Today -100: June 22, 1915: No peculiar necromancy in 1866

Georgia Gov. John Slaton, in his last week in office, commutes Leo Frank’s death sentence to one of life imprisonment. His lengthy statement explaining his decision blames the trial judge, who is now conveniently dead, for not understanding his own power to commute the sentence when the case was entirely circumstantial, despite his own doubt about Frank’s guilt.

The governor declares martial law in the area ½ mile around his house, and troops with bayonets disperse crowds who want to... discuss the matter with him. This is believed to be the first time a United States governor has ever had to declare martial law to protect himself. A mass meeting at the Atlanta court house adopts resolutions denouncing Slaton for destroying the courts, because nothing says respect for the courts so much as a baying mob. In Marietta, home town of Mary Phagan, Slaton is hung in effigy, the effigy bearing a sign reading “John M. Slaton, King of the Jews and Georgia’s Traitor Forever.” State Solicitor Hugh Dorsey, who prosecuted the case, criticizes Slaton’s decision, saying that Slaton was “disqualified, at least to an extent, by his environment and affiliations” from viewing the case impartially(meaning that one of his law partners was Frank’s lawyer). Dorsey will be elected governor in 1916, largely on the back of this case.

In Guinn v. US, the Supreme Court strikes down the grandfather clause in the Oklahoma and Maryland constitutions in a ruling also affecting similar provisions in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Virginia (Wikipedia says also North Carolina, but the NYT says NC’s grandfather clause expired in 1908; in 1915 the state was instead using educational qualifications to stop negroes voting). In the law just struck down, Oklahoma’s literacy test for voters didn’t apply to people whose grandfathers were either eligible to vote in 1866 (before the passage of the 15th Amendment) or were soldiers or lived abroad. The state told the Court this didn’t violate the 15th Amendment because it didn’t explicitly mention race, which is the exact same argument made in 2015 in the Supreme Court in support of de facto housing segregation (Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project). But the Court, in a decision written by Chief Justice Edward Douglass White, a former Confederate soldier, rejects OK’s claim as an evasion: “it cannot be said that there was any peculiar necromancy in the time named [1866], which engendered attributes affecting the qualification to vote”. The Court didn’t have a problem with a literacy test per se.

The NAACP filed a brief in the case, its first before the Court.

Oklahoma will keep the literacy provision, but require that those who had been excluded from voting by the overturned law register to vote within a 12-day period or “be perpetually disenfranchised.” That too was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1939.

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Today -100: June 21, 1915: Of fat frogs, trusties, and tunnels

Headline of the Day -100: 

100 kg (220 lb) men may be conscripted for non-combat duties.

The wife of the warden of Joliet Prison is murdered, probably by a negro trusty convicted of manslaughter, her skull crushed and the warden’s apartment (in the prison) set on fire.

The creation of the Federal Reserve has led, inevitably, to the first attempt at a Federal Reserve Bank robbery.

Headline of the Day -100: 

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Today -100: June 20, 1915: Take me out to the ball game

The USS Arizona is launched, 15 months after construction began. That’s the USS Arizona that was sunk at Pearl Harbor.

Former Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan holds a peace meeting in Carnegie Hall before a mostly labor-union audience. The meeting agrees that the US government should take over all munitions patents and manufacturing.

German troops are fighting a losing battle against the “tenth enemy”: lice. Specifically, Polish lice.

Clarice Baright has applied to NY Mayor John Mitchell to be appointed to the Court of Special Sessions, Juvenile Court division. The mayor first has to figure out whether a woman is even eligible to be a magistrate. She is an expert on juvenile crime and could not be more qualified. He won’t appoint her, although she will temp at the job for 30 days in 1925 while one of the judges is out sick.

Carranza’s attempt to unite all of Mexico behind him in response to Woodrow Wilson’s ultimatum has instead succeeded in breaking up even his own faction, as four cabinet members resign and several generals including “Lefty” Obregón are backing them. Carranza has retreated to a fortress. Wilson’s plan is still, reportedly, to have Carranza step aside in favor of some mythical person acceptable to all sides.

A New Jersey jail allowed 18 prisoners to see a baseball game in which the NY Yankees were beaten by a local team which the NYT crankily refuses to even name. At the end of the game, the prisoners couldn’t find the deputy sheriff who was supposed to take them back, because he’d gone off to celebrate. After looking around for a bit, they walked back to the jail, but no one answered their knocking, and the burglars amongst the company proved unequal to the job of breaking in. Eventually a cook heard them and let them in, along with 5 hoboes they’d picked up along the way. “It is understood that a pleasant evening was had by all.”

Buy me some peanuts and craaaaackerjack
I don’t care if I never go back.

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Today -100: June 19, 1915: Of peace prayers, well-educated white men under negro control, u-boats, and tractors

The German authorities are considering whether to prosecute the Cardinal Archbishop of Cologne for publishing a prayer for peace, saying “Nothing on earth is so cruel as war and such a war as the present war with its oceans of blood and tears.” In the past, though, he’s said that God is on Germany’s side, so who knows what’s up with him.

Germany complains that France is maltreating German POWs in Africa, especially in Dahomey (Benin), “where well-educated white men are under negro control”. In retaliation, French POWs will be forced to labor in swamps.

German feeling in favor of ruthless submarine warfare is reinforced by the story, whether true or not I don’t know, that two weeks ago a u-boat did what it was supposed to do under the rules of “humanitarian” warfare and gave a warning to a fishing ship it intended to sink so that the crew could escape, but the ship fired on her and sank her. (Update: Within a couple of days the story had changed from U-14 being fired on to U-29 being treacherously destroyed by a British tank steamer flying a Swedish flag. In fact, U-29 was rammed by one British dreadnought in March as it attempted to sink another dreadnought, no treachery involved).

A Cleveland company is advertising poison-gas shells in foreign publications. The government is not best pleased.

Henry Ford has invented an “automobile tractor.” I’m not sure what he’s actually invented that’s so new; tractors have been around since the beginning of the century, which is why there’s, you know, a word for them. At any rate, Ford will soon begin mass-producing tractors and come to dominate the market. The tractors will keep young men on the farm, Ford says. He doesn’t seem to have asked young men if they want to be kept on the farm.

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Today -100: June 18, 1915: Of gunboat diplomacy, slackers, and swell shells

Woodrow Wilson sends 3 warships to Mexico carrying 3 companies of Marines who the admiral in charge of the expedition is authorized to land to deal with the Yaqi Indians.

British Minister of Munitions David Lloyd George will introduce a bill to establish labor courts to fine munitions workers for “slacking.” Strikes and lockouts will be illegal. Profits will be restricted to pre-war profits + 25%.

As I mentioned, the German ambassador to the US sent an emissary on the arduous journey to Germany to convey his views about American reactions to the Lusitania sinking, because he rightly didn’t trust the security of cable traffic. Well, several US newspapers have been running rumors that that emissary, Dr. Anton Meyer-Gerhard of the German Red Cross, is actually Alfred Meyer of the German Privy Council, who was in the US on a secret arms-buying mission. Another version has Meyer or some other mysterious German traveling as Meyer-Gerhard’s assistant and the whole trip being a smokescreen to sneak him out of the country. The German ambassador will go to Acting Secretary of State Lansing tomorrow to formally deny any knowledge of this Alfred Meyer person. Lansing will formally accept that, because Count von Bernstorff... gave him his word.

William Jennings Bryan says the US’s military unpreparedness actually makes for peace; Europe demonstrates that deterrence doesn’t prevent war.

At the start of the zeppelin attacks on London, total blackouts of street lights were considered but rejected as creating more hazards (for example, making it difficult for fire trucks, police and ambulances to get around) than the actual bombing.

Rhyming Headline of the Day -100:

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Today -100: June 17, 1915: Of palaces, incinerations, rockefellers, and zeppelins

French planes bomb the Karlsruhe Palace, the home of the grand duke of Baden. Presumably they didn’t know that the queen of Sweden was visiting, but the wing she’s in is untouched. Kaiser Wilhelm’s aunt is also in residence.

France is experimenting with incinerating its dead soldiers. On its first try, after 5 hours “no unpleasant odor was noticeable.”

At the Lusitania inquiry, Cunard chairman Alfred Booth says that it was perfectly fine that the ship wasn’t using all its boilers – saving coal but reducing speed – because no ship had ever been torpedoed when it was going more than 14 knots, and the Lusi was making a full 18.

31 socialist writers send a letter to John D. Rockefeller Jr., accusing him of murder in the Colorado coal mines, not just for the Ludlow Massacre, but for the high mortality rate in his mines, high even by coal mine standards, and for manipulating the courts to sentence union leaders to death. Since union leaders are evidently being held responsible for acts committed by union members, it actually seems only fair that Rockefeller should be tried for murders committed by his thugs. Among the signers of the letter are Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis.

Headline of the Day -100:

It’s probably just a little gas. Hah!

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Today -100: June 16, 1915: Of rafts, helmets, futuristic bicyclists, and rubber

The British Court of Inquiry into the Lusitania sinking opens, and the fix is in. It’s a propaganda exercise, pure and simple. Any survivors who might criticize the Admiralty, the Cunard Line, or Capt. Turner (American passengers are most critical) are excluded as witnesses, and the inquiry is headed by Lord Mersey, who also ran the Titanic inquiry and decided that no one had done anything wrong. Lawyers representing victims and survivors are present, but Attorney General Sir Edward Carson is censoring their questions.

The main item of business on the first day (the inquiry will last only 3 – Carson says he doesn’t intend to bring “a raft of evidence” – really, Edward, really?) is to disprove that the ship was armed.

Headline of the Day -100:

A negro who murdered a farmer is lynched outside of Hope, Arkansas.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Nothing says The Future like a bicycle.

Which is the kinkiest war headline of the day -100? Is it this?

or this?

or perhaps this?

Frank Sheehy-Skeffington, Irish nationalist and feminist, was arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act for making statements “causing disaffection and affecting recruitment” (a speech against the prospect of conscription). Sentenced to 6 months, he hunger struck, like his suffragette wife Hanna back in the day, and has been released after 7 days under the Cat and Mouse Act, the first time the Act has been used for a non-suffrage-related offense.

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Today -100: June 15, 1915: Of wandering Jews, Greek elections, poisoned water, and lynchings

Romania seems to have done a deal with the Allies to enter the war. They want Transylvania. And Bessarabia. And other territory.

Headline of the Day -100:

Spain says it will take Jewish refugees from the Balkan war zone. This is the result of a campaign promoted by a Louis Friedman of New York since before the war. How welcome Jews will be remains a question, but Spain has admitted that the decree of expulsion (the 1492 one?) is no longer in force.

Greek elections: the party of former prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos, who was fired by the (now very ill) king for his pro-war views, wins a majority of parliamentary seats.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: the Berliner Tageblatt on May 9 (the NYT has evidently just received a load of old German newspapers) claims two British navy divisions got into a battle with each other at night.

Britain will stop treating German U-boat prisoners differently from other POWs, and Germany will stop its reprisals against British prisoners.

A lynch mob in Winnsboro, South Carolina, shoot a negro being taken to court on assault (presumably rape) charges, killing the county sheriff in the process.

Anti-German riots in Moscow after some factory workers get sick, which naturally led to rumors that Germans had poisoned the factory’s drinking water.

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Today -100: June 14, 1915: A farewell to arm

In Lahore, India, 81 Indians are indicted for conspiracy against the lawful government of India. The revolution is said to have started in Sacramento, of all places.

Mexico: Gen. Obregón is falsely reported to have died a few days after his arm was shot off.

Last week, the German occupation authorities in Belgium shut down transportation in and out of the town of Malines to punish it for not providing munitions workers. Now, Cardinal Mercier, who has clashed with the Germans more than once, attempts to walk out of Malines – with a large retinue. There may have been a clash of some sort.

Ernest Cowper, a Canadian journalist for Jack Canuck who survived the Lusitania sinking and rescued 6-year-old Helen Smith of Pennsylvania, who lost both her parents, her baby brother, and two cousins, says he handed her over to a woman in Queenstown who said she was Helen’s aunt, but who he now thinks was just some wealthy woman who read the story, because after he wrote a story about Helen he got 22 offers to adopt her.

OK, I’ve looked it up now, and that woman was in fact her aunt (another Lusitania survivor). Phew. Helen lived what sounds like a normal enough life in Wales (with other relatives, not the aunt, who was the mother of those dead cousins), where she died in 1993. She was still in contact with Cowper 10 years after the Lusitania. This is them.

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Today -100: June 13, 1915: When in Rome, or something

Germans are surprised and pleased, in their German way, at the mildness of Woodrow Wilson’s note.

William Jennings Bryan is now saying that the most recent note to Germany was watered down over the version that caused him to resign, but not watered down enough to justify him withdrawing his resignation. People have been wondering why he resigned over a letter almost identical and if anything weaker than the first one, which he did sign.

The NYT gets all Maureen Dowd on Bryan, calling his address to German-Americans “an unconscious picture of the state of a befuddled mind.”

An article in the Sunday NYT Magazine says that Italy today is using the same military strategy as Ancient Rome.

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Today -100: June 12, 1915: Why, the very thought of the Germany army resorting to cruelty and force!

Headline of the Day -100: 

21 treaties, to be precise. The recently passed Seaman’s Act gives foreign sailors in US ports the right to half-pay, exempts foreign sailors from arrest for desertion, requires that a certain percentage of sailors be skilled and a certain percentage understand the language of the captain. All these provisions violate treaties, as well as the contracts those sailors entered into abroad. One little problem: the treaties Congress plans to screw with cover much broader commercial ties, and may now be abrogated entirely by this law.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Whatever floats your boats, guys.

Actually, Social Democratic deputies present reports that German officers are ill-treating soldiers. The minister of war denies some of them, makes excuses for the rest, and asks deputies to stop talking about these things in open session because it might create the impression that “Germany army leaders had to resort to cruelty and force to drive their troops to battle”. He gets his way about the open session.

William Jennings Bryan issues a statement addressed to German-Americans, saying that it was perfectly ok if they wanted Germany to win, but criticizing their criticism of US arms sales to warring countries. Bryan says such sales are perfectly neutral even though they help only the side which is actually capable of taking advantage of it. Oh sure, the US could stop selling arms altogether as some suggest, “but it is strange that they could have overlooked” that that could hasten peace only because it would help one side. That may be the least persuasive logic I’ve ever heard, and he’s condescending about it as well, which pretty much sums up William Jennings Bryan right there. He also asks them to try to pressure Germany in favor of the US position; German-Americans will be about as happy about this as Muslims today are happy being asked to disavow every single terrorist act.

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Today -100: June 11, 1915: Contending for nothing less high and sacred than the rights of humanity

Pres. Wilson’s note to Germany (full text) is made public. It asks Germany for assurances that it will stop killing Americans and sinking American ships and accept as a principle that non-combatants can’t be endangered when Germany attacks unresisting merchant ships. “The Government of the United States is contending for something much greater than mere rights of property or privileges of commerce. It is contending for nothing less high and sacred than the rights of humanity”. Specifically, the rights of people from neutral countries to travel by sea without being blowed up. Germany’s claims about contraband munitions being aboard the Lusitania are dismissed as “irrelevant” to the issue of the legality of the methods used in sinking it. All in all, a pretty mild document; the promise Wilson made in the first Lusitania note to hold Germany to “strict accountability” is not repeated.

German newspapers attack Wilson’s note as “one-eyed neutrality”: accepting Britain’s naval blockade of Germany but not German attacks on British supply ships. The London Times has an article by an American living in Germany who says “The average German today holds the American to be a money-grubbing coward.” And your point is?

Former Secretary of State Bryan issues a new statement to the American people, saying that Wilson’s note to Germany is part of the “old system” of force, while Bryan espouses the new system of persuasion and arbitration. The old system led to this war. “Some nation must lead the world out of the black night of war into the light of day when ‘swords shall be beaten into plowshares.’ Why not make that honor ours? ... Some day the nations will place their trust in love, the weapon, for which there is no shield” etc.

The US Secret Service arrests Gustav Stahl, one of the people whose affidavits the German government trotted out to “prove” the Lusitania was equipped with cannons. He’s arrested for perjury in his testimony before a grand jury. If I’m getting this right, Stahl testified for officials of the Hamburg-American Line being investigated for using false papers to ferry supplies from the US to German naval ships, contrary to US law, and those officials then got him to lie about the Lusitania as well.

A forthcoming article in Scientific American suggests how German poison gas might be dealt with. Poison gas as currently delivered, simply releasing the gas when a mild wind is blowing in the right direction (too strong a wind and it disperses), is pretty vulnerable to... giant fans (airplane engines and propellers without the actual airplane, hidden so they aren’t immediately targeted and blown up).

The French army will reduce solders’ meat ration and send them more preserved fruit instead.

In Johnston City, Illinois, a mob lynches a Sicilian miner who helped assassinate a rich guy whose son-in-law is a mine superintendent who recently fired some other Sicilians.

For the first time since reformist Thomas Osborne became warden of Sing Sing, someone escapes: Frederick Spence, who paid a guy $2 and a drink to shoot a man who had beaten him up for making unwanted advances to the man’s sister-in-law. The other prisoners are so upset by this breach of trust (and breach of bars, but evidently Sing Sing was really easy to escape from) that they immediately subscribe $100 for a reward for his capture.

The 1916 Hudson! Now with graceful yacht lines!

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Today -100: June 10, 1915: Of God and his mighty gases

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: The Financial News (UK) claims that Kaiser Wilhelm ordered German aviators to try to bomb the children of Belgium’s King Albert. It also says he doubled the rewards to U-boat crews for sinking ships if they carried women and children, and that he specified the tortures to be used on 3-year-old children.

William Jennings Bryan is going to campaign actively for a softer approach to Germany than Wilson’s. He wants some sort of “investigation” by an international commission of the dispute with Germany over the Lusitania, lasting at least one blood-cooling year (as per all those arbitration treaties he’s been negotiating with various countries, but not Germany, I think), and for the government to warn Americans against traveling on ships, like the Lusi, registered in belligerent nations or carrying ammunition – “Passengers and ammunition should not travel together,” he says, in a statement issued simultaneously with Pres. Wilson’s note being sent to Germany. “Why should an American citizen be permitted to involve his country in war by traveling upon a belligerent ship, when he knows that the ship will pass through a danger zone... It is a very one-sided citizenship that compels a government to go to war over a citizen’s rights and yet relieves the citizen of all obligations to consider his nation’s welfare.” Bryan’s campaigning will probably consist mostly of statements and articles, he says. Amusingly, given his practice of going on paid lecture tours while still secretary of state, he is obligated to say that any speeches he gives on this subject will not be for pay.

The NYT complains that Bryan is talking publicly about private matters, if you think things like a note sent to Germany that might lead to war are private matters, which the NYT does. Bryan “takes no account of the embarrassment he may cause the Administration,” like some sort of former-day Edward Snowden.

The German military issues a staff order to troops in Poland: “God himself is on our side and fights for us in the conflict against the whole world. We, by the will of the Almighty, have had put into our hands a new and mighty weapon – those gases wherewith we have defeated our enemies.” Also, the war will obviously be won in a couple of months, max.

The Georgia Prison Commission rejects Leo Frank’s plea for commutation of his death sentence.

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Today -100: June 9, 1915: Less than three minutes to make a man a citizen, and he a foreigner

The real reason for Woodrow Wilson’s delay in responding to the German note on the Lusitania now becomes apparent: Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan resigns rather than sign the note, telling the president in his resignation letter, “you have prepared for transmission to the German Government a note in which I cannot join without violating what I deem to be an obligation to my country, and the issue involved is of such moment that to remain a member of the Cabinet would be as unfair to you as it would be to the cause which is nearest my heart, namely, the prevention of war.” In other words, he thinks the note (whose contents are not yet known) might lead to war with Germany. Which it won’t.

Pretty much everyone is happy to see Bryan go. The NYT says his resignation is “perhaps the wisest act of his political career.”

Bryan will not, as some are speculating, return to the Senate, or run for president in 1916, or even lead a significant opposition to Wilson. As a political force, the three-time Democratic candidate for president is (finally) done. The rest of his life, until his death in ten years’ time, will be devoted to prohibition and fighting Darwinism, which kind of go together since alcohol is behind so many Darwin Award winners.

Assistant Secretary of State Robert Lansing will replace Bryan temporarily (and then permanently). Semi-interestingly, Lansing is married to the daughter of Benjamin Harrison’s secretary of state and is the uncle of Eisenhower’s SecState John Foster Dulles.

The new British Cabinet will pool their salaries, except for the prime minister and the attorney general, who is paid partly through fees. The problem was that more Conservatives were getting the £5,000 a year posts and more Liberals the £2,000 a year posts.

Some newspapers claim that Germany is trying to buy up US arms companies (Winchester, Remington, Bethlehem Steel) to prevent them supplying the Allies.

The National American Woman’s Suffrage Association conference votes to condemn the two Congressional Union suffragists who attempted to speak to Woodrow Wilson “at a most inopportune time,” that is, when he’s preoccupied with the whole Lusitania thing.

New suffragist tactic: women college graduates wearing their black college robes silently attend naturalization ceremonies at US District Court to demonstrate visually the distinction between educated women unable to vote and ignorant foreign men just off the boat allowed to vote, or something. “Less than three minutes to make a man a citizen, and he a foreigner,” says one of the suffragists, and now women “must plead to this foreigner to grant us a voice in our own country [meaning the November NY referendum]. Could anything be more desperately unfair and humiliating?”

Liechtenstein declares itself neutral, but Austria says the country lies within its “theater of war.”

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Today -100: June 8, 1915: Of red-handed monks

German anti-Semitic newspapers want to restore the ban on Jewish army officers – after the war.

Gen. Pancho Villa may have been decisively defeated.

It mysteriously comes out that there is/was a secret treaty between Germany, Austria and Romania under which Romania can’t go to war with them until 1920.

A National American Woman’s Suffrage Association conference votes against militant tactics such as the recent “heckling” of Pres. Wilson and opposing Democrats in general for opposing a federal suffrage constitutional amendment.

The German occupation authority demands that 500 Belgians volunteer to work at their arsenal in Malines. None do. As punishment, the city’s entire business traffic by rail and canal is shut down.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Italian authorities arrest five monks for signaling military intel by way of reflectors from the windows of their monastery across the Adriatic to Austria.

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Today -100: June 7, 1915: Of passports, gas, and poison zeppelins

Two Americans who live in Dresden told a newspaper there that Wilson’s reaction to the Lusitania sinking makes them ashamed of their citizenship. So the State Dept revokes their passports.

Russia says German poison gas killed civilians, indeed wiped out whole villages down to the last chicken.

Headline of the Day -100: 

What’s the 1915 equivalent of “that would be a great name for a rock band?” I really don’t see a barbershop quartet calling itself the Poison Zeppelins.

Oh, and there are no, repeat no poison zeppelins.

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Today -100: June 6, 1915: Of astors, headaches, traitor monks, mob rule, and gas

2-year-old John Jacob Astor VI, born four months after his father, John Jacob Astor IV, died on the Titanic, on which he and his much younger wife Madeleine Talmage Force Astor were returning from their honeymoon, requires more to live on than the measly $20,000 a year the Surrogates’ Court is giving his mother out of the income of his $3 million trust, she tells the court. Why, she’s spent much more than that (mostly on their 5th Avenue mansion) out of the goodness of her heart and her own $7+ million inheritance. To be fair, she’ll lose that inheritance in a year when she remarries, because JJ 4’s will was kind of dickish that way.

Headline of the Day -100: 

So he was unable to finish writing his response to Germany’s response to his Lusitania Note.

The Danish Parliament votes for a new constitution, in which women not only have the franchise but also the right of election to the Parliament.

Headline of the Day -100: 

While the rest of the country is holding pro-Leo Frank meetings, one held in Atlanta cheers for his impending execution – close enough that Frank can hear them from his cell. The speaker says that giving in to the clamor of the rest of the country would be giving in to “mob rule.”

Headline of the Day -100: 

We’ve all been there.

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Today -100: June 5, 1915: Of zeppelin giants, spies, and poles

Headline of the Day -100: 

Oh, I don’t think so.

In a secret trial in London, two Germans named Muller and Hahn are convicted before two justices named Lush and Avory, which sounds like a bad pulp thriller, but then so much of the British justice system does. Muller is sentenced to death by firing squad, Hahn to life.

The Frankfurter Zeitung claims that arch-nationalist Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio is in fact... a Pole.

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Today -100: June 4, 1915: If we had a jingo in the White House, this country would now be at war with Germany

San Marino declares war on Austria! The Sammarinese army numbers nearly one thousand. Nearly. The NYT will print another story on the 8th saying that San Marino, “in an ardently picturesque manifesto... declares it draws the sword on the side of Italy.” And then doesn’t mention the republic’s no doubt ardently picturesque war effort at least through 1916.

Germany captures Przemysl.

Wilson’s warning to the Mexican factions to unite or face American action has the predictable (except to Wilson, I guess) effect: every side is now fighting harder than ever for dominance, hoping for American recognition.

The British Parliament meets for the first time under the new cabinet.  The NYT tells us “H.W. Foster was cheered when he answered questions about stockings” but fails to inform us as to what that was about, so I had to check Hansard:

Mr. RAMSAY MACDONALD  asked the Under-Secretary of State for War whether there has been any rejection of hosiery supplied to the War Office since the War on account of its containing excessive moisture; and, if so, can he state the quantities so rejected?

The FINANCIAL SECRETARY to the WAR OFFICE (Mr. H. W. Forster)  There have been a few rejections on account of excessive moisture, but the quantity rejected forms a very small percentage of the total supplied. In most cases the excessive moisture was due to the socks having been scoured after finishing and sent out before they were dry.

Why there might have been cheering remains a complete mystery.

Parliament passes a bill to end the requirement that MPs appointed to cabinet positions have to resign and fight a by-election. This was supposed to be temporary, but like so many war measures...

The Tories want all workers in munitions, mines, railroads and anything else that can be considered vaguely war-related to be put under government control, essentially conscripted, and all union regulations abrogated.

Emmeline Pankhurst goes further, holding a meeting to call for mandatory war service for everyone of both sexes. What war service is she performing, you might ask? Well, she’s campaigning for mandatory war service (with a secret subsidy from the government, although that probably starts later), and she plans to adopt some war babies and then pass them off to her subordinates when she gets bored. At another meeting announcing plans for a home for war babies, a Father Vaughan protests the idea that “because a soldier had had a bad time in the trenches he should be encouraged to have a good time here at the expense of morality.”

William Howard Taft, speaking at the Bryn Mawr commencement, says it’s good Wilson is president because “If we had a jingo in the White House, this country would now be at war with Germany.” I wonder who he might have in mind?

District Court refuses the federal government’s petition to dissolve US Steel as a monopoly. The government will appeal.

The commander of a German U-boat apologizes to the captain of a trawler he’d just sunk, saying he hadn’t realized it was Belgian. So that’s okay then.

29 French airplanes bombard the hq of the German crown prince.

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Today -100: June 3, 1915: The people and Government of the United States cannot stand indifferently by and do nothing to serve their neighbor

Headline of the Day -100: 

Woodrow Wilson orders Mexico to knock off all the civil warring, or the US “will be constrained to decide what means should be employed by the United States in order to help Mexico save herself and serve her people.”  For example, we might lend “active moral support” (i.e., an arms embargo on its enemies) to some strongman or strong-group, “if such may be found,” which can establish a functioning government. They’re thinking Gen. Eduardo Iturbide, mostly because he’s in Washington DC lobbying for the job. “Mexico is starving and without a Government,” Wilson says, so “the people and Government of the United States cannot stand indifferently by and do nothing to serve their neighbor. They want nothing for themselves in Mexico. Least of all do they desire to settle her affairs for her, or claim any right to do so. But neither do they wish to see utter ruin come upon her”. He telegraphs this statement to Carranza, Villa, Zapata, and Garza.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: The Daily News (London) says that Turkish troops have revolted at Gallipoli, killing German officers. The alleged revolt was put down, allegedly, and its ringleaders allegedly executed.

Cesare Battisti, a member of the Austrian Chamber of Deputies from Trentino for the Social Democratic Workers’ Party, is tried in absentia and sentenced to death. In absentia because he left the country at the start of the war and has joined the Italian Army. He will be captured by the Austrians a year from now and hanged (twice) and garrotted.

German Ambassador to the US Count von Bernstorff meets Pres. Wilson and tells him that he has affidavits that the Lusitania was armed: from some guy with a German name (who will turn out to be a German secret service agent) who claims he saw cannons when helping a friend bring his trunks on board; a boarding-house keeper and a lodger who say another lodger, a steward on the Lusi, said he’d be safe because the ship had “four big brightly polished copper guns” (the steward will swear he’s never met the guy and never said any such thing); and some guy who totally spotted a cannon while standing on the docks). Wilson tells him that the US won’t discuss the details of the Lusitania case with Germany until it accepts the principle that innocent lives shouldn’t be taken on the high seas.

Amb. Bernstorff has a problem: with trans-Atlantic cables passing through British territory, he has no way of communicating privately with his government, which he believes underestimates feeling in the US about the Lusitania. He will soon make arrangements to send a Dr Meyer-Gerhard all the way to Berlin.

A German newspaper claims that the former prime minister of Italy Giovanni Giolitti has had to flee the country because of his opposition to the war. Pretty sure this is false.

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Today -100: June 2, 1915: This impudent excuse is typical of the Germans

Austria is refusing to offer Romania anything to stop it entering the war. It is thought that Romania and Bulgaria will soon enter the war and maybe even – and this would obviously be a game-changer – San Marino. (Granted the game that would be changed is Trivial Pursuit, but a game-changer is a game-changer).

The NYT notes that in the 9th century San Marino declared war against Charlemagne. And where is he now? Dead, that’s where he is.

There are so many countries at war (okay, 11, but that doesn’t count all their colonies and protectorates and commonwealths), that evidently no one noticed that one was on vacation:

In a massive zeppelin raid on London (which has previously been untouched), 120 bombs are dropped, starting fires, and killing 7 people. The Blitz this ain’t. More riots against and looting of German-owned shops ensue. Germany says the raid was in retaliation for the (French) aerial bombardment of Ludwigshafen am Rhein. Which the French said was in retaliation for German bombing raids on Paris. The Daily News says “This impudent excuse is typical of the Germans”.

Grover Cleveland’s widow Frances Preston is president of the Princeton branch of the New Jersey Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage and vp of the state branch. She says many women don’t want the vote and women don’t know enough about politics to cast intelligent votes.

The Georgia Prison Commission is considering Leo Frank’s plea for commutation. A delegation from the Atlanta region is present, including members of Mary Phagan’s family, former Governor Joseph Brown, and Solicitor General of the Blue Ridge Circuit Herbert Clay, who complains that non-Georgians have been reading “biased, I might say subsidized accounts.” I wonder jew he thinks is subsidizing those accounts? Who – I meant who he thinks is subsidizing those accounts.

Punch:

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Today -100: June 1, 1915: But all the same we're wanting more

The British government is suing the London Times for printing a letter by a retired Maj. Richardson (they’re also suing Richardson) under the Defense of the Realm Act (DORA). The letter called for conscription in Britain, saying that France is running out of military recruits. The prosecutor says this would give Germany a sense of confidence and depress the French and British. The case will be dismissed because the Germans already know about the French thing.

Germany admits having sunk the American oil tanker Gulflight 4 weeks ago. The commander of the U-boat that sank it says he thought it was British and didn’t notice the American flag until after he’d given the order to fire.

Germany calls out the last of its reserves – except in Bavaria, for some reason.

Headline of the Day -100:

A mountain range, not a follicly challenged person.

British recruiting posters issued some time this month:

Recruiting poster issued this month in Ireland:

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Today -100: May 31, 1915: We know ourselves to be free of any blame

The German reply to Wilson’s Lusitania Note fails to offer reparations or give guarantees for American lives and ships in the future. It claims that the Lusitania had concealed cannon (it didn’t, but that’s Germany’s story, and it’s sticking with it).

Some German newspaper views on the Lusitania: The Berliner Tageblatt: “We pity their hard fate with sincere hearts, but at the same time we know ourselves to be free of any blame.” It blames the British Admiralty, and Winston Churchill in particular, for telling the Lusi to fly an American flag on a previous voyage.

Latest Italian spy scare: Spies in the catacombs under Rome!

9 of the 10 deputy sheriffs on trial for shooting strikers at the Roosevelt fertilizer plant in January are convicted of manslaughter. They may all be tried again for one of the other strikers they killed. (In a bit they will be sentenced to terms of 2 to 10 years.)

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Today -100: May 30, 1915: Of pledges, and spy scares

French President Poincaré takes the pledge to abstain from spirits. Funnily enough, he doesn’t say a thing about wine.

Germany finally replies to Wilson’s Lusitania Note. It’s just a statement of “facts.” They will wait for the US’s response to those facts before making any further statement. They insist the Lusitania was armed and had ammunition in its cargo in violation of US law. They justify the sinking of the Falaba because all merchant ships have supposedly been instructed by the British Admiralty to ram subs (there’s even a reward for sinking a u-boat) and fly false flags.

Italians believe that there has been a vast espionage operation against them that includes every Austrian and German tourist who has ever taken a photograph and billboards which are actually coded directions for airships, etc.

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Today -100: May 29, 1915: Holy anger, Batman!

Next week, Woodrow Wilson will tell Mexicans to get their act together, or he’ll get it together for them. He’s specifically pissed off that Carranza’s men seized a relief committee shipment of corn intended for the starving people of Mexico City.

A surprise defense witness at the trial of those ten cops who shot up the strikers at the Roosevelt fertilizer plant in New Jersey in January: the secretary of the union, who turns out to be a police spy. The attorney general questions him: “You joined the union to sell it out, didn’t you? And in doing so, you sold your manhood, didn’t you?”

German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg says “Italy has now inscribed in the book of the world’s history in letters of blood, which will never fade, her violation of good faith.” He says Italy could have gotten everything it wanted without going to war and that distrust of Austria didn’t enter into it, because Germany guaranteed the concessions and everyone (Belgium aside) knows Germany’s word can totally be trusted. He says that Germany wages this war “not in hatred... but in anger – in holy anger.”

Lots of Italian princes are joining the army. I look forward to many false dead-prince rumors.

A special correspondent explains in the NYT why Italy went to war: Italians really don’t like Germans.

Italy and Britain are each offering contracts for any company in the US that can manufacture 1,000 high-power airplane engines, but US factories aren’t up to it, in part because they’re busy filling contracts for trucks and planes. I can’t imagine why Germans keep saying the US isn’t really neutral.

Austrian Gen. Moritz von Auffenberg, who was fired after losing the Battle of Rawa at the start of the war, is arrested, the NYT says as a political criminal, but actually for helping a friend profit from insider (and top secret) information when he was minister of war in 1912. Embarrassingly, the government only just found out about this – four days after the Emperor made him a baron. He will be found not guilty by a military tribunal.

Headline of the Day -100 Which Is Not a Euphemism, Probably: 

The NYT calls the Austrian 42-centimeter gun an elongated version of Big Bertha, which the Times calls Thick Bertha, both of which sound like a Berlin cabaret act, but not as much as the name in German: Dicke Bertha. Anyway, a German correspondent claims that Russian troops go insane from fright during the 90 seconds between the gun firing and its shell arriving on target. The Austrians are very proud of their big gun (cough), and claim that they invented it all by themselves without copying Dicke Bertha, it’s just pure coincidence.

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Today -100: May 28, 1915: This is, perhaps, the very time when I would not care to arouse the sentiment of patriotism

Headline of the Day -100: 

A ship, not the actual royal person. A mine-layer, it blows up while docked in Sheerness, England, killing 352 crew and dockyard workers. Pieces of the ship, severed heads and whatnot land up to 9 miles away. A boot, a collar and tie, and a pound of butter fall into the garden of a woman in Rainham, four miles away. A court of inquiry will suggest that maybe in the future the Royal Navy train people a little better before letting them prime mines.

Also hit by an explosion: the US steamer Nebraskan, off the coast of Ireland. It’s still not clear if it was an accident or a torpedo, but it was in fact a torpedo. A German one. The Nebraska is only damaged. It will be sunk for good by another U-boat in two years.

The Germans are now using poison gas on the Eastern front as well as the Western.

Speaking of poison gas, 18 French airplanes drop bombs on the BASF factories in Ludwigshafen, where explosives and poison gas are produced. This is the first ever strategic aerial bombardment. 12 are killed. The French say their planes all returned unharmed, the Germans say they captured 2 of them (later they’ll also claim to have shot down 4 more), and anyway their bombs did little damage.

King Alfonso of Spain offers the use of a palace to the pope if he has to flee Italy.

Woodrow Wilson has stopped giving any speeches, blaming the press for focusing unduly on the “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight” line in his speech in Philadelphia two weeks ago. Why, he says, he didn’t attach any particular importance to that line at all, himself, and is surprised everyone else does. When asked whether he could just give a speech about patriotism (for Independence Day), he replies, “This is, perhaps, the very time when I would not care to arouse the sentiment of patriotism.”

Theodore Roosevelt falls off a horse and breaks a rib.

Maurice Benjamin Medbury, a rich antique jewelry dealer who died on the Lusitania, leaves behind two wives, one in California and one in London.

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Today -100: May 27, 1915: But born they are

Headline of the Day -100:

Interesting to see the Times using the term “birth control,” coined by Margaret Sanger just the year before. Anyway, this is a public meeting at the Academy of Medicine at which “The terms used were as frank as those of the lecture room of the medical schools in spite of the fact that the men and women present in about equal proportions were not of the profession”. Dr. Abraham Jacobi (a pioneering pediatrician and former president of the AMA who was a political prisoner in Germany after the 1848 Revolution and a friend of Marx and Engels) calls for elimination of the NY law making it illegal for anyone (including doctors) to give out birth control information. He makes the case on eugenic grounds, saying that hereditary epileptics, idiots, etc “should not have been permitted to be born.” Also, children of poor people, who get insufficient feeding, coarse clothing, and live in congested, cold or overheated tenements. “Would it be wise on the part of the children not to be born? Surely, but born they are”.

New York State Supreme Court Justice Edward Whitaker bans the Commissioner of Licenses from preventing the showing of the 1914 movie The Ordeal, which the National Board of Censors thought might upset German-Americans. Whitaker says there’s no such thing as German-Americans, there’s just Americans: “What has lately become known as hyphenated citizenship has no color or standing.” He also says the commissioner should ignore the self-appointed National Board of Censors.

New York state’s Committee on Elementary Schools rejects Major Sidney Grant’s complaint about the students of PS 165 in Brooklyn singing “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.”

In an editorial entitled “For Liberty and Democracy,” the NYT finds it significant that Italy entered the war because the people clamored for it and forced the government to respond, while the German and Austrian emperors didn’t even consult the people. “Italy’s war is an Italian war; Germany’s war is a Potsdam war. ... Aside from Russia [!], the war is one between autocracy and democracy; between the peoples and the Kings”. I call bullshit.

Unfortunate Headline of the Day -100:

 

Headline of the Day -100: 

150 lepers have been secretly (and presumably forcibly) removed from a Manila hospital from which they’ve taken to coming and going as they please, to the leper colony on the island of Culion.

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Today -100: May 26, 1915: Of cabinets, neutrality, and bitter Germans

The new British cabinet is formed. Asquith remains as PM, Grey as foreign secretary, and Lord Kitchener as hapless minister of war. Lloyd George moves from the Exchequer to the new post of Minister of Munitions, temporarily until he gets the shells shortage sorted (say that three times fast). He will be replaced by Reginald McKenna. Tory leader Bonar Law is brought in as colonial secretary and Austen Chamberlain (brother of Neville, son of Joseph) gets India. Churchill is replaced at the Admiralty by former PM Arthur Balfour. Churchill will be the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancashire, which is the equivalent of a waiter being tipped a nickle, or maybe it’s the equivalent of being sent to the naughty step. Ulster leader and pre-war treasonist Sir Edward Carson will be attorney general; Irish Nationalist party leader John Redmond refuses to take any Cabinet position. Lord Haldane is out as Lord Chancellor because rabid newspapers and idiots have been attacking him as supposedly pro-German. And there’s a member of the Labour Party in government for the first time, Arthur Henderson as president of the Board of education.

Portugal’s prime minister João Chagas resigns for health reasons – being shot in the head last week seems not to have agreed with him.

Italian troops invade Austria.

Headline of the Day -100:

Wilson’s special commissioner, Duval West, who has returned from investigating conditions in Mexico, reports that he has no idea who’s going to win power down there and recommends just doing more of the same – watching and waiting and selling arms to anyone who can afford them – because that’s working out so well.

Headline of the Day -100: 

They seem to think that US neutrality isn’t really very neutral, what with all the munitions being sold to Germany’s enemies.

I’ve noticed an increase in the use of the word Teutons when describing Germans + Austrians.

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Today -100: May 25, 1915: Perfidy whose like history does not know

Italy declared war on its own schedule, but most of the initial military moves seem to have been initiated by Austria, including aerial bombing of Venice.

Italy seizes $20 million worth of Austrian and German ships in Italian ports (even though they’re not at war with Germany?).

Germany declares war on Italy, the NYT claims, incorrectly.

The Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph issues a manifesto to his troops, calling Italy’s forsaking of its previous allies “perfidy whose like history does not know.” I dunno, history knows a lot of perfidy. And Franz Joseph knows a lot of history. He actually led troops against the Habsburg Empire’s rebellious Italian subjects during the 1848 revolutions and was emperor when Italy finally won its independence in 1860, because he is just that fucking old.

Sidenote: We don’t use the word perfidy enough any more.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: Britain says the Germans are now chaining artillerymen to their machine guns.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: 50 Italians are supposedly shot as spies in Trentino after a railroad bridge is blown up.

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