Today -100: April 30, 1914: Mediation all around?

Overly Optimistic Headline of the Day -100: “Ulster Crisis Is At An End.” Like Ulster crises are ever at an end. Former Conservative Prime Minister Balfour, who has fought Home Rule for Ireland his entire career, makes a speech of semi-surrender, accepting the inevitability of Home Rule, so long as Ulster is completely excluded from it forever. Asquith, who has been weaseling his way towards any compromise that might work, now has to get the Irish Nationalists to go along with a permanent division of their country. Good luck with that.

Alexander Berkman, chair of the Anti-Militarist League of the Anarchists, says the League will begin recruiting a regiment to assist the strikers in Colorado.

Headline of the Day -100: “Wilson to Try Mediation in Colorado War.” Meanwhile, strikers fight with mine guards and the Colorado National Guard, with a death toll of at least 15, as everybody tries to get in a last bit of mayhem before the federal troops arrive.

At the inquest for the Ludlow Massacre dead (25, including 14 children), a union doctor testifies that the militia set the camp’s tents on fire (in other words, it wasn’t a fire that started by accident and spread; the tents were too far apart for that) and that they fired on a ranch house in which women and children had taken shelter from the shooting. The doctor showed the white flag he used while trying to treat the injured; it was, of course, bullet-ridden.

Upton Sinclair and others picket John D. Rockefeller Jr’s offices, or rather, appear in mourning for the Colorado dead. “Free silence,” Sinclair calls it.

Carranza accepts mediation and Huerta accepts it “in principle” (well, they both only accept in principle, but Huerta’s track record suggests that he plans endless negotiations about negotiations). There is now an implicit armistice between the US, federal Mexican and Constitutionalist forces, and the US military won’t expand outwards from Vera Cruz or land troops elsewhere.

A federal judge rules that $600,000 in Mexican rebel currency seized by the US War Department must be returned because currency does not constitute munitions of war.

A story on the US War Dept sending troops to the Mexican border mentions a Col. Spunk, who works for Gen. Bliss. Just saying.

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