100 years ago in D.C.: House passes bill setting Grand Coulee Dam in motion

The Columbia Basin Bill passed the U.S. House, appropriating $150,000 for irrigation projects in central and Eastern Washington.

This was not nearly enough to pay for the projects – it was only enough to investigate the feasibility of such projects.

Still, it was considered a victory for irrigation boosters throughout the region.

The chairman of the local Columbia Basin project committee said he was “surprised at how little opposition that the bill faced.”

The Senate had already passed a similar bill, and the two bills might have to be reconciled. Yet legislators predicted it would be dealt with quickly and presented without much delay to President Warren G. Harding.

From the cigarette beat: An editorial in the Spokane Daily Chronicle admitted that cigarettes were bad for the health, bad for the nerves, a waste of money and a fire hazard.

The only thing worse? A statewide ban of cigarettes, as proposed by two Spokane state legislators.

The editors argued that it would tend to undermine another total ban – the prohibition of liquor.

“To place on the books at this time an absurdly drastic measure punishing every man who is found with a cigarette in his pocket is to double the opposition of all forms of prohibition – indeed, it is to weaken and discredit all the laws of Washington,” said the editors. “The most rampant enemy of the Volstead Act (Prohibition) could ask nothing better than the chance to enlist all the cigarette smokers of the nation in his fight for what he calls ‘personal liberty.’ ”