Today -100: August 6, 1917: Of court-martials, confessions of faith, and attempted lynchings

Kerensky withdraws his resignation. But he’s still struggling to put together a cabinet and in particular to get the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) on board. The Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviets are worried that Kerensky’s consolidation of power would reduce their influence. He’s also trying to bring in prominent former exiles like the anarchist Prince Pyotr Kropotkin, who will be offered the post of education minister, which he will refuse.

Gen. Kornilov has a general who refused to shoot deserters court-martialed and sentenced to death.

The National Security League (a hyper-loyalist group) demanded that all German-American organizations denounce the German government and tell all their relatives back in Germany that they do so. The groups mostly wrote back to tell the League to go fuck itself. Now it’s demanding that all 450 German-language newspapers subscribe to a “confession of faith” that “the objects of America in this war are noble, unselfish, and that they square with the highest aims of morality and religion” while “the aims of Germany in this war are sordid, selfish, and opposed to the principles of human liberty.” And so on.

Frank La Monte, a Socialist candidate for mayor of Evansville, Indiana, who has been making speeches against conscription, narrowly escapes being lynched.

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