Today -100: September 13, 1910: Of Arkansas and Maine

Arizona may not after all be going Republican out of sheer gratitude for being given statehood, as Taft had assumed would happen. Dems win a majority of delegates (at least 36 out of 52) to the Constitutional Convention, pledging to include powers of initiative and referendum and recall, direct primaries and popular election of US senators.

For some reason Maine had its elections yesterday rather than in November. Democrats also sweep the Maine elections (governor, both houses of the Legislature, congresscritters), which is widely thought to be one of the signs of the apocalypse. Some of this is the result of the Rooseveltian revolt against the Republican Old Guard, some of it a reaction to the state government’s imposition of prohibition on localities that didn’t want it. The new governor-elect, Frederick Plaisted, is the son of Harris Plaisted, the last Democratic governor (1881-3). The new Legislature will elect the state’s first Dem senator since 1863 – and New England’s first since the late 1870s.