Category Archives: 20th century

1920: German man spanks American wife to avenge war defeat

In October 1920, a German-born New York man named Paul Schoenhoff appeared before a magistrate charged with “disorderly conduct”. The charge stemmed from Schoenhoff’s regular habit of giving an “old-fashioned spanking” to his wife, Matilda.

This practice could not have been easy, claimed one press report, as Matilda Schoenhoff weighed 200 pounds while the defendant was considerably smaller. Schoenhoff also forced his wife to live in the basement and made her pay rent of six dollars a month.

Asked under oath why her husband spanked her, Matilda Schoenhoff said it was an act of retribution for Germany’s defeat in World War I:

“When asked his reason for spanking her, she said he would reply that he was a German and she an American and he would get revenge by beating her.”

Schoenhoff was found guilty, placed on probation and warned not to mistreat his wife in the future.

Source: The New York Tribune, October 24th 1920. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1938: Washington Republicans elect a mule to represent them

In 1938, Republican Party members in the small town of Milton, Washington assembled for their monthly meeting. On the agenda was the election of a committeemen to represent them at county level. Only one written nomination was tabled, from a Mr Boston Curtis. With no other candidates put forward, Boston was duly elected, despite the voters not knowing who or what he actually was:

“Boston Curtis, a mule, has been elected as Republican committeeman in the town of Milton, Washington. Boston was entered in the race by the Democratic mayor and received 51 votes – without offering a platform or making a speech.”

Boston’s nominator, Mayor Kenneth Simmons, later told the press he had nominated the mule as a prank, not expecting him to be elected. According to Simmons, he made no secret of his japery. He had led Boston to the local courthouse and ‘signed’ the nomination form with his hoof print, while laughing heartily with city officials.

In the end, the joke was on those who blindly voted a mule up the Republican Party ranks:

“It was a pretty mean trick to play on a mule, getting him into politics that way and making a fool of him. But at least Boston Curtis can congratulate himself on being no more of a donkey than the 51 Republicans who voted for him, without taking the trouble to find out what he was.”

Source: The Milwaukee Journal, September 30th 1938. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1922: Broadway pie pastry poisoner kills six

A nice slice of non-lethal huckleberry pie

On July 31st 1922, dozens of lunching New Yorkers crowded into the popular Shelburne Restaurant and Bakery at 1127 Broadway. For a few, it would be their last meal.

The Shelburne was famous for its peach and huckleberry pies but on this hot July day, the pies contained a deadly surprise: arsenic. As the afternoon unfolded, 60 of the Shelburne’s pie-eating patrons became seriously ill and required hospitalisation. Six of them did not survive. Four of the dead were young female office workers in their late teens or early 20s.

Police and city officials launched an immediate investigation, ordering a forensic examination of the leftover pie, the restaurant’s bakery and its stores. They found nothing amiss with the bakery’s flour and other ingredients, suggesting that the pie pastry had been tampered with by a mystery poisoner:

“According to [Commissioner of Health] Dr Monaghan, the ingredients from which the pie crust was made had been analysed and found pure, so that the arsenic must have been put in while the dough for the crust was being made. Dr Monaghan [was] also informed that the proprietors of the restaurant did not keep rat poison or any other insect powder containing arsenic about the place. Accordingly, he said the chances that the poison might have been mixed into the dough accidentally appeared to be very slight.”

Police attention turned to the three people employed in the bakery: the manager, the baker and his assistant. All denied any involvement, however, the baker falsely believed he was about to be fired while his assistant reportedly disappeared without a trace.

With no evidence, the New York police were unable to lay any charges. Unsurprisingly, the Shelburne’s clientele evaporated overnight and it was forced to close down the following year. The deaths also caused a slump in pie sales across New York:

“In spite of the fact that the poisoning was shown to be due to… food prepared only at the one restaurant, patrons of restaurants were reported yesterday to be eating only a small fraction of the pie usually consumed in this city. The demand for huckleberry and blackberry pie has fallen almost to nothing.”

Source: New York Times, August 2nd 1922. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1958: New US national flag earns a B minus

In 1958, the United States was on the brink of admitting Alaska and Hawaii as its 49th and 50th states. In Ohio, a 16-year-old schoolboy named Robert G. Heft was given a school social studies project with a broad focus: design an original visual artefact connected with US history.

Aware that two states were about to be added to the union, Heft resolved to design a new national flag. At his local department store he spent $2.87 on a length of blue cloth, along with some white iron-on tape. Working on the dining table at home, Heft cut up an existing flag, something that horrified his mother. He then set about designing a new configuration containing 50 stars rather than 48.

Heft presented his updated flag to his teacher, the appropriately named Mr Pratt, who was far from impressed and graded it severely: a B minus. According to Heft, Pratt told him:

“Why you got too many stars? You don’t even know how many states we have… If you don’t like the grade, get it accepted in Washington then come and see me. I might consider changing the grade.”

Determined to prove his teacher wrong, Heft sent his design to the White House. Over the next two years he followed his submission with 21 letters and numerous phone calls. US president Dwight D. Eisenhower endorsed Heft’s design in late 1959 and on July 4th 1960 it became the new national flag of the United States.

Mr Pratt subsequently agreed to change Heft’s grade from a B minus to an A, although by then Heft had graduated from high school.

Source: WBUR interview with Robert G. Heft, July 3rd 2009. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1910: Ohio teenagers like the taste of fried cat

According to a news report from 1910, teenagers in western Ohio have developed a taste for feline flesh:

“Suppers of fried cat are now the fad with high school boys of Allen and Auglaize counties at present. Those who have partaken of the delicacy pronounce it good. A plump young kitten is penned up, fed upon a milk diet for several weeks, then killed and prepared for the skillet. The meat is described as firm with a wild game taste, and is said to be equally palatable to squirrel or rabbit. Some who have eaten fried cat believed it to be rabbit.”

Source: Perrysburg Journal (Ohio), December 9th 1910. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1906: Illinois cheese-eating contest proves fatal

In 1906, a cheese-eating contest in Johnsburg, around 40 miles north-west of Chicago, proved fatal. The victim, Frank Miller, was 21 years old. His two friends were critically ill for several weeks but ultimately survived:

Source: The Minneapolis Journal, October 4th 1906. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1914: Women’s suffrage: a sign of homosexual tendencies

Wilhelm Stekel (1868-1940) was an Austrian doctor and psychologist who specialised in sexuality and fetishism. In the first decade of the 1900s, Stekel became a disciple of Sigmund Freud – both lived in Vienna and participated regularly in discussion groups and lectures.

Writing in 1914 with Dr Samuel Tannenbaum of New York, Stekel argued that an individual’s sexual preference was “betrayed” by their choice of position:

“In many cases homosexual betrays itself in the mode of intercourse adopted by the patient. [Homosexual men] prefer to take the position normally occupied by the woman… [Homosexual women] show similar tendencies; they experience an orgasm only when they are on top… Some of the perversions, e.g. fellatio, cunnilingus, are indicative of homosexuality…”

He also described more gender-specific signs:

“Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, a [homosexual] man has his beard shaved off, or he suddenly begins to take an active interest in sports as permit him to see naked men. He becomes passionately fond of prize-fighting, boxing, sun baths, Turkish baths, gymnasia…”

Homosexually-inclined women will also:

“..begin to take an interest in the movement for women’s rights. In a very large percentage of active suffragettes, the driving force is unsatisfied sexual desire… Only very rarely, if ever, do women whose libido is satisfied take any interest in the suffragette movement.”

Dr Stekel committed suicide in 1940, taking a fatal dose of aspirin to relieve chronic pain caused by his inflamed prostate.

Source: Drs Wilhelm Stekel and Samuel Tannenbaum, “Masked homosexuality” in American Medicine, v.20, August 1914. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1965: “Move over, this is your president”

History is replete with stories about the sex lives of US presidents, particularly Warren Harding, John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. One president whose bedroom antics have attracted less scrutiny is Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson.

According to his friends, colleagues and former employees, LBJ had an insatiable sexual appetite, backed by a considerable ego. This appeared to begin at college, where the future president was fond of exposing or waving his penis which he nicknamed “Jumbo”.

During and after his presidency Johnson engaged in scores of dalliances and affairs, fathering at least one illegitimate child. He was notoriously jealous of Kennedy’s reputation with the ladies, once claiming to have “had more women by accident than Jack had on purpose”.

Unlike Kennedy, however, Johnson was devoid of youthful good looks, seductive charm and patience. As a consequence, Johnson’s sexual propositions could be direct and confronting. One rather unnerving example of this was recalled by Carl Rowan, a high-ranking government official during the 1960s, and involved Johnson and a pretty young White House secretary:

“In 1965, when I headed the US Information Agency, I was approached by a shaken White House employee who told me of her first duty trip to the Texas ranch where President Johnson often retreated. She said she awakened in the wee hours of her first night there in terror, certain that someone was in her room. When a little pencil flashlight was shone on her face, she was too terrified to scream. Then she recognised Johnson’s voice saying ‘Move over. This is your president’.”

Intimidated and probably petrified, the woman complied with Johnson’s instruction. According to Rowan, she chose not to make a complaint against the president but did lodge a request a new job out of his reach. Rowan informed the White House and arranged for her to be transferred to the State Department.

Source: Carl Rowan, cited in Buffalo News (New York), January 28th 1998. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1915: Austrians invent electric underwear for trench warfare

In late 1915, newspapers in Europe and the United States reported that freezing German and Austrian soldiers on the Western Front could soon benefit from a thrilling new invention: electric underwear.

Developed by Max Beck at the University of Innsbruck and Professor Herman von Schroter of Vienna, the underwear were made of non-conductive fabric interwoven with thin wires, in a similar fashion to modern electric blankets. Each pair contained a safety fuse to prevent overloading and electrocution. They cost approximately eight pounds Sterling or $US20 to manufacture. According to American reports:

“For each series of trenches it is necessary to install an electric plant, from which conducting wires are carried. When a soldier feels cold, all he has to do is connect up his underwear with the current wires… As now perfected it will be possible for soldiers to warm themselves with this electrical clothing [up to] 1,500 feet away.”

Source: The Sunday Times (London), November 21st 1915; Keowee Courier, December 29th 1915. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1913: Slit skirt lands Edna in the insane asylum

In 1913, a Minnesota newspaper reported that a young lady had been arrested, jailed then sent to an insane asylum – for wearing a slit skirt that showed too much leg:

Source: The Warren Sheaf (Minnesota), October 15th 1913. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.