1,200 CHINESE SOLDIERS DIE AS SHELLS SPRAY SHIP IN FIRE
U.S. CALLS MARINES TO CHECK OUTLAW ATTACKS ON MAILS
The Evening Star's Sunday front page of October 17, 1926, previewed the arrival of Queen Marie of Rumania in Washington the next day at about 6 o'clock, by special train from New York with Princess Ileana and Prince Nicholas. It laid out her formal White House call, the Coolidges' return visit at the legation, and a Tuesday of Mount Vernon, Arlington and a state dinner. An AP dispatch from Shanghai reported that a munitions-laden transport carrying 1,500 of Marshal Sun Chuan-fang's soldiers caught fire and exploded off Kiukiang on the Yangtze, killing 1,200, and that a Chekiang governor had turned against Sun. A third story said President Coolidge and his cabinet had again assigned Marines to guard the mails after a $151,000 mail-truck robbery at Elizabeth, N.J.
Norris Launches Assault on Vare in Pennsylvania Fight
Vigorous Efforts Needed to Relieve Farmers, It Is Claimed
Bandits Escape Through Cordon
The Montgomery Advertiser's front page for Sunday, October 17, 1926, led with three wire stories. In Pennsylvania, Senator George Norris, a Nebraska Republican, urged voters to reject his own party's Senate nominee, William S. Vare. Norris argued that Vare's heavy primary spending amounted to putting a Senate seat up for auction, and he predicted that Vare would never be seated. In the South, Dr. Tait Butler, who led the cotton relief committee, called on bankers, merchants and growers to back a pool that would hold four million bales off a glutted market and to cut 1927 acreage by a fourth. A committee member, Oscar Johnson, left for Washington to seek government financing. In New Jersey, the eight bandits who had killed a postal worker and taken $151,700 at Elizabeth slipped past a 500-man cordon in the Watchung hills. Witnesses reported seeing their sedan on roads near Plainfield, Scotch Plains and Springfield.
The Vossische Zeitung of 17 October 1926 relayed a Manchester Guardian report from London: talks at Colonel Ashley's house in Romsey, meant to lay the foundations of an "economic Locarno" between British and German industrialists, had stirred French and Belgian suspicion, and both governments told their London ambassadors to find out what had been agreed. In a signed column, Georg Bernhard argued that the big political problems of Germany's entry into the League of Nations were largely settled and turned to the question of who would fill the Secretariat posts set aside for Germans. A Madrid dispatch reported a decree-law letting the Spanish government set aside court judgments, even Supreme Court rulings, turning a former emergency power into the norm.
On 17 October 1926 the Neue Freie Presse printed an essay by Henry Ford, datelined New York, that opens with a prediction a leading munitions manufacturer had made in Ford's Dearborn office some five years earlier: the next war would be waged against the United States, led by Japan and Mexico, because of American commercial supremacy, its gold reserves and the money other nations owed it. A Belgrade telegram reported that the Yugoslav government crisis had been resolved late at night, when the King received the resigned Prime Minister Uzunović and the resignation was withdrawn. A feuilleton, 'Fathers and Daughters', mocked the exhausted vogue for stage dramas about sons rebelling against their fathers.
The Journal de Genève's front page of 17 October 1926 carried three opinion pieces. W. M. argued that the League of Nations, unable to protect distant members by force, could justify its universality through health work: he praised the Singapore Epidemiological Bureau's wireless warnings to ports, cited Rockefeller funding and plans against malaria and infant mortality, and reported Africa's request for a similar effort. J. M. attacked the Geneva Council of State's proposed estate tax as a second levy on heirs that would further discourage saving. Henri Lichtenberger, writing for the Vienna congress of the Federation of Intellectual Unions, argued that Franco-German reconciliation after Locarno needed the support of intellectuals on both sides who were still embittered by the war and the inflation.
Politika's front page of 17 October 1926 followed the government crisis in Belgrade. Its lead report said that government circles, especially Radić's followers, had expected until two nights earlier that the Radicals and Radić's party would strike a deal leaving the cabinet largely unchanged, while other politicians warned that such a patch-up would only postpone a new crisis. The refusal to accept Prime Minister Uzunović's resignation was taken as a sign that the most authoritative quarter wanted the same outcome. A second report set out the Radical conditions on which the two parties had split, including a pledge that neither side would agitate by claiming that a Serbian, Croatian or Slovenian 'tribe' was persecuted. One of Radić's followers told the paper this would sanction in advance dissident movements like Dr. Nikić's.
This partial reading of the Shibao for 17 October 1926 follows, from Shanghai, the first day of Zhejiang civil governor Xia Chao's rising against Sun Chuanfang. The paper reported that soldiers of Sun's 13th Regiment tore up track and an iron bridge on the Shanghai–Hangzhou railway, stopping trains in both directions. It said Xia sent trains carrying about 1,500 security troops each toward Jiashan and Songjiang, and that both vanguards had come within 11 km of Songjiang. It also described machine guns rushed from the Gaochangmiao arsenal to Meijianong, soldiers watching the North Station telegraph room, a dusk-to-dawn ban on movement along the line at Longhua, Ding Wenjiang sending representatives to Nanjing, and Meng Zhaoyue in Nanjing sending his 8th Division and his officer Song Meicun to hold Shanghai, while assuring Nanjing that order would be kept.
Proclamation of the Headquarters of the Zhenwei Combined Third and Fourth Army Groups
Notice from the Zhengyan Evening News
Bound Volumes of the Shijie Ribao Supplement
This Sunday issue of Beijing's Shijie Ribao carried a proclamation from the combined 3rd and 4th Army Groups commanded by Zhang Xueliang and Han Linchun. It announced that their troops, quartered inside the capital as a temporary measure, would move elsewhere now that order was returning, and it invited residents harmed by soldiers to file complaints, promising punishment of offenders and secrecy for complainants. Beside it ran a launch notice for the Zhengyan Evening News, due out that same day and claiming twice the size of Beijing's other evening papers, and an advertisement for bound monthly volumes of the Shijie Ribao's own literary supplement, edited by the Peking University professor Liu Bannong.
British Liberal Party Leader: Messrs. Ok and A Both Resign
The Way of Regeneration
Plot to Occupy Nanjing
This partial reading of the Tong-a Ilbo for 17 October 1926 covers three items. A headline announced that the British Liberal Party leader, written as 'Ok' and 'A', had resigned, but the legible text beneath it reports on a Far East colonization and migration scheme: 66 percent of a planned 1,279,000 had been received, and arrangements for 38,000 migrant households were completed as planned. In the third installment of his serial on the regeneration of the Korean nation, Choe Hyeon-bae used physics to argue that white clothing helps people bear the summer heat but is a serious disadvantage against winter cold. A China column carried a Fengtian wire saying Zhang Zuolin had ordered that only new men be hired and that senior officials go abroad to study. It then reported that a plot to seize Nanjing, involving collusion between the Southern Army and part of the Third Division, had been discovered in advance.
This partial reading of La Nación of Santiago for 17 October 1926 centres on a Spanish translation of Maurice Level's story “El mal guía” (The Bad Guide). In the passage, a man shut away in the dark curses a creature he longs to crush underfoot, files through the hinges of a door, and takes heart that God, having let him break the first barrier, may open the others. Stray lines of the same story run into two medicine advertisements. One is for Catamina, an odourless zinc ointment against scabies, and names Heesch, Nagel & Cía. of Valparaíso and J. D. Riedel of Berlin. The other is for Gaurol ampoules, an injectable lime salt that the ad claimed would restore strength and health to people suffering from tuberculosis.
Crítica gave its front page of 17 October 1926 to the Gran Premio Nacional at Palermo. A lyrical opening sketch described the gusty wind, the indigo sky and the held breath of the crowd before the starting tape broke. A second report compared the packed grandstands to Epsom on Derby day, noted the last fur coats beside early spring dresses and the first straw hats, and recorded the surprise surrounding the Remanso colt from the Stud Saavedra, who had become the Palermo public's new idol. A third piece portrayed Buenos Aires society in its finery and the roar and a hundred thousand waving hands as the winner, Quemao, went by.
This front page of Il Piccolo for 17 October 1926 followed the aftermath of Locarno in three stories. A Berlin dispatch reported that the German ambassador von Hoesch would soon return to Paris with Berlin's conclusions on the Thoiry agreement, and set out the newspaper Germania's reply to French writers who wanted eastern-border guarantees in exchange for an early Rhineland evacuation, including German figures on the cost of placing railway bonds abroad. From Locarno came the first-anniversary ceremony, where Swiss Federal Councillor Motta praised the pact and the League of Nations and declared Swiss neutrality beyond discussion. A Paris dispatch relayed Le Temps on the Austrian cabinet crisis, Ramek's record and the expected return of Mgr. Seipel.