‘UNCLE JOE’ CANNON DEAD AT 90; LONG CZAR OF THE HOUSE
HALL-MILLS TRIAL INSPIRED BY PAPER, DEFENSE CHARGES
BOMBS ARE HURLED FROM AIRPLANE IN ILLINOIS GANG WAR
The Evening Star's front page of November 12, 1926, carried three Associated Press dispatches. From Danville, Illinois, it reported the death of "Uncle Joe" Cannon, the former Speaker once called the Czar of the House, and described how he fought old age in the brick mansion he had built for his bride. From the courthouse in Somerville, New Jersey, it reported the Hall-Mills defense's claim that the New York Daily Mirror had promoted the murder trial, as the Mirror's managing editor was questioned about a calling card said to bear Willie Stevens' fingerprint. From Harrisburg, Illinois, it described an airplane dropping three bombs near the Birger gang's roadhouse in its bootleg war with the Shelton gang, with no damage done.
AMERICA WILL ADHERE TO WORLD COURT ONLY ON SENATE CONDITIONS IS PROMISE OF COOLIDGE IN MEMORIAL DAY ADDRESS
CLAYTON DEPLORES ANTI-AMERICAN TREND IN EUROPE
TESTIMONY ENDS IN DAVIS TRIAL ON EIGHTH DAY
The Montgomery Advertiser's front page of November 12, 1926, led with the AP account of President Coolidge's Armistice Day address at the foot of Kansas City's war memorial, where he gave formal notice that the United States would join the World Court only on the Senate's terms, even as reports said the member nations would never accept them. Closer to home, Federal Judge Henry D. Clayton told the Montgomery American Legion banquet that America would never again send an army to Europe and could fight a defensive war against the combined world. The page also reported the close of testimony in the trial of Warden Davis, former head of the Flat Top prison camp, with witnesses on who directed convicts underground, the absence of bruises on the dead prisoner's face, and an alleged offer of a job in exchange for testimony.
TORONTO YOUNG PEOPLE MOVED BY INDIGNATION; TO TAKE DRASTIC ACTION
Will Force The Owners Into Line
FIRE AT ADELAIDE BURNS CREAMERY
This 12 November 1926 page carried three stories that can be partly read. In Toronto, indignant young people were organizing a mass gathering, and speakers, half of them university students and co-eds, were to address congregations in city churches the following Sunday to draw young people to it. On the British coal strike, the paper reported that the settlement negotiations had taken a dramatic turn after a statement from No. 10 Downing Street indicated that the mine-owners did not accept the projected terms, under a headline promising that the owners would be forced into line. Closer to home, an early-morning fire burned the Adelaide Creamery, one mile north of the village, a loss the paper called a heavy blow to the district.
The front page opened with a domestic settlement. Talks between the government, the coalition parties and the Social Democrats produced a compromise on unemployment relief, especially crisis relief, which the paper said guaranteed passage of the government's bill at that day's session. A report from Paris said the French Chamber of Deputies was meeting again after a three-month recess that was not entirely voluntary, and remarked that Poincaré, holding decree powers, seemed to have come to enjoy governing without parliament. From Landsberg an der Warthe came the result of the last Feme murder trial: First Lieutenant Schulz and Lieutenant 'Hahn' were acquitted, and Sergeant Erich Klapproth received one year in prison for grievous bodily harm.
On the Republic's anniversary, the Neue Freie Presse opened with an editorial arguing that the Republic's birthday called for honest truths rather than rose-tinted lies. The young state, it warned, was in great danger: it had not yet become an intellectual tradition, yet it already showed signs of age and exhaustion. Lower on the page, Stefan Zweig recalled Emile Verhaeren's quiet, free life and described his poetry as an unceasing yes to the present, the city, nature, people and himself. An advertisement announced Der heilige Berg, billed as a drama of the forces of nature, with Leni Riefenstahl, Frida Richard and the famous ski masters Luis Trenker and Hannes Schneider.
The Journal de Genève of 12 November 1926 carried H. Wilson-Harris's report on Labour's sweeping gains in the English municipal elections. He wrote that the results had surprised and pleased a leading German socialist he met in Berlin and alarmed English Conservatives, and put Labour's gains at 149 seats in all, against Liberal losses of 45 and Conservative losses of 63. An editorial signed "J. M." described the Geneva Grand Council rejecting the minority's plan by 47 votes to 23 and sending the majority's plan to a second debate. A letter from Berlin looked ahead to the Reichstag's third reading of a bill to protect young people from immoral literature and art: it called the aim praiseworthy but warned that a censor in one state, such as Mecklenburg, could decide what readers in Munich and Berlin were not allowed to read.
Should the railways be reserved for long-distance traffic and motor vehicles for local traffic?
Aftenposten's front page of 12 November 1926 carried a portrait of George Bernard Shaw, who had turned 70 that summer. The paper found nothing of dignified old age in him, described him as the same unruly, irreverent "G. B. S." as ever, and said that only his outward circumstances had changed. A Nobel notice reported that the Academy of Sciences had divided the 1925 physics prize between Professors J. Franck of Göttingen and G. Hertz of Halle for the laws of collisions between electrons and atoms, and had given the 1926 prize to Jean Perrin of the Sorbonne for work on the discontinuous structure of matter and sedimentation equilibrium. A transport report set out the railways' position: long-distance and goods traffic should stay with the railways, local traffic could go to route buses, and any competition had to be on equal terms.
This partial reading of the 12 November 1926 issue of La Nación of Santiago covers three items. A feature on Tibet opened with the claim that a country estimated at three million people had no fewer than half a million priests and was dotted with monasteries. A badly damaged notice told readers that only three days remained to enter a Fox film contest and said Fox would pay certain costs for the winners. A report from Moscow described a trial over an unusual run of frauds, starting with a Cossack railway guard who caught three men climbing a telegraph pole.
FASCISTS CONTINUE TO CAUSE ALARM ON THE FRENCH FRONTIER
A son of the ex-Kaiser will have to give up a dignity
Crítica's cable page of 12 November 1926 followed two linked crises: the aftermath of the failed Catalan invasion plot and the tension on the Franco-Italian frontier. From Paris, Interior Minister Sarraut said after a cabinet meeting that the files on the Garibaldi and Macià affairs would go to the Minister of Justice, and he denied that Ricciotti Garibaldi had been ordered out of France. A second cable described Fascist agitation along the Riviera after attacks on French consulates that followed the attempt on Mussolini's life. It reported the precautions police took when the man who broke into the Ventimiglia consulate was arrested, a protest meeting that broke up only on its Fascist leader's order, and Italian reinforcements meant to keep the Fascist bands in check. From Berlin came word that the ex-Kaiser's son Prince Eitel Friedrich would be asked to give up the grand mastership of the Order of St John after being found at fault in his divorce.