Today -100: March 6, 1911: Of lynchings, and the Socialistic Republic of Lower California

A black man is murdered by a mob in Marianna, Florida, after threatening to shoot the town marshal. The mob broke in the jail door to get at him.

Railroad firemen on the Cincinnati, New Orleans & Texas Pacific Railroad are voting on whether to call a strike against the practice of promotion by seniority. Because under it, black people can be promoted. And we can’t have that.

The NYT is worried about a medium-sized “army,” largely consisting of Americans, now in the Chihuahua region with the intention of turning Lower California into a “socialistic republic,” which would eventually join the United States.

It’s time to give Caesar what is owed Caesar

Sharia law, Cajun style: a 78-year-old convicted child molester was castrated as a condition for parole in Louisiana. Because mutilating old men is how they roll down there. His prostate cancer delayed the operation, but finally the judge insisted that “it’s time to give Caesar what Caesar is owed,” which is evidently one wrinkly old penis. “They tell me it’s comparable to having your wisdom teeth pulled,” says Maj. Richie Johnson of the West Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office. I’m pretty sure having your wisdom teeth pulled and having your dick, um, pulled are actually in no way comparable, but I’m loathe to argue the subject with someone named Major Johnson.

Update: the CBS story on this begins “Convicted pedophile Francis Tullier, 78, cut his prison sentence in half - and that’s not all”.

The operation (a medically unnecessary procedure for which some doctor needs to lose his license) was performed at the Earl K. Long Medical Center. Which looks like this:


Just saying.

Today -100: March 5, 1911: Of Le Juif Déserteur, truces, populistic heresies

The French prime minister praises Henri Bernstein for withdrawing his play, but the violence does not end. The son of the the Comédie-Française’s director fights a duel with the editor of the Camelots du Roi organ L’Action Française. They exchanged four bullets before moving on to rapiers. The son guy got injured. The NYT says that the whole brouhaha couldn’t happen here: “if any representatives of the lawless tried to disturb a performance of a play they would be suppressed, partly by efficient police, largely by the opposition of playgoers in general to rude conduct in theatres. We do not even hiss plays here.”

The Honduran peace conference between the government and rebels agrees on a provisional president, pending new elections in October, so the US envoy doesn’t have to pick one for them. Dr. Francisco Bertrand is a backer of the former president and current rebel leader Manuel Bonilla. His cabinet will consist of equal numbers of men from both sides. There will be an amnesty and the government will pay the war expenses of both sides.

On the last, remarkably foul-tempered day of the lame-duck Congressional session (though Taft plans to call a special session of the newly elected Congress to vote on the dreaded Canadian reciprocity treaty), Sen. Robert Owen (D-OK) filibusters everything in sight to prevent the admission to statehood of Republican New Mexico unless Democratic Arizona is admitted at the same time. He wins that, but the final bill for both territories falls short of the necessary 2/3 vote (45-39).

Then, Sen. Joseph Weldon Bailey (D-TX), who once beat up another senator during a debate, melodramatically resigns – or tries to resign – from the Senate in fury at his fellow Democrats for voting for the Arizona constitution despite the inclusion of provisions for initiative, referendum and recall, which he calls “populistic heresies” in his resignation telegram to the governor of Texas. He had to send that telegram because Vice President Sherman, presiding over the Senate, refused to accept his resignation. The governor didn’t accept it either. Bailey later calmed down and rescinded his resignation, accepting the Democratic senators’ explanation that they also hate those provisions but wanted to let the people of Arizona decide for themselves.

The immigration authorities prevented a ship smuggling “contraband” Chinese coolies landing at San Pedro, shooting at the launch. So the coolies were dumped into the Pacific Ocean and drowned instead. The same thing happened two weeks ago, so they knew what might happen when they stopped it from landing.

Today -100: March 4, 1911: Of leather insurgents, electrical trusts, banker belling, and Le Juif Déserteur

Headline of the Day -100: “Leather Insurgents Gain Part Victory.” Some court case by stockholders in the Central Leather Company. Whatever. But: leather insurgents!

Speaking of insurgents, Francisco Madero is demanding the city of Chihuahua surrender or be starved into submission.

The federal government sues to dissolve the “electrical trust,” 34 companies centered on General Electric and the National Electric Lamp Company, which has gained control of 97% of the 80 million lamps sold annually in the US since the patent on carbon filament incandescent lights expired in 1904. One tactic: setting up fake “independent” companies to sell inferior lamps to damage the reputation of real independents.

Headline, er, Other Headline of the Day -100: “Term in Prison for Banker Belling.” Sadly, it turns out to be a banker named Charles Belling (for forgery); there was not a crime of banker-belling.

Henri Bernstein withdraws “Après Mois” from the Comédie-Française, saying he does not wish to be responsible for more bloodshed.

We had a good meeting, and the conversation will continue.

You know how you can tell that the White House-Congressional meeting on the budget went really, really, really well? Joe Biden’s statement afterwards is just ten words long.

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.