Today -100: March 14, 1912: Of stupid and fantastic stories

President Taft is (finally) planning to get Congress to ban the sale of arms and munitions to the combatants in the civil war in Mexico.

Some of the British suffragettes who broke windows are sentenced to 4- and 6-month prison terms.

The Cuban government asked its ambassador to get a statement from President Taft about “rumors” that the US planned to invade it again (those rumors possibly caused by Secretary of State Knox having threatened that very thing in January). Taft responds: “The United States cannot be expected to take the trouble to deny all the foolish gossip which is, unfortunately, spread about its foreign relations. It should be understood in Havana that whenever the United States has anything to say about her relations with Cuba it will be said by the President or the Secretary of State. ... I am astonished to learn from you of the stupid and fantastic stories which are being circulated in some circles in Havana to the effect that intervention is being planned... [rumors which are] all the more surprising and reprehensible in view of the transparent politics of the United States. The Government of the United States, as an act of friendship, has indicated where dangers are and has adopted what has been well called a ‘preventive policy,’ that is, a policy which consists in doing all within its power to induce Cuba to avoid every reason that would make intervention possible at any time.” Yeah, I can’t see how stupid and fantastic stories about American intervention could start.

Striking corset workers (which sounds like something out of some sort of historical porno) in Kalamazoo, hit with a court order against picketing, are instead praying outside the factory (praying that scabs join the strike).

NY Governor John Dix, a Democrat, “has put on war paint” in preparations for battle with the Democratic/Tammany machine, which has just defeated his nominee for a position on the Public Service Commission for the 2nd district, which was I guess Boss Murphy’s attempt to show Dix who really runs things.

The huge Lawrence, Mass. mill strike is finally over, after two months, the IWW agreeing with textile mill owners to a pay increase of 5 to 25% (the lower-paid workers getting the largest increases).

Headline of the Day -100: “20th Century Goes into River.” Not a metaphor, apparently: the 20th Century was the train between Chicago and NYC.

Caption contest

Barack Obama, having evidently borrowed Romney’s Casual Shirt, took British Prime Minister David Cameron to a basketball game today. Did they shove phallic-shaped food-adjacent objects into their mouths? Yes, yes they did.

Today -100: March 13, 1912: Of feathers in France

Headline of the Day -100: “France Won’t Ban Feathers.”

Today -100: March 12, 1912: Of young suffragists and doggies

The Tennessee Legislature (which in 8 years will be the state that puts the 19th Amendment over the top) hears its first speech in support of women’s suffrage. It’s by Anna Hooper, the 9-year-old daughter of the governor. She notes that ignorant men are allowed to vote (as long as they’re white, she doesn’t say), but educated women are not. (Except for the fact that Anna was the youngest delegate to the 1924 Republican convention and that she died at age 100, I can find out nothing about her.)

Headline of the Day -100: “Peary’s Opinion of Dog Meat.” Admiral Peary thinks the... catering... on the Amundsen expedition, while “not a regular item on the polar bill of fare... comes enough as a matter of course not to be thought of either as a delicacy or as particularly hard rations.” And dogs have the advantage over ponies that when one dies, its body can be eaten by both men and dogs, while ponies can be eaten by the men but not by thee surviving ponies.

Today -100: March 11, 1912: Of coal and mules

With Prussian and French colliers about to join their British brethren on strike, and an anthracite miners’ strike threatened in Pennsylvania, the coal strike is rapidly going global.

Headline of the Day -100: “Cabinet on Mules Goes to See Knox.” The Honduran cabinet, taking a five-day round trip out of their no doubt busy schedules, because for some reason Secretary of State Knox couldn’t get from the port of Amapala to the capital. The NYT notes that Knox “had no special mission” in Honduras. He is now on his way to Salvador, which is evidently what gringos called El Salvador back then.

Today -100: March 10, 1912: Of the higher interests of art, spanking suffragettes, and ignoring primaries

A Munich jury acquits French dancer Adorée Villany of giving an immoral performance, deciding that she danced nekkid in “the higher interests of art.”


The Kentucky Legislature passes a bill for women’s suffrage for school board elections. Unlike male electors, women would have to be able to read and write.

Headline of the Day -100 (LA Times), on the subject of the British suffragettes: “‘Spank Them,’ Is Cry in London.” Or at least, that’s the cry “in first-class smoking compartments” (the equivalent of Thomas Friedman’s wisdom-spouting taxi drivers, I guess).

Sen. Leroy Percy (D-Miss.) refuses the Mississippi Legislature’s demand that he resign his seat. He says that his offer to resign if he lost a primary was restricted to 1910, and the primary was held in 1911.

Today -100: March 9, 1912: Of lynchers of nations, poles, and tyranny & confusion

Secretary of State Philander Knox is still touring Latin America, and while reporting is spotty, the trip doesn’t seem to be going that well. Nicaragua had to deploy troops to keep him safe and Costa Rica’s leading newspaper called him “the lyncher of nations.”

The NYT publishes Amundsen’s account of his polar expedition, with stern warnings for anyone who even thinks of violating their copyright. Warning: many dogs are killed and eaten in this story (Amundsen says they were delicious).

Norwegians may have discovered the South Pole, but under international law they don’t own it unless they also occupy it.

President Taft gives a speech in Toledo attacking Roosevelt’s idea of recall of judges as leading to tyranny and confusion.

Today -100: March 8, 1912: The whole world has now been discovered

The Senate passes the arbitration treaties with Britain and France, after gutting them to the point of making them meaningless. The NYT blames Roosevelt.

The Ohio constitutional convention votes to put women’s suffrage on the ballot in November.

A NYT editorial on British suffragette Christabel Pankhurst compares her disappearance to that of the Mona Lisa, and refers to her no fewer than three times as “little” (or “diminutive but tremendously aggressive”). It says that “No sane person can sympathize with the recent violent actions of the British suffragettes” at a time when there are a lot of strikes in Britain.

The NYT says of the Amundsen Antarctic expedition, “The whole world has now been discovered.” The head of the University of Chicago geology department says the discovery of the South Pole means that long-term weather predictions are now possible.

Headline of the Day -100: “Telephone Lines at War.” Rivalry between telephone companies leads one to cut off Hope, Blairstown and Belvidere, NJ.

The LAT reports under the headline “Disposing of a Leper” that John Early (we have encountered him before) will be “allowed to find a refuge” on tiny Eagle Island, Washington, by a federal government which feels no obligation to pay for his maintenance while he is involuntarily confined in this refuge. Also, he can’t cut down the trees, which help steamers in the fog somehow.

Today -100: March 7, 1912: Of airships, fugitives, and poles

Another advance in civilization: dirigibles are used in warfare for the first time, as Italian airships drop bombs in Libya.

The British police have so far failed to find and arrest suffragette leader Christabel Pankhurst, and will continue to do so (“They seek her here, they seek her there... that damned elusive Christabel”), possibly because when they raided WSPU headquarters yesterday she was on the roof. She is, in fact, now making her way to Paris, from where she will continue to general the militant wing of the suffrage movement (some of the militant wing; they were rather prone to splits) until the Great War begins.

Remember Capt. Lux, the French spy who escaped from a German fortress at the end of last year? He has been cited to appear at a local court in Germany for failure to pay a baker for the cakes he ate as a prisoner. Lux says he left a check in his cell which should more than cover it.

In honor of the forthcoming visit of US Secretary of State Philander Knox, Nicaragua locks up 100 opposition types, including the editorial staffs of two newspapers, which had suggested that an appropriate welcome for Knox would be dynamite.

Capt. Roald Amundsen has returned from the South Pole. The NYT seems to think that instead of having their sleds pulled by dogs, the Norwegians had trained polar bears.

Loaded term

I was gonna analyze Eric Holder’s state-sponsored-assassination-is-not-only-perfectly-legal-but-also-way-cool speech, but I ran into the problem that it was filled with words and terms I thought I knew the meaning of, but which Holder either stripped of meaning entirely or used to designate something entirely different from my understanding of those words: clear authority, robust oversight, due process, core Executive functions, and so on. It’s hard to debate with someone when you don’t share a common language (although seek out – because I need a nap and don’t feel like looking up the URLs – the responses of Glenn Greenwald, Charles Davis, Charles Pierce, and the ACLU).

My favorite bit, because it was so very like George Bush insisting that the US does not torture because when the US does it, it’s called something else, was where Holder insisted that the killing of people in foreign countries is not “assassinations.” “They are not, and the use of that loaded term is misplaced. Assassinations are unlawful killings.” Instead, this is “use of lethal force in self defense”.

So that’s okay then.

Today -100: March 6, 1912: Of primaries, retired presidents-for-life, and raids

Both houses of the Mississippi Legislature pass a resolution asking US Senator Leroy Percy (D) to resign, which he had promised to do if he lost the primary, which he did, last August, to racist pig and former governor James Vardaman. Of course, this is before the 17th Amendment, so the primary was entirely advisory, and Percy had proposed holding it in the first place. There was only a primary, no general election, so only the Democrats – the white Democrats – were asked to express their opinion.

The chairman of Roosevelt’s campaign committee, Sen. Joseph Dixon, challenges Taft’s chair (William McKinley, evidently no relation to the president) to primaries in every state to see just which candidate Republicans in the country actually prefer. McKinley asks whether Dixon has authority from TR to issue such a challenge.

Former Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz, in... retirement... on the French Riviera, denies that he plans to return to take a role in the ongoing revolution: “I have no intention of intervening in the strife of the parties, especially while they have not recovered their reason.”

London police raid the headquarters of the Women’s Social and Political Union, the suffrage organization responsible for all the window-breaking, and arrest all the leaders they can find (including Christabel Pankhurst, the NYT mistakenly reports). Public buildings, including the British Museum, have been closed, because who knows what the suffragettes will break next. Insurance companies are issuing special window-breaking-by-suffragettes policies (damage from riot is not ordinarily covered by insurance, so those department stores are shit out of luck). The London Times suggests that the government seize the WSPU’s funds. The Daily Express says, “We are all tired to death of the Suffragists.” One of the 150 or so suffragettes apprehended for window-breaking is American sculptor Alice Wright. The NYT asks a class-mate of hers at Smith if she’s pretty. Yes. As pretty as Inez Milholland (American suffragist pin-up)? No.

Oh, and today is evidently the 100th anniversary of the Oreo.

Better to be a dic.... tator than to su... oh, never mind

Berlarus dictator Lukashenko says “it’s better to be a dictator than gay.” Though, to be fair, being a dictator is probably pretty awesome.

Today -100: March 5, 1912: Well, he was pretty young to be stabbed

The House Rules Committee hears witnesses from Lawrence, Mass. about the conditions in the mill town that led to the current strike, which has been going on for seven weeks. The witnesses included 13 children, who testified about police beatings of women and children during the strike. Rep. Thomas Hardwick (D-Georgia) demanded that one witness, Samuel Lipsom, an immigrant from... somewhere... provide names of victims of police violence. Lipsom said that a Syrian boy had been stabbed. “Is that boy here?” “He’s stabbed – dead – to death. He was running away when the soldier stabbed him.” “How old was he?” “He was 16 to 20 years old.” “Then he wasn’t a child?” “Well, he was pretty young to be stabbed.”

The office of Massachusetts Governor Foss responds to a NYT inquiry about this testimony and admits that the not-child was killed by a bayonet stab; he was “in a mob which refused to disperse.” The reply blamed the violence against women on the strikers, who put them in the front. It says that some of the strikers have “slapped the soldiers in the face and thrown pepper in their eyes” and that the soldiers have not used undue force or clubbed any women or children.

Today -100: March 4, 1912: Of war dead, child’s garments, quiet suffragettes, women in trousers, and oddies

Italy admits to 536 dead in its little imperial war in Libya and 324 missing (note: the story’s headline gives a total of 660 instead of 860, suggesting either the Times’s math sucks or one of those numbers is a typo).

Woodrow Wilson calls the Republicans’ beloved protective tariffs “a child’s garment, not that of a man. We have outgrown it.”

Headline of the Day -100: “6,000 Police to Keep Suffragettes Quiet.” As if. British suffragettes in prison for the last bit of window-breaking have been breaking the windows in their cells.

For no particular reason, the LAT gives a list of the privileges women are granted in Kansas. They can keep their maiden names, own her own property, hold any government office, and can wear men’s trousers, as long as she doesn’t pretend to be a man (men cannot wear dresses in public).

The governor of Nevada in 1912 was named Tasker L. Oddie. That is all.

Today -100: March 3, 1912: Of non-interference, negro terror and rice, losing it at the movies, and whippings

President Taft issues a proclamation ordering everyone in the United States to refrain from interfering in Mexican affairs (except for the people selling arms to both sides, obviously, because capitalism is capitalism), and to be prepared to evacuate the country.

Headline of the Day -100: “Negro Terror May Shorten Rice Crop.” The “negro terror” is due to the voodoo sacrifice cult killing people in Louisiana and eastern Texas. A cop just killed a “negro faker” selling charms to ward off the cult’s killers. The NYT often uses local stringers for stories like this; you can tell by the use of the phrase “superstitious darkies” and the fact that the headline focused on agricultural matters and not on, say, the 31 murdered African-Americans. The Times notes that white planters are worried that the blacks are arming themselves against the axe killers and that after the sect fades away, the blacks “will be left with weapons any time the so-called race question bobs up.”

The NYT claims that a 3-year-old boy in New Orleans died due to over-excitement from an exceptionally stimulating cowboys-and-Indians movie.

French missionaries are massacred in the fighting in Beijing.

A Delaware man convicted of burglary is sentenced to 14 years and 70 lashes (40 yesterday, the other 30 a week later).

The prime minister does not have meetings on horses

In Britain, Horsegate continues, hilariously. David Cameron finally admits to having ridden Raisa the horse. Here are just some of the quotes from various people in The Guardian story about this:

“I think my staff have had to answer a lot of questions about horses.”

“I don’t think I will be getting back into the saddle any time soon.” (Update: the full quote is actually “I am very sorry to hear that Raisa is no longer with us and I think I should conclude that I won’t be getting back into the saddle any time soon.” Although David Cameron trying to ride a dead horse would be a good metaphor for something or other.)

“The prime minister does not wear pyjamas on the back of a horse.”

“The prime minister does not have meetings on horses.”

(The Independent deserves special mention for using the phrase “mounting criticism” in a headline).

Jumping the gun a little bit there

At a campaign event at ABC Home and Carpet in New York City yesterday, Obama was interrupted by a heckler right after he claimed that the US is “leading, again, by the power of our moral example,” give or take a few hundred drone strikes. The White House transcript has the heckler just saying “No more war!” although reporters say (and it’s what I hear too) it was “No war on Iran” – an interesting alteration.

He responded, waggling his finger, “None of this -- nobody has announced a war, young lady. (Applause.) But we appreciate your sentiment. (Applause.) You’re jumping the gun a little bit there. (Applause.)”

So remember, the time to oppose a stupid war is always after it has already started.

Today -100: March 2, 1912: Of maenads and parachutes

British suffragettes (“Mrs. Pankhurst and her maenads” as the London Times calls them) break windows in the West End of London. Lots and lots of windows. Shops, clubs, government offices, you name it. The London Times says it is a sign of despair, given the “obvious movement of public opinion from indifference to hostility”.

For the first time, someone parachutes from an airplane. Capt. Albert Berry, who has experience parachuting from balloons, is the son of balloonist Capt. John Berry. In a heartwarming sidebar, father and son were reunited after 20 years when John read in the newspapers about Albert going on trial for his part in the Coatesville lynching last year. So okay, maybe not that heartwarming.

Daily Telegraphy: The Witches of Windsor

Tomorrow’s Telegraph brings us one of the odder British political scandals: “David Cameron ‘Likely’ to Have Ridden Rebekah Brooks’ Ex-Police Horse, Number 10 Says.” The cosiness between the Metropolitan Police and Murdoch’s News International (elsewhere we learn that the assistant commissioner who refused to reopen the phone hacking investigation was fed expensive meals and lots of champagne at posh clubs by his good friend, the deputy editor of the News of the World) extended to the Met “lending” NoTW editor Brooks a retired police horse named Raisa and now it seems that Cameron probably rode Raisa but not, he insists, after he became PM. I especially like the triptych that accompanies the article:


In Mannheim, Germany, Google Street View captured the image of a naked man climbing into a car trunk, but really, who hasn’t done that?


But the Daily Telegraph Headline of the Day has to be “Witchcraft Is Growing Threat to Children in Britain, Warn Police.” A Congolese family in London killed a 15-year-old family member because he was a witch. Given the “Satanic ritual abuse” panics of the 1980s, I’d take police warnings about this with a grain of salt, but what really makes this the Headline of the Day is the layout of the front page:

Today -100: March 1, 1912: Of censors and partitions

British playwright Lawrence Cowen, after having his play Tricked banned by the official censor (the Lord Chamberlain), resubmits it under the title Quits, with new character names but otherwise exactly the same, and has it approved.

US Attorney General George Wickersham is trying to get the American Bar Association to rescind its decision to expel Assistant Attorney General William Lewis for the malfeasance of being a negro. When he was elected to membership, “His color was not the subject of inquiry.” Some Southern members of the Bar Association have been saying that he applied under false pretenses. Mind you, he didn’t say that he was white, so the false pretenses are presumably that any negro must under all circumstances announce themselves as such.

Germany, Britain, Russia and Japan have agreed to principles proposed by US Secretary of State Philander Knox regarding China: no power is to grab territory from China or make loans to it (the main non-gunboat means of gaining control over a country’s policies) without agreement from the other powers. There is some fear that China’s weakness due to its revolution (there is currently shooting in Beijing) will lead to a scramble to partition it.