Today -100: June 14, 1914: Of furies, Chios and Lesbos, republics, darlings, and Vice President Adlai Stevenson

Queen Mary is threatening to leave London for the rest of the Season if any more of those horrid “furies,” as she calls them, show up to disrupt her entertainments and remind her that women are being tortured in British prisons.

Oh, and suffragettes burned another cricket pavilion, this one in Reigate. One begins to suspect they have something against cricket.

Greece formally annexes the islands of Chios and Mitylene (I assume by the latter the NYT means Lesbos, on which the town of Mitylene is located), which it seized in the first Balkan War but hadn’t formally annexed. Turkey is not best pleased.

There’s been a debate in the NYT letters page over whether NYC should have a public defender’s office.

The Niagara conference is discussing who the next president of Mexico should be, almost as if their opinion is, you know, relevant. The US wants a prominent Constitutionalist, the Huertaists want an obscure one, and I think the ABC countries want a neutral guy (later the Huertaists would insist on a neutral). Carranza’s delegates still haven’t shown up, evidently having been given orders to come no closer than Buffalo until word came whether they’d be admitted.

Crowds have taken to the streets in major Italian cities and many minor ones. Railroads and telegraph wires and churches are destroyed. A republic is proclaimed in many of these places (the Times is a little unclear on whether anarchists or socialists or some unholy combination is behind these events, but then it’s not clear that the Times understands the difference). And then the military crushed them. Many (well, some unknown number) are dead, but the NYT persists in seeing it as a “farce,” because Italians are funny or something.

France: René Viviani succeeds in forming a cabinet. Nobody expects it to last very long.

In Butte, Montana, Wobblies attack a miners’ union parade and invade the Miners’ Union Hall. Would have blown it up, but there was a saloon next door.

The German army breaks another zeppelin, and two more French aviators die in a crash.

Name of the Day -100: Jasper T. Darling, the secretary of the National Bureau for the Advancement of Patriotism, who is complaining that Sen. Smoot plagiarized an old speech of his on Decoration Day.

Death of the Day -100: Adlai E. Stevenson, vice president in the second Cleveland administration and William Jennings Bryan’s running mate in 1896 after the D’s failed to give him the nomination for president, making him one of only two vice presidents to run for the thankless job again under a different presidential candidate. Grandfather of Adlai II, who ran for president against Eisenhower twice.

Charles Fairbanks, if you were wondering who the second one was, and don’t pretend you weren’t.

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