Today -100: November 2, 1917: Yellow calls to yellow

The Bolsheviks do badly in Russian municipal elections, 7% in the big cities, less in small towns. And they abandon plans for a demonstration in Petrograd. So the government is pretty sure the Bolshies are on the decline.

Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky tells the Associated Press that Russia is “worn out” and everyone else should just carry on with the war while Russia has a bit of a lie-down. He also complains that the German navy is in the Baltic and where the hell is the British navy?

NYC Mayor John Purroy Mitchel releases a poster of the letterhead of the Friends of Peace listing John Hylan as an honorary vice president. Hylan calls it a forgery, and again states that a lot of people were once listed as hon veeps without their permission, including several in the Mitchel campaign and administration, and anyway that was before the US entered the war, as was the endorsement of Hylan by the Hearst-owned German-language Deutsches Journal in 1915 that Mitchel is now citing as proof of treason or something. Mitchel says the result of this election will be seen in Germany, and if German soldiers read that “the Kaiser wins in New York,” they will be encouraged and strengthened, and “the American in the trench a hundred yards away may pay with his life as the penalty for disloyalty at home. The time has come to choose between the seditious and the loyal, between enemies and friends, between traitors and Americans.”

Theodore Roosevelt on Socialist mayoral candidate Morris Hillquit: “Yellow calls to yellow, and that is all there is in that campaign.”

By the way, look who else is running, for the #2 position in city government.

In Britain, the Pankhursts’ Women’s Social and Political Union changes its name to the Woman’s Party with a platform of a little bit of feminism and a lot of screw-Germany-into-the-ground-forever.

The Metropolitan Opera decides to leave Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde out of the new season. In London German operas have been performed only in English translation since the start of the war. Tomorrow the Met will announce the exclusion of all German-language opera. It was the Met that originally brought Parsifal to the US and which gave the first performance of the complete Ring Cycle in the Western Hemisphere. German operas still under copyright, like Strauss’s Rosenkavelier, would actually be illegal to perform under the Trading with the Enemy Act.

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