Today -100: August 19, 1910: Of sitting up, Teddy, trolleys, and slapping

The Times has naturally been keeping its readers apprised of every detail of Mayor Gaynor’s recovery from the shooting. Today’s report: Gaynor Expects to Sit up To-day.

Roosevelt has decided on a strategy: he will stand aside from the elections in New York and let the Old Guard Republicans take the blame for their inevitable loss to the Democrats. He will neither endorse nor criticize the Taft administration unless it, you know, starts it. And he’s definitely probably maybe not running for president in 1912.

The Columbus trolley strike continues, more peacefully (rocks thrown, one car dynamited, ok not that peacefully). Mayor Marshall is more or less daring the governor to remove him from office. Soldiers ordered to protect the scabs have been making generous donations to the strike fund.

Headline of the Day -100: “Governor Slaps Editor.” That’s Governor Denver Dickerson of Nevada and George Montrose, editor of the Carson City News, who may or may not have written an article accusing the governor of grafting $5,000 on a land deal for a new prison.

Who hijacked term moron?

Sarah Palin’s Twitter feed:


What “singular issue” does she mean? Abortion? Also, Sarah, if you’re looking to be crowned the Queen of the True Feminists, you might not want to refer to a “cackle” of women.

(Update: and in other tweets today, she advises Dr. Laura “don’t retreat...reload!” which I think means she wants her to say nigger a bunch more times, and called opponents of Dr. L’s hate speech “Constitutional obstructionists” – “her 1st Amend.rights ceased 2exist thx 2activists trying 2silence ‘isn't American,not fair’”).

The Burlington Coat Factory

is neither a factory nor in Burlington. Radical Muslim plot? Discuss.

Today -100: August 18, 1910: Of vivisection and California insurgents

The Washington D.C. Humane Society is threatening to sue the Bureau of Animal Industry of the Dept of Agriculture and other government bureaus for allegedly vivisecting dogs.

In California’s Republican primaries, Insurgents sweep up the nominations for every office, with Hiram Johnson winning 51 of the 52 counties (exc San Francisco). A couple of incumbent US congresscritters lose. Former congressman and state legislator Grove Johnson loses his bid for a seat in the Assembly. He was an Old Guard Republican and a bitter political enemy of Hiram Johnson; he was also his father. This election marks the end of Southern Pacific’s long dominance over California politics.

Headline-That-Sounds-Like-It’s-Dirty-But-Really-Isn’t of the Day -100: “Barber Out After Dick.” O.C. Barber of the Diamond Match Company – “America’s Match King” – will stump to rid the Republican Party of Old Guard types like Sen. Charles Dick.

Everyone’s a critic

I think it’s time to go to sleep. I just mis-read the WaPo as calling the flooding in Pakistan a tragedy of unimaginative proportion.

Today -100: August 17, 1910: Of Republicans and Roosevelt

Taft’s plans to change the leadership of the Republican party seem to have failed. Speaker Cannon in particular “is making it clearer every day that he intends to go down fighting and to do all the damage he can in the process.” The same could be said more or less of the entire Old Guard Republican leadership, who seem content to lose the 1910 elections if it means they retain control of the party in defeat. The Republican Party is fragmenting (which is fun to read even if it’s only in 1910, by the way) and “The use of the party whip to compel discipline in States where the insurgent sentiment has been growing has resulted disastrously in practically every instance.” Taft is simply too weak and uninfluential to hold the party together, especially with the return to America of Theodore Roosevelt. The old guard is trying to make Roosevelt, in the words of one anonymous party leader, “know his place,” and has just engineered his defeat for the post of temporary chairman of the NY state convention next month (evidently it’s more important than it sounds, if only symbolically) in favor of VP Sherman, who had worked hard to ensure the defeat of TR’s nephew, Theodore Douglas Robinson, for a state senate seat nomination, making the choice of him over TR especially insulting. TR, who is royally pissed off, will (probably) be at the convention as a delegate.

One “Roosevelt Republican,” insurgent Hiram Johnson, has won the first-ever direct primary for governor in California.

The NYPD has begun issuing photo i.d. cards to “persons of good character,” which will allow holders who break minor laws and city ordinances, especially while driving, to be served with a summons rather than be arrested. To get the card, applicants must send their personal details, employment and criminal history, with affidavits attesting to their character signed by three men who are over 21, not relatives, and not saloon-keepers.

He doesn’t have an American experience

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), responding to a constituent who called Obama a Muslim Marxist, said, “He’s at least a Marxist. And he surely understands the Muslim culture. ... He doesn’t have an American experience.” I love how merely understanding Muslim culture – pardon me, the Muslim culture – is elevated into something akin to treason. Yes, he understands stuff, let’s throw rocks at him.

Also, of course, King makes the assumption that Islam and “an American experience” are antithetical.

Also, Obama is a black man having abuse shouted at him by bigots – what experience is more American than that?

Mad Fucking Men

You know what I want to see? An episode of Mad Men written by David Mamet (that was his daughter as Peggy’s new friend in last night’s episode).

Today -100: August 16, 1910: Of infernal regions

Ohio Governor Judson Harmon sends the National Guard into Columbus, over the objections of the mayor. “When asked for his opinion of the new developments this evening, Mayor Marshall replied that he had nothing to say except that Gov. Harmon and Adjutant Gen. Weybrecht could go to the infernal regions.”

Today -100: August 15, 1910: Of trolleys, cayenne dough balls, popes and ladies with lamps

Violence in Columbus all day related to the trolley strike, with many rocks thrown. Also cayenne dough balls. And attempts to dynamite car sheds. Business groups are demanding the governor remove Mayor George Marshall from office for supposedly instigating the strike. The mayor has called for 2,000 volunteers to join the police force to put down disorder; precisely 0 have done so. The police have decided to stop arresting scabs who carry guns; “In consequence there was much firing by the strikebreakers to-day.”

The pope told a prominent (but unnamed) visitor that the Vatican doesn’t even have to respond to the government of Spain, because loyalty to the Church is such that PM Canalejas, who the pope said betrayed the Spanish nation, is likely to be removed by the Cortes. (Spoiler alert: he won’t be. He will continue in office two more years, until he is assassinated by anarchists).

Florence Nightingale dies. She was 90.

Speaking of lingering pains...

Sarah is at it again.


Those darn Muslims, always failing to show the proper tolerance of our intolerance!

Today -100: August 14, 1910: Of primaries, car accidents, and... Gaynor for President?

New Jersey’s former governor, E.C. Stokes, announces his candidacy for the US Senate. He will avail himself of the state’s 1907 Primary Act to put himself on the ballot of the Republican primary. Since senators were chosen by the Legislature, this is a voluntary act, and his rivals have not so far chosen to join him.

Since Mayor Gaynor seemed to have survived assassination, some people are talking about him as the next Democratic candidate for president. Or possibly for governor.

President Taft is paying to send the Italian laborer his son hit with his automobile on a lengthy vacation to Italy. Taft also paid his medical bills and gave him $500, more than he earned in a year.

From bias free of every kind, this trial must be tried

In the trial at Guantanamo of Omar Khadr, a colonel is removed from the jury for saying he agrees with Obama that Guantanamo should be closed. The prosecutor said he had “preconceived ideas that detainees were mistreated,” unlike the obvious open-mindedness of the jury members who said Guantanamo should remain open or the 7 jury members who have lost close friends in The War Against Terror (TWAT) – it is not clear how many of those 7 were among the officers who had volunteered to serve on the jury. More impressively, especially in the trial of a boy who was tortured into confessing, none of the jury members believe that the US ever tortures anyone into confessing.

NYT: “Much of the media tour is intended to convey that the 176 men the government is holding at Guantánamo are being treated humanely. Camp guards describe the curriculum for detainees, which includes a living-skills course on home budgeting and résumé writing.”

CONTEST: What advice might Omar Khadr and his fellow inmates have received on home budgeting and résumé writing?

Today -100: August 13, 1910: Of showers, trolleys, and conservationists

At a New York militia camp, members of Squadron C of Brooklyn are complaining about having to use the same showers as the Tenth Cavalry. Yes, the former are white, the latter black (New York state segregated its militia units?).

1/3 of Columbus cops are refusing to guard trolleys and the strikebreakers running them. They had been ordered to shoot anyone who refused orders to halt.

Interior Secretary Ballinger, who Taft is evidently planning to force out, tells the Commercial Club in Portland, Oregon that “The demagogue, the fanatic, the sentimentalist, the faddist are crusading under the banner of conservation”.

Today -100: August 12, 1910: Of the insanity defense, selfish farmers, and blowing up balloons

Gallagher’s lawyers intend to plead insanity for his assassination attempt on Mayor Gaynor.

A NYT editorial complains that farmers are organizing politically to defeat congresscritters who won’t pass pro-agriculture laws. The NYT does not like the idea of PACs, saying, “This puts politics frankly on a basis of selfishness, instead of patriotism. ... When farmers or unionists or Socialists or any other class of citizens seek any other object than the universal good they debase American citizenship.”

The German military tests field artillery against moving balloons, succeeds in blowing them up. The German military just likes to see children cry. And stuff blowing up. Actually, that does sound like a nice afternoon out.

George Bush and the Mangoes of Doom

Bush is back in Haiti, evidently suggesting that the way for Haiti to recover from the earthquake involves mangoes in some way.


Seriously, how does anyone see that face and not punch it? How is that even physically possible?


Which reminds me of the shoe-throwing incident in Iraq, which reminds me that I meant to note that two Pakistani tv stations were taken off the air for reporting that a grandfather in Birmingham threw one or both of his shoes at President Zardari, presumably in protest at his leaving Pakistan instead of staying to deal with the floods.

Today -100: August 11, 1910: Of planes, bicycles, cars and trolleys

The French military is running tests to see if military scouting airplanes can be shot by scouts on bicycles and automobiles. They can.

The Columbus, Ohio trolley strike continues, with lots and lots of violence, rioting, scabs beaten to death, dynamite found on the tracks, etc etc. But, interestingly, the city council refuses to appropriate money for extra police to protect the trolley company’s property unless it shows greater willingness to settle.

Minnesotans against moon gods

Lynne Torgerson wants you to know that the fact that she is running against Keith Ellison, who is black, doesn’t make her racist. Why she’s even dated black men and loves black cock (she may not have said the last bit). No, she’s running against Keith Ellison because he’s Muslim and worships “the moon god Allah” and wants to impose Sharia law, the end.

On the front page of her campaign website, you can click a link to buy the book Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That Is Conspiring to Islamize America.

Dead Ted Contest

News has reached me through a series of... well, you know... that Former Senator Ted Stevens has died in a plane crash. Contest: make fun of Ted Stevens in comments.

Too soon?

Today -100: August 10, 1910: He took away my bread and meat

NYC Mayor William Jay Gaynor has been shot. Fatally, sort of: he will actually continue walking around, doing the mayor thing, for more than three years before a bullet fragment (which was not removed from his throat) kills him. Gaynor was posing for pictures aboard the ship he was due to sail to Europe on when he was shot: the picture above captures that moment. The person behind and to the left of Gaynor must be Street Cleaning Commissioner “Big Bill” Edwards, “of Princeton football fame,” all 350 pounds of him, who tackled the assassin, a fired employee of the Dock Department named J.J. Gallagher. “He took away my bread and meat, I had to do it,” said Gallagher, who will die of syphilis in 1913, several months before his victim’s belated death.

Among many other stories on the shooting, the NYT has the scoop that Mrs. Gaynor (who seems not to have been accompanying the mayor to Europe) had a premonition when she woke up today that something was wrong.

Gaynor is the only New York mayor ever assassinated, before or since.

(The NYT had an article on the Gaynor assassination yesterday. Thanks for the spoiler, dudes.)

Two strikebreakers hired by the Central Vermont Railroad who were arrested for rioting in Connecticut turn out to be sons of prominent Pennsylvania lawyers, one of them a D.A., who “went into strikebreaking for the sake of adventure”. Naturally they were released without trial.