Today -100: January 17, 1918: Of idle Mondays, Armenias, and assassination attempts

Fuel Administrator Harry Augustus Garfield responds to the coal shortage (really more a distribution problem than a supply problem) by ordering non-essential industries east of the Mississippi to close for 5 days and then for every one of the following 10 Mondays. No one is happy about this. Some congresscritters are wondering from where Garfield thinks the legal authority for this order derives. Garfield, who is the son of Pres. James Garfield and president of Williams College but is basically unknown, issued this far-reaching order with no advance notice.

It’s not just factories either, and Broadway theatres are pissed off, as, presumably, are the people whose jobs will be shut down on Monday but won’t be able to take advantage of the day off.

The Hungarian Cabinet resigns after Emperor Charles refuses their request for a separate Hungarian army.

Russia supports a free Armenia, including territory now held by both Russia and the Ottoman Empire.

A break (or even a coup) between German military and political leaders is averted, reports say, by a compromise in which there will be no annexations in the east that might screw up a peace with Russia but Hindenburg retains full authority to grab whatever land he wants in the West. Provided he wins the war, of course.

Someone shoots at Lenin’s car in Petrograd, breaking the windshield.

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Today -100: January 16, 1918: Of religious maniacs, Polish Jews, and the tango

Russia arrests the Romanian ambassador and his staff, for reasons they will not disclose. The other ambassadors are worried/pissed off.

According to “news” that has reached Geneva, the former Czar Nicholas now “seeks only oblivion and silence” while Mrs. Czar “has become a religious maniac.” Become?

Officials from the Polish puppet regime meet with Jewish leaders, who are demanding that special laws and taxes applying only to Jews be abolished as they have been in Russia. The officials reply that instead, they might want to get all the Jews the hell out of Poland.

Supposedly, former French Prime Minister Joseph Caillaux was arrested because US Secretary of State Lansing informed France that Caillaux was in contact with the German Foreign Office when he visited Argentina in 1915. Also supposedly, the documents found in his bank deposit box in Italy show that in 1916 he was planning, if he became prime minister again, to order the arrests of several politicians and soldiers, including current Prime Minister Clemenceau. Also, everybody’s making a big deal about a supposed order by German censors for the press not to mention Caillaux at all.

The Vatican bans the tango.

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Today -100: January 15, 1918: Of treason, annexations, and juries of one’s socialist peers

France’s former Prime Minister Joseph Caillaux is arrested (the police held off for a day when they found he was having a dinner party, because France). Evidently... something... was found in a bank vault in Italy under his wife’s maiden name.

The NYT thinks the German military establishment is about to force out Foreign Secretary Richard von Kühlmann and Chancellor Georg von Hertling. The military is grumbling at the possibility that peace talks won’t result in Germany annexing major territory and placing other areas (the Baltics, the Ukraine) under German “influence.”

Russo-German peace talks break down as Germany refuses to remove its troops from Lithuania, Courland, Riga, etc.

The US Supreme Court affirms that aliens in the US are subject to the draft. In another case, it rules that socialists were not tried unconstitutionally because jury members from other political parties were prejudiced against them. The Court says, hey we’re okay with black people being tried by all-white juries, so...

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Today -100: January 14, 1918: Of curtseying to Bolshevist authority and cussing out mules

At the Brest-Litovsk conference, the Germans complain that while the talks were recessed, Russians officials were talking about their hopes for a revolution in Germany. The Germans say they’ve very politely refrained from talking about internal conditions in Russia. Go ahead and talk, Trotsky responds.

Izvestia says Wilson’s 14 Points speech is “a great victory in the great struggle for democratic peace”. Pravda, on the other hand, calls Wilson a representative of capitalism and says the 14P are a mask for the old war formulas and for “plundering under the mask of self-definition of nations”; “the American Bourse found it necessary not only to reckon with the Bolshevist authority, but to make its curtsey to it.”

US Army muleteers are ordered to stop cussing out lazy mules.

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Today -100: January 13, 1918: Wilson is seeking a way out of war

German newspapers are interpreting Wilson’s 14 Points speech in different ways. The Frankfurter Zietung, for example, thinks it shows that Wilson realizes the Allies can't win the  war; “Wilson is seeking a way out of war, although he is doing it in a manner not yet quite acceptable to us.” The paper seems to think the US has given up on getting Alsace-Lorraine back for France, which is very much not what Wilson said.

Russia gives in to Germany’s refusal to remove the peace talks from occupied Brest-Litovsk to a neutral country (which many think was a Germany ploy to force a break in talks). The armistice is extended a month.

Lithuania declares independence. Well, a bunch of Lithuanians in Stockholm declare independence anyway. They have rather expansive ideas about what constitutes Lithuania, including areas presently part of Germany such as Königsberg (Kaliningrad), the capital of East Prussia, as well as all of Russian Lithuania. They point out that they have names in Lithuanian for the territories they’re claiming, and if that doesn’t prove they rightfully belong to Lithuania then they just don’t know what more proof you need.

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Today -100: January 12, 1918: Morally dished

Germany withdraws its Christmas offer of a peace without annexations or indemnities, since only Russia was willing to talk to them about it.

Former NYC Boy-Mayor John Purroy Mitchel joins the Army Aviation Service. Don’t forget to fasten your seatbelt, Mr. Boy-Mayor!

Spoiler Alert: He will totally forget to fasten his seatbelt.

Food Czar Herbert Hoover calls for still more food savings in the US so meat exports to France, Britain and Italy can be doubled. While he’s not proposing rationing, he does plan to send out thousands of agents to prosecute hoarders – regular consumers as well as wholesalers.

On Feb. 4, the US will start registering all Germans in the Southern District of New York, which means photographing and fingerprinting all males 14 and older.

Christabel Pankhurst says women’s suffrage will be used in Britain for “disciplining democracy.” Kinky!

Mary Kilbreth, acting president of the New York Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, says “representative government has been wrecked” by Congress’s vote for the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, and a “woman autocracy” established. She hopes the American people won’t “tamely submit to the yoke.” Kinky! Anti-suffragist women will have to use their ballots to elect men who have not yet lost “all the male instincts of domination and sovereignty.” JUST. SO. KINKY!

George Bernard Shaw writes a letter to the Daily Chronicle about the recent proliferation of statements (from Wilson, Lloyd George, etc) about war aims: “The bidding for peace took a long time to start, but now that it is started it is bewilderingly brisk. It seems only yesterday that to have any war aims at all was denounced as the blackest pro-German treason. Victory, a smashing, triumphant victory, without any ulterior object whatever except ‘the crushing of Prussian militarism,’ (the same thing in other words,) was the whole aspiration of the pugnacious patriot.” It suited Germany’s rulers that “we should keep declaring that we were out to crush them. That was precisely what they had been telling the German people”. But with the Russian Revolution there is a new situation “in which it was extremely important to all belligerents that they should appear in the character of grievously molested Quakers, reluctantly forced to defend their countries against imperialist aggression.  To take up the pacifist position in the moral tug-of-war that goes on between Governments in their appeals to the conscience of civilization the Germans suddenly let go the rope, and we sat down with a crash. We were morally dished.” Wilson backed down from demanding a complete democratization of Prussia and set out the 14 Points (which no one is calling that yet , by the way), and “any sort of definite war aims must seem so clear and reasonable in contrast with the crude ravings they replace, that we are for the moment cheated into believing that the Germans must think them as moderate as they seem to us.” Shaw declines to “join the ranks of those kindly people who cry peace when there is no peace.” Rather, “When both sides become convinced that neither of them can both win and survive the effort, then it will be time to talk of peace.”

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Today -100: January 11, 1918: A question of evolution

The House of Representatives votes 274 to 136 in favor of the women’s suffrage amendment to the Constitution, which is exactly the 2/3 vote required. All very dramatic. Democrats were 104 to 102 in favor, Republicans 165 to 33 in favor. A proposal for a 7-year deadline for ratification, such as the one attached to the prohibition amendment, fails. The opening speech is made by the first and only woman congresscritter, Jeanette Rankin (R-Montana). “We are facing a question of evolution,” she says. She argues that during the war, when American soldiers are dying for lack of a woolen shirt, women, who unlike men think in terms of human needs, might have something to contribute.

The House of Lords, which is usually firmly against evolution, rejects Lord Loreburn’s amendment to remove women’s suffrage from the Representation of the People Bill by an astonishing 134 to 71, despite warnings from Lord Curzon that it would lead to socialism and disturb home life and that in a future war men might resist being conscripted by the female vote. The Lord Chancellor added that pacifists might work on politically inexperienced women and force an inconclusive peace. Every bishop and archbishop who voted supported the women’s suffrage provision.

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Today -100: January 10, 1918: Of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, ex-villages, and mutinies

Woodrow Wilson reverses his previous position that women’s suffrage should be determined at the state rather than the federal level, and comes out in support of the federal constitutional amendment “as an act of right of justice.” He was evidently influenced in part by the granting of suffrage to women in Britain. And by the fact that the Republican Party came out in favor of it first. The NYT, anti assholes to the end, accuses the Democrats of chicken-heartedness.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: Gen. Hindenburg is reported by Matin to have ordered the destruction of 130 French villages behind the Western front.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Boy is that headline over-selling the story. The crew of the Portuguese battleship Vasco de Gama mutinies and fires on a fort, which fires back, the government retakes the ship, the end.

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Today -100: January 9, 1918: Didn’t your mother teach you that it’s not polite to point?

Woodrow Wilson, as is his wont, calls Congress into session with almost no advance warning so he can make a speech at them. This is the 14 Points speech, in which he lays out the basis for peace and the post-war rearrangement of the map of Europe. These are:

1. Open peace treaties established by open diplomacy with no secret bits.
2. Freedom of navigation of the seas.
3. Free and equal trade conditions (Republicans are not so thrilled with the free trade bit).
4. Reduction of armaments.
5. Adjustment of colonial claims, with consideration of the interests of the colonial populations (guess who gets to decide what those interests are? not the colonial populations, that’s for sure).
6. Withdrawal of occupation troops from Russia.
7. The restoration of Belgium.
8. And France, to which Alsace-Lorraine will be returned.
9. Enlargement of Italy along lines of nationality.
10. “Autonomous development” of the peoples of the Austrian Empire (he’s being a bit vague on whether this means breaking up the Empire).
11. Restoration of Serbia, Romania, and Montenegro.
12. More autonomous development, this time for the peoples of the Ottoman Empire, which Wilson rather more clearly intends to break up.
13. An independent Poland.
14. A League of Nations.

This is the first time Wilson has publicly supported France and Italy’s aspirations to reclaim territories lost in the 19th century to Germany and Austria respectively.

George Creel, head the Committee on Public Information, decides that his remit now includes propagandizing abroad. Without asking the State Department, he sends Vira Boarman Whitehouse to Europe to spread the good news about the US’s war aims. Whitehouse’s previous experience in publicity was for the women’s suffrage movement in New York.

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Today -100: January 8, 1918: Of self-determination, soldiers & suffrage, and conscription

The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) says a lasting peace can only be based on the principle of self-determination, putting them at odds with the increasingly aggressive annexationists (encouraged by Hindenburg and Ludendorff).

Since soldiers voted by mail in November’s elections, it is possible to see how they voted in aggregate. Soldiers from New York voted 26,664 in favor of the women’s suffrage referendum and 15,760 against. Soldiers from New York City voted 17,428 for and 8,323 against.

The US Supreme Court rules in 7 cases that conscription is constitutional, saying that governmental power isn’t real without sanction, that is, sanction against non-consenting US citizens. “[T]he very conception of a just Government and its duty to the citizen includes the reciprocal obligation of the citizen to render military service in case of need and the right to compel it.” That’s... really weak logic. The problem is that the Constitution only gives the federal government the power to raise an army, it doesn’t say how, and World War I was the only the second time conscription was used. The 14th Amendment, which some lawyers argued invalidates the draft, on the contrary, the Court says, “broadened the national scope of the Government by causing citizenship of the United States to be paramount and dominant.” That... in no way follows. The Court doesn’t even bother making up more crap arguments about why the 13th Amendment’s ban on involuntary servitude doesn’t apply, saying the argument that it does is just “refuted by its mere statement.”

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Today -100: January 7, 1918: Of Frankensteins, Yugoslavs coming in, and bank accounts

NYT correspondent Harold Williams, who admits “I do not understand the Bolsheviki” but is sure that German secret agents created the Russian Bolshevik movement, or something, says of the peace negotiations, “The Germans, having created a Frankenstein for their own purposes, seem to be considerably perplexed by his antics.” And back then a NYT reader who wanted to say “ACTUALLY, Frankenstein was the MONSTER” would have to dip a pen in an inkwell, write it down on stationary, and mail it in. Who says civilization hasn’t progressed?

Headline of the Day -100: 

British Prime Minister Lloyd George gave a speech a couple of days ago, which I skipped, sorry, in which he added to the Allied war aims the breaking off from the Austrian Empire of any nationalities who wanted to do so, especially Poland, but also areas with large Italian and Romanian populations who might want to be annexed by Italy and Romania. Now the “Southern Slavs” (Croats, Slovenians and the like) are asking, Hey, what about us?

Russia and Ukraine have come to some sort of armistice deal.

Foreign Minister Trotsky forbids banks releasing funds deposited by foreign embassies until their home countries hand over deposits made by the Tsarist government in banks in those countries.

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Today -100: January 6, 1918: Of peace talks, spelling, and electric chairs

For some reason, Russia is trying very hard to have the peace talks transferred from Brest-Litovsk to Stockholm, and Germany is resisting very hard.

A decree orders the adoption of phonetic spelling of Russian next week, eliminating 3 vowels and a consonant.

Headline of the Day -100: 

These are in fact electric WHEELchairs for wounded soldiers.

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Today -100: January 5, 1918: We can quietly wait and see how the incident will pass off

German Chancellor Georg von Hertling tells the Reichstag that Germany will refuse Russia’s request that it withdraw its troops from occupied territories in the east before holding referenda on whether they’d care to be annexed by Germany. “We can quietly wait and see how the incident will pass off.”

Rep. Jeannette Rankin introduces a resolution in favor of Irish independence, and another for equal wages for women and men.

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Today -100: January 4, 1918: Of peace talks, ambassadors, and rice

Izvestia publishes, and denounces, Germany’s negotiating terms. Foreign Minister Leon Trotsky also denounces them. But everyone knows that Russia is in no shape to resume the war, so it is, as they say in Russian, fucked.

Trotsky is naming new ambassadors. The ones he names for Britain, Switzerland and Sweden were all political exiles under the tsar.

Ukraine demands that the Russian Bolsheviks withdraw their troops within 24 hours and say whether or not Russia and Ukraine are at war now.

There’s a war on, you know:

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Today -100: January 3, 1918: Of peace talks, trusts, plots, and translations

The Russo-German peace negotiations are not going well. Germany is claiming that Poland, Lithuania, Courland and parts of Estonia and Livonia have all declared their desire to be free of Russia, and Germany accordingly recognizes them and won’t withdraw troops from them because they’re no longer Russia (Germany is clearly planning to annex them). Trotsky notes that since those areas are under German occupation they can hardly have expressed themselves freely. Since Ukraine has said it won’t be bound by negotiations to which it is not party, Germany wants to retain its troops in strategic points, including Riga. Russia has demanded that Germany release imprisoned German socialists, which Germany says is an internal matter.

Attorney General Thomas Gregory asks the Supreme Court to defer hearings on 7 anti-trust cases (including suits against US Steel, Eastman Kodak, and Quaker Oats) because of the war.

Albert Kaltschmidt, on his way to Leavenworth for plotting (before the US entered the war) to blow up munitions plants and the like in the US and Canada, says “Germany will bring the United States to its knees, which would all have been prevented had not German-Americans been inefficient, stupid, white-feathered, and cowardly” and not defeated Wilson in 1916. For example, he says, he organized a Bund in Detroit ostensibly to raise funds for widows and orphans of German soldiers but really to propagandize against the US entering the war, and those stupid literal-minded Germans insisted the money go to widows and orphans of German soldiers.

The editor of the St. Paul Die Freie Presse is arrested for giving the government inaccurate translations of articles in his paper, such as ones praising the Austrian offensive in Italy.

In The Tribunal, the newspaper of the (British) No-Conscription Fellowship, Bertrand Russell writes that if the Allies refuse Germany’s peace offer, it will “make it clear to all that they are continuing the war for purposes of territorial aggrandisement.” Further warfare will lead to mass starvation. “The American Garrison which will by that time be occupying England and France, whether or not they will prove efficient against the Germans, will no doubt be capable of intimidating strikers, an occupation to which the American Army is accustomed when at home.” For criticizing an ally, Russell will be sentenced to 6 months in prison.

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Today -100: January 2, 1918: Of flags

Finland is the first of the bits of Russia which have declared independence to choose a flag: a lion with a weird sword on a red background.

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Today -100: January 1, 1918: Happy 1918!

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Today -100: December 31, 1917: Of earthquakes and peace

An earthquake, actually part of a series that isn’t over yet, largely wipes out  Guatemala City. The world will rush aid to Guatemala, and President Cabrera will sell that aid and keep the money for himself, as is the custom.

Bulgaria accepts Russian peace proposals.

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Today -100: December 30, 1917: Of phantom bases and unconscious perverts

Headline of the Day -100: 

They were ordered to report to the ordinance base, which does not exist. Locals are struggling to house them all. More will come tomorrow and the army is skeptical when local officials phone to inform them there’s no ordinance base here, really there isn’t.

The NAACP holds its 7th annual conference. Someone claiming to be from the Committee of Public Information, the government censorship and propaganda body, but who refuses to give his name, warns against stirred hatred among black soldiers against white soldiers and says Germany is trying to make black people believe black soldiers are being discriminated against in the (segregated) military. Perish the thought.

The NYT Sunday Magazine has an article by Dr. Mary Keyt Isham, who says pacifism is associated with “a certain type of unconscious pervert,” i.e., they’re bottoms, who are naturally drawn to Prussian sadism, or something.

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Today -100: December 29, 1917: Of separate peaces, banks, and feet

Trotsky warns the Allies that if they don’t join the peace negotiations within 10 days, Russia will make a separate peace. He seems to think there will be plebiscites in Alsace-Lorraine and the former German colonies about what country they’d like to be attached to; Germany has other views.

Russia seizes all private banks (in Petrograd anyway).

Belarus secedes from Russia.

Headline of the Day -100: 

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Today -100: December 28, 1917: Of stimulated France, independent socialists, and ferdinands

Headline of the Day -100: 

The French, eh? It’s just sex sex sex with them.

The German military rounds up hundreds of members of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) on Christmas Eve, naturally.

The Central Powers respond to Russian peace proposals, saying they’re ok with an immediate general peace without annexations (and Germany wants its colonies back) or indemnities (although there is some difference over compensation for the cost of upkeep of POWs). King Ferdinand of Bulgaria immediately says that the Austrian foreign minister, who was supposed to be speaking on behalf of the Quadruple Alliance, doesn’t speak for Bulgaria, which intends to keep ever inch of land it’s seized in Serbia, Romania, and Greece.

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Today -100: December 27, 1917: Of bandits, godmothers, railroads, and visibly tiring Russians

US troops cross into Mexico to kill Mexican bandits (possibly Pancho Villa affiliated), as was the custom.

The US Army is trying to dissuade American women from “adopting” US soldiers in France – “godmothers” they’re calling themselves – and sending them stuff, because it’s clogging up the mails. Also, censorship regs forbid soldiers corresponding with strangers.

The US government will take control of the railroads tomorrow. Pres. Wilson will be guaranteeing the profits of the railroad companies, because of course he will.

NYT: “Russia is visibly tiring of the Bolsheviki; they may be overthrown at any time. They are without one vestige of legal authority to speak for Russia, they have no standing among nations.”

Prof. Jan Kucharzewski, the puppet prime minister of puppet Poland, says there is a lot of support for making the Austrian emperor the king of Poland, and it should definitely be done before any elections.

The NYC Board of Education decides to end all foreign language instruction in elementary schools next year (65% of the students taking a language were studying German).

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Today -100: December 26, 1917: Of troop transfers, conspiracies, and rotating governors

Russian Foreign Minister Leon Trotsky is pissed that, while peace negotiations are going on, Germany is transferring troops from the Russian front to the Western front, like they were supposed not to do.

The US government claims to have proof of a world-wide conspiracy of American Wobblies, Russian Bolsheviks, Irish Fenians etc to overthrow the existing order. This follows the discovery of some weapons on the Russian freighter Shilka, which they think were intended for the Wobblies. But somehow they’re also still pretending to believe that the IWW is paid by and operating on behalf of Germany.

Following the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision that George Hunt was elected governor last year after all, he resumes the office and offers his unseated predecessor a job on the state tax commission, which he declines.

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Today -100: December 25, 1917: We must bring peace to the world by battering in with the iron fist and shining sword the doors of those who will not have peace

Former British Prime Minister Asquith’s son Arthur is wounded while serving in the Royal Naval Division in France. His leg will be amputated.

Kaiser Wilhelm addresses the Second Army on the French front: “If the enemy does not want peace, then we must bring peace to the world by battering in with the iron fist and shining sword the doors of those who will not have peace.” If that’s not a peace-loving sentiment, I don’t know what is. He says the Germany army has done so well in 1917 that it’s clear God is on Germany’s side, that’s just science.

G.H. Mika of the Slav Press Bureau (in New York, I think) points out a little problem with the recent declaration of war on the Austro-Hungarian Empire: there are immigrants from the Dual Monarchy currently serving in the US military who have only taken out their first papers on the path to citizenship, which means if captured by Austria they will be treated as traitors subject to execution.

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Today -100: December 24, 1917: We would accept them only in order to rise together with the German people against German militarism as we did against Czarism

Peace talks begin between Russia on one side and Germany, Austria, Turkey, and Bulgaria on the other. A Polish delegation wants to participate; good luck with that, guys. Trotsky worries aloud to delegates of the Petrograd Soviet, the Peasant Congress and the like about negotiating with representatives of the German kaiser rather than the German people and says “if, exhausted as we are by this unprecedented slaughter, we must accept the terms of the German emperor, we would accept them only in order to rise together with the German people against German militarism as we did against Czarism.”

Trotsky accuses the American ambassador and the head of the American Red Cross mission to Romania of “counter-revolutionary activities,” to wit, trying to send cars and other supplies to rebel Gen. Kaledin. They claim the goods were just being transported through Rostov on their way to Mesopotamia.

The German socialist newspaper Vorwärts is suspended for the umpeenth time for writing about poor conditions in Germany, saying many are starving and that war profiteers are hoarding, and because an “article denouncing the militaristic party’s demands for the annexation of large sections of Russian territory is considered likely to stir up trouble.” Trouble among, you know, soldiers who had been told they were fighting to defend Germany and are now fighting to expand the Reich.

The Hungarian government introduces a bill extending suffrage to all literate adults, male and female, over 24.

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Today -100: December 23, 1917: Of governors, Americanization, hommes du monde, and supermarkets

The Arizona Supreme Court, which after a close election in 1916 decided that Thomas Campbell (R) had been elected governor after 4 weeks of George Hunt (D) refusing to give up his office, now decides that Hunt is governor after all.

The New York State Suffrage Party, having won suffrage, turns its attention to “Americanizing” immigrant women who now have the vote by virtue of being married to naturalized citizens, without having had to meet the tests their husbands did (speaking English, being of good character, 5 years’ residence, oath of allegiance, etc).

The French Chamber of Deputies votes to suspend the parliamentary immunity of former prime minister Joseph Caillaux so he can be charged with treason because he, I don’t know, supported peace, and conspired with people he says he couldn’t possibly have conspired with because he’s a gentleman (“un homme du monde”).  Caillaux claims this is all a political and personal attack on him on trumped-up charges, and he is not wrong. He ends by calling for the lifting of immunity that was going to happen anyway, because he wants all this cleared up in a trial (perhaps remembering how his wife literally got away with murder in a trial in 1914).

Canada is moving towards prohibition, to expire one year after peace.

The NYT has an article about a self-service market in Lockport, NY. Instead of the grocer standing behind a counter and the customers asking them for goods, this market’s items are put alphabetically on shelves. In fact, the idea, a product of wartime labor shortages, was originated and patented in October by Piggly Wiggly of Memphis (customers enter through a turnstile, take a basket, go up one aisle, down the next, up the next, down the next, and pay at the cash register, that’s literally all the patent was for).

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Today -100: December 22, 1917: Of secret treaties

Russia publishes another secret treaty, one between Russia and Japan in 1916 for joint military action against a third party like Britain or the US achieving dominance in China.

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Today -100: December 21, 1917: Of abandoned militarism and ultimata

British Prime Minister Lloyd George talks about Britain’s war aims, in the usual vague terms. Prussia must “abandon militarism” – what does that actually mean, in concrete terms? He says Germany’s overseas colonies will be disposed of by the peace congress and that future trustees of the colonies (independence is literally unthinkable) must take into account the sentiments of their peoples (Spoiler Alert: they won’t) (I mean, South West Africa was made a trust territory of South Africa, for fuck’s sake). And Turkey will never get Jerusalem back.

Ukraine rejects the Russian ultimatum that it stop assisting Gen. Kaledine and stop preventing passage of Russian troops through Ukraine to fight him.

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Today -100: December 20, 1917: Of contempt of court, states of siege, and enemy aliens

Philadelphia Mayor Thomas Smith is indicted for contempt of court for trying to cover up his role in the murderous violence on election day.

The Petrograd Soviet declares a state of siege in Petrograd to deal with all the looting of wine shops.

Renegade Gen. Kaledin proposes that the Don region, of which he is top dog, be given independence.

In Salt Lake City, a German named Herman Frederick Wilhelm Babbel (I know, you’d have been lost if I hadn’t already told you he was German) is ordered interned after saying that Germany would win the war.

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Today -100: December 19, 1917: Of spoils, bombs, prohibition, drill, and women doctors

New York Mayor-Elect John Hylan participates in that great tradition of NY politics: Tammany Hall’s Boss Murphy gives him a list of people to hire.

A bomb takes out part of the California governor’s mansion, near where Gov. William Stephens and Mrs. Governor are sleeping. The culprits are not caught, but Stephens says it was probably “done with a view to terrorism, the chief weapon of the alien enemy.”

The Senate passes the Prohibition amendment to the Constitution, 47-8. A lot of senators seem to have skipped the vote.

The NYT notes that many of the dry states wishing to impose prohibition on wet states are Southern states which object to having women’s suffrage imposed on them and which also continue to obstruct and nullify enforcement of the 15th Amendment.

The foreign ministers of Germany and Austria will go to Brest-Litovsk for negotiations with Russia. Russian Foreign Minister Trotsky informs the Allies and asks if they’d like to come to, or “state whether they wish peace or not.” Pravda denies rumors that Germany is demanding that Russia evacuate Finland and... Petrograd, disarm the Russian Army, and grant Germany a monopoly of grain exports.

City College of New York (presumably like many other colleges) has suspended or expelled 19 students for not attending military drill.

Obit of the Day -100: Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836-1917), the first woman doctor in Britain, the first woman elected to a school board (London in 1870, with three times as many votes as T.H. Huxley), the first woman mayor in England (Aldeburgh in 1908), the first woman magistrate, and a few other firsts. The doctor thing is a funny story. Doctors had only recently been legally required to have a license to practice, which could be issued by several medical societies (surgeons, physicians, etc). Garrett realized the apothecaries’ society didn’t specifically forbid women members (they changed that rule fast after she used it). She later founded the London School of Medicine for Women. A long-time suffragist – here’s Bertha Newcombe’s 1910 painting depicting her and Emily Davies passing John Stuart Mill a women’s suffrage petition, hidden under the apples for some reason, for him to present to Parliament in 1866 –

her younger sister Millicent Garrett Fawcett is president of the largest women’s suffrage society in Britain, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, which Anderson left for the more radical Women’s Social and Political Union, although she resigned when it became too militant for her.

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Today -100: December 18, 1917: Of yellow cats, curbing intemperance by law, and royal privates

Canadian elections: the Unionists do very well outside Quebec, leading to a likely showdown with Quebec over conscription.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: an American woman living in Venice claims German planes dropped poison gas on the city. It turned her cat yellow.

The House of Representatives votes 282 to 128 for a Prohibition amendment to the Constitution. Julius Kahn (R-California) objects, saying “You cannot curb intemperance by law, but you make sneaks, liars, and hypocrites of men when you attempt to put in force laws of this kind.” There is a 7-year time limit for ratification, which might or might not be constitutional.

Rep. Royal Johnson (R-South Dakota) takes a leave from Congress (he doesn't quit, as the NYT says) to join the army as a private.

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Today -100: December 17, 1917: Not the fortress, but the guillotine

Germany and Russia sign a 4-week armistice, with peace negotiations to follow. Germany promises not to transfer troops to other fronts.

The Petrograd Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviet declares the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) enemies of the people. Trotsky says “You are perturbed by the mild terror we are applying to our enemies. But know that within a month this terror will take the terrible form of the French revolutionary terror – not the fortress, but the guillotine.”

There are rumors – false, of course, that the Tsar has escaped.

The Vatican says its only regret about the capture of Jerusalem is that the soldiers involved were not all Catholics.

Former French Prime Minister Joseph Caillaux is being investigated by the Chamber of Deputies for making unpatriotic speeches in Italy. Caillaux says the forgery industry has declined since the days of the Dreyfus Affair and accuses the French ambassador to Italy of making it all up, after a spat in which the ambassador’s wife refused to receive Caillaux’s wife, the famous unconvicted murderer.

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Today -100: December 16, 1917: Please don’t let any one get the idea that we discussed peace

The Bolsheviks say they have captured Gen. Alexey Kaledin of the Don Cossacks. They have not.

“Pro-Germans” petition for Rep. Fiorello La Guardia to be removed from Congress because he’s off in the military doing military things. So far Speaker Champ Clark is taking no action because La Guardia is not violating the law by taking two salaries.  In fact, he’s not currently getting either salary, and he is furious. The House will later grant him a leave of absence and eventually agree to pay him (his congresscritter’s pay is 3 times what he’d get as a captain in the Army Air Service, so that’s good for him).

Col. House returns from Europe, where he consulted with Allied leaders about war and only war: “I didn’t talk peace with a soul in Europe. I didn’t discuss war aims. ... Please don’t let any one get the idea that we discussed peace.” Heaven forfend.

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Today -100: December 15, 1917: Only good enough for German fertilizer

More delegates to the Russian Constituent Assembly show up, but the Bolshevik government stations sailors with orders to keep them out. Members are threatening to go to Kiev, and some government employees, now on strike, are threatening to go with them.

Pope Benedict celebrates the “liberation of Jerusalem” by British troops.

Kate Richards O'Hare, the Socialist writer, editor and lecturer, is sentenced to 5 years for a speech in Bowman, North Dakota opposing the war and conscription. Mothers who raised their sons to be cannon fodder, she said, are no better than brood sows, and young men who volunteer are “only good enough for German fertilizer.”

A NY judge does one of those join-the-military-or-go-to-jail things with a man who committed petty larceny ($40). Army recruiters are livid.

Gen. Skalon, one of the Russians negotiating a truce with Germany, shoots himself. This may be bullshit. Certainly the NYT identifies him as the former governor-general of Russian Poland, but that Skalon died in 1914, so I don’t know.

Headline of the Day -100: 

1917 porn was just weird.

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Today -100: December 14, 1917: Only the simplest of living is patriotic

The Russian Constituent Assembly assembles. Well, only about 50 of the 600 actually show up, so they adjourn for a day, when 40 show up. The Assembly was initiated before the October revolution, and now the Bolsheviks don’t want one, and arrest some of the delegates. The government orders the arrest of all Constitutional Democrat (Kadet) leaders, on general principles and, Trotsky says, to save them from being lynched. He’s considerate that way.

Food Czar Herbert Hoover asks American families to add a porkless day to their meatless day and wheatless day. “In this emergency only the simplest of living is patriotic,” he says. In 12 years Hoover’s economic policies will lead to many Americans living very patriotic lives indeed.

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Today -100: December 13, 1917: Of alien enemies, first shots, and rankins

There are a lot more citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire living in the United States than Germans, and many of them are essentially refugees from the oppressed minority nationalities of the Empire – Czechs, Slovenes, Poles, etc – so Wilson won’t make them register or restrict their movements like he did the Germans (males over 14 do have to get permission to leave the country). Also, the war would grind to a halt without  miners, steelworkers etc from the Dual Monarchy. Wilson’s proclamation on all this doesn’t even use the term “enemy aliens” (which the NYT mistakenly calls “alien enemies”).

The first American to shoot at Austria after the declaration of war is Rep. George Holden Tinkham (R-Massachusetts), who fires a shell into Gonfo. Since he’s not in the military, Tinkham committed a war crime punishable by execution. (Spoiler Alert: he will not be executed).

The House of Representatives gives the chairmanship of the new Committee on Woman Suffrage to John Raker (D-CA) rather than to the only, you know, woman in the House. Jeanette Rankin really wanted the job but wasn’t supported by her own Republican party. I know! Republicans being dicks to a woman.

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Today -100: December 12, 1917: Of short shrifts, great futures, and military justice at its finest

Russian officials stranded in London are quite sure that an alliance of the Don Cossacks and the non-Bolshevik parties will “make short shrift of the Bolsheviki.”

According to Wikitionary, a short shrift was originally “a rushed sacrament of confession (shrift) given to a prisoner who was to be executed very soon.” I feel like I should have known that before now.

Headline of the Day -100: 

That’s Col. Sir Mark Sykes of the secret Sykes-Picot agreement recently made not-so-secret by Trotsky, on how swell Zionism is gonna turn out.

13 black soldiers are hanged for the race riots in Houston in August. 41 more are sentenced to life imprisonment.

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Today -100: December 11, 1917: It’s on. Oh, IT IS ON.

Panama declares war on Austria-Hungary.

Jerusalem surrenders to British troops in this, the 822nd year of the Crusades. Gen. Edmund Allenby enters the city on foot to show respect for the holy sites of the city he’d been respectfully besieging.

Portuguese coup leader Sidónio Pais reassures the Allies that Portugal will stay in the war, doing whatever it is that Portugal is doing in the war. Ousted Prime Minister Afonso Costa is arrested. The war minister and the commander of the fleet seek sanctuary on British warships.

The Supreme Court rules that there is no 14th Amendment right to possess alcohol.

The Supreme Court rules that employers may impose an open shop, that is make a condition of employment that employees not join a union. It says attempts to unionize, in this case a mine, may be illegal even if they’re completely peaceful, for example by “persuading man after man to join the union, and having done so, to remain at work, keeping the employer in ignorance of their number and identity, until so many should have joined that by stopping work in a body they could coerce the employer and the remaining miners to organize the mines, and that the conduct of the defendants in so doing was unlawful and malicious.” Forcing the mining company to accept unionization through “fear of financial loss” is thus illegal. What power do they think a union has, if not a threat of financial loss? Loud tutting? And how does the Court think the mine got miners to agree not to join the UMW in the first place, if not a threat of financial fucking loss? This is just terrible supreme courting.

The government now regulates bakeries, requiring standard 16- and 24-ounce loafs of bread using less milk and sugar and animal fat.

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Today -100: December 10, 1917: Of civil wars, armistices, and swear words

The Bolshevik government announces that Gens. Kornilov and Alexey Kaledin of the Don Cossacks have started a revolt in the Don region “against the people and the revolution.” The counter-revolution and civil war begin here.

The Russian and German positions in the armistice negotiations seem quite far apart.

Headline of the Day -100: 

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Today -100: December 9, 1917: Of coups, enemy aliens, and armistices

A revolution in Portugal (actually more like a coup) led by Sidónio Pais forces the government to resign. Pais will exercise increasingly dictatorial powers for a year until he is assassinated.

One consequence of the US declaring war on Austria: newly enemied aliens from the Empire have to be weeded out of the US military.

Trotsky informs the Allies that Russia will only sign an armistice with Germany on condition that it not move troops to the western front (a condition Germany has been scoffing at). On the 7th, for the first time since the war began, not a shot is fired on the Russian front. Trotsky is suspending negotiations a week to give the Allies time to say whether they will join an armistice and, if not, to state what their war aims are.

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Today -100: December 8, 1917: In matters of war I am a teetotaler

The US is at war with Austria. The declaration passes the Senate unanimously (La Follette is not present, claiming later he didn’t know the vote was going on) and the House by 363 to 1, the 1 being Meyer London (Socialist-NY), who says Socialists oppose war. “In matters of war I am a teetotaler. I refuse to take the first intoxicating drink.” Walter Chandler (R-NY) asks him to cite one instance in which Karl Marx denounces war.

Jeanette Rankin (R-Montana) says war is a “stupid and futile way of attempting to settle international difficulties” and this one was caused by “commercial and selfish interests,” but this time votes for war, saying it’s not a real declaration of war but a “technicality” arising from the previous declaration of war on Germany.

No one pushes for Bulgaria and Turkey to be included, grumpily accepting Wilson’s argument that, like Austria, “They too, are tools of Germany. But they are mere tools and do not yet stand in the direct path of our proposed actions.” The US will end the war without having declared war on the two countries, or vice versa.

Halifax, hundreds of its houses in ruins after the munitions ship explosion yesterday, now faces a blizzard, because of course it does. Rescue work halts. “Many of the injured necessarily died of neglect.”

Finland declares independence from Russia.

Romanian troops who were fighting alongside Russians join the cease-fire, because what choice do they have? Austria starts releasing Russian prisoners even before Russia begins releasing Austria’s.

Recent German air raids on London show that Germany has switched completely from zeppelins to airplanes.

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Today -100: December 7, 1917: Of Halifax, baby factories, and contested elections

In the harbor at Halifax, Nova Scotia, the SS Mont-Blanc, carrying a big ol’ load of munitions, collides with a Belgian relief ship, drifts to land and goes boom. 2,000 or so dead. The largest explosion (not counting volcanoes) before 1945. Bits of the ship including the anchor are found miles away. The blast wave takes out every window in the city and a pretty good chunk of the city. Naturally, many assume it was a German plot.

The Croydon (UK) conscription tribunal upholds the plea of a widow that her, I believe, youngest son not join his 10 brothers in the military.

There will be a 10-day cease-fire between Russia and Germany.

In Parliament, Chief Secretary for Ireland Henry Duke says that Éamon de Valera’s election as MP for East Clare can be challenged by any elector in the constituency because he may not actually be British (the future president of Ireland was born in New York).

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Today -100: December 6, 1917: Lords of Looseness?

The House Committee on Foreign Relations passes the declaration of war on Austria with no dissenters. Everyone except Clarence Miller (R-Minnesota) falls in line behind Wilson’s decision not to include Bulgaria and Turkey.

Incidentally, this is another of those “recognizes that a state of war exists” declarations of war.

Rudyard Kipling has a new bad poem out. Evidently Bunyan predicted World War I, or something:

Likewise the Lords of Looseness
  That hamper faith and works,
The Perseverance-Doubters,
  And Present-Comfort shirks,
With brittle intellectuals
  Who crack beneath a strain--
John Bunyan met that helpful set
  In Charles the Second's reign.

Etc.

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Today -100: December 5, 1917: This is a war of high principle, debased by no selfish ambition of conquest or spoliation

Woodrow Wilson, in his State of the Union address (as they didn’t call it yet) to the new session of Congress, asks it to declare war on the Austria-Hungarian Empire but not Bulgaria or Turkey. He says his goal is not to “impair or rearrange” the Empire. Oh, it so is. He portrays the populations of Austria, Turkey and the Balkans as in need, just as much as those of Belgium and northern France, of liberation from the “impudent and alien dominion of the Prussian military and commercial autocracy”.

Impudent and alien dominions are the worst kind.

So really, declaring war on Austria is for the benefit of Austria, which these days is “simply the vassal of the German Government.” This great act of charity extends even to Germans: “We are in fact fighting for their emancipation from fear, along with our own”. But do we ever get a thank you? no, we do not.

Wilson responds to critics of the war: “I hear the criticism and the clamor of the noisily thoughtless and troublesome. I also see men here and there fling themselves in impotent disloyalty against the calm, indomitable power of the nation. I hear men debate peace who understand neither its nature nor the way in which we may attain it, with uplifted eyes and unbroken spirits. But I know that none of these speaks for the nation. They do not touch the heart of anything. They may safely be left to strut about their uneasy hour and be forgotten.”

Gen. Nikolay Dukhonin, who refused to give up his self-designated title of Supreme Commander of the Russian military, is removed from office with extreme prejudice by “infuriated members of the Bolsheviki.”

Hey, Apocalypse Now was nearly 40 years ago, do people still understand “extreme prejudice” references?

Siberia and Ukraine have declared themselves independent republics.

Secretary of War Newton Baker denies that there is any discrimination against negroes in the (segregated) army and says any complainants are suffering from “overworked hysteria.”

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Today -100: December 4, 1917: Of armistices, debauched soldiers and sailors, legations, rustlers, and teachers

A new session of Congress opens. Everyone wants to declare war on Austria, and maybe Bulgaria and Turkey as well. They’re weirdly excited by the prospect.

Germany says there are local armistices in place with the Russian army at the division and corps levels.

New Rochelle, NY saloon owners are indicted for conspiracy to debauch soldiers and sailors. Which I guess just means letting them buy booze.

Russian Foreign Minister Leon Trotsky fires 160 Russian legations and consulates abroad who don’t recognize the Bolshevik government.

American troops invade Mexico and have a pitched battle with some cattle-rustlers, killing 35 of them.

The High School Committee puts on “trial” the 3 suspended De Witt Clinton High School (Bronx) teachers. Samuel Schmalhausen is accused of not rebuking one of his students for an essay calling Woodrow Wilson a murderer in such a way as to force the student to perceive the “gross disloyalty involved in his point of view” and even saying he didn’t think it was his job to “develop in the students under his control instinctive respect for the president of the United States as such”. They drag in the student, who says he didn’t get the ideas from Schmalhausen but from books and his own thinking. He was then hanged as a witch, probably.

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Today -100: December 3, 1917: Of ambassadors, mad carousels (mad carousels are the worst kind), antis, and teaching German

Russian Foreign Minister Leon Trotsky responds to letters from the US and French military missions protesting Russian armistice and possible separate-peace plans, saying Russia “cannot permit allied diplomatic and military agents to interfere in the internal affairs of our country and attempt to excite civil war.”

Trotsky appoints Georgy Chicherin as ambassador to Britain. Chicherin is an exile from the 1905 Revolution currently held in Brixton Prison in Britain for writing against the war. Trotsky wants him and another Russian political prisoner in Britain released and is threatening to hold English supporters of counter-revolution in reprisal (and tomorrow will ban any British subjects from leaving Russia).

Headline of the Day -100: 

I can’t tell if the NYT reporter really enjoyed this meeting or really felt out of place.

Mad carousel?

New York anti-suffragists will work to oppose the federal suffrage amendment and not to repeal women’s suffrage in New York. They figure women will just get tired of all the voting. Why, in a couple of years it’ll be current suffragists calling for repeal.

Pittsburgh orders the removal from high school German classes of all textbooks praising Kaiser Wilhelm or the German military system. Did language textbooks actually do this?

The good folks of Dyersburg, Tennessee burn a black man at the stake for allegedly attacking a white woman.

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Today -100: December 2, 1917: Wikileaks 1917

Russia releases another secret treaty, in which, as a price for Italy entering the war on the Allied side, it would get various bits of the Austrian Empire and control of Albania’s foreign policy if the Allies decided on an independent Albania instead of dividing it among Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro. And if France and Britain take some of Germany’s African colonies, Italy gets some too. Italy undertook to try to prevent the pope working to end the war. Russia also reveals the territorial bribes offered Greece (which didn’t bite). American officials are pretending to believe that the documents might be forgeries and that Italy, to whose aid the US is planning to go, was not massively bribed to enter the war. Which it totally was.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: Germany is said to be sending germ-infested balloons into the American trenches.

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Today -100: December 1, 1917: Of measles, ensigns, and knitting

US army camps in the South have been fighting measles outbreaks.

Russian military Supreme Commander Nikolai Krylenko is having trouble getting the Russian military to accept his supreme commanderness, possibly because he’s just an ensign. He orders the arrest of generals and the disbandment of soldiers’ committees which don’t recognize his authority.

Headline of the Day -100: 

The Netherlands adopts universal male suffrage and proportional representation and allows women to be elected to public office, though there is no women’s suffrage.

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