Today -100: September 24, 1913: A little was enough for me

Headline of the Day -100: “Not So Afraid of Germany.” In November, Britain will send a bunch of warships into the Mediterranean, in a change from its policy in recent years of keeping them nearby just in case Germany tries something.

A few days ago the Tennessee state senate passed bills banning the importation into the state of alcohol and defining the sale of any alcohol as a public nuisance, allowing courts to close saloons on the petition of ten taxpayers. The lower house of the Tennessee Legislature is now discussing the bills. Speaker Stanton complains that Gov. Ben Hooper has stationed armed guards in the House to force him to make rulings favorable to the bills. A state senator breaks down a door in the Capitol building behind which he finds seven guards (prison guards, probably) and a suitcase filled with revolvers.

Anthony Comstock, “in the role of a literary critic,” arrests a publisher and one of his employees who sold an allegedly immoral book, “Hagar Revelly” by Daniel Carson Goodman, which “deals with the problems of life as faced by two poverty-stricken girls in New York City.” You can sort of read it online, because it’s been “DoiizodbvCoogle” or “DolizodbvCoOglc” or “DolizodbyGoOgle”, which I think means Digitized Really Badly by Google. A quick skim suggests that Emile Zola didn’t have anything to worry about, but neither did it reveal what got Comstock so hot and bothered (Comstock admits that he didn’t read the whole book; “a little was enough for me”).

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