Today -100: April 15, 1920: No patriotic American could decline to serve

Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer blames the railroad strike on the IWW as part of a world-wide communist conspiracy, as was the custom. The government thinks the railway workers will go back to work once the government informs them they’ve been duped. Palmer says the strike is part of a program “to capture the political and economic power, to overthrow the Government and to establish a dictatorship on the part of what they call the proletariat, and transport to this country the exact chaotic condition that exists in Russia.”

Gen. Pershing says that he’s not running for president, buuuuut “no patriotic American could decline to serve” if The People called him. Just couldn’t do it.

The Irish 89 hunger-striking prisoners are suddenly released, possibly because a general strike was called demanding it (I think this was its first day). The authorities had tried to divide the prisoners, releasing only some of them. And it tried to release them on license, to return to prison after their health recovered, under the Cat and Mouse Act brought in in 1913 for hunger-striking suffragettes. The prisoners rejected both proposals.

Mexican presidential candidate Gen. Álvaro Obregón flees the capital. And there was an assassination attempt against Pres. Carranza. Federal troops are moving into position to invade the now-independent Republic of Sonora.

Striking railroaders deny that they are revolutionaries. They just want better wages and shit.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Sadly, in an outrigger, not on a surfboard.

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