Today -100: October 13, 1910: Of defective senses of responsibility and sabotage

Roosevelt, speaking at a Knights of Columbus banquet on Columbus Day, predicts that one day there will be a Catholic president.

A rather dickish NYT editorial says that TR’s spontaneous decision yesterday to accept an invitation to fly in that plane is typical of the impulsiveness that makes him such a dangerous politician, with a “defective sense of responsibility”.

French Prime Minister Aristide Briand calls a railway strike an attempted revolution. He’s using a law intended for wartime to mobilize (i.e., conscript) railroad workers as reservists, and it’s not going down very well. Strikers have been destroying railway ties, which were called shoes (sabots). This is the origin of the word sabotage in French; it entered the English language in 1918.