Today -100: March 28, 1912: Of Jewish homelands, criminal farces, and physiological emergencies

Portugal is considering establishing a Jewish colony in Portuguese Angola.

Theodore Roosevelt denounces the New York primaries, which he lost Tuesday by a 2:1 margin, as a “criminal farce.” The only inspectors allowed at polling stations were anti-Roosevelt; in some districts, the names of Roosevelt delegates didn’t appear on the ballots; in others ballot papers were not delivered or were late. In Indiana, TR says, 200 of his delegates were thrown out of the Republican state convention, “and the will of the people reversed.” Ditto Colorado.

Sir Almroth Wright, a famous British immunologist (who doesn’t believe in washing), has a long and soon to be infamous letter in today -100’s Times of London explaining that, when viewing the militant suffrage movement, “no doctor can ever lose sight of the fact that the mind of woman is always threatened with danger from the reverberations of her physiological emergencies. ... there is mixed up with the woman’s movement much mental disorder; and he cannot conceal from himself the physiological emergencies which lie behind.” A NYT editorial in tomorrow -100’s paper notes that Dr. Wright is “likely to meet several [physiological emergencies] as soon as the suffragettes get after him.”

Wright continues, “A conciliation with hysterical revolt is neither an act of peace nor will it bring peace.” Fortunately, “Peace will come again. It will come when woman ceases to believe and to teach all manner of evil of man despitefully. It will come when she ceases to impute to him as a crime her own natural disabilities, when she ceases to resent the fact that man cannot and does not wish to work side by side with her. And peace will return when every woman for whom there is no room in England seeks ‘rest’ beyond the sea, ‘each one in the house of her husband,’ and when the woman who remains in England comes to recognize that she can without sacrifice of dignity give a willing subordination to the husband or father, who, when all is said and done, earns and lays up money for her.”