Today -100: November 22, 1916: So suck it, Victoria

Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph I dies. He was 86 and had been on the throne since he was 18, a longer reign than Queen Victoria’s.

Here’s the London Daily Mail obit: “Emperor Francis Joseph had been politically defunct for two years. In the present war he played a very insignificant part and it is exceedingly doubtful whether had he been in vigorous health he would ever have consented to become the passive agent of a German plot.” Etc.

The Habsburg family tree in general and the line of succession in particular have been... subject to revision... over FJ’s lifetime. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, of course, but also FJ’s only son Crown Prince Rudolf’s suicide pact with his mistress at Mayerling in 1889, the execution of his brother Maximilian in Mexico, his wife’s assassination by an anarchist, one of his nephews lost at sea. Also his granddaughter Elisabeth Marie (Rudolf’s daughter) shot her husband’s actress mistress to death

If Germany does not intend to give up its Polish territory to the puppet Polish buffer state it and Austria announced, the German state of Prussia really doesn’t intend to give up anything. That land is “sacred and inviolable,” says Prussian Interior Minister Count Friedrich von Loebell. The Prussian Diet votes for no portion of Prussian Poland to be given to, um, the Poles. Though to head this off, Prussia might even give Poles some rights. 

Norway, which is not participating in the war (it has a note from its mum), will have to institute food rationing. And Britain orders a potato census.

The New York State Woman’s Suffrage Party plans to push for another women’s suffrage referendum in 1917, even though the 1915 referendum failed. This time it promises “No more pink teas, no more parlor meetings and abstract lectures for the suffrage cause.”

For the first time, the Philippines’ Senate has a full-blooded Moro, Hadji Butu. There are also two Moro – or, as the NYT puts it, “reclaimed savages” – in the lower house.

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