A deadly collision at sea dominates the front page as the Navy calls for criminal prosecution in the S-51 submarine disaster. On September 25th, the submarine S-51 was rammed and sunk by the steamship City of Rome off Block Island, killing 33 officers and men on a clear, moonlit night. The naval court of inquiry found the steamer entirely at fault, revealing shocking negligence: the City of Rome's crew spotted the submarine's white light from 5-6 miles away but took no evasive action for 20 minutes. When the collision occurred, the steamer's searchlight was broken, they launched only one lifeboat, and after picking up just three survivors, they sailed away without marking the spot or reporting the disaster until after midnight. Secretary Wilbur has now turned the case over to the Justice Department for both criminal and civil action against the Savannah Line and the ship's officers. Meanwhile, nature provided its own drama in Maine, where a mysterious tidal wave suddenly drained Bass Harbor dry before rushing back with 10-foot walls of water, hurling 50 fishing boats ashore while terrified fishermen dodged crashing ice cakes.

These stories capture America in the confident but sometimes careless mid-1920s. The S-51 disaster reflects the era's growing maritime traffic as commerce boomed, but also reveals the deadly consequences when modern technology met old-fashioned negligence. The push for criminal prosecution shows a new expectation of corporate accountability. Meanwhile, the Senate's juggling of World Court membership, tax cuts, and the lingering influence of the Ku Klux Klan illustrates America's reluctant emergence as a global power—wanting the benefits of international leadership while remaining deeply isolationist at heart.

• Harry Thaw, the man who famously murdered architect Stanford White in 1906, is still making headlines 20 years later, sending his ex-wife Evelyn Nesbit $10 a day while she recovers from a suicide attempt in Chicago
• New York's Prohibition enforcement has become so successful that Captain Frederick Kirby needs a rock crusher to destroy 968,000 bottles of seized liquor—158,086 cases destroyed at just one Brooklyn location last year
• Seven-year-old Edna Proudfoot was killed sledding when pushed by a playmate straight into an undertaker's hearse—tragically, her carpenter father had died months earlier falling from a scaffold, leaving eight children in poverty
• A Norwegian naval lieutenant is attempting the first winter flight to Spitsbergen through Arctic darkness, planning to continue to the North Pole from Nova Zembla despite being forced down in a snowstorm 70 kilometers from his starting point

• The S-51 submarine disaster led to major changes in maritime safety protocols—this was one of the deadliest peacetime submarine accidents in U.S. Navy history and sparked the development of submarine rescue technology still used today
• Senator Walsh of Montana, defending World Court membership on this front page, would later become famous as the prosecutor who exposed the Teapot Dome scandal—the biggest political corruption case of the 1920s
• The mysterious Maine tidal wave was likely caused by an underwater landslide, a phenomenon so rare that it wouldn't be properly understood until modern seismology developed decades later
• That $10 daily support Harry Thaw paid his ex-wife equals about $170 today—generous for the era, but Thaw had inherited millions from his Pittsburgh railroad fortune, making him one of America's most notorious wealthy playboys