Today -100: October 25, 1916: Let him not vote for me

Henry Ford will pay female employees on an equal basis, following an “inspiring” conversation with Woodrow Wilson.

Headline of the Day -100:

Or indeed, anyone “whose allegiance to our flag is not single and complete.”

On the other hand:

Not helping the “Wilson Kept Us Out of War” meme, two US officers are killed in the Dominican Republic, you know, the country Wilson invaded (one of several countries Wilson has invaded).

Hughes refuses to take any position on prohibition.

The Sun accuses Woodrow Wilson of using the word “very” too often, which it says is a sign of femininity.

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Today -100: October 24, 1916: At least when he dodged the draft, he did it en pointe

The London Times says the British government is considering changing the election laws to allow proxy votes for military personnel on active service.

Charles Evans Hughes’s story is that when he met Jeremiah O’Leary and the other pro-Germans, he had never heard of O’Leary before.

Republicans counter-charge that it’s actually the D’s who are going after the hyphen vote, that they are in fact putting out campaign literature in... gasp... German.

Theodore Roosevelt says that Wilson not firing Secretary of War Newton Baker shows that Wilson “in his heart believes that Washington was no better than Villa or Carranza”.

Women voters are expected to tip the balance in the presidential election in Illinois, but neither party knows how to deal with that.

Russia demands that the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, currently touring the US, return to join the army, or be declared a deserter (actually, he was declared a deserter in 1911 for not doing 3 years of military service). In 1915 Austria interned him as an enemy alien, and he was released only after promising not to bear arms.

The mayor of Eckernförde in Schleswig-Holstein bans the peeling of potatoes. 3 months in jail or a fine. They take food shortages seriously in Eckernförde. Also potatoes.

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Today -100: October 23, 1916: Of secret racial organizations, comparative rebels, and assassins

The Allies are now demanding that Greece remove all its troops from Thessaly and hand over to the Allies those troops’ military supplies.

The DNC accuses Charles Evans Hughes of making a secret deal with Irish- and German-Americans. Hughes admits having met with the American Independence Conference (which the DNC calls a “secret racial organization... a weapon of vengeance and force against Anglo-Saxon influence”), but says there was no deal.

The Daughters of the American Revolution demand the resignation of Secretary of War Newton Baker for supposedly saying that Pancho Villa’s followers are just like George Washington’s soldiers at Valley Forge, who were also big ol’ thieves (which Baker denies saying).

Friedrich Adler says he assassinated Austrian Prime Minister Count Karl von Stürgkh because he refused to recall the parliament, which hasn’t met since several months before the war began. Austrian authorities are already trying to portray him as a lunatic, because they’d really prefer to commit him rather than let him speak at a trial.

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Today -100: October 22, 1916: Everyone is justified to use force when the laws are destroyed

Count Karl von Stürgkh, the authoritarian minister-president (prime minister) of Austria (but not of Hungary) since 1911, is assassinated in a Viennese restaurant by Friedrich Adler, 37, son of Victor Adler, the founder of the Austrian Social Democratic Party. Friedrich, a publisher, was upset that his anti-war writings were censored. At his trial, he will say that his act of killing was exactly the same as the war which Stürgkh waged without the permission or consent of the Austrian people; “Everyone is justified to use force when the laws are destroyed,” Adler says. After a delayed trial he will be sentenced to death but the emperor will commute his sentence and then release him altogether, which is a little odd if you consider that this whole stupid war started because of an Austrian assassination.

Adler was also a physicist and a friend of Albert Einstein. Freddy will stay active in Socialist politics, fleeing Austria in 1938. He’ll then live in exile the rest of his life, first in New York and then Switzerland, dying in 1960 at 80. His father’s political career doesn’t seem to have been affected: he became foreign minister in the last days of the war, and died of a heart attack on the last day.

Stürgkh will be replaced by a series of short-lived minister-presidents, five over the next two years.

If it’s Sunday, it must be the Sunday New York Times Magazine’s special English Authors Prettying Up the War issue. There’s H.G. Wells’s “Italy’s Picturesque Mountain War” and Rudyard Kipling writing about British destroyers in the North Sea looking for German u-boats, which is just like fox-hunting, he says. Just like it.

Congressional elections in Mexico tomorrow. Only Constitutionalists are eligible for office. And no secret ballot.

German soldiers have been given a letter they’re supposed to mail to their relatives, asking them not to send any depressing news from home because it would just be a “drag” on the army – “many a letter speaks of discouragement, a feeling to which we would remain foreign; we at the front ignore the meaning of the word discouragement.” The German Army is especially annoyed that letters from home describing the hardships of daily life have been found on POWs and published by the Allies.

The letter makes interesting reading, although the translation comes from the London Times, which has been known to be less than trustworthy in this regard – in 1917 it will accuse Germany of rendering soldiers’ corpses to produce glycerine based on a deliberate mistranslation. Anyway, the letter refers in passing to “the hypocrisy of the United States, who is merely playing the ignoble role of moneylender.”

Theodore Roosevelt gets in a debate/shouting match with hecklers in Gallup, New Mexico about the 8-hour day, Mexico, etc. And then there was this exchange, which I’m a little confused by:

“Didn’t yet let the Japs sit beside our children in the schools of California?” 

“Ha! I sent the battle fleet [the “Great White Fleet”’s round-the-world tour of 1907-9] around the world to protect just such men as you against the Japs.”

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Today -100: October 21, 1916: Of chief inspectors, u-boats, blackouts, and legions

A French officer has been appointed “chief inspector” to the Greek Interior Ministry. He will have approval over all orders to police.

Hindenburg yesterday, and Ludendorf today, ask Germans who are agitating loudly for unrestricted submarine warfare to knock it off.

The Canadian military orders a nighttime blackout for Halifax, Nova Scotia, for some mysterious reason. Fear of zeppelin raids? They’re not saying.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: The Allies are claiming that the Central Powers’ Polish Legion has mutinied and most of its members imprisoned.

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Today -100: October 20, 1916: Of banners, Standards, quarantines, and klucks

Members of the National Women’s Party picket a Woodrow Wilson speech in Chicago, but the crowd tears up their banners (“Wilson is against women,” “Wilson prevented the passage of suffrage amendment”, etc).

Inside, Wilson says that the function of women will be “the element of mediation, or comprehending and drawing all the elements together. It is the power of sympathy, as contrasted with the power of contests.”

In another Chicago speech (or possibly the same one? not worth going back to check), he tells immigrants not to be so... foreign. He says the US can help in the settlement of the Great War because Americans come from all stocks and can “interpret the thought of the world [and...] the needs of the future.” I’m not sure if he realizes that he’s assigning the US the same place in the world as he assigned to women in politics.

The Bayonne Standard Oil strike breaks up when American-born workers desert their immigrant (mostly Poles) compatriots.  Standard offered nothing, but will “investigate” any grievances – except those involving pay.

The Harvard football team is quarantined (well, confined to campus) after a half-back comes down with suspected polio.

German Field Marshal Alexander von Kluck retires, at 70, to the doubtless disappointment of British soldiers, who sang songs about him.

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Today -100: October 19, 1916: Of inconsistent principles and polio

Irish Nationalist leader John Redmond introduces a resolution in Parliament declaring that the treatment of Ireland is “inconsistent with the principles wherefor the Allies are fighting in Europe”. He demands immediate Home Rule, the ending of martial law, and the release of prisoners from the Easter Rising (500 still held without trial).

As there were “only” two polio deaths in New York yesterday, the health commissioner has decided the epidemic is over and will stop issuing daily reports.

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Today -100: October 18, 1916: A surrender can’t be repealed

A heckler asks Charles Evans Hughes if he would repeal the Adamson Act, the law which established the 8-hour day in the railroad sector. Hughes says a surrender can’t be repealed. He says if he’d been faced with a threatened rail strike as Wilson was, he’d have appointed a commission so impartial and so fair that neither side would have gone against its recommendations. Oh, Charles Evans, you’re just too pure for this wicked world.

Woodrow Wilson fails to get the belligerents to agree a plan to allow relief supplies into Poland.

The Justice Dept is investigating claims that Republicans are “colonizing” Southern negroes into Illinois and Indiana to register to vote, although Illinois law requires one year of residence to register. However, the article also notes that many of them are taking meat-packing jobs formerly held by immigrants who have returned to Europe to fight, so maybe this is just normal economic migration and racist D’s then, like racist R’s now, just automatically equate black people voting with voter fraud.

Under some sort of deal with Germany, Switzerland bans exports of munitions to the Allies if those munitions are made using German coal or steel.

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Today -100: October 17, 1916: Of provisional governments, lynchings & laudings, operatic menaces, newsprint, and obedient wives

The Allies recognize Eleftherios Venizelos’s “Provisional Government,” although possibly only in Crete?

The NYT has its first picture of a tank.

Two black men are lynched in Paducah, Kentucky. One is accused of attacking a white woman, the other supposedly “lauded” the first’s attack.

Headline of the Day -100:  

There’s a newsprint shortage in the US, so the FTC asks big-city newspapers to cut down the size of their Sunday papers, so as not to put smaller newspapers out of business.

The Episcopalians refuse to remove the word “obey” from the marriage vow for women.

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Today -100: October 16, 1916: Babies vs. dogs

Princeton University is under quarantine after a freshman dies of polio.

Margaret Sanger opens a Planned Parenthood clinic in Brooklyn.

Norway has banned armed submarines from its ports and Germany’s afraid other neutrals will follow suit.

The train of pro-Hughes women continues its campaign tour. In Medford, Oregon, Democratic women planned to bring stray dogs to greet them, but Republican women arranged to bring babies to the train station, because politics.

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Today -100: October 15, 1916: Let the enemy crush his head against a wall of iron

Kaiser Wilhelm visits the troops on the Eastern Front. He tells them “Let the enemy crush his head against a wall of iron. God help you in this great work.” They respond, “So we’re like the wall in this scenario?”

Charles Evans Hughes insists that his “doctrine of firmness” will not lead to war, while Wilson’s policies of weakness and vacillation will.

40 opposition members of the Hungarian Diet who are in the military, including their leader Count Karolyi, are being sent to the front. This seems to be retaliation by the army for their criticism of its mishandling of the war.

Australia will hold a referendum on whether to introduce conscription.

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Today -100: October 14, 1916: And we’ll keep it broken

The Allies demand control over the Greek police, the banning of Greeks carrying arms, and the export of wheat (which is currently prohibited) from Thessaly.

The Greek Navy’s sailors will be turned into an army. When the Allies seized the Navy, the king gave them the option of staying with their ships under French command, but none did.

Bayonne, NJ police break the Standard Oil strike, as was the custom. “We got this strike broken, and we’ll keep it broken,” says Commissioner of Public Safety Henry Wilson.

Greek King Constantine still opposes Greece going to war on the Allied side. He says Romania is about to fall and then, if Greece declares war, the full might of Germany would fall on it.

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Today -100: October 13, 1916: Tall, with a wealth of red hair

The first mention in the NYT that a woman, Jeanette Rankin, is running for Congress. It’s an editorial but it provides rigorous political analysis:

And that’s all the coverage she’ll get in the Times until the votes are being counted.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: Russia accuses Germany of dropping poisoned candy and cholera-infected garlic (can you actually infect garlic with cholera?) on Constanza, Romania.

Headline of the Day -100:

He says that when the German embassy put ads in the paper warning passengers, he would have threatened to break relations with Germany, so they wouldn’t have sunk it. Er, he knows the u-boat that sank the Lusi was already at sea, right? And before that, he says, he would have had a State Department that commanded respect around the world.

Eleftherios Venizelos’s self-styled Provisional Government will soon issue orders mobilizing the army.

Otto I, the former Mad King of Bavaria, who reigned from inside his padded throne room from 1886 until he was deposed in 1913, dies.

Woodrow Wilson’s train backed into a crowd in Indiana, but no one was hurt. One woman was saved by Secret Service agent John Q. Slye.

In other news, Woodrow Wilson had a Secret Service agent named John Q. Slye.

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Today -100: October 12, 1916: We want peace that is honorable, that squares with the dignity of American manhood

France seizes the Greek Navy. And we hear again that the Entente is offering nothing to Greece to induce it to enter the war. Not sure why they’re so determined to treat Greece as a vassal rather than a potential partner.

Charles Evans Hughes says as president he would favor no nation, but uphold the rights of neutral countries. Denying that a Republican victory would mean war, he says “We want peace, but we want peace that is honorable, that squares with the dignity of American manhood. We can have that sort of peace a great deal more easily than we can have the other sort of peace, which borders on the cowardly and the loss of the self-respect of the nation.”

Woodrow Wilson seems to have decided that the U-53’s sinking of ships off the US shore doesn’t violate any of Germany’s promises.

Dr. Maxime Ménard of the Hôpital Cochin in Paris receives the Legion of Honor for his work with x-rays in locating shrapnel in soldiers. Oh, and for losing two fingers to cancer in the process. One on each hand; I have been unable to ascertain which fingers.

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Today -100: October 11, 1916: It is not necessary to swing to the maudlin

Armed striking Standard Oil workers are marching around Bayonne, NJ, closing off entire districts and shooting at cops and scabs.

New York Gov. Charles Whitman, speaking to the American Prison Association’s annual congress, indirectly addresses the resignation of Sing Sing warden Thomas Mott Osborne: “In swinging away from the brutal, it is not necessary to swing to the maudlin.” Superintendent of Prisons James Carter says the practical – he emphasizes the word practical – features of Osborne’s system will be retained.

Theodore Roosevelt blames Woodrow Wilson for the German u-boat attacks off the US’s Atlantic coast, because of course he does. Wilson should have stood up to Germany and done... something... right at the start of the war when it invaded Belgium.

Sarah Bernhardt arrives in New York. She will play Cleopatra, but has promised the French prime minister not to perform in anything partisan, like Edmond Rostand’s anti-German play “Les Cathedrals.” Don’t know what that’s about.

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Today -100: October 10, 1916: Of u-boats, bullfights, and retaliation and brutality

There is much talk about what the US can and should do about u-boat activity off its shores. The government thinks none of the sinkings off Nantucket constitute a violation of either international law or Germany’s pledges to limit submarine warfare.

Carranza bans bullfighting in Mexico.

As I may or may not have mentioned, Charles Evans Hughes’s campaign has a trainload of women supporters going around making speeches. The DNC has been alerting locals to expose them as wives of Wall Street and Big Business types (and William Randolph Hearst’s mother).

Thomas Mott Osborne, the reforming warden of Sing Sing, resigns, accusing NY Gov. Charles Whitman of acquiescing in the legal persecution of Osborne and breaking “every promise he ever made to me” and of preferring “the old system of retaliation and brutality.” Osborne accuses the superintendent of prisons of interfering with his reforms without giving them a chance to work (most recently banning lifers who were trusties from leaving prison walls).

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Today -100: October 9, 1916: Of u-boats and gomperses

U-boats sink several ships off the East Coast of the US. One of those u-boats is the very same U-53 that just left port in Rhode Island. Seriously, what was the point of that? It didn’t even take on provisions, just dropped off one letter. The US Navy is busily rescuing survivors. The war has now reached the Western Hemisphere.

Britain will protest to the US for allowing the U-53 to leave dock, an act Britain considers unneutral because it allows the sub to interfere with the shipment of munitions from the US to Britain. There’s a flaw in that logic somewhere, I just can’t put my finger on it.

Samuel Gompers complains to Mexico about Carranza’s recent decree abolishing the right to strike and declaring striking treasonable and punishable by death, no less.

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Today -100: October 8, 1916: Maybe soon, maybe never

Germany plans to court-martial two captured British pilots for using tracer bullets. Britain explains that everyone uses tracer bullets for machine guns, including zeppelins, and hey we captured the crew of a zeppelin just last week and it had tracer bullets, so....

A German u-boat docks in Newport Harbor, Rhode Island, to everyone’s surprise. Evidently it made the 17-day voyage just to deliver a letter to the German ambassador to the US, which the captain asks an AP reporter to pop in a mailbox for him. Supposedly the letter is about relief campaigns in Poland, but rumors that the kaiser is asking Wilson to mediate peace inevitably spread. Under the rules of war, the sub can stay in port one day (Britain disagrees with this, saying that submarines are different from ships). Fregattenkapitän Rose says “We expect to reach home maybe soon, maybe never.” Spoiler Alert: He will reach home. During the war, the U-53 has or will sink around 88 ships.

Woodrow Wilson says that the Republicans lack a united set of proposals. “The only distinct definitions of purpose come from the collateral branches of the family” i.e., Teddy Roosevelt, who “professes opinions and purposes at which the rest in private shiver and demur.” Fair enough.

Mihály Károlyi, leader of a Hungarian opposition party, demands the end of the war, or at least Hungary’s participation in it, and for the emperor to dismiss the government of Count István Tisza, which “obtained its majority by corruption and does not represent the nation”.

Germany denies deliberately infecting prisoners of war with tuberculosis.

The NYT says that Russian military censors have allowed all sorts of calumnies about Jews to be published (cowardice as soldiers, evading military service, responsibility by treachery for military defeats, secret agents of the Germans, Jewish doctors maiming wounded soldiers, etc), while suppressing anything that praises the bravery of Jewish soldiers or contradicts the anti-Semitic lies.

Germany is reportedly interested in re-establishing the Vatican as a temporal power (making it independent of Italy).

Headline of the Day -100:

Oh, go fuck yourself, AP reporter who wrote this.

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Today -100: October 7, 1916: Madness, ruin, and disaster

Irish Nationalist leader John Redmond says he doesn’t think the government is insane enough to try to introduce conscription in Ireland: “in that way lies madness, ruin, and disaster.” Which sounds like a typical Friday night in... nah, I won’t go there.

Orville Wright will not renew his British patent monopoly when it expires in March, as his contribution to the British war effort. In five months.

Headline of the Day -100:

You do you, Mother Jones, you do you.

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Today -100: October 6, 1916: There is as much fight in America as in any nation in the world

The first lawsuit is filed under California’s 1913 Alien Land Law. The state’s assistant attorney general is trying to seize a house purchased by the Harada family in Riverside.

Since it was bought by the Harada parents in the name of their three American-born children, who are US citizens, the purchase will be ruled (in 1918) as legal. So that’s a nice loophole.

Headline of the Day -100:

“The war,” Wilson says, “has obscure European objects which have never been disclosed. Europe must understand that before we exert the force of this nation we want to know what we are exerting it for.” He says that after the war there needs to be a league of nations to preserve peace.

Mother Jones leads a crowd of female relatives of striking NYC carmen in destroying a street car.

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Today -100: October 5, 1916: Have you tried texting them?

Greek King Constantine will form a government of national unity including the Venizelos crowd. The Cabinet resigns to allow this to happen, although their official statement also cites as a reason that they haven’t been able to get in contact with the Entente powers’ representatives.

Corporal Adolf Hitler is seriously wounded by a shell on the Somme. He will be a couple of months recovering, during which he will return to Germany (Berlin and Munich) for the first time in years and will be appalled by the low home-front morale, which he will blame on the, oh you know who.

Tsar Nicholas issues a decree dissolving the marriage of his sister the Grand Duchess Olga to the homosexual Duke Peter of Oldenburg. They were married 15 years, since she was 19. This form of divorce allows her to remarry, which she will do almost immediately to someone who actually was willing to fuck her, which Duke P never did. She’ll be one of the Romanovs to survive the Revolution, emigrating with her husband to Denmark, then Canada, where she died in 1960. Peter will also remarry, another Olga.

A black woman is lynched in Leary, Georgia. She was part of a quarrel during which her son shot and killed a white farmer. He’s still in jail.

An idea is spreading in Britain that after Germany’s inevitable defeat it should be punished in the peace treaty for sinking all those ships by having its own ships seized as compensation on a ton-by-ton basis.

Headline of the Day -100:

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Today -100: October 4, 1916: Of hatred, polio, and hand-shaking

Headline of the Day -100:

Sensible sentiments – revenge would sow the seeds of future wars, consult reason and passion, you can’t ban a whole people for all time to come, etc – but a bit laughable coming from Bryce, the man who wrote the propaganda report accusing Germany of fictional war atrocities to gin up anti-German passion and revenge.

Russia gets its fifth Interior Minister in a 10-month period. Outsiders aren’t sure what’s going on.

The feds think the polio epidemic is over and are ending inspection of interstate travel originating in New York City.

Taft and Roosevelt shake hands. After all reporters had been removed from the room. They did not speak, beyond “How d’you do?” or somesuch. Definitely worth a front-page article.

Japanese Prime Minister Okuma resigns, supposedly because of his age.

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Today -100: October 3, 1916: Of ellises, POWs, and golf

Edith Ellis, the novelist, feminist activist, and lesbian wife of sexologist Havelock Ellis dies, having caught a cold watching a zeppelin raid (that’s not quite right, but never mind).

Jamaica doesn’t go ahead with a conscription bill after all, because the governor decided it would be too expensive. The House of Assembly votes to ban enemy aliens from having any business in Jamaica for 20 years after the end of the war.

Germany sent 10,000 French POWs to Russia in retaliation for France sending its POWs to North Africa. Now both sides are backing down.

William Howard Taft is down to a fighting weight of 266 pounds, 100 pounds less than when he was president. He says it’s all due to golf. I presume he’s on an all-golf-ball diet now. Very high in fiber.

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Today -100: October 2, 1916: Of zeppelins and palaces

Britain shoots down a zeppelin north of London, the fourth in the last month. Searchlights, better guns, and experience are making the air raids unproductive for Germany.

The Vatican complains to Italy after it seizes the palace in Rome used by the Austrian ambassador to the Vatican.

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Today -100: October 1, 1916: There is only one choice as against peace and that is war

Woodrow Wilson gives a speech accusing the Republicans of wanting war in both Europe and Mexico. After all, they’re saying that his foreign policy is all wrong, and “There is only one choice as against peace and that is war.” The logic is impeccable.

Theodore Roosevelt says of Wilson’s May 1915 “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight” speech that “In all our history there has never been any other American president who has used a phrase that has done such widespread damage to the good name of America.”

German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg’s speech a couple of days ago in the Reichstag declaring that any German politician failing to support the use of all means to shorten the war deserves to be hanged is being taken as signaling the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare.

Emperor Iyasu V of Ethiopia (age 21) is deposed amid rumors that he had converted to Islam (he’s also excommunicated), and replaced by his aunt Zewditu Menelik. Iyasu will make trouble for a few years before being captured. He will die in 1935 during the Italian invasion, possibly killed on the orders of Haile Selassi to prevent him being used as a puppet by the Italians.

Thanks to the polio epidemic, there aren’t enough children to pick cranberries in New Jersey.

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Today -100: September 30, 1916: Of handshakes and outrageous buttons

Former presidents Roosevelt and Taft will both attend a reception for Charles Evans Hughes at the Union League Club, but Roosevelt makes it clear that this will not be a reconciliation with Taft. In fact, he won’t make a move to shake hands with his former war secretary, although he will be in the receiving line so he may have to shake Taft’s hand, but it’ll just be an ordinary hand-shake, it won’t have any special meaning. The event’s organizers have been pushing the reconciliation angle, presumably because it’s more of a draw than boring ol’ Charles Evans Hughes. Roosevelt is also really pissed to hear that there were plans to put out a button with a picture of himself, Taft and Hughes – “outrageous,” he says.

Hughes says he supports the 8-hour day, really he does. No, it’s just the Adamson Bill for railroad workers he opposes, because it will mean an increase in wages, and the public will have to pay for it. I’m not sure who he thinks pays when workers in other industries get fewer hours at the same wages.

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Today -100: September 29, 1916: Britain has only begun to fight

On Crete, Eleftherios Venizelos forms an alt-government at an “armed meeting of Cretan people.” They’re armed and they dare you to make that joke. Back in Athens, the king’s capitulation on going to war actually seems to be confined to going to war against Bulgaria, whose troops are presently occupying Greek Macedonia.

British War Minister Lloyd George says that any talk of peace by neutral countries, including the US, will be considered as pro-German and unneutral because the Allies are totally winning now and “Britain has only begun to fight; the British Empire has invested thousands of its best lives to purchase future immunity for civilization; this investment is too great to be thrown away.” He then goes on a bit about how “the British soldier is a good sportsman” and fights and dies like a sportsman and fair play and Jesus I can’t believe we’re still using sports metaphors to describe this horror. “Even when beaten like a dog he was a game dog.” OK, you can go back to the stupid sports metaphors now. Asked whether the allies were similarly game, he says that France will stick to the end and Russia will “go through to the death.”

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Today -100: September 28, 1916: Of plebiscites, sympathy strikes, and demoralized Germans

The Danish Parliament will hold a plebiscite on the sale of the Danish West Indies to the US. A plebiscite of the Danish people, not the Danish West Indians, obvs.

The attempt in New York at a general strike in sympathy with the street car etc workers fails miserably. So much for solidarity.

King Constantine of Greece gives in to the revolt and will graciously allow Greece to go to war.

In war spin news, the British say German troops on the Somme are totally demoralized, and Germany says British tanks are total failures (their specific criticisms – that the tanks are slow, prone to break-down, miserable environments for their crew – are all true).

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Today -100: September 27, 1916: Of provisional governments and executions

A memorial from the Army chief of staff and 500 officers addressed to Greece’s King Constantine demands that Greece enter the war. Former PM Venizelos says his provisional government isn’t actually superseding the Athens government, which makes no sense.

Supposedly the Carranzistas have executed 600 suspected Pancho Villa supporters in Chihuahua.

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Today -100: September 26, 1916: Of men on horseback

Former Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos leaves Athens for Crete to head the revolutionary movement intended to bring Greece into the war on the side of the Entente. He’s accompanied by the chief admiral and is supported financially by Leonidas Embericos, the richest man in the country.

Thomas Dixon, author of the novels that D.W. Griffith adapted into The Birth of a Nation, plans to commission a statue of his uncle, Col. McAfee, on horseback in Ku Klux Klan robes, to be placed in front of the Shelby, North Carolina Court House. There is some controversy about this.

The Mexican-American Commission is absolutely not discussing internal Mexican matters, says Mexico.

New York public schools opened yesterday, belatedly, but an estimated 10% of children were kept home by polio-fearing parents and another 4 or 5% were sent home because they’d been out of the city and didn’t have health certificates. Classrooms have all been sprayed with oil because science.

A bomb goes off in a Chicago movie theatre, evidently from a dispute between two projectionists’ unions. It’s the Chicago way.

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Today -100: September 25, 1916: The ancient struggle for dominance between zeppelins and turnips... continues

The “Great Secret Order” is meeting in Cleveland. The anti-Catholic group claims to be able to order 5 million people to vote as a bloc and elect whoever they pick, probably Hughes.

The British have been getting better at defending against zeppelin raids, and on Saturday shot down two over Essex. There were survivors from one of the airships. They were taken into custody by a single village constable. One farmer complains that “The wreck had made a sad mess of one of our trees and there were a good many mashed turnips in the field.” Oh, and eight dead bodies, most of them burned to death, one decapitated, but getting back to those mashed turnips....

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Today -100: September 24, 1916: Of TB, tanks, war whoops, polio, britlings, and gardeners

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: France claims that Germany is deliberately infecting POWs with tuberculosis in secret prison camps and then returning them to their home countries (or to neutral countries).

Germany may complain to the International Red Cross about the British use of tanks, which it says is contrary to the recognized methods of civilized warfare. Because the Germans are all about civilized warfare.

Headline of the Day -100:

The Germans’ll probably complain about this too.

US Secretary of War Newton Baker has supposedly told Secretary of State Robert Lansing that Pancho Villa is definitely, absolutely, positively dead.

New York City polio death toll = 2,233. Schools are reopening tomorrow, but attendance will not be mandatory.

The NYT reviews H.G. Wells’s latest novel, Mr. Britling Sees It Through. They like it. I would say that while showing the limitations of the form of the Edwardian novel in dealing with the subject matter of the war, it is an excellent portrayal of the effects of the war on the psyche of a certain stratum of English society on the home front.

British novelist Marie Corelli asks her local military tribunal not to draft her gardener. The army’s man on the tribunal says rude things about her garden and they refuse the exemption.

The Women’s Republican National Committee is sending a trainload of women to speak on behalf of Charles Evans Hughes in 28 states. Alice Chittenden of the New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage complains that the women all seem to be supporters of women’s suffrage.

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Today -100: September 23, 1916: Of Greek splitters and sympathetic strikes

Large portions of Greece have declared themselves independent of King Constantine and his government.

A general strike is called for New York City. After all, good union men can hardly be expected to go to work on public transportation manned by scab labor (actually, they can: the general strike will be a miserable failure).

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Today -100: September 22, 1916: Who is ever going to think of Greece, save with shame?

Former Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos refuses to deny plans to set up a revolutionary government in opposition to King Constantine and take Greece into the war on the Entente side. He makes the case that whichever side wins the war, Greece is sure to lose land to either Bulgaria or Serbia if it has not allied itself to someone. “Who is ever going to think of Greece, save with shame, if we have stood idly by while half the world has battled for civilization?” Meanwhile, PM Nikolaos Kalogeropoulos denies that King Constantine is pro-German, saying he is only pro-Greek. Asked by an AP reporter about his own attitude toward the Entente, Kalogeropoulos, whose name makes me so grateful for copy-and-paste, says he’s been smoking French tobacco for 45 years. Crete’s local administration is overthrown, and King Constantine advises new army recruits to display blind devotion to their superior officers and ignore people who “sell patriotism like retailers.”

New York City Mayor John Purroy Mitchel threatens to bring in the military to crush any sympathetic general strike called in support of striking train workers.

A NYT editorial mentions a lynching in Olathe, Kansas, but doesn’t give many details and there is no news story. A mob took convicted murderer Bert Dudley, who killed farmer Henry Muller and his wife, from the jail the night before he was due to be transferred to the state pen to start his life sentence. In a whimsical touch, the lynch mob chose Dudley Road as the locale for the hanging (the town later changed the street’s name). There’s an 8-minute film about the lynching here.

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Today -100: September 21, 1916: Because if there’s anything Germans hate, it’s cruel efficiency

The French claim to have found a confidential order on a captured German soldier, complaining about the British tanks, “whose cruelty is equaled by their efficiency.” It also says soldiers who do not fight to the death to hold their positions will be court-martialed. Anyway, the credibility of the document is rather undermined (for me, that is; the NYT hasn’t noticed this) by the fact that it’s dated September 14th, the day before tanks were first deployed.

NY Gov. Whitman’s special train hits a brewery truck, killing 2.

Headline of the Day -100:

That’s Secretary of War Newton Baker, who says “As a civilian I believed that a standing army was a menace to free institutions, and that the professional soldier desired war”. But then he was put in charge of the army, and found this not to be the case (although he evidently hasn’t learned the definition of “civilian” if he thinks he isn’t one).

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Today -100: September 20, 1916: Of seals, salvage, parasitism of big business, and islanders

German Food Dictator Adolf Tortilowitz von Batocki-Friebe is now pushing seal meat. Which even Germans think is gross.

The Cunard Steamship Company files suit to limit damages from the sinking of the Lusitania to the value of the ship – well, the salvage of the ship – plus the money they took in for passenger fares and freight on the last voyage, a total of $91,296.

In a speech in Philadelphia, Woodrow Wilson ascribes the calls for military intervention in Mexico to the “parasitism of big business.” “What she needs more than anything else is financial support which will not involve the sale of her liberties and the enslavement of her people.”

There is a letter to the NYT from Harry Houdini. He asks for people to send newspapers and magazines to the only white man on one of the Solomon Islands, a Mr. H.M. Markham, who is getting a little bored. Which would make for a great New Yorker cartoon, if the New Yorker existed yet.

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Today -100: September 19, 1916: The enemy has by no means a monopoly on inventive ingenuity

Gen. William Crozier, chief of the US Army’s Ordnance Bureau, denies that Lewis offered the Lewis gun for free to the army. He is lying.

The Holt Caterpillar Company of Stockton, California claims that the British tanks are based on its tractors. Which is true. Lloyd George, Minister of Munitions when the development of tanks was authorized, credits Winston Churchill with persuading him of their utility. “The enemy has by no means a monopoly on inventive ingenuity,” he adds.

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Today -100: September 18, 1916: Of chihuahuas, benevolent neutrality, and Lewis guns

Mexican Chief Carranza has been claiming that Pancho Villa probably died some time back, so it’s a bit embarrassing when Villa and his men briefly capture Chihuahua, free all the prisoners, and then leave, taking the army’s artillery and other weaponry with them. Carranza will claim this was actually done by supporters of the late former dictator Huerta, disguised as Villistas. Meanwhile, his men are happily executing captured Villistas.

Yesterday the NYT was saying that new Greek Prime Minister Nikolaos Kalogeropoulos was pro-Entente. Now he’s denying charges of being a Germanophile and saying his government will observe “benevolent neutrality” towards the Entente.

The best machine gun used by the British and French armies is the Lewis Gun, invented by an American, Col. Isaac Newton Lewis, in 1910. Fun fact: he offered it to the US Army for free in 1911, but they didn’t want it and still use inferior machine guns. My sense is that the general in charge of the ordnance department just didn’t like Lewis.

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Today -100: September 17, 1916: Of death-dealing war autos, cracker messiahs, and easy amputations

The first reports of the British tanks, which the NYT is calling “death-dealing war autos.” Gen. Haig calls them “superdreadnoughts of the land.” The British papers use the term “tank,” but think British soldiers came up with it themselves, “mysteriously.” In fact, it had been adopted during the development phase as a nice innocuous word that wouldn’t mean anything to people who overheard it.

Woodrow Wilson’s sister Annie Howe dies. This has been keeping him off the campaign trail (although he is pretending not to be campaigning at all and says he’ll only speak to non-partisan organizations).

The new Greek prime minister (but not for long), Nikolaos Kalogeropoulos, is considered pro-Entente.

The NYT has no interest in Florida, no matter how Carl Hiaasenesque it gets, so it looks like the not hugely informative article about gubernatorial candidate Rev. Sidney Catts in today’s Sunday Magazine is the last one about him until “Governor Threatens to Shoot Editor” more than four years from now. Catts, who quit his job as a Baptist minister 10 years ago to sell insurance, narrowly won the Democratic primary in June. Party establishment types will get the courts to order a recount which will hand the nomination back to William Knott. Catts will run as a Prohibition Party candidate and win in November, making him the only Prohibition Party governor ever and also the first non-Democratic governor in the South since 1881. His anti-black, anti-Catholic and anti-German diatribes will only increase in office; he will claim that German monks were planning to arm Florida’s blacks to seize Florida for Kaiser Wilhelm and the pope. After his single term, he will be indicted for taking bribes in exchange for pardons and also for peonage, pardoning black men he then forced to work on his farm; he will be acquitted. In 1929 he’ll be charged with being part of a counterfeiting ring; that will lead to a mistrial. In 1931 he’ll be arrested for breaking into the café of a man who owed him money. There’s a 1977 biography of him called Cracker Messiah, which I haven’t read but I’m definitely considering buying.

Until now there have been no college courses open to women in the state of New Jersey but the Newark Institute of Arts and Sciences will now host courses taught by NYU faculty. (Update: Someone from the College of St. Elizabeth, Convent Station writes to say that there is so a college [Catholic] giving degrees to women).

Headline of the Day -100:

Easier in the sense of quicker than splinting and repairing, according to an article in American Medicine.

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Today -100: September 16, 1916: Of race conferences, missionaries, Arab revolts, and prohibition

A negro “race conference” (not sure if that’s their term or the NYT’s) endorses Charles Evans Hughes after voting down a proposal to first send a delegation to Hughes to find out what his views on negroes actually are.

India bars non-British missionaries, teachers and the like from entering the country without a permit.

Carranza orders elections for a convention to amend the Mexican constitution. He insists the changes he wants aren’t that he be made a dictator. Likely story.

Hussein bin Ali, the Grand Sharif and Emir of Mecca proclaimed the Arabs in revolt against Ottoman rule last June, but the British, who got him to do so, are only now getting around to translating the proclamation for propaganda purposes.

Referendum elections in British Columbia support women’s suffrage and prohibition. But did they? Suffrage definitely won by more than 2 to 1, but there will be some question about prohibition. Soldiers voted absentee and when their ballots come in (months from now), they will be anti-prohibition to an unbelievable degree, possibly because they were counted by former BC prime minister Richard McBride, who was both anti-prohibitionist and dying. The count turned out to be full of fraud and irregularities. When more than half the military votes were discarded, prohibition was again the victor. The province soon tired of prohibition and the gangsterism it generated (the Prohibition Commissioner himself was arrested and jailed for bootlegging) and re-legalized booze again in 1921.

The St. Louis Democratic Party expects cops to contribute $10 each ($25 for sergeants).

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Today -100: September 15, 1916: Tanks! We got tanks!

It’s a big day on the Somme. The British use tanks for the first time.

Slow (maybe 3 miles per hour) and prone to breaking down and getting stuck, they were still pretty terrifying. Of the 49 tanks, 17 never started, and only 9 made it to the German lines. Still a few kinks to be worked out.

Also on the Somme, the prime minister’s son, Lt. Raymond Asquith, is killed. 37, he was a scholar, lawyer, and former president of the Oxford Union. His father tried to keep him off the front lines by getting him a cozy staff position but he got himself transferred back, with fatal consequences.

And Harold Macmillan, the future prime minister (1957-63), is badly wounded and stranded in a shell-hole in No Man’s Land. While awaiting rescue he read Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound and took morphine, as was the custom. He’ll spend the rest of the war in hospital.

Greek Prime Minister Alexandros Zaimis resigns, evidently pissed off that just as negotiations were beginning with the Entente over Greece possibly entering the war, the Allied fleet showed up to say “Please hello.” King Constantine asks Demetracopulos to form a new cabinet, but he refuses, evidently vetoed by France and Britain.

Cops raid an IWW meeting in Scranton, Pennsylvania and arrest everyone in the hall, 318 persons. There’s a strike at one company’s coal mines.

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Today -100: September 14, 1916: Restless and inclined to change

Following that crash caused by scabs yesterday and the subsequent revelations about how untrained many of the strikebreaking street car operators were, the New York Railways Company fires 1,000 of them as well as the “detective agencies” that supplied them. However the company’s assertion that the operators it will be using, many of them currently employed in its offices, are entirely qualified is less than reassuring, as is its inability to say just what the previously dismissed car operators who are now being hired back were dismissed for. “A good many of them simply got restless and inclined to change,” the company president asserts. So that’s okay then.

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Today -100: September 13, 1916: Of dorseys and street car scabs

Hugh Dorsey, proud prosecutor of Leo Frank, wins the Democratic nomination for governor of Georgia, and effectively the governorship, defeating incumbent Gov. Nat Harris (a Confederate vet).

The strikebreakers hired to run NYC subways, street cars and elevated trains are not happy, in part because they are being paid less than they were promised when they were recruited from as far away as Chicago. And it turns out many of them don’t have much if any experience running choo choos. A scab motorman and a scab conductor are held after they lose control of a car going down a hill in the Bronx, crashing into an automobile and killing three men and injuring a bunch more. The motorman turns out not to have known how to operate the brakes, which would seem to be kind of essential.

Greek Prime Minister Alexandros Zaimis resigns, but the king persuades him to stay on. The Greek government is fracturing.

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Today -100: September 12, 1916: Of polio, shirker raids, Hebrews, bridges, and Lees

New York City polio death toll = 2,123. Public schools will finally be allowed to open on September 25th, and all other restrictions on children (movie theaters, pools, etc) will be ended on the same date, just to rub it in.

A Greek “National Defense Army” is forming, to aid the Entente. It is not authorized by the government.

British police and military raid the Marylebone train station and haul away 180 military-age men they suspect of evading the draft. 179 had exemption papers (which they had to get family members to bring to the police station) and 1 was exempt as a conscientious objector.

Hugh Dorsey, running for governor of Georgia largely on the basis of his zealous prosecution of Leo Frank, accuses Jews (he seems to prefer the term “Hebrew”) of raising a slush fund to defeat him and secretly meeting with former Gov. Slaton, who commuted Frank’s sentence and was then virtually run out of the state (there is no secret slush fund and there was no meeting). His campaign and his supporters have been anti-Catholic as well as anti-Semitic.

A span of the under-construction Quebec Bridge falls into the St Lawrence as it is being raised into place. This is the second time this has happened on this spot in the last decade, though only 13 construction workers were killed this time compared to 75 in 1907.

A rally at the Hotel Astor of the Women’s City Committee of the Hughes Alliance was slightly marred by a Southern woman who stormed out after spotting 3 black women, proclaiming that she couldn’t possibly sit with – yes, she used the n–word – because she’s the great-great-granddaughter of Robert E. Lee.

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Today -100: September 11, 1916: Of zaimises, red pepper, and hand grenades

Greek Prime Minister Alexandros Zaimis confers with ambassadors from the Entente countries about Greece maybe possibly joining the war.

4 prisoners in the West Side Prison in NYC escape by throwing red pepper into the eyes of a guard, then beating him. 2 are quickly recaptured.

James O’Hara a British soldier who was invalided out, shouts at neighbors at his Glasgow tenement building to be quiet. When they don’t, he chucks a hand grenade at them, killing 2.

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Today -100: September 10, 1916: He made as clean a promise as ever a man made

Suffragists of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association feel “universal satisfaction” over Woodrow Wilson’s remarks to their convention yesterday. “He made as clean a promise as ever a man made,” says Anna Howard Shaw, probably non-sarcastically.

The Fund for Starving Children (of New York) claims that 14 million Poles have died since the start of the war from starvation, disease etc. including every single child under 7. This may be a slight exaggeration.

Headline of the Day -100:

And mushrooms. Germans are trying to gather berries and mushrooms to store for the winter so they don’t, you know, starve, but landowners are not cooperating.

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