Today -100: October 18, 1912: I incite this meeting to rebellion

Woodrow Wilson, in a speech in Delaware (he’s still doing campaign speeches where locals went to trouble and expense, he says, but he won’t attack the recuperating Roosevelt), calls the Republican Party the “Know-Nothing, Do-Nothing Party.” And how far we’ve come in the last hundred years, huh?

The judge in the case of Roosevelt’s would-be assassin doubles his bail. Evidently motion picture people were going to pay his bail so they could film him and then recall the bail and send him back to jail.

Twins are born in the hospital room next to Roosevelt’s. One of them is named Theodore (don’t know what the other one is called). They are brought in to see the ex-president. “Well, well, no race suicide here,” he comments.

Someone sends him a bull moose steak. His doctors are deciding whether he’ll be allowed to eat it.

Turkey declares war on Bulgaria and Serbia but not Greece, which it still hopes to wean away from its allies, though that doesn’t stop Greek forces from attacking.

Having expelled the Pethick-Lawrences, the remaining Women’s Social and Political Union (Britain) leaders are making the case for escalating militant attacks on the government. Emmeline Pankhurst says “We have been greatly betrayed by the Government, and that warrants militancy. It is our only weapon.” The only limit on militancy in the future, she says, will be violence against people. At a meeting in the Albert Hall, she thunders, “I incite this meeting to rebellion.” She asks everyone to do whatever they can: if they can try to enter the House of Commons, do that; if they can break windows, do that; if they can “still further attack the sacred idol of property... do so.” We shall see what that means.

Her daughter Christabel writes in The Suffragette that militancy has been gradually increasing in severity, just as each of the plagues of Egypt was more severe than the one before. And a December 13 editorial in that newspaper says “The quiet, patient methods of the law-abiding, non-militant Suffragists are very popular indeed (with those who happen to hear anything about them), and it is just because they are so popular that they are a failure. ... The vote has never been given as a prize for good conduct. Women will never get the vote except by creating an intolerable situation for all the selfish and apathetic people who stand in their way.”

Nevada Governor Tasker L. Oddie declares martial law in Ely, where there is a miners’ strike going on and where two strikers were killed by company guards, as was the custom.

Responding to another rebellion in Mexico, led by Gen. Félix Díaz, nephew of the deposed dictator, Pres. Madero says he will never resign and only death can remove him from the presidency before his term expires. Spoiler alert...

People are always inventing new things to do from airplanes. The latest: duck shooting. By the way, the 201st aviation death is recorded, a French aviator who in an earlier incident crashed a plane into a crowd, killing one spectator.

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