Today -100: June 24, 1914: Of battleships, dancing, mashers, home rule, and dynamite

The House votes to sell a couple of old battleships to Greece and use the proceeds to build a shiny new dreadnought. Turkey is not best pleased.

The audience at a Birmingham, Alabama theater expressed disapproval (hissed, walked out) at the sight of a black man and a white woman dancing. No, not dancing together – they weren’t suicidal – but one act following the other. According to the Birmingham News, this constituted an assertion of social equality which cannot be tolerated in the South. The police have forced the firing of the black man because of course they have.

The Massachusetts State Senate passes the “masher’s bill” which punishes men who accost women or girls with whom they are not acquainted with 6 months in prison.

In Reading, England, a presumably suffragette bomb fails to explode in the Church of St Mary the Virgin. There’s probably a joke in there somewhere.

Oh, I just thought of one. I’ll be keeping it to myself.

The British government introduces a bill to amend its Home Rule Bill – which isn’t even law yet, having passed the House of Commons but not the Lords – along the lines already rejected by Sir Edward Carson, but since Carson didn’t negotiate, just said no (as is the custom in Northern Ireland), it hasn’t been altered. Each county in Ulster will vote on whether to exclude itself from the jurisdiction of the Home Rule Parliament for six years only.

France and Germany are threatening to seize Haiti’s customs houses unless it pays back its loans. Nice to see France and Germany getting along so well, isn’t it?

IWW miners storm a meeting of the Western Federation of Miners in Butte, Montana and are shot at by sheriff’s deputies, who hit 3, at least 1 fatally. One was a visitor who thought it was a parade until, you know, the bullet grazed him. The sheriff shouts to the crowd that he wants 500 men to volunteer as deputies. He gets 0 men. Sniping goes on back and forth for a few hours without any more injuries. At midnight the Wobbly miners dynamite the Miners’ Union Hall.

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