Today -100: December 18, 1913: Of hunger strikes, conventions, and mayors

The British prison authorities succeeded in keeping Emmeline Pankhurst in prison for three full days this time before having to release her. She adopted a hunger, thirst, and sleep strike.

The Republican National Committee proposes (it has to be ratified by state conventions) to reduce the representation at the 1916 National Convention of the Southern states, where there are basically no actual Republican voters. The South would lose about one-third of its current delegation, bringing them down to less than one-sixth of the total delegates, which would still be more than is warranted by its share of the national Republican vote. The NYT article doesn’t mention this, but many of the delegates from the South since the Civil War have been black. At the last convention, they were reliable votes for the party machine that delivered the convention for Taft rather than Roosevelt, and we know how well that went.

(By the way, this is why it helps to edit: I originally wrote “many of the delegates from the South have been black since the Civil War.”)

Boston Mayor John F. Fitzgerald will not run for re-election. He cites his poor health since he fell down stairs inspecting some buildings that had burned down. Fitzgerald would be JFK’s grandfather.

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