Today -100: May 15, 1912: Of spectacular candidates, crooks, red flags, and dead kings

Roosevelt wins the California primary, on a low turnout, coming in first in every county but San Joaquin, where La Follette wins. The NYT blames TR’s strong showing on women, voting in their first presidential election in the state, saying they “voted for the spectacular candidate.” Champ Clark wins the D. primary with more than twice the number of votes as Woodrow Wilson.

In Steubenville, Ohio, Roosevelt denies the class warfare charge: “I preach hatred toward no class except the class of crooks – political crooks or financial crooks, big crooks or little crooks. Even then I do not preach hatred of the crook himself, but of his crookedness.”

Mexican President Madero is “highly elated” over Gen. Huerta’s victory over the Orozco rebellion. So that’s okay then.

Seattle bans the carrying of any flag (i.e., the red flag) other than that of the United States. All parades must be lead by an American flag no smaller than 54 X 66 inches.

King Frederik VIII of Denmark dies on a visit to Germany. He is best known for the song “I’m Freddy the Eighth, I Am, I Am,” probably.

Today -100: May 14, 1912: Of amendments, dancing, outrageous romantic lying, and honeyfugling

The Senate Judiciary Committee votes for a Constitutional amendment changing the presidency to a single 6-year term. Yes, it’s aimed at Roosevelt (the NYT editorializes that the notion of a president not being eligible for re-election must have gained “great multitudes of conversions” in the last month). One argument against the amendment is that the American people should be forced to pay attention to public business more often than sexennially.

The House passes a resolution in favor of another Constitutional amendment, for the direct election of senators. It includes a provision for federal supervision of elections, which Southern racists, i.e. the entire Southern delegation, oppose, joined by only two Republicans, Knowland and Kahn, for equally racist (anti-Japanese) reasons.

Italy has succeeded in closing off the Aegean, preventing Turkey sending ships & troops to Libya.

Paraguay defeats a rebellion led by ex-President Alvino Jara, who is killed.

The Methodist church’s conference decides against allowing dancing.

George Bernard Shaw writes to the Daily News against the “explosion of outrageous romantic lying” by journalists and others about the Titanic to fulfill the narrative demands of “romance in a shipwreck,” which filled news reports whether true or not. These demands: That the captain must be a superhero, “a living guarantee that the wreck was nobody’s fault”. “Such a man Captain Smith was enthusiastically proclaimed on the day when it was reported that he had shot himself on the bridge, or shot the first officer, or been shot by the first officer, or shot anyhow to bring the curtain down effectively.” “The officers must be calm, proud, steady, unmoved in the intervals of shooting the terrified foreigners.” Everybody must face death without a tremor, though in reality the crew didn’t tell the passengers that the ship was sinking to prevent a panic, and the band was ordered to play Ragtime to reassure the passengers.

Arthur Conan Doyle naturally responded in the same paper a week later, singing paeans to those very romantic demands. The officers did do their duty and Shaw “tries to defile the beautiful incident of the band by alleging it was the result of orders issued to avert panic.” Shaw responded “there is no heroism in being drowned when you cannot help it.”

Your Old-Timey Vocabulary Word of the Day (from a Taft speech in Ohio): honeyfugle. To deceive or swindle.

The contrasting features of both genders

In 2004, Twitt Romney testified to Congress against gay marriage: “The children of America have the right to have a mother and a father.” It’s always bizarre when social reactionaries use the language of “rights,” isn’t it? “Of course, even today, circumstances can take a parent from the home, but the child still has a mother and a father. If the parents are unmarried or divorced, the child can visit each of them. If a mother or a father is deceased, the child can learn about the qualities of their departed parent. His or her psychological development can still be influenced by the contrasting features of both genders.”

The contrasting features of both genders. I’ve said this before: homophobia is a subset of sexism.

Today -100: May 13, 1912: Of wet corpses, butt missions, duels, and horse thieves

The Titanic’s bodies are still being recovered, four weeks after the sinking.

President Taft thinks “there is a conspiracy for the purpose of arousing religious prejudice against me.” Specifically, anti-Catholic prejudice, with claims that Taft is favoring the Catholic church. Taft himself is a Unitarian, but there were rumors that Major Butt was in Europe on a mission from the president to the Vatican (sub-hed for this story: “‘Butt Mission’ a Falsehood”) and that Taft wired congratulations to the new Apostolic Delegate, both of which he denies. But he did countermand an order by the Indian Commissioner banning nuns wearing their habits when teaching in Indian schools.

Theodore Roosevelt sweeps the Minnesota primaries.

In a duel in Hungary, one of the duelists accidentally chops off the hand of one of the seconds, who didn’t get out of the way fast enough when the duel started.

Italy extends the franchise to illiterates (over the age of 30).

I seem to have missed a story last week where the San Diego police killed Joseph Mikolasek, an IWW member (who came after the cop with an ax, if the LA Times and the SD police are to be believed, which they probably aren’t)(Update: a quick Google search tells me that Mikolasek was either 1) shot by cops in his own home, 2) shot down in front of IWW hq, or 3) died in jail. Thanks a lot, Google). Anyway, the IWW plans a procession (with the body) to protest the death, tomorrow. But today, the grand marshal is arrested as a horse thief.

Today -100: May 12, 1912: Of senators, serial killers, red flags, automobile brigands, dueling, and unwanted Canada

The House will vote next week on a constitutional amendment for the popular election of US senators. But evidently 9 Pacific Coast congresscritters will vote against it in exchange for Southerners voting against abolishing the mints at San Francisco and Carson City.

Remember the Atlanta Jack the Ripper? Just killed his 20th black woman, or “comely yellow girl,” as the NYT puts it.

Indianapolis Police Superintendent Martin Hyland bans red flags from tomorrow’s socialist parade (there’s a, um, National Socialist Convention).

The NYT claims the Paris automobile bandits (or “automobile brigands” – we don’t use the word brigand enough these days) are actually anarchists.

The German Reichstag’s Budget Committee asks the chancellor to wipe out the practice of dueling in the army.

Headline of the Day -100: “Roosevelt Denies He Wanted Canada.”

Today -100: May 11, 1912: Of yellow perils, veterans, draft riots, and dancing

The Dillingham Immigration Bill, passed by the Senate but not the House, would add a literacy requirement for male immigrants, and, they’ve just noticed, would probably accidentally remove the enforcement mechanism for the exclusion of Chinese, because Chinese immigrants would now only have to carry the same papers as other immigrants, not ones with their picture, as under previous racist immigration laws, which also provided for immediate deportation of any Chinese immigrant found without their papers on them, and it would abolish the provision that they prove, by the testimony of two white witnesses, that they were in the country legally before the first Chinese exclusion act of 1892.

The House votes 175-57 for pensions for every Civil War veteran 62 and older (I guess former child soldiers are screwed) who served at least 3 months. An amendment to segregate negro veterans in separate but no doubt equal old soldiers’ homes was defeated 137-43. The 43 were all Democrats.

Charles Appleby, 88, is suing the city of New York for damages to his property, the Hotel Allerton, which was burned down during the draft riots of 1863 (plus 50 years’ interest).

The barber of severe conservatism

Today -100: May 10, 1912: Of black perils, home rule, imperious ambitions, vanities, and mysterious antipathies, and ham strikes

South African Prime Minister Louis Botha announces there will be a commission into the “black peril.”

The Irish Home Rule Bill passes its second reading in Parliament 372-271.

There is a rumor that Theodore Roosevelt plans to be a delegate at the Republican National Convention.

Secretary of State Philander Knox, in a speech in L.A., says Theodore Roosevelt is a man “prompted by whims” and of “imperious ambitions, vanities, and mysterious antipathies.” And your point is? He attacks TR’s “new nationalism” as an assault on the autonomy of the states that might lead to a new civil war. Knox was Roosevelt’s attorney general (inherited from McKinley).

A white man is sentenced to hang (and his brother to life imprisonment) for killing a black man in Alabama. Huh. Didn’t think that was illegal in Alabama.

Headline of the Day -100: “Crew Strike for Ham.” The crew of the United Fruit Company’s steamship Admiral Farragut wanted ham instead of corned beef.

Two things I haven’t figured out about Mitt Romney yet

1) How intelligent is he? Smarter than George Bush, dumber than Barack Obama, sure, but where in that large gap does he fall? Part of the problem is that he’s so conventional in his thinking that it can barely be said to be thinking at all. And he says a lot of stupid things, but they generally arise from his narrow experiences, even narrower circle of acquaintances, and a complete lack of empathy rather than from faulty thought processes per se.

2) Why does he want to be president? The thought that he feels his privileges oblige him to give something back to his country is too ludicrous to be entertained, he seems too smugly self-satisfied to be haunted by the daddy issues that motivated GeeDubya, and he doesn’t have an agenda he’s burning to impose on the country. Sure, he wants to lower taxes on his rich friends, but does he seem like someone who would go this far out of his way for the benefit of his friends?

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I’ll give Obama one thing on gay marriage: he has ensured, I think, that he will be the last Democratic presidential candidate to oppose gay marriage.

Because it’s all about him

Obama: “for me personally it is important for me to affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

North Carolina’s long proud history of being stupid

North Carolina banned white people marrying blacks or Indians in 1715 and again in 1875 (blacks being defined as those with at least 1/4 black blood). Just for the hell of it, blacks were banned from marrying Indians in 1887.

NC was the only state to file a brief in support of Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws in Loving v. Loving in 1967.

NC finally legalized interracial marriage in 1977 (technically the ban was invalidated by the Supreme Court in Loving, but it remained on the books until the state enacted a new constitution in 1971. The 1977 law recognized the legal validity of interracial marriages not recognized by the previous laws.

What is legal in NC: 14-year-old girls marrying. If they’re pregnant.

Today -100: May 9, 1912: Of miscegenation and dollar diplomacy

The German Reichstag votes 203-133 to reverse the attempt of the government to make inter-racial marriage illegal in German colonies.

Two “Dollar Diplomacy” treaties die in split Senate committee votes. They were with Honduras and Nicaragua, and would have allowed American syndicates to take over the debt of those countries and lend them money guaranteed by the US government, with the countries’ customs receipts as collateral. Something like that. Neo-colonialism.

June 2012 California proposition recommendations

Prop. 28. Re-jiggers term limits for the Legislature because evidently that’s what makes California politics so terrible. 28 would reduce max time in office from 14 years to 12, but allow those 12 to be served in one house.

Term limits are an insult to representative democracy: either you believe the voters can be entrusted to select their leaders, or you don’t.

Given that, it’s a little hard to care a great deal about these repeated attempts to play around with the rules for term limits. The changes proposed here would do away with some of the nonsense entailed in the scramble by legislators to switch from the Assembly to the Senate or vice versa, so that’s an improvement. On the other hand, the hard 12-year limit seems to mean that anyone who took over a seat mid-term after someone died or resigned would have to quit and force an unnecessary special election 12 years later.

I will probably vote a very unenthusiastic Yes, but if you wanted to skip the initiative so as not to vote for any term-limits measure, I wouldn’t argue with you.

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Prop. 29. $1 a pack tax on cigarettes (plus sales tax on top of that) to fund cancer research (not treatment).

A rather high tax on addicts (“those who choose to smoke,” as the yes argument calls them), mostly going to a fund overseen by appointees (one of whom must have been treated for a tobacco-related illness!) and UC chancellors. There’s no reason to think that this group would be qualified to determine where research money can be best spent to bring about a breakthrough, and in general I’d rather see the feds rather than the 50 states trying to cure cancer. Also, why is California creating a fund just for smoking-related cancer? Because it would have looked bad imposing a tax on bras to fund breast cancer research and calling it a “user fee?”

Lastly, I don’t smoke myself, but I don’t really see their greater likelihood of getting sick as a justification to punish them financially.

As much as I hate to be on the same side as the expensive Big Tobacco campaign against Prop. 29 or the hysterics who wrote the no argument (hurts schools! doesn’t clean up Sacramento’s wasteful spending!), this is a No.

Today -100: May 8, 1912: Of $30 dinners, 3-cent pieces, wills, effeminate schoolboys, and waifs

Two competing Republican conventions are held in Arkansas. Each elects competing slates of delegates to the national convention. The Taft convention also voted for women’s suffrage, “when the women have all signified their desire to vote.”

In Washington state, Taft’s loss to Roosevelt in Pierce County is attributed to a $30-a-plate dinner he attended last October (rather than holding a $1 dinner that more people could have afforded to come to). Still, I’m pretty sure Taft ate $30 worth.

Punch cartoon this week.


The caption reads: Uncle Sam (philosophically watching the Taft-Roosevelt scrap): “Wal! I guess old friends are the best!”

A letter to the NYT by Alice Hill Chittenden, who will soon take on the exalted post of president New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, writes that evolution means the increasing differentiation and specialization of the sexes and that the women’s suffrage movement “is in fact largely a condition of hysteria”.

The NYT defends Maryland’s negro voters against accusations made by Taft’s campaign manager that they were bribed to vote for Roosevelt. But the paper does press its case against democratic elections, insisting that if Maryland’s turnout had been higher, Roosevelt wouldn’t have done nearly as well, and that the “more intelligent Republicans” voted for Taft.

The House has voted for the minting of three-cent coins, which have been lobbied for by cities where that’s the fare on street cars. The vote also calls for a half-cent coin.

Headline of the Day -100 (LA Times): “Are Our Schoolboys Effeminate?” Responding to the director of public schools in Munich, Georg Kerschensteiner, who says that the reliance of American schools on women teachers is producing “effeminacy and flabbiness” in schoolboys, the LAT says that the US has lots of college athletes, boxers, soldiers, etc., so there. It also says that everyone has aspects of both sexes: “temperamentally and psychologically every individual is really bi-sexual.”

81 “frowsy and illiterate” (according to the LAT) IWW members hijack a freight train, forcing the crew to bring them to San Diego, where they are promptly arrested.

The will of John Jacob Astor, who went down with the Titanic, specifies that his widow will lose the rather large income he bequeathed her if she remarries, which is a thing men used to put in their wills. This is the guy whose chivalry was highly praised when he died.

The “Titanic waifs” have been identified and their mother is coming from Paris to claim them (one of the waifs, Michel Navratil, Jr., will die in 2001, the last male Titanic survivor).

Today -100: May 7, 1912: I am not engaged in going about cutting off the heads of bosses

Roosevelt supporters hold one of those separatist conventions in Washington County, Tennessee, but it is captured by Taft supporters.

Taft expresses support for a plan to allow federal employees to retire at 70 with a pension worth half their salaries.

Roosevelt wins the popular vote in the Maryland primary, but Taft delegates will have the majority in the state convention. By state law, the convention will have to instruct delegates to the national convention to vote for Roosevelt, but only on the first ballot.

Champ Clark won the Democratic primary.

Taft denies Roosevelt’s charge that the political “bosses” all support him, and names several who support TR. However, he also says that he won’t go after the bosses: “I am not engaged in going about cutting off the heads of bosses. I cannot do it. It is not my function. It is the function of the people at home to reform matters. I don’t recollect in the seven years that Theodore Roosevelt was president that his path was strewn with the bodies of dead bosses that he had killed.”

Headline of the Day -100 (LA Times): “Turks Repulse Italians.” In Rhodes. Not that that stopped Italy appointing a governor.

NYT headline: “Home Rule Debate Tedious.” Everyone’s a critic.

Today -100: May 6, 1912: Of crooked misrepresentation

Compare and contrast these headlines on the Italian capture of Rhodes. NYT: “Rhodes Was Easily Taken.” LAT: “Use Bayonets on Turks.”

San Diego releases 16 IWW members from jail, where they have been held without trial for two months for violating the city ordinance against makes speeches in the street, but they are told to return for trial next month.

Theodore Roosevelt accuses President Taft of knowing that Taft delegates in Kentucky, Indiana, NYC and elsewhere were elected by “barefaced fraud. He stands guilty of connivance at and condonation of these frauds”. Taft “has stood for crooked misrepresentation of the will of the people.” He notes that since Taft started anti-trust suits against Standard Oil and International Harvester, their stocks have risen: “Evidently Wall St. has made up its mind that Mr. Taft’s prosecutions are fake prosecutions.”

Here’s my favorite putdown from TR’s statement: “he never discovered that I was dangerous to the people until I had been obliged to come to the conclusion that he was useless to the people.” Ouch.

Today -100: May 5, 1912: Even a rat in a corner will fight

Taft on Roosevelt: “He thinks the job is more than running the government. The job, he thinks, is to introduce social revolution.” He added, in a campaign speech in Maryland: “I am a man of peace, and I don’t want to fight. But when I do fight I want to hit hard. Even a rat in a corner will fight.”

Roosevelt, also scheduled to give a campaign speech in Maryland, had to wait for a fight between two dogs to end.

Half of the Mississippi delegates to the Republican National Convention are black, sounds like by quota. Booker T. Washington is lobbying the black delegates to switch from Taft to Roosevelt.

A big women’s suffrage parade in New York City. 10,000 people (1,000 of them male)(Teddy Roosevelt was invited, but didn’t come), 2 hours. The women wore white. Watched by huge crowds, including some hecklers: “They were for the most part the young men with their hats on the sides of their heads – of the same class that make nuisances of themselves at Coney Island in the Summer.” Banners read Votes for Women and “All this is the natural consequence of teaching girls to read.”


The NYT news coverage of the parade is surprisingly uncondescending, its editorial not so much. It calls the women marchers “obviously healthy and presumably intelligent” (which is restrained when compared to the way the London Times throws around the word “hysteria” when discussing British suffragists), but declares that women’s suffrage would play havoc with society and that men need to be “firm and wise enough and, it may as well be said, masculine enough to prevent them.” The editorial does the slippery slope thing: “Granted the suffrage, they would demand all that the right implies. It is not possible to think of women as soldiers and sailors, police patrolmen, or firemen, although voters ought to fight if need be”.

French Army Lt. Col. Gombault has an article bringing to France’s attention the fact that the army has only 21 dirigibles, while the Germans have 29.

The Italian navy occupies Rhodes.

The Mexican rebels appoint a pretender to the presidency, Emilio Vasquez Gomez.

Today -100: May 4, 1912: As it is bossism, what’s the use?

Secretary of State Philander Knox, traveling through Texas, refuses to see delegates from the Mexican rebels.

War Headline of the Day -100: “Italy Finds Tripoli A Hard Nut to Crack.” According to a lecture by explorer and author Charles Wellington Furlong, who has explored the region, Italy failed to consider that Arabs and Turks are all Muslim and might bond against the Christian colonialist invaders. Also, it’s impossible to live off the land in the desert, so all the Italian army’s supplies have to be brought in and transported, and the Italians don’t have any camels.

Another member of the Coatesville, Penn. lynch mob is acquitted, and the state gives up on the rest of its planned trials (including that of the police chief).

In a Maryland speech, Theodore Roosevelt claims that large sums of money are being used to buy negro votes in Monday’s primaries, and accuses anyone who sells his vote of treason to the Republic and, in the case of negroes, of injuring their race.

Roosevelt, who is in Delaware, refuses to make any speeches in the state: “If you had direct primaries in Delaware I would only be too glad to make a personal appeal to the people. But, as it is bossism, what’s the use?” Indeed.

Sexist Headline of the Day -100: “Women Sputter at Senate.” Actually, the Senate Office Building closed the only women’s rest room, so sputter might actually mean......... (Oh wait, “rest room” seems to have meant waiting room rather than, you know, rest room. Although I still like the last sentence of the article: “women having business with Senators will have to stand up.”)

Today -100: May 3, 1912: Of disturbing doctrines, lynchings, kaiser-farmers, zeppelin challenges, and flags

Sub-Headline of the Day -100: “TAFT TALKS PROSPERITY.; In Southern Speeches He Opposes Doctrines That Would Disturb.”

The Grand Jury in Fort Smith, Arkansas, indicts 23 for the lynching of a black man (hanged on a trolley pole) in March.

Kaiser Wilhelm has bought two farms in German South-West Africa (Namibia) and will raise sheep. Not a metaphor.

Headline of the Day -100: “Challenged by Zeppelin.” Not a flying machine but Count Zep himself, who has challenged the secretary of the failed Zeppelin Arctic Expedition, Theodore Lerner, to a duel. But it’s on hold pending some lawsuits between them. Which seems like the worst of both worlds.

Some IWW types (from the affiliated Italian Socialist Federation) trampled an American flag and put up an IWW flag in Union Square, and evidently there’s not going to be an end to the hand-wringing and outrage any time soon.

Today -100: May 2, 1912: Of delegates, plots against Canada, shiftless gangs, and prince-aviators

Because Theodore Roosevelt lost the popular vote in Massachusetts (74,808 to 71,158), he asks the elected delegates-at-large he won to ignore their pledges and vote for Taft at the Republican National Convention, which is jolly sporting of him (his larger game is to turn around and demand that the will of the people also be respected in the many states throughout the US where the Republican machine is thwarting it, and especially to pressure the 20 Taft delegates from Illinois to follow the overwhelming preference of Ill. voters)(it also seems that many of the votes for Taft delegates were invalidated because there were 9 Taft delegates on the ballot and many people voted for all of them, but were only supposed to vote for 8).

The Mexican ambassador says the current revolution isn’t a real revolution, just a bunch of brigands and Indians, and will be put down within three months.

A Senate resolution asked the president if it’s true that the Japanese are trying to take over the harbor of Magdalena Bay in Baja California, Mexico, as a naval base. The White House says no, but that an American company did try to sell some land in the area to a Japanese syndicate. So the Senate is still bubbling with racist paranoia and muttering about the Monroe Doctrine.

Speaking of conspiracy theories, our Headline of the Day -100 comes from the Daily Mail in London: “The Plot Against Canada: Amazing Revelation.” See, last week when President Taft published his private correspondence with Roosevelt, he included one from January 1911 about the Canadian Tariff Reciprocity Treaty, which later failed in the Canadian Parliament because of fears that the US was secretly planning to absorb Canada. Taft wrote that the treaty would make Canada “only an adjunct of the United States.” He meant economically rather than literally (he told TR that much of Canadian business would move to Chicago and NY), but the Daily Mail, as is its wont, is quite upset.

IWW marchers are still on their way to San Diego, and the LA Times is there with up-to-the-minute unbiased coverage, and an unusual number of sub-headlines: “Mischief Makers / Not Invited, Unwelcome / Shiftless Gang Arrives Here on Its Way South / Is Run Out of Every Town Along the Road / Mobilization at San Diego to Rant and Revile.”

Prince Axel of Denmark is going to take flying lessons.