Today -100: October 20, 1913: Of moral turpitude

Mexican rebels blow up a troop train, killing 46.

Woodrow Wilson is personally looking into whether Emmeline Pankhurst should be deported. In the meantime, hearings will examine the extent of the militant suffrage movement in Britain and whether Mrs P’s crimes were political, in which case she cannot be excluded unless moral turpitude is involved (suffragists have been pointing out that for decades Irish former political prisoners have been allowed into the US unimpeded). Mrs P supposedly says that if deported she’ll start hunger-striking and be dead within 24 hours. I say supposedly because the next day she denied having said any such thing but the NYT story had her alleged words in quotation marks. It is a puzzlement.

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