The Montgomery Advertiser
- ASSAILANT SEIZED BY INFURIATED MOB AND PUT TO DEATH
- HARRY HOUDINI UNABLE TO ESCAPE GRIP OF GRIM REAPER; NOTED MAGICIAN DIES AFTER QUARTER CENTURY OF POPULARITY
- TWIN CITIES GIVE QUEEN MARIE ROYAL RECEPTION SUNDAY
The Montgomery Advertiser's front page for November 1, 1926 carried stories from October 31. An AP dispatch from Bologna reported that an eighteen-year-old had fired at Benito Mussolini, missing his chest by a fraction of an inch and tearing his coat and sash, before a furious crowd stabbed and beat the youth to death. From Detroit came word that Harry Houdini, the escape artist famous for slipping out of straitjackets, chains and cells, had died of peritonitis after a second operation that followed surgery for appendicitis. Another story followed Queen Marie of Romania through the Twin Cities, where she used a WCCO radio broadcast to invite North Dakota farmers and their wives to meet her train and tell her about their problems.
Translation
ASSAILANT SEIZED BY INFURIATED MOB AND PUT TO DEATH
BOLOGNA, ITALY, Oct. 31. - (AP) - An eighteen-year-old youth who today attempted to shoot Benito Mussolini, was himself stabbed and beaten to death by an infuriated mob. Mussolini escaped injury. The assassin's bullet missed passing through the premier's chest by the fraction of an inch. It actually ripped both sides of his coat and cut the sash of the Order of St. Maurice and St. Lazarus.
HARRY HOUDINI UNABLE TO ESCAPE GRIP OF GRIM REAPER; NOTED MAGICIAN DIES AFTER QUARTER CENTURY OF POPULARITY
DETROIT MICH., Oct. 31. - (AP) - Harry Houdini, the magician, died today. The noted escape artist, whose adeptness at freeing himself from straightjackets, chains, and cells mystified audiences in all parts of the world, died after a second surgical attempt had been made to save his life from the effects of peritonitis. Houdini was operated upon last Monday for appendicitis.
TWIN CITIES GIVE QUEEN MARIE ROYAL RECEPTION SUNDAY
After the formal reception at the station, Marie stopped long enough to speak over the radio from station WCCO to invite North Dakota farmers and their wives to meet her as her train passes through that state tomorrow. She said she wanted to know the problems of Dakota farmers and their means of meeting them, so that her own countrymen might be profited by their experiences.
Context
The Bologna assailant: eighteen in the paper, fifteen in later accounts
The AP dispatch described the attacker as an eighteen-year-old youth who had tried to shoot Mussolini and was then stabbed and beaten to death by the crowd. Later accounts identify the person killed as Anteo Zamboni and give his age as fifteen, describing a shot fired at Mussolini as he rode in an open car through Bologna and the boy's lynching that followed. The paper's certainty that the dead youth was the gunman is also open to doubt: the terrorism specialist J. Bowyer Bell wrote that the boy was likely innocent and that the affair was either a put-up job or a plot among Fascists. The vivid details about the bullet tearing the premier's coat and sash are best read as a record of what was reported from Bologna that day, rather than as a settled account of who fired.
Three attempts in 1926 and the laws that followed
The Bologna shooting was the third attempt on Mussolini in 1926. On April 7 Violet Gibson fired a pistol that grazed his nose, and on September 11 the anarchist marble worker Gino Lucetti threw a bomb at his limousine at Porta Pia in Rome, injuring four others. An earlier case shows how such episodes could serve the regime: the former Socialist deputy Tito Zaniboni was arrested on November 4, 1925 for attempting to assassinate Mussolini, and historians believe that plot was engineered by Mussolini's administration as a pretext to consolidate power, which is what followed. The Bologna attempt in turn resulted in laws creating Mussolini's secret police. The paper presents the event as a narrow personal escape and says nothing of these political consequences.
Houdini's last week in Detroit
The paper reported that Houdini had been operated on "last Monday" for appendicitis and died after a second operation against peritonitis. Later medical accounts fill in the sequence. Dr. Howard Markel, writing for PBS, dates the emergency operation to October 24, when surgeons removed an appendix that had already ruptured and caused severe peritonitis. A second operation followed on October 28, together with a new anti-streptococcal serum, but Houdini succumbed to overwhelming sepsis. Markel places the first operation on October 24, while the dispatch placed it on "last Monday."
The Montreal punches and the debate over the cause
Accounts soon tied Houdini's death to blows he took in Montreal. According to Markel, McGill University students visited his dressing room at the Princess Theatre on October 22, 1926, and one of them, Whitehead, struck him in the abdomen; a Smithsonian account places the incident after an October 20 performance, so even the date varies between retellings. Doctors at the time concurred that the student's blows had likely caused the appendicitis. A 2013 literature review cited by Markel is more cautious, finding blunt abdominal trauma a rare cause and noting that appendicitis and trauma only occasionally exist together. The Smithsonian account adds that Houdini had apparently been suffering from appendicitis for weeks before he died. The AP dispatch mentions neither the punches nor the weeks of illness, reporting only appendicitis and peritonitis.
Queen Marie's tour and the American press
The Twin Cities reception was one stop on what American Heritage describes as a zigzag tour across America and Canada lasting seven weeks and two days and covering 8750 miles in her special train, The Royal Romanian. Why exactly she had come was a mystery, the writer Gene Smith notes, and he explains the frenzy of coverage by observing that America in the 1920s was undergoing a personality craze. The papers estimated that six million people saw her. On her last night in New York she spoke on the radio, insisting she had not come for politics but "just to make friends with you." The WCCO broadcast reported in this paper, with its stated aim of learning from Dakota farmers for the benefit of her own countrymen, shows a more practical purpose alongside that language of friendship.
From the WCCO broadcast to the North Dakota stops
The invitation reported in the paper led to meetings the next day. According to Prairie Public's Dakota Datebook, the queen had invited farmers to meet her from a radio station in St. Paul the day before, and in Fargo she met farmers in her private car and learned about farming conditions. She heard about tractors replacing oxen and horses and about the necessity of good roads, the kind of practical problems she had told WCCO listeners she wanted to understand. At Mandan, in a ceremony during the stop, Red Tomahawk adopted her as a sister of the Sioux.
Original
ASSAILANT SEIZED BY INFURIATED MOB AND PUT TO DEATH
BOLOGNA, ITALY, Oct. 31. - (AP) - An eighteen-year-old youth who today attempted to shoot Benito Mussolini, was himself stabbed and beaten to death by an infuriated mob. Mussolini escaped injury. The assassin's bullet missed passing through the premier's chest by the fraction of an inch. It actually ripped both sides of his coat and cut the sash of the Order of St. Maurice and St. Lazarus.
HARRY HOUDINI UNABLE TO ESCAPE GRIP OF GRIM REAPER; NOTED MAGICIAN DIES AFTER QUARTER CENTURY OF POPULARITY
DETROIT MICH., Oct. 31. - (AP) - Harry Houdini, the magician, died today. The noted escape artist, whose adeptness at freeing himself from straightjackets, chains, and cells mystified audiences in all parts of the world, died after a second surgical attempt had been made to save his life from the effects of peritonitis. Houdini was operated upon last Monday for appendicitis.
TWIN CITIES GIVE QUEEN MARIE ROYAL RECEPTION SUNDAY
After the formal reception at the station, Marie stopped long enough to speak over the radio from station WCCO to invite North Dakota farmers and their wives to meet her as her train passes through that state tomorrow. She said she wanted to know the problems of Dakota farmers and their means of meeting them, so that her own countrymen might be profited by their experiences.
Source: Holding institution