Federal Judge George W. English of Illinois is about to bring Congress to a grinding halt. The impeachment trial of this previously obscure southern Illinois jurist threatens to jam up legislative business for weeks, with leaders in both Houses desperately searching for ways to postpone the proceedings until fall. But constitutional provisions offer no escape route, and English has flatly refused to resign. The trial will likely stretch through six weeks, keeping Congress in session until at least June 1st and potentially killing important legislation including the rivers and harbors bill. Meanwhile, prohibition forces are in full defensive mode, with Anti-Saloon League superintendent N.R. Johnson urging 'dry' voters to boycott newspaper straw polls on the 18th Amendment, claiming the surveys are rigged by 'repeaters, minors and aliens.' The local front page also chronicles a miraculous airplane crash where two Army aviators walked away unscathed after their plane's propeller snapped mid-flight and plunged into a ravine near New Athens.

This snapshot captures America in 1926 wrestling with the unintended consequences of its moral crusades. Prohibition, now six years old, was generating fierce political battles as its failures became undeniable. The English impeachment case reflects the broader corruption plaguing federal courts during the bootlegging era, while the Anti-Saloon League's desperate attempts to suppress unfavorable polling shows how prohibition supporters were losing the public relations war. The airplane crash reminds us this was still the dawn of aviation—just 23 years after Kitty Hawk, military pilots were flying experimental aircraft that could fail catastrophically at any moment.

• A cat was stranded on a telephone pole for 'nearly four days' after being chased by a dog, surviving on food from neighbors until two boys climbed up with a basket to rescue her—she now lives at a gas station on McCasland avenue
• Train engineer Harry Bennett blamed the deadly Pennsylvania Railroad crash on an unlucky '13' combination: 'this is the thirteenth of the month and the train was No. 13, and it was a '13' engine'
• The newspaper cost 10 cents on Sunday and came with an impressive 48 pages across six sections, including a full magazine and comics section
• A 'love child' named Lawrence Beckwith was denied his right to inherit half a million dollars from his unwed mother by the Massachusetts Supreme Court, despite being cared for by a church deaconess who waived her own claim to the fortune
• The Lansdowne sewer project was estimated at $838,000—a massive infrastructure investment for East St. Louis covering the area from Ninth Street to the city limits

• Judge English's impeachment trial would indeed drag on—he was one of only 15 federal judges ever impeached in U.S. history, and he finally resigned just before the Senate voted, making the whole congressional gridlock pointless
• That Pennsylvania Railroad crash involving engine No. 13 on the 13th occurred on the newly opened 'cut-off' track—the Pennsy was then America's largest railroad corporation, employing over 250,000 people
• The newspaper's weather forecast shows temperatures in the teens—March 1926 was part of one of the coldest winters on record, contributing to massive coal shortages across the Midwest
• Anti-Saloon League leader N.R. Johnson's claim that '90 percent of U.S. territory was dry' before national Prohibition was technically true by land area, but missed the point—most Americans lived in the wet urban areas
• Those Army aviators who survived the plane crash were flying from Langfield Field, Virginia—military aviation was so dangerous in 1926 that pilot death rates were higher than they'd been during World War I combat