Today -100: January 7, 1912: 47

New Mexico is now the 47th state, after 62 years as a territory. It has 1 million cattle, 4 million sheep, and 327,396 people (1910). Its first governor is William Calhoun McDonald (D). Its first US senators are both Republican, Thomas Catron and Albert Fall, who will be President Harding’s Interior secretary and go to prison for his role in the Teapot Dome scandal.

Those 70 people who died in a Berlin homeless shelter did not succumb to bad herring or the Purple Death after all, but to bad schnapps.

The city of Paris has banned handbills. Shops have responded with... unsolicited phone calls. The invention of telemarketing?

German Reichstag elections are coming up. The Socialists are expected to win the one district in Berlin they didn’t capture last time, which is the district where the kaiser keeps his castles. He said in 1907 that if the district went SPD, he’d move to Potsdam. The Conservative party is accusing the Socialists of opposing the army and navy and “national obligations,” which people take to mean that the government is planning new taxes to pay for an increase in the size of the army and navy. The Conservatives are talking up the English Peril. Evidently Britain planned a sneak attack to invade Germany last summer.