Today -100: April 28, 1918: Of tsars, assassins, hung juries and noble hands, nonsinking ships, the Solomon of the Essex Market Court, and unexpected attacks of common sense

A counter-revolution supposedly breaks out in Petrograd. It names Alexei Nikolaevich, the 13-year-old hemophilic former tsarevich, as the new True Tsar of All the Russias.

Gavrilo Prinzip, the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, dies in prison of tuberculosis at 23.

There’s a hung jury in the prosecution of Max Eastman and others associated with The Masses. The prosecutor vows to try again, right after he prosecutes Irish radical Jeremiah O’Leary for The Bull. Incidentally, the judge in this case is Augustus Noble Hand, who 15 years later will rule that James Joyce’s Ulysses is not obscene.

Headline of the Day -100: 

“Guys, so I got this idea for improving our ships. Now, hear me out. What if they were... NON-sinking?”

A New York magistrate settles a case where babies may – or may not – have been switched in a hospital maternity ward last September. He asks everyone in the courtroom to weigh in on which baby looked like which parents, and then ordered the mothers to swap babies. “Mr. Leoniff said at his home yesterday afternoon that he did not believe that he had obtained his own baby, but on the other hand was not sure that the other baby was his.”

Headline of the Day -100:  

The British food controller resigns because he worked so hard making sure people had food to eat that he forgot to eat. YOU HAD ONE JOB! He liked to boast that he could keep himself healthy on way less food than the rations he imposed on the nation. He was wrong and will die soon. And his daughter will try to take his seat in the House of Lords.

The Lord Mayor of Dublin was planning to come to the US to lobby Wilson against conscription being introduced into Ireland, but has cancelled. The NYT applauds this as “an unexpected attack of common sense.” It says Irish independence based on German support would be treason against “orderly freedom” and says Germany wants “a peace of annexations, national humiliation, and ruin”. Someone inform the Times that Ireland knows all about annexations, national humiliation and ruin. The paper threatens withdrawal of US support for Irish independence if the Irish choose to resist fighting Germany, so at least it realizes that British rule is a punishment.

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