Deaths of 10,000 Reported in ‘Red’ Siege of Wuchang
President’s Move in Butler-Walsh Contest Watched
Woman and 2 Men Lynched by Mob
The Evening Star of Friday, October 8, 1926, led with Associated Press reports from Peking and Hankow on the Cantonese siege of Wuchang. Unconfirmed Chinese estimates put the dead at 10,000, most of them starved, and at least 50 women were trampled in the rush for refugee boats. Only about 40,000 of more than 250,000 residents had been carried across the Yangtse before an expected bombardment. From Boston, G. Gould Lincoln described the Butler–Walsh Senate race as a test of President Coolidge’s popularity and of prohibition, with both parties waiting to see whether Coolidge would step in. An AP dispatch from Aiken, South Carolina, reported that a mob took Clarence, Demmond and Bertha Lowman from jail during their retrial and shot them in a pine thicket. A short item reported that Guam’s Congress protested a Philippine proposal to annex the island.
RECORDS BURNED TO PROTECT CAMPAIGN FUND JURY IS TOLD
COTTON HOLDING GAINING GROUND THROUGHOUT STATE
FERRY BOATS USED IN MAIN STREET OF FLOOD SWEPT TOWN
The front page of October 8, 1926, led with closing arguments in the New York conspiracy trial of former Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty and former Alien Property Custodian Thomas W. Miller. Daugherty's lawyer, Max D. Steuer, told the jury his client burned bank records "in a moment of madness" to destroy records of the Harding campaign fund, not to hide a bribe in the American Metal case. Closer to home, the paper reported that the cotton-holding movement was slowing rail shipments across Alabama ahead of a regional agricultural conference in Montgomery on October 12. An AP dispatch described Beardstown, Illinois, cut off for thirty hours by the Illinois River flood, with a ferry carrying people up its main streets. The opening of a story on Commander Richard E. Byrd's tour promoting commercial aviation also appears in the Daugherty column.
This London, Ontario evening paper led its foreign news with a special cable from Henry Somerville in London: Britain's locked-out miners, facing defeat, had voted against their own leaders' advice to call out the safety men who kept the pits from flooding, and the correspondent warned of guerilla-style violence and expected arrests of extremist leaders. At home, utilities manager E. V. Buchanan argued that publicly owned Hydro power, sold at 1½ cents a kilowatt hour against an average U.S. private rate of 7½ cents, had saved the city more than $20,000,000 in about 16 years, including $1,800,000 last year. A third report covered an Ontario Court of Appeal ruling that a marked cheque drawn on the failed Home Bank, delivered half an hour before it closed, did not pay off a mortgage. Weather tables and the death of Times drama critic A. B. Walkley also appeared.
The Vossische Zeitung of 8 October 1926 led with the crisis over Colonel General Hans von Seeckt, chief of the Army Command. It reported that President Hindenburg had received Seeckt and Defence Minister Geßler one after the other, tried to mediate, and put off his decision until he had heard Chancellor Marx. Political circles expected him to accept the resignation, because Seeckt had let the ex-Crown Prince's eldest son take part in manoeuvres without telling the minister. Dispatches from Paris explained the French fascination with Seeckt, whom France saw as the organiser of a hidden army of millions, and a Frankfurt item mocked the prince's claim to the rank of lieutenant. In a signed column from Vienna, Julius Elbau described the first Pan-Europa Congress at Schönbrunn, the German and French speakers there, the governments that sent envoys and Ignaz Seipel's active support.
Le Figaro's front page of 8 October 1926 mixed impressions from Geneva with domestic politics. In a signed column, G. de Reynold described a hot, flag-decked Geneva full of foreign cars, café orchestras and English, Spanish and German voices, from which he crossed the bridge to the quiet, French-speaking old town, announcing that there were two Genevas. Henri Vonoven's political editorial urged the cabinet, meeting that morning on the cost of living and on wheat and coal supplies, to publicize its measures, arguing that rising prices were eroding ordinary people's satisfaction at the fall of the pound and that technical explanations were poor consolation. A third piece on the administrative reform insisted that decentralization, deconcentration and the transfer of powers to elected bodies were three distinct ideas, all driven by the search for economies.
The Neue Freie Presse of 8 October 1926 led with an editorial on the parliamentary committee examining the ruin of the Lower Austrian Bauernbank. It conceded that State Secretary Stöckler and Governor Buresch had trusted too readily and erred, and that a governor should never have speculated in francs, but insisted the opposition had proved nothing dishonourable; it blamed the committee majority's delay in hearing Buresch for letting Social Democrats tie him to the vanished speculator Josaias Aberbach. A London telegram reported that British miners had rejected Baldwin's arbitration offer and voted to pull safety men from the pits and seek a boycott of foreign coal. In the feuilleton, Theodor Heuss recalled Ragusa's patron saint, its lost republic, its century under Austria and the city's uncertain mood under its new rulers.
L'Écho d'Alger's front page of 8 October 1926 carried Paris political news from Raymond Poincaré's National Union government. One measure was being sent to the Finance Ministry's departments for study before the cabinet ratified it the following week. Briand was expected to brief ministers on incidents in the Rhineland and recent events in Germany. Poincaré received the Keeper of the Seals, Louis Barthou, and the secretary-general of the civil servants' federation was received by M. Ribère about equalizing pay. A fragment of an editorial accused the Cartel of having grabbed every post over the previous two years and called on the executive to step in. A dispatch reported that the War Minister had issued a circular to prevent fatal accidents in military aviation. From Lyon, the paper reported that the swindler Rème, back from Algeria, was taken under heavy escort to the examining magistrate and admitted that he had been to Geneva.
Two days before the Colonial Council vote due on Sunday, 10 October 1926, the front page of L'Écho annamite was given over to the campaign. An editorial headed "Honnêtes gens" accused the candidate Lê-quang Trinh of breaking his pledges and using his seat as colonial councillor for profit. It tied him to the regime of the departed governor Maurice Cognacq and urged voters to sweep away what was left of it. A notice, surviving only as a fragment, charged him with exploiting a claimed friendship with the late patriot Phan Châu Trinh and said that Phan Văn Trường had twice denied it. A profession of faith from outgoing councillors asked voters to renew a four-year mandate that, they said, had been served in unrewarded independence from the Administration.
The Prager Tagblatt of 8 October 1926 opened with a Prague editorial, "A General Staff of Peace," which begins by recalling how the intellectual movements of the Enlightenment prepared the French Revolution; the page also carried the name of Prof. Otto Peterka, the new rector of the German University. From London the paper reported that the British miners' delegate conference had rejected Baldwin's offer of arbitration after the districts voted down the government proposal by 737,000 to 42,000, and that it had then voted 594,000 to 194,000, against the executive's strong objections, to pull the safety crews out of the pits. From Berlin it reported that the decision on General von Seeckt's request to resign as Chief of the Army Command was still awaited.
The Journal de Genève's front page of 8 October 1926 carried an editorial signed W. M. that welcomed Marshal Piłsudski's decision to become Polish prime minister himself after the Sejm had twice brought down Kazimierz Bartel's cabinet. It argued that a man who rules a country in fact should rule it openly and under his own name. A second editorial, signed J. M. and headed "Revirement", went back to John Rochaix's speech of November 1924, in which he promised to spread Geneva's tax burden beyond the third of citizens who carried it and called the imbalance a moral as well as a fiscal error. From Berlin, a correspondent reported that political pacification was spreading in Germany. He quoted Stresemann on broad support for rapprochement and noted moves toward a grand coalition.
Politika's page of 8 October 1926 carried an editorial on Bulgarian disarmament that weighed what Romania's new seat on the League of Nations Council meant for Belgrade. Its author argued that the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes would thereby lose its place on the Council's Investigating Commission, set up two years earlier to carry on supervising Bulgaria's disarmament under the Treaty of Neuilly once inter-Allied control ended. A descriptive piece portrayed Cetinje, which the writer called the 'second Serbian capital', as a small, unidyllic town whose first point of interest was its very lack of obvious sights. A short gossip item signed 'Ibis' worked out that a construction-section chief's 15,000-dinar advance implied total moving expenses of 22,500 dinars.
The workers at Tinnfos rejected the factory's offer.
Master criminal Harry Hagemann escaped from the Aker police yesterday.
Prime Minister Berge's explanation.
Aftenposten's page of 8 October 1926 carried a telegram from Notodden reporting that striking workers at the Tinnfos mill had rejected the company's offer to rehire half of them on the old terms. Their families' eviction from their houses was now set for Monday. A long police story described how the smuggler Harry Hagemann leapt out of a window and over a barbed-wire fence at Oslo's Justice Building moments before receiving a two-year sentence, and the paper printed his full description. A sharp jab at Gunnar Knudsen's prohibition campaign followed it. A fragment of Abraham Berge's testimony to the impeachment court recalled the banking panic and the May 1923 letter in which Handelsbanken reported that it lacked liquid capital.
This Leiden daily of 8 October 1926 mixed local, national and foreign news. An editorial on the previous day's power failure argued that, although the municipal light works could not be blamed for a run of unlucky coincidences, the city should secure a standby supply by contract with a provincial electricity company or with The Hague, because businesses and residents in Leiden and neighbouring towns had suffered real losses. A column of short Dutch news items covered a repeat swindler who wept before shopkeepers over a daughter's invented death, a director's denial that the export slaughterhouse at Hook of Holland would close, and the death of a motorcyclist injured at Bussum. From Germany, the paper reported that the whole cabinet backed Defence Minister Gessler against General von Seeckt and expected Hindenburg to accept the general's resignation despite talk of officers lobbying for him.
English mining districts reject the Government's proposals by 4 to 1
Cession of Angola to Italy by Portugal denied
A terrible earthquake devastates Karachi
The front page led on Britain's coal dispute. A London dispatch reported that the mining districts had rejected the government's proposals by four to one, settling the question of a national tribunal on wages and hours, and that an alarmed government had asked the railway companies to cut traffic by almost half. A Geneva dispatch said Briand and Stresemann meant to put the Saar question to German and French experts at the League Council in December: the withdrawal of 2,000 French troops, dropping the 1927 plebiscite and a buyback of the mines put at about 250 million marks. The same column described a plan to abolish 1,700 posts. A short item passed on a report from Bombay of an earthquake and cyclone around Karachi causing 25 million rupees of damage. It followed a note on stones thrown at police and windows smashed at the homes of miners who had gone back to work. The page also carried a headline denying that Portugal had ceded Angola to Italy, but the text of that story is not part of this reading.
This partial reading of the Shibao for 8 October 1926 covers three war reports from the Jiangxi front of the Northern Expedition. A Jiujiang wire dated the 7th said talk of peace was growing again and the focus had shifted to politics, while Sun planned to visit the front to encourage his men. A dispatch of the 5th described trenches at the gate of a cotton mill outside Jiujiang, Nationalist 'party troops' sighted at the foot of Mount Lu, and machine guns placed on nearby hills. A badly damaged account of the fighting around De'an reported heavy but indecisive battles at Gao'an and a partly illegible '-chang', listed troop positions near Wuning and Jiujiang, and told of a force of more than 5,000 crossing the mountains from Hubei, after which a commander named Xie broke out of an encirclement. The page also printed the paper's subscription rates.
THE PRESIDENT OF THE BOLIVIAN DELEGATION SPEAKS TO “LA NACION”
A DISTINGUISHED LEADER OF THE ARGENTINE DELEGATION VISITS US
Santiago's La Nación, printed as the South American Championship was about to begin, gave its sports coverage to the foreign delegations arriving in Chile. It announced that the Argentine players would lay a wreath at the O'Higgins monument, with half-back Segundo Médici speaking for them. A special correspondent boarded the Bolivian team's steamer and interviewed delegation president Luis Castell Quiroga. He said his side hoped to be a bond between Chilean and Bolivian sportsmen and called it an honour to make their Copa América debut in Chile. He also said he would ask not to be scheduled for the opening match after more than six days of travel. A profile introduced the Argentine delegate José León Rodeyro, a former national deputy who had led his country's delegation to the 1924 labour conference in Geneva, and reported his visit to the paper's offices.
Il Piccolo of Trieste reported on 8 October 1926 that the Fascist Grand Council had opened its October session in Rome at 10 p.m. the evening before. The report listed those present, from party secretary Turati and the quadrumvirs Balbo and Bianchi to all the ministers and the Militia's representative, and said the sitting, which heard a detailed report on the provinces, would resume the next night. Alongside it ran General Prince Gonzaga's farewell order to the Militia legions, announcing that the Duce would personally take effective command. A Berlin dispatch described the indignant right-wing German press blaming the Republic for General von Seeckt's resignation over a former imperial prince's military training, and a Rome item began reporting Bulgarian Foreign Minister Buroff's statements to the press. A stray fragment at the top argued that Italy was right to look to the Mediterranean. Only the opening line of the Buroff item could be read.