Thursday, October 27, 2016

Today -100: October 27, 1916: The business of neutrality is over


Music is broadcast over the wireless, from the laboratory of the Columbia Graphophone Company. It was heard, apart from a few interruptions by the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s storm warning broadcasts, at the Hotel Astor, which is like two whole miles away.

Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt responds to Charles Evans Hughes’s remark that “we must pay less attention to punctuation and more to targets” by accusing him of “casting a veiled aspersion” on the Navy. But what about the veiled aspersion he cast on punctuation, Franklin? WHAT ABOUT THE PUNCTUATION?

Speaking of punctuation...

Headline of the Day -100:


Ack, “old-time”! They’re everywhere! 

Other lines from Roosevelt’s speech: “I am being held up to the American people as a bloodthirsty being, when, as a matter of fact, I am a peaceful literary man.” “If a person lets the idea get abroad that slapping his face is a safe and healthy amusement he is liable to have a lot of trouble.”

Woodrow Wilson says this is the last war that the US can keep out of, that wars are now fought on such a scale that “the business of neutrality is over.” In future wars. Not this one. We can totally keep out of this one.

An attempt by the pro-German “American Independence Conference” to line up German priests, Catholic and Lutheran, against Hughes in the Midwest did not go well, and now Catholic Archbishop of Milwaukee Sebastian Gebhard Messmer bans priests having anything at all to do with politics.

Headline of the Day -100:  


The US War Department issues a statement that it has information that “enemies of the Administration’s policy toward Mexico” have arranged for an attack at a border point sometime before the election in order to influence voters to vote against Wilson. Some hours later they clarify that they didn’t mean Republicans, they meant Mexican politicians opposed to Carranza.


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