Today -100: May 2, 1913: Let Greed Not Feed on Need

The Brooklyn Institute rejects the offer of “To the Highest Bidder,” a 1906 painting by Harry Roseland of two slaves, mother and daughter, at an antebellum slave auction, because it “tends to keep alive memories that had better be forgotten.” Oprah owns it now.

The Daily Mirror (UK) claims that there’s a suffragette plan to burn down London.

They do burn down a stable, leaving a placard reading “Votes! Votes! Votes! Beware!”, which I suppose is a good motto for the WSPU’s current strategy.

The Common Cause, the newspaper of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, the non-militant British organization, complains, “Militancy has introduced into the Suffrage movement elements of revenge, of contempt for others, of unreason, of deafness to honest and considered criticism, which in a movement that stands for peace and justice and humanity, are tragic.”

Montenegro, which seized Scutari last week after a six-month siege, is now preparing the city for a new siege by Austria. Poor Scutari.

The NYT notes that yesterday’s NYC May Day parade was the first in a years not to coincide with a major strike; “the paraders had to import some 110 children of Paterson silk strikers from New Jersey to give concrete embodiment to the woes of the workers.” (Lexicological note: this is before the term “the concrete embodiment of workers’ woes” in New Jersey came to refer to union leaders being buried in the foundations of thruway overpasses).

(click on photo for full-length)

Banners & placards at the parade included: “The Unionized Needle is Mightier Than the Sword,” “We Want a Square Deal and No Triangle Disasters” and “Let Greed Not Feed on Need.” Very Dr. Seuss, that one. The Bakers and Confectioners’ Union baked a giant cake.

Everett Pepperrell Wheeler, prominent lawyer, author, and failed candidate for NY governor in 1894, is forming a men’s anti-women’s-suffrage organization, although he has thought better of calling it the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Women (the “cruelty” consisting of forcing them to suffer “the burden of political activity”).

Ten companies of the Georgia state militia are mobilized to prevent the lynching of Leo Frank, the Jewish “carpetbagger” superintendent of the National Pencil Company of Atlanta, and Newt Lee, a black night watchman, both arrested after Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old employee of the company, is found murdered.

NY Gov. William Sulzer’s bill for direct primaries fails, and Sulzer is pissed off: “The vote in the Senate yesterday expressed nothing except what the people know – that the Senate of the State of New York is not a free agency. The Senators did not discuss the merits of the Direct Primary bill. They amused themselves by criticizing the Governor ... both political parties caucused to defeat a bill to carry out the solemn pledges of their platforms.” Opponents say that in fighting Tammany, Sulzer is using its methods of intimidation and patronage to influence the Legislature (but less successfully).


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