The Montgomery Advertiser
- ORGANIZED LABOR PLANNING TO ASK FOR FIVE-DAY WEEK
- THOUSANDS FLOCK TO AIMEE’S TEMPLE FOR BIG COMMUNION
- FLOODS AGAIN DRIVE WESTERN FARMERS TO HIGHER GROUNDS
The Montgomery Advertiser's front page for October 4, 1926 carried three Associated Press dispatches. From Detroit, the American Federation of Labor's executive council, meeting on the eve of its 46th convention, adopted the five-day, 40-hour week as its central bargaining goal, and President William Green argued that shorter hours would raise output, cut unit costs and turnover, and give workers more leisure. From Los Angeles, Aimee Semple McPherson staged a tableau called “The march of the martyrs” at her temple, a pageant that ran from Calvary to Joan of Arc and ended with a present-day scene, on the eve of the second week of her hearing on conspiracy and false-evidence charges. From Chicago came word that renewed rains were flooding Kansas, Oklahoma, Illinois and Missouri, forcing evacuations by boat, straining Mississippi levees and shutting down railways, utility plants and mines.
Translation
ORGANIZED LABOR PLANNING TO ASK FOR FIVE-DAY WEEK
[?] DETROIT, Oct. 3.—(AP)—The five day week for all workers came to the fore as a definite goal of the American Federation of Labor program today in the final meeting of the executive council of the federation preliminary to the 46th annual convention which opens tomorrow morning. President William Green and his cabinet, composed of international officers of affiliated unions, agreed upon the five-day 40-hour week as the cardinal point in the advancement program of organized labor and determined to recommend the policy to all affiliated organizations as a basis of negotiation for contract renewals and employers.
“The 40-hour week is inevitable in American labor,” Mr. Green said in a public statement after the meeting, “for the simple reason that it is economically sound and profitable. It is profitable for the worker, and for the employer, and has been tremendously successful in the numerous crafts in which it is already partially effective.
“High pressure production and the physical demands of modern industry are such that only with the shorter day can we attain notable progress in mechanical production. In the printing crafts, garment trades and building trades, where the five-day week is effective in some sections of the country, the results have increased production as much as 40 per cent on certain operations with an actual decrease in the unit cost. Scientific study of charts in mechanical operations point to the shorter week as the most promising method of maintaining the prosperity of American industry, for it will reduce the labor turnover and increase production as well as the quality of work, create more leisure for the enjoyment of life and add to the general, high standard of living for the American worker, the best paid worker in the world.” [?]
THOUSANDS FLOCK TO AIMEE’S TEMPLE FOR BIG COMMUNION
[?] LOS ANGELES, Oct. 3.—(AP)—Thousands of members of Aimee Semple McPherson's flock gathered today at Angeles temple to witness “The march of the martyrs,” a tableaux portraying famous Biblical scenes and depicting the “history of persecution.”
The spectacle, interpreted by her followers as drawing a parallel between the sufferings of Biblical characters and what the evangelist has termed her own “persecution,” followed a communion service which had been heralded by Mrs. McPherson's announcement that it was to be the largest communion ever held.
The pastor selected “the great coronation day” for the text of her sermon tonight, her last gesture from the pulpit before she appears in municipal court tomorrow morning for the second week of her hearing on a felony charge.
The first scene in the tableau was the crucifixion of the Christ at Calvary. Then followed a tableau portraying the suffering of the martyred Stephen, the beheading of St. Paul, the persecution of the Christians by Nero of Rome, the burning of three persons at the stake for printing the Bible and the burning as a witch of Joan of Arc. The seventh scene intended by the evangelist to portray events of the present day, showed a large Bible placed on a chair. Lying beside it was a pair of scissors and a pile of mud. The dramatis personae was drawn from the congregation of the temple.
When the state continues presentation of evidence at the hearing tomorrow where Mrs. McPherson, Mrs. Minnie Kennedy, her mother, and Mrs. Lorraine Wiseman-Sielaff, are charged with conspiring to obstruct justice and preparing false evidence, the scene of testimony is expected to shift again to Carmel-By-the-Sea, California, where the state alleges that the evangelist spent ten days with her former radio operator, Kenneth G. Ormiston. [?]
FLOODS AGAIN DRIVE WESTERN FARMERS TO HIGHER GROUNDS
Independent 8 PAGES Price 5 Cents Spang LER TRIAL CLOSE FLOODS AGAIN DRIVE WESTERN FARMERS TO HIGHER GROUNDS Sector Recently Swept by Destructive Overflows Faces Second Inundation as Torrential Rains Continue FLEET OF SMALL BOATS PRESSED INTO SERVICE Bartelsville, Okla., Lowlands Submerged; Fifteen Hundred Seek Highlands
CHICAGO, Oct. 3.—(AP)—Level lowlands of the Central West, where torrential rains swept away many lives and millions in property a fortnight ago lay at the mercy of floods again tonight. Thousands fled their homes, unable to tarry and attempt to stay the advance of the waters farther back from submerged banks of swollen streams.
Along the Kansas-Oklahoma line and in lower Illinois, where conditions were most acute, farmers abandoned their fields and fleets of small boats carried to higher ground families marooned, in villages and towns threatened with complete inundation.
The Mississippi river which had been able to bear away the record breaking September cloudbursts, was choked with the rains that ushered in October in western Illinois and tried miles of levees with muddy water several feet above flood stage.
Utilities plants went out of commission with the influx of the intermittent downpours since Friday, rail transportation was halted in many sections and in northeastern Oklahoma more than a score of the tri-state region mines were flooded out of operation.
The Neosho, Terdigris and Caney rivers passed flood limits, a village of 2,000 in Chautauqua county, Kansas, was completely surrounded by water and in the Caney bottoms in Oklahoma people were rescued from trees.
To the east, Missouri also had suffering areas. There was a growing toll in life and property and in some areas it appeared that a doubling of the damage to crops from the previous floods, running well into the millions of dollars was probable. [?]
Context
Where the AFL’s forty-hour demand stood in 1926
The Detroit dispatch shows the AFL leadership framing the five-day, 40-hour week as a productivity measure rather than purely a welfare demand: Green claimed gains of up to 40 per cent on some operations in the printing, garment and building trades, together with lower unit costs, less turnover and more leisure. Those figures are the federation's own, and the article offers no independent check. The demand came in the same year that Henry Ford standardized a five-day week at his plants without reducing pay, a prominent employer precedent that the dispatch itself does not mention. Across the economy, American hours had levelled off at about 49 a week during the 1920s, so a 40-hour standard was well below what most workers were then putting in. Later history also qualifies Green's picture of the five-day week already taking hold in the crafts. One account credits the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America with being the first union to demand and win a five-day week, in 1929, and a national 40-hour maximum took effect only in 1940 under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The AFL's decision, as the article describes it, to pursue the goal through affiliated unions' contract negotiations fits that slow, piecemeal path.
How McPherson cast her court case as martyrdom
The pageant described in the Los Angeles story drew on methods McPherson used routinely. Her church was Angelus Temple (the OCR reads “Angeles”), an early megachurch where she brought stage techniques into her weekly sermons and employed a small group of artists, electricians, decorators and carpenters to build sets for each service; a seven-scene tableau acted by members of the congregation fitted that practice. Size was part of her appeal as well: enrollment grew to over 10,000, and the temple was advertised as the largest single Christian congregation in the world, which is the backdrop to her announcement of the “largest communion ever held.” What gave the October 1926 pageant its edge was her legal situation. National coverage of McPherson included accusations that she had fabricated her reported kidnapping, and the hearing in this article, on charges of conspiring to obstruct justice and preparing false evidence, with the state alleging she had spent ten days in Carmel with Kenneth G. Ormiston, belonged to that controversy. By placing her own “persecution” at the end of a line running from Calvary through the martyrs to Joan of Arc, and closing on a Bible lying beside scissors and a pile of mud, she gave followers a religious frame for the case against her; the dispatch notes that they read the spectacle as exactly that parallel. The article reports the charges and the state's allegations; it does not settle whether they were true.
How the autumn 1926 floods led into the great flood of 1927
The Chicago dispatch describes a second round of flooding on the Kansas-Oklahoma line, in Illinois and in Missouri, about two weeks after the “record breaking September cloudbursts.” Here the paper supplies the local detail: boat rescues, a surrounded Kansas village of 2,000, flooded tri-state mines, and railways and utility plants put out of action. Later accounts place these storms at the start of a much larger disaster. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 is traced to heavy rain across the river's central basin in summer 1926, and by September the Mississippi's tributaries in Kansas and Iowa were swollen to maximum capacity. The states named in the article, Kansas, Oklahoma, Illinois and Missouri, are all listed among those the 1927 flood eventually affected. When the paper reports that levees in western Illinois were being tried by water several feet above flood stage, it is describing fresh rain falling on a river system whose tributaries, by later accounts, were already full. The article's crop-damage estimates are contemporary judgements of probability, not final tallies.
The levee policy behind the strained embankments
The article's picture of “miles of levees” straining against muddy water reflects a federal flood-control strategy built on levees. The Mississippi River Commission, established in 1879, had recommended raising extensive levees along the river's channels to contain the flow, dismissing critics who predicted that compressing a swollen river between walls would increase its destructive potential. The following spring, the flood that the 1926 rains had begun broke levees along the river in at least 145 places, most severely on the lower Mississippi. Congress responded with the Flood Control Act of 1928, under which the Corps of Engineers built the world's longest system of levees and added floodways to divert excess flow from the river. Read with that later history in mind, the dispatch's account of levees under strain in October 1926 records an early stage of the pressure that the 1927 flood would expose.
Original
ORGANIZED LABOR PLANNING TO ASK FOR FIVE-DAY WEEK
[?] DETROIT, Oct. 3. - (AP) - The five day week for all workers came to the fore as a definite goal. of the American Federation of Labor program today in the final meeting of the executive council of the federation preliminary to the 46th annual convention which opens tomorrow morning. President William Green and his cabinet, composed of international officers of affiliated unions, agreed upon the five-day 40-hour week as the cardinal point in the advancement program of organized labor and determined to recommend the policy to all affiliated organizations as a basis of negotiation for contract renewals and employers. " The 40-hour week is inevitable in American labor, " Mr. Green said in a public statement after the meeting, " for the simple reason that It is economically sound and profitable. It is profitable for the worker, and for the employer, and has been tremendously successful in the numerous crafts in which it is already partially effective. " High pressure production and the physical demands of modern industry are such that only with the shorter day can we attain notable progress in mechanical production. In the printing crafts, garment trades and building trades, where the five-day week is effective in some sections of the country, the results have increased production as much as 40 per cent on certain operations with an actual decrease in the unit cost. Scientific study of charts in mechanical operations point to the shorter week as the most promising method of maintaining the prosperity of American industry, for it will reduce the labor turnover and increase production as well as the quality of work, create more leisure for the enjoyment of life and add to the general, high standard of living for the American worker, the best paid worker in the world. " [?]
THOUSANDS FLOCK TO AIMEE’S TEMPLE FOR BIG COMMUNION
[?] LOS ANGELES, Oct. 3. - (AP) - Thousands of members of Aimee Semple McPherson's flock gathered today at Angeles temple to witness " The march of the martyrs, " a tableaux portraying famous Biblical scenes and depicting the " history of persecution. " The spectacle, interpreted by her followers as drawing a parallel between the sufferings of Biblical characters and what the evangelist has termed her own " persecution " followed a communion service which had been heralded by Mrs. McPherson's announcement that it was to be the largest communion ever held. The pastor selected " the great coronation day " for the text of her sermon tonight, her last gesture from the pulpit before she appears in municipal court tomorrow morning for the second week of her hearing on a felony charge. The first scene in the tableau was the crucifixion of the Christ at Calvary. Then followed a tableau portraying the suffering of the martyred Stephen, the beheading of St. Paul, the persecution of the Christians ' by Nero of Rome, the burning of three persons at the stake for printing the Bible and the burning as a witch of Joan of Arc. The seventh scene intended by the evangelist to portray events of the present day, showed a large Bible placed on a chair. Lying beside it was a pair of scissors and a pile of mud. The dramatis personae was drawn from the congregation of the temple. When the state continues presentation of evidence at the hearing tomorrow where Mrs. McPherson, Mrs. Minnie Kennedy, her mother, and Mrs. Lorraine Wiseman-Sielaff, are charged with conspiring to obstruct justice and preparing false evidence, the scene of testimony is expected to shift again to Carmel-By-the-Sea, California, where the state alleges that the evangelist spent ten days with her former radio operator, Kenneth G. Ormiston. [?]
FLOODS AGAIN DRIVE WESTERN FARMERS TO HIGHER GROUNDS
Independent 8 PAGES Price 5 Cents Spang LER TRIAL CLOSE FLOODS AGAIN DRIVE WESTERN FARMERS TO HIGHER GROUNDS Sector Recently Swept by Destructive Overflows Faces Second Inundation as Torrential Rains Continue FLEET OF SMALL BOATS PRESSED INTO SERVICE Bartelsville, Okla., Lowlands Submerged; Fifteen Hundred Seek Highlands CHICAGO, Oct. 3. - (AP) - Level lowlands of the Central West, where torrential rains swept away many lives and millions in property a fortnight ago lay at the mercy of floods again tonight. Thousands fled their homes, unable to tarry and attempt to stay the advance of the waters farther back from submerged banks of swollen streams. Along the Kansas-Oklahoma line and in lower Illinois, where conditions were most acute, farmers abandoned their fields and fleets of small boats carried to higher ground families marooned, in villages and towns threatened with complete inundation. The Mississippi river which had been able to bear away the record breaking September cloudbursts, was choked with the rains that ushered in October in western Illinois and tried miles of levees with muddy water several feet above flood stage. Utilities plants went out of commission with the influx of the intermittent downpours since Friday, rail transportation was halted in many sections and in northeastern Oklahoma more than a score of the tri-state region mines were flooded out of operation. The Neosho, Terdigris and Caney rivers passed flood limits, a village of 2, 000 in Chautauqua county, Kansas, was completely surrounded by water and in the Caney bottoms in Oklahoma people were rescued from trees. To the east, Missouri also had suffering areas. There was a growing toll in life and property and in some areas it appeared that a doubling of the damage to crops from the previous floods, running well into the millions of dollars was probable. [?]
Source: Holding institution