Today -100: November 23, 1919: Pigs caused the war

Sen. Warren G. Harding (R-Ohio) informally announces his candidacy for president (that is, he gets someone else to do it for him, because he’s shy) (or too busy fucking his mistress) (hashtag #presidential). He previously said he wouldn’t run. National Republican leaders are trying to get a bunch of “favorite son” candidates into the field in order to head off Gen. Leonard Wood and to divide up the delegates between them, leaving it to the party grandees to pick the candidate at the convention in a smoke-filled room, like God intended.

Democratic candidates aren’t declaring themselves yet because they’re politely waiting for Woodrow Wilson to make it official that he’s not running for a third term and Wilson, well, you know.

Coal miners accept Secretary of Labor William Wilson’s pay increase proposals, which he based on cost-of-living increases in the coal districts. Coal owners do not, and say they will no longer deal with Wilson because they accuse the Secretary of Labor of speaking with... labor.

Prof. Richard Lynch Garner, who, as we have seen, claims to have captured the Missing Link and to be able to speak with monkeys, sues a photography company for $100,000 because a picture of theirs ran in a number of newspapers supposedly showing the good professor kissing a monkey. The company says the picture was of a monkey trainer and it was the newspapers that said it was Garner. Beyond the identification issue, Garner’s complaint mentions the fact that the chimp in question was chained up, a practice Garner objects to; “He has also disapproved the custom or practice of embracing or kissing animals.”

The NYT Sunday Magazine has an excerpt from a Justice Department report on “Radicalism and Sedition Among the Negroes, As Reflected in Their Publications.” Many of these publications, the report says, are “always antagonistic to the white race, and openly, defiantly assertive of its own equality and even superiority” and they show “insolently race-centered condemnation of the white race”.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Not specific pigs. Count Carl Seilern, a former adviser to the former Austrian emperor, attributes the hostility between Serbia and Austria in the 15 years or so before the war to Austria cutting off the sale of Serb pigs to Hungary.

The North Dakota Supreme Court says Gov. Lynn Frazier (Non-Partisan League) can’t just take over the coal mines. Justice James Robinson’s opinion complains about laws “pandering to the labor vote [which] permit and encourage strikes, picketing and idleness” and limit work to 8 hours a day. He further complains that “without any grievance our well-paid miners have quit work and struck pursuant to orders from some labor agitators.”

The Women’s Christian Temperance Union decides not to try to get tobacco banned.

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