Today -100: August 3, 1912: Of gunboats, harbors, black bull moose, and lepers

Revolution in Nicaragua, again. Taft sends a gunboat, as is traditional.

Remember the baseless panic about the Japanese supposedly secretly buying Magdalena Bay in Mexico? The Senate has voted to expand the Monroe Doctrine to oppose any harbor in the Western Hemisphere falling into the hands of any corporation or association connected to foreign powers (except for the US, of course). During the discussion, one (unnamed) senator suggested leveraging US claims for compensation for damage from the two Mexican revolutions to force Mexico to give us Baja California.

The only Bull Moosers that they could find in South Carolina willing to be delegates to the national convention were black. So... there will be no South Carolina delegates to the national convention. There will be competing black and white delegations from Miss., Alabama and Georgia.

Who knew so much of the talk about the new third party would revolve around race? Certainly not Theodore Roosevelt, who tries to explain how he’s really a great friend of the negro in a letter – and I swear to god I’m not making this up – to Uncle Remus Magazine. He says he’s in favor of treating all men the same. He says that in the South the Democrats have maintained their power by encouraging the hatred of the white man for the black, while the Republican machine has tried to perpetuate itself by stirring up the black man. In fact, it was the corrupt black delegates to the 1912 Republican convention, by “their own greed for money or office” (i.e., their support for Taft and the party establishment), who brought about the split in the party. And as long as the parties in the South exploit race in the way he describes, we can’t “secure what a future of real justice will undoubtedly develop, namely, the right of political expression by the negro who shows that he possesses the intelligence, integrity, and self-respect which justify such right of political expression in his white neighbor.” So anyway, the exclusion of negro delegates from the South from the Bull Moose convention is really for the benefit of negroes, the end.

Headline of the Day -100 (LA Times): “Leper Worrying Denver.”

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