Today -100: April 15, 1912: Of armed marches, so-called hunger strikes, and...

A boat ferrying passengers disembarking from the British steamship Seang Chun sinks in Amoy (China), drowning 40. On another day, this might be bigger news.

The Industrial Workers of the World plan to send large contingents into cities where they have recently been violently driven out by Vigilance Committees, including San Diego, Fresno, L.A., Spokane, Kansas City, etc. Or as the always hysterically anti-union LA Times’s headline terms it, “I.W.W.’s Plan Armed March on San Diego.”

A NYT editorial complains about British suffragettes getting out of prison through use of “the so-called hunger strike” (the term hunger strike was new in the English language, popularized by the suffragettes but adopted from the Russian) and says that forcible feeding by tube is not torture. So why don’t ordinary criminals use it to get out of prison? Probably, says the Times, because of “the low intelligence of the ordinary criminal, his acceptance of confinement as more or less a matter of course, to be made the best of, and his inability to resist the temptation to eat when he is hungry.”

When today’s edition of the NYT went to press, they knew only that the Titanic has hit an iceberg and that rescue ships are on the way.

The NYT notes that several steamers have recently arrived in NY with damage caused by making their way through ice packs.