WET AND DRY ISSUE SHOVING PARTISAN POLITICS TO REAR
KLAN PROBE FACTS ASTOUND SENATORS
YANKEES CAPTURE OPENING GAME OF WORLD SERIES, 2-1
The Sunday Evening Star of October 3, 1926, set national politics, an Indiana scandal and baseball side by side. G. Gould Lincoln argued that prohibition had pushed ordinary party differences aside in the fall campaigns: wet-and-dry questions were on referendum ballots in nine states, from California to New York, and in five of them voters would decide whether to repeal state dry-enforcement laws. An Associated Press dispatch from Indianapolis reported that six state senators were 'astounded' by evidence a Republican editors' committee had gathered on alleged bribery and job-selling under the imprisoned former Klan leader D. C. Stephenson. Sports editor Denman Thompson described the Yankees' 2-1 World Series opening win over the Cardinals behind Herb Pennock as expert but strangely dull for its crowd of about 62,000.
SEVEN PERSONS DIE WHEN BIG AIRLINER IS SWEPT BY FLAMES
DOHENY INTERESTS MUST FACE CHARGE
On October 3, 1926, the Montgomery Advertiser carried three Associated Press dispatches. From New Orleans came cotton exchange president Frank B. Hayne's call for Southern bankers to stop farmers from panic-selling cotton at under $65 a bale. He blamed the early federal crop estimate for the slump, and the story added that Tennessee Valley bankers would meet at Florence, Alabama, with the Alabama Farm Bureau's help, to plan holding Alabama cotton off the market. From Kent came an eyewitness account of a French Air Union airliner that caught fire near Penshurst on its way from Paris, killing all seven people aboard. From Washington came word that an appeals court had refused to throw out the conspiracy indictments of Doheny, Sinclair and Fall in the naval oil lease case, clearing the way for trial.
This Berlin liberal daily's page followed up on the Briand–Stresemann meeting at Thoiry. From Paris came word that Austen Chamberlain, returning from a Mediterranean cruise, had met Briand at the Quai d'Orsay, and a joint communiqué called their accord closer than ever and tied Franco-German relations to Locarno and Thoiry. A London report put the main obstacle in the United States: Wall Street had cooled toward British soundings about German bond issues, and the Washington Treasury reportedly discouraged a large German loan because it might spare France from ratifying its war-debt agreement without reservation. Editor Georg Bernhard's signed column argued that the understanding had moved from speeches to detailed work. He noted Hindenburg's assent and Poincaré's grudging consent, warned of covert opposition, and described French hopes that Briand's policy would end 'American debt bondage'.
This front page set a meditation on sanctity beside two anxious pieces on money. Georges Goyau of the Académie française wrote about Francis of Assisi's "folly" of voluntary poverty, which echoed Paul's "folly of the Cross." He argued that by loving Christ's wounds and bearing the stigmata, Francis taught Christians to face the Crucifixion, which early Christian art had avoided showing. An editorial signed "Intérim." attacked a rival paper's call for foreign credits. It blamed London, Washington and "international finance" for letting a defeated Germany dictate terms to an isolated France, and it said a Franco-German understanding did not depend on France. Henri Vonoven welcomed the returning confidence in French finances but warned that "the financial illness remains." He called for new sacrifices, savings and more production to restore the franc.
For a Revision of the Dawes Plan. — Proposal for an International Financial Conference.
The Duke of Reichstadt at the Burgtheater.
The Vienna Neue Freie Presse of 3 October 1926 gave its front page to an interview with Thomas W. Lamont of J. P. Morgan & Co., given to one of the paper's correspondents at Newport in mid-September. Lamont called the Dawes Plan the crux of Europe's financial problem. He argued that German payments could help stabilize the French and Belgian currencies, but that deliveries in kind would, over time, drag down both the European and the American economies. He praised Germany's recovery, built on its own energy and mostly American capital, pointed to the strong American demand for German industrial bonds and expected more loans on better terms. He declared that a revision of the plan was necessary, and the headline added a proposal for an international financial conference. In the feuilleton on the same page, a critic complained that for months politics had been threatening to entangle the Burgtheater's production of Rostand's play about Napoleon's son, the Duke of Reichstadt. This reading is limited to the selected excerpts and does not include the rest of each article.
M. Stresemann delivers a major speech on Franco-German understanding
M. Briand met M. Austen Chamberlain yesterday at the Quai d'Orsay
M. Herriot and the Poincaré Cabinet
L'Écho d'Alger of 3 October 1926 led its front page with the new diplomacy between France and Germany. Gustav Stresemann, the German foreign minister, called Franco-German understanding the "central point" of any European pacification. He expected to be called an eternal optimist and a trusting utopian, but argued that Germany's recovery could rest only on peace. From Paris, the paper printed the Quai d'Orsay's official note on Aristide Briand's meeting with Austen Chamberlain. According to the note, the two ministers examined Franco-German relations as organized by Locarno and Thoiry and found their understanding in the service of peace closer and more cordial than ever. The page also carried an interview in which Édouard Herriot defended his decision to join Poincaré's "government of financial defence" by citing the Jacobin tradition of putting country first. He remembered his speech at Geneva as the sweetest hour of his time as prime minister.
The Prager Tagblatt of 3 October 1926 looked back on the League of Nations assembly that had just closed in Geneva. Its editorial judged Austen Chamberlain an honest but unremarkable British foreign secretary, too trusting of Briand and the Polish delegate, and observed that Edvard Beneš had chaired the Disarmament Commission even though, in the paper's view, Czechoslovakia spent more on arms per head than almost any European state. It argued that the League's new course would free small states from reliance on French protection. A report of a German speech traced the 'policy of understanding' from the Dawes arrangements and the February memorandum through Locarno and Geneva to Thoiry, with Rhineland sovereignty as its goal. A Rome dispatch reported that the Italian cabinet had approved a bill imposing death for attacks on the royal family and the head of government.
Politika marked the arrival of a delegation of Czechoslovak parliamentarians in Belgrade with an explanatory piece about the parliament they came from. The selected passage opens with an anecdote about a German woman deputy who ostentatiously wiped her hand after shaking the Speaker's, then turns to the Slovaks, described as long opposed to the constitution but lately softening. The writer argues that Yugoslavs are uniquely placed to understand such guests, since both states faced national unification and the building of new democratic foundations. It then sets out the basics of the Czechoslovak constitution of 29 February 1920: two chambers of 300 and 150 members, age thresholds of 30 and 45 for those elected, no dual membership, and votes for women, with eight women deputies.
Chamberlain and Briand Review the International Situation, Above All Franco-German Relations, at the Quai d'Orsay
THE STEEL CARTEL AND OPINION IN THE UNITED STATES
Le Petit Matin of Tunis opened its 3 October 1926 page with a legal argument close to home. Two days earlier, the Civil Court of Tunis had held that France's law of 30 June 1926 on commercial leases did not apply in the protectorate. The editorial expected the protectorate services to put equivalent rules before the Bey, argued that only French courts should have jurisdiction, and proposed hearing appeals in Tunis rather than before the overloaded Court of Algiers. The international wires reported Austen Chamberlain's stop in Paris to see Aristide Briand after Locarno and Thoiry. Briand dismissed talk of a British-Italian counterweight and called for incidents in the occupied regions to be settled. A further report gathered reserved American reactions to the new European steel cartel from the White House, Herbert Hoover and Judge Gary.
On 3 October 1926, Santiago's La Nación ran a comics page with syndicated strips signed by Pat Sullivan, the name tied to Felix the Cat. One legible caption, in the Laura strip, picked up the big sports story of the moment, the heavyweight fight between Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey: Tunney drives Dempsey to the ropes, and then the strip asks whether Tunney is declared the winner. In the Felix strip, a character orders a sleeper to get up and start training every day. Nothing else on the page can be read reliably.
Crítica's page of 3 October 1926 continued its coverage of the murder of Carlos Ray, the Vicente López councilman killed at home the previous month. The paper presented a painter, Nicolás La Rosa, who said he had seen the two thieves as they fled and had heard shots between 5 and 5:10. It argued that his account matched the maid Angela Villalba and the other witnesses, and that the inquiry was rightly turning toward the criminal underworld. A shorter, partly illegible piece reported that a detective had found a trampled plant where the maid said the attackers had jumped over. It treated the find as strengthening the certainty that thieves were responsible. A sharp editorial mocked Enrique S. Mosca, the former Santa Fe governor, who had attacked Crítica from a newspaper he directed. Mosca had written that María Poey's defense was hatched in a rival newsroom that relished the case with "morbid, cynical or venal" complacency. Crítica answered with a sweeping personal attack and ended on a marksman's pun on his name. This reading is limited to the three selected excerpts and does not cover the rest of the page.
A Speech by Stresemann at the Volkspartei Congress
Il Piccolo's page of 3 October 1926 opened with an editorial on Italy's place in post-Locarno diplomacy. It denied that the 'latest event' it discussed was a reply to the Franco-German meeting at Thoiry and linked it to the Mediterranean question. It insisted on Italy's treaty rights, including over colonial mandates, and welcomed the identity of views between London and Rome. A news report set out the Interior Minister's bill to reform provincial government on the model of the 1926 municipal laws. Under it, each province would be run by a government-appointed commission with a Consulta dominated by legally recognized syndical associations. A dispatch from Berlin described Stresemann opening the German People's Party congress in Cologne in a hall hung with imperial black-white-red flags. In his speech he mocked 'foolish nationalists' and defended the road from Locarno and Geneva to Thoiry.