Today -100: July 23, 1916: Boy, they weren’t prepared for that

A bomb explodes at a preparedness parade in San Francisco, killing 6, including a Civil War vet. There was a warning sent to newspapers. Emma Goldman, in town lecturing, denies it was the anarchists. The SF district attorney will frame a couple of innocent radicals for it, as was the custom.

A “Women’s War Procession” in London features women in the uniforms of their new jobs substituting for men. It’s organized by the remnants of the Women’s Social and Political Union. The Daily Chronicle suggests, probably with good reason, that the government funded the parade. There are also banners calling for Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes to be appointed to the War Council. Hughes was recently in Britain on a visit and his blunt Aussie-style talk about the war impressed Christabel Pankhurst and a lot of others.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazanov is forced out. Sorry, he “retired... at his own request.” He made the mistake of proposing to offer Poland autonomy after the war (a Poland reuniting the parts Prussia, Russia and Austria divided amongst themselves in the 18th century).

One item that will be making the submarine Deutschland’s perilous return voyage of to Germany: a copy of Dr. Louis Dechmann’s
book The Dechmann Law of the Determination of Sex at Will, which he is sending to Kaiser Wilhelm. Dechmann breeds poultry including six-toed chickens, based on the “law of latent reserve energy,” because science.

Sweden says it will attack any submarine using its waters, and bans planes over-flying it.

Polio death count, New York City: 555. The towns and cities now banning New Yorkers are ignoring their Health Department certificates.

Seems like only a day (and 100 years) ago that former NY Governor William Sulzer was saying that he hadn’t even wanted the Prohibition Party nomination for president that they didn’t give him. And so it was. Now he accepts the nomination of the American Party.

Alice Paul announces that her Woman’s Party will campaign against anti-suffragists in the 12 states with women’s suffrage.

The NYT Sunday Magazine has an article by William Burns of the Burns Detective Agency on the “big American crime”: blackmail.  Especially in New York.

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