Today -100: June 18, 1912: If they ask for the sword, they shall have it!

Metaphor of the Day -100: Some of the Taft delegates traveling to the Republican National Convention are injured in a train wreck.

Metaphor of the Day -100, runner-up: Theodore Roosevelt, at a meeting: “If they ask for the sword, they shall have it!” He asks Taft delegates to vote for his candidate for the temporary chairmanship of the convention to rebuke the “burglary and piracy” of the RNC and says that any action by the convention which was voted upon by fraudulently seated delegates would not be binding on the party (he wants organizational votes to be cast only by unchallenged delegates). William Jennings Bryan reports: “The Arabs are said to have seven hundred words which mean ‘camel’; Mr. Roosevelt has nearly as many synonyms for theft, and he used them all tonight. ... He compared political crimes, such as he charged against his opponents, with the crimes for which men are imprisoned, to the advantage of the latter, and declared that some of the governors among the reactionaries have refused pardons to criminals whose deeds were infinitely less wicked than the political misdemeanors of the governors themselves.”

Some of the negro delegates from Georgia defected to Roosevelt yesterday and defected back to Taft today, claiming they’d been bunkoed. The Georgia delegates almost came to blows, a white delegate who announced himself a Theodore raising a chair to ward off negro Tafties (Tafty is my own term, since there seems to be no one-word term for Taft supporters, but Roosevelt supporters are occasionally called Theodores). The Roosevelt strategy of winning over negro delegates (or bribing them, according to the Tafties) is not going well.

Taft vetoes the $92 million Army appropriation bill because of its provisions reducing the size of the General Staff, setting the qualifications for the office of Army chief of staff that would remove Taft’s appointee, and removing decisions on the distributions of forts and disposition of the army from the War Dept to a committee of retired officers.

The LAT, always so good in its understanding of the Celestial mind: “CHINESE RESIST REFORMS.: Abolition of Gambling and Girl Slavery Weakens Hold of the New Government on the Ignorant Masses.”