Today -100: November 26, 1909: Of provisional governments and hookworms

The NYT has taken to referring to Gen. Estrada, leader of the Nicaraguan insurgents, as head of the “provisional government.” The US government is accepting telegrams from the rebels and otherwise treating them as a legitimate government.

A San Francisco divorce story, quoted in its entirety:

Judge Graham has divorced Anita Coover from David R. Coover. The hookworm was the cause.

“My husband was dull, stupid, lazy, languid, slow,” said Mrs. Coover.

“He must have been a victim of the hookworm,” said the Court.

Mrs. Coover expressed some doubt as to this diagnosis, but Judge Graham stuck to his opinion and granted the decree.

Pardon

Obama has pardoned two turkeys, as is the tradition. They were named Courage and Carolina by their breeders.

You are healed!
During the Bush administration, the naming was done by a poll on the White House website, and whatever interns had to come up with five or six pairs of names every single year was clearly running out of ideas by 2008. But Obama’s break with the venerable naming tradition doesn’t mean we in the WIIIAI-o-sphere have to break with our own venerable tradition of holding an alternative naming contest (it just means I forgot all about it until now). Remember, there are two turkeys that need names. To get you started: Audacity & Hope, Public & Option, McCrystal & Eikenberry, Death & Panel...

Today Minus 100 Years, November 25, 1909: Of scabs, more horsies, Turkey Day, giant possums, and Bernard Shaw

Some of the large NYC shirtwaist manufacturers have been meeting secretly to organize owners against the strikers (and the smaller firms that have settled). One of the larger manufacturers, not identified by the NYT, claims that its employers are perfectly satisfied and calls the strike foolish and hysterical. 17-year-old Mina Bloom, one of the strikers, was fined $10 for hitting a scab.

At the Madison Square Garden Old Glory horse sale, hundreds of horses were auctioned off, along with a single automobile, “led on to the track with a halter attached,” “[a]mid the jeers, laughter, and hoots of a thousand horsemen”. It sold for $1,000, less than some of the horses.

The Wright brothers plan to open “the first are largest airship factory in the country” in Dayton, Ohio, producing four planes per month.

An editorial warns against acting hastily against the Zelaya government in Nicaragua, which risks damaging commerce with other Latin American countries and inclining them to trade more with Europe. Amusingly, the NYT thinks if the US shows it carefully weighed up such factors as whether Cannon and Groce were free-lancing or were part of a legitimate combatant rebellion and therefore entitled to prisoner of war status, our decision to send in the marines or whatever won’t look like an imperialist power grab. “We are a pretty big brother to the nations down there, and some of them, perhaps because they do not understand us very well, are not a little afraid of us.” The ones that do understand us well are very afraid of us, in 2009 as in 1909. “They have not forgotten, they never will forget, the international crime by which we separated Panama from the United States of Colombia.”

Thanksgiving at the Taft White House will feature a large turkey (but I repeat myself), a 50-pound mince pie, and a 26-pound possum “reputed to be the largest that ever came out of Georgia”. It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without a giant possum.

Now an appearance in Today Minus 100 Years by a guest Times, the NYT’s even snootier older brother, the Times of London, which Today Minus 100 Years printed a letter from George Bernard Shaw (who wrote many witty, cranky letters to newspapers over many decades on a wide variety of subjects – Shaw so needed a blog) about the recently begun forcible feeding of suffragette hunger strikers. Shaw offers to provide Home Secretary Gladstone, who has downplayed the unpleasantness of the practice, with “a banquet which Sardanapalus [the possibly fictional last king of Assyria and a noted party animal] would have regarded as an exceptional treat. The rarest wines and delicacies shall be provided absolutely regardless of expense. The only condition we shall make is that Mr Herbert Gladstone shall partake through the nose; and that a cinematograph machine be at work at the time registering for the public satisfaction the waterings of his mouth, the smackings of his lips, and other unmistakable symptoms of luxurious delight, with which he will finally convince us all of the truth of his repeated assurances to us that the forcibly-fed suffragist is enjoying an indulgence rather than suffering martyrdom.” I pause to remind you that here in 2009, roughly 30 prisoners at Guantanamo are being forcibly fed, also roughly, through the nose. Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

Idiot meme warning

Sarah Palin, or whoever writes her Facebook page for her, calls the idea of a surtax to pay for the Afghan war “a tax on national defense.” Expect the other morons to follow suit.

State din din

Barack Obama held his first state dinner tonight (vegetarian, out of deference to the Indian prime minister, but not teetotal) and, oh sure, very dashing and all


(although to Fox viewers, black man + bow tie = Nation of Islam). But Queen Elizabeth visited Bermuda today,


and that’s the governor of Bermuda in his official uniform and all I’m saying is, don’t you think Obama could totally rock a plumed hat?

Well la-di-da, la-di-da

Now for another edition of our occasional feature, Here Are Some News Stories, Write Your Own Damn Jokes, I Have a Headache:

Carla Bruni will appear in Woody Allen’s next movie.

Today Minus 100 Years – November 24, 1909: Of shirt-waist girls, Gringo conspiracies, horsies, and a bad, bad word

18,000 shirt-waist workers (or as the NYT calls them, “shirt-waist girls,” which sounds naughty) so far are out on strike. 11 employers have already come to terms with the union.

The NYT passes on reports – rumors, really – that the Zelaya government in Nicaragua has been imprisoning Americans. Posters have gone up denouncing the “Gringo conspiracy.”

The Pennsylvania home of Secretary of State Philander Knox was robbed, the thief or thieves taking only documents and leaving all the valuables behind. Very mysterious.

A letter to the Times complains about the title of a play opening at the New Theatre about race relations in the South: “The Nigger.”

A letter from First Lt. William MacKinlay of the 11th Cavalry agrees with a Nov. 10th editorial that “commerce will soon be done with the horse”, but insists that horses will still have military uses for many years to come. He warns that Canada and Mexico have many more cavalry than the US does, and that it’s very hard to build up cavalry quickly once war has already started.

Nick Clegg’s democratic duty

Nick Clegg of the British Liberal Democrats has announced that in the event of a hung Parliament (it won’t happen, but the media love to talk endlessly about the possibility before every single election), the LibDems will support the party, Labour or Conservative, that gets the most votes, dropping the previous long-time policy of making its support contingent on the implementation of proportional representation. Clegg claims that it is his democratic duty to back the top vote-getter. He says, “Whichever party has the strongest mandate from the British people, it seems to me obvious in a democracy they have the first right to seek to try and govern, either on their own or with others.” This is an odd theory for the leader of a third party, one which will be very lucky to break 20%, to hold, since under it, the Lib Dems don’t really have any right to exist. Indeed, the voters whose opinions matter least in Clegg’s formulation are the ones that vote for his party, since the “mandate” will come exclusively from those members of the electorate who vote for either the Tory or Labour party. LibDem voters will be entirely irrelevant in determining what their MPs will do in Parliament. Democratic duty, indeed.

At least when LibDem leaders in the past talked complete crap, you knew it was because they were drunk.

Today Minus 100 Years – November 23, 1909: Of shirtwaists, turkeys, severe ladies, and pistols in Paris

The shirtwaist-makers of NY vote to go on strike at meetings held in five different halls. At Cooper Union, Samuel Gompers of the AFL spoke, and a B. Finegbeim, who spoke in Yiddish, presided. Their demands are for recognition of the union, a wage increase of 25 to 30% over the present rates, which are between $10 and $12 a week, and a 52-hour work week.

Rhode Island turkeys for Thanksgiving 1909 are selling for an unprecedented, outrageous 32¢ a pound. Pumpkins are 3¢ per pound.

The US is sending another ship to Nicaragua, and 400 marines, but still claims to be weighing whether to demand reparations.

19th century meets 20th: There was a duel yesterday in Paris between journalist Urbain Gohier and author Laurent Tailhade, both well-known lefties and Dreyfusards, which was filmed by a movie camera. No one was hurt, only one gun was fired. Details are scanty. A stunt?

A letter to the editor objects to a classified ad in one of the NY dailies, in which a Ray P. Oliver of Rochester advertises for “A LADY wanted, take charge of boy; good inducement to firm, severe party not averse to corporal punishment.” The letter-writer goes on at some length about the moral and practical objections to corporal punishment, without ever mentioning that the “boy” in question is eighteen.

DIY blog

This is the first edition of my new occasional feature, Here Are Some News Stories, Write Your Own Damn Jokes, I Have a Headache:

1) Astronaut becomes a father while in space.

2) Disney is forcing the people being thrown off the land on which it wants to build a Disneyland in mainland China (“a Magic Kingdom theme park with characteristics tailored to the Shanghai region”) to dig up their ancestors’ graves, disturbing their spirits.

3) Sarkozy’s plan to move the remains of Albert Camus into the Panthéon is being denounced as a stunt to associate himself with Camus’s... glamor.

Today Minus 100 Years, November 22, 1909: Of trusts, canals, cyanide pills, and reparations for mercenaries

The NYT is not happy about yesterday’s decision dissolving Standard Oil of NJ, saying such decisions make it impossible to do business on a large scale and anyway sometimes monopolies are just more efficient and result in lower prices.

The Isthmian Canal Commission reports that the Panama Canal is progressing nicely, at only $250,000,000 over the initial budget. They’ve got a whole mini-US going on in the Canal Zone, with a supreme court, district and circuit courts, and segregated schools.

Many recently promoted captains on the Austro-Hungarian General Staff received sample boxes of pills purporting to be for nervous debility but actually containing cyanide. One of them died. The NYT speculates that it might be the work of a disappointed officer or an “Anarchist outrage.”

Secretary of State Philander Knox is threatening to demand reparations from Nicaragua for the execution of the American mercenaries Cannon and Grace (or possibly Groce – the NYT keeps going back and forth), who I’ll repeat were caught in the act of trying to blow up Nicaraguan soldiers. The Times speculates that the US may be preparing to invade, either to “throw President Zelaya into prison” (whose prison?) or seize a port in lieu of those reparations. Some things never change. Except that Philander is probably not going to make a comeback as a popular name.

Feeling normal

Rabbi Baruch Chalomish, on trial for the hookers and coke thing, says it all began after his wife died. He felt lonely and “I wanted to stop feeling depressed, to feel normal.” And what feels more normal than hookers and coke? He says he was introduced to cocaine by “an Israeli friend with whom he celebrated the Sabbath.”

Headline of the Day: Man Tied Lizards to Chest at Airport (AP). 15 of them.

Eating his way into the hearts of his countrymen

Today Minus 100 Years:

The Circuit Court in Missouri orders Standard Oil of NJ dissolved for acting as an illegal combination in restraint of trade. Like that’s a bad thing.

Secretary of State Knox says of the execution in Nicaragua of the Americans aiding the revolutionists, “this Government will not for one moment tolerate such treatment of American citizens.” The mercenaries Grace and Cannon were laying mines to blow up Nicaraguan ships.

Supreme Court Justice David J. Brewer writes in Ladies’ World that women’s suffrage will, eventually, come to the US (beyond the four states that already have it, that is). He doesn’t think it will debase the home. However, he says, something that is an abstract right isn’t always wise to implement, suggesting that the 15th Amendment giving the suffrage to black people might have been one such thing. And definitely not in the Philippines or certain other dark-hued places he could name.

Justice Brewer also warns suffragists not to emulate the methods of the “fighting Amazons” of England. Good luck with that: Alice Paul of Philadelphia was even as he spoke (okay, maybe not literally, time difference and all) being force-fed in a British prison during a one-month sentence for breaking a window at the Lord Mayor’s banquet.

William Jennings Bryan is about to mount a campaign to push the Democratic Party to implement prohibition, beginning with Nebraska. Bryan believes that the liquor interests schemed against him in the past and that he can ride a movement against them into the Senate or even the White House. The NYT thinks it is more likely he will tear the party apart. Bryan is writing a series of articles that will be published while he is conveniently out of the country.

The recent Taft tour of the country saw him “eat his way into the hearts of his countrymen,” chowing down on “the most remarkable assortment of meals ever conceived in the brains of chefs,” according to an entire page devoted to the subject in the Sunday paper. The prohibitionist governor of Alabama served a banquet, gasp, without alcohol of any kind. The guests were not best pleased and when Gov. Comer made a joke about becoming ambassador to China, there was a “roar of approval.” Taft himself was evidently teetotal. Attendees of the banquet in Savannah took all the rather expensive plates and silverware and whatnot as souvenirs. Despite all this sumptuous dining, it is reported that Taft did not suffer from dyspepsia during the 57-day tour.



Egyptian deities?

Obvs

Sarah Palin on the new guidelines for breast cancer prevention: “Obviously the first thought that comes to mind when hearing of these new recommendations from bureaucratic panels is ‘rationed care.’” Oh, obviously. Death panels for tits.

Of ice monopolies, football injuries and bloomers

Today Minus 100 Years was a light news day:

The monopoly case against the American Ice Company continues before Justice Wheeler. The Company is arguing that you can’t actually form a monopoly in ice because it’s, you know, ice.

Following some serious injuries and deaths in the sport of football generally, the NY city school district has banned the sport. However, Princeton’s president, one Woodrow Wilson, says that “Football is too fine a game to be abolished off-hand.” He does think the rules should be changed so there aren’t quite so many fatalities.

In other 1909 sports news, “Field hockey was played by girls wearing bloomers on the lawn of the Staten Island Cricket and Tennis Club”. Ah, 1909.

Man is the most dangerous game. Fat man, a little less dangerous.

A gang in Peru has been killing people for their fat, which was probably sold to European cosmetics manufacturers. Plan your vacations, and skin care regimen, accordingly.

So not kosher: Rabbi Baruch Chalomish “was so exhausted after three days of constant cocaine-fuelled partying with escorts that his pimp grew worried and cancelled that day’s supply of girls, a jury was told.” He did this “on the ninth day, and after the rabbi had stayed up for three straight days”. And that is why we light the menorah. The caring pimp slash drug dealer, Nasir Abbas (!), “said that he was too scared to attend the trial after the rabbi ‘sent around some heavies’ to threaten him”.

An Alert Reader suggests a Name of the Day: Amy Cunninghis, the legally married wife of federal court employee Karen Golinski. The 9th Circuit judge has ordered that Ms Cunninghis be given spousal insurance benefits, which the Obama admin has been fighting. Fox News will no doubt be claiming that Obamacare will cover cunninghis. I would add that “go linski” also kind of sounds like something lesbians might get up to. If you have any speculations about what it means to “go linski”... well, I wouldn’t be surprised, pervert.

However, my personal choice for Name of the Day: the new president of Europe, Herman Van Rompuy.

Of bringing rabbits back to life, the danger of drunken women at the polls, and Grace and Cannon

Today Minus 100 Years, the Nicaraguan government of José Zelaya executed two American mercenaries named Grace and Cannon, found bringing dynamite to the (US-backed, United Fruit Company-financed) rebels. The US gov. informs shipping companies that it will not do anything against the rebels’ naval blockade.

The NYT editorial page features another of the paper’s hostile screeds against women’s suffrage (it’s clear I’m still talking about 1909, right?). Responding to reports by Harriot Stanton Blatch (Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter) of seeing drunken poll workers, a state of affairs she thinks would be improved by the civilizing presence of women voters, the Times believes that “The great majority of refined, well-educated women do not want to vote. Many of them could not be induced to vote if they possessed the right of suffrage. The idea that all women are refined and that all women exert an uplifting influence on men is preposterous.” Indeed, “If she and her associates have their way we may have drunken women at the polls, and degrade our elections still further, introducing elements in politics hitherto happily lacking.”

Elsewhere in the paper is a report on various offers of help received at the suffrage association’s hq, including a lawyer out West who sent an offer to marry Alva Belmont, the movement’s richest benefactor: “With your money and my brains, we ought to do it.”

The Edison Company arranged a private exhibition by Dr. Louise Robinovitch of the use of a rhythmic electric shock to restart the heart of a rabbit after it was electrocuted (everyone seems to assume the method only works when the cause of death was electricity) (Edison Co. was interested because so many of its workers died of accidental electrocution). An earlier article says she planned to ask NY authorities for permission to experiment with resuscitating the next prisoner electrocuted in the electric chair. A NYT archives search shows that the medical career of the good doctor – who was also experimenting with electricity as a form of anaesthesia (“electric sleep”) – ended rather abruptly in 1910-11 when she got involved in the trial of her larcenous banker brother Joseph Robin (note the anglicization; their other brother goes by Robinson), who had caused the collapse of the bank he ran. At one point their immigrant parents showed up in court, Louise and Joseph denied that those were their parents, the parents showed letters from the kids proving that they were, and Louise was indicted for perjury (unclear what happened with that; her brother did go to jail after an attempt to claim insanity). Anyway, sometimes doing a search on a name you see in an old newspaper produces rather different results than you were expecting, is my point.

Pope Pius said that France is making war on the Catholic Church (the never-ending fight over who should control French schools, the state or the church).

These remotely defunct mollusks

Today Minus 100 Years Blogging:

The prosecution rests in the trial of the American Ice Company for violations of the anti-monopoly act. I guess they controlled all the ice.

The Iowa Supreme Court ruled that businesses can refuse to serve blacks.

A petition signed by “practically every citizen” of Rising Fawn, Georgia, asks Pres. Taft to pardon Sheriff Shipp and the others: “We view with grave fear the effect that the fulfillment of the sentence will have upon the ignorant and irresponsible negroes, increasing beyond question the danger to the women of the South.”

Meanwhile in the North, women are not menaced but menacing. At a women’s suffrage meeting in Carnegie Hall, Dr. Anna Howard Shaw exhibited what the NYT calls “a note of menace,” asking, “England has driven its women to extreme measures. Do the men of the United States seek the same result in this country?” Frances Squire Potter (1867-1914), who had recently resigned as professor of English lit at the University of Minnesota to devote herself full-time to suffrage work, castigated the trustees and faculty of Harvard which rejected Inez Milholland’s application to the law school. “Some kindergartner ought to lead these gentlemen into the nearest geological museum and show them, pityingly but firmly, the fossilized remains of their Silurian ancestors. These remotely defunct mollusks, after the Silurian age was gone, could not climb up into the Devonian age, and so, squirming themselves into strange shapes, they died, and, turning to stone, became their own monuments. If these sermons in stone cannot teach these gentlemen anything, nature has decreed that they are to stay in the museum to enrich the collection.”

Percival Lowell, astronomer and crap interplanetary weatherman, announces that it is currently snowing on Mars, which he says is unseasonably early for Mars.

A real love story

Name of the Day: Thanks to one of the oddities of French law, a woman today married her dead fiancé. The ceremony was conducted by the mayor of her village, Christophe Caput. Said Monsieur Caput, “It is a real love story.”

I knew I forgot to post something: pictures from the traditional part of the APEC ceremony where the heads of state dress up in local garb and try to retain their dignity.



Here’s my favorite post from one of these events, 3 years ago.

There’s no point in talking to people who don’t have blood on their hands

Quote of the Day: British Major-General Paul Newton: “There’s no point in talking to people who don’t have blood on their hands.”

Even if only moose blood: I recorded the Sarah Palin appearance on Oprah but in the end decided it’s just not worth it to subject myself to that even for the big blogger bucks. Did see somewhere that she said one of her favorite writers was Ogden Nash. Sure, because if she’s challenged on it, it’s not too hard to memorize one of his poems, like little WIIIAI did when everyone in my third grade class had to memorize and recite a poem and I chose:

The Fly

God in his wisdom made the fly,
And then forgot to tell us why.

Another of her purported favorite writers: Steinbeck. CONTEST: Translate the “Wherever there’s a cop beating up a guy, I’ll be there” speech into Palinese.

Also (now she’s got me doing it), she evidently made fun of the father of her grandson as “Ricky Hollywood.” Yes, she went on fucking Oprah and accused Levi of being a media whore.

(Update: I see her Facebook page calls Newsweek sexist for putting on its cover this week a picture of her that features her legs. A picture she posed for.)

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A century ago, they were also fascinated by female charlatans. Today Minus 100, the NYT reported at great length on a seance by famous Italian medium Eusapia Paladino, who the paper had been finding reason to write about seemingly every day for quite some time. Okay, just did an archive search, and their enchantment continued for some time, though it will grow increasingly sour, with the headlines evolving like this: “Paladino Does Her Marvels,” “Palladino Again Mystifies Science,” “Dog Didn’t Notice Paladino Spooks,” “Paladino Used Phosphorous,” “Paladino, Tied Up, To Submit to Test,” “Paladino Tricks All Laid Bare.” One of the many experts who chimed in on her credentials was our old friend, Columbia University Professor Emeritus John Quackenbos.

Headline of the Day, That Day Being November 17, 1909: “Business Man, Not Tramp.” A “ragged stranger” who died in a 10¢ lodging house in Cleveland was actually W.C. Lytle, vice president and general manager of the Motor Improvement Comp., who had disappeared four months before, ahead of his scheduled trial for some (unspecified in the NYT) dispute over a diamond ring. No other reference to Lytle appears in the Times index.

Not the Headline of the Day: “Taft Too Busy for Golf.”

Former Chattanooga Sheriff Joseph Shipp, who Yesterday Minus 100 was sent to jail for contempt of the US Supreme Court for failing to prevent a lynching (by the way, my mistake yesterday: Johnson was the name of the lynchee, not the Justice who ordered his execution stayed), is planning to run for reelection from prison. (How confusing would it be if I just used the present tense for the 100 Years Ago posts? The editing is driving me crazy.)