Today -100: October 18, 1914: Of assassinations, murder, war taxes, and the World League for the Peace of Righteousness

Gen. Uribe-Uribe, the head of the Liberal Party in Colombia, is assassinated. With an axe.

The German Social Democratic Party newspaper Vorwärts is banned again.

France is expropriating German-owned businesses, including a department store.

The insurance industry newspaper The Spectator says that the murder rate in the US is increasing. 6,500 last year.

Rumor of the Day: The airplane flown by British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey’s brother is shot down and he is taken prisoner by the Germans.  I couldn’t confirm that Grey actually had any brothers still alive (following the unfortunate lion and buffalo incidents).

The “war tax” passes the US Senate, with no Republicans voting in favor, and a minor revolt amongst the cotton Southern Democrats.

Theodore Roosevelt has an article in the Sunday NYT about how silly Woodrow Wilson’s arbitration treaties are, and what would really preserve the peace is a tribunal of the great powers, a World League for the Peace of Righteousness, all pledged to militarily back the decision of a world court.

Major Clarence Wiener offers to leave Harvard University $10 million in his will if they fire psych professor Hugo Münsterberg, a prominent advocate of Germany’s position in the war.  Wiener is remembered at Harvard for a rather brief undergraduate career and for once getting drunk and shooting a stuffed lion he kept in his rooms.  Münsterberg offers his resignation but Harvard refuses to accept it.  Also, they correctly disbelieve that Wiener actually has $10 million (he’s also not really a major) despite his invention of an expandable boot-tree.  Wiener in fact left nothing but debts when he hanged himself in 1932.

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