Today -100: August 12, 1916: Of burials, dead students, and censorship

Headline of the Day -100:

The National Woman’s Party will work in the 12 suffrage states to defeat Woodrow Wilson in November because he opposes the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.

Of the 38,160 German university students who were in the army last winter, 3,650 are now dead. On the plus side, there are more female university students now.

The US State Department passes on to the British Foreign Office the complaints of American reporters in Germany that their reports home, which go through London, are being censored. Lord Robert Cecil responds that the censorship is perfectly justified because “often things appear in these dispatches that are apt to create a false impression, and we take the liberty, for military reasons, of stopping them going through.” Military reasons, huh? It’s rare for someone to admit that censorship is not just about keeping information from the enemy (which is obviously not the case for information coming from the enemy), but to massage and shape the news. Anyway, another official says, German reports keep exaggerating Allied losses on the Somme, and it would be tedious to have to keep issuing corrections.

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