Cold and Hunger Forcing Miners to End British Strike
The Star Sets New Record
The Evening Star's front page of September 30, 1926, carried two prominent dispatches involving Britain. An Associated Press dispatch from Leghorn described Mussolini slipping out of Rome incognito by special train to receive Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain aboard a former Turkish yacht, with cheering crowds on the old Medici docks and the subject of the talks kept secret. From London, John Gunther cabled that cold and hunger were driving miners back to the pits — about 150,000 now at work — as A. J. Cook spoke of an "organized retreat" and delegates weighed Prime Minister Baldwin's offer of a national arbitration tribunal if the men first returned on the owners' district terms. A front-page editorial hailed the day's 78-page issue as a new record, "with possibly one or two exceptions," for regular American dailies and argued that a newspaper is the heart and voice of its community as well as an economic necessity.
CLAIM REPUBLICANS RESPONSIBLE FOR PROHI LAW FAILURE
MINERS RESCUED AFTER FIVE DAYS OF IMPRISONMENT
This front page led with a dispute over schoolbook prices at home: Alabama's state department of education, under Superintendent John W. Abercrombie, announced that it had found apparent discrimination in the prices of some adopted textbooks, which seemed to cost Alabama more than other states, and the attorney general was asked to verify the discrepancies in hopes of securing reductions under a contract clause. From the national wires came New Hampshire Democrats, who, unlike their New York and Massachusetts counterparts, backed enforcement of Prohibition while blaming Republicans for its failure, and the happy end of the Pabst mine entrapment at Ironwood, Michigan, where all 43 iron miners were brought up after five days and sent to hospital to rest.
The Evening Advertiser of 30 September 1926 carried wire stories from several places, and this partial reading follows three of them. From Ironwood, Michigan, the paper reported that 43 iron miners, sealed 800 feet down in the Pabst mine by a shaft cave-in that killed three electricians, had been brought out alive after 121 hours, having lived on birch-bark tea while 400 rescuers worked to reach them. A New York Herald-Tribune cable from London quoted A. J. Cook conceding for the first time that Britain's striking miners were returning to the pits "beaten by starvation," while he attacked Baldwin and the Trades Union Congress; Miners' Federation delegates debated a government arbitration proposal without deciding, and a Communist was jailed under emergency powers. A Mexico City brief described bandits robbing passengers on a Guadalajara–Mexico City train at Corralejo after the military escort failed to drive them off. Local photo captions of Senator Charles Murphy and Major Hume Cronyn also appeared within the excerpts.
This Berlin page led with an emergency telegram from the mayor of Germersheim in the French-occupied Palatinate, who told the League of Nations that a French officer had struck down three young townsmen on the night of 26–27 September, blamed the League for all victims, and demanded an impartial tribunal and the withdrawal of French troops. A local report described how Berlin police, sifting 150 tips, traced the Tauentzienstraße jewel robbery to Breslau, where a 29-year-old laborer was arrested while selling the loot; his accomplice, a young Polish woman who had worn men's clothing during the raid, apparently fled across the border with half of it. From London and Rome came forecasts of an imminent Chamberlain–Mussolini meeting, with Italian papers linking it to Thoiry and Locarno and floating a scheme under which Germany would regain full sovereignty over the Rhineland by taking on Allied war-debt payments to America.
Le Figaro's front page of 30 September 1926 mixed diplomacy, foreign turmoil and constitutional polemic. An editorial defended Premier Raymond Poincaré's reticence on the inter-Allied debts in his Bar-le-Duc speech and claimed that the paper's own line — ratify the Washington debt agreements, but with a preamble of express reservations voted by the Chambers — was also the government's. Alfred Mallet traced Greece's cycle of military coups, from Pangalos's seizure of power in 1925 to the resignation of Condylis's government, and doubted that elections set for October 24 would produce a strong majority. A second editorial mocked the government's plan to decentralize by decree under full powers as a revival of the First Empire's decree-laws.
The Neue Freie Presse of 30 September 1926 led with a Viennese workplace story told with open sarcasm: some 300 workers at a Heiligenstadt coachwork factory demanded the dismissal of a young colleague who had marched with a Catholic youth group whose procession had clashed with the Social Democratic Schutzbund, and struck when management refused. A correspondent's telegram from Trier reported that a German workman had been shot dead by a French laboratory assistant attached to the occupation forces, on the same Sunday as a shooting at Germersheim. Alice Schalek's feuilleton argued that Austrians took for granted the legally secured leisure to enjoy art and mountain scenery, something even well-off Americans could not reach.
This Algiers daily's front page for 30 September 1926 led with a vivid dispatch from Marseille. Lieutenant Desmons, the French ship's officer arrested and sentenced by the Turks, arrived a day late on an Italian liner. He stepped into a crowd of captains, dockers, fishermen and women who had left the bean-sacking machines, and the crush was so great that his parents struggled to get through to him. From Paris came two stories about Poincaré's financial recovery. The premier met deputy Adrien Dariac, whose subcommittee was examining the Washington and London war-debt agreements, and they discussed bringing the whole question before Parliament as soon as possible. Meanwhile, hundreds of deputies, senators and mayors of small provincial towns hit by the economy decrees met at the Palais d'Orsay. They promised not to obstruct the Government but urged it to suspend its judicial reform.
On 30 September 1926 La Tribune de Madagascar carried an editorial titled after a line of the Lord's Prayer. Citing veterans' accounts of men whose ailments vanished within weeks on the front-line diet, it reckoned that 7 million tonnes of wheat would give France an average of one pound of bread per person per day, which it said was more than consumption required. It proposed that only stale bread be sold, and pointed out that people in regions that ate rye bread were none the worse for it. A brief news note reported that the Banque de France was buying not gold and silver coins as such but the weight of their fine metal, and that coins would be weighed and paid for according to their actual weight.
The Verein für Sozialpolitik (Association for Social Policy).
The Germersheim Incident.
On the German-Czech Coalition
The page mixed scholarship, occupation politics and Czechoslovak coalition-building. In a signed column, Prof. Heinrich Rauchberg defended the Verein für Sozialpolitik against charges that it had turned reactionary: in his view the political environment, pushed left by the 'world revolution', had moved while the association stayed true to itself, and rapid social legislation had freed it to study the economic consequences of the postwar order, notably in a series on commercial policy directed by Prof. Eulenburg. From the occupied Palatinate came word that French Second Lieutenant Roucier had been arrested and taken to Landau after the Germersheim incident, that a large crowd had gathered outside a French regimental farewell party, and that the French garrison commander expressed grief, promised a thorough trial and banned a dance. A press review on the new German-Czech coalition quoted Senate Vice-President Donat crediting economic necessity and the agricultural tariffs with bringing Czechs and Germans together, and the socialist Právo Lidu calling German participation in government a possible advance for democracy.
The Journal de Genève of 30 September 1926 combined a front-page editorial, a statistics column and a report from Rome. In the editorial, "W. M." argued that Germany's repeated attempts to reopen the war-guilt question under Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty were futile and ill-timed. In his view, reconciliation with France depended on forgetting, but he also held that Germany's ultimatum to Russia of 31 July 1914 made the German government objectively responsible. A column signed "J. M." used the new Swiss Statistical Yearbook to trace the country's population from 2.68 million in 1871 to nearly 3.94 million in 1925. It stressed that births had fallen even while the surplus of births over deaths grew. The paper's Rome correspondent quoted Mussolini's charge to Governor Cremonesi to build a monumental "Third Rome". He described the demolitions around the Theatre of Marcellus and the Argentina area before turning to the plan to clear the Capitoline hill.
In Politika of 30 September 1926, D. Ban argued in a signed column that the Štip–Kočani line, together with its branch to Veles, was above all an economic railway. He added that the Kočani basin, famous for its rice fields, was, in a view not yet widely held but backed by experts, the most fertile part of "South Serbia", sheltered by a ring of high, wooded mountains. A dispatch from Rome reported that a two-day storm on Italy's southern Adriatic coast had caused damage estimated at tens of millions of lire, and that the peninsula between the Gulf of Taranto and the Strait of Otranto was badly damaged. A sketch about Sremski Karlovci before the harvest showed a little girl asking where Stražilovo was and then seeing a brick-and-tile factory with that name on its roof.
Aftenposten's page of 30 September 1926 combined a referendum-campaign editorial, a court programme and foreign labour news. Ahead of the prohibition vote, the editorial told readers that the present, prohibition-minded Storting would write whatever replaced the ban, so voting for repeal did not mean open spirits taps; it then turned the word "immoral" back on the prohibitionists by recalling that Mowinckel had used it in 1918 about their voting rules. A long report set out the programme for Finnish President Relander's visit to Oslo from 4 October: a royal welcome at the East Station, lodging at the Palace, a gala dinner, a legation lunch, The Merchant of Venice at the National Theatre and a trip to the Agricultural College. A London telegram reported that the British coal stoppage was ebbing after 21 weeks, with 23,800 men back at work in three days and 137,478 miners employed.
The Third Lustrum of the Christian Mixed Choral Society "Halleluja"
Arson on Behalf of the Municipality
General Netherlands Millers' Union
This Leiden daily's page mixed civic ceremony, municipal housing policy and trade news. A Christian mixed choir marked its third lustrum, or fifteen years, with a round of speeches from the local Christian Workingmen's Union, its Sunday school, its sick fund and sister choirs, complete with medals, a bandolier and coffee and cake. The paper reported that the city had burned two of its own wooden emergency houses at the end of the Magdalena Moonstraat: built after the war with a 90 per cent state subsidy to rehouse slum-dwellers, they had become vermin-ridden and worthless. And the national millers' union elected Mr. Das as chairman, briefly discussed a report on electrifying windmills, backed windmill preservation unanimously, and voted to join the association De Hollandsche Molen.
Books Sold on Commission by This Paper's Publications Department
The legible parts of this 30 September 1926 page of Beijing's Shijie Ribao (World Daily) are commercial notices, not news reports. A small advertisement for the Beijing French Commercial College gave the date term would open, October 1, and the school's address at No. 144 Mishi Dajie in the Dongcheng district. Beside it, the Deji Trading Company announced that it had stopped the film screenings it had been running at the First Stage, one of the city's big modern theatres. The new films it was waiting for had not arrived in the capital, so the company suspended the shows and cancelled its contract. A third notice introduced the paper's own publications department, which sold books and magazines on commission and printed an abridged list of titles recently placed with it. This translation covers only these three legible passages and does not include the book list itself or the medicine advertisements on the right edge.
They Are the Same Ones as in Castritius, Says Foppiano
And the Explanation Is This:—
This page of Crítica followed the murder of Dr. Carlos Ray at a turning point in the investigation. One report described Judge Facio checking a maid's account on the spot and summoning Mr. Clary, who had left for his business in Buenos Aires, to testify in La Plata the next day, while praising the legwork of Deputy Commissioner Mancho. Another quoted Foppiano, the former head of the robbery squad, insisting that the killing was purely the work of thieves, possibly the same gang behind the Castritius crime, and blaming the provincial police for building a case against María alone. An editorial column, meanwhile, pushed back against moralizing judges by arguing that prostitution was a social product rooted in poverty and hypocrisy rather than individual sin.
The Germersheim Incident and the Franco-German Negotiations
A Communiqué from the Exchange Agents
Il Piccolo's page for 30 September 1926 combined Fascist agricultural propaganda, a flashpoint in the occupied Rhineland and a note of anxiety from the stock exchange. It reported that Mussolini had conferred with Undersecretary Peglion on the Permanent Grain Committee's plans to intensify wheat growing, and that on 10 October he would personally reward the winners of the national grain competition, with Communications Minister Ciano granting the usual reduced rail fares so farmers could travel to Rome. Just above the grain item, the closing lines of a preceding report recorded Mussolini's praise of Modena's Fascists and his three Blackshirt virtues of courage, work and disinterestedness. A Berlin dispatch on the Germersheim shooting set the official German account against the Havas self-defence version, reported that the French second lieutenant Rouzier was in prison and his artillery regiment ordered out of the town, and described a crowd shouting "murderer and bandit" at him. A fragment of a communiqué from exchange agents complained that brokers had to answer for other people's failures with their deposits, their whole fortunes and their names.