10 World Events That Made the News a Century Ago in 1925

So, what was going on in the world a century ago, in 1925? We’ve scoured the archives to find ten of the most compelling events of that year that made the headlines, and there are some humdingers. The year saw America’s deadliest tornado, the invention of television, Italy’s emergence as a fascist dictatorship, and a Boston tragedy blamed on the Charleston. Read on to find out more about newsworthy events from 100 years ago.

Related: Top 10 Deadly Pandemics Of The Past

10 Mussolini Declares His Dictatorship

Born in Italy in 1883, Benito Mussolini is regarded by many historians as the founder of Fascism. He first became involved in socialist politics but renounced left-wing beliefs because he supported Italy’s participation in World War I. In 1919, he founded Italy’s fascist party, which was spearheaded by the violent ranks of the infamous Blackshirts. WWI veterans, many of them unemployed, flocked to join the new party, and it became part of a ruling coalition in Italy in 1921.

At a time when Italy was in a state of near-anarchy, unemployment was high, and the economy was dire, many Italians were tired of previous socialist and liberal coalitions and supported the fascists. In 1922, the Blackshirts marched on Rome, and this popular mass demonstration prompted King Victor Emmanuel III to ask Mussolini to form a government. Mussolini then spent the next few years destroying Italy’s democratic institutions. He completed this work in January 1925 when he declared himself dictator with the title of Il Duce.^[1]

9 America’s Deadliest Tornado

The Tri-State Tornado scythed its way across southeastern Missouri, southern Illinois, and southwest Indiana in March 1925. The twister took off at about lunchtime in Ellington, Missouri, taking the locals completely by surprise since the weather forecast had not breathed a word about an imminent tornado. In fact, forecasters had been banned from using the term tornado for years to avoid creating panic in the population.

After devastating towns in Missouri, the tornado moved northeast into Missouri. Then, it crossed the Mississippi River to wreak havoc in Illinois before finally landing in Indiana. By about 4:30 in the afternoon, the tornado’s destructive force was mostly spent. But in its trail of destruction across the nation’s Midwest, the tornado had extracted a terrible price, the highest ever death toll of any such event. As many as 695 people lost their lives, and a further 2,000 were injured. One Illinois town alone, Murphysboro, Illinois, suffered 234 deaths.^[2]

8 The Scopes Monkey Trial

Despite the title, this entry does not involve the trial of a wayward simian. Instead, the issue at stake was the teaching of Darwinian evolution theory, which, of course, contradicts the literal reading of Genesis that some people favored back in 1925—and indeed still do. The courtroom drama took place in Dayton, Tennessee, and the man on the dock was science teacher John Thomas Scopes.

Scopes was charged with breaking a Tennessee law passed in March 1925 forbidding the teaching of “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” It seems that Scopes deliberately defied the law to illustrate its evident absurdity. Indeed, the History website tells us there was a “carnival-like atmosphere” in Dayton, with traders selling “Bibles, toy monkeys, hot dogs, and lemonade.”

Scopes was found guilty and fined $100, but the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the verdict several years later. And as we know, mainstream thought today is pretty firmly on the side of Darwin.^[3]

7 Founding of the Nazi SS

The year 1925 saw the founding of what was and is probably still the most evil organization the world has ever seen, the Schutzstaffel, best known as the SS. It was an important year for the man who formed the SS as his personal bodyguard, Adolf Hitler, for he also published his racist blueprint for Germany and Europe, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). He wrote it while serving a jail sentence for leading a failed coup in 1924.

At first, the SS was quite small, no more than a few hundred strong. But things changed when the fanatical Nazi Heinrich Himmler took command of the group in 1929. Himmler’s expansion of the SS saw its numbers increase to some 250,000 by 1939, becoming what Britannica describes as “a state within a state,” answerable only to Hitler himself. SS recruits “were schooled in racial hatred and admonished to harden their hearts to human suffering.” Among its many crimes against humanity, the SS was responsible for running the Nazi death camps and an extensive system of slave labor.^[4]

6 Television Invented

Born in Scotland in 1888, John Logie Baird was an engineer and prolific inventor. According to the BBC, his innovations included “a disastrous homemade hemorrhoid cream [and] a rustless glass razor,” with which he had badly cut himself before abandoning the project. But it was the field of television where his talents really shined.

In 1922, Baird experimented with a mechanical television system that included a large revolving disc with a spiral arrangement of holes. Seeking to improve this gizmo, the inventor fitted glass lenses, but the rapidly spinning wheel ejected those in an explosion of breaking shards.

Fortunately, the intrepid Scotsman was uninjured by this disaster, and in October 1925, he was able to create “a recognizable image, complete with shades of grey.” The star of this prototypical TV show was a rather scary-looking ventriloquist’s dummy that went by the name of Stooky Bill. Television had arrived, although it would be some years before it landed in people’s homes.^[5]

5 Pact of Locarno

The 1925 signatories to the Pact of Locarno (an agreeable lakeside city in Switzerland) were Great Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, and Germany. In the aftermath of World War I, the driving idea behind this international treaty was to guarantee a peaceful future for Western Europe. The agreement that the five nations signed up to stipulated that the borders between France and Germany and Belgium and Germany, set by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles after WWI, were sacrosanct.

What’s more, the pact stated that Germany, Belgium, and France would never attack each other except in “legitimate defense” and that they would “settle their disputes by pacific means.” As we know, although peace reigned for a time, it was catastrophically shattered at the end of the 1930s by the deadly expansionist antics of a certain Adolf Hitler, no respecter of international treaties or borders.^[6]

4 Percy Fawcett Disappears

The last time we know Percy Fawcett was alive was on May 29, 1925, and since then, his disappearance has become a legend. So, just who was this man, and what was he doing in the depths of the Amazonian jungle? Born into an aristocratic English family in 1867, the young Fawcett joined the Royal Artillery as an officer but soon defected to the Royal Geographical Society, which sent him to North Africa to spy on the Sultan of Morocco.

After other adventurous assignments, which met with varying degrees of success and disaster, Fawcett decided to devote himself to finding a legendary lost city in the heart of the Amazonian jungle. Calling his grand jungle metropolis “Z,” Fawcett spent years fruitlessly searching for it.

In January 1925, he set off from New Jersey on another expedition accompanied by his son Jack and Jack’s friend Raleigh Rimell. It was April before the party reached the Amazonian jungle. Arriving at a spot called Dead Horse Camp—he’d had to shoot his mount there on a previous sortie—Fawcett wrote a letter that eventually reached his wife, Nina. Nothing has been heard from the three explorers since then, and their fate remains a mystery.^[7]

3 Murder of Madge Oberholtzer

Madge Oberholtzer had the great misfortune of getting mixed up with D.C. Stephenson.

Aged 28, Madge met Stephenson in January 1925 at an inauguration dinner in honor of Indiana Governor Ed Jackson. At this time, Stephenson was a prosperous businessman and held the position of Grand Dragon in the Indiana Ku Klux Klan. Stephenson danced with her at that first meeting, and they began to see each other often.

One evening, Stephenson urgently contacted Oberholtzer, demanding to see her immediately. Oberholtzer then disappeared for two days until she was more or less dumped at her family home in a distraught and wretched state. But she was able to describe what had happened to her. A drunken Stephenson had abducted her and then brutally assaulted and raped her. A severely traumatized Oberholtzer tried to kill herself with deadly mercury bichloride tablets and was then driven to her parental home. A month later, she died. Stephenson was found guilty of kidnapping, rape, and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

This scandal involving a senior Ku Klux Klan member is said to have destroyed the loathsome group in Indiana, with membership crashing from a high of almost 250,000 to just 4,000 by 1928.^[8]

2 Dance of Death

Of course, 1925 was bang in the middle of the decade known as the “Roaring 20s.” A central cultural phenomenon of that era was the Charleston, a highly energetic dance beloved by party animals of the time. However, few could have believed that this dance could cause a disaster that would result in multiple deaths and injuries. When the Pickwick Club in Boston collapsed, the Charleston was fingered as a likely cause of the disaster.

The five-story building’s failure caused 44 deaths. As a result, the Charleston earned a dramatic reputation as “The Dance of Death,” according to the New England Historical Society. Even Boston’s Mayor believed that the Charleston had caused the tragedy, and ultimately, dance halls around the country posted notices saying, “This Building Cannot Withstand the Charleston.”

However, later investigations concluded that excavations to build a garage in the neighboring lot were probably a more likely cause of the collapse.^[9]

1 Nellie Tayloe Ross Becomes First Female Governor

Back in 1925, American women were largely absent from formal politics. It had only been five years earlier, in 1920, that the 19th Amendment had finally given women the right to vote. So the success of Nellie Tayloe Ross in becoming America’s first woman governor was all the more striking. She won the 1925 governor’s election in Wyoming, taking the position that her husband had held prior to his death not long before the poll.

As a progressive Democrat, Ross supported Prohibition, stricter bank regulations, and increased education funding. However, she was unable to have much impact on Wyoming politics since the state legislature’s membership was overwhelmingly Republican. Even so, she’s remembered as a groundbreaking pioneer for women standing for high office.

After losing the governorship, Ross continued in public life, becoming chair of the Democratic National Committee and later boss of the U.S. Mint. She died in 1977, aged 101.^[10]