Today -100: April 4, 1914: Of spies, dead boxers, French scandals, bosses, and sangers

Huerta denies that Torreón has fallen.

A British court convicts Frederick Adolphus Gould (real name: Schroeder) of spying on the Navy for the Germans (he ran a pub with a naval clientele and was able to tell Germany many technical details of British battleships). He is sentenced to six years followed by deportation, the longest sentence ever given in Britain for espionage. This article may well be the first NYT mention of “the secret service police,” five years after MI5 was formed. Schroeder’s wife was indicted as well, but this was later withdrawn.

Headline of the Day -100: “Boxer Dies of Pneumonia.” In the ring, mind you. James Grant, at the end of a ten-round bantam-weight match. His opponent, John Eggers, is exonerated.

The French Chamber of Assemblies disposes of a scandal, rejecting by a vote of 342 to 141 a motion calling for criminal proceedings against former prime ministers Ernest Monis and Joseph Caillaux (you’ll remember Caillaux from his wife shooting the editor of Le Figaro a couple of weeks ago), for interfering with the investigation of financier/scam artist Henri Rochette. They did put a bit of pressure on the magistrates to postpone Rochette’s trial; when it resumed his lawyers tried to say the statute of limitations had expired, Silvio Berlusconi style, but it didn’t work. The debate in the Chamber was the usual calm Gallic affair: only one deputy threatened to challenge Prime Minister Doumergue to a duel.

“Boss” Barnes (or is it “Boss” Bill?), chairman of the NY Republican State Committee, sues William Anderson, the head of the NY Anti-Saloon League, for libel for calling him the “Boss of the Liquor End of the Republican Party.” He objects to the word boss, possibly because in NY it’s usually associated with Tammany, i.e., Democratic bosses? His suit claims that “boss” is “an odious and opprobrious epithet.”

The Post Office bans Margaret Sanger’s magazine The Woman Rebel from the US mails, for advocating birth control.

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