Today -100: February 12, 1911: Of Lincoln, borders, miscegenation, radium, and executions

It is Lincoln’s birthday and, hey, it’s also (nearly) the 50th anniversary of the election of Jefferson Davis as President of the Confederacy. The NYT thinks that after all this time “we ought to be willing to leave the civil war to history.” It says that the South is no longer hostile to the North and the “occasional demonstrations of the sectional spirit” are only ginned up in order to pressure the states to keep paying pensions to Confederate veterans. “The new South, full of commercial and industrial energy, will not long pretend to mourn the failure of the Confederacy.” Not long, huh?

At a Lincoln Day speech, Teddy Roosevelt comes out in favor of the direct election of US senators and the president. He also says that “the Republican Party must be not only progressive but sane.” (So how’s that going?)

Congress rejects New Mexico’s demand for a revision of its border with Texas in its favor (the border was set 50 years before, but NM says there was a surveying mistake).

Nevada outlaws marriage between whites and Asians. Any minister or justice of the peace who performs one is henceforth guilty of a misdemeanor.

The Radium Bank in Paris, which I think sends radium out as needed to doctors and hospitals, is using more female porters because of fears that robbers will target the extremely valuable substance, which is after all the elixir of life.

Haiti executes two more rebel generals but promises to stop now after, as the NYT puts it in a sub-head, “Negro Government Informed by Washington That Execution of Prisoners Would Be Improper Act.”