Today -100: September 9, 1914: The foreign barbarian yoke is gone

Woodrow Wilson proclaims October 4 a day for Americans to pray for peace in Europe.

Austria, whose troops (with Germany’s) are in Russia’s Polish territories, issues a proclamation to the Jews there asking for their support, saying that Austria brings equal rights and religious freedom.  “The foreign barbarian yoke is gone.”

British Chancellor David Lloyd George plans to out-spend his way to victory: “The first hundred million our enemy can spend as well as we, but the last they cannot, thank God.”

Christabel Pankhurst gives a speech suggesting that militant women might be able to rouse spirit of militancy in men.  She says, “The defeat of our country and the victory of Germany would be a calamity from the women’s point of view.”  Christabel is in the process of adjusting her rhetoric: where before Asquith’s government represented the worst of masculine attitudes, now Germany does.  Speaking of Asquith, she says, “I agree with the Prime Minister thoroughly at this time, and I hope he will never disagree again with me.”

Inez Milholland, who has mostly retired from suffrage activism to pursue her legal career, is suing  the Sociological Research Film Corporation for payment of her legal fees for her defense of the film “The Inside of the White Slave Traffic.” They respond that she can’t collect legal fees because as a Swede she is ineligible to practice law in New York (they’re right that she lost her American citizenship when she married a foreigner, although he’s actually Dutch not Swedish).

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