The pope gives tongue to a bagpipe player (not a metaphor!)

Caption con... Oh, you say you’d like a close-up?


...test.

Today -100: December 25, 1909: Of racial definitions and mince pies

Booker T. Washington has been proposing a “Negro Exposition” to mark the 50th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1913. The NYT believes that this plan is unwise since “Few of our colored population can afford to travel” and “The assertion that any large number of influential whites in the South look upon the plan with favor lacks verification.” So it would be a financial failure and just stir up that race stuff.

In other racial news, “Dragged by Elevated Train: Man Saved from Death by a Negro Platform Porter.” The NYT felt the porter’s race significant enough to require pointing out in the headline – because heaven forfend you form an opinion of him based on his actions before you know his race. The generic “man” saved from death was of course white.

Elsewhere in the paper, on the front page in fact, is a headline, “Wanted to Wed Japanese; License Refused at New Haven to Miss Dorr and Jullen Kwan.” Kwan was a Harvard student. The reason they were refused was actually that she was too young (18), but race made the whole thing newsworthy.

Sometimes those racial distinctions were disturbingly ambiguous. The US Circuit Court in Boston had to decide whether Armenians counted as white or whether they were Asiatics and therefore excluded from seeking US citizenship. Judge Lowell ruled that there has been so much race-mixing in that part of the world over the last 2,500 years that it is impossible to tell, and admitted four Armenians to citizenship, over the objections of the federal government. Lowell notes that if you accept Hebrews as white, you have to accept Armenians.

You will be relieved to hear that the giant mince pie made it to the White House safely.

Selling human beings

Cambodia deports 20 Uighur seeking political asylum back to China; a few hours later gets $1.2b aid deal from China; denies any connection.

Today -100: December 24, 1909: Of irritating scabs and mince pies

NYC Magistrate Barlow fines a shirtwaist striker $10 for calling scabs “scabs.” “There is no word in the English language so irritating as the word ‘scab.’” Scab scab scab scab scab.

What’s for Christmas dinner at the Taft White House? A 92-pound mince pie. That’s a lot of mince. It’s even large than the 50-pound one Taft was supposed to enjoy over Thanksgiving, which vanished with its two caretakers somewhere between Newark and the White House.

Today -100: December 23, 1909: Of assassinations, ringleaders, dog whips, and bulls at the Waldorf-Astoria

Zelaya issues a statement blaming his having to resign entirely on the United States. Just as his forces were, he claims, about to defeat the rebels, the US severed relations and threatened to send in the Marines under the pretext of the executions of Cannon and Groce, which he compares to the blowing up of the Maine, for which there was no proof of Spanish culpability.

The NYT wrongly reports Korean Prime Minister Yi Wan Yong was assassinated, stabbed to death. Stabbed yes, died no.

Actually assassinated: Col. Karpoff, head of the secret police in St. Petersburg, lured to a building and killed by a bomb (there’s a long story in the 1/16/10 magazine section, with engravings of the bombing and everything), and Arthur Mason Tippetts Jackson, Chief Magistrate of Nasik in the Presidency of Bombay, shot by a member of a secret society while attending the theatre.

Two days ago, we heard of a little racial dispute in Magnolia, Alabama. Today, the authorities claim to have quelled a plan by negroes to attack whites, which they thwarted by arresting 42 “ringleaders.”

NY Governor Charles Evan Hughes met a delegation from several suffragist groups and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, all calling for a referendum on women’s suffrage in the state. Hughes responded, “so far as my personal views upon this question are concerned I have nothing to say at this time.”

From the London Times: Theresa Garnett, a suffragette who struck the president of the Board of Trade, Winston Churchill, with a dog whip at the train station in Bristol in November, is out of prison (the charge was only disorderly conduct rather than assault, so that Churchill didn’t have to testify; she hunger struck in prison and was forcibly fed; she also set fire to her cell). Garnett wants her whip back. It now has historical significance, she says.

“A bull calf late yesterday afternoon suddenly appeared in the throng on the sidewalk just outside the Waldorf-Astoria, at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-third Street, and, more frightened than savage, endeavored to gain admittance to the hotel by climbing over the iron railings on the Fifth Avenue side.” The calf “came at a gallop down Thirty-third Street from Madison Avenue, scampered among the automobiles on the avenue, and bumped unceremoniously into Patrolman Nittel, who was directing the traffic. Before Nittel could recover his equilibrium – the bump was a rear attack and most unexpected – the young bull was headed in the direction of the hotel. ... The bull’s path was cleared as if by magic as he bounded across the sidewalk toward the iron railing. ... Everywhere were seen fluttering veils as women rushed for shelter. ... ‘Get a rope!’ shouted a man who was prepared to climb the electric light post should the emergency arise.” Patrolman Trainor, on his horse, lassoed the bull, which was then led, I regret to say, back towards the abattoir at First Ave & 45th from which he’d escaped.

Comments

Hopefully, that’s everything fixed, thanks to my personal IT support system in New York. It would have been easier (and cheaper) to dump Haloscan, but we’d have lost the last 12,000 comments made on this blog, which just wasn’t an option.

I had to set comments to show up in a separate tab instead of a pop-up, which didn’t display properly in Chrome. I had trouble signing in to comment in Opera, but signing in isn’t mandatory. Otherwise it seems to test out in Firefox, Chrome, IE and Safari. Tell me if there are problems, or if the current settings aren’t working for you.

You can use bold & italics, and insert hyperlinks and images.

You can get follow-ups to your comments via email. Some other day I’ll work on figuring out why there is no RSS for each post, like there’s supposed to be.

Features I have not enabled: You cannot “like” comments because this is not junior high or Facebook (but I repeat myself). You cannot use graphic emoticons because this is not the 6th grade.

Echo has a feature where I could send comments that use specified naughty words into moderation. I’m thinking of implementing that for a different random word every day. “Say the secret word and collect $100” sort of thing.

(Update: except, of course, everything is not fixed, and comments go to entirely different places depending on whether you’re commenting on a post in its unique URL, on the front page, or in a monthly archive. Swell.)

Bear with me

while I get the new commenting system up and running. Haloscan’s owners decided to start charging for a more annoying system. All the moving parts aren’t moving yet. Probably better not to add comments to any posts older than this one.

If a blogger on Blogspot with the JS-Kit Echo system installed is reading this, it would be very helpful if you could send me, by email or as a comment, the html code from its gadget box on the Page Lageout page.

Today -100: December 22, 1909: Of the spirit of a good son going to the rescue of his beloved mother

Madriz is sworn in as president of Nicaragua, saying, “I assume the Presidency unmoved by personal ambition, but by the spirit of a good son going to the rescue of his beloved mother, harassed and imperiled.” He announced a political amnesty.

However, the fighting continues, with the Estradists beating the government forces near Rama. The NYT attributes this to the former being “armed with the latest equipment and machine guns”. Huh. Wonder how that happened.

Shot

I thought better of titling this post “The President’s shot.” Anyway, Obama got his swine flu shot today. CAPTION CONTEST.

But is it kosher?

The various news stories and blogs talking about a supposedly discontinued Israeli program of secretly harvesting the organs and skin of dead Palestinians (and others) all fail to mention the reason Israel has a chronic shortage of organs: Orthodox Jews claim their religion prevents them being organ donors but not organ recipients.

Today -100: December 21, 1909: Of sick immigrants, lynchings, lynchings, and more lynchings, and all this Santa Claus business

Reading the 1909 papers goes a lot quicker if you don’t bother reading any of the stories about the controversy over whether Cook reached the North Pole.

The Commissioner of Immigration has decided that “physically or mentally unfit” immigrants will no longer be treated by the government but made the responsibility of the steamship companies that brought them.

As in NY, Philadelphia shirtwaist manufacturers are willing to concede pretty much every demand of the strikers – except union recognition.

The NY shirtwaist strikers’ ally, the Woman’s Trade Union League has introduced an innovation into the practice of picketing: the automobile. It will be used to cover all the factories where scabs are working. One striker, the amusingly named Fanny Fireman, has been sentenced to five days in the workhouse for throwing a rotten egg at a scab.

Here’s a picture I forgot to post earlier, I think from the paper 100 years + 2 days ago.


The Nicaraguan Congress has unanimously elected José Madriz, Zelaya’s nominee, to be the nation’s president. Gen. Estrada vows to fight on. US Secretary of State Philander C. Knox has issued a strong note saying that Madriz will have to show he is capable of directing a responsible government and make reparation for the execution of Cannon and Groce. But the US will not yet recognize either Madriz or Estrada.

In your lynching news of the day, a man who fatally wounded a marshal was lynched in Rosebud Texas; the Illinois National Guard is being moved to Belleville to protect another black man suspected of being involved in a fatal street car robbery in East St. Louis; a black man was shot to death by a mob in a jail cell in Devil’s Bluff, Ark.; and a lynch mob in Magnolia, Alabama was searching for 4 black brothers suspected of killing a white man. When the house one of the brothers was hiding in was set on fire, he shot at the mob, killing one and wounding two others, but was fatally shot himself as he tried to escape the blaze. Two others were arrested and narrowly escaped lynching; the fourth brother remains at large. “Nearly every negro resident left Magnolia to-day. The whites are all armed.”

Mark Twain announces “I am through with work for this life and this world.”

More front page news: The 6-year-old grandson of Rep. McMorran (R-Mich.) has been having doubts about “all this Santa Claus business.” So his parents told him to ask President Taft about it. Taft suggested that if he writes a letter to Santa and Santa then brings everything he asks for, that should be proof enough. The boy agreed, and is now busily writing his letter. Probably asking for a monkey-on-the-stick, whatever that might be (this?).

And that boy grew up to be Ben Nelson.

Mirror mirror

There is indeed a joke about the warlord running the Ministry of Energy and Water. Given the reliability of the power supply in Kabul, he is called the Minister of Darkness.

Karzai: “We have tried to ensure that the cabinet is a mirror of Afghanistan’s people, a cabinet that all Afghan people can see themselves in.” Evidently the Afghan people are only 4% female.

Would explain why Afghan men always seem so pissed off.

Sir Jean-Luc Picard! Make it so.

This is not renaming the post office

So to make up for the terrible abortion provisions in the health care bill, the D’s will create a Pregnancy Assistance Fund to convince pregnant women and teenage girls that forced childbirth is okay. The fund will provide money for “maternity and baby clothing, baby food, baby furniture and similar items.” The fund will be $25 million per year. Yup, that should cover it.

(Update: Smintheus points out “the most astounding aspect of this provision: It encourages teenage pregnancy by offering financial rewards to pregnant teens.”)

Mitch McConnell: “This is not renaming the post office. Make no mistake -- this bill will reshape our nation and our lives.” Although to be fair, he’d probably bitch and moan and filibuster and obstruct about renaming the post office too.

One of the warlords in Karzai’s cabinet is minister of electricity and water. There’s probably a joke in there somewhere.

Today -100: December 20, 1909: Of late trains

The shirtwaist strike spreads to Philadelphia, which has been getting orders from some of the NY firms being struck.

Another slow December news day, as demonstrated by a NYT headline gracing the front page: “Taft Train an Hour Late.”

What is the capital of Nelsonia?

As part of the deal Harry Reid cut with Ben Nelson, Nebraska will henceforth be known as Nelsonia. Adjust your maps accordingly.

Meaningful and unprecedented

Obama called his little deal at the Copenhagen summit a “meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough.” Because if there’s one thing that is both full of meaning and totally without precedent, it’s the world’s nations agreeing to “take note” of a non-binding aspirational document with no targets or compliance oversight that even if adhered to wouldn’t come close to averting global environmental catastrophe.

George Monbiot calls the closed-door negotiations among the big states “a scramble for the atmosphere comparable in style and intent to the scramble for Africa.”

Some people, of course, think even this goes too far.

Today -100: December 19, 1909: Of college girls, scabs, and monkey-on-the-sticks

Manhattan’s District-Attorney-Elect Charles Whitman (Wikipedia tells us that he was later governor, that Christine Todd-Whitman is married to his grandson, and that he was not the Texas tower sniper) (I had to look him up to get his first name; the NYT in 1909 was absolutely allergic to using first names) has chosen a deputy assistant, Cornelius McDougald, who is an actual negro, and will appoint a woman deputy to oversee work in the Children’s Court.

The Sunday paper, has a feature on “college girls,” by which they mean recent college graduates such as women’s suffragist Inez Milholland and her Vassar cohort, who have been joining the shirtwaist strikers on the picket line, attempting to prevent arrests, and arguing on behalf of the strikers in court. (The NYT also reports that wealthy suffragist Alva Belmont has been providing lawyers and bail money to arrested strikers.) Seeing the treatment of female strikers by police and Night Court, and hearing from the shirtwaist-makers about their work conditions, has been a radicalizing experience for them. Strikers have been invited to give talks to many middle- and upper-class women’s clubs.

Here’s a helpful tip if you’re ever on a picket line in 1909 New York: the word “scab,” shouted at the scabs, is against the law, and you can be arrested for it. “Strikebreaker” is okay. The scabs can yell pretty much anything they like at the strikers.

A story in the Sunday magazine section has Santa Claus complaining about these kids today: “Years ago children were satisfied with Jack-in-the-boxes, monkey-on-the-sticks, and other inexpensive baubles, but nowadays they’re looking for a whole string of iron cars, miniature automobiles, and flying machines.”

Torture is constitutional. It’s official.

Chris Floyd says what needs to be said about the Supreme Court’s decision to let the D.C. Circuit Court’s ruling in the Rasul case stand, as the Obama Justice Dept urged. I’d just add a link to my post two years ago on that ruling, which was remarkable for asserting that torture was precisely what was intended when Guantanamo was set up, so the torturers could not be sued because they were just doing the job for which they were employed.

Today -100: December 18, 1909: Of exiles and fish splits

Zelaya plans to leave Nicaragua.

Headline of the Day -100: “Harvard Split Over Fish.” Sadly, the story doesn’t live up to the potential of that headline, although the news day was so singularly uneventful that it was on the front page. The fish in question is not of the piscine variety, but Hamilton Fish III, captain of the football team (and later an isolationist congresscritter, rabid anti-semite and centenarian; not to be confused with the publisher of The Nation), who lost the class election to be First Marshal (I think it’s like class president) to someone who hadn’t made the football team. There are many bitter feelings and Fish fled Harvard for New York, but claims he “didn’t care a rap which way the election went.”

But I think it’s wrong

John McCain, complaining after Al Franken, presiding over the Senate, cut off Joe Lieberman’s 10-minute speech at 10 minutes: “I don’t know what’s happening here in this body, but I think it’s wrong.”