Today -100: June 14, 1916: My attitude is one of undiluted Americanism

Charles Evans Hughes, finally in campaign mode, says, “My attitude is one of undiluted Americanism, and anybody who supports me is supporting an out-and-out American and an out-and-out American policy and absolutely nothing else.”

With all the talk this year of “Americanism,” a term I don’t think I came across at all for 1915, and which will be ubiquitous for a long while (the Ku Klux Klan of the ‘20s loved it), Wilson has named today, Flag Day, as a federal holiday for the first time (it’s the anniversary of the adoption of the first American flag in 1777).

Sen. Charles Thomas (D-Colorado) introduces a resolution for a constitutional amendment banning members of the Supreme Court running for public office while on the bench – or two years afterwards. Subtle.

The NYT suggests that the Democratic Convention won’t be that interesting:

Headline of the Day -100:  

Reading that, I wonder if that’s the first time someone heard a murder telephonically, but I can’t think of any way to look it up.

Headline of the Day -100:  

A survivor of the Charge of the Light Brigade, not of knitted headwear.

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Today -100: June 13, 1916: Of beards, train wrecks, and lawless aggression

Headline of the Day -100:

It’s not just Theodore Roosevelt who won’t run as a Progressive. Frank Hanly, who won the party’s primary for governor in Indiana (he was governor 1905-9), says he won’t run because the party failed to come out for prohibition. Hanly will run for president this year as the candidate of the Prohibition Party.

Metaphor of the Day -100: Some of the Republican convention delegates are in a literal train-wreck, including the governor and the former governor of Kentucky and the mayor of Louisville. They’re all okay.

Pres. Wilson sends 1,600 more troops to the border with Mexico. A draft of the Democratic Party platform written by Wilson no longer pretends that the Punitive Expedition is aimed only at Pancho Villa but says its purpose is also to protect “American citizens against lawless aggression” (there have been anti-American demonstrations in Chihuahua and Vera Cruz).

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Today -100: June 12, 1916: Slow news day -100

The Italian cabinet resigns after failing a vote of confidence.

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Today -100: June 11, 1916: I have not desired the nomination

The negotiations between Republican and Bull Moose leaders on fielding a joint presidential ticket fail, mostly because the R’s refuse to suggest a candidate. As the conference reached its inevitable conclusion, Roosevelt (phoning from Oyster Bay) suggests Henry Cabot Lodge, but it comes to nothing.

So the two conventions go about their separate business. The Progressives nominate Theodore Roosevelt and John M. Parker. Two minutes later across town, the Republicans nominate Charles Evans Hughes and Charles Fairbanks.

Hughes accepts by a telegram which begins “I have not desired the nomination.” Oh, NOW you tell us. He comes out for “Americanism” and preparedness and against Wilson’s policies in Mexico, in terms designed to satisfy Roosevelt (if such a thing is possible).

Roosevelt declines the nomination of the party he created and says he’s retiring from politics. Actually, he’s suspending his campaign – a “conditional refusal to run” in his words – leaving open the possibility of jumping back in if Hughes isn’t up to his expectations, but also preventing the Progs naming a replacement. Bull Moose party leaders refrain from reading TR’s telegram until right before the convention adjourns, to prevent rioting.

Roosevelt’s now unrunning mate John Parker will run instead for governor of Louisiana and lose, then run again in 1920 and win (as a Democrat). He is different from other Southern politicians in that the only lynching he is known to have personally participated in was of whites (Italian immigrants), which makes a refreshing change of pace.

Former Vice President Charles Fairbanks accepts the vice presidential nomination with all the enthusiasm it deserves, saying he had told the Indiana delegation to withdraw his name if anyone nominated him, but his message arrived too late so now “I feel it is my duty, under the circumstances” to accept.

Beards, they both have beards. That won’t happen again.

Racist Headline of the Day -100:  

According to Frank Rash of Kentucky at the National Association of Manufacturers’ convention.

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Today -100: June 10, 1916: Shit or get off the pot already, Hughes

The Republican Convention holds its first two ballots, and then halts pending negotiations with the Bull Moosers, the idea being that they had to assess the support for various candidates before possibly negotiating a joint GOP-Moose candidate. Charles Evans Hughes comes in first in both, although he still – still! – hasn’t declared his candidacy or said whether he’d accept the nomination, much less resigned from the Supreme Court. Nor has he sent a message of any kind to the convention.

The Allies have decided that they don’t trust Greece to maintain its neutrality, so they take over the port of Saloniki and ban Greek ships from it.

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Today -100: June 9, 1916: We believe in American policies at home and abroad

Delegates of the Republican and Progressive parties meet to try to find a presidential candidate acceptable to both, without success so far. Progressive Party leaders are hard put to calm their convention down and keep it from jumping the gun and just nominating Roosevelt, but they manage it.

Roosevelt issues a threat, in the form of a telegram to ex-Sen. William Jackson, saying that there’s a good chance that if the R’s nominate Hughes without his repudiating the support of “the professional German-Americans” (i.e., the German-American Alliance, which said that Hughes would be acceptable to them but TR or Elihu Root would not), the people will reject the R’s, and may even support a third-party candidate.

The Republican platform heavily emphasizes “Americanism,” which means whatever anyone wants it to mean, of course, but it includes no dual allegiances – This means you, German-Americans! This probably doesn’t mean you, Anglo-Americans! It says, “We believe in American policies at home and abroad.” The US should enforce the rights of Americans “at home and abroad, by land and sea,” unlike that weakling Wilson. “The present Administration has destroyed our influence abroad and humiliated us in our own eyes.”

While calling for a super-strong military, compulsory military training is rejected.

National prohibition is rejected without discussion or a vote.

The plank on women’s suffrage supports it as a “matter of justice,” but recognizes “the right of each State to settle this question for itself.” At the word “but,” the women in the audience stopped cheering. Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter Alice, who had encouraged them to cheer, laughed at this practical joke.

Mainstream Republicans want Charles Fairbanks to be Charles Evans Hughes’ running mate. Fairbanks, who is technically still running for president, says he doesn’t want the job again. Fairbanks was veep in Roosevelt’s second term, though he supported Taft in 1912, which would make things a touch awkward if TR gets the nomination this year.

The NYT editorializes that Supreme Court justices should never run for higher office, as it taints the court and their own judgement. Which is a fair point. But then they say that the fact that the German-American Alliance would boast Hughes as their own candidate is a reason not to nominate him, because it would cause racial division (the Germans being a race), which is a silly point.

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Today -100: June 8, 1916: Of wabbling warfare, unperturbed hugheses, little rooms, and hooge villages

I really want to know who the NYT correspondent at the Republican Convention is, because I’m really enjoying his prose: “Somewhere between 12,000 and 14,000 graven images gathered together in the Coliseum at 11 o’clock this morning and viewed each other with cold, unwinking eyes and chilled steel faces for something like three hours, then dispersed. During those three hours they demonstrated convincingly the hitherto unrealized powers of the human race in the matter of not getting excited.” Sen. Warren G. Harding of Ohio is the temporary chairman and gave a temporary speech. The correspondent makes fun of his arm gestures. Harding does his favorite thing, alliteration, although nothing like that of his speech at the 1912 convention. He accuses D’s of “the mistaken policy of watchful waiting and wabbling warfare.”

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The Progressive Party is also holding a convention in Chicago. There are 93 minutes of cheering for Theodore Roosevelt (who isn’t even there, although he was listening by telephone), a record in party convention history, although it took floor managers with whips and cattle-prods to produce it, the whole convention being nothing more than cover while Bull Moose leaders negotiate with Republican leaders behind closed doors in a little room. “But when the call came for a prolonged and triumphant shout of coming victory, the triumphant note was lacking. The delegates were thinking of that little room. Yet it was a throng eager to be enthusiastic. No men ever worked more loyally, diligently, and doggedly to be enthusiastic for a longer time than any group of men before them. Even before the major demonstration began the delegates were plainly waiting for the minute that would certainly come and sweep them into the old delirium. In little groups they stood about the floor watching for the spark to fall. They had not forgotten the fervor of four years ago. They remembered it poignantly, hoping it would come again. The leaders had set the stage for that fervor, but they only staged a memory.” That said, the Michigan delegation sang “This is Teddy, we declare / Sure it’s Teddy; he’s a bear,” so there’s that.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Was Donald Trump’s grandfather a German army officer?

NYPD Police Commissioner Arthur Woods admits that the police tap unions’ phones.

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Today -100: June 7, 1916: Of guilty but insane captains, dead kitcheners and dead emperors, and inscrutable hugheses

Capt. John Bowen-Colthurst is court-martialed for murder for the extra-judicial execution of Frank Sheehy-Skeffington and two others in Dublin during the Easter Rising. He’s going for an insanity defense, which will succeed. He will be found “guilty but insane,” confined to a loony bin for a year, make a miraculous recovery and be released. He will then emigrate to Canada, where he will receive a full military pension until his death in 1965.

Field Marshal Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, the not-hugely-competent British war secretary, dies when the ship he is taking to Russia hits a German mine and sinks. This leads, naturally, to more cries for all Germans to be interned, because someone must have told the Germans Kitchener’s travel plans. Which they didn’t, although the secret might have been better kept. The British government had encouraged Kitchener to leave the country on a nice long trip, less to confer with the Russians over munitions than from a desire to get The Recruiting Poster That Walked Like a Man away from his office so it could be run properly.

Theodore Roosevelt eulogizes Kitchener as “one of the great figures in that work of spreading civilization which has been the greatest permanent achievement of the civilized powers of the world during recent decades.” You know, conquering Sudan, ruling over the dusky natives in Egypt and India – spreading civilization.

Headline of the Day -100:

The Republican leaders agree on planks to be submitted to the National Convention: 1) military preparedness, including universal military training at schools. 2) “Americanism.” No hyphenated allegiances. 3) Fill more federal government jobs through the civil service. 4) No independence for the Philippines for a long, long time. 5) Protective tariffs. 6) Cheaper government. 7) Expansion of the merchant marine. The platform may matter this year more than these things usually do, since the leading candidate, Justice Hughes, has been, as the Times says, inscrutable.

Two suffrage meetings are held in Chicago to pressure the Republicans into adopting a women’s suffrage plank, but the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association rejects the Congressional Union’s demand for a federal constitutional amendment, because the state-by-state method is working so well. In other news, Iowa voters reject a women’s suffrage amendment to the state constitution.

US marines in the Dominican Republic and Haiti kill 7 and 11 rebels respectively. Which is worth 3 paragraphs on page 8.

Chinese President, Then Emperor, Then President Again Yuan Shikai dies. Officials are denying that he committed suicide, just like last week they denied he’d been poisoned.

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Today -100: June 6, 1916: A silence louder than all the brass bands in Chicago

The delegates to the Republican National Convention are arriving in Chicago, and the main problem is how to deal with the fact that the leading candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, won’t express his opinions on any issues. “Not since the invention of silence, one might say, has there been a silence so tremendously potent, a silence so creative and so destructive. ... It is a silence which shrieks, a silence louder than all the brass bands in Chicago.” Hughes is the only candidate who might unite the party’s factions, but the Progressives really want him to answer a few simple questions first, and this he will not do.

So where is the 1916 anti-Donald Trump? At the graduation ceremony of the National Cathedral School (an Episcopalian girls’ school), giving a mostly typical graduation-ceremony-type speech, except for something about the American flag meaning “undivided allegiance” and “America first.” Which is more significant than it might sound, since German-American objections to Roosevelt and Root have led to concern-trolling calls that candidates like Hughes must reject being German puppets, or something. Anyway, Hughes promised to be at this event months ago – one of the grads is his daughter Catherine.

Coming today to a theater near you: “The Fall of a Nation,” written and directed by the Very Racist Reverend Thomas Dixon Jr, author of the novels that D.W. Griffith adapted as The Birth of a Nation. It’s a sci-fi flick about how pacifists and military unpreparedness cause the US to be invaded and conquered by Germany (unnamed but, according to tomorrow’s NYT review, “a country of incredible efficiency whose commanding officers are given to mustaches strangely like the Kaiser’s”). A band of irregular women fighters ride to the rescue, just like the Ku Klux Klan in Birth of a Nation, presumably. The movie is now lost. It was the first feature-length movie, the NYT says, with a musical score specifically composed for it, by Victor Herbert of “Naughty Marietta” fame. The NYT says the film is “marked by a few points that offend against good taste and several points that outrage the intelligence, but many stretches of the film are finely spectacular and it is full of battlefields and such pictures of avenging cavalry sweeping along moon-lit country roads as the movies always do particularly well.”

Ida Rauh (a lawyer, sculptor and theater-manager and Max Eastman’s wife) is arrested along with Bolton Hall (a lawyer, not a general-assembly building), for distributing birth control pamphlets.

The Supreme Court rules that the 1914 Harrison Act banning possession of opium applies only to dealers, not users of the drug.

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Today -100: June 5, 1916: Of Jutlands, Jewish farmers, and English executioners

The British Navy is now claiming (incorrectly) to have sunk more German ships at the Battle of Jutland than the number of British ships sunk by the Germans.

Former President Taft tells the National Farm School, a Jewish organization, that Jews should totally take up farming, they’d be quite good at it, with their business sense and all. He also says Jewish immigration should not be restricted, but Jews should give up everything Jewish except the religion bit: customs, language, matzoh ball soup, guilt, etc.

John Goff, a justice on the New York Supreme Court, tells a meeting of the Friends of Irish Freedom in Syracuse that the killing of Irish rebels by “English executioners” has checked the US rush to join the European war. Goff is a longtime supporter of Irish nationalism, having organized the rescue of 6 Fenian prisoners from Australia in 1875, before he became, to repeat, a justice on the New York Supreme Court.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska dies in battle at Neuville. The brilliant painter-sculptor was 23. Twenty Fucking Three!

He is the subject of a memoir – out by the end of the month – by Ezra Pound, and a film by Ken Russell, which I haven’t seen in quite a few years but remember as fun (and Helen Mirren is rather impressively naked in it).

 See Gaudier-Brzeska’s work here.

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Today -100: June 4, 1916: I am not a believer in the idea that war is the very worst thing that can come to a people

Attorney General Thomas Gregory proposes 18 laws to strengthen US neutrality, closing some of the loopholes that German spies and saboteurs and Mexican fighters have been walking through. For example, bombing or setting fire to ships conducting foreign commerce. Ships would be forbidden to carry munitions in violation of a US embargo or to supply the ships of belligerent nations on the high seas (another example of US bias against Germany; Allied ships can simply resupply in Canada). The president would have the power to censor radio messages to belligerent nations or ships. Another proposed law would make it a crime for the interned military personnel (mostly sailors) of a belligerent nation to escape. It would be illegal for government employees to give information about US military defenses to a foreign nation.

Vice President Thomas Marshall addresses the Loyal Order of the Moose in Newark, which is what you do when you’re a vice president. He comes out for preparedness: “Now, I am not a believer in the idea that war is the very worst thing that can come to a people. I hope it may never come. Being old enough myself to avoid any dangers of war, I still see that it would be far better for our American youth to lose his life upon the field of battle in defense of our institutions than to destroy his life by vicious conduct in social affairs.” He doesn’t specify the vicious conduct he’s thinking of, but it’s a pretty remarkable statement.

In an exchange with Admiral John Jellicoe about the Battle of Jutland, King George bitches that the German fleet was allowed to escape, “enabled by misty weather to evade the full consequences of the encounter.” The British, like the Germans yesterday, are now beginning to claim to have won. Sure, their losses were a lot higher, they say, but German losses were greater relative to the size of their fleet, and the Royal Navy drove them from the North Sea.

Most families of British sailors don’t know what ships they serve on, so they don’t know if they’re alive or dead.

The Battle of Jutland has the US rapidly rethinking its own naval plans. For a start, battle cruisers, which the US planned to rely on heavily, didn’t stand up very well to the guns of the battleships. Also, zeppelins seem like a good idea, for spying out enemy ships.

Theodore Roosevelt isn’t saying whether he’d repeat 1912 and run as an independent if the Republican convention doesn’t pick a candidate he likes. He’d prefer to leave that sword over their heads.

The NYT stopped covering the Dominican Republic around the time the Marines landed. Funny that. So it won’t be in the paper that today the Marines arrest 8 members of the Dominican Congress to prevent a quorum, because Wilson does not like Congress’s choice of a new president. They will be released in two days, but Federico Henríquez y Carvajal will withdraw from consideration.

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Today -100: June 3, 1916: There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today

News reaches the NYT of the Battle of Jutland, a major clash between the navies of Britain and Germany, indeed the largest naval battle in history, 151 British ships vs. 99 German, and the only one of the war, off the Jutland Peninsula (Denmark). Germany initiated this in an attempt to destroy part of the Royal Navy and reduce its ability to strangle Germany’s trade and food supply. Though Germany destroyed more British ships (14) than it lost (11) and killed more than twice as many sailors (over 6,000) as it lost (2,500), the larger British navy could more easily afford the losses. After Jutland, until the end of the war, Germany never dared try another large-scale naval battle, so their goal of breaking the British blockade and regaining access to the Atlantic has been thwarted, and the British plan to starve Germany into submission continues. German naval tactics in future will center on u-boats rather than the Hochseeflotte (High Seas Fleet). But right now Germany is crowing about their “victory.” “The report even temporarily eclipsed the news of the restrictive meat ordinances in popular interest, which is saying a great deal nowadays.”

Some of the sunken British ships include the badly named Invincible, the more accurately named Turbulent, but not the amusingly named Warspite (hulled in a bunch of places but still able to limp back to port). One of the German cruisers is the Derfflinger, which if I remember my German correctly is one of those compound words that means “one who flings derfs.”

What went wrong with the British that they lost so many ships? Some of the technology and practices hadn’t caught up with the developments in other technologies. The ships had wireless but communicated orders via flags that couldn’t necessarily be seen from several miles away in a sea obscured by the steam from hundreds of ships, so at one point one part of the fleet zigged while the other part zagged. Also, the advantage of the longer range of British guns was wiped out by the laboriously slow 19th-century methods still in use to actually aim the guns. To compensate, they tried to keep up a high rate of fire, lobbing a lot of shells in the general direction of the target, which meant that safety procedures, like closing the fire doors, were ignored in the interests of speed by the sailors lugging around bags of cordite, so that hits on a ship that shouldn’t have been catastrophic wound up setting off its shells and powder. The second time a ship simply exploded, Vice-Admiral David Beatty commented, “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.” There were also numerous errors of judgment; Beatty and his boss Admiral Sir John Jellicoe spent the rest of their lives throwing blame at each other. When Beatty was promoted to First Sea Lord in 1919, pretty much the first thing he did was try to alter records and maps to support his story.

Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes’s secretary issues a statement that Frank Hitchcock does not in fact represent Hughes in pushing his candidacy for president, and in fact Hughes “has no representative.”

The NYT says the Dreyfus Affair, in which an army captain was falsely convicted of spying and accurately accused of being Jewish, leading to 20 years of French society viciously tearing itself apart, is now “over,” with Dreyfus and his son now serving in the army along with his various persecutors and their children. Because nothing says national reconciliation than killing Huns together.

The Austrian Supreme Court invalidates the marriage of Count Rudolf Schirding as violating Austrian law, even though he was married in Germany. At the time he had renounced his Catholic faith in order to marry a Protestant, but non-Christians are banned from marrying Christians, although they can marry Jews.

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Today -100: June 2, 1916: Damn, now I’m going to have to cancel my vacation plans to New South Greenland

The US, you will be surprised to hear, intends to ignore Carranza’s demand that US troops be pulled out of Mexico. They say they’re just following the agreement that Carranza himself proposed (which ignores the fact that US troops crossed the border before Carranza proposed that face-saving device) and if anyone is failing to “comprehend the scope and meaning of the reciprocal arrangement” it must be Mexico. Which is odd, since the US accepted the “reciprocal arrangement” without a negotiation.

Sir Ernest Shackleton reports back on what he’s been up to for the last 2½ years. He has discovered a whole new land mass in the Antarctic, but he confirms that New South Greenland, first mapped out by Benjamin Morrell in 1823, doesn’t actually exist, Morrell totally made it up. Or maybe it sank. And that’s about all that Shackleton has to show for all that time and hardship, including more than a year on ice after abandoning the doomed Endurance as it was slowly crushed by ice.

After the longest confirmation process ever for a Supreme Court justice, Louis Brandeis is confirmed by the Senate 47-22 on a mostly party-line vote.

Suffragists want to know Charles Evans Hughes’s views on women’s suffrage. They remember that he wasn’t a lot of help when he was governor of New York.

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Today -100: June 1, 1916: Whatever defects I have, I do not pussy-foot

First Chief Venustiano Carranza demands that US troops leave Mexico. Pancho Villa’s band of merry men has been “entirely dispersed,” he says, yet the Americans remain. “[T]here has been a great discrepancy between the protests of sincere friendly co-operation on the part of the American authorities and the actual attitude of the expedition, which, on account of its distrust, its secrecy regarding its movements and the arms at its disposal, clearly indicated that it was a hostile expedition and a real invasion of our territory.” However, the note fails to give the US a deadline. US officials are pretty much unanimous in declaring it a bluff intended for internal consumption.

Ernest Shackleton has left the Antarctic and his ill-fated Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, but 22 of his expedition remain behind on Elephant Island, needing rescue. Everyone will be out of the Antarctic by next February.

Theodore Roosevelt, in a speech in St. Louis, says Woodrow Wilson uses “weasel words” about preparedness but “only the compulsion of the spirit of America.” Yeah, I don’t know what that means either. He says “Whatever defects I have, I do not pussy-foot,” which is the slogan of every awful candidate ever (looking at you, Donald J. Trump).

I don’t understand the Republican Party of 1916. The old guard, the people who fought so hard four years ago to ensure that the nomination went to Taft rather than Roosevelt, are now asking Roosevelt and the Progressives (actually, they may be trying to do a deal behind TR’s back) to help them prevent Charles Evans Hughes becoming the party’s presidential candidate. I don’t know what they have against Hughes. The proposed deal seems to be that the Progressives would return to the Republican party and help defeat Hughes in favor of someone like Elihu Root, who would serve one term and then Roosevelt could run in 1920. Which doesn’t pass the laugh test.

Meanwhile, Frank Hitchcock, a former chair of the RNC and postmaster-general, who seems to be running Hughes’ campaign even though he says he hasn’t spoken with Hughes for months, is assuring everyone that Hughes would accept the nomination if offered, leading to calls that Hughes say that himself. But Hughes isn’t even taking phone calls from party leaders. And no one knows his positions on current issues.

The convention is just a week away.

By the way, Hitchcock’s power doesn’t derive from his RNC role but his role in the Post Office, the greatest source of government patronage of the time. A lot of Southern delegates got cushy PO jobs from him.

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Today -100: May 31, 1916: No, I expect you to smell zesty and citrusy, Mr. Bond

Woodrow Wilson gives a Memorial Day speech. He defends the “league of nations” idea, saying it wouldn’t be an entangling alliance, but a disentangling one, “an alliance which would disentangle the peoples of the world from those combinations in which they seek their own separate and private interests, and unite the people of the world upon a basis of common right and justice. There is liberty there, not limitation. There is freedom, not entanglement.”

In his own Memorial Day speech, Theodore Roosevelt calls for increased military spending and universal (male) military training. He calls pacifists “the old women of both sexes.”

Headline of the Day -100:

To bring out any notes or maps drawn on the skin.

Chinese President Then Emperor Then President Again Yuan Shikai is sick. Or, as his opposition puts it, has been poisoned. One way of the other, he’ll be dead soon.

The Louisiana Republican state convention was held at a segregated hotel in New Orleans, which kept out 12 negro delegates, who just so happen to be Roosevelt supporters.

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Today -100: May 30, 1916: Losses both in men and in prestige

Kaiser Wilhelm rides a Berlin street car. For the first time. Paid his fare and everything (and a tip – most people don’t tip, Mr. Kaiser).

Gen. Douglas Haig reports on the last 5 months of war, the period since he took over command on the Western front. He thinks he’s doing pretty well, because of course he does. The only offensive by the Germans in that period has been Verdun, where “The efforts made by the enemy have caused him heavy losses, both in men and in prestige”.

Headline of the Day -100:

I thought we were past the “Oh what a jolly game” phase of this war.

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Today -100: May 29, 1916: Nobody but an avowed advocate of blood and carnage could oppose it

The NYT supports Wilson’s “league of nations” idea as a common-sense approach to preventing future wars. “Nobody but an avowed advocate of blood and carnage could oppose it, save on the grounds of impracticability.” Fortunately, the Times thinks the US will never fall afoul of the rules such a league would enforce: “War without warning is not our habit, aggression is contrary to our interests and practice. There is not the slightest probability that in any New World dispute to which we were a party we should bear ourselves so arrogantly as to invite the interference of the league of nations.” That sound you hear is the people of Mexico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic trying not to snicker.

Seymour & Seymour, the law firm wiretapped by the NYPD and the Burns Detective Agency, denies NYC Mayor John Purroy Mitchel’s claim that they had anything to do with a plot to ship munitions to Mexico. They say the wiretapping was done at the behest of J.P. Morgan & Co., worried that there might be some munitions contract with the British War Office not passing through their greedy, monopolistic hands. They want an apology from Mayor Mitchel, the head of the phone company, and J.P. Morgan himself.

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Today -100: May 28, 1916: We can’t stop the horses

Headline of the Day -100:

The Long Island Railroad is putting up posters to educate the public to stop ignoring signals at crossings. I can’t find better copies:

Three J.P. Morgan messenger boys (literally: one is 15) steal $10,515 (they hadn’t intended to take so much, but that’s what was in the bag they stole) to buy horses so they could join the Texas Rangers to go after Pancho Villa. As you do. They made it as far as Philadelphia.

Woodrow Wilson tells a banquet of the League to Enforce Peace (ex-President Taft’s group) that the US would be willing to join a “league of nation” after the European war is over, to protect the freedom of the seas, stop wars beginning in violation of treaties, and protect small states from aggression. Funny how those are all areas where Germany has been the bad actor. He claims that the US has a right to participate in formulating a peace because this war has affected American rights, privileges and property. (Complete transcript here.)

Kaiser Wilhelm appoints August Müller, an actual Socialist type person, to the Food Commission. Oh how he must have hated having to do that.

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Today -100: May 27, 1916: A rather violent hypothesis

The Thompson Committee of the NY Legislature hears from two of the cops who listened in on phone conversations, revealing that they routinely wiretap lawyers and doctors (as well as hotels and pool rooms). They claim they don’t violate their doctor-patient or lawyer-client confidentiality, listening only long enough to determine where some wanted criminal is located. So reassuring.

The new German Food Dictator, Adolf Tortilowitz von Batocki-Friebe, says that the army will have priority for food over civilians. One problem he has to face: southern German states are not happy about having to send food to satisfy “Prussian food egotism.”

The US protests to France and Britain over the “lawless practice” of interfering with neutral, i.e. American, international mail.

Former President Taft is asked whether he would support Roosevelt if the Republican party nominated him for president. “That is a rather violent hypothesis,” he replies.

British munitions workers want the traditional Whitsuntide holidays. Lloyd George says no.

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Today -100: May 26, 1916: It was an attempt to take God out of the hearts of our little ones

“Three Catholic priests denied under oath before the Thompson Legislative Committee yesterday that a conspiracy exists among certain Catholic clergy and laymen of the city to injure the city administration and defeat the ends of justice, as Mayor Mitchel has charged in the committee’s investigation of the tapping of telephone wires by the police.” Monsignor John Dunn, chancellor of the archdiocese of NY, admits that he had spoken on a wiretapped phone about giving an inspector of charities “100,” but says this did not mean a bribe of $100 to leave the state to avoid being subpoenaed, but was a clever ruse to draw out the police he suspected were listening in on his phone conversations and anyway, he never said “100 dollars,” he said “100,” which could mean one hundred anything. Dunn says that the conspiracy behind the attack on Catholic institutions includes Standard Oil, the Sage Foundation, and the Charity Trust; “It had only one aim and that was the secularization of the charitable institutions. It was an attempt to take God out of the hearts of our little ones, and that is something we will not stand.” By little ones, he presumably means the lice-covered, under-fed orphans under the Church’s tender care. The monsignor also questions whether Mitchel is a real Catholic.

Prime Minister Asquith has been pondering how to restructure Ireland’s antiquated system of governance since the Rising (I guess just implementing Home Rule, like he promised before the war, isn’t an option, huh?). He still hasn’t worked it all out, but he will have wily negotiator David Lloyd George mediate between the Unionists and the (increasingly irrelevant) Irish Nationalists.

The NY National Guard opens an investigation into whether volunteers were turned away because they were Jewish. And it creates an all-negro regiment, Gov. Whitman announces at a memorial meeting for Booker T. Washington.

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Today -100: May 25, 1916: Of national guards, wiretaps, and nationalized meat

The Senate Judiciary Committee approves Louis Brandeis’s appointment to the Supreme Court on a 10-8 party-line vote.

The military bill just passed by Congress requires National Guards in each state to expand to fixed quotas (800 per US Senator and congresscritter). New York law allows the state to draft men into the Guard if the quota isn’t met by volunteers. In practice, the governor would order mayors to do the picking.

NYC Mayor John Purroy Mitchel returns to testify before the Thompson Committee, whether they want it or not, and reads out transcripts of the possibly illegal wiretaps of Father Farrell and others.

The German Imperial Meat Bureau seizes control of all meat in the Reich. Possibly to make one gigantic sausage.

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Today -100: May 24, 1916: Well-organized and purposeful conspiracies are the best kind of conspiracy

NY Mayor John Purroy Mitchel testifies before the state Legislature’s Thompson Committee, which has been investigating NYPD phone-tapping. He says the Catholic clergy has been conducting a “well-organized and purposeful conspiracy” against his administration as well as to thwart justice by paying to get a witness, an examiner of charities in the Finance Department (and defrocked Baptist minister), out of the state. The Committee tries to stop the mayor revealing details derived from possibly illegal phone taps, demanding to go into secret session, but the mayor refuses and keeps talking, not that anyone can hear him over all the shouting. This all has to do with the terrible conditions at several Catholic orphanages. In turn, Monsignor John Dunn, chancellor of the diocese, accuses Mayor Mitchel of being part of a conspiracy against private orphanages.

Headline of the Day That Makes the War Sound Like Gay Porn -100:

Germany names its food dictator: former governor (Oberpräsident) of East Prussia Adolf Tortilowitz von Batocki-Friebe. Forget about rationing food, there’s probably a kid somewhere in Berlin with no name at all because Adolf Tortilowitz von Batocki-Friebe has so many. Think of the children, Adolf Tortilowitz von Batocki-Friebe, think of the children.

The General Council of the Methodist Episcopal Church endorses women’s suffrage (but not dancing, card-playing, or theater-going, which are still banned).

The Prohibition Party wants William Jennings Bryan to run for president on their ticket. He’s been threatening to leave the Democratic Party if they don’t adopt a prohibition plank.

A bill on Puerto Rico passes the House. It gives the island greater control of its own revenue and adds property and education qualifications for citizenship. A provision for women’s suffrage is voted down.

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Today -100: May 23, 1916: Of aggressive movements for thorough-going Americanism and thorough-going preparedness

Complaints are made that Jews trying to join the National Guard – in New York, yet – are being turned away.

A committee of mainstream Republicans (those who supported Taft rather than Roosevelt in 1912) go to Oyster Bay to tell TR that this time, he’s their man. He says of their action, “I accept it absolutely in the spirit in which you have taken it. You are for me because you regard me as representing and embodying the aggressive movement for thorough-going Americanism and thorough-going preparedness.” One of the delegation is Hiram Bingham III (they just don’t make names like that anymore), who complains that when he was in Peru, “I found the claim to American citizenship won no respect.” The Peruvian government even accused him of stealing gold (as opposed to the thousands of priceless relics he actually did loot from Machu Picchu). Roosevelt says this is because foreigners think the US under Wilson is afraid to fight for its citizens’ rights.

Meanwhile, Justice Charles Evans Hughes refuses, again, to say whether he is a candidate. Although anyone-but-Roosevelters are working hard for his nomination, he doesn’t seem to have communicated with any of them. He is rumored to have said recently that he expects Roosevelt to be the nominee, but this may be a ruse by TR supporters to force him to make a declaration of candidacy or non-candidacy.  The Republican convention is just over two weeks away.

Obit of the Day -100: Artúr Görgei, commander of the Hungarian forces which attempted to win freedom from the Austrian Empire in the year of revolutions, 1848. Since he surrendered in 1849 and wasn’t, you know, executed, although he did spend 18 years in prison, his reputation among Hungarians was not especially good, and he’s kept out of the public eye for the last few decades.

Professors Frédéricq and Pirenne of the University of Ghent have been arrested by the German occupation forces in Belgium and interned in Germany for refusing to teach in Flemish (Germany is trying to widen the divide between the Flemish and the Walloons).

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Today -100: May 22, 1916: Of blue laws, contraband, and bally bunk

Headline of the Day -100:

The New York National Guard was supposed to have war games in Sheepshead Bay, with 10,000 guardsmen, bands, airplanes, cannon & other firearms. But it was a Sunday, and somebody complained that all that noise would violate the blue laws, so they had to do it all with blanks, without bugles and airplanes, and with the bands only allowed to play religious music (Onward Christian Soldiers etc).

The Prize Court in Hamburg rules that it’s okay for German subs to sink any neutral ship whose cargo is more than half contraband.

Former US ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau says that he and Turkish officials discussed buying Palestine. It’s not clear who would actually do the buying. Jews? Surely not the United States.

Why are the Republicans even holding presidential primaries? The vast majority of convention delegates already chosen are committed to no candidate, and no one knows who’s actually running.

At a Chicago meeting called to protest the British executions of Irish rebels, Irish labor leader Jim Larkin leaps on and strangles a British man in the audience who complained about the “bally bunk” and “ridiculous drivel” being spoken.

From the Wipers Times:

We are glad to see that the City Fathers of Wulverghein [near Ypres] are going to introduce the Day-light Saving Bill, as this will mean that some soldiers, who are in the district, will be able to go to bed earlier. It really is a great blessing, and will enable all of us who are lovers of nature to take our early morning ramble an hour earlier, thus catching the lark at its best.

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Today -100: May 21, 1916: The faking is the best part

The German occupation authorities in Belgium still haven’t found the source of an underground newspaper, La Libre Belgique, produced “régulièrement irrégulier” for over a year, despite offering a large reward. The name is a play on the pro-German La Belgique.

Coney Island opens for the summer and it promises, this time, to be “sanitary, safe, and sane” and to ban all faking.

Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes wins the Oregon Republican primary for president, despite already having a job, despite not having announced that he wants the job, and despite having tried to get his name taken off the ballot.

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Today -100: May 20, 1916: You cannot do detective work in a high hat and kid gloves

At the NY Legislature’s Thompson Committee hearings about NYPD phone taps, the city of NY’s corporation counselor tries to shut the whole thing down, claiming there are “national issues” involved. Sen. George Thompson (R) expresses skepticism. From his office, NY Mayor John Purroy Mitchel accuses Thompson of a “cumulative act of treachery” towards the United States Government for making the wiretapping public. Finally, Police Commissioner Arthur Woods testifies. Asked if he wasn’t tapping many innocent people, Woods says, “You know, you cannot do detective work in a high hat and kid gloves” and complains about all this talk about the rights of criminals. He reassures the public that no one’s phone conversations are being listened to “unless he is a crook.” Curiously, no one points out to him that it is the job of a court of law and not the commissioner of police to determine who is a crook.

The White House asks Britain not to execute Jeremiah Lynch, a naturalized US citizen, for his part in the Easter Rising, and they agree. Lynch was a staff captain during the occupation of the General Post Office. He will be released with other prisoners in 1917 and deported to the US in 1918. From exile, he will be elected to the British Parliament in 1918.

A Royal Commission is investigating the Easter Rising, which the NYT is pleased to call “the Sinn Fein revolt,” though SF had little enough to do with it. Former Chief Secretary of Ireland Augustine Birrell defends his failure to foresee the events, although he admits he knew little about what was going on in “the cellars of Dublin” and was uneasy about it. He defends spending most of his time in London instead of Ireland, saying he had to attend Cabinet meetings, although “a jackdaw or a magpie might have done just as well to cry out ‘Ireland!’ ‘Ireland!’ when bills were being discussed by the Cabinet.”

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Today -100: May 19, 1916: Of controversies of the past, wire-taps, and peace conferences

British Prime Minister Asquith tells Millicent Garrett Fawcett, president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, that if there is new franchise legislation before the next election (and there has to be, as residency requirements in the current laws would deprive most soldiers of the vote), then women’s suffrage will be “fully and impartially weighed without any prejudgment from the controversies of the past.”

More information about the NYPD’s phone-tapping emerges from the Legislature’s committee. The law firm of Seymour & Seymour was tapped to determine how stolen information about J.P. Morgan’s financing of munition sales to France leaked to munitions companies, including how much Morgan was willing to pay, and to get intel about German agents’ purchases of munitions for Mexican rebels. The NYPD seem to have subcontracted the dictaphone-placing and black-bag break-in work to the William Burns Detective Agency. Mayor John Purroy Mitchel denies that any influential person (like Morgan) can just tell the cops to wiretap someone for him. No, phones are only tapped if the police commissioner thinks a crime has been committed or might be committed. Which would be more reassuring if the police commissioner, Arthur Woods, were not engaged to J.P. Morgan’s granddaughter (not sure if anyone knew that).

The House Committee on Naval Affairs includes in the annual Navy budget a provision authorizing the president to call a conference at the end of the European war to discuss disarmament and create a court of arbitration to prevent future wars.

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Today -100: May 18, 1916: No one should shake hands with Italian officers

The US Cavalry kill 5 Mexican bandits who participated in the raid on Glenn Springs, Texas, and rescue two kidnapped Americans.

The Dominican Republic’s Chamber of Deputies elects Federico Henríquez y Carvajal provisional president.

Italy makes public what it claims is an order issued by Austrian Gen. Szekozar Borovich: “Troops on the southwest front should make as few prisoners as possible. No one should shake hands with Italian officers.” Okay, killing prisoners is bad, but snubbing an extended hand is just plain rude.

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Today -100: May 17, 1916: The only thing that saves the world is the little handful of disinterested men that are in it

A committee of the New York Legislature hears that the NYPD have tapped 350 phones over the last two years, more than anyone realized. And that’s just the official taps; unofficial ones are suspected to have occurred as well. No warrants. The committee stumbled on the extensive wiretapping as a by-product of an investigation into the wiretapping of 3 priests. More details to come.

Woodrow Wilson, speaking at the National Press Club, says that only if the US stays out of the European war will it be able to help formulate a “solution” after it is ended. “If you are in a conference in which you know nobody is disinterested, how are you going to make a plan? I tell you, gentlemen, the only thing that saves the world is the little handful of disinterested men that are in it.”

The French War Ministry rejects all the bids entered to supply the military with 100,000 pounds of meat per day after discovering that the wholesalers colluded to rig the bid.

Headline of the Day -100:

Sadly, it’s a James Douglas Glass, not a boy made out of glass.  Jersey City cops are rounding up Gypsies, because that’s what you do when a child goes missing, obvs.

Headline of the Day -100:

Sam Perlstein, headwaiter at Joel’s on West 41st St. in New York, inherits from his uncle, a captain in the Austrian army, a property which is currently commandeered by the military. Perlstein does not intend to go to Europe.

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Today -100: May 16, 1916: Of Sykes-Picot, Waco lynchings, Irish brigades, and sending in the Marines

The Sykes-Picot Agreement is signed. It won’t be in the newspaper because it’s, shhh, a secret deal between Britain and France. It’s named after its negotiators, Colonel Sir Tatton Benvenuto Mark Sykes and François Marie Denis Georges-Picot, who each had way too many names, dividing up the Ottoman Empire. When the Bolsheviks release the text in late 1917, it will come as quite a surprise to the Arabs who T.E. Lawrence is now trying to get to revolt against Turkish rule. Zionists will also not be best pleased. Fortunately, imperialists drawing arbitrary lines on maps of the Middle East always works out well...

In Waco, Texas, a 17-year-old negro named Jesse Washington is lynched. He had just been convicted of raping and murdering the wife of his employer, a farmer, in a one-hour trial (followed by a 4-minute jury deliberation) in which his lawyer offered no defense. He is castrated, his fingers cut off, and he is burned to death, slowly, repeatedly lowered into the flames and raised out again, in front of a crowd variously estimated at 10,000 to 15,000. The remains of his body, at least those that had not been taken as souvenirs, are put in a bag and dragged behind a horse through the streets of Waco, then hung from a telephone pole. There are photographs (indeed, postcards), which you can see online (not recommended). Tomorrow the NYT will editorialize “wherever the news of it goes – and the news will go far – it will be asserted that in no other land even pretending to be civilized could a man be burned to death in the streets of a considerable city amid the savage exultation of its inhabitants. The assertion is probably not true, but to disprove it will be difficult.” The news will indeed go far, in part thanks to W.E.B. DuBois and The Crisis, but the NYT won’t mention it again.

Oh yeah: no one was ever prosecuted, although there were those postcards, in which members of the lynch mob are clearly visible.

Sir Roger Casement’s trial begins at Bow Street Police Court in London. It’s not one of those secret-court-martial-without-a-lawyer deals used for most of the Irish rebels, because Casement was nabbed before martial law was declared. He has a surprise co-defendant, Daniel Bailey, one of the Irish soldiers who Casement recruited from German POW camps for Germany’s “Irish Brigade” and who accompanied Casement on the u-boat that put them ashore in Ireland. Bailey will do a deal, testify against Casement, and be released, amazingly enough, back into the army.

US marines land in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. They’ll leave in 1924.

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Today -100: May 15, 1916: No soup for you!

The curfew in Dublin is loosened. It now covers only midnight to 4 a.m. Asquith is currently touring the wrecked city.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Denmark, facing a shortage of merchant ships, is putting two ships built in 1776 and 1786 back into service.

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Today -100: May 14, 1916: This war is helping the cause of women wonderfully

A huge Citizens’ Preparedness Parade is held in New York to support enlarging the military. 135,683 marchers according to the New York Times. That’s eleven hours of parade – 11 hours! – without even an Underdog balloon to liven it up, although Col. Sherrill of the NY National Guard did have a prancing horse.

The food shortage in Germany (and, it is rumored, food riots) has forced Interior Minister Clemens von Delbrück to resign.

Belgians are supposedly resorting to eating dogs.

British actors in the US (aged 18 to 41) have been ordered to return home to fight. The NYT worries about its effect on Broadway, which is lousy with English actors.

Charlie Chaplin (27) doesn’t go.

Headline of the Day -100:

British suffragette Christabel Pankhurst, in Rome, says “It will not be necessary for women to smash windows and go to jail to get their rights when this war is over. This war is helping the cause of women wonderfully.” Wonderful. When the war is over, she says, “Europe then will be mentally and spiritually fifty years ahead of where it was before the war started.”

Dr. Alexander Just, the Hungarian inventor of the tungsten-filament light bulb, admits that his announcement that he’d invented a dry cell battery that could recharge from the oxygen in the air alone was wrong, that he was in fact duped by a pissed-off lab assistant.

Obit of the Day -100:

Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem (pseudonym of Solomon Rabinovich), author of the short stories that were the basis for Fiddler on the Roof, as well as numerous plays, novels, etc, is dead at 57. He’s been living in New York and Switzerland for much of the last decade, having found it expedient to leave Russia to escape pogroms.

Japan only imported 26 automobiles in 1915, having started making its own.

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Today -100: May 13, 1916: Of endorsements, executions, and expeditions

Thomas Edison endorses Theodore Roosevelt for president.

The British execute James Connolly and John McDermott, which completes the set of all 7 signers of the proclamation of an Irish Republic.

The British Foreign Office defends banning medical supplies from being imported (including from the US) into Germany. It points out that during the Civil War the North prevented medical supplies, including quinine and anaesthetics, from reaching the Confederacy.

The US doesn’t seem to know what to do with the troops it sent into Mexico, who are now just kind of sitting there. They can’t go deeper into the country without many more men to maintain supply and communication lines, and they don’t have the men and can’t get Mexicans to work for them. Also, they don’t know where Villa is.

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Today -100: May 12, 1916: You are doing everything conceivable to madden the Irish people

Prime Minister Henry Asquith announces in Parliament that he is going to Ireland.

Irish Nationalist MP John Dillon offers a resolution that the government should declare its intentions as to continuing to execute rebels following secret military trials, the length of martial law, etc. It is rejected without a vote. Dillon demands that the executions in Ireland be ended, speaking, he says, as someone who opposed the Rising. “At this moment, I say, you are doing everything conceivable to madden the Irish people and to spread insurrection – perhaps not insurrection, because if you disarm the country there cannot be insurrection – but to spread disaffection and bitterness from one end of the country to the other. ... You are letting loose a river of blood, and, make no mistake about it, between two races who, after three hundred years of hatred and of strife, we had nearly succeeded in bringing together. ... It is the first rebellion that ever took place in Ireland where you had a majority on your side. ... I admit they were wrong; I know they were wrong; but they fought a clean fight, and they fought with superb bravery and skill, and no act of savagery or act against the usual customs of war that I know of has been brought home to any leader or any organised body of insurgents.”

Prime Minister Asquith, no doubt thinking that one more river of blood among so many hardly makes a difference at this point, does not promise to stop the executions, the details of which he seems rather fuzzy about, either because he is genuinely ill-informed or because he’s trying to put any blame on Sir John Maxwell (to whose “own discretion” he has left these matters of life and death), the obscure general now in absolute command of Dublin. But the executions will stop after the next two, although not before turning the leaders of an unpopular uprising (Dillon was right about that) into national martyrs, and making anything less than a republic impossible.

The decision to stop executing rebels comes before they get to Éamon de Valera, the future president of Ireland. Luck of the draw, really.

US-Mexican negotiations fail. So the US Army will continue to do whatever the hell it wants to do in Mexico, for as long as it wants.

As Gen. Obregon is leaving the failed talks in El Paso, a deputy sheriff serves him papers in a damage suit brought by the mother of a child whose leg was broken when he was run down by a car driven by the general’s son yesterday.

There are reports (false reports, but reports nonetheless) that Rasputin has been assassinated.

Theodore Roosevelt finally indicates that he is in fact running for president, in a letter to the secretary of the Roosevelt Non-Partisan League expressing approval of their activities.

Two members of Congress get in a fist-fight in a D.C. hotel lobby over a movie (unnamed in the story) about Reconstruction and race in general. Frederick Lehlbach (R-NJ) says that his grandfather and his father were abolitionists and Samuel Nicholls (D-SC) replies that they were clearly most undesirable citizens, and fighting ensued.

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Today -100: May 11, 1916: I haven’t any interest in ultimatums that fail to ultimate

Theodore Roosevelt comments on Wilson’s last note to Germany on submarine warfare: “I haven’t any interest in ultimatums that fail to ultimate.”

George Bernard Shaw protests the executions of leaders of the Easter Rising, who he says were prisoners of war and who had as much right to resist British rule as the English would if invaded by Germany. The executions, he says, are canonizing the prisoners. “It is absolutely impossible to slaughter a man in this position without making him a martyr and a hero, even though the day before the rising he may have been only a minor poet.” Ouch with the literary criticism, dude.

The British government finally admits that Francis Sheehy-Skeffington and two other journalists were executed at the Portobello Barracks before martial law was declared (i.e., illegally) and that they were ordered by a captain without the authorization of his superiors. He will be court-martialed...

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