Today -100: April 21, 1911: Of ultimata, lynchings, and retaliations

Francisco Madero gives President-for-Not-Very-Long Díaz 24 hours to resign, or he will attack Juarez.

Sen. William Stone (D-Missouri) introduces a resolution, in the badly chosen words of the NY Times, “authorizing the President, if necessary, to cross the frontier and by force guarantee the protection of American lives and property”. Let’s all take a moment to imagine President Taft waddling across the border to by force guarantee the protection of American lives and property. Other senators objected that this resolution would be tantamount to a declaration of war. It is tabled for now.

A black man who shot a white man in a pool room in Livermore, Kentucky, is lynched in the opera house (which the marshal had thought more defensible than the jail house). 50 men shot him from the orchestra pit.

The Republican-dominated Rhode Island Legislature refuses to appropriate money for a new science hall at RI State College in retaliation for the role some of its professors took in the 1910 election working for the Democrats, who took control of the South Kingstown city council.