Today -100: October 19, 1911: Of Nanking, brown people over the sea, heckling, theories the great American government cannot be run upon, & marijuana

The Chinese revolutionaries seem to have captured Nanking.

Vice President James Sherman says the US has really improved conditions in the Philippines or, as he puts it, “we are and have been pursuing the wise course and we have brought to these brown people over the sea blessings which they never could have acquired had they remained under Spanish rule or been left to themselves.” One of those blessings: when we arrived Filipinos spoke many different dialects; soon, according to Sherman, they will only speak English.

Elizabeth Freeman, a suffragist who spent some time in Britain studying the more radical tactics of the movement there, announces at the annual convention of the Woman Suffrage Party of Manhattan that she plans to heckle Teddy Roosevelt at Carnegie Hall: “I shall send up some written questions, and if they are not answered I shall get up and ask them as we did in England. I understand it is not the custom here to ask questions verbally or heckle, but heckling would do good.”

Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson speaks at the International Brewers’ Congress, to the great outrage of prohibitionists. Wilson says prohibitionists probably have the best of motives, but “the great American government cannot be run upon the theories they hold.”

California’s inspector of the State Board of Pharmacy asks the state to add marijuana to the list of banned narcotics.