Today -100: December 15, 1911: Of ultimata, archdukes, king-emperors, bandits, gallows in opera houses, absinthe and defective children

British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey basically agrees with Russia’s ultimatum to Persia that it fire its American treasurer-general, William Morgan-Shuster, and only appoint foreign advisers acceptable to Russia and Britain.

33-year-old Archduke Henry Ferdinand (or, to give him his full name, Henry Ferdinand Salvator Marie Joseph Leopold Charles Ludwig Pius Albert Rupert Katherine von Richi) quits the Austrian court, the second archduke to do so this year. Like Ferdinand Karl, he met a woman from the lower orders. He doesn’t seem to be marrying her, but he did leverage the threat of doing so to get permission to leave the military (which he did without leave anyway) to study painting in Munich (I wonder if he knew Hitler?).

In Delhi, the King-Emperor reviews 50,000 troops and creates 93 knights and 200 companions of orders.

The House passes a bill for an 8-hour day for laborers and mechanics engaged on contracted-out government work.

The bloody work of American occupation in the Philippines goes on (and on). American troops kill 42 Moro “bandits.”

In a story for which the NYT Index fails to provide a proper link, a negro preacher, William Turner, is hanged in the Jackson, Georgia opera house for inciting a “race riot” in which one white man was shot. This is not a lynching, but a legal hanging. The sheriff decided that he could prevent a lynching by holding it in the opera house, and the victim’s family could watch from the box seats and not have to stand in the rain.

John E. Brown, in jail in Moab, Utah awaiting trial for killing his daughter and her husband, likes his privacy, so he’s been paying the fines of anyone who gets arrested.

The feds ban the import of absinthe, which the head of the Pure Food Board says is “one of the worst enemies of man”.

Headline of the Day -100: “FEW CHILDREN NORMAL.” 65% of the children in Boston schools are below physical par or, as they are sensitively termed, defective.