Today -100: December 13, 1914: Of conciliation, coups, Germans in boxes, lynchings, and suffrage movies

Pres. Wilson’s Colorado Conciliation Commission sees no reason to travel to, you know, Colorado.

Carranza declares that he now holds all executive, judicial, legislative and military powers.

Deposed Mexican dictator Victoriano Huerta, now in exile in Spain, writes the NYT to deny that he is supporting Pancho Villa. “I can never have dealings with Carranza, the four-flusher; Zapata, the highwayman, nor with Villa, the jailbird.”

Headline of the Day -100: “Find German Officer Hidden In a Big Box.” A German spy (?) escapes from internment in Britain and puts himself on a steam ferry to Rotterdam. In a big box. Labeled “non-poisonous safety matches.”

The number of lynchings in the US may be on the decline, but not as much, I think, as reporting of lynchings in the NYT. The AP reports an epidemic in Caddo Parish (Shreveport, Louisiana), 8 in the last year, 5 in the last 10 days. Of the 8, 7 were charged with murdering white men, one with raping a white woman. The latest, Charles Watkins Lewis, was burned at the stake.

Women in London have switched from knitting warm clothing for the troops to something much more practical: rolling cigarettes for them.

The Sunday NYT book review section takes note of a quickie biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II by Asa Don Dickinson (author of “Wild Flowers Worth Knowing”) which declares the monarch “not a bad fellow.”

And the arts section takes note of what it calls the first women’s suffrage propaganda movie, “Your Girl and Mine: A Woman Suffrage Play.” It tells the story of a woman who faces various forms of legal discrimination in states without women’s suffrage before moving to a more enlightened state. Looks like the film hasn’t survived.

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