The Evening Star's front page of October 12, 1926 led with Vice President Dawes telling the American Legion convention in Philadelphia that direct primaries should be largely abolished in favor of nomination by conventions, arguing that voter apathy let organized minorities of roughly 7 to 12½ per cent of qualified voters pick nominees and officeholders. An Associated Press dispatch described the machine-gun killing of North Side gang leader Earl Weiss and a lieutenant across from Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago, and traced the feud with Al Capone's faction back to Dion O'Banion's murder in the same flower shop. The paper printed the Commission of Fine Arts' letter to Senator Smoot urging that no department building go on the Mall and that the new Commerce Department building stay between Fourteenth and Fifteenth streets. A staff correspondent in Ohio predicted that prohibition would decide the Senate race between Frank Willis and Atlee Pomerene.
City voters ratify school bond issue by large majority
Trial of Daugherty and Miller ends in mistrial after five weeks' grind; jury is deadlocked sixty-five hours
Planters' main hope in balanced crops, keynote of meeting
The Montgomery Advertiser of October 12, 1926 led with a local vote. Montgomery approved a $1 million school bond issue, 1,205 to 158 in the body count, to pay for a new fireproof high school on the South Court Street extension and equipment for other schools. The mayor planned to sell the bonds within 60 days, and the school board expected the building to be ready for the 1928 school year. From New York, the Associated Press reported that the conspiracy trial of former Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty and former alien property custodian Thomas W. Miller ended in a hung jury after more than 65 hours of deliberation. The prosecutor said he would take at least a month to decide on a retrial. A five-state regional agricultural conference at the state capitol agreed that the South had grown too much cotton and needed diversified crops. Governor-designate Bibb Graves urged taking a third of the crop off the market. In Birmingham, a U.S. Chamber of Commerce vice-president proposed bonded warehousing and bank loans instead of federal aid.
The Advertiser's front page for October 12, 1926, led its local news with a fatal crash at a railway crossing at Crumlin, near London: a C.P.R. Montreal–Chicago express running 20 minutes late struck a light truck, killing Edgar C. Clark, 48, and his five-year-old son Kenneth, and tore spokes from the locomotive's pilot. From Chicago the page carried a vivid account of a machine-gun attack beside Holy Name Cathedral that mowed down five men, left two dead, and was expected to set off another round of reprisals between bootlegging gangs. A Moscow dispatch cited Soviet trade-commissariat figures showing that Britain had overtaken the United States as Russia's leading trading partner, with Germany second and America, which had led in 1925 without recognizing Moscow, slipping to third.
The Vossische Zeitung of 12 October 1926 carried a Paris report that, according to an official French statement, experts on both sides were still working on the Franco-German understanding begun at Thoiry, with the two governments for now working separately on drawing up an overall plan. A second Paris report described French associations resolving on an energetic campaign against what they called a kind of debt bondage, even at the risk of a government crisis, and a press turning combative, with L'Oeuvre's "We are not paying!" urging opposition to ratification and floating a tax strike. A Prussian item noted that talks on a Grand Coalition confined to Prussia sat awkwardly with the Democrats' and the Centre's wish for stable majorities in both the Reich and Prussia.
Le Figaro's front page of 12 October 1926 opened with a signed column by Lucien Romier, the paper's director and political editor-in-chief, insisting that effort, policy and responsibilities were shared with François Coty. Romier wrote that despite Coty's imperious, inventive temperament, their collaboration had produced no clashes and their agreement on general policy remained complete. A news report said that Captain Tropat, rapporteur to an army-corps military council, had gone to Germersheim to reconstruct the drama of the night of the 26th and would soon question Germans. The same space carried the day's events (the Automobile Show at the Grand Palais, Leather Week, races at Enghien) and an appeal by Mgr Seipel, Austria's former chancellor, urging Catholics worldwide to take an interest in international affairs. Under Henri Vonoven's headline about the general councils' resolutions, the legible text is only masthead matter: the paper's supplements and the Paris exchange table.
This front page of 12 October 1926 looked from Vienna at two neighbouring political crises. A Prague telegram reported that the German Agrarians and German Christian Socials had agreed to enter Antonín Švehla's cabinet, named the professors Spina and Mayer-Harting as likely ministers, and expected German to gain a place in parliamentary committee work, though Hlinka's absence might delay matters. The leading editorial described the uproar in the Styrian Landtag at Graz, where Anton Rintelen, under fire over his bank ties, answered the Social Democrats with a counter-dossier and blamed them for the Centralbank's fall; the paper admired his nerve but wished the crisis had ended peacefully. Below the fold, the poet Anton Wildgans recalled his boyhood walk to school through Vienna's Josefstadt.
This front page of L'Écho d'Alger was dominated by Franco-German tension and war debts. Georges Wagner, writing from Mainz, urged calm over the clashes between French occupation troops and Germans at Germersheim, Trier and Koblenz, arguing that the Rhineland's economic recovery had turned the once well-fed French soldier into the poor and humiliated party. A report from Essen gave Chancellor Marx's speech insisting that the incidents must not undo the Thoiry understanding and defending Germany's entry into the League of Nations, with a caption on Seeckt's resignation. A press review showed the Paris papers divided over ratifying the American debt agreement, from L'Ère nouvelle's attack on veterans' intimidation to L'Œuvre's 'We will not pay!' Short items noted Poincaré's arrival in Metz and a Marseille protest against closing the Tarascon court.
La Tribune de Madagascar of 12 October 1926 mixed metropolitan tax politics with colonial administration and communications. Its leading item reported that Edmond Boyer, deputy for Maine-et-Loire, had tabled a bill to make foreign tourists in France pay a daily levy equivalent to the French income tax, sorted into three classes at 15, 25 and 50 gold francs a day, and the paper backed the scheme as fair. A news item reported that M. Dumas, head of the mines service, had been named to run Public Works and was already in Malagasy waters aboard the Dumbéa, recalling that he had signed the tender specifications for the Southern railway. A short piece mocked a Channel swimmer, and a third item attacked the makeshift wireless station at Djibouti, run by one NCO and a handful of Somalis, which was supposed to relay the Alarobia station's transmissions to France.
Events for the benefit of the Tonkin disaster victims
The page set a signed column on schooling beside foreign financial news and a report on disasters in Tonkin. In a column signed VAN-GIANG, the writer described Japanese primary schools drilling children every morning in a catechism of love for parents, teacher and, above all, Japan, and argued that this daily repetition turned love of family and country into a faith that would unfold fully in adulthood. A brief dispatch, citing the Daily News correspondent in Washington, reported under a heading on French debts that the American government had decided to let Wall Street mobilize German railway bonds. A report datelined Dalat, introducing benefit events for Tonkin's disaster victims, listed the year's calamities: cholera, floods across most of the delta that costly engineers could not tame, millions of piastres lost, and the wreck of the Dông Loi with 400 dead.
The Prager Tagblatt of 12 October 1926 led with Prague's drawn-out coalition crisis. It reported that the executive of the German Agrarian League, after a report by Franz Spina, had endorsed its deputies' readiness to send ministers into a parliamentary government under Švehla, that the German Christian Socials had reached the same decision, and that Spina and Mayr-Harting were tipped as ministers, while part of the Czech National Democrats still objected. From Paris the paper reported Poincaré speaking of an understanding with Germany, even as a 400,000-strong veterans' federation and the newspaper L'Oeuvre attacked the war-debt agreement with the United States, whose ratification the paper judged less likely than ever. From Berlin it described Communist uproar in the Prussian Landtag at the first reading of the Hohenzollern settlement bill, including shouted insults at the finance minister and a deputy excluded for throwing water.
Politika's front page of 12 October 1926 followed a crisis in Nikola Uzunović's cabinet over Stjepan Radić, the Croatian Peasant Party leader whose party then sat in the government. The paper reported that Belgrade politicians were waiting for a Council of Ministers decision that would settle the fate of the Radical–Radić coalition, and that most expected the cabinet once again to accept Radić's explanations, which the paper called clumsy and contrived. A second report quoted Uzunović refusing, before the talks ended, to confirm even the point put to him and described talk from government circles of widening the coalition to the Democrats and clericals, an idea parliamentary circles thought hard to realize. A third noted that even the usually forthcoming prime minister said almost nothing after the cabinet session.
State operation has in places increased the telephone fee in Fredrikshald 7-fold.
Ahead of Norway's 18 October 1926 referendum on the spirits ban, this Aftenposten page campaigned openly for a 'no' vote. An editorial accused the leaders of the labour parties of keeping up pro-prohibition agitation against their own members' indifference, and mocked their claim that defending the ban was a fight against private capitalism; it also pointed to unemployment and a 9 million kroner shortfall in State Railways revenue. An appeal signed by nationally known figures, among them Roald Amundsen, argued that ten years of prohibition had brought smuggling, illicit distilling and contempt for the law without reducing drinking. A report from Fredrikshald described local business groups protesting that telephone fees had risen more than sevenfold in the top class since the State took over from a private company.
The Leidsch Dagblad of 12 October 1926 opened with a warm review of Theo Mann-Bouwmeester's farewell performance at the Leiden theatre in Henri Bataille's "The Child of Love". The paper described a nearly sold-out house, a student escort from the station in the L.S.C.'s Senate carriage, a welcome at the Minerva society and flags flying over the theatre. A letter to the municipal council described how pupils saved a little each week for class outings, and how poor children who could not save were left behind to wave their classmates off. The letter then began to argue that a few hundred guilders from the community could put this right. Under the heading "Thoiry Continued", a foreign report followed the Prussian Diet's debate on the settlement with the Hohenzollerns. The Communist Pieck first moved to drop the bill and then to postpone it for four weeks until the Reichstag had decided.
Le Petit Matin of Tunis gave its front page to P. Lavrière's column welcoming a planned Labour Office for Tunisia. He argued that the shortage was one of training and willingness, not numbers: by his reading of official figures only 77,478 of 171,904 workers were employed, so Polish immigration should be limited to a few skilled men who could serve as instructors. Wire briefs below reported turmoil over the Soviet opposition, an alleged plot against Stalin and Mussolini's 'battle for wheat'. Polish foreign minister Zaleski dismissed the new Soviet–Lithuanian treaty and mocked Lithuania's 'unilateral war'. Raymond Colrat's Paris letter described Poincaré's National Union cabinet as divided, with Marin and Maginot siding with veterans against the war-debt agreements.
The Situation Before the Revolutionary Army Entered Wuchang
Military News from All Quarters
Shibao carried early reports of the fall of Wuchang, the walled Yangtze city whose garrison had held out against the Northern Expedition's siege. A Reuters dispatch from Hankou said part of the defenders mutinied and opened the gates on the afternoon of the 10th, that defence commander Liu Yuchun was being held in a foreign-run university, and that Chen Jiamo had reportedly been taken too; a Toho Agency report credited the Henan 3rd Division with opening the Zhonghe Gate and noted a report that Chen had fled long before. A badly damaged Hankou dispatch of October 8 described intermediaries' long efforts toward a Wuhan peace settlement tied to the release of women and children, naming Tang Shengzhi, Liu Zuolong and Deng Yanda as signatories for the besiegers. A short war-news column relayed the Nanjing allied headquarters' claim to have repulsed the enemy and its order to rush Jiangsu recruits to the front.
This partial reading of the Tonga Ilbo for 12 October 1926 covers two passages. The first is the opening installment of an unsigned editorial, "The Scientific Process of the Class Movement," which argued that class should be defined by consciousness rather than property. It held that awakening class self-awareness, by intellectual or emotional means, must come before purely practical agitation among peasants, and it called for more "scientific" pioneers. The second block sits under a headline about disregarding a break with the Kenkyūkai, but the legible text is an essay on why good Korean houses were scarce. The essay blamed the cold climate, bare mountains and plunder by corrupt late-Joseon officials, and it rejected the claim that warm ondol rooms had made Koreans idle. It is followed by a satirical column on threatening letters against Japan's prime minister and a change of chief in the colonial police.
On 12 October 1926, the anniversary of Columbus's landfall, Santiago's La Nación filled this page with two poems about the discovery of America. An excerpt from Ramón de Campoamor's long poem 'Colón' compares Columbus to Alexander the Great, praises him for opening his book 'in the name of God' and hails him for giving the 'greedy old continent' mountains of gold on coral islands. A poem signed J. M. de Heredia, 'Los descubridores', shows captains and labourers leaving Palos de Moguer for the gold of Cipango and watching unfamiliar stars rise over the tropical sea. The page also carried small advertisements: one for ECO soap and a short notice urging mothers who cannot breastfeed to use dried milk.
LAST NIGHT THE DUKE OF AUMALE'S CASTLE IN FRANCE WAS SACKED
THEY HID ON THE SHIP BUT THE RUSE DID NOT WORK: THEY WERE CAUGHT
Festival of the Race!
Crítica's front page of 12 October 1926 led with an Associated Press cable from Paris on an overnight burglary at the Duke of Aumale's castle in Chantilly: thieves climbed into the Tower of Jewels on twelve-meter ladders, broke a window and took gems put at 80 to 90 million francs, including the Grand Condé diamond, valued at seventy million, and a stone from Abd-el-Kader's dagger. A second cable, citing Le Matin, told of two Italian men and a woman found travelling without tickets on the liner Massilia and locked up aboard, with a subhead wondering whether an organization lay behind them. A column on the Día de la Raza mocked the flood of holiday prose, its talk of Race and Latinity and its family metaphors of Mother Spain and Aunt Italy, before turning to Columbus.
Il Piccolo of Trieste led with Finance Minister Giuseppe Volpi's departure for Genoa, where he was expected to pledge continued deflation, credit the lira's rise (quoted at 115 to the pound in London) to foreign confidence rather than state intervention, and praise the budget; a ministerial circular tightened stockbrokers' reporting of trading volumes. The same column carried Mussolini's speech to farmers with Senator Corradini's eulogy of the regime, a report on an Anglo-German industrialists' conference on tariffs, and an angry rebuttal of foreign stories about an Italian purchase of Angola and a war with Turkey. A second column reported the British Labour Party conference rejecting Communist affiliation by 2,706,000 votes to 349,000 and chairman Robert Williams attacking the miners' coal-embargo policy, next to a British health society's letter praising Italy's wholemeal-bread decree. An editorial column welcomed Minister Fedele's commission on a single lower secondary school and listed its advantages, from choosing a career at 14 instead of 10 to savings and steadier teaching staffs.