Daily Telegraphy

So why do I read the Daily Telegraph alongside proper newspapers?

Well, at this very moment the website’s front page features these stories:

David Cameron asks why people care about Kim Kardashian. Also, he doesn’t like hip hop. Shocker.

MI5 agents will wear wigs and makeups when testifying against alleged Al Qaida dude Abid Naseer in Brooklyn. My study of British historical documentaries (okay, Monty Python) suggests that this means they will testify in drag and in falsetto.

Why women should not be on top (on top of men anyway) during sex (I shrieked and stopped reading at the phrase “penile fractures”).

Labour MP Jim Dobbin, who has the most Labour-MP name ever, or rather had, because when he was visiting Poland his hosts told him it was customary to down a shot after every course. He will be missed, probably.

Ukip Leicester local councillor (and candidate for Parliament) Lynton Yates, who has the most Ukip-councillor name ever, wants anyone getting government benefits banned from driving.

16-year-old John Denno has done the rise and fall of the Third Reich in Legos.

Berlin book burnings.

Kristallnacht.

The liberation of Auschwitz.

Hitler’s suicide.

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Today -100: January 21, 1915: This blind barbarian vengeance doesn’t terrify us

The British shrug off yesterday’s zeppelin raids. Says the London Star: “This blind barbarian vengeance doesn’t terrify us. Rather do we deduce from its comparative impotence new confidence in the triumph of right over might.” A church was damaged in an English town with the most English-townish name ever, Snettisham. Which is 4 miles away from the king’s estate at Sandringham, so there are rumors that the Germans were trying to assassinate him but got lost in the dark (anyway, the king wasn’t home).

The people of King’s Lynn are sure the Zeps must have had help from spies in identifying targets, since the bombs fell quite near (without actually hitting) such vital targets as an oil storage tank and the King’s Lynn post office. The MP for the area, Holcombe Ingleby, which is the most English-Tory-MPish name ever, will claim that two unknown automobiles had used searchlights to point out targets.

British insurance companies have sprung into action, doubling their rates for policies against damage by aircraft.

The air raids have alerted the NYT to the existence of “a German policy that does not seem to have been very well understood”, a policy of terrorizing civilian populations so they will pressure their governments to end the war. No, really, the NYT is just figuring this out now. But they figure the ineffectiveness of zeppelins, at least in this raid, should reassure the British people, because Londoners have a greater chance of being eaten by a lion than bombed by a zeppelin, probably.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: Austrian Emperor Franz Josef, having stubbornly failed to drop dead despite many rumors saying he was going to, is now totally going to abdicate.

Australia’s capital is temporarily moved from Melbourne to Sydney.

22 of the Carteret, New Jersey deputy sheriffs who shot up the strikers have been arrested for manslaughter. The rest remain guarding the fertilizer plant.

Following that pool-room raid in Maryland where some congresscritters – or perhaps some people who just claimed to be members of Congress – asserted their immunity to arrest, there is talk about issuing them with special badges or something which they would be required to wear under their lapel, like that of a secret society.

The lower house of the Idaho Legislature passes a bill against aliens owning land.

All non-combatants are ordered out of Cracow within 48 hours.

A negro, Edward Johnson, is lynched in Vicksburg, Mississippi, for stealing cattle.

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Today -100: January 20, 1915: Of carteretism, colonial wars, civilizing flags, humorous soldiers, zeppelins, and cardinals

Deputy sheriffs employed as guards by the Liebig Fertilizer Works in Carteret, New Jersey, shoot 20 strikers, killing one; four more will die later. All of them were shot from behind, presumably as they were running away. The strike is against a 20% wage cut and they had blocked a railroad line to prevent strikebreakers being brought in. The deputies are claiming the strikers fired first; no witness who is not a deputy sheriff is backing up their story.

Germany invaded Portuguese Angola a couple of months ago but still hasn’t declared war on Portugal, evidently because Portugal would then seize as prizes of war all the ships it interned at the start of the war. The war between the two countries is confined entirely to the colonies.

Senator-Elect Warren G. Harding says “The magnificent resources of Mexico never will be given to mankind, and that country never will come into its own until it is brought under the civilizing influences of the American flag. How and when that condition will be brought about is not for me to say at this time, but it is coming.”

Rudyard Kipling claims Britain’s soldiers “are humourous because, for all our long faces, we are the only genuinely humorous race on earth.”

Zeppelin raids in England, the first on the British mainland (more on this tomorrow).

Cardinal Mercier, archbishop of Malines, Belgium, denies German claims that his house arrest isn’t interfering with his episcopal work in a letter sent secretly to all the priests in his diocese.

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Today -100: January 19, 1915: Sure, they take jaywalking very seriously in D.C.

The Battle of Hartmannswillerkopf begins. I’m guessing that’s the German name for it.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: Supposedly, a telephone operator in Austria started a panic by reporting that Italian troops were on the move to occupy Trento. Soldiers were moved to meet them, roads were blown up, but it wasn’t true.

The Senate votes 40-38 to impose prohibition on the District of Columbia, short of the required 2/3.

Eulalio Gutiérrez, the Very Provisional Indeed President of Mexico, explains in a letter sent to Washington, that he fled Mexico City because he feared Villa and/or Zapata would have him killed because of his disapproval of their murders and “acts of brigandage.”

Billy Sunday gives a sermon/harangue in Washington DC, attended by many members of Congress. Woodrow Wilson is not in attendance, but had a private meeting with him. Sunday says in his sermon that he “would not have to leave the corporate limits of Washington to find people who would vote to crucify Jesus Christ if he walked up Pennsylvania Avenue today.”

Released today:

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Today -100: January 18, 1915: With a capital T which rhymes with P...

Headline of the Day -100: “Congressmen Taken in Poolroom Raid.” In Baltimore. Doesn’t say how many – they have immunity while Congress is in session, so they weren’t booked.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: the German press claims that Russia threatened France and Britain that it would make a separate peace unless they gave it a large loan.

Gen. Roque González Garza is the newest provisional president of Mexico, appointed by the convention, which is a bit short of numbers since some members have been assassinated and some have fled the country. Eulalio Gutiérrez, who made the mistake of breaking with Villa and Zapata, has fled Mexico City, without resigning the provisional presidency. Garza declares martial law, as was the custom.

Woodrow Wilson’s first grandson is born in the White House. As yet unnamed, he will be Francis Bowes Sayre, Jr. (d.2008), the dean of National Cathedral in D.C. and a pretty impressive social activist. Wonder what the man who marched with Martin Luther King thought of his racist grandfather. He is the 11th baby born in the White House.

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Today -100: January 17, 1915: Should probably just have waited for them to come home for the weekend with laundry

Headline of the Day -100: “Rumanians Called Home.” Romanian students at Swiss universities have been asked to return, so they can be put into the army. Or maybe Romania was just missing them.

Mexico: the Carranza regime supposedly executes two naturalized American citizens for gun-running.

Carranza ends his embargo on oil to Britain. The US came down on him hard.

“Name That War” Watch: a NYT Sunday Book Review article is entitled “The World War.” The insta-books under review include “Treitschke and the Great War,” “The World War: How It Looks to the Nations Involved and What It Means to Us” and simply “The War, 1914: A History and an Explanation for Boys and Girls.”

Also reviewed: “Swollen-Headed William (after the German!),” a children’s book making fun of Kaiser Wilhelm (in verse) in a parody of the Shock-Headed Peter nursery stories about what befalls a naughty boy. A couple of pages will suffice (click to enlarge):

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Today -100: January 16, 1915: Of oil, lynchings, not-so-white bread, hobble kilts, shattered nerves, and war as a moral institution

Carranza orders several foreign-owned oil companies shut down, jeopardizing oil production for the British Navy. They had refused to pay a special tax.

A mob in Monticello, Georgia lynches an entire black family, Dan Barber, along with his son Jesse (age 16) and his two daughters Eula and Ella, all of whom resisted the father’s arrest for selling whisky without a license. The mob only brought one rope, so they lynched each of his children in front of him one by one before murdering him.

Germany decrees that all “white” bread must henceforth be at least 30% rye, and rye bread 40% potato.

But that is nothing to the privation of Scottish soldiers, who are protesting War Office attempts to reduce the number of pleats in their khaki kilts so as to require only 5 yards of material instead of 7.

Richard Norton of the American Volunteer Ambulance Corps says there is no such thing as shell shock (“shattered nerves”).

Headline of the Day -100: In the Cologne Volkszeitung, which the NYT says is the “leading organ” of the Catholic political party: “War As a Moral Institution.” War elevates for Germans the principles of piety, love of Fatherland, unity, sacrifice, regard for intellectual values, contempt for vanities, and pristine simplicity of life. So it’s just like a monastery, but with more barbed wire, I guess. Women, the paper says, are no longer frivolous or wanton, men no longer think of evil things. Degenerate art has disappeared. The German people are thinking high and holy thoughts. Ain’t war grand?

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Today -100: January 15, 1915: Look with contempt upon those who are so immoral as to eat cakes

South Carolina Gov. Coleman Blease resigns, five days before his term was due to expire. Just doesn’t want to attend his successor’s inauguration, evidently. (He will also take all his records with him).

The New Jersey auto commissioner, speed demon that he is, wants the state speed limit raised to 30 mph in the country and 15 in the city, up from 25 & 12. He also wants to put drunk drivers in jail – it’s not clear what the punishment is now, if any.

Headline of the Day -100: “King Helps at Avezzano.” If you define “helped” as “stood around giving orders to people who were actually helping those injured by the earthquake.”

Thousands of Armenian refugees are fleeing Turkey into Russia. “They are in a pitiable state,” says the NYT. But not as pitiable as the state of the Armenians who didn’t make it out.

Headline of the Day -100: A matched set: 1) “Germany Alarmed By Famine Menace,” 2) “CAKES AND TARTS TABOOED.; Germans Exhorted to Blush with Shame if Tempted to Eat Them.” Prussian Agriculture Minister Baron von Schorlemer is also said to be “really concerned about pork”. I’ll bet he is, I’ll bet he is. The blush thing comes from a Doctor Professor Harms of the University of Kiel, who adds, “Look with contempt upon those who are so immoral as to eat cakes, and by their greed diminish our supplies of flour.”

At a meeting of the New York State Association Opposed to Woman’s Suffrage, a Mrs Frank Goodwin says 8 of the 11 suffrage states are controlled by Mormons. She says feminism is “not the sweet, easy elevation of womanhood which many suffragists believe, but the demand of restless, discontented, unhappy women for greater economic and social independence and for freedom to interpret the question of motherhood as they see fit.” She says that like it’s a bad thing. The suffragists, she says, “would help this world along on stepping stones for smirched and stained womanhood.” A Miss Minnie Bronson, the Association’s general secretary, says “Woman’s work is the training of the men who will make the laws. The worst grafter had a mother who found something – perhaps bridge whist or woman’s suffrage – more interesting than the training of her child.” Suffragists, she says, teach disobedience to laws they have not helped make. She says that like it’s a bad thing. A Mrs. A.J. George of the Massachusetts anti society tells of friend who asked her how to “cure” a woman of 18 who had joined the suffrage movement. “I said I thought if she would fall desperately in love it would settle the matter.”

Headline of the Day -100 (LA Times): “Screech of the Shells Makes the Hens Lay.” According to a British captain in a letter home. After every fusillade, the men go chasing after the chickens in hope of eggs. “I shall try running a poultry farm on the explosion system when I get home.”

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Today -100: January 14, 1915: What wife or mother does not better love a dead hero than a living shirker?

Earthquake in central Italy destroys the town of Avezzano and kills 12,000 people.

Austria’s Foreign Minister Count Leopold von Berchtold is forced out. Others in government thought he was offering too much to Italy to try to keep it out of the war (they’re claiming he’s retiring for personal reasons, of course). He is replaced by the more hardline Baron Stephan Freiherr Burián von Rajecz.

The Servian legation in London informs the press that Servia would now like to be called Serbia. In fact, they say, the former spelling, the only one I’ve come across up until now, “is highly offensive to our people, because it suggests a false derivation from the Latin root meaning ‘to serve.’ It is a source of hidden pain to Serbians to see that some journals persist in using the corrupt forms.” They’d also like to hear the Serbian national hymn played more often.

Cuba has finally decided to start its own currency (which the US Mint will make for them).

The national convention in Mexico reappoints Gen. Eulalio Gutiérrez as provisional president, to serve out the rest of Díaz’s term (Díaz! that’s like four or five presidents ago!), until November 1916.

The Russian Council of Empire is reorganized, with anyone with German names replaced. Most of those men were officials in Russian Poland.

Russia is expelling all Germans and Austrians aged 16 to 60 from Petrograd and parts of Russia along its western borders.

Carrie Chapman Catt points out that many of the Southern congresscritters who claimed they voted against the women’s suffrage amendment because they believedin state’s rights were somehow able to bring themselves to vote for a prohibition amendment. Funny, that.

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Christabel Pankhurst gives a speech at Carnegie Hall. There was some heckling, interjected questions which she responded to. One of the hecklers was playwright August Strindberg’s widow (I think this means his divorced second wife, who was Austrian, rather than his third); another was Edith Ellis, the (lesbian) wife of sexologist Havelock Ellis.

Christabel begins by placing the war in some sort of continuity with her own pre-war militant suffrage tactics: “We are here to-night to consider the militancy in which some countries are engaged for the sake of ideals which are as precious to America as they are to Europe itself.”

She notes that “We British women have not yet entered into our inheritance, but that inheritance exists, having been won for us by our forefathers and foremothers. That Mr. Asquith has not handed over our inheritance to us will not blind us to the fact that the Kaiser, if he could, would destroy it altogether. Why, the men in Germany have not got real votes yet. If the men of Germany had followed the example of the British suffragettes and agitated for full political liberty in Germany, that would have been a better policy than attacking the free and freedom-loving nations of Europe. ... We know now where anti-suffragism has its home. We know where it has its real leader. It has its home in Berlin and its leader in the Kaiser. Our Prime Ministers can be changed, but you can never change the House of Hohenzollern.”

She hasn’t buried her enmity towards Asquith, who she accuses of having kept secret the fact that Germany announced two years before the war that it intended to dominate all of Europe. I have no idea what she’s talking about here.

Asked about Britain’s not-so-democratic ally Russia, she claims that everything tyrannical about Russia is actually an import from Prussia, whose influence “has brought out all the worst in Russian life and has repressed all the best in Russian life.” “The Russian people know how to fight for freedom, and the Germans don’t.”

Echoing that War Office ad from yesterday, she says the women of Britain want their menfolk to fight: “what wife or mother does not better love a dead hero than a living shirker?”

Finally, she suggests that the peace movement in the US is being got up by German agents.

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Today -100: January 13, 1915: Their beauty is disturbing to business

The lame duck Congress votes down a women’s suffrage amendment to the US Constitution, 174-204. The ayes were 86 D’s, 72 R’s, 12 Progressives, 3 Progressive-Republicans and an independent. 171 D’s & 33 R’s voted against. The only Democrat from the Deep South who votes yes is Richmond Hobson of Alabama, an outgoing lame duck himself. Of the congresscritters from the 11 suffrage states, only one, George Kindel (D-Colo.), another lame duck, voted no. There was hissing in the galleries during the speech of Stanley Bowdle (D-Ohio), yet another outgoing lame duck, who said, “The women of this smart capital are beautiful. Their beauty is disturbing to business; their feet are beautiful; their ankles are beautiful, but here I must pause – for they are not interested in the State.”

Mrs Arthur Dodge, president of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (honestly she has a real first name of her own, but I can never remember it and I’m tired of looking it up each time she pops up) says this vote shows “that from now on the wave of hysteria in which the suffragists have indulged or of which they have been the victims will be on the wane.”

Woodrow Wilson says he didn’t intend those remarks in his Jackson Day speech to indicate that he was running for re-election. No, really he didn’t.

It’s interesting seeing everyone jump to over-interpret anything he says, a la Hillary. It was genuinely thought possible that a president’s ambitions might not extend to a second term (there are rumors that he plans to step aside in favor of his son-in-law, William Gibbs McAdoo, who would eventually... well, check back here in 9 years).

The US Supreme Court stays Leo Frank’s execution.

The British War Office takes out an ad in various newspapers (I believe this is a poster version of the ad):

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Today -100: January 12, 1915: Of militias, warrior women, polygamy, and coyote (the other other white meat)

A few days before he is due to leave office, SC Gov. Coleman Blease abolishes the state militia. He’s been quarreling with the federal War Department for years, which he says has left the militia in such bad morale that it would just be wrong to turn it over to incoming Gov. Manning.

A colony of Belgian refugee farmers will be settled in Cuba.

Turkey has evidently given up on the idea of invading Egypt.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: The Russians claim to have captured seven women who were fighting in German army uniforms. According to the Daily Chronicle (London), “They are fine specimens of Teutonic womanhood, and the Russian nurses greatly admire their finely developed muscles, which seem to indicate that they have belonged for years to German gymnastic societies.” The story is nonsense, but what purpose does it serve?

Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan expresses his understanding of military matters: “If the president of the United States needed one million men for the national defense, he could call for them at the rising of the sun, and they would answer the call by sunset.” This will give rise to much comment.

Secretary of War Lindley Garrison, appearing before the Senate Philippines Committee, is asked about a provision in the eventual-independence bill banning polygamy. Garrison is against forcing the ban on non-Christians, and anyway, he says, Jesus never spoke against plural marriages and there’s lots of polygamy in the Bible.

Headline of the Day -100 (LA Times): “Drinks His Blood and Eats Coyote. And Yet Prospector, Lost on Desert, Perishes.” Or maybe it was his diet that killed him.

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Today -100: January 11, 1915: Of rascals, chains, hospital ships, and coal mines

Headline of the Day -100: “Called Kaiser a Rascal.” Belgian retired Gen. Gustave Fift, sentenced to life by a German court-martial for helping young Belgian men escape to the Netherlands to join the Belgian Army in France.

A Julius Wodiska has invented a chain gun (two projectiles connected by a chain) to destroy aircraft, functioning sort of like a bolas. Mr Wodiska is the holder of patents for an improved bicycle pedal and for rings (the jewelry kind) with words on them. I don’t know how those panned out, but I think this invention is a loser.

Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan vetoes the Navy’s plans to build a new hospital ship to replace its old and inadequate one, because he says it might give the impression that the US is preparing for some sort of war or something.

The United Mine Workers and the Bache-Denman Coal Company in Arkansas come to an agreement ending the labor struggle there: the union will buy the company out for $200,000 and operate the mine itself on a cooperative basis at least until it can be sold for a profit, and the company will drop its damages lawsuit.

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Today -100: January 10, 1915: Of lotteries, pardons, and rabbits

Pancho Villa, along with miscellaneous commanders and governors on various sides of the Mexican melée, sign a treaty to stop shooting into the US and to make Naco a neutral port.

Carranza, who you would think has other worries, bans lotteries as detrimental to public morals.

Under martial law in Alsace, speaking French is now banned. A few divorces have been granted where one spouse is pro-French and the other pro-German.

Headline of the Day -100 (LA Times): “Gov. Blease Pardons Everybody But Himself.” The outgoing governor of South Carolina pardons another 1,500, everyone paroled in the last four years. Plus a bunch more commutations, clemencies etc, including 17 more murderers. No governor of any state has ever pardoned as many people as Blease has, something like 3,165. There are something like 125 prisoners remaining in the state pen.

The game warden of Fairfax County, Virginia, who is named H.C. Cockrell because of course he is, says he will demand that Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan be arrested and extradited on a charge of hunting rabbits, which it is illegal for non-residents to do in Fairfax County. Bryan says he did go rabbit-hunting on Christmas Day but he didn’t shoot any rabbits.

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Today -100: January 9, 1915: Of cardinals, animated conservatives, fraternization, and armchair generals

A German cruiser is using a supply base in Haiti, despite the US having specifically told Haiti not to allow that.

Kaiser Wilhelm sends a telegram to Pope Benedict saying that Cardinal Mercier was not arrested, just warned to stop his anti-German propaganda, and the kaiser is quite sure the pope will approve of that. The pope replies that in fact Mercier was duty-bound to work for Belgium independence, and he himself would have done the same. The Germans are claiming that the governor-general of conquered Belgium brought to the cardinal’s attention his view that the pastoral letter was an incitement, so the cardinal said it certainly wasn’t intended to be an incitement and withdrew it at once. I’m assuming this is no more true than the claim that Mercier isn’t under house arrest, or palace arrest, or whatever cardinals live in.

Germany protests to San Marino (that’s a country – look it up) against it supposedly encouraging espionage through its wireless station. Germany threatens to send in a commission of enquiry. San Marino says no you won’t.

Woodrow Wilson gives the Jackson Day speech at Indianapolis, saying that the Republicans haven’t had a new idea in 30 years. He says progressives should leave the R party for the D party, and says he himself is an “animated conservative,” whatever the hell that means. He also says, “There may come a time when the American people will have to judge whether I know what I am talking about or not,” which many people take as an announcement that he will be running for re-election.

French Prime Minister René Viviani’s son Jean is killed in action. Actually, he was killed in August but it’s only just been confirmed because he died near the German lines, and I guess the Germans told the Swiss, who Viviani had asked to make enquiries.

The German Army bans fraternization, as during the Christmas Truce. This article is the first mention I’ve seen of football during the truce.

French General Paul François Grossetti is so fat he likes to sit in an armchair on the battlefield. He hasn’t been hit yet, but he keeps having to find new people for his staff to replace the ones who get shot.

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Today -100: January 8, 1915: Er, what exactly disqualifies a nation from being called “civilized?”

After 3½ months of investigating, the commission appointed by the French government to look into charges of German atrocities has concluded that there have indeed been German atrocities. “We must conclude that there never has been a war against civilized nations of so savage and ferocious a character as that waged upon our soil by our implacable adversary. Pillage, outrage, burning, and murder are ordinary practices of our enemies”. And rape, lots of rape.

Germany denies arresting Cardinal Mercier. Germany totally arrested Cardinal Mercier.

Former member of the Russian Duma Shmaryah Levin, a Zionist, says 1,000 or more Jews have been massacred in Russian Poland by Poles and Cossacks. When the invading German troops were driven out, Poles told soldiers that Jews had collaborated with the Germans; thus, the massacres. Many more Jews were told to leave.

The House of Representatives has rejected the amendment excluding negro immigrants the Senate added to the immigration bill, although Rep. Joe Eagle (D-Texas) suggests that negro migration should go in the other direction, i.e., back to Africa. The amendment loses 252-75, all 75 being Democrats. The House accepts the Senate’s provisions banning chronic alcoholics and people with “constitutional psychopathic inferiority.”

Seriously, “Joe Eagle”?

Headline of the Day -100: “ONLY AMERICAN BREAD RESTRAINS BELGIANS; Without It They Would Hurl Themselves on German Bayonets, Says Palmer.” So often the problem with humanitarian aid: American charity in shipping large amounts of food to Belgium keeps the Belgians from starving, but also makes the occupation easier and cheaper for Germany.

NY Gov. Whitman “emphatically” opposes ending the death penalty.

The Federal District Court rules that Arizona’s 1914 referendum requiring businesses to employ no more than 20% foreign employees is unconstitutional. Britain and Italy had complained that the law violated their treaty rights.

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Today -100: January 7, 1915: Of child labor, Cossacks, and chorus girls

David Clark, editor of the Southern Textile Bulletin, shows up at a meeting of the National Child Labor Committee, a non-governmental reform group still in existence today, and demands to be heard. He says that children employed in North Carolina textile mills are not overworked and under-nourished, as documented in NCLC reports and the photos taken by its photographer Lewis Hine.

Why, Clark says, “I am willing to wager that the children in the mill district, boy for boy, can lick any other class of boys in America.” Also, he says it’s none of the business of people in New York and Massachusetts if 13-year-olds work in North Carolina.

Mexico: “President” Gutierrez’s regime has arrested the brother of “President” Carranza. Promises a fair trial.

NY’s new governor Charles Whitman makes his first annual message to the Legislature. He calls for the abolition of the Dept of Efficiency and Economy, which is efficient and economical of him, and the state Fire Marshal, because everyone’s forgotten all about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, I guess.

German Chancellor Theobold von Bethmann-Hollweg’s son, a cavalry lieutenant, is killed in Poland by some Cossacks, as was the custom.

Last year, Robert Goldman, the son of banker Henry Goldman (of Goldman, Sachs & Co.) married a chorus girl, as was the custom. Because he is 19, his father is suing for divorce on his behalf, evidently against his will, which I didn’t know was a thing. Edith, the chorus girl, is suing Henry for alienation of affections for $100,000. (Update: More details emerge when the case reaches court in March. The young Mr. Goldman met Ms. Ostend when she was performing in “The Belle of Bond Street,” which is kind of perfect. When the senior Goldman found out about the marriage, he “sent his son to a ranch in the West, where he made him work as a cowboy for $40 a month.” And it sounds like young Robert was agreeable to being divorced, after his father’s private dicks found his wife in the company of other men.)

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Today -100: January 6, 1915: Of vultures, patriotism & endurance, and propellers

There have been meetings demanding justice for Leo Frank in Chicago, New York, I believe San Francisco, and elsewhere.  Former Georgia Gov. Joseph Brown calls for him to be executed at once, saying the movement for a new trial is based solely on the fact that Frank is a Jew.  Frank responds, “When I read that tirade – unfair, cruel and untruthful - I remembered that, when Prometheus was bound to the rock it was the vulture, and not the eagle, that struck its beak into his vitals.”  That’s telling him!  (Actually, it’s a pretty strong letter, worth reading, making the case that Gov. Brown’s letter was based solely on politics.)

The Germans arrest Cardinal Mercier of Malines/Mechelen in Belgium (near Antwerp).  He’d issued a pastoral letter “Patriotism and Endurance,” saying that no obedience is owed the German occupiers.  It was read in many churches on Sunday.

Russian troops are “menacing Transylvania.”  You can write the joke as well as I can.

Transylvania, by the way, was at that time part of Hungary.

Pope Benedict has gotten warring nations to agree to an exchange of prisoners who are too injured to return to the war.

Headline of the Day -100:  “FIGHT WITH FISTS FOR AN AEROPLANE. Russians Win Bout with Germans Between Trenches — Propeller Kills German Airman.”

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Today -100: January 5, 1915: God hates a four-flusher

Evidently Romania is just waiting until the weather gets better (and the mountain passes are free of snow) before joining the war.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: Supposedly, Germany is trying to conscript Belgians.

British ships bombard Dar-es-Salaam in German East Africa.

Two men are contesting each other’s claim to the world’s saddest title: Oldest Man in Sussex County, New Jersey.  George Niter, 106, would seem the winner.  “I come from a family of charcoal burners, and every one of them lived to be close to 100 years.”  His first presidential vote was for Andrew Jackson.

Two negroes are lynched in Wetumpka, Alabama.

Evangelist Billy Sunday, preaching in Philadelphia, is unimpressed by his Unitarian critics, who find him “wretchedly vulgar.” He refutes this by responding with great class: “Bah for the critics! They’ll get theirs.”  The NYT says “the quality of Sunday’s arguments in the cause of religion” is exemplified by his slogan, “God hates a four-flusher.”

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Today -100: January 4, 1915: The cult of cowardice

German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg says “We Germans do not cherish hate. To hate is not a German trait. The vendetta belongs to the Latin races.”  On charges of German atrocities: “Our boys are not bad boys. They do not do such things.”

Oregon Gov. Oswald West appoints Kathryn Clarke to a vacant seat in the state senate. She would be the first woman state senator in Oregon.  The attorney general says the governor doesn’t have the power to make the appointment, but either way she’ll win a special election later in the month.  The lower house will also see its first female member in the next session, Marion Towne, who was elected in November. Clarke is a Republican, Towne a Democrat.

Ghent, Belgium will raise the German extortion money in part by putting a tax on bachelors.

In an article in The Independent, Theodore Roosevelt blasts Woodrow Wilson and William Jennings Bryan for “acquiescing” in the German invasion of Belgium, a policy he calls “contemptible,” “short-sighted and timid inefficiency” and “selfish indifference to the cause of permanent and righteous peace” and “the cult of cowardice.”

Headline of the Day -100:  “Turkish Opium Dearer in London.”  War is indeed hell.

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Today -100: January 3, 1915: A scientific proposition

The Congressional commission on Indian affairs is finding that the Crows of Montana are starving on their reservation while their tribal account is being syphoned for irrigation projects that don’t benefit them, while government officials steal their land for themselves.  And 90% of them have tuberculosis.

Former President Taft (who was also governor-general of the Philippines) testifies before the Senate Committee on the Philippines that if the Philippines is given independence, it will turn into a post-apocalyptic hellscape like Mexico. He thinks the Filipinos might be ready in a generation or two – the time it would take to teach everyone in the Philippines English.  “We cannot present the Filipino people with a character. It must be acquired.”  “I am in favor of gradually extending self-government to these islands. But we have done it. Let us wait and see; let us try the experiment of waiting. The difficulty is that when you give them one thing at once they want another.  That is characteristic.”  The Democratic Party’s promises of independence, he says, only create unrest.

Thomas Edison thinks the war will last another two years.  He thinks the British are developing ships capable of withstanding torpedoes from submarines.  “The present war has taught the world that killing men in war is a scientific proposition.”

Three Americans, William Thaw, Bert Hall, and James Bache, join the French aviation corps.

The Senate passes the immigration bill, including the literacy requirement, but with an exemption for Belgian farmers, the only acknowledgment they seem to be making that the European war might change things, immigration-wise.  Immigration officials will make any immigrant over 16 read from a list of 30 to 40 ordinary words in the appropriate language (including Hebrew and Yiddish).  Vagrants and people with tuberculosis or other conditions which prevent them earning a living can be excluded.  Also, anyone who advocates the unlawful destruction of property (i.e., anarchists).

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Today -100: January 2, 1915: You sunk my battleship!

Whatever is the world coming to? New York’s first woman taxicab driver, who is named Wilma Russey, because of course she is, begins her blasphemous work. Wearing a leopard-skin hat and stole and black leather gloves and some other clothes which the NYT describes in detail, as was the custom.  To further blow 1915 minds, Miss Russey has been working for the last year as an auto mechanic.

The British battleship Formidable turns out to be not so much, sinking in the English Channel with a loss of 600 men, with 150 rescued.  It’s unknown whether it was hit by a torpedo or a mine.

Turkey will change its property laws in Palestine to allow Zionist groups to buy up to 1/3 of the province.

Booker T. Washington says there were 52 lynchings in the United States in 1914, of whom 49 were black, 3 white.  3 were women.  There were 2 in Alabama, 1 in Arkansas, 4 in Florida, 2 in Georgia, 12 each in Louisiana and Mississippi, 1 in Missouri, 1 in New Mexico, 1 in North Dakota, 1 in North Carolina, 3 in Oklahoma, 1 in Oregon, 4 in South Carolina, 1 in Tennessee and 6 in Texas.

In a rather weird charity sponsorship thing, for every rabbit people kill in Oregon, the federal government will donate 5¢ to the Belgian Relief Committee.

French President Raymond Poincaré says the war will end this year.  That’ll be nice.

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Today -100: January 1, 1915: Of literacy tests, and what Arkansas needs

Karl Liebknecht, German Social Democratic Party member of the Reichstag, sends a New Year’s message to British Socialists calling on the workers of the world to unite in a war against war.

The US Senate votes 47 to 12 to keep the literacy test in the immigration bill. An amendment to exempt religious refugees (i.e., Russian Jews) from the requirement is defeated. The Senate also votes 29 to 25 to exclude people of the “black or African race” from the country (which was introduced as a poison pill to prevent northern Republicans voting for the final bill), but votes 10-43 not to exclude Turks and East Indians.  Polygamists are excluded by a vote of 45-3.  If you’re wondering which non-Utah senator voted against that, it was William Hughes (D-NJ).  Smoot of Utah pleads for his co-religionists; he says if asked whether they believe in polygamy, they would have to say yes even if they abstain from the practice.

South Africa will introduce conscription, using the very slight threat that Salomon Maritz, whose rebellion was crushed and who fled to German Southwest Africa (now Namibia), will invade South Africa backed by German troops as an excuse to invade and annex the German colony.

Headline of the Day -100:  “Arkansas Needs $10.”  The state is broke.  Gov. Hays, who can’t afford the cost of printing his biennial message to the Legislature, is asking newspapers for $2.50 each towards the cost.

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Today -100: December 31, 1914: Happy 1915 from the Archbishop of Canterbury, now go kill some Germans

Outgoing SC governor Coleman Blease just keeps pardoning prisoners, including three who dynamited a county jail in a failed attempt to lynch a negro prisoner who was later acquitted.  In Blease’s nearly four years in office, he has pardoned 1,544 prisoners.  There are only 149 state prisoners left.

Supposedly there are anti-war riots in Vienna and Budapest.

The archbishop of Canterbury’s New Year’s letter calls for more soldiers because Jesus, or something: “The very life of the empire may depend on the response to the call for men.  I think we can say deliberately that no household or home will be acting worthily if in timidity or self-love it keeps back any of those who can loyally bear a man’s part in behalf of the land we love.”

Austria, which started this whole mess by declaring war on Serbia, has given up on military operations against Serbia in order to concentrate on fending off the Russians.

Federal troops begin a phased withdrawal from the Colorado mining strike regions.

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Today -100: December 30, 1914: Of prohibition and political prisoners

Russia expands its alcohol ban from vodka to beer and wines.  There’s a war on, you know.

Woodrow Wilson is trying to get the Mexican government (which one?) to grant amnesty to all political prisoners.  He says he doesn’t think the Gutierrez government has executed all that many people.

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Today -100: December 29, 1914: Who is the 20th Century’s greatest criminal against humanity? The answer may surprise you.

NYT Index Headline of the Day -100: “DEMAND FOR CASTOR OIL.; Germany Needs It to Lubricate ...”  I have never had less desire to click on a link, because I just don’t want to know what Germany needs to lubricate.

Austria is denying reports of anti-war demonstrations in Hungary.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: French Commander in Chief Gen. Joseph Joffre claims that a Bavarian lieutenant issued an order that all prisoners be killed.  Joffre mentions this in a general order, as a subtle hint to French soldiers to fight to the death rather than be taken prisoner.

The US complains to Britain about it interfering with American commercial shipping.

The Honduran consul-general in San Francisco is arrested for burning his house down.  I have no idea what that’s about.

US Supreme Court Justice J. R. Lamar grants Leo Frank’s appeal to be heard by the full court.

The Daily Mail claims that a pamphlet on sale in Germany proclaims King Edward VII “The Twentieth Century’s Greatest Criminal Against Humanity.”

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Today -100: December 28, 1914: When he has a couple of torpedoes in his body he will be more amenable

Pancho Villa claims he does not “intend to tolerate” any more executions by, er, his men.

Italy says that its invasion of Albania was intended solely to keep Albania independent and neutral and preserve its integrity.  There’s probably a flaw in that argument somewhere.

In the context of fending off charges that German attacks on English coastal towns violated international law, Admiral Schlieper says that if anything the Germans have been too humane, and German subs should sink everything they can.  “Germans must not allow their hereditary weakness or considerateness to slacken their firm purpose. ... We cannot bring the British lion to his knees by feeding him with cakes.  When he has a couple of torpedoes in his body he will be more amenable.”

You’re still marveling over the thing about German weakness and considerateness, aren’t you?

The US admits, after several days of rumor-filled reports in the press, that there’s a small revolt going on in the Philippines, which Governor-General Francis Harrison had been denying.

Headline of the Day -100:  “Our Indians Not Yellow.”  “Cato Sells, United States Commissioner of Indian Affairs, has ruled that the American Indian is not a Mongolian” and will ban from Indian schools all books that say that they are.

Headline of the Day -100:  “Terra Haute Mayor is Weary of Jail.”  He is going to find his 3½ years at Leavenworth sooooo boring.

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And writing Shakespeare plays

North Korea calls Obama a monkey, and blames the US for shutting down its internet. Which just goes to prove what we’ve always suspected: monkeys are in charge of the internet.

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Today -100: December 27, 1914: Those v’s will get you every time

Germany is telling neutral countries that it won’t recognize their consuls in Belgium anymore, part of its slow-moving annexation.  If the US and other neutrals accept this move, they’d be effectively accepting German sovereignty over Belgium.

Headline of the Day -100 (AP story in the LA Times):  “German Spy’s Accent Sends Him to Death.”  I’m guessing this is nonsense, but the story goes that when the German army was near Paris, a German spy pretending to be a French officer got into the collection of artillery assembled to defend the city, claiming to belong to the military staff but not knowing the password and wearing a new uniform.  A suspicious French colonel had him count the artillery pieces, in ordinal rather than cardinal numbers because it’s a well-known fact that Germans can’t pronounce vingt-neuvieme, something about the v’s and the t.  So the spy was arrested and shot.

Mexico’s Provisional President Gutierrez orders everyone to stop all the summary executions.

Headline of the Day -100 (NYT Magazine):  “New Ruler of Egypt Is a Dancing Sultan.”

Most Terra Haute, Indiana officials, from Mayor Donn Roberts down, are arrested for corrupting in the November elections, including for Congress and the US Senate.  The conspiracy included repeat voting (some of the floating voters testified that they were paid to vote for Republicans in Illinois and Democrats in Indiana), infiltrating election boards, fake registrations, arresting people they didn’t want voting, all paid for with a “tax” on saloons, gambling houses, dance halls etc.  Roberts, who had been planning to spend 1916 running for governor, instead was serving a sentence for bribery in Leavenworth.

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Today -100: December 26, 1914: Feast and fight

A very Sing Sing Christmas: new warden Thomas Mott Osborne gives the prisoners a Broadway show (out of town try-outs, as it were), with the Broadway cast and even the Broadway sets, Owen Davis’s, um, “Sinners.”

A revolution begins in Albania, fomented by the Turks according to the no doubt unbiased London Daily News.  Italian troops land.

In addition to all the cigars and wine the Germans demanded of Belgians so that German soldiers could celebrate Christmas, they also asked the Belgians to make them some Christmas cakes.  The Belgians naturally replied that they couldn’t make cakes without flour (and rat poison).

Japan’s Imperial Diet votes down a bill to increase the size of the army, so the emperor dissolves it. The Imperial Diet, not the army.

Headline of the Day -100:  “British Soldiers Feast and Fight.”  We’ve all been there.

That article mentions British and German soldiers singing a hymn together in their separate trenches, but the wider story of the Christmas Truce hasn’t been reported yet.

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Today -100: December 25, 1914: We no shoot and no work today

Bird dude John Muir dies.

A Louisville, Kentucky court rules that enforcing residential racial segregation, as a recent city ordinance requires, is the rightful exercise of a police power of the state and doesn’t violate the 14th Amendment or KY’s own Bill of Rights.  The article doesn’t state exactly what the particular negro in the case, Arthur Harris, was arrested for doing.

Headline of the Day -100:  The LAT reports that the 1910 census showed that there were 71,500 Chinese in the country, and 72,000 Japanese, and gives other information about their professions and whatnot.  The headline, because it’s the LA Fucking Times, is “The Yellow Peril.”

I mentioned that the British were supplying every soldier and sailor with a plum pudding.  The French military is sending one bottle of champagne for every four soldiers, Belgium is giving its soldiers 25 cigars each.

Headline of the Day -100:  “French Girl Sacrifices Her Hair For Soldiers.”  Yvonne Pusel, a “Lorraine peasant girl,” sent her hair to Paris to be sold to buy presents for the soldiers.  Only to find that all the soldiers had sold their guns to buy her a fancy set of combs, probably.

At many places along the front lines between German and British troops, a spontaneous Christmas Truce develops, in which enemy soldiers not only didn’t shoot, but joined in singing hymns, then cautiously venturing out and greeting each other – “We no shoot and no work today” some Germans reassured them – and exchanged halting conversation, cigarettes, food, alcohol, and presents.  With all the presents from home and from drives organized by newspapers and gifts from Queen Mary and the like, the soldiers had goods to trade in unusual quantities (also actual newspapers; there is one story of a German who asked for a British paper because German ones were full of lies).  An officer who wrote one of the first published accounts, possibly the first, in the London Daily News of December 30th, was given a photo of the Crown Prince of Bavaria.  He adds, “Of course, these men were Saxons – not Prussians.”  One British soldier got a haircut from a German who had been his barber before the war in London (that may be an exaggeration).  The London Daily News account doesn’t include football, but only because the Germans considered the ground too hard to join in.  Football matches, a favorite part of the myth that grew up around these events, were actually not a feature of more than a couple of the local truces, if any (it’s not like there were a lot of balls in the trenches). In the mythical versions the score was almost always 3-2.

There were incidents of fraternization between other armies pretty much everywhere, though on a smaller scale, even the French and Germans, which tend to be less well documented (French newspapers weren’t allowed to mention them).

A letter, just come to light, by a British general (who didn’t participate in the fraternization because he thought he might be too tempting a target) says one of his men “smoked a cigar with the best shot in the German army, then not more than 18. They say he’s killed more of our men than any other 12 together but I know now where he shoots from and I hope we down him tomorrow.”

There were much more scattered truces on Christmas of 1915 and 1916, but the army brass of both sides, embarrassed by the 1914 one, ordered Xmas artillery barrages to pre-empt any repetition – and ordered sentries to shoot anyone who tried to party with the enemy.  The 1914 truces, however, were far too widespread for the participants to face any punishment.  One German soldier, a Private Hitler, fumed at other soldiers who participated, “Have you no German sense of honor?”

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It’s all about the hats

Six years ago, I wrote:

“What will a Barack Obama presidency bring? A long, long visual drought. An increasingly frustrating series of dignified poses. Sigh. Soon desperation will drive me to learn how to photoshop propeller beanies


and Queen Elizabeth’s hats




onto his head,


and he’ll still look ten times more dignified than Bush at his most dignitudinous.”

So now there’s this:



Just saying.

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Today -100: December 24, 1914: Of swaps, Christmas cards, and insurance

The Daily Telegraph claims that talks between Germany and Britain over an exchange of civilian prisoners fell apart when Germany demanded a ratio of 5 Germans for every 1 Britisher (the British have many more interned Germans than Germany has Brits).

The latest order from the British censors bans the publication of any war news that occurred in the previous five days or within 20 miles of the front.

The British king and queen are sending a Christmas card to every single soldier and sailor, because they’re just polite that way.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: The Daily Telegraph claims that Austria has attempted, twice, to make peace with Serbia, only to be turned down.

Oh, and Austrian Emperor Franz Josef is rumored to be dying.  Again.  Last rites are said to have been read.

The Lusitania is having to pay a near record for insurance, $50,000 (to a value of $10 million), for its return voyage from New York to Britain.  Also, one of the Lusitania’s stewards and one of its firemen are arrested after $7,500 worth of opium are discovered in their lockers, but the insurance premium probably doesn’t cover this.

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Today -100: December 23, 1914: Of generals, prohibition, potatoes, menacing Arabs, fair play, and art students

Georges Weill, a deputy in the German Reichstag for Metz (Lorraine) since 1912, who was at the café with Jean Jaurés when he was assassinated, has been “missing” since then.  Turns out, he volunteered for the French Army.  His German citizenship will be stripped from him in 1915.  When Lorraine is re-incorporated into France, he’ll be a deputy in the French parliament (1924-8).

French Commander in Chief Gen. Joseph Joffre fires 24 generals.

Rep. Richmond Hobson (D-Alabama)’s proposed prohibition amendment to the Constitution fails in the House, getting 197 votes to 189, well short of the 2/3 needed.  The voting was very much not along party lines.  The NYT calls the idea a federal usurpation of the rights of the states.

Austria bans the hoarding of potatoes, and regulates their price.

A short NYT article about French opposition to Japan sending troops to Europe to fight on the Allied side intriguingly suggests that one reason the government rejects the idea is that it is deferring to US opposition.

Headline of the Day -100:  “Arabs Menace Christians.”  In Hodeida, Arabia (now Yemen).

There is a race war going on in South Carolina near the town of...  what for it... Fair Play.  4 or 5 dead black men, 4 wounded white men, including a magistrate who is said to be dying.

Artists to the front: Of the 2,000 students at the National School of the Fine Arts in Paris at the start of the war, 1,800 have joined up. And some of the professors.  A bunch of them have died, including no one I’ve ever heard of, but perhaps would have if they’d lived.  Several prominent Futurists are in the army, which doesn’t bode well for their, well, you know, future.

Headline of the Day -100:  “Russians Care Nothing for Lodz.”

Headline of the Day -100:  “Russians Moving on Thorn.”  Sounds painful.

Romania will return most of the territory it captured from Bulgaria during the Second Balkan War.  This seems to be Romania protecting its flank for when and if it goes to war against Austria.

The Germans occupying Ghent are demanding 1 million cigars, 1 million cigarettes, and all the wine in town.  For Christmas.

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Today -100: December 22, 1914: Of bombing and lunatics

A British plane bombs what the pilot hopes were German targets in Ostend, Belgium.  I say hopes because he did it at night, the first ever night-time aerial bombing raid, if you’re keeping track of historical firsts in the killing of other humans.

Harry Thaw, murderer of architect Stanford White, is ordered by the Supreme Court to return to New York from New Hampshire to face trial for his escape from Matteawan Asylum.  Thaw might plead not guilty by reason of insanity, which to be fair is a pretty good defense to the charge of escaping from a lunatic asylum.

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Today -100: December 21, 1914: Of firing squads and baby killers

Russia is plans to teach Russian to elementary school teachers in Galicia.

Headline of the Day -100:  “Firing Squads Busy.”  Mexico, where former supporters of Huerta have been shot in large numbers since Villa and Zapata forces took over the capital.

Headline & Epithet of the Day -100: “‘BABY KILLERS,’ CRIES CHURCHILL TO RAIDERS; Says the Name Will Stick to the German Navy While Sailors Sail the Seas.”

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Today -100: December 20, 1914: That’s a lot of pudding

An article cribbed from an unnamed London newspaper about songs sung by British soldiers says they’re all sick of “Tipperary” already.  And it quotes this one, which I would have guessed came later in the war:



In New York, the lighting of the Tree of Light in Madison Square Park (still a tradition today, begun in 1912).  There will be songs, but foreign national anthems are banned this year.

Haiti’s National Bank has put all of its gold and silver coins on a US warship (or the US just pulled off a less-than-subtle heist)(more like the latter than the former, I believe).

Austria claims to have cleared Russian troops out of Western Galicia.

Sen. James Vardaman (D-Miss.), who is not fond of the negro race, plans to try to get the 15th Amendment repealed.

Occupied Lille is starving. The Germans blame the British blockade.

Headline of the Day -100:  “Prussia Appeals to Poles. Uses Their Language Officially for the First Time in Many Years.”  In the military mobilization proclamation.  What’s the Polish word for “swell”?

Hopefully they printed the proclamation in big print, because they German Army is also taking a lot more men who wear glasses than they used to.

Italy is trying to suppress anti-Austrian demonstrations tomorrow on the anniversary of the 1882 execution of Overdank, a deserter from the Austrian army who tried attempting to assassinate Emperor Franz Josef.  Overdank was from Trieste, which Italians think should be Italian rather than Austrian, so he’s been a martyr ever since.

Headline of the Day -100:  “Empress of India Sold.”  A ship, not an actual royal person.  Bought from the Canadian-Pacific Railway by the Gaekwar (prince) of Baroda for use as a hospital ship for Indian troops.

The Wisconsin Boxing Commission will not issue permits for matches with black boxers.

A court ruling establishes uniform speed limits in California (except in charter cities) of 30 mph in the country, 20 in built-up districts, and 15 in business districts, doing away with speed traps.

A Christmas Pudding Fund has ensured that everyone in the British military will have plum pudding for Christmas dinner.  That’s half a million puddings.

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