Today -100: May 22, 1910: Of parades, pogroms, corruption, arbitration, and marionettes

The Equality League of Self-Supporting Women holds a women’s suffrage parade/demonstration in NYC to protest the NY Legislature’s failure to vote a suffrage bill out of committee. It’s the largest suffrage demo ever held in the US. The New York Times reports it on p. 11.

Russian expulsions of Jews, hitherto most notable in Kiev, have reached Moscow. Expulsion orders are being made against babies as a way of forcing parents with residence permits to leave. In Kiev, Jews have usually been ordered to leave within two days.

Congress is working on a bill to require transparency for campaign contributions and expenses, but the Senate is insisting that reports be released only after elections, in case they influence the election, which is rather, one would have thought, the point of the exercise.

Peru and Ecuador, which were threatening to go to war over a border dispute, have accepted offers of mediation from the US, Brazil and Argentina. Boooring!

Not 10 years after the Boer War, a new Union of South Africa is formed by the British, uniting the conquered Boer republics and the British colonies in a federal structure, paving the way for the leveling down of the rights of Africans. The new prime minister will be Louis Botha, a general on the losing side of the war.

Signor Parisi and his Italian marionettes, who went out of business six months ago after losing the economic battle with moving pictures, have returned for Sunday performances, now in English, of “Constantine and the Pagans” and the tale of Roland, which are the only marionette plays translated so far from the Venetian dialect.