Tuesday, May 08, 2012

Today -100: May 8, 1912: Of $30 dinners, 3-cent pieces, wills, effeminate schoolboys, and waifs


Two competing Republican conventions are held in Arkansas. Each elects competing slates of delegates to the national convention. The Taft convention also voted for women’s suffrage, “when the women have all signified their desire to vote.”

In Washington state, Taft’s loss to Roosevelt in Pierce County is attributed to a $30-a-plate dinner he attended last October (rather than holding a $1 dinner that more people could have afforded to come to). Still, I’m pretty sure Taft ate $30 worth.

Punch cartoon this week.


The caption reads: Uncle Sam (philosophically watching the Taft-Roosevelt scrap): “Wal! I guess old friends are the best!”

A letter to the NYT by Alice Hill Chittenden, who will soon take on the exalted post of president New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, writes that evolution means the increasing differentiation and specialization of the sexes and that the women’s suffrage movement “is in fact largely a condition of hysteria”.

The NYT defends Maryland’s negro voters against accusations made by Taft’s campaign manager that they were bribed to vote for Roosevelt. But the paper does press its case against democratic elections, insisting that if Maryland’s turnout had been higher, Roosevelt wouldn’t have done nearly as well, and that the “more intelligent Republicans” voted for Taft.

The House has voted for the minting of three-cent coins, which have been lobbied for by cities where that’s the fare on street cars. The vote also calls for a half-cent coin.

Headline of the Day -100 (LA Times): “Are Our Schoolboys Effeminate?” Responding to the director of public schools in Munich, Georg Kerschensteiner, who says that the reliance of American schools on women teachers is producing “effeminacy and flabbiness” in schoolboys, the LAT says that the US has lots of college athletes, boxers, soldiers, etc., so there. It also says that everyone has aspects of both sexes: “temperamentally and psychologically every individual is really bi-sexual.”

81 “frowsy and illiterate” (according to the LAT) IWW members hijack a freight train, forcing the crew to bring them to San Diego, where they are promptly arrested.

The will of John Jacob Astor, who went down with the Titanic, specifies that his widow will lose the rather large income he bequeathed her if she remarries, which is a thing men used to put in their wills. This is the guy whose chivalry was highly praised when he died.

The “Titanic waifs” have been identified and their mother is coming from Paris to claim them (one of the waifs, Michel Navratil, Jr., will die in 2001, the last male Titanic survivor).

1 comment:

  1. "every individual is really bi-sexual."

    Wow, that's pretty advanced thinking for 1912 - or even 2012.

    ReplyDelete