Today -100: May 27, 1915: But born they are

Headline of the Day -100:

Interesting to see the Times using the term “birth control,” coined by Margaret Sanger just the year before. Anyway, this is a public meeting at the Academy of Medicine at which “The terms used were as frank as those of the lecture room of the medical schools in spite of the fact that the men and women present in about equal proportions were not of the profession”. Dr. Abraham Jacobi (a pioneering pediatrician and former president of the AMA who was a political prisoner in Germany after the 1848 Revolution and a friend of Marx and Engels) calls for elimination of the NY law making it illegal for anyone (including doctors) to give out birth control information. He makes the case on eugenic grounds, saying that hereditary epileptics, idiots, etc “should not have been permitted to be born.” Also, children of poor people, who get insufficient feeding, coarse clothing, and live in congested, cold or overheated tenements. “Would it be wise on the part of the children not to be born? Surely, but born they are”.

New York State Supreme Court Justice Edward Whitaker bans the Commissioner of Licenses from preventing the showing of the 1914 movie The Ordeal, which the National Board of Censors thought might upset German-Americans. Whitaker says there’s no such thing as German-Americans, there’s just Americans: “What has lately become known as hyphenated citizenship has no color or standing.” He also says the commissioner should ignore the self-appointed National Board of Censors.

New York state’s Committee on Elementary Schools rejects Major Sidney Grant’s complaint about the students of PS 165 in Brooklyn singing “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.”

In an editorial entitled “For Liberty and Democracy,” the NYT finds it significant that Italy entered the war because the people clamored for it and forced the government to respond, while the German and Austrian emperors didn’t even consult the people. “Italy’s war is an Italian war; Germany’s war is a Potsdam war. ... Aside from Russia [!], the war is one between autocracy and democracy; between the peoples and the Kings”. I call bullshit.

Unfortunate Headline of the Day -100:

 

Headline of the Day -100: 

150 lepers have been secretly (and presumably forcibly) removed from a Manila hospital from which they’ve taken to coming and going as they please, to the leper colony on the island of Culion.

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