Today -100: October 19, 1912: Our love of peace is now exhausted

The NYT blames the new Women’s Social and Political Union militancy campaign on the “timidity” of the British government which failed to keep hunger-striking prisoners in prison.

Greece claims that Turkey has dispatched doctors with typhus and cholera microbes to the border, to engage in biological warfare.

The notes by Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia declaring war, virtually identical, claim that it’s necessitated by the anarchy in Turkey (and nothing calms anarchy like a four-front war), by Turkey’s refusal to implement reforms promised 30 years ago at the Congress of Berlin (whose provisions were pretty much all broken – Bulgaria shouldn’t even be a country now), and say that they really didn’t want to go to war but were forced to (they totally wanted to go to war).

King Ferdinand of Bulgaria issues a proclamation. Evidently, “this is a war for human rights” (of the poor persecuted Christians in the Ottoman Empire). “Our love of peace is now exhausted.”

Black heavy-weight champ Jack Johnson is arrested for “abduction” of a 19-year-old white woman, Lucille Cameron, on a complaint sworn out by her mother, who later said that she’d rather see her daughter live the rest of her life in an insane asylum than “see her the plaything of a nigger.” In December 1912 he married her, and in 1913 was convicted on Mann Act charges, after a first trial collapsed. He skipped the country for seven years, came back and did some time.

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