Today -100: December 6, 1914: It still has that new revolution smell

Headline of, Oh, Pretty Much Once a Week -100:  “New Revolution Begins in Mexico.”  Led by a couple of Huerta’s generals, Emilio Campo and José Inés Salazar.  Salazar escaped a couple of weeks ago from jail in Albuquerque, where he was held on a perjury charge, which I think must relate to his acquittal by a federal jury in May on a charge of smuggling 100,000 rounds of ammunition into Mexico.  After this current revolutionary movement fails, Salazar will once again flee into the US, and a year from now will be acquitted again.  Somehow he’ll wind up joining Pancho Villa’s forces, even though he had been in charge of fighting Villa under Huerta.  He’ll be killed in battle in 1917.

The departure of the Lusitania from New York harbor is delayed while the new “war tax” on tickets is collected from passengers.  This amounts to $3 for steerage passengers on their $37.50 ticket.

According to official reports, “Nothing of importance happened in the Carpathians yesterday.”

Vice President Marshall says no one cares that he’s taking paid lecturing gigs.

Belgium is reported, falsely I assume, to have hidden some of its art treasures, including a Rubens, from the Germans at the bottom of the River Scheldt.

Theodore Roosevelt has an op-ed in the NYT entitled “Our Responsibility in Mexico” (this link is more readable than the NYT’s; it’s his 1916 book Fear God and Take Your Own Part [!]; today’s article starts on p.230 at the words “THE SOUND OF LAUGHTER AND OF PLAYING  CHILDREN HAS BEEN STILLED IN MEXICO.”)  TR accuses Wilson of doing both too much in Mexico (refusing to recognize Huerta’s coup regime in the first place, then landing troops at Vera Cruz) and too little (not... actually I’m not sure what he thinks Wilson should have done, but he accuses him of having “hit soft” and withdrawn before accomplishing anything).  I believe this type of criticism is called the Full John McCain.  He says that Wilson’s putting the American finger on the scale in favor of Carranza/Villa has “produce[d] much evil and no good and [made] us responsible for the actions of a peculiarly lawless, ignorant and blood-thirsty faction” and cites the many acts of violence and the harassment of the Catholic Church.

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