Evening Star
- PRESIDENT WARNS POWERS HE BACKS SENATE ON COURT
- CAPITAL PAUSES TO PAY TRIBUTE TO VALOROUS DEAD
- Children at Play Use Dynamite in Game of “Robber”
The Evening Star's front page on Armistice Day led with J. Russell Young's report from Kansas City that President Coolidge told the League of Nations powers the United States would join the World Court only on the terms of the Senate resolution, and saw no prospect of adherence otherwise. Closer to home, the paper described Washington's eighth Armistice Day observance, as citizens stood in silence at graves from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington to the resting place of the wartime President on Mount St. Alban, with artillery firing salutes. A brief Associated Press item from St. Paul told how pupils of St. Agnes School played cops and robbers with 25 sticks of frozen dynamite they had found in an empty garage, until Gilbert Graff came upon them and called an officer, and the explosive was dumped into the river.
Translation
PRESIDENT WARNS POWERS HE BACKS SENATE ON COURT
BY J. RUSSELL YOUNG.
KANSAS CITY, Mo., November 11. - In an address here today President Coolidge served notice upon the powers of the League of Nations that the United States will enter the World Court upon its own terms, or not at all. Unless the requirements governing American adherence to the court, as laid down [?] the Senate resolution, are met fully by the other interested nations, the President sees not the slightest prospect of this country adhering to that international tribunal.
CAPITAL PAUSES TO PAY TRIBUTE TO VALOROUS DEAD
The Nation's Capital paused from its busy work-a-day routine today, and in common with a reverent people, made its eighth annual Armistice day pilgrimage to the bivouac of the valorous dead of war. To prove that their country does not forget, the respectful citizens of the Federal city stood with bowed heads at the sepulchres of the departed heroes-known and unknown-and paid tender homage to their glorious memory. From across the Potomac on th [?] white-flecked hills of Arlington, where rests the tomb of America's unknown warrior, to the far heights of Mount St. Alban, where lies the nation's war President, there fell a mantle of hushed veneration, disturbed only by whispered prayers, soft words of eulogy or the thunderous, but reverential roar of artillery in salute.
Children at Play Use Dynamite in Game of “Robber”
By the Associated Press.
ST. PAUL, Minn., November 11. - Children of St. Agnes School here had a delightful time playing "cops and robbers" with 25 sticks of dynamite until some one discovered them. Gilbert Graff, who found them, called an officer and the dynamite, which was frozen, was dumped into the river. The explosive was found by the children in an empty garage near the school.
Context
The Senate's five reservations before the Geneva conference of 1926
The Star's front page presents Coolidge as standing squarely behind the Senate resolution that set the terms for American adherence to the Permanent Court of International Justice, the World Court, and as seeing no prospect of adherence unless the other nations met those terms fully. Those terms were five reservations, and the United States demanded that all of them be accepted. The governments that had signed the Court's Statute had already examined them: the Conference of States signatories held its first session on September 1, 1926. According to the report of the American consul at Geneva, the conference was unanimously of the opinion that there was no substantial objection to the first, second and third reservations, and its four remaining meetings were devoted entirely to the second part of the fifth. The consul described the delegates of Great Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Uruguay and Poland as showing a most conciliatory spirit and favouring every possible concession. The London weekly The Spectator later summed up the European view in two judgments: it had been easy and right to accept four of the five conditions, and the fifth reservation was the crux.
Why the fifth reservation blocked agreement
The Geneva debate over the fifth reservation centred on how the League would ask the Court for advisory opinions. Delegates discussed whether a Council decision to apply for an advisory opinion required unanimity or merely a majority vote; if unanimity was required, any single member's objection could stop a request. The consul's report records the view that the reservation claimed for the United States a right of veto in questions in which it was interested. The same report observed that delegates were aware of growing opposition in Congress to American participation in the Court and of a strong possibility that adherence might be defeated. Seen against that record, the Star's account shows Coolidge in Kansas City refusing to reopen the Senate's text and placing the burden on the other nations to accept it in full. The Star reported the remarks as a warning to the powers. The Spectator, writing on November 20, 1926, drew the harder conclusion that the November 11 speech had extinguished all hope that the United States would adhere to the World Court.
The Liberty Memorial dedication as the setting of Coolidge's address
The Kansas City dateline on the Court story reflects the occasion. Coolidge was in the city to dedicate the Liberty Memorial, and in his address he called the ceremony a fitting observance of the eighth anniversary of the signing of the armistice on November 11, 1918. He also recalled that five years earlier he had taken part in a public service on the same site; the National WWI Museum and Memorial records that in 1921 more than 100,000 people gathered to see the supreme Allied commanders dedicate it. The museum puts the 1926 dedication crowd at 150,000, while a 2018 report by Kansas City's public radio station KCUR gives an estimate of 100,000, so the size of the audience is uncertain. Coolidge told that crowd the monument had not been raised to commemorate war and victory but their results, peace and liberty. On the same day that Washington observed its eighth Armistice Day at Arlington, as the Star's second story describes, the President combined this tribute to the war's results with a firm statement on American terms for joining the Court that emerged from the postwar settlement.
How Kansas City paid for its war memorial
The Liberty Memorial began as a local undertaking. In a community fundraising drive organised and led by the Liberty Memorial Association in 1919, Kansas Citians raised more than $2.5 million in just ten days; KCUR puts the number of contributors at 83,000. Coolidge himself told the crowd that more than one person out of four in the city's entire population had answered the appeal, with pledges in excess of $2,000,000, a figure lower than the museum's later total. The scale stands out because, by KCUR's count, only 441 of the war's dead came from around Kansas City. The city thus built a memorial far larger than its own losses, honouring those who served as well as those who died. The Star's Armistice Day story centres Washington's remembrance on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington and on the war President's grave; the Kansas City memorial gave the Midwest a site of comparable ambition, paid for by its own citizens.
Original
PRESIDENT WARNS POWERS HE BACKS SENATE ON COURT
KANSAS CITY, Mo., November 11. - In an address here today President Coolidge served notice upon the powers of the League of Nations that the United States will enter the World Court upon its own terms, or not at all. Unless the requirements governing American adherence to the court, as laid down [?] the Senate resolution, are met fully by the other interested nations, the President sees not the slightest prospect of this country adhering to that international tribunal.
CAPITAL PAUSES TO PAY TRIBUTE TO VALOROUS DEAD
The Nation's Capital paused from its busy work-a-day routine today, and in common with a reverent people, made its eighth annual Armistice day pilgrimage to the bivouac of the valorous dead of war. To prove that their country does not forget, the respectful citizens of the Federal city stood with bowed heads at the sepulchres of the departed heroes-known and unknown-and paid tender homage to their glorious memory. From across the Potomac on th [?] white-flecked hills of Arlington, where rests the tomb of America's unknown warrior, to the far heights of Mount St. Alban, where lies the nation's war President, there fell a mantle of hushed veneration, disturbed only by whispered prayers, soft words of eulogy or the thunderous, but reverential roar of artillery in salute.
Children at Play Use Dynamite in Game of “Robber”
ST. PAUL, Minn., November 11. - Children of St. Agnes School here had a delightful time playing " cops and robbers " with 25 sticks of dynamite until some one discovered them. Gilbert Graff, who found them, called an officer and the dynamite, which was frozen, was dumped into the river. The explosive was found by the children in an empty garage near the school.
Source: Holding institution