Today -100: August 18, 1913: Thawed out

Harry Thaw, murderer of architect Stanford White in the 1906 Crime of the Century, escapes from the booby hatch after his family bribes attendants at the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and takes off in a car that was waiting for him. Since he was committed rather than convicted of a crime, he can’t be extradited (he is believed – wrongly – to have fled to Connecticut, as was the custom).

The governor of New York swings into action to find Thaw. As does the other governor of New York.

The NAACP protests the Wilson administration’s segregation of government departments by race, noting that this has never been done before (except in the military). But now, the federal government “has set the colored people apart as if mere contact with them were contamination.”

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