1925

Jan 3  Benito Mussolini dissolves parliament and becomes a dictator.

Feb 19  President Coolidge (1923-29) proposes phasing out the inheritance tax.

Feb 27  In Munich, Adolf Hitler resurrects his political party.

Mar 2  Japan's House of Representatives recognizes male suffrage.

Mar 4  The inauguration of Calvin Coolidge's for his first full four-year term as president is broadcast live on twenty-one radio stations coast-to-coast. Many homes now have radio receivers. Dance bands broadcast from dance halls, radio stations and hotels.

Mar 12  Chinese revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen dies of cancer. Within the Guomintang, Within the Guomindang, rivalry between moderates and leftists will now intensify. Youthful Guomindang political organizers will begin extending Guomindang authority northward.

May 12  Germany's President Ebert, a Social Democrat, has died. Germans elect the conservative and mendacious 81 year-old wartime national hero General Paul von Hindenburg. He hates the Social Democrats and will do what he can to keep the government out of their hands despite their size in parliament. In eight years he will appoint Adolf Hitler as Germany's chancellor.

Mar 23  Tennessee's Governor Austin Peay signs a law that prohibits the teaching of evolution. He states that "the very integrity of the Bible in its statement of man's divine creation is denied by any theory that man descended or has ascended from any lower order of animals."

May 31  For sixteen weeks, Kurds in the Kurdistan region of Turkey have been in rebellion against Turkey's effort to repress Kurdish identity. The rebellion also opposes Turkey's secularism and is to be described as nationalist dressed in religious garb. It is the first large scale rebellion of the Kurdish national movement, and the rebellion's 15,000 fighters are crushed militarily. Sheikh Said and all the other rebel leaders will be hanged on June 29.

May 5  The American Civil Liberties Union wants to test Tennessee's new law against teaching evolution. A group of businessmen in the town Dayton, Tennessee, has been looking for publicity for their town, and they have talked a local teacher into using a textbook that has a chapter on evolution. The teacher, John T. Scopes, is arrested for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution.

May 30  In China, students and labor unionists associated within the Guomindang have been directing their energies against British and Japanese commercial interests in China and a boycott of British and Japanese goods. A strike for higher wages at a Japanese owned cotton mill in Shanghai results in the mill's management committing brutalities against strike supporters. British municipal police fire on and kill thirteen demonstrators. China's Communist Party, fervently anti-imperialist, expands from a few hundred members to more than 20,000.

Jul 18  Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" (My Struggle) is published.

Jul 21  In Tennessee the so-called "Monkey Trial" ends. John T. Scopes is convicted of violating state law for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution. Scopes is fined $100.

Aug 8  As many as 40,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan parade in Washington DC. The Klan has an estimated 5 million, making it the largest fraternal organization in the United States. The Klan has claimed that the Bible, the United States flag and the Constitution are their keystone principles. They believe that to be one hundred percent American one must be white and Protestant.

Aug 25  Diplomacy has convinced the French to evacuate the Ruhr region of Germany.

Sep 3  Near Caldwell, Ohio, the navy-built 682-foot dirigible "Shenandoah" breaks apart in mid-air and crashes. Thirteen die.

Sep 4  Turkish women enter a beauty contest for the first time.

Oct 16  At Locarno, Switzerland, an eleven-day gathering of foreign ministers attempts to normalize relations between the two sides who fought in World War I.

Oct 16  The Texas School Board prohibits the teaching of evolution.

Oct 19  A greek soldier runs after his dog and crosses into Bulgaria. Border guards shoot the Greek soldier. Greece's dictator, Theodoros Pangalos, sends soldiers into Bulgaria. Bulgaria orders its troops to provide only token resistance, trusting the League of Nations to settle the dispute. The fighting will ends on the 29th. Bulgarians suffer less than a dozen casualties, the Greeks around four hundred.

Oct 27  In the United States, water skis are patented by Fred Waller.

Nov 16  In New York, the American Association for Advancement of Atheism is formed.

Nov 25  in Turkey, President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk outlaws religious dress, including the tasseled fez headwear for men and the wearing of veils by women. Atuturk has told conservatives that the Fez is of Venetian origins.

Dec 3  The League of Nations orders Greece to pay an indemnity for its October invasion of Bulgaria.

Dec 17  Brigadier General William "Billy" Mitchell has accused US Army and Navy leaders of an "almost treasonable administration of the national defense." He is court martialed for insubordination and reduced in rank to colonel.

Dec 18  At the 14th Communist Party Congress, Soviet leader Lev Kamenev, a former ally of Stalin against Trotsky, sides with Lenin's widow and calls for Stalin's removal as Party General Secretary. His old ally Grigori Zinoviev is with him, as is Grigori Sokolnikov, an alliance known as the New Opposition. Stalin appears to the Party rank and file as the reasonable leader and his opponents as quarrelsome. Stalin survives and his opponents are headed downward.

Dec 26  Six US warships are ordered from Manila to China to protect US interests there.

Dec 31 Immigration to the United States from Italy drops from 56,246 in 1924 to 6,203. Immigration from Britain has dropped from 59,490 in 1924 to 27,172.

to 1924 | to 1926

Copyright © 2015 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.