayer, who has presided over the various Sacco and Vanzetti trials in an extremely biased and unprofessional manner, denies them a new trial, calling Celestino Madeiros, who confessed to the murder, a crook and a liar.

D.C. Stephenson refuses to answer questions from a delegation led by a newspaper publisher about the Klan dominance of Indiana politics during his Ku Klux Klan grand dragonship. “I am confused and troubled and I can only think of my own personal liberty and the individual peril I am in,” he tells them.

Headline of the Day -100:

Italy bans women from being mayors. So Mussolini first gave women the municipal vote, then before they could exercise it made the post appointed rather than elective, now this.

Leon Trotsky & Lev Kamenev are ousted from the Politburo & Grigory Zinoviev is expelled from the Comintern for “a shameless violation of party discipline,” which is the worst kind of violation of party discipline.

Today -100: October 23, 1926: Of pardons, lynchings, and wiener dogs

2026-10-23T00:00:00.000-07:00

The Texas Legislature’s investigating committee looks into the practice of selling pardons by Frank O’Rourke, secretary of the State Prison Commission, in partnership with gubernatorial spouse James Ferguson. Warden of the State Pen N.A. Speer testifies that a bunch of people showed up at the execution of two black men as guests of O’Rourke, proceeded to get super drunk and partied through the execution and the whole next day.

Georgia arrests 8 men, and is hunting 7 others, for the lynching of a white man.

Dachshunds, which were mostly “got rid of” in Britain during the war, reappear for the first time since 1913 at the big dog show.

Today -100: October 22, 1926: Of milk and (joke I could only write if I looked up the lyrics to that song, which I won’t do)

2026-10-22T00:00:00.000-07:00

The lab that NY gubernatorial candidate Rep. Ogden Mills has been citing to prove that milk in New York City is bad and adulterated and icky says the samples it analyzed show “nothing deleterious,” although they won’t show anyone the reports they made at the behest of Mills and the R. party. Mills says he’ll only show it while testifying at a Grand Jury; I guess he’ll just keep any information about the alleged great milk danger under his hat until then.

The Soviet Union expels H.D. Anderson, the last American YMCA person left in the country.

Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, is published, with 5,090 copies printed.

At the Princess Theatre in Montreal, a McGill student punches Harry Houdini in the stomach.

Today -100: October 21, 1926: I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth; I am a citizen of the world

2026-10-21T00:00:00.000-07:00

Eugene Debs, perennial Socialist candidate for president and occasional political prisoner, dies at 70 of health issues not unrelated to his time in prison.

Yes, I chose this picture because of that tie.

“In a speech devoted for the most part to milk,” Ogden Mills, R. candidate for governor of NY, says the milk is adulterated in Manhattan as well as boroughs he’s previously named. I have no idea if this is true, but it’s certainly having a Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-type effect on parents’ willingness to feed milk to their children.

The NYT says “many” women are running for the Legislature, “many” in this case meaning 15 candidates for the 150 Assembly seats and 3 for the 51 State Senate seats. The senate candidates are all socialists, as are 8 of the Assembly candidates (2 are from the Workers’ Party) and US Senate candidate Jessie Wallace Hughan. The article names exactly one (1) of these women, incumbent Assemblycritter Rhoda Fox Graves (R).

Headline of the Day -100:

Yay! Peace in our time!

Germany: the prosecutor of two reactionaries who plotted to assassinate Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann last year recommends they be acquitted. Kaltdorff, a follower of Hitler, says it was all just a hoax, that he was collecting material for a novel, and that that letter he wrote to his lawyer, who turned it over to the cops, was a joke he wrote while super-drunk, but he did repeat that Stresemann was a traitor. So they’re released, because far-right crimes don’t count.

Today -100: October 20, 1926: Of forbud

2026-10-20T00:00:00.000-07:00

Norway votes for a referendum ending the 1917 prohibition imposed by decree and confirmed in a 1919 referendum. Since then, smuggling from Germany has sprung up, much of it captained by former u-boat officers though, sadly, just using regular boats.

Today -100: October 19, 1926: We do not even think of it. Why should we?

2026-10-19T00:00:00.000-07:00

Headline of the Day -100:

First it was booze, then milk, now water. This election is very liquid-themed.

Queen Marie of Romania is visiting New York, and the Times will not shut up about it.

At an imperial conference in London, Canadian PM Mackenzie King says “Any talk of the annexation of Canada by the United States is purely political and should not be taken seriously.” “[I]t is the last thing Canada is worrying about. Nobody there really talks about it; nobody wants it, and personally I haven’t encountered a single soul in Canada who has ever mentioned it. We do not even think of it. Why should we?”

At the preparatory meeting for the Disarmament Conference in Geneva, France proposes that countries that use gas during warfare should be punished by a massive air chemical attack on them by all countries signing the ban on such weapons. The US, Germany, Italy and Japan oppose this idea but Belgium, Poland, Finland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia support it.

Colorado Republicans claim the state’s D’s are linked with the Ku Klux Klan. Their evidence is laughable.

Headline of the Day -100:

The NYT’s long habit of citing the opinions of randos (a shoemaker in this case) about the Soviet Union has not abated.

The Texas Legislature committee investigating the Fergusons hears that the governor’s husband told road contractors he could secure maintenance contracts for them in exchange for c.10%. Ferguson denies it.

Today -100: October 18, 1926: I would not even advise my wife

2026-10-18T00:00:00.000-07:00

Headline of the Day -100:

Along with Zinoviev, Kamenev, etc. They confess to conduct calculated to split the Communist Party and to violating party discipline. They promise to obey the Central Committee in the future without any of that pesky expression of unapproved ideas. “We categorically repudiate the theory and practice of the freedom of forming groups and factions.”

Max Eastman finally publishes Lenin’s hitherto secret Testament criticizing Stalin, whose people have been denying it existed.

NY gubernatorial candidate Rep. Ogden Mills says he will personally vote yes on the referendum to modify Prohibition but he won’t advise voters to do the same; “I would not even advise my wife.”

Today -100: October 17, 1926: Equal rights are all we are asking

2026-10-17T00:00:00.000-07:00

Commerce Sec Herbert Hoover, in a speech for senatorial candidate James Wadsworth, says a Democratic-controlled Senate would cripple the Coolidge Admin’s work. “If our opponents shall be returned at this election, our legislative branch comes into conflict with the Executive, and we shall have neither party responsible and no direction of any sort.” In other words, he’s calling for one-party government.

After that string of retaliatory mob shootings, Chicago politicians ask for a pause in violence during the elections. One of Al Capone’s lieutenants says they’re fine with that as long as the politicians make the North Side Gang “behave.” “Equal rights are all we are asking.”

“That wild beast called anti-Semitism,” as Soviet Commissar of Education Anatoly Lunatcharsky calls it, seems to be raising its wild head in Russia, and the government is trying to put a stop to it. Lunatcharsky says the cause of it is the fear of the middle classes and intelligentsia of competition from Jews, with their high intellect, ability, and enterprise. There are plans to colonize 200,000 Jews in the Crimea and, to try to head off a reaction rooted in the traditional Ukrainian peasant anti-Semitism, grant other lands to Ukrainians.

8 states – NY, Wisc., Nev., Ill., Colo., Missouri, Montana, California – will vote on Prohibition next month, some on modifying the Volstead Act, some (CA, Colo., Mont., Missouri) on eliminating state-level enforcement.

Today -100: October 16, 1926: Of milk, royals, and jury fees

2026-10-16T00:00:00.000-07:00

Ogden Mills claims that adulterated milk is flooding New York City, even Queens & the Bronx. He evidently thinks this is the issue he can ride into the governor’s mansion, I guess.

More fighting in the Prussian Diet as it ratifies the deal giving the former royal family enough money and property to make them the richest family in Germany, if not Europe. The Communists are not best pleased. Their deputy Wilhelm Kasper steals the large brass bell normally used to call for order and rings it whenever the president of the Diet tries to use a smaller, until Kasper is thrown out. The Socialists sit the whole thing out, abstaining from the vote and the fisticuffs.

In a Kansas City court case in which a black man stands accused of “cussing out” a black woman, the jury refuses to give its verdict until it’s paid its $1 fee, for which they’d ordinarily have to wait until next month. So the judge locks them up while he goes to lunch, allowing them only bread and water.

Today -100: October 15, 1926: Of libs, Germans, and souls

2026-10-15T00:00:00.000-07:00

Herbert Asquith (aka Lord Reading and Asquith) resigns as leader of Britain’s Liberal Party after months of squabbling with David Lloyd George, to whom he is now ceding the field.

The new Czech Cabinet will include ethnic Germans – Sudeten Germans, if you will – for the first time. Robert Mayr-Harting will be justice minister and Franz Spina will be public works minister.

Thomas Edison thinks there might be such a thing as an immortal soul after all. He suggests religious teachers look for genuine evidence, but does not suggest how they should do that.

Today -100: October 14, 1926: A recruiting film?

2026-10-14T00:00:00.000-07:00

The Rhode Island Republican Convention calls for Prohibition to be put to a new referendum (but with strict enforcement until then).

Vice President Charles Dawes’s call for the abolition of primaries and a return to nominating conventions is not going over well with some Republican leaders.

Lon Chaney’s “The Phantom of the Opera” is still banned in Britain, not because of its content but because when the film arrived in Southampton last year, it was given a military escort by Territorials who were tricked into thinking it was a recruiting film.

Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne, introducing the title character, is published simultaneously in Britain and the US (it was Disney which viciously stripped him of his hyphens).

Today -100: October 13, 1926: There’s enough business for all of us without killing each other like animals in the street

2026-10-13T00:00:00.000-07:00

Dr. Alfred Salter, Labour MP for Bermondsey, says he’s seen many MPs drunk in the House of Commons chamber, from all parties but especially Tories. He says maybe Parliament having its own bars is not such a good idea.

Al Capone is questioned about yesterday’s machine-gunnery by the befuddled Chicago PD but is not under arrest. He tells a reporter “there’s enough business for all of us without killing each other like animals in the street, but they don’t see it.”

Yugoslavia, whose navy consists of a single light cruiser, would like to buy Belgium’s entire navy, which is evidently for sale.

Sir James Parr, High Commissioner for New Zealand, complains that most of the films shown in the country’s 350 cinemas (a lot more than it has in 2026) are American and almost none British: “Are New Zealanders to be completely Americanised?” Also, American films suck, he says.

Headline

Said uniform consists of “a black cocked hat adorned with white ostrich plumes, a black swallowtail coat, with gold buttons and lace, and black trousers.”

Treasury Sec. Andrew Mellon says of Mussolini: “Many of his measures are unique, indeed. But they are effective, and he certainly is making a new nation out of Italy.”

Today -100: October 12, 1926: Of mistrials, mob violence, dodging milk, and criminal petit bourgeois opposition

2026-10-12T00:00:00.000-07:00

The federal trial of former attorney general Harry Daugherty ends in a mistrial when the jury fails to come to a verdict.

In retaliation for last month’s attempt by Chicago’s North Side Gang to rub out Al Capone, Capone gunmen kill the Gang’s head Hymie Weiss, 28 (aka Earl Weiss, born Henryk Wojciechowski), and gangster Paddy Murray in a machine gun attack outside the North Side Gang hq, Schofield’s Flowers, also wounding 3 others. One of the gunsels – not that the cops have any idea who they are – is called Sam “Golf Bag” Hunt.

NY Gov. Al Smith accuses challenger Ogden Mills of “talking about milk for political purposes.” He calls the Republican platform “the coldest and clammiest document” he’s ever seen.

Mills says Smith really just wants to be president and is only running for re-election because Tammany Hall ordered him to.

The Prussian Diet discusses – with the occasional thrown water tumbler – the settlement with former kaiser Wilhelm. Some are worried about a provision setting aside Bad-Homburg Palace for his use if he ever comes back to Germany. They are reassured that he won’t do that because then he’d have to pay taxes on his income and property like a common commoner.

The Soviet Politburo takes measures to prevent the opposition (Trotsky, Zinoviev, etc) being heard, including sending claques to meetings to disrupt speakers and censoring reports of meetings at which they were able to speak anyway. Pravda accuses “the criminal petit bourgeois opposition” of “aiming at undermining the party discipline and... trying to open up fresh discussion and foist upon the party decisions long ago rejected.”

Today -100: October 11, 1926: Of baseball, illegal uniforms, and gas

2026-10-11T00:00:00.000-07:00

The St. Louis Cards win the World Series over the Yankees. I’m reliably informed that this story is about baseball.

During the game, baseball fans in Emporia, Kansas gather outside the Emporia Gazette offices to watch the scores change on a magnetic score board, which sounds super-exciting. Clergy complain about this Sunday activity, although the Gazette, which started doing this with last Sunday’s game, pointed out that the game began 30 minutes after services.

The German League for the Rights of Man charges former prince Wilhelm (grandson of former kaiser Wilhelm) with wearing the uniform of an army lieutenant during maneuvers (he was made a lt. before the war, when he was 10, probably on merit, right?). Gen. von Seeckt was fired as Army Chief for allowing Willy to do this.

The American Legion opposes the ratification of the Geneva protocol banning the use of poison gas in war. It says gas is humane and effective. The opposition to poison gas, according to John Thomas Taylor, chair of the Legion’s Legislative Committee, comes from pacifists, not practical soldiers.

Today -100: October 10, 1926: Of prospective wars, lynchings, and weddings

2026-10-10T00:00:00.000-07:00

The Daily Express (UK) claims that Mussolini is planning to go to war with Turkey to gain “influence” on the Aegean coast.

A mob in Doyer, Tennessee seizes and lynches a black man, Rip Bell, who supposedly killed a farmer during a fight over a craps game (or “‘crap’ game,” as the NYT puts it, which is not what it was called then or ever).

The world’s first Esperanto-language wedding takes place in London. He’s British and she’s Austrian. There’s a Reuters newsreel of it on YouTube, obviously silent so what’s the point of that?

Today -100: October 9, 1926: Of lynchings

2026-10-09T00:00:00.000-07:00

In Aiken, South Carolina, a lynch mob of 100 to 150 assholes break into the county jail and abduct (almost certainly with the connivance of the sheriff, as opposed to the bullshit version given in this article) 3 negroes, one of them a woman, charged with murdering the kluxer sheriff last year in a shoot-out when he raided their farm looking for illegal liquor. They’d been convicted but the state Supreme Court overturned the verdict and ordered a new trial; yesterday the judge directed a not guilty verdict for... wait for it... Demon Lowman. The verdicts for the other two, Lowman’s sister & cousin, had not yet been delivered when the mob jumped the gun, as it were. Judge Lanham convenes the Grand Jury to do “the most searching inquiry possible” and says the lynchings were a disgrace to civilization and the white race. You can guess how effective the most searching inquiry possible will be.

The NYT says the lynchings were “a wanton act of savagery,” which is the worst kind of acts of savagery. It notes that the prisoners were let loose and then gunned down “in Mexican style” as they ran.

Today -100: October 8, 1926: Religious war? OK!

2026-10-08T00:00:00.000-07:00

George Key, chair of the Oklahoma Democratic State Committee, says Republican activities are “peculiarly calculated to produce a religious war in Oklahoma.” I think that’s about Johnston backing Al Smith for president in ‘28. The D’s candidate for governor, Henry Johnston, is an open member of the Ku Klux Klan; Republican candidate Omer Benedict admits to having been a kluxer in the past.

The Texas House of Representatives demands that Gov. Miriam Ferguson fulfil her promise to resign if she lost the D. primary, as she did. The State Senate then kills the measure as not coming under the terms of Ferguson’s call for the special session.

At former attorney general Harry Daugherty’s trial, his lawyer explains that when he burnt all his bank records, it was “in some mad, lone moment”. The lawyer blames the whole bribe-taking thing on Dirty Harry’s friend Jess Smith, who conveniently committed suicide 3 years ago.

Today -100: October 7, 1926: Without they first have the endorsement

2026-10-07T00:00:00.000-07:00

Lamartine Griffin Hardman, 71, described as a “banker, cotton mill owner and practising physician,” wins the Democratic run-off primary for Georgia governor, one of many Georgia elections this year where Klan-backed candidates lose big time.

The Indiana Republican newspaper editors’ organization releases a photostat of a contract signed in February 1925 by John L. Duvall, promising that if he is elected mayor of Indianapolis with Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson’s support (which he was), “I promise not to appoint any person as member of the Board of Public Works without they first have the endorsement of D.C. Stephenson” and to appoint Claude Worley chief of police. Duvall says it’s a forgery. It will be the basis of his corruption conviction a year from now.