Today -100: July 14, 1913: Of moonlighting and creating the millennium with the ballot

William Jennings Bryan is skipping out on his day job to go back on the lecture circuit for six weeks. He’s still secretary of state, but he needs the extra money, he says. He will be paid $12,000 by the Chautauqua bureaus, equal to his annual government salary.

Alice Hill Chittenden, president of the New York State Anti-Suffrage Association (not to be confused with the contemporaneous painter Alice Brown Chittenden), has been investigating conditions in California since the establishment of women’s suffrage there, and she is appalled. The Legislature is now dedicating itself to “creating the millennium with the ballot and regardless of the staggering cost” (I hereby nominate that for the new state motto). School teachers and old people are to be given pensions, children will not be taken away from their parents because of poverty; the state is also wasting money by appointing inspectors for orphans, establishing an Industrial Accident Commission, etc.

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