Mrs. Hall Almost in Tears as Mills Testifies at Trial
Death or Prison for All Who Dare Oppose Mussolini
Sesqui Enforces Ban
The Evening Star of November 5, 1926 carried Associated Press reports from three very different places. From Somerville, New Jersey, it followed the Hall-Mills murder trial. Jane Gibson, the eyewitness the State was counting on, was too ill to leave the Somerville Hospital. James Mills, husband of the murdered choir singer, calmly described the last time he saw his wife, and the usually composed Mrs. Hall seemed briefly close to tears. From Rome, the paper reported that Mussolini's cabinet had made plots against the premier, the royal family or the state punishable by death, and had set prison terms of five to more than 30 years for harming Italy by deed or propaganda. A short item from Philadelphia said the Sesquicentennial Exposition would close its sales buildings on Sundays to enforce a ruling by the state Supreme Court.
CHIEF EYE-WITNESS IN HALL-MILLS CASE UNABLE TO TESTIFY
PREDICTS RADICAL COMMITTEE SHAKE IN COMING SENATE
CHECK RUNNERS AT FLAT TOP BRUTAL TO KNOX, CHARGE
The Montgomery Advertiser's front page for November 5, 1926 put two murder trials next to news about the Senate. An AP dispatch from Somerville, New Jersey, reported that the Hall-Mills trial could not hear its chief eyewitness that day. Judges ruled that Jane Gibson, the pig raiser who said she had seen the killings, was too ill to testify. Earlier that day, experts had tied a fingerprint on the Rev. Edward Wheeler Hall's calling card to defendant Willie Stevens. From Birmingham, the paper's own correspondent covered the murder trial of former warden Charles R. Davis. There, the state called a former convict to show that check runners had brutally treated James Knox inside the Flat Top mine on the day he died. A second AP story predicted shake-ups in Senate committees, because Tuesday's elections had unseated Republican Senators Wadsworth, Ernst, Stanfield and Harreld, who held committee chairmanships.
Le Figaro's front page of 5 November 1926 opened with Lucien Romier's column on the franc. He reported that speculative buying of francs had for the first time drawn a broad public on the Bourse, and he likened the movement to a "panic in reverse" like the one that followed the franc's recovery in March 1924. In a signed editorial, François Coty recalled that the paper had backed an understanding with Germany early on, starting with economic agreements, and argued that divisions among the Allies now made full execution of the Versailles settlement impossible. A short item signed Le Masque de Fer described a Paris newspaper hawker hailing a "great victory for General Pinard in America", a joke at the expense of American Prohibition.
This Vienna front page carried a correspondent's analysis of the defeated opposition in Soviet Russia. He argued that the latest struggle showed new features: all oppositional forces had united behind a common tactic, and Zinoviev had brought the personal element into the fight. Within the bloc, he wrote, only Trotskyism supplied a firm programme and ideological basis. A telegram from Rome described Mussolini stepping onto the balcony of the Palazzo Chigi after war volunteers gave him a consecrated sword. He told the crowd that this was no time for speeches and promised that the next day they would have the deeds they demanded. Armin T. Wegner's feature opened with a tired Rabindranath Tagore in a quiet Berlin hotel. The poet had just come back from visiting his son in hospital, partway through a crowded European tour to win support for his new university at Santiniketan.
The front page of L'Écho d'Alger for 5 November 1926 carried three short wire reports. From Rome came word that Anteo Zamboni had indeed fired at Mussolini in Bologna, using his brother Vico's revolver, and that police had also arrested a communist, Rodolpho Passardi, who had told friends he meant to kill the Duce. From Perpignan came a vivid scene from the breaking of a plot against the Spanish government: police burst into a hotel at Millas where 'revolutionary troops' were lunching, and a Genoa-born prisoner broke free and grabbed a bomb from a suitcase. From Lille, the paper reported that Marie Lefebvre, the 'murderous mother-in-law' sentenced to death by the Douai assize court, had dropped her appeal and could now hope only for a presidential pardon.
This issue of L'Écho annamite set civic commentary beside colonial news and a sharp press quarrel. A signed column by L. K. Van surveyed the three main mutual education societies of Indochina, in Hanoi, Saigon and Huế, noting their ages and branches, and praised the aims set out in the Saigon statutes: helping members study French, the sciences, the arts and French law through libraries, lectures, competitions and exhibitions. A dispatch from Hanoi described the solemn funeral of Consul Robert, killed on 31 October on the road from Long-Tchéou to Langson, with the Governor General leading the mourners and the procession passing through the Cathedral to the cemetery. A third column, by Vuong-Quan-Nguou, attacked the rival L'Impartial for applauding an assault at Mytho and accused its director of leading armed toughs at Bui Quang Chiêu's reception and of slapping a woman on the rue Catinat.
The Journal de Genève's front page of 5 November 1926 carried a letter signed 'Dr E. v. R.' on the Dutch-Belgian treaty. It set out the treaty's five measures: the end of Belgian neutrality and of the ban on a naval port at Antwerp, a reorganized administration of the Dutch Scheldt, canals from Antwerp to Moerdyk and to Ruhrort, and better waterways between Liège and Maastricht. The letter argued that only the last of these was bilateral and that the rest were Dutch concessions. An editorial treated the Grand Council's renewed debate on merging Geneva with its suburbs as the second act of a drama that had already been heavily reworked in committee. A box listed what was on pages 2 and 3.
This issue of Politika set a domestic political quarrel beside Greek politics and a curiosity from the sky. In a signed column, Dr. Drag. S. Kojić answered Dragiša Lapčević's Politika article of 3 November on Yugoslav parliamentarism. Kojić accepted most of it but rejected Lapčević's conclusion that talk of dictatorship came solely from disregard for parliamentary order, arguing that this put the real sequence of political events in reverse. A report signed "S." said that spreading monarchist propaganda in Greece had alarmed the army, which was tied to the republic, and that General Kondylis's government had therefore banned changes to the constitution and ordered elections under proportional representation to strengthen democratic elements. A short item passed on English press claims that a Dr. Robinson in London had received from Mars a signal matching the Morse letter M.
This Leiden front page of 5 November 1926 mixed academic, labour and civic news. One item outlined a lecture course on tropical-colonial economics that set out to test how far the standard schemes of theoretical economics held in the colonies, opening with two lectures on the colonial setting split into foreign enterprise and the native sphere. A report described K. ter Laan of Zaandam addressing a well-filled Volksgebouw for the Leiden branch of the Instituut voor Arbeidersontwikkeling on Multatuli's meaning for the working class, beginning with the misery of the Dutch people in Douwes Dekker's day and Cremer's picture of Leiden's factory children. The Leiden rescue brigade complained that a rescue hook on one bridge had been destroyed six times and said it wanted safe equipment in place before ice covered the canals.
This partial reading of the Dong-A Ilbo's front page for 5 November 1926 recovers short wire items on China's Northern Expedition. The first, headlined with a question mark, passed on a report that Sun Chuanfang's army headquarters in Shanghai said it had received directly from Sun himself. The report cited the director of a hospital run by American missionaries in Changsha, but the legible text breaks off before it says what the director reported about Chiang Kai-shek. The second item said that Zhang Zongchang, military governor of Shandong, had in the end chosen to back Wu Peifu with seven divisions. Both items show a Korean paper following the war between the Nationalists and the northern warlords, the first through a report from a warlord's own headquarters. The other articles on the page, including items on the northern and southern armies and on Soviet Russia, could not be read.
Mussolini's Agents Were Trying to Provoke Conflicts in France
Ricciotti Garibaldi Was a Common Spy for Fascism in Nice
The Spanish Uprising Would Have Had Proportions Not Suspected Until Now
Crítica's front page of 5 November 1926 carried Associated Press cables on the collapse of a Catalan separatist invasion plot on the French–Spanish border and on the Italians caught up in it. One report relayed the French police's claim to hold proof that the Italians in the Perpignan plot were Italian police agents whose mission was to stir up trouble. Another, likening the French secret police's work to an adventure novel, told how French secret agents traced Scivoli, an Italian said to be planning Mussolini's assassination, to Nice, where Ricciotti Garibaldi introduced him to antifascists as a man who would do great things; the headline called Garibaldi a common Fascist spy. A third described Colonel Maciá's arrested followers swearing on their honor not to flee while he urged them, amid sobs, to stay calm.
The Diário de Lisboa of 5 November 1926 ran an editorial on the merchant marine. It admitted it knew nothing of the work of a commission studying a Portuguese shipping line to Brazil, but hoped the commission would not meet a few times and then declare the problem insoluble. Such resignation, the paper warned, would hand victory to defeatism and condemn the country to the role of the vanquished, out of step with modern life. Beside it ran a short joke playing on the surname Paredes ('walls') and the saying that walls have ears. A short news item from the Paris suburbs told of a 56-year-old night watchman with a wooden leg who fell asleep beside a brazier at a timber yard and woke to find the leg burning.
Il Piccolo of 5 November 1926 carried Mussolini's brief words to a crowd of Roman Blackshirts: he thanked them, said it was no hour for speeches, and promised that “tomorrow morning” they would have the deeds they were waiting for, to frenzied cheering. A parliamentary report announced the Chamber's convocation for the 9th and summarised Alfredo Rocco's report, which claimed everyone now agreed that a law restoring capital punishment for attempts on the life of the King, the Queen, the Regent, the Crown Prince and the Head of Government was indispensable and urgent. From Turin the paper described a rain-soaked but imposing ceremony in Piazza San Carlo, where army units and the Militia formed a square for the presentation of a marshal's baton to the Duke of Aosta.