Today -100: April 18, 1914: We have not plots, we have not nihilism in this country

The NYT says that Huerta’s first reaction to the demand for a 21-gun salute was to prepare a declaration of war.

Mexico’s foreign minister decides to complicate the whole thing by saying that the Huerta Junta will take the US’s return salute as tactic recognition of his government.

There’s an assassination attempt on John Purroy Mitchel, the Boy Mayor (he’s 34) of New York City. The assassin, one Michael Mahoney, 71, misses and hits Corporation Counsel Frank Polk in the chin, breaking his jawbone and knocking out two teeth, which he plans to have mounted in gold. Mitchel pulls out his own gun, which he carries because Mayor Gaynor died last year from assassination, but Mahoney is wrestled down by a crowd that includes the police commissioner. Mahoney is evidently a crazy lone gunman and not part of a plot. Says the Boy Mayor, “We have not plots, we have not nihilism in this country.” Mahoney circumvented NY’s strict gun control laws by buying his gun in New Jersey.

Obit of the Day -100: Hermann Ahlwardt, founder of the Antisemitische Volkspartei. The NYT obit says he died a disappointed man because anti-Semitism has been declining in Germany.

British suffragettes bomb the theater on the Great Yarmouth pier.

A doctor at the University of Pennsylvania is being prosecuted for cruelty to animals. His name is Dr. Sweet, because of course it is. I’ll spare you the details, mostly because I stopped reading before getting to them, but evidently it’s not the vivisection of dogs that’s at issue, it’s the neglect of them afterwards.

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