Today -100: April 26, 1910: Of various judicial matters

Taft did officially nominate Charles Evan Hughes to the Supreme Court, but on the understanding that it not take effect until October (evidently the Supreme Court just took 6 month vacations back then), allowing him to participate in the process of choosing his successor. The whole thing was done by letter: Taft sent a letter on the 22nd offering Hughes the job, without knowing if he’d accept it, and Hughes responded by letter on the 24th. One possible obstacle to Hughes accepting was the small salary of a Supreme Court justice, $12,500.

The Supreme Court is currently considering whether corporal punishment in schools is legal.

The Louisiana Supreme Court rules that Jim Crow laws do not apply to octoroons or quadroons.

Would explain a lot

Obama eulogy for the W Virginia miners: “These miners lived - as they died - in pursuit of the American dream.” The American dream is at the bottom of a coal mine?

Today -100: April 25, 1910: Of Clara Shortridge Foltz

It was a slow news day (on page 1: President Taft invites Sgt Thomas Morley of the Pittsburg police, who looks just like him, to sit next to him at a baseball game), so let’s focus this post on our...

Person in the News -100: Clara Shortridge Foltz (1849-1934), who just became a deputy district attorney for Los Angeles, the only woman deputy DA in the country. Wikipedia and, better yet, this article (well worth reading), say she was the first woman lawyer in California, in 1878 (she was a divorced mother of 5). Since the law had said that lawyers in CA had to be white and male, she herself wrote a new law deleting both disqualifications and got it passed (on the second try). Then she had to sue the Hastings College of Law, a public school, to force it to admit her (reported in the San Francisco Chronicle under the headline “Two Lady Lawyers Who Demand Admission to the Hastings Law College--How They Dress”), and when Hastings appealed the ruling she represented herself again before the state Supreme Court. She helped create both the public defender system and the parole system in California, and got SF to stop putting defendants in iron cages during their trials.


A San Francisco DA once closed a case in which she represented the defendant: “She is a WOMAN, she cannot be expected to reason; God Almighty decreed her limitations ... this young woman will lead you by her sympathetic presentation of this case to violate your oaths and let a guilty man go free.”

She was the president of the California Woman Suffrage Association in her 30s and drafted the suffrage amendment that passed in 1911.

She was a descendant of Daniel Boone and the sister of Sen. Samuel Shortridge (R-CA, 1921-33). She ran for governor of California in 1930 in the Republican primary at 81.

Today -100: April 24, 1910: Of Russian Jews and scouts

Russia will “expel fewer Jews” living outside the pale of settlement.

A paramilitary movement for boys will be established, following the model of a group in Britain. The American version will also be called “Boy Scouts.”

Enough? Not possible.

British Foreign Minister David Miliband’s message to the voters: “Look, you’ve punished us enough about Iraq.”

Cat pictures

Christabel, taken today. Because why not?

Church action

At St Peter’s Square, the Pope Ratz spoke of his meeting with Maltese victims of clerical sexual abuse. He said, “I shared with them their suffering...” No, no you didn’t. That may be the most insulting thing you’ve said yet. “...and emotionally prayed with them, assuring them of church action.” Oh, I think they’ve gotten got enough “action” from the church.

Today -100: April 23, 1910: Of justice delayed, and the return of the comet

Taft is widely believed to have offered the vacant Supreme Court seat to NY Governor Charles Evans Hughes, and Hughes to have accepted, but the nomination probably won’t be official until November, so Hughes can campaign for the Republicans in the elections.

It was dark in Chicago, creating fear among the “more ignorant,” who attributed it to Halley’s comet. “In street cars women became hysterical, and in the foreign quarters policemen were appealed to to put at rest the fears of the nervous.”

Don’t you hate it when one form of xenophobic bigotry gets in the way of another form of xenophobic bigotry?

The Belgian government collapses in a conflict between Flemish and Walloon speakers over one voting district which is (gasp) bilingual, scuttling plans to pass a law banning the burqa.

British leadership debate: Securing our future for the future

Second British leaders’ debate today. Gordon Brown wore a red tie, his party’s color, Nick Clegg wore a yellow tie, his party’s color, and David Cameron came so close, wearing a purple tie.


From Gordon Brown’s opening statement: “Like me or not, I can deliver that plan...” That noise you heard was several million British people all saying “Not” at the same time.

Nick Clegg (LibDem and it’s all his fault) defended the European Union (“Size does matter,” he actually said), while noting that it took 15 years to define chocolate (yummy?). He pointed out (correctly) that the Tories ally themselves in the European Parliament with “a bunch of nutters, anti-Semites, people who deny climate change exists, homophobes”.



Clegg again won the debate, by seeming like a more or less real human being who believed what he was saying. This is the advantage of being the one person there with no chance of being prime minister.


In the first debate, Brown and Cameron tried to go after LibDem voters by starting every sentence “I agree with Nick.” But that just it made it look like they were okay with the possibility of a hung Parliament and a coalition government and that it was therefore okay for people to vote LibDem. So this time, both of them 1) disagreed with Clegg, 2) pointed out whenever the other one disagreed with Clegg about anything. Brown said that Cameron & Clegg reminded him of his two boys “squabbling at bath time.” That noise you heard was several million British people all singing “Rubber ducky, you’re the one, / You make bath time lots of fun” at the same time while picturing Cameron & Clegg naked in a bath together. Later, Cameron said that the more Brown & Clegg quarreled, the more he thought everyone should vote for the Tories. Had he not thought that before?


Cameron and Clegg used the word “proper” a lot.

Brown, who again came with the most prepared (and over-rehearsed) lines, said “David is anti-European [he isn’t, I think, but much of his party is], Nick is anti-American [he isn’t]” and “David’s a risk to our economy, Nick’s a risk to our security,” the latter because Clegg sees no need to spend billions to upgrade the Trident nuclear missile system. Brown told him to “get real.” Cameron said that Trident is necessary for “securing our future for the future.”


Clegg said, “I’m not a man of faith.” That would never happen in the US. That was in response to a question about the pope, who is visiting the UK this year. No one was willing to take up the No Popery banner or say that they’d arrest him on sight.

Brown: “If you’re gay or straight, you have a place in British society.” Which will be news to Americans, who think all you guys sound gay.

All three (sigh) are in favor of the war in Afghanistan, although Clegg kept saying that in the next war Britain should bring “proper” weapons. Brown seemed to want to go to war in Yemen and Somalia. Did anyone even mention Iraq?

The fringe UK Independence Party was not represented in the debate, but I’ve been meaning to mention its election motto: Sod the lot.

Today -100: April 22, 1910: Not exaggerated

Mark Twain is dead. His daughter was with him, and her husband, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, which seems like the sort of name only a humorist could have invented.

A Rev. Thomas Chalmers of the Jewish Evangelical Society wrote to NYC Mayor Gaynor asking for a license to preach Christianity to Jews on street corners in Jewish parts of the city. Gaynor did not provide the license and wrote back, “Do you not think the Jews have a good religion?” and asks “Would you not annoy them and do more harm than good? How many Jews have you converted so far?” If Chalmers ever responded, the NYT doesn’t seem to record it.

The Illinois Supreme Court upheld a law banning the employment of women in factories or shops for more than 10 hours a day.

Headline of the Day -100: “Again Buying Rubbers in London.”

Today -100: April 21, 1910: Of Gay Paree and arbitration

Headline of the Day -100: “Roosevelt in Paris, City is Gay for Him.”

The Journal des Débats says TR is “the representative man of the twentieth century democracy.” Yup, totally gay from him.

Secretary of State Philander Knox believes that disarmament of all the nations of the world is possible through the establishment of a court of arbitration. Why that’s so crazy, it might just work! (Spoiler alert: it didn’t.)

Texas logic: protecting traditional divorces

AP: Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott “is appealing a divorce granted to a gay couple in Dallas, saying protecting the ‘traditional definition of marriage’ means doing the same for divorce.”

Today -100: April 20, 1910: Of speed traps

A new NY law on automobiles includes a provision keeping proceeds from tickets at the state rather than local level, to prevent speed traps. The Online Entymology Dictionary says the term “speed trap” dates from 1906.

Sitting and thinking

The George W. Bush Institute is open for bidniz. And George gave a little speech.

HE’S STILL THE REMINDERER: “We’re going to focusing on the freedom agenda to remind the country that free societies are in our national interest.”

SITTING AROUND: “I was nervous about starting a think tank, that we’ve got people to come, sit around and think. It’s important to have experts sit and opine, but we also have to act.”

Caption contest

From National Army Day in Iran.

Today -100: April 19, 1910: Of laughing in the Senate, and Siamese twins

A petition for an amendment to the US constitution for women’s suffrage signed by 500,000 people, was presented to the Senate. Suffragists in the galleries were several times ordered not to show emotion by laughing or applauding (NYT sub-head: “Dare to Laugh in Senate.”)

Wosa Blazek, one of a pair of Czech Siamese twins, gave birth.

Today -100: April 18, 1910: Of ghosts, owls, and complacent sinners

The unions representing the striking Philadelphia trolley workers declare the strike over, on the company’s terms, over-ruling a referendum of the strikers which showed a slight majority for rejecting the terms.

The NYT blames a revolt that has broken out in Guatemala on former Nicaraguan President Zelaya.

At a mass meeting associated with National American Woman’s Suffrage Association’s annual convention, Beatrice Forbes-Robertson says that American opponents of women’s suffrage divide into the ghosts, the owls (or hooters) and the complacent sinners. Ghosts feared that only bad women would vote, that women would deprive the men of their darling vices, that women wouldn’t vote, or that they would do nothing else but vote. (It’s unclear from the article who owls might be.)

French suffragists are planning to stand, illegally, for election to the Chamber of Deputies next week. One of them, Marguerite Durand, running in the Ninth Arrondissement, “produced a male idiot on the platform, sarcastically explaining that he had a right to vote and she had not.” (A recent court case established that idiocy is not a bar to the exercise of the franchise.)

It seems that Tenn. Governor Patterson has actually issued lots of pardons to convicted murderers, not just those who happen to be his friends, 152 of them since taking office in 1907.

Charles Green, professor at the Harvard Medical School, says that co-education endangers the future of the American home and that boys and girls should be segregated after kindergarten. He cites the danger of [CHEAP LAUGH WARNING] “the effect on the nervous system of children of both sexes of constant intercourse in the school room.”

Today -100: April 17, 1910: Of elections, eating hippopotami, and booty

Headline of the Day -100: “Negro in Cuban Cabinet.” Martín Morúa Delgado, Sec. of Agriculture and Commerce.

The Mississippi Legislature agrees to Sen. Le Roy Percy’s suggestion of a primary election to validate his election by the Legislature. This is just weird. In these pre-17th Amendment days the power to elect US senators remained with the Lege, so this is an election without the force of law, although Percy promises that if he loses, he’ll resign and let the governor pick someone else, presumably Vardaman (in the decades before the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1912, states were increasingly using advisory popular elections). But this one would be a primary with no general election, so that the only citizens who would get to vote for this office are registered Democrats.

An article in the NYT Sunday magazine section suggests solving the high cost of meat by importing animals from Africa and elsewhere. Hippopotami, yaks, antelopes, llamas, giraffes, white rhinoceroses. Hippos, for example, could graze in parts of the country (Florida) not previously used for pasturage. Prof. W.N. Irvin of the Bureau of Plant Industry in the Dept of Agriculture has eaten hippo and says it’s like a blend of beef and turkey, no wait beef and pork. “I predict that in five years hippo steak will be found quite common on the menu of the average New York and Chicago restaurants.”

Other Headline of the Day -100: a man was arrested trying to sell a diamond ring he’d stolen from the jeweler he worked for. The headline: “Caught Selling His Booty.”

Snippy-snappy

Britain held the first ever party leaders’ debate yesterday, and the Lib Dem, Nick Clegg, won. David Cameron, the (sigh) next prime minister, who has been variously described as looking like he’s wearing a David Cameron mask and as having too few features on too much face,


said Clegg had “sung a good song.” He said of his own failure to fight back against Gordon Brown’s ponderous pot-shots at him (“this is not question time, it’s answer time,” “You can’t airbrush your policies even if you can airbrush your posters,” and about twenty attempts to bring up Lord Ashcroft, the Tory party treasurer who doesn’t pay any British taxes because he claims to live in Belize) that he hadn’t wanted to get “snippy-snappy.” And of his failure to talk about his political ideas during the debate, Cameron said, “Well, all the questions were all rather subjecty subjects.”

He also said, while being endorsed by Gary Barlow of Take That, “Last night in the TV debate I felt a bit like I was in Britain’s worst boy band, so it is helpful to share a stage with a founder member of Britain’s best ever boy band.” David Cameron has a favorite boy band. What is Gordon Brown’s favorite boy band? I fear we will find out before May 6.