1924

Some notable events,1924

January 7: The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit voids a conviction of several Pioneer League leaders for obscenity charges, holding that the educational purpose of the League’s sex education program for teenagers, which warned older pioneers about the dangers of venereal disease and the means of avoiding it or unwanted pregnancy, exempted it from the federal definition of obscenity.

January 15: Following his narrow defeat in the Louisiana Democratic Primary, populist Huey Long tells his supporters to vote for the DFLP candidate for Governor.

January 25: The first Winter Olympiad opens in Chamonix, France.

January 31: The 1924 Soviet Constitution is promulgated, legitimating the Treaty of Union.

February 16: President Leonard Wood extends formal diplomatic recognition to the USSR, following the conclusion of back-channel negotiation to allow the return of prisoners of war.

February 18: George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue is first performed by Paul Whiteman and his “Palais Royal Orchestra” in New York.

March 20: As Eugene Debs, in ailing health, steps down from his position as General Secretary of the Workers’ Party, the Politburo places C.E. Ruthenberg as the provisional head of the party until the next National Convention.

March 27: The Virginia General Assembly narrowly rejects the proposed “Racial Integrity Act” to strengthen provisions against miscegenation, fearing political backlash as many northern business interests begin to exert pressure against Jim Crow.

March 30: Multiple Asian American entities such as the North American Industrial Company, Chinese American Citizens Alliance, and La Choy Foods combine to form the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Commune (大東亜共栄團) in Detroit. A national organization, it serves the blooming Asian American community through job offers, loans, legal representation. The GEACPC would also spearhead the development of the American soju and seaweed aquaculture industries.

April 1: Adolf Hitler is sentenced to 5 years in jail for his participation in the Beer Hall Putsch. He serves only 9 months.

April 7: In a rigged election, the Italian Fascists cement a 2/3rds control of the Italian Parliament.

April 18: Amidst a booming economic situation, the Revenue Act of 1924 further lowers federal income tax rates, especially on the wealthy. President Wood’s signing statement declares that the United States has “both won the war, and won the peace.”

May 4: The Games of the VIII Olympiad open in Paris, France.

May 9: Several prominent Italian socialist leaders are kidnapped by Blackshirts, including the head of the PSI Giacomo Matteotti, who was abducted in broad daylight.

May 18: Miners in Taung, South Africa discover a fossilized ape skull. Further examinations reveal very human-like characteristic, redefining human evolution.

May 24: The Immigration Act of 1924 establishes strengthened deportation rules for criminals and subversives. Amendments to further restrict immigration through national quotas are quashed in committee.

June 9: The Alignment: following months of negotiations in smoke filled rooms, the insurgent Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party establishes a national compact with the Republican Party. Legislative candidates of the two parties will not run against one another, and will caucus together in Congress, and the DFLP will run the Republican nominee on all of its ballot lines.

June 14: Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin passes away in his sleep from a sudden, massive stroke. The vibrant intellectual and energetic leader of international communism’s death is sudden and though he’d been in ill health, few thought he’d been on death’s door. Lenin’s posthumous testament, criticizing fellows within the All-Union Communist Party (bolshevik), will become the focal point of political struggle in the Soviet Union.

June 16: The Whampoa Military Academy begins operation in the KMT-controlled Guangzhou.

June 24: Lt. Colonel Patton supervises US Army testing of the British Vickers Medium Mk II tank at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds.

June 28: At the Democratic National Convention, the party adopts a platform condemning the Ku Klux Klan as a terrorist organization, and authorizing the expulsion of all Democratic Party members for affiliation with it.

July 1: The Bureau of Investigation is reorganized as the National Bureau of Investigation. J. Edgar Hoover is appointed its first director.

July 15: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , a silent adaptation of the L. Frank Baum story of the same name, is released by the newly formed film conglomerate Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)

July 31: The Fifth World Congress of the Communist International: the “Second Period” policy of accommodation begins, as national communist parties are directed to retreat from direct militancy with the retreat of revolutionary conditions, and instead pursue cadre building for future revolutionary moments.

August 1: The Dawes-Young Plan, reducing German indemnities by 20 percent and providing major American capital investment to secure annual reparations payments, is accepted. French troops will leave the Ruhr, ending the direct expropriation of raw materials.

August 4: Harold Gray’s beloved comic strip Little Orphan Annie debuts.

August 6: An act of Congress is passed, granting all Native Americans within the territorial boundaries of the United States full citizenship rights.

August 9: A statewide sit-in campaign against Virginia’s segregation laws provokes widespread reactionary violence from local police and reactionary paramilitaries, before order is restored by the National Guard.

September 4: The Tenant Farmer General Strike: a multi-racial strike organized by the Tenant Farmers’ Union begins in the Deep South. Teamsters, railway and dock workers take sympathy action, refusing to load or unload cargo for the planter class. The strike largely succeeds at earning recognition, with the sharecropping relationship mediated by collective bargaining and cooperative arrangements to provide tools and working animals to tenant farmers free from the exploitive terms of the landlords.

September 18: Several members of the Tennessee state legislature are expelled for their connections with the KKK. Voluntary denouncements follow in other states as the national committee exerts its pressure.

October 13: The US Supreme Court strikes down a Mississippi poll tax law as unconstitutional. The controversial 5-4 decision in Hatch v. Mississippi Board of Elections, 266 U.S. 1 (1924)(1) infers a general right to vote based on the Fifteenth and Eighteenth Amendments. Poll taxes, whether discriminatory like Mississippi’s (which effectively exempted most whites) or not, are unconstitutional.

October 20: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is published in English, after being banned in the USSR.

October 27: National delimitation in Central Asia begins with the formation of the the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic.

November 4: United States General Election: President Wood is re-elected by a full majority of voters, while a Republican government is returned in the House of Representatives.

November 26: The Mongolian People’s Republic, a presently unrecognized Soviet satellite state, is established, asserting its independence from the Beiyang government of the Republic of China.

November 27: The first “Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade” is held in New York City, the success of which makes an annual tradition.

December 4: Following the destruction of his forces by the British-trained forces of Sharif Hussein, Ibn Saud abdicates as Sultan of Nejd.

December 22: An inter-allied committee chaired by French General Foch certifies that Germany has complied satisfactorily with disarmament protocols of the Treaty of Versailles, enabling the final withdrawal of French troops from the Ruhr.

December 26th: Astronomer Edwin Hubble realizes that the Andromeda Nebula is in fact another galaxy, the first one discovered outside the Milky Way.

December 31: A group of thirty-six Blackshirts arrive at Mussolini’s office, demanding that he crush all opposition to the National Fascist Party, or they would without him.

(1) Fictional Court case

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The 1924 General Election ​

The 1924 election season began with the Wood Republicans strengthening their grip over the Republican Party. Conservative “Business Republicans” lacked the national voice to compete with the president. In most of the Republican primaries, Wood stood virtually unopposed, and even in the “smoke filled rooms” that characterized the leadership of the state Republican parties, most agreed that Wood’s popularity and temperance were an absolute necessity.

The Republican platform, adopted in 1923, would provide the blue-print for Wood’s second term. A one-two punch, combining an aggressive focus on civil rights with federal infrastructure spending would crack the Solid South. But the Republican name was still tarnished in the South, however much work had been done in eroding the Lost Cause in the National Army and the Great War mobilisation.

Fortunately, the left-wing splinter from the old Democrats had proved amenable. The insurgent Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party had performed poorly in the 1920 election, failing to secure much ground in state governments. Worse, the split had hastened the extinction of the Democratic brand outside the South. Rather than go the way of the Populists, the loose leadership of the DFLP, represented by Montana Congressman Burton K. Wheeler, found common purpose with Wood and the Republican Party.

In the historic “Alignment” negotiated in the summer of 1924, the DFLP would effectively become the Republican Party’s auxiliary in the South. The two parties would caucus together in Congress and in state governments, would not run in opposition to one another, and run a common candidate for president. With the Alignment came a new infusion of money into the party, allowing it to continue activities in the 1924 election campaign.

While Wood deferred granting the VP seat to the DFLP until at least 1928, should the Alignment prove successful, he gave more concessions to the DFLP in the form of farm relief and infrastructure spending. The Alignment also gave him new weapons against the Business Republicans. Nonetheless, in the 1924 Republican Convention held in Cleveland, Ohio, Wood recommended relative political newcomer Herbert Hoover as his running mate.

Hoover straddled the line between the Progressive and Business Republicans. He’d won considerable prestige for himself in organizing relief efforts in the Russian Civil War. And most importantly, did not seem to have great ambitions at this time.

The Democratic Party, purged of its populist elements, nearly considered not enduring the expense of running a presidential campaign, especially having lost ballot access outside the South. While the party had become frozen in serving as the vehicle of Southern sectional interests, the landowning elite and White supremacy, changing political winds were pulling the party to the center.

A bitter primary fight ensued, with John W. Davis of Virginia and John Nance Garner of Texas in a virtual dead heat. The convention deadlocked initially over questions of the party’s increasingly unfortunate connection to the KKK, the looming threat of federal intervention, and a need to accommodate to growing militancy among the Negro population as well as white workers.

The Democratic leadership hoped to win enough electors to throw the election to House, which would vote as state delegations, and thereby extract additional concessions by playing kingmaker. To that end, it was believed that party unity mattered more than anything. On the final ballot, John Nance Garner conceded, and was installed as the VP nominee.

For the Workers’ Party, the sudden shift to the conciliatory “Second Period” policies by the Communist International was a welcome relief. In 1924, the Party’s resources had been stretched thin by the past few years of confrontation and revolutionary agitation. Second Period policies gave more room for practical policy making, and given the Presidents campaign on shifting federal resources to protect the civil rights of its citizens, the time was ripe for party building.

In 1924, the Party was active in all 48 states, and had conducted primaries to send delegates to its national Party Congress. The 1924 program adopted a huge slate of practical policy proposals, including cooperative housing, nationalization of the major trusts, democratic control of workplaces, robust tenant rights and social insurance. Combined, the platform would have been impossible to implement without a revolutionary overthrow of the existing constitution and the imposition of a workers’ republic.

This was the strategy developed by Benjamin Gitlow and William Z. Foster, to ratchet up the demands and expectation of workers, smallholders, and sharecroppers, and leave the political system incapable of meeting them. For no one expected to win the elections at present time.

The 1924 election season occurred under the specter of terrorist violence in the South, but the party was resolute in nominating black candidates to stand for election in Southern state and Congressional elections. Canvassing in white neighborhoods, talking to poor whites about their concerns was dangerous work. But it was working. The Southern strategy served to strengthen cross-racial alliances among working people, and the few notable victories they eked out served as symbols for this new coalition.

Results

Legislative elections, 65th Congress ​

House of Representatives

Party	Leader	Home State	Seats	Last	Net
Republican	Leonidas Dyer	Missouri	227	222	5
Workers’ Party	Upton Sinclair	New Jersey	101	136	-35
Democratic	Claude Kitchkin	North Carolina	76	70	6
Democratic-Farmer-Labor	Frank Havener	California	29	5	24
Independents			2	2
Total			435
Needed to Win			218

Senate

Party	Seats	Change
Republican	48	-1
Democratic	22	-2
Workers’ Party	16	2
DFL	10	1
Total	96

Special thanks to @Asami for all the graphics