Today -100: May 26, 1912: How can a man speak of the questions of the day when a prizefight is going on?

One of Theodore Roosevelt’s guards is run over and killed by TR’s car in Atlantic City after he fell off its running board. Meanwhile, Taft is driving around New Jersey at speeds of up to 70 mph.

In Elizabeth, NJ, Roosevelt says Taft can’t win the popular vote and can’t win over the Republican national convention either without “deliberate cheating,” i.e., refusing to sit TR delegates.

Woodrow Wilson asks, “How can a man speak of the questions of the day when a prizefight is going on?” How indeed.

2,000 people help lynch a black man in Tyler, Texas. They make him confess to attacking a white woman, then set him on fire, as is the custom.