Today -100: March 3, 1911: Of hereditary power, Le Juif Déserteur, and racial melodrama

The House of Commons passes the bill removing the House of Lords’s veto power. Opposition leader Arthur Balfour gave a speech on the benefits of retaining hereditary power but said, “Let it be our servant; let it no longer be our master.” MPs laughed at him.

More theatrical disturbances in Paris, where a large mob fight the police while trying to storm the Théâtre-Français as Henri Bernstein’s “Après Mois” was being performed. Inside, 100 detectives (in evening dress) failed to prevent the usual disruptions, including exploding magnesium.

There’s a story about an 8-year-old white girl whose mother had left her when she was six months old with a “black mammy of the old type” and then went off to commit suicide. (A follow-up story says she was a 16-year-old chorus girl and did not actually commit suicide). Though the girl was well-cared for and happy, the authorities of course take her away. Read it if you want to be depressed for the rest of the day.

Until the last man and woman

Libyan clothes horse Muammar Qaddafi gave a 2½ hour speech today. He said that there had been “no peaceful demonstrations at all” in the last couple of weeks, and that no government officials have resigned. But then again, he says that he can’t resign either, because he doesn’t actually have any job – he’s the Sarah Palin of Libya – “I carried out a revolution in the 70s, handed over power to the people and then rested.” He does look very well rested, doesn’t he?


If foreign troops invade, they “will be entering hell and they will drown in blood.” But then again, he also says that about “whoever took the last Pop-Tart, which I was totally saving for a snack while watching Glee.” He will fight “until the last man and woman.” But not until the last voluptuous Ukrainian nurse, because she left last week.

He blamed the unrest – which totally doesn’t exist – on Al Qaida, which of course serves Western interests. Er, it’s all very subtle.

And then he got in the Qaddafi-mobile and left.

Today -100: March 2, 1911: Of senators

The lame-duck Senate declares William Lorimer (R-Illinois) duly elected by a vote of 46-40, despite the wide-scale bribery of state legislators in his 1909 election. Interestingly, he was supported by 36 Republicans and 10 Dems, and opposed by 22 R’s and 18 D’s. The Senate’s so-called investigation did not require Lorimer to testify. The vote is an interesting coda to yesterday’s vote against the popular election of senators.

Lorimer will eventually be expelled in the summer of 1912.

I am such a child

Me, trying to read an article by a Mormon about their magic underwear: “The Garments of the Holy Priesthood, or garments, as we call them for short, are simple underclothes that a member” snort giggle “of the church who has participated in the endowment ceremony...” HAHAHAHA!

Triangle

Hey, Today -100 fans, er, both of you: I should have mentioned that PBS aired a documentary last night on “American Experience” about the Triangle shirtwaist fire of 1911. Check local listings for the re-broadcasts. And there’ll be another doc on HBO on the 21st.

It was... okay. More time spent on the social conditions and the 1909-10 shirtwaist strike than on the actual fire, which is fine by me, although I got the impression it was mostly because they weren’t particularly interested in the factory workers themselves. I do have two objections. 1) I couldn’t tell which of the images they used were actually images of the things they were discussing and which were stock footage – were those firemen the actual ones trying to put out the fire at the Asch Building or just any old firemen from around that period? 2) They willfully obscured the fact that most of the Triangle workers were immigrants. None of the voiceover actors supposedly speaking the words of the survivors had so much as a trace of an accent. And when they talked about the Cooper Union meeting in 1909, they mentioned that Clara Lemlich stood up and gave a rousing speech that roused the meeting, against the wishes of Samuel Gompers and the other union leaders on the stage, into calling the strike, they even quoted some of her words, but failed to mention that they were given in Yiddish. Funny, that.

And of course check back here on March 26th for up-to-the-minute -100 coverage of the fire.

Today -100: March 1, 1911: Of senators, cowboys & Indians, and long-distance hypnotism

The proposed constitutional amendment for the direct election of senators falls 4 votes shy of the required 2/3 vote in the lame-duck Senate. Both parties were split on the subject, southern Democrats and New England Republicans accounting for most of the no vote.

A party of Shoshone Indians battles with the Nevada State Police. 8 of the former – some of them children – and 1 of the latter are killed, possibly because the Shoshones (actually the “squaws” in the group) used bows and arrows. The Shoshone had killed some ranchers.

Amateur hypnotist Fernando Loutzenheimer will attempt to hypnotize a subject over a long-distance telephone wire (NYC to Canton, Ohio).

Mercenaries & thugs

Hillary Clinton accuses Qaddafi of using “mercenaries and thugs” against protesters. Or as we call them, at least when they’re caught shooting people in Lahore, “our diplomats.”

She was lukewarm about the idea of Qaddafi going into exile because “accountability must be obtained for what he has done.” Again, unlike “our diplomats” or any other employee of the US government.

Also, Hillary, when you’re accusing someone of using excessive force, maybe you shouldn’t say about the US’s possible response that “nothing is off the table.”

Qaddafi, meanwhile, says that all the Libyan people love him and there have been no protests in Tripoli. So that’s okay then.

Grossest anti-Qaddafi chant: “The blood of martyrs won’t go to waste.”

Today -100: February 28, 1911: Of historiography

There is a furore in Virginia over the use in a mandatory history class at Roanoke College of Rev. Henry William Elson’s A History of the United States, which discusses how slave-owners used to fuck their female slaves (the NYT article quotes the relevant passage). Parents are ordering their daughters not to attend the class.

South Dakota’s new abortion law

I’m reading South Dakota’s new law to make women seeking abortions jump through hoops.

A woman with an unwanted pregnancy – or as the act puts it, “a pregnant mother considering termination of her relationship with her child by an abortion” – must go to a “pregnancy help center” (described in the act as having a central mission of helping “pregnant mothers” “maintain and keep their relationship with their unborn children”) for “counseling,” that is, to receive information she does not want about help she could receive if she didn’t have an abortion. By the way, the “problem” the bill claims to be addressing is that “In the overwhelming majority of cases, abortion surgery and medical abortions are scheduled for a pregnant mother without the mother first meeting and consulting with a physician or establishing a traditional physician-patient relationship.” Yes, South Dakota, that would be because you drove almost every abortion provider out of the state.

Also, the law claims, abortions are currently scheduled “without a medical or social assessment concerning the appropriateness [!!!] of such a procedure or whether the pregnant mother’s decision is truly voluntary, uncoerced, and informed”.

It asserts that “Such practices are contrary to the best interests of the pregnant mother and her child and there is a need to protect the pregnant mother’s interest in her relationship with her child and her health by passing remedial legislation”. See? they’re just protecting her interests.

Like the Oklahoma law of 2009, which claimed that the need to prevent sex-selection abortions required that abortion-seekers be asked loads of intrusive questions and their answers be put on the internet, South Dakota is also deeply concerned with women’s motives, asserting that doctors have a “common law duty to determine that the physician’s patient’s consent is voluntary and uncoerced and informed”. Which is why they need to be sent to pregnancy help centers to be coerced and misinformed.

The doctor, like the woman, must jump through time-wasting hoops, like meeting the woman “physically and personally” to assess not just her medical but also her “personal circumstances,” determining whether her decision to “submit to an abortion is the result of any coercion, subtle or otherwise.” Do they do subtle in South Dakota? Reading the language of this thing, I tend to doubt it. The doctor shall demand to know the age of the father and “shall determine whether any disparity in the age between the mother and father is a factor in creating an undue influence or coercion.”

Then the doctor has to send her to one of those centers, which will also cross-examine her for signs of coercion. The patient must then give the doctor “a written statement that she obtained a consultation with a pregnancy help center, which sets forth the name and address of the pregnancy help center, the date and time of the consultation, and the name of the counselor at the pregnancy help center with whom she consulted”. I’ll get back to this in a minute.

The state will maintain a list of pregnancy help centers, which for some reason seem to escape from the level of scrutiny and regulation imposed on doctors, or indeed any scrutiny or regulation at all (“Nothing in this Act may be construed to impose any duties or liability upon a pregnancy help center”) (such as a requirement that its counselors have any medical knowledge or indeed any training at all, or that they tell the truth). However, any center on the list must have as one of their “principal missions... to educate, counsel, and otherwise assist women to help them maintain their relationship with their unborn children”. And they can’t perform abortions, be affiliated with anyone who does, refer women for abortions, or have ever referred women for abortions since 2008. Yeah, those are definitely the people to keep a pregnant woman safe from coercion.

While the pregnancy help centers are supposed to determine if the woman is being coerced, they are “under no obligation to communicate with the abortion provider in any way,” even if they see signs of coercion, and are “under no obligation to submit any written or other form of confirmation that the pregnant mother consulted with the pregnancy help center.” Presumably because the centers which the legislators most want pregnant women to go to would refuse to cooperate in any way with satanic abortion mills.

If the doctor doesn’t follow the act’s provisions, any patient who has had an abortion can sue him/her for $10,000 plus attorney’s fees, plus any damages that “the woman or other survivors of the deceased unborn child may be entitled to receive under any common law or statutory provisions”. In such court cases, there will be a rebuttable presumption that if the doctor had made her jump through all the hoops, she would have decided not to have an abortion. If the court decides that someone coerced the woman, there will be a nonrebuttable presumption that she would have decided not to have an abortion.

Fortunately for pregnant women who don’t want to go to a “pregnancy help center” to have someone try to talk them out of their decision, the only real requirement the law puts on a patient is that she give the doctor a written statement that she went to a center, not that she actually go there. There is no enforcement in this act that applies to the patient. So my advice to them, as it was with the Oklahoma law, is to lie. Pick a center off the list at random, tell your doctor that you went there Tuesday and spoke with Susie. Lie, it’s an appropriate, ethical and legal response to this coercive, intrusive, obnoxious law.

Today -100: February 27, 1911: Of truces and holidays

There are reports that the Mexican government has made approaches to the rebels for a truce.

Fox News -100, or its yellow press equivalent, is all over this story: Milwaukee’s socialist mayor, Emil Seidel, recognizes Labor Day as a holiday, but kept his office open on Washington’s Birthday. The NYT does agree that there are too many damn holidays. We’re not like those lazy Mexican peons, people!

What I learned about Thurgood Marshall

from the HBO one-man play about him with Laurence Fishburne: his first wife was named “Buster,” his second wife was named Cissy.

Weird.

Today -100: February 26, 1911: Of extreme hobble gowns, despots, and lynchings

Pope Pius X comes out against various fashionable forms of women’s dress, including – and I have no idea what any of these somewhat alarming terms mean – the jupe-culotte, pneumonia blouses, harem skirts, sheath robes, and hobble gowns. He writes, “The fashions of these women – women, not ladies – would have had a most unfavorable judgment from pagan Roman matrons. ... In the old Roman days the demi-monde was publicly marked; but now even young women called ladies so dress that one class is mistaken for the other.” I think he’s saying those clothes make them look like whores.

The Socialist Party holds a women’s suffrage meeting in Carnegie Hall. The Times just can’t refrain from mentioning the clothing of the meeting’s chair, Anita Block (“a gown of the extreme ‘hobble’ variety”).

Norway will allow women to occupy state offices. Well, except for the Cabinet. And the military. And the diplomatic service. And the Church.

Lorin Collins, until two months ago a justice on the Panama Supreme Court (the Canal Zone’s Supreme Court, I assume), and before that Republican speaker of the house in the Illinois legislature, says that Taft is acting as a despot in Panama: “The president’s word, not the law, governs all and everything.”

Two negroes are lynched in Warrenton, Georgia.

Today -100: February 25, 1911: Of civil wars, racial/religious exclusion, trouser skirts, Le Juif Déserteur, and the Lusitania

Peace negotiations over the Honduran civil war are taking place on board the US warship Tacoma. The elected president Miguel Davila offered to resign in the interests of peace, if rebel former president Gen. Bonilla, who Davila correctly accuses of being an agent of the United Fruit Company, also withdraws as candidate for the post. So a temporary president might be appointed by... American special representative Thomas Dawson.

The Senate takes a break from making sure that Japanese laborers will continue to be excluded from the US under the new treaty with Japan (now ratified) to consider a resolution in favor of abrogating the 1832 treaty with Russia because of its exclusion of American citizens who are Jewish.

Parisian men have expressed their disapproval of the new fashion of trouser-skirts (trousers skirt, the NYT calls them) by mobbing and throwing eggs at women seen wearing them. French newspapers have been printing medical opinions for and against the style.

The fight over Henri Bernstein’s play “Après Mois” continues in Paris. Last night the police had to storm one of the theatre’s boxes, which had been barricaded from the inside by five Camelots du Roi in possession of car horns. When the Camelots were ejected, there were cries of “Down with the Jews” from their compatriots. That was during the first act. The second act was marked by the release of a flock of doves. Bernstein has written to Prime Minister Briand asking that the president of the Camelots, Lucien Lacour, be temporarily released from prison so that he and Bernstein can duel. Lacour is serving a sentence for slapping the same Prime Minister Briand (Lacour was elected president of the Camelots while in prison in honor of that act).

“The Cunarder Lusitania arrived late yesterday afternoon after one of the roughest voyage [sic] across the Atlantic she ever has experienced.” But not the roughest she will ever experience.

Today -100: February 24, 1911: Of Teddy and the women, Japanese exclusion, and Le Juif Déserteur

In Chicago, Theodore Roosevelt announces his support for women’s suffrage.

The Tafties reassure California that even under the new treaty with Japan, there won’t be any Japanese immigration, because Japan itself will continue to restrict emigration. Some Californian politicians are not reassured, though Gov. Hiram Johnson says, “California wants exclusion. President Taft says we will get it. That is enough for me.”

Members of the monarchist (and more or less proto-fascist) Camelots du Roi have been disrupting performances of Henri Bernstein’s play “Après Mois” at the Comédie-Française in Paris with shouts, car horns, whistles, etc. Everyone’s a critic. Actually, their problem is less with the content of the play than with Bernstein’s Jewishness and his desertion from the military as a young man. Newspapers have been attacking each other over the play, and many duel challenges have been issued, including several to and from Bernstein.

Guess who wants to start a war with Libya? No, go on, guess.

John McCain & Joe Lieberman, who you will be scared to hear are in the middle of a diplomatic tour of the Middle East, issued a statement about Libya yesterday, calling for “a no-fly zone to stop the Qaddafi regime’s use of airpower to attack Libyan civilians.” Obviously such a thing could only be enforced by a military force ready and willing to shoot down Libyan planes.

Today -100: February 23, 1911: Of annexation, and danger to our citizens, to our industrial development, and to our civilization1

The Canadian Parliament declares unanimously that Canada should not be annexed by the United States.

The California state senate unanimously demands that the US Senate reject the new US-Japanese treaty, calling the omission of a provision allowing the US to exclude Japanese immigrants “fraught with so much danger to our citizens, to our industrial development, and to our civilization.” The new governor, progressive Hiram Johnson, refuses to comment: “I don’t desire to discuss it.” Wimp.

Not to be confused with Ram Dass

“Pourmecoffee” on Twitter: “Rahm Emanuel wins Chicago Mayor. You may know him from previous job, trying to please Olympia Snowe and Joe Lieberman.”

So winning the votes of corpses is not a new experience for him.

A revolutionary from tents

Libya’s leader, Muammar Qocksucker (sometimes spelled Ghocksucker, Khacksukker, etc etc), went on tv to proclaim that he will “die a martyr” and “fight until the last drop of my blood.” A couple of days ago his son promised to “fight to the last bullet.” If only the last drop of the “colonel’s” blood leaked out as the last bullet thudded into his body, this could still have a happy ending.


In fact, he insisted that he hadn’t ordered “one bullet to be fired” yet, but “when I do, everything will burn.” So we have that to look forward to.


He declared himself “a fighter, a revolutionary from tents”. “Muammar is leader of the revolution until the end of time,” he predicted, and called on the people of Libya to come out and beat up the protesters.

He denounced protesters as “cockroaches,” “rats” and “mercenaries” “serving the devil,” as inspired by “bearded men” and as being “drug-fuelled, drunken and duped” (not necessarily in that order). He said, “Muammar Qaddafi is history, resistance, liberty, glory, revolution” (he personally wrote Libya’s official thesaurus). If only he had stopped after the first four words.

Today -100: February 22, 1911: Of peers, dancing in Flushing, the black line, and running over dogs

British Tory Party leader Balfour says he will consent to removing the House of Lords’ veto power only if any measure of Irish Home Rule is submitted to a popular referendum.

Irish Nationalist MPs will boycott George V’s coronation ceremonies.

The Taft admin has sprung a proposed treaty with Japan on a Senate that evidently didn’t know it was being negotiated. It’s much like the expiring 1894 treaty but leaves out the provision requiring Japan to accept American racial exclusion laws. The Tafties want it ratified quickly, hoping the Californian delegation won’t provoke the usual racist agitation while the lucrative 1915 Pacific-Panama Exposition can still be taken away from San Francisco.

The Flushing Association (an organization of the hoity toity of Flushing)(which would be a great name for a rock band) calls on the Board of Education to eliminate dancing in public schools. It’s not the dancing they object to per se, it’s that black and white pupils might be required to dance... together.

But how do you determine that all-important question, who is white and who is black? “In an endeavor to determine scientifically the race of a child, staff physicians at Johns Hopkins Hospital to-day made an examination of Luella Loftridge, an eleven-year-old girl, who is trying to obtain her freedom from a negro institution in which she has been confined for nearly seven years. The examination, it was said, did not settle the question, and the lawyers for the girl declared that there would be no cessation of the fight for her release. ... The physical characteristics by which physicians are said to be able to detect the presence of negro blood, but which are held by some authorities to be utterly valueless, played a large part in the examination. The main point to be settled – one that has been the subject of unlimited debate for decades – is what can really be considered the line of demarkation between a white person and a negro. In the present case it was stated that all the accepted tests for the presence of negro blood, save one, had failed. That one is the presence of a black line across one of the girl’s fingernails”. Neither Google nor the NYT index shed any light on the subsequent fate of Luella Loftridge.

Playwright Henri Bernstein asked the leading actress in his play “Après Mois” in the Comédie-Française in Paris to wear a trousers skirt. This set off a scandal at the public dress rehearsal (spoiler alert: not the last scandal associated with this performance – keep watching this spot!). The American ambassador was heard to exclaim, “Gee whiz!” The offending garment will no longer be displayed.

A letter to the editor from guest publication The Car in Britain, written by George Bernard Shaw, entering a discussion in that periodical on what to do when one runs over a dog (I’m folding in a follow-up later in the March 15th issue)(um, the squeamish might stop reading at this point). GBS says that he has been in a car, driven by himself or his chauffeur, on 13 occasions when it has killed a dog. In one incident, his driver ran over the dog of an 8-year-old girl. They stopped, but “When the begoggled monster who had just killed her dog approached her, possibly with the intention of continuing his fell work, she went into screaming hysterics”. So he suggests that the most tactful thing to do is “withdraw as rapidly as possible”, although he does confine that advice to dogs: “On the whole, when you kill a human being, stop.” He disagrees with those authors of letters to The Car who point out “that the motorist who runs away loses an opportunity of demonstrating that he is a gentleman, and thereby defeats the main purpose for which, in the opinion of many respectable Englishmen, the universe was created.”

Scolding of the Day

Hillary Clinton to Libya: “Now is the time to stop this unacceptable bloodshed.”

There are days when I think that every public figure is just as batshit insane as Glenn Beck, or at least morally insane, but some of them are just capable of hiding it better. I suspect Hillary has two large blackboards in her office, on one of which there is a list of acceptable bloodshed and on the other a list of unacceptable bloodshed.