Today -100: September 14, 1918: Where do we go from here?

Pres. Wilson sends a letter to the union of striking machinists in Bridgeport, Connecticut who refuse to accept a National War Labor Board ruling. He calls their strike “disloyalty and dishonor” and threatens to revoke their draft exemptions. Simultaneously, to prove his even-handedness between management & labor, Wilson orders the take-over of Smith & Wesson after its refusal to accept the Board’s order that it stop (for the duration of the war) making workers sign contracts not to join a union.

Surgeon General Rupert Blue admits that there was a Spanish flu outbreak at Fort Morgan, Alabama in August. The last influenza pandemic was in 1889-90, so Blue offers information on how to handle it to doctors who have never seen one. He has concluded that quarantines are useless against the disease. The Navy is banning sailors from Boston because of the spread of flu there.

Headline of the Day -100:

And we’re gonna keep printing these rumors in the hope that eventually it might be true.

The public is informed of Lloyd George’s influenza.

Journalist John Reed, in a lecture, says Russia wouldn’t have signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty if the US had promised it food and ammunition, and Lenin & Trotsky had sent Woodrow Wilson a cable to that effect 6 days before signing but received no reply. The anonymous but presumably governmental response to this claim is that that cable was just another sneaky attempt to get the US to recognize the Bolshevik government. Reed also accuses Britain of being behind the attempted assassination of Lenin. He will, of course, be arrested for this speech.

Headline of the Day -100:  

“The battle's done and we kind of won, So we sound our vict’ry cheer...”

Oh all right, here’s the actual song.

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