In the news from 1925
October 6-12, 2025
The Daily Record wasn’t the only thing going on in 1925. Here are a few other memorable events.
• Benito Mussolini makes a pivotal speech in the Italian Chamber of Deputies which will be regarded by historians as the beginning of his dictatorship.[1]
•Nellie Tayloe Ross becomes the first female governor (Wyoming) in the United States. Fifteen days later, Miriam A. Ferguson becomes first female governor of Texas.
• The Phi Lambda Chi fraternity (original name «The Aztecs») is founded on the campus of Arkansas State Teachers› College in Conway, Arkansas (the modern-day University of Central Arkansas).
• Pionerskaya Pravda, one of the oldest children’s newspapers in Europe, is founded in the Soviet Union.
• The Tri-State Tornado, the deadliest in U.S. history, rampages through Missouri, Illinois and Indiana, killing 695 people and injuring 2,027.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is published in New York.
• Fritz Haarmann, a serial killer convicted of the murder of 24 boys and young men, is guillotined in Germany.
• English explorer Percy Fawcett sends a last telegram to his wife before he disappears in the Amazon.
• African-American Tom Lee rescues 32 people from the sinking steamboat M.E. Norman on the Mississippi River.
• The Chrysler Corporation is founded as an automobile manufacturer by Walter Chrysler in the United States.
• Scopes trial: in a staged test case (the “Monkey Trial”) in Dayton, Tennessee, United States, John T. Scopes, a young high school science teacher (technically arrested on May 5 and indicted on May 25) is accused of assigning a reading from a state-mandated textbook on Darwinian evolution in violation of a Tennessee state law, the "Butler Act”. He is found guilty and fined $100, though the verdict is later overturned on a technicality. The trial makes explicit the fundamentalist–modernist controversy within the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, with William Jennings Bryan (who dies on July 26) being challenged by the liberal Clarence Darrow.
• Adolf Hitler publishes Volume 1 of his personal manifesto Mein Kampf in Germany.
• The US Congress grants permission for Gutzon Borglum to begin constructing Mount Rushmore National Memorial on federal land in South Dakota.
• The weekly country music-variety radio program Grand Ole Opry is first broadcast on WSM radio in Nashville, Tennessee, as the “WSM Barn Dance”.
• The first motel in the world, the Milestone Mo-Tel (later the Motel Inn of San Luis Obispo), opens in San Luis Obispo, California.
Others who came into the world 100 years ago were Paul Newman, Jack Lemmon, Flannery O’Connor, Yogi Berra, Malcolm X, Dale Bumpers, Honor Blackman (see Goldfinger), B.B. King, Elmore Leonard, Johnny Carson, Richard Burton, Rock Hudson and Robert F. Kennedy.
