Today -100: February 9, 1915: A difficult Birth

Philip Snowden, a British Labour MP and future chancellor of the Exchequer, who only just got back to Britain after being caught in Australia when the war broke out and coming back by way of the United States, writes that he discovered in the US that pro-Allied Americans are not particularly pro-British, but believe in the democratic principles Britain is supposedly fighting for. But if the US ever attempts to enter the war, he says, it will have a serious problem with its German immigrant population. And the Irish in the US aren’t particularly fond of the English either, you’ll be surprised to hear.

Germany explains that its declaration of a watery war zone around Britain doesn’t mean it will sink every neutral ship, just those carrying contraband. Of course the definition of “contraband” is elastic, and the British have already stretched it quite a bit in their blockade of Germany.

A Turkish newspaper says a jihad has been declared in Afghanistan, so that’ll end well.

Sen. Robert La Follette proposes a resolution directing President Wilson to attempt to convene a peace conference to end the European war.

The US State Dept is refusing to answer any questions about the Lusitania’s use of the American flag.

“The Clansman,” still not named “The Birth of a Nation,” opens in LA, despite the efforts of the City Council which, after hearing protests from the NAACP  that “The Negro is made to look hideous”– just proving the line in the movie, “Dem free-niggers f’um de N’of am sho’ crazy” –  asked the censors not to allow it and then ordered the police chief not to allow it. The first matinee was cancelled, but D.W. Griffith got an injunction and the show went on, pending a further hearing. The LAT reviewer thinks it’s the best motion picture ever made but that 3 hours is too long for any movie.

Well, I watched the movie – the things I do for this blog – but found I don’t have much to say about it. As a movie, it was innovative then, making many realize for the first time that film was capable of being its own art form, not a bastardized version of theater or photography but capable of representing the world in a way entirely its own. The furious ride of the avenging Klansmen startled audiences; some screamed as the horses seemed to be coming right at them – that’s how new the conventions and capabilities of cinema were to people. Now, of course, we have Jar Jar Binks, so we’re pretty jaded to that shit.

As a piece of propaganda for white supremacy, it doesn’t seem as particularly effective. It no doubt reinforced the stereotypes of racists, but it’s hard to see it making many converts. For example, the scene in which Ben Cameron, a former Confederate soldier, refuses to shake the hand of a mulatto only works if you’re already inclined to view a dark-skinned gentleman extending a hand as an act of uppity presumption and a violation of the natural order of things. Otherwise, Cameron just looks dickish, standing there with folded arms.

I had a similar reaction to the famous scene in which Gus (Walter Long) chases Flora (Mae Marsh), who throws herself off a cliff to preserve her purity, as was the custom. I know what the scene is supposed to be conveying, but to me it looks like Flora became needlessly hysterical when a black man spoke to her on the street (well, a white man in black face, I guess that would be kind of creepy). Here’s a 9-minute clip of that scene (the most frequently censored scene of the movie).

A better-quality version can be viewed here.

And just for the hell of it, here’s Walter Long in the ’30s without the black face.

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Today -100: February 8, 1915: Now let us ray

It is reported that it was the British admiralty which ordered the Lusitania to raise an American flag, although they will deny it and I’m not actually sure whose decision it was. (If you’re wondering, as I was, how a British ship happened to have an American flag, it’s because it’s customary to fly the flag of your destination on the foremast and your national flag on your taffrail.)

Japan is threatening military action against China if it doesn’t give in to a long list of sovereignty-damaging demands that include turning over all German concessions to it, extending the lease on Port Arthur and on several railroads to 99 years, access to ports and rivers, not making such leases to other nations without Japan’s permission, South Manchuria and East Mongolia opened up to Japanese colonists, Japanese “advisers” for the Chinese administration, police, and military, etc etc.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: A French prisoner of war has supposedly been sentenced to two years for defacing a portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm – specifically, gouging out its eyes.

One thing the Mexican turmoil won’t be allowed to disrupt: prize fighting. Jack Johnson, still in exile from the US, evading arrest for the crime of having sex with the (white) woman he married, has been assured by Pancho Villa that he’ll be able to reach Juarez to fight Jess Willard next month.

Turkey hands back the British consul they seized after storming the Italian consulate in Hodeida in Arabia (now Yemen) two months ago, and have “rendered honors” to the Italian flag, and that evidently settles that incident.

Headline of the Day -100:

We’ve all been there.


Proquest L.A. Times Typo of the Day -100: “Pope Rays for Peace.”

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Today -100: February 7, 1915: Of false flags, politically undisciplined children, bread, women’s suffrage, and casting Birth of a Nation

The Lusitania arrives in Liverpool. The British ship is flying an American flag because of fears of German submarines. Captain Daniel Dow (not the one who would be in command of the Lusitania in May) claims he has a right to do this because the ship was carrying neutral mail and neutral passengers. Evidently there is no actual rule of international or US law against such a ruse de guerre, although it is not considered “quite the proper thing”. Also, the Lusitania is recognizable and well-known, hard to mistake for another ship.

Headline of the Day -100:

The steamship, not the king.

The German Governor-General of Belgium, Gen. Moritz von Bissing, says that the Belgians are “politically undisciplined children” who keep expecting to be liberated.

Germany denies reports that it asked Bulgaria to attack Romania if Romania went to war with Austria.

Berlin will start rationing bread.

The New York Legislature has voted to put the issue of women’s suffrage before the male electorate in November, and the NYT could not be more pleased at the prospect: “The proposed amendment... should be voted down by such a majority of the voters as to deprive the advocates of an objectionable and unreasonable derangement of the political and social structure of any further hope of success in this State. ... The grant of suffrage to women is repugnant to instincts that strike their roots deep in the order of nature. It runs counter to human reason, it flouts the teachings of experience and the admonitions of common sense. ... Without the counsel and guidance of men no woman ever ruled a State wisely and well. The defect is innate and one for which a cure is both impossible and not to be desired. That they lack the genius for politics is no more to their discredit than man’s unhandiness in housewifery and in the care of infants... men vote according to judgments founded on observation and knowledge acquired in the pursuit of their daily business. Women would inevitably attempt to decide such matters empirically or emotionally. ... Either women must work as men work, or they will never be qualified to vote as men vote.” “Is it worth while to take women out of the school where she fits herself to her high natural duties to put her under a tuition against which her body and mind and soul would be in perpetual revolt? Of course, the most fanatical advocate of votes for women would never preach a doctrine so monstrous.” And the vote would “coarsen” women, and so on and so forth. The editors conclude, “it is just as well that the matter should be decided now by all the men of the State. They are facing a grave crisis.” They think that women’s rights can be decided by all the men, isn’t that adorable?

The LA Times has an article about the casting of Birth of a Nation: the difficulties finding someone who looked like Abraham Lincoln who could also act, the red tape to get the National Guard to fill out the war scenes, the problem in getting enough negroes, some of whom came all the way from the South. This is evidently the first movie to film night battles and to use real explosives in the war scenes, and real Civil War cannons, borrowed from the Presidio. The battlefield was two miles long, with the cosplayers directed by telephone.

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Today -100: February 6, 1915: Of blockades, pirates, more Mexican presidents, and prohibition

Alfred von Tirpitz, head of the German navy (and what a head),

seems to think that neutral countries should not only accept but positively welcome Germany’s blockade of the British Isles, “as England’s tyranny on the seas of the world would only be smashed in this way.” He says Britain itself assents to the legitimacy of Germany’s blockade by its own blockade of the North Sea. He’s got a point. Two points, actually.

He accuses Britain of putting the flags of neutral countries on its commercial ships.

The British Army now has 3,000,000 men.

Headline of the Day -100: “Roused by Russian Threat. Germany Protests Against Treatment of Bomb Droppers as Pirates.”

Congress passes a naval appropriations bill. Showing no sign of alarm about the changed international circumstances in the year since the last such bill, it votes to remove from the bill 5 submarines, a badly needed new hospital ship, half the aeronautics budget, etc.

A “peace conference” of Mexicans is about to begin in San Antonio, right-wingers I think, which will name yet another provisional president. Evidently there will be peace only when every single Mexican is president.

The Arkansas Legislature votes to make Arkansas dry. The 16th prohibition state.

The Free Speech League is raising funds to defend artist William Sanger, awaiting trial on a complaint brought by Anthony Comstock, for distributing his wife Margaret Sanger’s birth control pamphlet “Family Limitation.” Comstock has already driven Margaret Sanger out of the country.

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Today -100: February 5, 1915: Of watery war zones, Mexican presidents, sabotage, and literacy tests

Possibly in response to Winston Churchill crowing about Britannia ruling the waves, Germany announces it will consider all water around Britain a war zone. I believe this is the first time (of several) that Germany announced unlimited submarine warfare. American steamship companies think it’s a bluff – a word many of them use.

Pancho Villa says he only became military dictator “to preserve order and permit peaceful pursuits” and because he couldn’t find Provisional President of the Week Garza. He says he’ll totally retire when all this is over.

Carranza threatens to expel the Spanish ambassador if he doesn’t hand over a Spaniard hiding in the embassy who Carranza says has been working with Villa.

The US isn’t quite sure what to do about Canada/Britain’s request for the extradition of Werner Horn (the “von” in his name in earlier reports was either a mistake or self-aggrandizement) for his attempt to blow up the Vanceboro bridge. In a holding action, he is sentenced to 30 days in jail for the damage he caused on the US side of the border (the explosion blew out some windows). After the 30 days, he will be charged with transporting explosives on a passenger train (on the way to the bridge) and serve 18 months in US federal prison. After the war, he’ll be extradited to Canada and put in prison. In 1921 he’ll be adjudged insane and deported to Germany.

Germany is arresting the parents of young Belgian men who escape the country to join the army.

French socialists meet to condemn Sébastian Faure’s peace campaign and to support continuing the war until victory and the crushing of German imperialism.

Congress fails, barely, to overturn Wilson’s veto of the immigration bill.

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Today -100: February 4, 1915: In charge

Pancho Villa has declared himself “in charge of the presidency of Mexico,” which is probably different from declaring himself president, but not by much.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: Supposedly the entire town council of Radnitz (Radnice, as the Czechs call it) has been arrested for failing to attend a mass for Kaiser Wilhelm’s birthday.

The German Social-Democratic Party is distancing itself from Karl Liebknecht’s anti-war position.

There’s been a sort of military coup in Portugal.

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Today -100: February 3, 1915: The sea is free

First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill says “For the first time in history England can say, ‘The sea is free.’” And they can say it with glee while climbing a tree.

There is a debate between German newspapers over whether the Belgians should be allowed to starve, with one writer calling for a “gospel of frightfulness,” which probably doesn’t sound better in the original German.

A Werner von Horn, supposedly a captain in the German reserves but caught on the wrong side of the Atlantic when the war started (on a coffee plantation in Guatemala), tries to blow up the Canadian Pacific Railroad bridge connecting Maine to New Brunswick, although without doing much damage. Captured in Vanceboro, Maine, mostly because he was the only stranger in town and you know Mainers and strangers, he is claiming that it was an act of war and that neutral US cannot hand him over to belligerent Canada (did I just really write “belligerent Canada”?). The funny thing there is that it would only be a legitimate act of war – maybe – if he was acting under orders. He was, his handler was the military attaché at the German embassy in Washington, but that’s not the story he’s giving out, which is that he was acting entirely on his own initiative, with help from some unnamed co-conspirators including a mysterious Irishman who passed him the dynamite.

Mexico: Carranza is distributing land to Zapatistas who turn in their weapons.

Austria says any Transylvanians or others found serving as volunteers with the Russians will be shot.

France will allow the pope’s prayer for peace to be read in churches after all.

The Cuban congress passes the amnesty bill over the president’s veto (and US objections), freeing the former governor of Havana Province, in prison for a year for killing the chief of the national police after a police raid on a club Gov. Asbert owned.

Headline of the Day -100:

It’s a great headline, but don’t bother to click on the link, you will be sorely disappointed.

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Today -100: February 2, 1915: Of peace prayers, the illusion that the woman always is the victim, ships, executions, and not-so-fatal wars

Pope Benedict orders prayers for peace to be said in all Catholic churches. The French government says it will prosecute any clergy who try it.

The Supreme Court decides that the Mann Act, aka the White Slave Act of 1910, which criminalizes transporting a woman across state lines for the purpose of prostitution, could be used to prosecute prostitutes, for example “a professional prostitute, as well able to look out for herself as was the man,” in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s words, who travels across state lines to blackmail a john. This would require, says Holmes, abandoning “the illusion that the woman always is the victim.”

French newspapers are indignant, as was the custom, that a German u-boat sank the British steamer Tokomaru in the English Channel without giving warning.

I guess I should mention the Ship Purchase Bill, currently experiencing fierce opposition in the Senate. Wilson’s idea, the bill would, among other things, allow the US to purchase German and Austrian ships interned at US ports (there are 66 of them). Whether the British Navy would respect the new American flags on these ships is an entirely different matter.

But what about the sailors on those 66 German and Austrian ships interned in the US? Well, they’re interned too. At the start, their employers put them on reduced shore pay. By December, when it was obvious they weren’t getting back to sea any time soon, their pay was reduced to 2/3 for married men and 1/3 for single men. The men refused to accept this, so the steamship companies fired them, but neither could they release them into the US, so the men are now their “guests” and are complaining about the food.

Carranza’s brother Gen. Jesus Carranza, captured a couple of weeks ago by Gutiérrez’s forces, is executed. I must have missed the fair trial they promised him.

Headline of the Day -100 (Los Angeles Fucking Times):

Given the advances in medicine, and the humanitarianism that results in prisoners being taken alive rather than massacred.

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Today -100: February 1, 1915: Of perverts, wires, liquid air bombs, sore throats, the aristocrats, and bullet ownership

Leo Frank’s prosecutor, Solicitor Hugh Dorsey (the future governor of Georgia), says that if the Supreme Court reverses Frank’s conviction, he will go to the Grand Jury to have him indicted on charges of “criminal assault or being a pervert.” Dorsey has just failed to win a conviction of several detectives from the Burns Agency for supposedly bribing a witness to say he heard Conley, the real killer of Mary Phagan, confess.

Headline of the Day -100: “300 Dead Hung on Wires.” German soldiers on Allied barbed wire. Although the “official” story of a British or possibly French soldier who single-handedly recaptured a house from 8 German soldiers, bayoneting four and taking the rest prisoner “while he continued to suck at his clay pipe” seems like it might possibly be slightly exaggerated.

Headline of the Day -100: “GERMAN 'LIQUID AIR' BOMBS WORK HAVOC; Look Like Champagne Bottles and Are More Deadly Than Melinite.” Also, chemical weapons were just used by the Germans on a fairly large scale, not very effectively, but that hasn’t made the paper yet. Something to look forward to.

Kaiser Wilhelm has left the front because his throat is sore. I’m sure the soldiers left in the war zone are very concerned for his health.

The British Army now includes 8 dukes, 10 marquises, 61 earls, 22 viscounts and 77 barons.

The German Juristic Magazine discusses the question of who owns a bullet after it has been used to shoot an enemy soldier. Does the state the first soldier works for give up its right of ownership when it fires the bullet away? Does the soldier who has been shot possess the bullet in his body merely temporarily as an agent of his state? Evidently German jurists have been debating this since the Balkan War, when a soldier and the surgeon who removed a bullet from him both wanted to keep it. This may be the most German thing I’ve ever heard.

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Today -100: January 31, 1915: Of elusive cars, relief, curfews, race feeling, and motorcycle accessories

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: The Sunday NYT Magazine has an article about an “elusive gray car” on the Yorkshire coast, which totally exists and which is totally sending signals to German U-boats, or something.

German newspapers claim that Russia is arresting socialists.

Pancho Villa is said to have been shot and wounded by his bodyguard.

The Rockefeller Foundation is withdrawing from relief work in Belgium, leaving it to the Commission for Relief in Belgium (which is headed by Herbert Hoover and is doing an impressive job of feeding an entire country). Since October, it has brought $1 million of food and supplies to Belgium in four steamship cargoes.

The mayor of an (unnamed) French town near Nancy is suspended for shooting at a German airplane, because a civilian acting as a combatant violates the rules of war and could lead to retaliation.

The war finally hits home in Berlin, where a 3 a.m. curfew is imposed, “for reasons of discipline, public order, and safety.” Haven’t they heard that life is a cabaret?

Rev. Charles Edward Locke, a Methodist pastor and author of Is the Negro Making Good?, objects to the film “The Clansman,” which is to air soon at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles, because it might arouse race feeling. Says Rev. Locke, “It exhibits the negro character in such perfidy and diabolism as to do a crying injustice to a large portion of our fellow-citizens”. The censors order several cuts. The movie in question will, of course, be released under the title “The Birth of a Nation.”

Yes, yes it does.

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Today -100: January 30, 1915: Of weekend trippers, bootblacks, and false teeth

British Prime Minister Asquith’s wife Margot is stopped by French soldiers on the way to the front with some other guests. They were supposed to be having a nice weekend at a villa behind the lines of a war zone, as you do. Instead, they weren’t allowed to go on or return, ostensibly because French supply trucks were coming through, really because Gen. Joffre is getting annoyed with all the weekend tourists. It used to be a nice war zone until people started discovering it on Yelp, and now it’s all crowded and noisy and you can’t park...

Headline of the Day -100: “Wants Japanese in Poland.” Past and future prime minister of France and past, current, and future dick Georges Clemenceau wants 150,000 Japanese soldiers brought in to fight the Germans.

Russian troops have pushed through Austrian Poland into Hungary. Austria-Hungary had kinda hoped to keep the fighting confined to Poland.

The NYT doesn’t seem to have taken to heart Serbia’s request to be called Serbia rather than Servia.

A negro bootblack in Glendale, CA is sent to prison for 6 months and fined $250 for giving a white woman a suggestive note – or an extra 250 days if he can’t pay the fine, which obviously he can’t.

Headline of the Day -100 (LA Times): “Teeth in Court, Can’t Chew.” A dentist sued for non-payment for a set of false teeth ($20 + car fare), which hurt, then they were sandpapered but now they they fell out, then the dentist fixed them with powder which made the guy sick so that he couldn’t eat or chew tobacco, etc. The court ruled in favor of the dentist, who then left town while the old guy’s teeth were still locked up in the evidence room, and... maybe you had to be there.

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Today -100: January 29, 1915: Of zeppelins, valkyries, duels, birthdays, and fertilizerers

Carranza recaptures Mexico City.

Russia will put a captured zeppelin crew on trial for bombing an undefended town.

The opera house in occupied Lille gives a performance of Wagner’s Die Walküre in honor of Kaiser Wilhelm’s birthday. The French locals are invited but refuse to go.

Peru’s foreign minister resigns in order, I guess, to fight a duel, in which he is seriously wounded. The NYT doesn’t feel a need to find out the cause of the duel, or to follow up the story.

The French War Office announces: “On the heights of the Meuse, opposite the French position at Eparges, German soldiers during the celebration yesterday of Kaiser Wilhelm’s birthday began singing the Marseillaise to the accompaniment of fifes and drums. A violent fire from the French troops silenced them.” So probably no present either.

Headline of the Day -100: “Offer Strikers More Pay.” This is the New Jersey fertilizer plant where deputy sheriffs shot up strikers, killing five. The NYT seems to have conveniently forgotten that the fertilizerers are striking against a pay cut, so the “more pay” being offered by the company is actually a 10% pay cut rather than the 20% pay cut. The union rejects the offer.

Fertilizerers is the word for people who work in a fertilizer factory, right?

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Today -100: January 28, 1915: Of vetoes, cakes, canals, and long letters

The German occupiers sentence the wife of the Greek consul at Liège, Belgium to 3 years for helping Belgians escape.

Woodrow Wilson will veto the immigration bill because of the literacy provision, just as Taft did two years ago. He believes it would prevent entry of political refugees and others who would make good American citizens.

Kaiser Wilhelm claims to be setting an example by eating the same adulterated crap he’s forcing on his people. No cakes or whipped cream. And it’s his birthday too.

I’d totally forgotten that Italy still had a formal alliance with Germany and Austria, which didn’t kick in when those two countries went to war because it’s a purely defensive alliance. Anyway, as Italy is evidently now making preparations to go to war with Austria, Germany threatens to renounce the Triple Alliance and consider Italy an enemy if it doesn’t stop.

Turkish troops begin an attempt to seize the Suez Canal. It’s not going too well.

Mexico’s Provisional President Garza’s presidency gets more provisional as he flees Mexico City to establish a new capital at Cuernavaca.

British literary dude Edmund Gosse sent a letter to his friend, British literary dude Compton Mackenzie (neither of whose names is spelled correctly in the NYT) in Italy, only to have the censor complain that it was too long and threatening not to deliver such lengthy missives in the future.

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Today -100: January 27, 1915: Sie hatten alle nur einen Feind

Japan is demanding that China turn over to it all the German and Austrian concessions, give it permission to build a railroad, give it mining rights, etc etc.

The French newspaper L’Eclaire has been told by the censors, who are pissed at criticisms of their work in the paper, that they will no longer review its articles before publication and the paper can just take its chances on being prosecuted.

The German government is taking over the country’s food supply, banning all private trade in corn, wheat and flour, and seizing all existing stocks.

Catholic schools in Germany are all making children sing Ernst Lissauer’s “Hymn of Hate.” Hate of England, that is.

He is known to you all, he is known to you all,

He crouches behind the dark gray flood,

Full of envy, of rage, of craft, of gall,

Cut off by waves that are thicker than blood.

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Today -100: January 26, 1915: It would take me a week to get to you this time

Headline of the Day -100: “Russians Held in Leash.” Didn’t know they were into the kinky stuff.

Headline of the Day -100: “Monster Protest on Literacy Test.” At Cooper Union, an audience of monsters protested the literacy requirement in the immigration bill and, like other such meetings all over the country, demands Wilson veto the bill, which it calls “un-American and inhuman.” You’d think “inhuman” would encompass “un-American,” but I guess that would explain the protesting monsters and ok I’ll stop it now.

Switzerland bans the export of chocolate. (And now, we can't get proper Cadbury's in the US. It's just like history is repeating itself.)

The Supreme Court rules that employers have the right to require employees to quit unions as a condition of employment. That doesn’t require employees to give up their constitutional freedom, the court says; they are “free to decline employment on such terms”.

The transcontinental telephone line opens. The first transcontinental telephone call, like the first phone call in 1876, is between Alexander Graham Bell, this time in New York, and Thomas Watson in San Francisco. Bell repeats, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you” and Watson replies, “It would take me a week to get to you this time.” Such a phone call would cost $20.70 for the first three minutes and $6.75 for each minute thereafter. It will take about ten minutes to put the call through. (While phone call rates have gone down, a smallish one-bedroom condo in 333 Grant Ave, the SF building where Watson took the call, now goes for $779,000). Bell also speaks to Woodrow Wilson in DC.

Bell, I notice, is sticking with “Ahoy” instead of hello, just like Mr. Burns.

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Today -100: January 25, 1915: The baby-killers of Scarborough sallied forth to kill some more babies

Naval battle in the North Sea between the British and German fleets, known as the Battle of Dogger Bank. The British intercept ships on their way, presumably, to bombard more English towns, and do well in the battle, sinking the cruiser Blücher with a loss of 792 men, but not as well as the NYT suggests. They should have pursued the escaping ships but instead hung around to send the crippled Blücher to the bottom. (Yes, British readers, sent to the bottom at Dogger Bank. You may commence sniggering.)

(Pro tip: if you’re looking for cool pictures of the cruiser Blücher on its side, on fire, and sinking, some are from 1940, when the same thing happened. Um, spoiler alert.)

The Daily Chronicle crows, “Yesterday morning the baby-killers of Scarborough sallied forth to kill some more babies...”

Thus far in the war, the Germans have lost 33 ships, amounting to 147,640 tons, the British 20 ships and 156,143 tons.

German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg corrects the “misapprehension” about his oft-quoted remark to the British ambassador just before the war began that the Belgian neutrality treaty was a mere “scrap of paper.” He didn’t mean that Germany viewed it as a mere scrap of paper, no, heaven forfend, but that Belgian and British actions had rendered it such. He’s had six months in which his words were used to demonstrate German duplicity and lack of honor, and that’s the best he could come up with?

Harvard is bringing over some of the refugee Louvain University professors to teach.

Sen. William “Gumshoe Bill” Stone (D-Missouri) writes to Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan about the supposed partiality of the US towards the Allies (the NYT notes that there are many Germans in St. Louis)(Stone will be one of the few senators to vote against entering the war). Bryan replies that it is not the duty of a neutral country like the US to prevent contraband reaching a belligerent, and that the supposed partiality towards the Allies merely reflects the fact that the British Navy is superior to the German and better able to stop contraband (or things the British deem contraband, including oil and rubber) – in other words, the Germans are just as welcome to buy munitions in the US, the munitions just probably won’t make it to Germany. Bryan is saying that it would actually be “an unneutral act” to prevent Americans selling munitions to the Allies, and there is no obligation on the US to do so. Keep all this in mind when German submarines start sinking ships (although Bryan does point out that Germany didn’t think neutral countries should be banned from selling munitions to warring countries when it was doing it during the Russo-Japanese and Balkan Wars).

A French doctor figures out that shells can kill soldiers they don’t actually hit, with shock and air pressure and fumes and “nervous disturbance.” Lungs can literally explode. “Dr. Sencert’s explanation solves a mystery which formed the base of some of the war’s most extraordinary stories.”

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Today -100: January 24, 1915: The subject is too revolting to humanity to be employed for political propaganda

Germany warns Romania that its order to mobilize its military will be regarded as a hostile act.

Russian Prime Minister Goremykin denies as “nonsense” rumors being spread by Germany that Jews are being slaughtered in Russian Poland. GoreMyKin, his name is. He adds that he is surprised to hear Jews talking of emancipation. Yes, they’ve been serving loyally in the army, he admits, but if they hadn’t they would have been shot, so it’s not like they should be given something in return.

No, really, that’s what he said.

The German ambassador to the US says why would he lie about the Russians killing Jews in Poland, “The subject is too revolting to humanity to be employed for political propaganda.”

A committee investigating the NY State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills considers reversing former superintendent Katharine Davis’s policy of making white and black prisoners roomies, but admits that segregation would violate state law.

The will of Charles Emery, former head of the American Tobacco Company, includes $50,000 for his grandson upon his 30th birthday, provided he has abstained from tobacco.

Pres. Wilson orders a census of the unemployed. Because he thinks people have been exaggerating their number for political purposes.

Carranza has supposedly had the father, mother, wife and three children of Gen. Santibanez taken hostage, saying they will be executed if Carranza’s brother Jesus is not released.

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Today -100: January 23, 1915: “Wolves vs. refugees” would be a great video game

Pope Benedict calls on countries not to commit excesses in the countries they’re invading, but fails to name any countries he thinks are doing so. To name names, he says, would be neither convenient nor useful. Convenient? He also says that people in occupied countries shouldn’t commit any infraction of public order. He also thinks the war is a punishment from God against people whose thoughts are entirely engrossed with the things of the world. I think he blames the recent earthquake in Italy on the same thing.

Prohibition is re-enacted in Alabama, the Legislature over-riding the veto of Gov. Charles Henderson, who had wanted the issue decided by a referendum.

Headline of the Day -100: “Wolves Hunt Refugees.” Carpathian refugees fleeing Austrian troops.

A French newspaper is complaining that German prisoners of war are allowed to just stroll around town, insulting shopkeepers, in this case a shopkeeper selling postcards of German atrocities.

Atrocity postcards: collect them all!

A negro is lynched in Arlington, Georgia.

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Today -100: January 22, 1915: Hohenborn to be wild

Theodore Roosevelt writes to British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, saying that Britain and France’s ban on war correspondents is harming public relations in the US, by which he means the chances of getting the US into the war.

Name of the Day -100: New German Minister of War Major Gen. Adolf Wild von Hohenborn.

Germany defends the attacks on mainland England: those Zeppelins were just innocently going about their business, flying to bomb the fortified town of Great Yarmouth – a totally legitimate military target – when out of the blue the towns they were flying over started viciously shooting at them, so naturally they dropped bombs on them.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: The Cologne Gazette claims that France put out peace feelers to Germany last September, but Lord Kitchener threatened to bombard the French coast unless France promised not to make peace without British permission.

Georgia Governor John Slaton offers $500 rewards each for the arrest and conviction of the first five members of the lynch mob that killed the Barber family.  Evidently lynching a whole family reflects badly on all lynch mobs. “A malignant crime and an attack on civilization,” the governor calls the lynchings.

Headline of the Day -100: “Turks and Germans Expelling Zionists.” Settlers in Palestine.

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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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