Today -100: November 29, 1912: Of lynchings and dead letters

Three negroes who wounded a deputy are lynched in Vanceville, Louisiana.

British suffragettes of the Women’s Social and Political Union have escalated their militant tactics: they are now destroying people’s mail by pouring acid and other liquids into mailboxes. The WSPU (which I should point out isn’t the largest suffrage organization, though it does get the most press) has moved from trying to convince the British public and politicians to trying to coerce them. Christabel Pankhurst explains that if a poor charwoman loses a postal order, she may be thankful if at such a price she takes a step nearer to enfranchisement.

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Today -100: November 28, 1912: Of pardons, mobilization, aerial warfare, and mince pies

South Carolina Gov. Coleman Blease pardons 16 convicted murderers and 17 other prisoners. One of the pardons, that of murderer William Mills, was a campaign promise. Here’s how it happened: in a stump speech, Blease promised to pardon anyone the people wanted liberated (a “welease Bwian” sort of thing); there were calls from the crowd for Mills (who had killed his wife’s lover) to be freed. Blease said fine, he’d do it if they voted out the current D.A. Which they did.

French army reservists are called up in nine towns on the German frontier in the dead of night pursuant to a general mobilization order that, it turned out, didn’t actually exist. Starting at midnight, troops took up positions protecting the post office, bridges, railway lines, etc. Church bells were rung, town criers went round town with drums (because this was evidently the 17th century). The officer who misread the order is now under arrest.

A Bulgarian aeroplane drops incendiary bombs on Adrianople.

In another sign of the ongoing non-viability of Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party, none of the Republican members of Congress changed their designation to Progressive in the new Congressional directory.

Headline of the Day -100: “Taft Awaits His Mince Pie.”

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The last Daily Telegraphy?

I can get around the Telegraph’s new paywall, but a paywalled newspaper is one that has withdrawn from the public discourse and does not wish its articles discussed, so we won’t be doing any more of these Daily Telegraphy roundups.

British nudists, pardon... naturists... are complaining about a BBC documentary series, History of the World, depicting people in ancient times who would have been naked, pardon... naturist... as wearing animal skins and the like, which they didn’t. British Naturism says the Beeb is “sacrificing its reputation for commercial reasons.” Yes, it’s not showing nudity for commercial reasons. The nakedists are entirely right about the distortion of history, of course, but they’re still silly.

Police Constable Kevin Hughes of the Met says that when he remarked to another PC about three black men, “Look at them, they look like fucking monkeys,” he was merely engaging in a discussion of the theory of evolution and was referring to the gait of the man, not his skin color. He denies having said that black people are closely related to chimpanzees and Neanderthals, because he does not even know what Neanderthal means, which I really really believe. Hughes and another plod are in court on a charge of using threatening, abusive, or insulting words or behaviour to cause another person harassment, alarm, or distress.

Finally, there’s a story about two ice cream van drivers, Zeheer Ramzan and Mohammed Mulla... no wait, that’s not funny. Mr. Yummy attacked Mr. Whippy’s van with a tire iron (or “tyre iron” – aren’t the English adorable?), to the tune of Greensleeves.

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Today -100: November 27, 1912: Of $25,000,000

Possibly Sarcastic Headline of the Day -100: “Carnegie Gives Up All But $25,000,000.”

Theodore Roosevelt says no one’s interested in Carnegie’s proposal to give pensions to ex-presidents (which is really intended to embarrass the nation into doing so) but are interested in pensions for the “small man” and widows (of any size, one assumes). Or to put it another way, Carnegie is only offering it to presidents from Taft onwards.

Eleven sailors of the Russian Black Sea Fleet are executed for inciting mutiny.

A lab assistant at Stanford University, Frederick Migge, claimed to be a professor to sell his baldness cure in advertisements. Stanford has now fired him.

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Today -100: November 26, 1912: Of Balkan wars

The Great Powers are trying not to let the Balkan War turn into a, to coin a phrase, world war as a result of the smaller powers fighting the war making territorial claims that impinge on what the larger powers consider to be their interests. Austria in particular has been getting quite bellicose towards Serbia, but Germany seems to be trying to restrain it. Messages and meetings are going back and forth between German, Austrian and Russian kaisers and tsars. Russia, which is more or less allied with its fellow Eastern Orthodox Slavs in Serbia, denies reports that it is mobilizing its troops against Austria. Austria and Italy want a new autonomous state of Albania, but Serbia’s insistence on access to the Adriatic would carve that state in two.

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Today -100: November 25, 1912: Of suffrage and anti-war meetings

At the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association convention, W. E. B. Dubois says that he’s not asking the suffragists not to fight for negro suffrage per se, but to fight for all women, including black ones.

Socialist anti-war meetings in Budapest result in 14 dead. Killed by police.

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Today -100: November 24, 1912: Of triangular smiles, race suicide, misuse of the mails, and Piltdown men

Fashionable women in London are cultivating something called the “triangular smile,” which only sounds incredibly filthy. Something about lifting the center part of the top lip to show the teeth. It’s supposed to suggest innocence and simplicity, although it actually sounds rather alarming. Some women have taken to wearing a band under their nostrils, fastened to the top of the head, while they sleep to pull up the nose and upper lip.

Headline of the Day -100: “Race Suicide Alarms France.” For a couple of years in the last decade, deaths exceeded births.

Eugene Debs is indicted, along with other Socialists, for obstruction of justice, for allegedly paying a witness to disappear rather than testify in a case of “misuse of the mails in posting obscene matter concerning the Federal prison in Leavenworth.”

This is funny: two stories appearing one above the other in the NYT index today: 1) Darwin’s assistant W. B. Tegetmeier has died at 96, 2) “Pleistocene Skull Found in England.” A major find in evolutionary... oh okay, it’s actually Piltdown Man, a hoax.

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Today -100: November 23, 1912: A definite just-before-World-War-I vibe developing

Russia is backing Serbia’s territorial claims, so Austria has been mobilizing its troops in response, and now the German military is holding back railway cars in case they’re needed to transport troops.

Meanwhile, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria (formerly known as Prince Long Nose) has ordered a top mosaic-maker in Venice to make a mosaic portraying him and his wife as the Emperor and Empress of the Balkans, along the lines of a famous mosaic portraying the Byzantine Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora.

Taft won’t take the Carnegie Foundation pension for ex-presidents.

The coal strike in the Kanawha region of West Virginia ends with a massive victory for the miners – 21% pay increase, 9-hour day, union recognition – even though the governor declared martial law and sent in the national guard to protect strikebreakers.

Wait, there’s a town in West Virginia named “High Coal”?

Britain, like France a few months ago, but unlike the US, refuses to confront Russia on its discrimination against Jewish holders of British passports. Foreign Sec. Sir Edward Grey says that doing so might lead to the commerce treaty between the two countries being abrogated, and we can’t have that.

John Schrank, the guy who shot Theodore Roosevelt last month, is pronounced insane.

Woodrow Wilson threatens to “thrash” a photographer who took pictures of his daughters.

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Today -100: November 22, 1912: Of armistices and ex-presidents

Turkey rejects the armistice conditions and fails to make counter-proposals. It’s like they don’t understand diplomacy or something, everyone says. War resumes, I guess.

Andrew Carnegie says that since the US doesn’t give pensions to its former presidents and their widows, he will. $25,000 a year, 1/3 of the presidential salary. But not for Roosevelt.

Presidents didn’t get pensions until 1958.

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Today -100: November 21, 1912: Of airships and insane musicians

Count von Zeppelin denies that it was one of his airships seen over England last month.

Headline of the Day -100 (LAT): “Musician Becomes Insane. Santa Ana Man Loses Mind While Playing Organ at a Masonic Temple Dedication.”

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Today -100: November 20, 1912: But the men must be bored

Woodrow Wilson, on vacation in Bermuda, says he’s actually beginning to forget politics. Don’t worry, Tom, politics hasn’t forgotten you.

Peace talks begin in the First Balkan War. However, the allies’ terms call for Turkey to surrender places the allies didn’t succeed in capturing, including Adrianople and Scutari, so we’ll see. Cholera has everyone worried, though the NYT claims that “Mussulman fatalism makes a cholera epidemic a less important factor” to the Ottomans than to the Bulgarians.

Headline of the Day -100 (LAT): “Peace News Hurts Wheat.”

The annual luncheon of the NY anti-women’s suffrage society came to grips with the problem of how to assert themselves politically to argue against asserting themselves politically. Said the president, Mrs. William Putnam, “It is high time there should be no silent women, though that sounds bad for an anti-suffragist.” “Let every man you meet know that you are an anti-suffragist. Never sit at dinner beside a man without letting him know that you are an anti-suffragist. ... I have been afraid of boring people, but the men must be bored. Tell every carpenter and every man who works for you.” Mrs. Martha McCullouch Williams said, “It is a woman’s duty to be delightful, ornamental, and useful, and she could not be more so with the vote. If she had it she would not know what to do with it. Where the ballot is placed in the hands of those unfit to use it there follows ruin, rapine, and terror. ... Woman is no more fit for the ballot than to be a trapeze performer or bareback rider.”

Noted in the LAT: they referred to Thanksgiving as Turkey Day even back then.

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Name that penis! Another competition I may very well regret

For once – and only this once – Charles Pierce has let us down, referring to Col. Combover’s wang with less than his usual creativity as “little Petraeus.” Surely we can do better than that. So when he combs over his pubic hair and affixes the tiny row of medals beneath his cock in preparation for a night on the town, what does he call it?

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Today -100: November 19, 1912: Of Albanias, bathtub trusts, and baronesses

While the Great Powers want a new Albania established out of the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire, the Balkan League nations want to partition it amongst themselves.

Turkish troops finally do something right, stopping a Bulgarian attack at Tchatalja. This will save Adrianople and Constantinople from occupation.

The Supreme Court affirms that the Bathtub Trust was an illegal combination and should be dissolved. The ruling goes beyond bathtubs, saying that holders of patents can’t set a fixed price for retailers of that product.

Retired opera singer Minnie Hauk dies. She was the first to sing the title role of Carmen in the US, but retired when she married a German baron. This just goes to show that in this world you can be born a Minnie Hauk and die a Baroness von Hesse-Wartegg.

Correction: Her Wikipedia entry says she actually died in 1929.

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That’s preferable

Obama is in Thailand. He and PM Yingluck Shinawatra held a press conference.

A reporter asked if Thai “democracy” was “satisfying,” given the human rights abuses and people being imprisoned for very long prison terms for criticizing the king, etc. Obama answered that “democracy is not something that is static; it’s something that we constantly have to work on” and cited America’s shaky history. This is something he’s said before. Someone needs to follow up and ask some questions about American history, such as: when blacks weren’t allowed to vote in Mississippi, was Mississippi a democracy? If he’s going to keep using the word democracy for countries that aren’t very democratic, (later, on whether his trip to Burma is premature: “if we waited to engage until they had achieved a perfect democracy, my suspicion is we’d be waiting an awful long time”) I’d like to know what his definition of it is.

He was asked about Gaza. He insisted that the “precipitating event” was “an ever-escalating number of missiles,” because we all know that that’s how history started. Adam and Eve and the ever-escalating number of missiles.

He said that “there’s no country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders.” Wow. Just.... wow.

“So we are fully supportive of Israel’s right to defend itself from missiles landing on people’s homes and workplaces and potentially killing civilians.” He did not say how Israel’s shooting missiles at journalists (for example) or “send[ing] Gaza back to the Middle Ages” constitutes defending itself from missiles landing on people’s homes and workplaces and potentially killing civilians.

He said that if the missiles can be stopped without a full-scale invasion of Gaza, “that’s preferable; that’s not just preferable for the people of Gaza, it’s also preferable for Israelis -- because if Israeli troops are in Gaza, they’re much more at risk of incurring fatalities or being wounded.” A Nobel Peace Prize Winner Explains Shit To You.

“But what I’ve said to President Morsi and Prime Minister Erdogan is that those who champion the cause of the Palestinians should recognize that if we see a further escalation of the situation in Gaza, then the likelihood of us getting back on any kind of peace track that leads to a two-state solution is going to be pushed off way into the future.” Um, a follow-up, Mr President: what was the “likelihood” of that before this?

He’s stopped even tacking on a suggestion that Israel avoid slaughtering civilians while exercising its “right to defend itself.”

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Today -100: November 18, 1912: Of attempted coups, UFOs, and what a great majority of men object to

An alleged plot by the Young Turks for a quick revolution to establish a republic has been thwarted.

For a month now, rumors have been going around about a mysterious object seen in the sky over England. Now it seems to be confirmed that it was a German airship, flown by Count Zeppelin himself, possibly blown off course, possibly testing out its capabilities in the laughably unlikely event of a war between Germany and Great Britain.

It’s a light news day -100, so let’s give some excerpts from a letter to the NYT by Everett Pepperrell Wheeler, a prominent lawyer, author, and failed candidate for NY governor in 1894, on the subject of last week’s women’s suffrage parade. I quote at length not because it’s exceptional but because it isn’t. It’s a rather typical anti-suffrage screed, nicely illustrative of the assumptions and arguments of many men and quite a few women:

And so 20,000 women paraded down Fifth Avenue to the sound of the trumpet and in the glare of the electric lights. Did their leaders really think that any sensible man likes to have his wife, or his mother, or his daughter thus parade the streets? It seems to me that this parade is one of the strongest arguments against universal suffrage for women that has yet been presented. It shows such a failure to adopt means reasonable to a desired end that it destroys the confidence any of us may have had in the good sense and sound judgment of the leaders of this movement.

Some of the women who have thus exhibited themselves to a curious public seem to believe that their rights are denied under our present laws. ... If it is better legislation that these zealous women desire, we can tell them that any woman who studies any subject and masters it can always have a respectful hearing from legislative bodies. ... What a great majority of men object to is the extension of the suffrage to nearly 2,000,000 women, citizens of voting age in the State of New York, whose time and strength are fully occupied by their present duties. These duties are most important. No man can perform them. These wives and mothers bear children, bring them up, train them.

He goes on to explain that good laws are useless without such training. I mean, look at the Ten Commandments: they’ve had a lot of publicity over the years, but they’re broken all the time.

It is to the mothers and sisters that we look primarily for that teaching and training in sound principles which will keep the man from committing these crimes, and to do this requires the undivided attention and thought and interest of the great majority of women.

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Today -100: November 17, 1912: Of troop movements, insured tsarevitches, and incensed frogs

Another Balkan state is heard from: Romania moves troops to its border with Bulgaria. Trying to ensure Bulgaria doesn’t grab too much territory.

And West Virginia Gov. William Glasscock moves troops into the coal fields of Kanawha to impose martial law and protect scabs.

The LAT reports that Tsarevitch Alexei of Russia has relapsed. And says his life is insured for $5,000,000. Which seems rather unlikely.

Diplomatic Headline of the Day -100 (LAT): “France Incensed at Russia.” For not supporting all of Serbia’s claims to new territory. Although the French actually seem more pissed at Germany, as was the custom. In Paris thousands march shouting “On to Berlin!” as they did in 1870 (as you’ll no doubt recall from the last words of Zola’s novel Nana), and that didn’t end particularly well (the Franco-Prussian War and the novel). “The French army is said to be in a perfect state of preparedness.” Preparedness for what, the LAT does not say.

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Risk causing civilian casualties

The Congressional resolutions (passed unanimously today) supporting Israel’s “inherent right of self-defense” in dropping bombs on Gaza didn’t suggest any limits on that right of self-defense: even Obama suggested that Israel might try to avoid Palestinian civilian casualties, Congress did not.

Indeed, the sole mention of the fact that Palestinians are dying is this: “the recent spike in Gaza-linked terrorist missile attacks against Israel, which risk causing civilian casualties in both Israel and Gaza”. Israel not only doesn’t get blame for the death of children and others, it doesn’t even get agency: Hamas is “causing civilian casualties” with Israeli bombs.

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Today -100: November 16, 1912: Of nobels, tariffs, and cholera

Gerhart Hauptmann wins the Nobel Prize for literature. Can’t say I’ve heard of him.

Wilson announces that he will call a special session of Congress in the spring to revise tariffs, although he denies supporting free trade, which he says is not advocated by any thinking Democrat.

More bad news for Turkey: a cholera outbreak among their troops. But some rare good news for Turkey: the cholera outbreak will make the Bulgarians afraid to occupy Constantinople.

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Obama & Netanyahu shoot the shit, Palestinian children

The White House puts out a statement on today’s call by Obama to Netanyahu.

Evidently he “reiterated to Prime Minister Netanyahu the United States’ support for Israel’s right to self-defense in light of the barrage of rocket attacks being launched from Gaza against Israeli civilians.” I’m not sure what “self-defense” has to do with what Israel is actually doing.

“The President urged Prime Minister Netanyahu to make every effort to avoid civilian casualties.” Well, every effort except not firing missiles into crowded cities.

“The two agreed that Hamas needs to stop its attacks on Israel to allow the situation to de-escalate.” Because people totally have conversations that sound like this.

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Today -100: November 15, 1912: Of armistices, parliamentary decorum, and lynchings

Or maybe there isn’t an armistice in the Balkan War.

A couple of days ago, there was a huge disturbance in the House of Commons over the Home Rule Bill, forcing the House to be adjourned. Someone threw a book at Winston Churchill’s head (hit it, too). In a Tory rally in Albert Hall, Tory party leader Andrew Bonar Law says he didn’t regret the disturbance and did nothing to stop it.

(Usage note: I’m using the informal “Tory” to avoid confusion. During this period, the Irish issue was so central that the Conservative Party called itself the Unionist Party, or sometimes the Conservative and Unionist Party).

A black man is lynched near Ocala, Florida. He was seized from the jail, taken two miles out of town and told to run, whereupon the mob shot him a few hundred times.

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