Today -100: September 20, 1917: One looming shadow if this war is its drift toward socialism

1/5th of the men drafted in Manhattan failed to show up.

Food Administrator Herbert Hoover warns a war conference of the US Chamber of Commerce that if business doesn’t to its public duty and cooperate with the government in the war effort, the result might be socialism. Just look at Russia, he says.

After Bolshevik resolutions – exclusion of the propertied classes from government, abolition of private property, the Soviet to seize power from the provisional government, etc – win in the Petrograd Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviet, the outvoted executive committee resigns.

Argentina’s Senate votes 23 to 1 for breaking off relations with Germany.

The Republican primaries in Philadelphia’s Fifth Ward (the “Bloody Fifth”) are marked by riots and a blackjack attack on one candidate by a paid thug who then shoots and kills a cop who was guarding the candidate. He is captured along with others from a group of men recruited in Jersey City – by a man called “Little Neck,” no less – to vote illegally and intimidate the opposition.

Italy refuses a request from the Jewish Union of Frankfurt that it allow the export of palm branches for use in religious services.

Alice Smyth Burton Jay sues Chappell & Co., Ltd., the publishers of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” for stealing the chorus from her 1908 song Yakima (beginning “I’m on my way to Yakima”). She wants $100,000.

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