Today -100: February 25, 1914: Of adulterated food, bentons, and women voters

The Supreme Court rules that adulteration of food is okay unless it disguises defects in the food or consumers are actually, you know, poisoned. The ruling will obviously make the post-The-Jungle Pure Food Act harder to enforce, forcing the government to determine just how much poison people can eat without being harmed.

Constitutionalist leader Carranza privately warned the US a couple of weeks ago against sending American troops into Mexico to protect Americans and other foreigners.

Pancho Villa now claims that William Benton was a cattle thief and that he had killed at least four men without provocation. And he was totally trying to assassinate Villa. Villa also says he won’t give up Benton’s body “out of respect to the dead. It was interred with all religious observances and a cross erected over it, and I will not allow the sacrilege of its removal.”

Headline of the Day -100: “Burn Negro in a Box.; Mississippi Mob Takes Vengeance on Slayer of a Deputy Sheriff.” As gruesome as it sounds.

The ship carrying those illegally deported South African union leaders arrives at Gravesend, UK, where the British labor movement had laid on lavish reception plans, but the South Africans had their own protest in mind, which involved refusing to leave the ship. There was a stalemate of sorts for several hours before they agreed to come out and be honored.

The New Jersey State Senate joins the Assembly in voting for women’s suffrage, although another vote and a referendum are still required. All the Republican senators voted for it and all but three Democrats.

Women vote for the first time in Illinois’s primaries, including 89-year-old Eveline Guthrie Dunn, who attended the convention that first nominated Abraham Lincoln for president. At some polling places special arrangements are made for women voters, such as mirrors to help women whose hats got entangled with the curtains. Several women won aldermanic primaries (Democrats, Progressives and a “socialistic” candidate).

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