100 years ago in Spokane: Democrats prep for brief vice presidential visit

Spokane was preparing for the visit of U.S. Vice President Thomas R. Marshall, en route to Glacier National Park.

A party of local Democrats was planning to gather at the Great Northern depot the next morning in hopes of meeting with him.

However, since he was scheduled to be in town only from about 7 a.m. to 8 a.m., it was possible he would not even exit the train. On the other hand, since he was campaigning for Democratic presidential candidate James M. Cox, there was also a fair chance that he might use that hour to make a speech from the platform.

From the Wobbly beat: Two more Wobblies were arrested by Spokane authorities, bringing the two-day total to 12.

They were all held for violating a court injunction in which a Spokane judge had essentially declared it illegal to be a Wobbly or to even wear Wobbly insignia.

The Spokane Daily Chronicle claimed that the men were gathering in Spokane as delegates to a secret regional convention of Wobblies in the city, although whether it was “secret” or even a convention at all was questionable.

On this day

(Associated Press)

1911: Actor-comedian Lucille Ball was born in Jamestown, New York.

1965: President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act.

1991: The World Wide Web made its public debut as a means of accessing web pages over the Internet.

2009: Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed as the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice by a Senate vote of 68-31.