FORD "AGENT" PUT OFF MARIE'S TRAIN FOR EXPENSE TALK
PRESIDENT STARTS CONGRESS FIGHT BY TAX REBATING PLAN
'DOT' WINS SECOND GIRAFFE CONTEST
The Evening Star's Sunday front page of November 7, 1926, followed Queen Marie of Romania's American rail tour as it ended a stretch of internal quarrels: her host Samuel Hill left the party, and the official host, Col. John H. Carroll, expelled J. A. Ayres, said to represent Ford, after Ayres was quoted claiming that Ford was spending nearly half a million dollars on the royal party's transport and that he was lending the entourage money. The page also reported that President Coolidge's sudden proposal to refund 10 or 12 per cent of this year's income taxes puzzled the Treasury, which preferred a credit on next year's taxes, and surprised Democrats, who called it a ploy to put off general tax cuts until 1928. A lighter item announced that young Herbert Martyn had named the girl giraffe coming to Washington's zoo with "Hi-Boy": she would be "Dot," and he would get $20 in gold.
President's Plan for Tax Reduction Startles Leaders
Alabama Forges to Front in Pool and Acreage Cut
Long Island Physician Complains at Treatment
The Montgomery Advertiser of November 7, 1926, led with an AP report that President Coolidge's sudden call to refund ten or twelve per cent of the year's income taxes had puzzled Washington. Treasury officials quietly preferred a credit against next year's taxes, while Democrats called the plan a subterfuge to put off a general tax cut until 1928 and hand Republicans an issue. Another front-page report quoted Edward A. O'Neal, chairman of the Alabama cotton committee, saying that twenty-five counties were already organized, with fifteen more forming, in a drive to keep 4,000,000 bales off the market and win pledges to cut acreage by 25 per cent next spring. An AP dispatch from Rome told of a Long Island doctor attacked by fascists for failing to remove his hat to their flag. He planned to protest to the State Department.
Le Figaro's front page of 7 November 1926 led with Lucien Romier's editorial on Raymond Poincaré's answer to members of the Chamber's finance committee: his monetary policy would come in two phases, first the recovery of the franc and only then its stabilization. Achille Mestre, writing on the reopening of the faculties, portrayed a generation of students shaped by the war, impatient to live on their own and uneasy about leaning on fathers' allowances that hard times had cut. Régis Gignoux took a small advertisement offering cash for parakeets, collected at home, and imagined the buyer arriving with his cage. He wrote that rising prices and the falling pound had never before put such torture on lonely women, old couples, bachelors and widowers.
The front page of 7 November 1926 led with a commentary on a speech by National Bank President Richard Reisch to a parliamentary subcommittee on the condition of the Postsparkasse, Austria's state postal savings bank. The paper read his sharp remarks as a deliberate show of complete openness meant to dispel every suspicion, while pointing out that he had pronounced a final verdict before the detailed report setting out his reasoning was published. A feuilleton on Stefan Zweig's "Volpone" opened by recalling a lecture scene on Elizabethan literature from his novella "Confusion of Feelings". A short report from Paris told of a senior Ministry of Commerce official arrested for taking up to 100,000 francs from people who wanted decorations.
The Prager Tagblatt of 7 November 1926 carried a sharp report declaring it already established that Ricciotti Garibaldi, grandson of the Italian national hero, had sold fellow anti-fascist exiles to Mussolini's police and had been paid to stage conspiracies against the Fascist regime on French soil. A second item explained how Italy's new protection law would banish active opponents of the regime, either to a fixed district they could not leave or to one of four penal islands, with the prefect deciding irrevocably. A partly legible commentary on the termination of a trade treaty argued that Austria, too, was in a bind, because its new protective tariff could not take effect until trade relations with Czechoslovakia were definitively settled.
The Journal de Genève front page of 7 November 1926 ranged from Danish politics to Geneva's own municipal map. A lead editorial signed W. M. warned that a Danish agrarian agitation led by Cornelius Petersen had won backing from an army threatened by the Stauning government's disarmament plan, and that Captain Niewenhuis-Möller's openly fascist National Corps supported it. J. M. weighed rival plans for merging Geneva with its suburbs and argued for the minority's, which kept an enlarged city commune. A notice from the Union of Patriotic Societies attacked Robert Grimm as the instigator of the 1918 'revolution' and urged readers to block his rise to the chair of the National Council.
This reading of Politika for 7 November 1926 covers two pieces about Vojvoda Radomir Putnik, Serbia's commander in the Balkan Wars and the First World War. In a signed column, P. M. Lazarević calls the Battle of Kumanovo in 1912 the test of the army's strength and spirit, qualities he says the leadership's recklessness had clouded with doubt in the 1885 war with Bulgaria. He argues that this first battle was psychologically decisive for the final success and calls it a brilliant victory. A second piece describes Putnik as a withdrawn, serious generalissimo who was gravely ill but made no time for treatment or rest, because the work of the state and the nation was his highest aim.
Il Piccolo built this front page around the Fascist government's new measures. It quoted the daily La Tribuna, which argued that the measures adopted “yesterday” showed the regime recognizing itself as totalitarian and formed an integral system of defence for regime and nation, aimed at open enemies and at masked ones, including the anti-Fascism said to nest within Fascism itself. The paper also printed Article 1 of a law authorizing a 5% consolidated national loan to absorb the state's short-term debt, exempt from all present and future taxes and shielded from conversion until the end of 1936. Finally, it described two novelties of the new public-security law: a police licence for building porters, who were now to guarantee vigilance over their buildings as well as honesty, and the identity card.