Today -100: April 28, 1914: Of hunger strikes, war correspondents, the real infamy in Colorado, and votes of censure

Becky Edelson is released on bail, without the condition that she shut up whenever a cop tells her to. She denies having failed in her hunger strike; rather, she fasted 56 hours until she heard that a motion for appeal would be heard.

Mexican Federales abandon Nuevo Laredo; rebels occupy it.

The US War Dept is now licensing war correspondents, who must provide a $2,000 bond for good behaviour and $1,000 which may be drawn on for supplies.

Some members of Congress are complaining about the alarmist false reports sent last week by the US consul in Vera Cruz (a Taft appointee) about mobs in Mexico City, planned massed executions of Americans, etc.

Woodrow Wilson is still dilly-dallying about whether to send troops into Colorado and has yet to utter a word publicly about the Ludlow Massacre. It’s not like it’s some Mexicans who dared to diss our flag by detaining a few sailors for part of an afternoon while finding a translator (as opposed to Gen. Chase, who locked up Mother Jones without trial for months).

The Colorado strikers demand that the mine guards be disarmed. They also seem to be acquiring territory, attacking Louisville, Lafayette, and Marshall and the McNally coal mine.

The NYT editorializes: “There are those who think that ‘infamy’ in Colorado consists in the fact that the militia are shooting workmen. It may be contended that there is something like infamy in the opposition of workmen to society and order. The militia are as impersonal and as impartial as the law.” Let me stop you right there and point out that the mining companies have been sending their gun thugs into the Colo. National Guard for months, while regular militiamen, who feel they didn’t sign up in order to guarantee the Rockefellers’ share value, are increasingly mustering out.

In Parliament, Austen Chamberlain proposes an inquiry into the Curragh Mutiny. He accuses the government of lying its head off, the not-so-subtext being that the government planned to incite a rebellion in Northern Ireland in order to suppress it so all the gun-running is totally justified. Churchill responds that this is “the most impudent demand for a judicial inquiry of which our records can provide a parallel. ... what we are now witnessing in the House is uncommonly like a vote of censure by the criminal classes on the police.”

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