Today -100: December 11, 1915: Of personae non gratae, cranks, Model T’s, menaced rears, and Hydes

Germany finally recalls attachés Karl Boy-Ed and Franz von Papen, as the US demanded, and asks the US to arrange with Britain and France for their safe passage back to Germany.

Objective Headline of the Day -100: 

Ford manufactures its one-millionth Model T. They’re now selling for $440; when introduced in 1908 they were $850.

Headline of the Day -100:

Again I have to ask: is this a war or an extended alcohol-fueled orgy? Indeed,

I think we all know what “into Greek territory” means.

Loring Cross of Elizabeth, New Jersey, an engraver, is arrested for terrorizing women and girls in the streets (the details are a bit vague). His excuse: he’s been in a state of mania ever since he read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

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Today -100: December 10, 1915: I love America first, then I hate England and then I love Germany

Headlines of the Day -100: 

Is this a war or an extended alcohol-fueled orgy?

German Chancellor Dr. Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg tells the Reichstag that “if our enemies make peace proposals compatible with Germany’s dignity and safety, then we shall always be ready to discuss them,” but he won’t make any himself because that would just give them the wrong idea. In fact, he says they’ve already gotten the wrong idea because of the parliamentary question on this subject, to which he is now responding, posed by Social Democratic Party leader Philipp Scheidemann. That question, he says, “has attracted great attention in the hostile countries, mostly of a joyous nature. The question regarding the German terms of peace is interpreted as a sign of the diminution of German strength or the beginning of the end of the unanimous will of the German people.” He assures the Reichstag that Germany is totally gonna win this thing and that Germany can’t be starved into submission because it has enough food, the only problem is working out distribution (Germany never will manage that). “Against the logic of facts even our enemies can do nothing. Our calculation shows no flaws, and there are no uncertain factors to shatter our firm confidence. If our enemies are not yet inclined to yield to facts they will have to do so later.”

Alphonse Koelble of the United German Societies of Greater New York announces the creation of a fund to produce literature refuting Wilson’s accusations of German-American disloyalty. He says Wilson is unduly influenced by information given him by Secret Service officers working with British detectives. Koelble says he hates traitors to the US. “I love America first, then I hate England and then I love Germany.”

Hopewell, Virginia, a boomtown created by DuPont to house a gunpowder plant servicing the burgeoning European market, burns down. Which is followed by looting, as was the custom. One of the looters is lynched, as was also the custom. Although a suspected saboteur was arrested inside the plant a few hours before the fire, the fire actually started in a Greek restaurant, as was the custom. Ironically, pretty much every structure in town burns down except the gunpowder plant.

War Secretary Lindley Garrison issues his annual report, supporting his plan for an increased military augmented by a Continental Army. Much of the report is devoted to a philosophical defense of military preparedness and a refutation of the notion of passive non-resistance. “So long as right and wrong exist in the world there will be an inevitable conflict between them. The rightdoers must be prepared to protect and defend the right as against the wrong.” He rejects the idea of passive resistance to evil, because if you can use mental force or moral force to repel evil, surely physical force is just the same thing. He also denies that establishing what amounts to a standing army would lead to militarism, because 1) the US can absolutely be trusted as a nation to possess force without misusing it – “Why should it be presumed that a just man or a just nation will cease to be just because it has the power to be unjust? We must either trust others or trust ourselves.” 2) if the US were defeated in a war because of lack of preparedness, the public reaction would be far worse, more militaristic.

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Today -100: December 9, 1915: Nothing doing in Christianity at present

Kaiser Wilhelm postpones Prince Joachim’s wedding from this month to February, because of course the war will be over by then.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: The Daily Telegraph reports that Germany and Turkey plan a massive invasion of India.

A bill is introduced in Congress to ban false advertising for goods sold across state lines.

In Parliament, Robert Outhwaite (Lib-Hanley) asks the under-secretary for war whether clergy shouldn’t enlist in the army, “as there is nothing doing in Christianity at present”.

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Today -100: December 8, 1915: Great democracies are not belligerent

Woodrow Wilson gives his State of the Union Address. Most of the speech is devoted to military “preparation.” He wants to increase the size of the army from 108,008 to 141,843 plus 400,000 trained reserves and increased production of battleships, paid for largely by income tax increases aimed mostly at the rich rather than by issuing bonds. “Great democracies,” he says, “are not belligerent. They do not seek or desire war.”

However, despite all this talk of preparedness, “We are at peace with all the nations of the world, and there is reason to hope that no question in controversy between this and other Governments will lead to any serious breach of amicable relations”.

Then he turned to The Danger Within™: “I am sorry to say that the gravest threats against our national peace and safety have been uttered within our own borders. There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life... America never witnessed anything like this before. It never dreamed it possible that men sworn into its own citizenship, men drawn out of great free stocks such as supplied some of the best and strongest elements of that little, but how heroic, nation that in a high day of old staked its very life to free itself from every entanglement that had darkened the fortunes of the older nations and set up a new standard here, that men of such origins and such free choices of allegiance would ever turn in malign reaction against the Government and people who had welcomed and nurtured them and seek to make this proud country once more a hotbed of European passion.” At which point half the assembled members of Congress started discretely masturbating under their desks. Wilson wants new laws, about which he’s rather vague, to be used against these “creatures of passion, disloyalty and anarchy [who] must be crushed out.”

Speaking of creatures of passion, disloyalty and anarchy, Theodore Roosevelt doesn’t like any of the speech. He says the military buildup is insufficient, Wilson likes peace too much (“He has met a policy of blood and iron with a policy of milk and water”), and the reserves system puts the patriotic volunteers who abandon their jobs for a couple of months a year at a competitive disadvantage (he wants to make it compulsory, because of course he does). Most damningly, he says “Mr. Wilson’s elocution is that of a Byzantine logothete [a functionary – basically he’s saying WW sounds like an accountant] – and Byzantine logothetes were not men of action.” How far our political insults have fallen in our Age of Trump.

Headline of the Day -100: 

So maybe not by Christmas. New Year’s, he suggests. Or Easter. Or the 4th of July.

Two deserters from the German Army arrive at Ellis Island as stowaways. They claim they ran more from starvation than fear. Were they deported back to Germany? I can’t find a follow-up.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Some sort of electricity-propelled, hypersonic, trans-continental... you know, I’ve just realized he may be describing a drone. Tesla says it’s not yet time to explain the details. He does trash-talk a California electrical engineer who thinks the US could be surrounded by “an electrical wall of fire” during time of war. Tesla thinks this is impractical.

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Today -100: December 7, 1915: It does not look like peace, and so Germany cannot sheathe her sword

King Constantine of Greece explains to an AP reporter his policy of neutrality in the war. He’s also obviously trying to undercut former prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos. He insists the Greek people re-elected Venizelos as a man but rejected his policy of joining the war, which seems like kind of a big thing to overlook.

Field Marshal von Hindenburg says the war may have to go on for a while longer. If France wants Alsace-Lorraine back, “they should come and get it.” Oo, German smack talk. He thinks Britain will be seriously weakened by the forthcoming revolt in India. I don’t know if German military leaders genuinely believe that will happen or if they’re pretending they do to bolster German morale. He pretends surprise that Russia and France haven’t figured out yet that in continuing to fight “they are only sacrificing themselves for Great Britain. It does not look like peace, and so Germany cannot sheathe her sword.”

Germany asks the US to state its reasons for declaring Boy-Ed and von Papen personae non gratae, but the US, which under international law and custom doesn’t have to provide reasons, won’t.

Secretary of War Garrison says West Point is not anti-Semitic. He also says he has no idea how many Jews are at West Point.

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Today -100: December 6, 1915: And if the belligerent nations know for what they are fighting, why not tell the world?

Headline of the Day -100: 

Jacob Schiff, banker and important leader of Jewish Americans, expects a mass immigration of European Jews after the war, but he says US cities are kinda full.

William Jennings Bryan calls on Pres. Wilson to ask the warring European nations what their peace terms are. “Each of the governments at war certainly knows what it is that it demands – otherwise it could not justify a continuation of the slaughter.” Um, right. “And if the belligerent nations know for what they are fighting, why not tell the world?”

News about a newly discovered comet reaches the US from Copenhagen, although some details are suppressed by military censors because why not.

A federal grand jury in New York is investigating Labor’s National Peace Council, which may or may not be a German front and which works for an embargo on the export of war materials. What is illegal about any of this that brings it within the purview of the grand jury remains unclear.

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Today -100: December 5, 1915: Of peace ships, money well spent, and French contempt

The Oscar II, Henry Ford’s Peace Ship (the NYT is calling it Peace Ark) is under way, with over 150 passengers, of whom 1/3 are reporters. The passengers include suffragist Inez Milholland Boissevain and the poet Berton Braley and his new wife – who marry on board the ship before it sails. The ship is seen off by William Jennings Bryan, Thomas Edison, and a band playing “I Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be a Soldier.”

US government investigators report that since the start of the war Germany has spent $27 million in the US on various nefarious projects, including $3 million on propaganda and subsidies to newspapers and $12 million to foment a Huerta-led counter-revolution in Mexico.

Headline of the Day -100: 

And the New York Times is ON IT!

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Today -100: December 4, 1915: Fight preparedness

The US asks Germany to recall Karl Boy-Ed and Franz von Papen, its naval attaché and military attaché in Washington respectively, because of their “improper activities.” They are personae non gratae. Although both have been involved in espionage, sabotage and the like on US soil since the start of the war, there’s no clear reason why the Wilson administration is acting now. Papen says “I have no regrets. I have simply done my duty as a soldier and have obeyed instructions”. He will be Hitler’s vice-chancellor.

Germany retaliates by saying that US ambassador to Belgium Brand Whitlock, currently visiting home, will not be returning, although they’re claiming he has retired. Which is news to him.

Henry Ford and William Jennings Bryan meet at the Biltmore, where Bryan explains that he can be more useful working against military preparedness in the US than by joining the Peace Ship (or Ship of Fools, as some of the British press have taken to calling it). He endorses Ford’s mission without quite saying that he expects anything to come of it. A reporter asks Ford about accusations that “some people” are making that he has German blood. Ford says he investigated that today and no he doesn’t. His last word to the US before leaving: “Fight preparedness.”

Carranza says US recognition of his government isn’t enough, he needs the US to enforce its supposed embargo against non-Carranza groups.

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Today -100: December 3, 1915: We should not marvel at an occasional fire or blow up

Gen. Joseph Joffre is named commander-in-chief of all the French armies in Europe (excluding north Africa).

DuPont denies rumors that the explosion at its Wilmington gunpowder plant was caused by saboteurs. “We should not marvel at an occasional fire or blow up,” says one company official about the deaths of 30+ of his employees.

The head of the Hamburg-American Line, Karl Buenz, and 3 of his underlings are found guilty for defrauding the US government (filing false papers in order to supply and fuel German Navy ships from US ports early in the war).

Headline of the Day -100: 

A French soldier (a piou-piou – young chick – which is slang for a young soldier), Priv. Lucien Tapie Bellocq, writes to the NYPD asking them to track down his wife, who he believes absconded here, to let her know “I forgave her before I died for my country,” adding, “I still feel friendly to her, in spite of her act of folly.” What’s the French for “guilt trip?” He thinks she can be found working in a hospital or infirmary “or maybe in a much worse place”. There is no follow-up story in the NYT index.

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Today -100: December 2, 1915: Of sentimental war talk

Henry Ford responds to his critics: “There has been a lot of talk of attack on ‘sentimental peace talk’ by people who want us to have sentimental war talk instead.” The State Dept is restricting the scope of his mission by only issuing passports for Peace Shippers to enter neutral countries (Ford’s proposed conference would be held in the Netherlands). Several people who want to go are having difficulty getting passports in time, which may be deliberate State Dept obstruction, confusing new passport rules, or Ford’s almighty rush.

Gen. Obregon, commander of Carranza’s forces, says Pancho Villa has gone insane.

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Today -100: December 1, 1915: Worst Christmas tree decorations ever

A gunpowder explosion at a DuPont plant near Wilmington, Delaware kills 31. For some reason the workers in the packing plant were all aged 16 to 21. The Western Newspaper Union News Service reports: “From every tree left standing in the neighborhood there was hanging either pieces of flesh or parts of clothing worn by the unfortunate men.” The remaining workers had to pick up all those bits and bobs.

Does this explosion have anything to do with a poster campaign to get German & Austrian workers at the plant to quit? It would be irresponsible not to speculate. DuPont says the cause may never be known, since everyone in the packing plant was, you know, blown to tiny pieces. In fact, DuPont’s powder plants have explosions of a pretty regular basis.

Kaiser Wilhelm is visiting Vienna and it would be irresponsible not to speculate that he’s there to persuade the ancient Austrian emperor not to make a separate peace with Italy.

IWW organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is acquitted on a charge of inciting violence during the Paterson silk strike of 1913. The jury disbelieved police witnesses about Flynn’s language (the cops all remembered the same words about forcing scabs out of the factories by force but somehow failed to remember anything else at all from her speech) and believed her witnesses.

British newspapers are now refusing Ford automobile ads because of Henry F’s anti-war activism.

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Today -100: November 30, 1915: If the warring countries would go back to fighting then, they are fools

Canadian and Australian soldiers (and medical students, according to the London Times) break up a peace meeting in London called by the Union of Democratic Control, gaining entrance with forged tickets and bearing gas bombs. The Daily Express, which has been inciting such action, describes this as the “utter rout of the pro-Germans.”

It’s a World War, After All:

Germans are supposedly training Indian and Burmese insurgents in far Siam.

Henry Ford thinks that news of his Peace Ship has so inspired the warring nations’ troops – who he thinks have all heard about it – that on Christmas they will start a general strike against the war. “What we want right now is to get these men out of the murder ditches and home for Christmas. If the warring countries would go back to fighting then, they are fools.” No word yet on whether William Jennings Bryan will be on the Peace Ship, and Pres. Wilson’s daughter Margaret has declined her invitation, but they do have Charles Pease, president of the Anti-Smokers’ Protective League of America.

The Supreme Court upholds a New York law against the employment of aliens on public works projects. If I’m reading this correctly, it’s treating the city as a private body in hiring matters, not subject to the 14th Amendment.

The New York Radium Sanitarium opens tomorrow. I’m assuming every one of its patients will die horribly.

Ad of the Day:

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Today -100: November 29, 1915: Of conquests, lost provinces, poison gas, and lynchings

Germany declares victory in Serbia. Half the Serbian army are now prisoners, most of the rest have escaped into the mountains or out of the country. King Peter supposedly keeps talking about suicide. Serbia does not admit defeat, claiming to be retreating in perfect order with barely any losses.

Germany denies plans to give Schleswig-Holstein, seized in the 1860s, back to Denmark in return for its neutrality in the war. Why, it would be an insult to even suggest that Denmark could be bribed, Germany says.

Fog of War, so to speak: the Allies say that Turkey has used poison gas for the first time, at Gallipoli.

John Willey of Gibonsburg, Ohio, who was out on bail while on trial for murdering his grandmother, is lynched. He’d been getting letters threatening a “lynching bee” for some time. Since the NYT doesn’t mention his race, I assume he was white.

Ad of the day:

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Today -100: November 28, 1915: Of rodds, Parisian crime, armbands, and truces

Skirmishes between Pancho Villa’s forces and the US Army on the Arizona border kill 11 of the former. In a later clash with Carranzaists, which was supposedly due to a mistake, one US soldier is killed.

The Berliner Tageblatt said (in a 5-week-old article the NYT is just now reading) that Italy’s government and military are being secretly run by the British ambassador Sir Rennell Rodd (!), exercising his influence on Queen Elena through the royal children’s English nurse.

Émile Marie Laurent, prefect of the Paris police, says crime has almost entirely ceased in Paris since the war began, including murder, burglary and armed robbery. And with buses commandeered for war work, the streets of Paris are much safer. So he’s been focusing on the aspects of la vie parisienne he especially detests: gamblers, drug dealers, and restaurants that have both wine and live music (“not a decent combination”).

The British government is now issuing khaki armbands to men of military age who are doing work exempting them from military service or who have enlisted but not been called up yet. All the better to put social pressure on shirkers.

Pope Benedict plans to ask everyone for a Christmas truce.

Seriously: Sir Rennell Rodd.

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Today -100: November 27, 1915: Out of the trenches before Christmas, never to go back

Henry Ford gives an anti-war speech in Washington. It’s his first public speech ever and it consists of the slogan, “Out of the trenches before Christmas, never to go back.”

A meeting in London of disaffected Women’s Social and Political Union members declares that Emmeline Pankhurst is misusing the group’s name – and its funds – by associating it with pro-war rather than pro-suffrage activities. There will soon be two splinter groups, the Independent Women’s Social and Political Union and the Suffragettes of the Women’s Social and Political Union.

Suffragist Inez Milholland reveals that it was she who proposed to her husband.

A Mrs Adamson of Philadelphia adopts a Japanese baby to test whether environment is more important than heredity. Says Mrs Adamson, “She doesn’t know that she is Japanese and will not know it until she is old enough to recognize the different racial characteristics.” Evidently if at 21, after not learning Japanese, she chooses to live in the US rather than Japan, that will have proved the importance of environment, because science.

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Today -100: November 26, 1915: I know that moral pressure will not be without its effect

Henry Ford’s letter of invitation to governors and former presidents and other dignitaries to join his Peace Ship says that Jane Addams and Thomas Edison have already accepted, which they haven’t. Asked how he expected to compel the warring nations to participate in the peace conference he intends to call, he says “I know that moral pressure will not be without its effect”.

Spoiler Alert: moral pressure will totally be without its effect.

The NYT notes that the idea of the Peace Ship originated with Rosika Schwimmer, the suffragist and internationalist who would probably not have been thrilled to be described by the Times as Austrian – she’s a Hungarian Jew. After the war Schwimmer had to flee Hungary when it went fascist (proto-fascist? whatever), but was denied US citizenship because of her refusal to take an oath to take up arms on behalf of the United States, a decision upheld by the Supreme Court which said that a citizen has the right of conscientious objection but a non-citizen applying to become a citizen does not, because logic.

The Medico-Legal Society of America wants all states to pass laws making all illegal-drug users, no matter the degree of their drug habit, wards of the state to force them into treatment, rather than wait for them to commit crimes or go insane.

Thanksgiving Day sermons in New York largely focused on the need for military preparedness. A warning someone should have given the Indians at the first Thanksgiving.

Alaska’s delegate to the US Congress, James Wickersham, will introduce a bill for statehood in the coming congressional session.

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Today -100: November 25, 1915: I intend to try to crush militarism

Henry Ford charters an entire liner, the Oscar II, to carry him and an assorted group of pacifists to go to Europe to stop the war. “We are going to try to get the boys out of their trenches and back to their homes by Christmas Day.” Well at least he’s given himself a full month. He’s invited any number of prominent people to join him, including William Jennings Bryan and Thomas Edison, who have or will both refuse. “I intend to try to crush militarism,” Ford says.

Spoiler Alert: He will not crush militarism.

Edward Ryan’s luggage explodes in Budapest. Specifically, an artillery shell which he was taking back to the US as a souvenir, as you do. Dr Ryan was head of an American Red Cross mission in Serbia.

The German Army has adopted an artificial-respiration device, involving a rubber tube and foot-operated bellows, which was invented before the war by Dr. Samuel Meltzer of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research for use by miners, to restore the breathing of soldiers asphyxiated by gas or buried in trench collapses. The Rockefeller Foundation has supplied these devices to the British, French and (more recently) German armies.

Headline of the Day -100:

A “foreign official source, in no way connected with European affairs” tells the NYT that for 6 months Germany has been funding Huerta’s attempt to start a counter-revolution in Mexico, to keep the US occupied militarily and distracted. And then the US arrested Huerta right before he could reach Mexico.

The Serbian government is now a government-in-exile, retreating to Scutari, Albania.

Greece gives the Allies permission to move their troops around Macedonia unimpeded, because what choice did Greece have? In return, the Allies promise not to keep any Greek territory they occupy during the war.

Albert Einstein presents to the Prussian Academy of Sciences the Einstein Equations establishing the theory of general relativity.

On Stone Mountain, Georgia, 16 men re-found the Ku Klux Klan. Burn a cross and everything. Next week the state of Georgia will issue them a charter. It will take a while for it to amount to anything – it may be a few years before I have cause to mention it again – but this group will grow into the mammoth Second Klan of the 1920s, which will elect (and impeach) governors in states throughout the union (Oregon, Indiana, etc), pass laws banning Catholic schools, and fight against unions and immigrants and for prohibition.

One of the men on Stone Mountain is Col. William Joseph Simmons, who will be the Imperial Wizard of the Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He’s mostly harmless and had in mind not a night-riding, negro-lynching organization but a fraternal order much like the others he loved: Elks, Shriners, Masons, Woodmen of the World, that sort of thing (the “colonel” title came from the Woodmen of the World, although he was a private during the Spanish-American War). The fact that the body he chose to revive was the Klan is of course down to “The Birth of a Nation,” which he adored and watched over and over. One of the things he adopted from it: burning crosses, which the post-Civil War Klan did not do. He loved the paraphernalia and secret handshakes and such, which he would lovingly detail in a 54-page document called... wait for it... the Kloran. However, Simmons wasn’t much of an organizer (and liked the bottle a little too much), so his Empire will remain mostly Invisible in fact as well as name until he hired some PR people in 1920...

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Today -100: November 24, 1915: Oh, of course there was sauerkraut

Officials of the Hamburg-American Line and other Germans and German-Americans are being tried for conspiring early in the war to supply German ships illegally from the US. Including sauerkraut? the prosecutor asks a stevedore, but he can’t remember. The testimony directly implicates Capt. Karl Boy-Ed, the German naval attaché in Washington, who somehow hasn’t already been expelled from the country despite repeated links to espionage and sabotage.

The feds have found a building in Cleveland (still under construction) which they think Germans were building to store explosives for an attack on Canada.

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Today -100: November 23, 1915: I think this line’s mostly filler

Allied forces capture Tibati, in Kamerun, if you needed a reminder that this is indeed a world war or something to write on a slow news day -100.

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Today -100: November 22, 1915: Cigars v. zeppelins: the eternal Battle of the Phallic Symbols

New British regulations limiting alcohol sales to five hours a day will go into effect next week and London trade unionists are not happy, threatening to resist “by open revolt if necessary.” “No Beer, No Work” will be their clarion cry.

I think I mentioned the State Dept yanked the passport of a German-American naturalized citizen after he made some sort of remarks about Woodrow Wilson. Now, because he can’t prove that he’s a US citizen, which he is, he’s likely to be drafted into the German army. The US ambassador to Germany still refuses to give back his passport.

Headline of the Day -100: 

The Allies are pressuring Greece to join their side of the war through a “pacific blockade” of Greek ports, harassing Greek-flagged ships, etc. If that doesn’t make Greece more kindly disposed to them, I don’t know what will.

Germany isn’t very impressed with Greece’s declared neutrality either, threatening that if Greece doesn’t disarm Serb and other Allied soldiers fleeing into Greece (Serbian forces are losing quite badly right now), then German troops will invade Greece to go after them.

Anna Howard Shaw resigns as president of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association.

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Today -100: November 21, 1915: Of fires, uncultivated literary taste, locusts, and careless pedestrians

Pennsylvania State Fire Marshal Joseph Baldwin says several recent fires at munitions plants were all started deliberately.

Headline of the Day -100 (NYT Magazine):  “Do Women Lack Cultivated Literary Taste?” Harry Leon Wilson, author of Ruggles of Red Gap, thinks so, and the pandering to them by publishers is dragging American literature down.

Palestine has been hit by a plague of locusts. As was the custom.

Francis Hugo, NY secretary of state, warns the NY State Automobile Association that public opinion has been hardening against reckless drivers. It’s true; since I’ve started these posts I’ve seen a shift away from viewing the running down of pedestrians as the inevitable price of modern life. In today’s auto news, Treasury Secretary McAdoo denies that his wife (Woodrow Wilson’s daughter Eleanor) had been summoned for speeding - it was her chauffeur. And Prince Paul Troubetzkoy, the sculptor, escapes the workhouse for reckless driving because there’s only one witness. However, the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce says that 90% of New York City street accidents “are due to carelessness or other fault of the injured”. Of course many of those the Chamber is blaming are children, who account for 45% of fatalities.

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Today -100: November 20, 1915: Of inflammatory street speaking, rajahs, and Paris dresses

The Allies are trying to get China to join the war. China wouldn’t be expected to do anything militarily (indeed, China is incapable of doing anything militarily), but it’s hoped this will allow Japan to focus more on its small role in the European war and less on bullying China.

Wobbly hobo poet Joseph Hillstrom is executed in Utah by firing squad. Hillstrom yelled “Fire” himself. Hillstrom still claimed to be innocent and he could prove it but that would wreck a woman’s reputation, so he didn’t. Gov. William Spry says he will now clear the “lawless element” out of Utah and stop “inflammatory street speaking”.

Britain denies German claims of revolts in India. Indeed, they say that not only is the Rajah of Bhagalpur not leading a revolt, but there is no Rajah of Bhagalpur.

Edith Galt, Woodrow Wilson’s fiancée, is having trouble ordering dresses from Paris, which is what happens when you use a German-American importer.

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Today -100: November 19, 1915: Of zep bombs, cold soldiers, safety at sea, and cases of undue importance

The Daily Mail (UK) prints a claim that unusually high death rates among those injured by bombs dropped from zeppelins must mean that the Germans are using biological warfare (they’re not).

A story going round the German Army on the Eastern front says that Gen. Hindenburg asked Kaiser Wilhelm for warm clothes for his troops but Willy said no, if they were cold they’d be more likely to take Riga and Dvinsk quickly just to warm up.

Headline of the Day -100: 

It will. Not. Do! Good day to you, sir. I said, good day!

Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes asks the Nebraska secretary of state to ignore a petition being circulated to put his name of the 1916 ballot for president (the secretary will comply).

Utah Gov. William Spry rejects Pres. Wilson’s request to stay the execution of hobo poet Joe Hill (Joseph Hillstrom), complaining that “Your interference in the case may have elevated it to an undue importance”. (For those clicking on the article: Hillstrom did not compose “Hallelujah I’m a Bum”).

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Today -100: November 18, 1915: Of hopeless defectives, vice presidents and senators (but I repeat myself), privy councillors, and hobo poets

This has been kind of a big deal in Chicago for the last few days: a doctor decides not to perform an operation that might have saved a new-born “hopeless defective” boy, which has now died. The doctor says the boy would have been doomed to “an animal existence and imbecility.” He says he’s done a favor for the child, “its” parents, and.... the race.

Vice President Marshall is giving Pres. Wilson and Edith Galt a Navajo blanket as a wedding gift.

Sen. Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania announces his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president. Right now Penrose is following the Liberty Bell as it tours around the country.

In Britain the Anti-German League is suing to remove Sir Edgar Speyer and Sir Ernest Cassel from the Privy Council because they are naturalized citizens (Speyer was American but with German parents, Cassel a German Jew).

Pres. Wilson asks Utah Gov. William Spry to stay the execution of hobo poet Joe Hill (Joseph Hillstrom).

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Today -100: November 17, 1915: Of exterminations, sneaky contract, and loyal and vigorous conduct of the law

Lord Robert Cecil, the British under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, denies that Britain stirred up the Armenians to revolt, saying rather that the Armenian massacres were pre-meditated by the Turks to “exterminate the Armenian race,” but adding that no, Britain didn’t intend to do anything to stop them.

German money, from the Deutsche Bank of Berlin, was used to prevent the Bridgeport Projectile Company providing shrapnel presses to the Allies, by entering into a contract that was never intended to be fulfilled and which was cancelled 12 hours after it was signed without invalidating a provision which prevents the company selling to anyone else until 1916. The whole thing is now in court.

The Albert Hall cancels a meeting Mrs. Pankhurst was to have held “to demand loyal and vigorous conduct of the war,” by which she means forcing Prime Minister Asquith and Foreign Secretary Grey to quit.

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Today -100: November 16, 1915: You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race

Motto of the Day -100:

Winston Churchill gives a speech to Parliament, refuting point by point the charges against him for his many miscalculations as head of the Admiralty, and specifically denying that he had imposed policies against the advice of career Navy officers and experts. In other words, he’s trying to spread the blame for the Dardanelles campaign and earlier disasters as widely as possible. And he says of his decision to join the military, “I alone have open to me an alternative form of service whereto no exception can be taken and wherewith I am perfectly content.” Winnie certainly had a way wherewhichwith archaic adverbial forms.

Woodrow Wilson orders that Assistant Postmaster George Burkitt of Winnetka, Illinois be reinstated. He was fired for saying that Wilson should have waited longer after his first wife died before getting engaged (and for many other offenses).

George Bernard Shaw’s playlet O’Flaherty V.C.: A Recruiting Pamphlet is banned by the censors ahead of a production at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The hero, who joined the army to get away from his family and from small town Ireland, as you do, will now on his return home have to explain his decision to his Fenian mother. “She’s like the English: they think there’s no one like themselves. It’s the same with the Germans, though they’re educated and ought to know better. You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.”

In my Complete Plays, it says this play was “first performed on the Western Front Belgium 1917.” Take that, censors. In the preface to the (postwar) published edition, Shaw notes that when he wrote this play recruitment of Irish Catholics was going badly. “To attract them, the walls were covered with placards headed REMEMBER BELGIUM. The folly of asking an Irishman to remember anything when you want him to fight for England was apparent to everyone outside the [Dublin] Castle”. Another line from the preface: “Finally the British blockade won the war; but the wonder is that the British blockhead did not lose it.”

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Today -100: November 15, 1915: Of bookers, champagne horrors, and aeroplanes

Booker T. Washington dies, at 59. Taliaferro, by the way, is what the T. stands for. He will be buried on Tuskegee University, which he founded 34 years ago – I’ll wait while you do the math on that one.

In recent years, Washington’s leadership of the American negro community has been slipping; his focus on negro autonomy and self-development was accompanied by an unfortunate willingness to accept segregation, Jim Crowism, and negro political powerlessness, which sat increasingly badly with the rising generation.

Headline of the Day -100: 

We’ve all been there.

The NYT thinks we should stop calling heavier-than-air flying machines by the “intolerably awkward name of ‘aeroplane’” and instead use the French “avion.” They’re not too thrilled with “automobile” either.

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Today -100: November 14, 1915: Of saboteurs, pirates, and converts

Josef Goricar, the former Austrian consul in San Francisco, says there are 3,000 spies for Germany and Austria in the US, and every act of sabotage or espionage or whatever committed by any one of them is not done on their own initiative but strictly following orders. The Austrian embassy is now claiming that Goricar is a Russian spy. Goricar denies this but says he is working for Slavic unity, whatever that means.

The US will charge Robert Fay and the other German saboteurs with crimes of piracy. It turns out there really aren’t any laws covering conspiracy to blow shit up on behalf of a foreign nation, so piracy it is.

An Italian newspaper reports that King Ferdinand of Bulgaria wrote to the pope saying that after the war Bulgaria will switch from the Greek Orthodox Church to Catholicism.

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Today -100: November 13, 1915: So church bells were the 1915 equivalent of the internet

The Austrian consul in the US, Ernst Ludwig, calls Josef Goricar, the former consul in San Francisco who accused Austria and Germany of a massive spying/propaganda operation in the US, a “has-been consul who attacks his own country.”

Winston Churchill resigns as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster so he can join the military and see some action, until he gets bored. He’ll be a major. This seems to be a reaction to Asquith setting up a small War Council, on which he planned to include Churchill but then thought better of it.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: Yesterday Berlin went wild celebrating the surrender of Serbia. However, Serbia did not actually surrender. What seems to have happened is that a General Synod was held, church bells in Berlin were rung at noon in honor of it, and everyone leapt to conclusions.

A negro, John Taylor, is lynched in Aberdeen, Mississippi.

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Today -100: November 12, 1915: Spies amongst us

Headline of the Day -100: 

Josef Goricar, the former Austrian consul in San Francisco, contacts American newspapers to say that the US is riddled with Austrian and German spies and flooded with their propaganda, including in subsidized German-language newspapers, with the especial goal of disrupting munitions production. Goricar fled Austria – something about Slavic sympathies (I think his name is Croatian) – and has been back in the US since February.

Although there is no conscription in Britain, it’s getting closer, and Lord Derby, the Director of Recruiting, gives unmarried men until November 30 to join up, or else.

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Today -100: November 11, 1915: The war upon the kindergarten goes on relentlessly

After that Austrian-flagged, German-manned u-boat sank the Ancona, the US is just now realizing that while Germany gave assurances about giving up unrestricted submarine warfare, Austria didn’t. So the US is going to pretend that Germany was speaking for its ally. Austria, meanwhile, says the sinking was justified because, they claim, the Ancona tried to run. Italy (and the Ancona’s captain, who survived) say the ship immediately stopped after the U-38 fired a warning shot and that the sub shot at the lifeboats. Noting the large number of children reported killed, the NYT says, “The war upon the kindergarten goes on relentlessly,” on land and on sea, and compares it, unfavorably, to Herod.

Now Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryan are disputing whether the prophet Ezekiel would endorse or disapprove of increased military spending, because sure why not.

The Newark Police Board bans “Birth of a Nation.”

Headline of the Day -100: 

The Georgia prison farm from which Leo Frank was abducted and lynched gets a machine gun to stop such events in the future.

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Today -100: November 10, 1915: Of anconas, red crosses, mikados, and zeppelin insurance

An Austrian u-boat sinks the SS Ancona, an Italian passenger ship, in the Mediterranean off the coast of Tunisia, without warning. It was heading from Naples to New York. Over 200 are dead, about half of those on board. The U-38 was just nominally Austrian; its captain is a German, Max Valentiner, and I think its crew as well. Not sure how that works legally, since Germany was not yet at war with Italy.

The Providence Journal claims that before he was expelled, Austrian Ambassador Konstantin Dumba tricked the American Red Cross into sending hundreds of documents containing military secrets to Austria, disguised as tetanus vaccine.

Japan’s Emperor Taisho is formally crowned.

The Indian colonial government bans a pamphlet based on William Jennings Bryan’s “British Rule in India” (1906) from the mails.

The British government is now selling anti-zeppelin insurance, but only to the poor.

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Today -100: November 9, 1915: The perpetuity of the nation depends upon the women of the country

A side-note to the Williamsburg, Brooklyn factory fire: the nephew of the couple who owned the building, Alfred Raff, had just returned from being on the lam in Boston after he hit-and-ran a 16-year-old girl with his aunt’s car. Right after the fire, a nearby bakery owner saw him running down the street. He told her there was a fire and when asked why he hadn’t turned in an alarm, yelled “To hell with the factory.” Charming. Raff previously served a couple of years in Elmira for burglary.

At the annual convention of the American Federation of Labor, Pres. Samuel Gompers calls for removing women and children from factories. “The perpetuity of the nation depends upon the women of the country, and we want to do all we can for them.” Sure you do.

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Today -100: November 8, 1915: Of neutral rights, fire inspectors, and benevolent neutrality

The US sends Britain a note saying its blockade of European ports is illegal and asserting the rights of the US and other neutral countries. It’s not entirely clear what the US plans to do if Britain ignores the note and continues to interfere with trade with neutral European countries (on the theory that they might sell stuff on to Germany).

The Williamsburg, Brooklyn factory building that burned down yesterday was not up to code, but, members of the State Industrial Commission point out, there are too few inspectors to enforce the codes enacted after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Will they ask the Legislature to budget for more inspectors? “No,” says Commissioner James Lynch, “What’s the use?” There are 65 inspectors for something like 35,000 factories. I say something like because they don’t even seem to know just how many factories they’re supposed to be inspecting.

Stephanos Skouloudis, the new Greek prime minister, says his government will continue to keep Greece out of the war but it will have a “benevolent neutrality” towards the Entente.

A letter to the NYT by pulp writer and Founding Father descendent Gouverneur Morris, addressed “to the children,” asks them to request that Santa Claus bring them French-made toys and not German ones “for the sake of the American children who were drowned like so many blind kittens when the Germans sank the Lusitania.” Also, Germany toys are ugly and French ones “are beautiful and they are clean. And there is no blood on them.”

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Today -100: November 7, 1915: Of fires, saxonias, violent electrical waves, kitcheners, and lambs

A factory building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn burns down, killing at least a dozen people. As in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, there were too few fire escapes and insufficient fireproofing of stairways. The owners, who had been ordered to rectify this 3 months ago, are arrested. Also, naturally, the door to the emergency stairway was locked on the 4th floor - all the deaths were from people on the 4th and 5th floor. The building housed a candy factory and two shirt factories, but it is not yet known where the fire started. Today the site is home to a vintage clothing store, because Brooklyn.

The Cunard liner Saxonia turns away 900 Irishmen who’d bought tickets for the US, following strenuous objections from Liverpool mobs to these able-bodied men evading military service (even though there is no conscription yet). This will be Cunard policy now, and White Star will follow suit in a couple of days.

Nikola Tesla thinks the Nobel Prize he is reported (wrongly) to be receiving must be for his discovery of the means to transmit electricity without wires, which he believes will change the world and make the deserts bloom and so on. “I also believe that ultimately all battles, if they should come, will be waged by electrical waves instead of explosives.”

Lord Kitchener will tour the eastern front, leading to rumors that he is resigning as secretary of war. He isn’t, but it may well be that his cabinet colleagues thought it would be a good idea to get him somewhere where he can’t do too much damage like the Balkans and, hey, Herb, maybe you should check out the action in Egypt too, as long as you’re heading in that direction anyway, take your time.

The Lamb, Douglas Fairbanks’ first movie, is released.

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Today -100: November 6, 1915: The ground upon which all preparation for war is made

Jews will now be allowed to become officers in the Bavarian army.

Reuters reports that Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla have been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. This is not true, so there will be all sorts of wild theories premised on the idea that they were supposed to be and then... something... happened.

Headline of the Day -100: 

So Germany can feed itself with sugar beets, despite the Allied embargo.

Former Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan says Pres. Wilson’s plan to expand the military (which has been costed at $1 billion over 5 years) is “not only a menace to our peace and safety, but a challenge to the spirit of Christianity which teaches us to influence others by example rather than by exciting fear. The president says that we should be prepared ‘not for aggression but for defense.’ That is the ground upon which all preparation for war is made.”

Headline of the Day -100: 

That is NOT A EUPHEMISM.

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Today -100: November 5, 1915: She stands in friendly relation with all the world

The Greek government falls. Someone was rude to the war minister in parliament, and he stormed out. When he returned, the opposition leader said he needed to apologize, the prime minister said he didn’t and he’d would resign if parliament insisted on one, which is what happens. The real cause is the same one behind the collapse of the other 83 Greek governments (approx.) this year: the king’s insistence on keeping Greece out of the war against the wishes of the majority of the Greek people.

Woodrow Wilson explains his plans to increase, very modestly, the training of “civilian soldiers.” “We have it in mind to be prepared, but not for war, but only for defense... No thoughtful man feels any panic haste in this matter. The country is not threatened from any quarter. She stands in friendly relation with all the world.” The NYT transcript of the speech provides our Typo of the Day -100: “But we feel justified in preparing ourselves to vindicate our right to independent and unmolested action by making the farce that is in us ready for assertion.”

In their newspaper Britannia (renamed from The Suffragette last month), Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst attack the government, and Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey in particular, for “betraying” Serbia. Christabel writes that Serbia is the keeper of the gate of the British Empire, whatever that means, and a “free Slav nation, untouched by German influence.” Britannia’s harsh – and I mean harsh – attacks on politicians and military leaders like Grey and Lord Haldane and Sir William Robertson for being insufficiently warlike or even traitorous resulted in the paper being raided and seized more often than The Suffragette was before the war.

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Today -100: November 4, 1915: Never again will I speak from a street corner

Harriot Stanton Blatch, pissed at the loss of the suffrage referenda, says “Never again will I speak from a street corner. Never again will I make an appeal to an individual voter. It is utter folly for a disfranchised class, with no party to support it, to attend a referendum. We can’t follow up an individual voter, but we can one in a legislative body.” And then she goes Donald Trumpish, complaining about recent male immigrant voters: “I call it tyranny and license for them to have power to pass upon me and upon the native born women of America”.

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Today -100: November 3, 1915: For the good of the State and the good of the women

Election results are coming in. Women’s suffrage was crushed in New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.

These defeats, following that in New Jersey last month, will lead to a shift in tactics by suffragists to a federal suffrage amendment, bypassing hostile male voters (in any case most of the states voting this year have provisions preventing a re-vote on the issue for 4 or 5 years).

The NYT, as is the custom, gloats: “The defeat of woman suffrage in three great Eastern States yesterday... is unmistakable and ample notice to the suffragists that the old, highly developed, populous, complex Commonwealths of the East will have none of a political experiment that some simpler, meagerly settled communities fo the West have ventured to make. ... It could not be accepted there with the easy carelessness of sparse Western populations eager for innovations. The men of the mighty industrial States voted it down for the good of the State and the good of the women.”

Mississippi’s new governor is Theodore Bilbo (D), a racist with a funny name. Read that Wikipedia entry, he sounds like the second coming of Coleman Blease. Unfortunately, the NYT didn’t cover his election campaign and it won’t cover his antics in office; according to the index, the next mention of him in the paper is a year and a half from now.

Massachusetts’s new governor is Samuel W. McCall (R) and its new lt. governor is Calvin Coolidge. The term for both those offices was one year.

New Yorkers reject the constitution the Constitution Convention came up with. Probably a good thing.

Ohio votes down prohibition.

Hey, a false rumor about the death of a German crown prince. It’s been a while. How I’ve missed you, false rumors about the deaths of German princes.

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Today -100: November 2, 1915: Of voting men, diverting divorces, fetishes, and sous

Headline of the Day -100: 

The New York women’s suffrage referendum. More voters have registered this year than for last year’s gubernatorial election (evidently New Yorkers had to register every single election, which sounds like a major pain in the ass).

The German military governor of Brussels, Gen. von Sauberzweig, is removed, evidently because of his mishandling of the Nurse Edith Cavell execution.

A British Divorce Court judge rules against a woman trying to divorce her husband, an army officer, saying it’s not in the interests of the nation “for men to have their minds diverted from their duties by such matters.”

The Supreme Court rules Arizona’s anti-alien labor law, a 1914 ballot initiative requiring that 80% of employees at companies employing more than five workers be U.S. citizens, unconstitutional.

Theodore Roosevelt finds Pres. Wilson’s ship-building plans inadequate. He wants to restore the US Navy to the position of the world’s second largest. And a bigger army. And universal (male) military service.

Former French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau denounces the Briand government as merely a shuffle of the same old cards, the politicians who have been attempting to bludgeon the public into acquiescence through fetish worship, “which replaces in negro tribes any scientific investigation of facts” (in this analogy, the political leaders are the fetishes).

France is running out of small change. The popular belief is that the Germans are somehow seizing the sous for their copper and spiriting it out of France.

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Today -100: November 1, 1915: We shall not give life to a child and a child to life

British soldiers finally get steel helmets.

The New York anti-suffragists claim that only 10% of the state’s women want the vote and also claim, wrongly, that the suffragists’ assertion that 1 million women want it is based on a postcard canvass by the New York World. In fact, says Carrie Chapman Catt, they conducted a door-to-door canvass of the state.

Rabbi Stephen Wise (a big Jewish/Zionist leader) says the European war won’t end until women have the vote, and they should protest the war by refusing to give birth, saying “We shall not give life to a child and a child to life”.

If a birth strike doesn’t work, how about an arboreal one?

Oh, okay, not an actual tree but the actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Tree will shortly be coming to the US to make movies, including a now lost version of Macbeth (produced by D.W. Griffith, with Constance Collier as Lady Macbeth).

In Salt Lake City, police major H.P. Myton shoots and kills IWW organizer Roy Horton, who had just told him “A man who would pack a star is no good and that goes for you.” Horton was campaigning against the forthcoming execution of hobo poet Joe Hill. Myton will be tried for murder but acquitted.

The Treasury Dept releases a list of names of 2,000 Americans who were stranded in Europe at the start of the war to whom the government loaned money which they haven’t repaid. Funnily enough, many turn out to have given false names and/or addresses. The NYT prints the names of the New Yorkers and tries to find some of them. G. Mortimer Wilmerding says the government never contacted him. My point is this: “G. Mortimer Wilmerding” is NOT one of the made-up names.

Update: I’ve googled him and it’s worse than I thought. His full name is Cuthbert Mortimer Wilmerding. Also, he was divorced in 1917 and his wife remarried and became a Mrs. Biddle, which makes me wonder if her sole purpose in life was collecting comical names.

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