Profound Thought of the Day

Mosques in Britain are advised to install panic alarms and safe rooms. Isn’t that all a mosque – or any church – is? a safe room with panic alarms.

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Today -100: June 8, 1913: Kaiser Wilhelm, he kept us out of war

To celebrate Kaiser Wilhelm’s 25 years on the throne, the NYT Sunday magazine has several articles about what a great keeper of the peace he is.

Almroth Wright, the British doctor last seen here writing a letter to the London Times about the hysteria underlying the women’s suffrage movement, now has a book on the subject, The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage. The NYT sends a reporter round to talk to him. Wright suggests that giving the vote to women is rather like the Americans giving negroes rights, which they “jolly well wished they hadn’t.” In both cases, there are some very intelligent individuals, but negroes and women in general are stupider than whites and men, Wright says.

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I don’t welcome leaks

Today Obama tried to talk about ObamaCare, but all anyone wanted to talk about was ObamaSpy.

ARE YOU CALLING ME BORING? “When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls.”

This “metadata doesn’t count” argument reminds me of my personal definition of torture: if it can make a fanatical terrorist betray his compatriots and his ideals, that is if it works, it’s torture. In the same way, if the information that they’re collecting is worth collecting, it’s not an insignificant intrusion on our privacy.

WHAT OBAMA TOTALLY WELCOMES: “I welcome this debate. And I think it’s healthy for our democracy.” That’s why the entire apparatus of the FBI, CIA, NSA, and half a dozen agencies you’ve never heard of are trying to track down the leaker: to give him or her a medal for services to the health of democracy.

WHAT OBAMA FINDS INTERESTING: “And I think it’s interesting that there are some folks on the left but also some folks on the right who are now worried about it who weren’t very worried about it when there was a Republican president.” Name me some folks on the left who are worried about this who weren’t worried about it under Bush. Name me two.

OO, THERE’S A TRADEOFF! WHAT’D WE GET? WHAT’D WE GET? WAS IT A PUPPY? “But I think it’s important for everybody to understand -- and I think the American people understand -- that there are some tradeoffs involved.” Of course the American people didn’t trade our privacy rights, you traded them for us, in secret.

MODEST ENCROACHMENTS R US: “But my assessment and my team’s assessment was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks. And the modest encroachments on the privacy that are involved in getting phone numbers or duration without a name attached and not looking at content, that on net, it was worth us doing.” I’ll bet Obama thought good and hard for maybe up to five minutes about this one.

WHAT OBAMA DOESN’T WELCOME: “I don’t welcome leaks, because there’s a reason why these programs are classified.” Yes, so that we don’t know what you’re up to. That’s definitely a reason.

SOMEHOW: “I think that there is a suggestion that somehow any classified program is a ‘secret’ program, which means it’s somehow suspicious.” Classified: “adjective. Formally assigned by a government to one of several levels of sensitivity, usually (in English) top secret, secret, confidential”. And yes, secret programs are inherently suspicious.

PRESUMABLY: “And if, in fact, there was -- there were abuses taking place, presumably those members of Congress could raise those issues very aggressively. They’re empowered to do so.” Raise them where, raise them how?

ALTHOUGH WE DO HAVE COPIES OF THEIR TEXTS. ALL THEIR TEXTS: “We also have federal judges that we put in place who are not subject to political pressure.”

YES IT IS: “That’s not to suggest that you just say, trust me; we’re doing the right thing; we know who the bad guys are.”

I KNOW I FEEL SAFER WITH DIANNE FEINSTEIN AND LINDSAY GRAHAM AND THE FISA COURT ON THE CASE: “And the reason that’s not how it works is because we’ve got congressional oversight and judicial oversight.”

YOU SAID IT, NOT ME: “And if people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress and don’t trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.”

VERY SERIOUSLY: “But my observation is, is that the people who are involved in America’s national security, they take this work very seriously. They cherish our Constitution. The last thing they’d be doing is taking programs like this to listen to somebody’s phone calls.” This paragraph only works on people who know nothing whatsoever about the history of the FBI, the CIA and the Justice Department.

“And by the way, with respect to my concerns about privacy issues, I will leave this office at some point, sometime in the last -- next three and a half years”. Is he so unsure about when he’s leaving office because he thinks he’ll impeached? “...and after that, I will be a private citizen. And I suspect that, on a list of people who might be targeted so that somebody could read their emails or listen to their phone calls, I’d probably be pretty high on that list.” Why? You’ll be painting pictures of yourself in the bathtub just like Bush does.

BY WHICH I MEAN PROSTITUTES: “But I know that the people who are involved in these programs, they operate like professionals.”

YOU CAN COMPLAIN: “And in the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential program run amuck...” and we’ll be listening in and taking notes “...but when you actually look at the details, then I think we’ve struck the right balance.”

Whenever Obama talks about “balance,” someone gets fucked. Sometimes, everyone gets fucked.

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Today -100: June 7, 1913: Of lobbies

Congress has been discussing tariffs, specifically what items should and should not be subject to them. President Wilson has been denouncing the “lobby” in favor of retaining protectionist tariffs on various products, so the Republicans are threatening to have the Senate Investigating Committee look into the lobbying by Wilson himself to pressure Democratic senators into voting for free trade items, because Wilson talking about the lobby was in fact lobbying, and oh kill me.

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Today -100: June 6, 1913: Of unpunished militants, wrecked aeroplanes, and loony cardinals

Three good candidates for Headline of the Day -100 today.

First headline: “Derby Militant May Go Unpunished.” Unless you count fatal wounds from a horse falling on her.

Second: “Skirt Wrecks Aeroplane.”

Third: “CARDINAL LOSES HIS MIND.; Vives y Tuto Thinks He Is Pope and Orders Liberals Exterminated.”

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Today -100: June 5, 1913: A Day at the Races

Emily Wilding Davison, a suffragette of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) with a long history of activism, including 8 imprisonments, 7 hunger strikes and 49 forcible feedings, attempted to disrupt the Derby by grabbing the reins of a horse (the king’s horse Anmer as it happened), or possibly she thought all the horses were past and intended to unfurl a women’s suffrage banner, which she had wrapped around her body under her coat, or attach it to the horse. Her intentions have been debated up to the present – there was a documentary on British tv examining the question just last week (and a note to that program’s presenter Clare Balding, who kept referring to the “hidden history” of the suffrage movement: not to be a snitch, but I can tell you exactly where it’s hiding: in the many books on the subject you never bothered to read) – but it was widely assumed at the time that she’d deliberately killed herself. The horse is fine (finished the race sans jockey, second to last), the jockey Herbert Jones is injured but not too seriously, Emily is rather badly trampled, and will die in a few days.



You can find newsreel footage of the incident on YouTube, if you’re into that sort of thing. They certainly were into that sort of thing in England: by the end of day the film had already been shown at the Palace Theatre.

There is a problem when real news happens at sporting events: the news gets written by sports reporters. The sports reporter from the London Times notes that the Derby was marked by two events, 1) the intrusion of a suffragette onto the track, and 2) the (unrelated) disqualification of the favorite, for deliberately bumping other horses, so that the winner was a horse whose odds had been 100:1. And it’s pretty clear which of those events the reporter considered more important. But the Times’ editorial
isn’t much better: “The desperate act of a woman who rushed from the rails on to the course as the horses swept round Tattenham Corner, apparently from some mad notion that she could spoil the race, will impress the general public even more, perhaps, than the disqualification of the winner.” Perhaps! Perhaps!! It continues: “She did not interfere with the race, but she nearly killed a jockey as well as herself, and she brought down a valuable horse.” The Evening Standard wrote: “It is highly characteristic of suffragette militancy that an attempt should be made to introduce a note of tragedy into a day of festival.”



The queen sent a telegram to the jockey in hospital: “Queen Alexandra was very sorry indeed to read of your sad accident caused through the abominable conduct of a brutal lunatic woman.” Jones will ride the winning horse in the Derby in 1919.

The WSPU will elevate Davison to martyrdom, which implies that her death was intentional (and not just the WSPU; the Free Church Suffrage Times proclaimed that never before Emily Wilding Davison had anyone died for the freedom of women: “Something new is with us, the love of women for women, and of this new passion, Miss Davison’s death is the supreme expression, and perhaps, the price.”). Whether her intentions really included the ultimate self-sacrifice or not, there was an ecological niche open in the movement for a martyr, and she filled it nicely. A quicky biography of Davison by Gertrude Colmore repeatedly compares her to Joan of Arc (the suffragettes loved them some Joan of Arc). The June 13th issue of The Suffragette says that Davison’s death “has fired the imagination and touched the heart of the people” and Christabel Pankhurst calls the death “A wonderful act of faith!” adding, “It is only men and women of superhuman generosity and courage who can die for those unseen, unheard, unknown.”



The National American Woman’s Suffrage Association announces that it will begin electoral work in support of pro-suffrage candidates in every Congressional district. This is a (somewhat controversial) move away from the old state-by-state suffrage strategy and towards a federal constitutional amendment. The work will be done by the NAWSA’s Congressional Union, under the leadership of Alice Paul, which will soon split off from the more conservative NAWSA.

The controller of the Treasury tells Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo that he can’t have a government-paid-for automobile.

There’s a fight in the Hungarian Parliament after Prime Minister von Lukacs is declared guilty of misappropriating government funds for party purposes. “During the uproar that followed an opposition Deputy ex-Premier Count Khuen-Héderváry von Hédervár, was knocked down with two blows of his sword by the Captain of the guard, who afterward asserted his right as an officer to knock down any one who insulted him, as the Count had done, by shouting ‘Fie!’ at him three times.”

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Preachers of hate

Here’s what happened in the Mother of Parliaments yesterday:

1) David Cameron bragged about keeping “preachers of hate,” by which he meant Muslim preachers of hate, out of the UK, and spoke of the need to “drain the swamps” of “violent extremists.”

2) Meanwhile, in the House of Lords, aka the swamp of sleepy extremists, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby was speaking forcefully against gay marriage.

Welby actually talked about “category errors” by supporters of gay marriage, who, he says, are “failing to understand that two things may be equal but different.” Wow, separate but equal.

By the way, you know how Dan Savage gave a new meaning to the word “Santorum”? Well Just In Welby already sounds kinda...

He said that gay marriage is “an awkward shape, with same-gender and different-gender categories scrunched into it, neither fitting well.” Kinky.

The other chief opponent of the same-sex marriage bill in the Lords is named Lord Dear, because of course he is.

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Today -100: June 4, 1913: Of vetoes, hostility to government, and gypsies

NY Gov. Sulzer uses his line-item veto to eliminate programs and posts favored by opponents of his plan for direct primary elections, because Bill Sulzer is all about winning friends and influencing people.

In other actions, Sulzer signs into law a bill creating a colored battalion of the National Guard in NY City, which the black community had been asking for for 20 years but which the Guard leadership opposed.

Alexander Scott, the managing editor of the socialist Passaic Weekly Issue, is found guilty by a Paterson jury of publishing an editorial advocating “hostility to government,” which was made a crime in New Jersey after the McKinley assassination. The editorial (rightly) accused the Paterson police chief of running amok during the silk strike at the behest of the owners and attacking “defenseless workers like a bunch of drunken Cossacks”. He will be sentenced to a prison term of one to fifteen years.

You know, the NYT is not what you’d call pro-IWW, but it seems to have quoted just about every word of that illegal-in-New-Jersey editorial.

An editor who does rather better for himself is Richard Metcalfe, editor of William Jennings Bryan’s Commoner, who is appointed governor of the Panama Canal Zone.

The NYT says that it’s “probably a wild generalization” that Gypsies steal children (there was a scare in Pennsylvania when a three-year-old boy briefly disappeared just after a band of gypsies was seen passing through).

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Effectively serving

John McCain on Face the Nation suggested that Eric Holder should ask himself if he is “really able to effectively” do his job, because John McCain is not big on either irony or self-awareness.

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Today -100: June 3, 1913: Of poets laureate and bigamists

Alfred Austin, the British Poet Laureate, dies. If you’ve never heard of him, it’s probably because he was kind of crap.

Headline of the Day -100: “Bigamist a Murderer.” I suspect this story is false, since I can’t find another reference to it, but here goes: a Belgian dude, Georges Brény, was told that his wife died on the Titanic, so he married another woman. Finding out that his wife had survived, he shot his second wife dead, tried to shoot himself, failed, tried to hang himself, failed.

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Today -100: June 2, 1913: Of harassment, numerous and insidious lobbies, ritual murders, and Jack the Ripper

Almost-War Headline of the Day -100: “Bulgars Harass Greeks.” Show us on the map of Salonika where Bulgaria touched you.

Elsewhere, the prime ministers of Bulgaria and Serbia meet to try to prevent a new war.

Since President Wilson claimed that there is a “numerous and insidious lobby” against tariff reduction, a sub-committee of the Senate Judiciary committee will investigate the matter, requiring every member of the Senate to answer questions under oath, to recount every conversation they had about tariffs with persons with financial interests in them, to detail any of their own financial interests that might be affected by tariffs, etc (a later article suggests that this is a scheme to get those financial details so that objections can be made to individual senators voting on particular tariffs that affect them personally, but this scheme, if it exists, is based on a misreading of Senate rules, which do not prevent such votes). It is unclear whether Wilson will testify (he won’t). The next 6 days will see much debate over the precise meaning of the words lobby and lobbyist.

The Russian Ministry of Justice plans to put a Jew on trial for ritual-murdering a Christian boy in Kiev in 1911 (I had thought this was settled when the boy’s step-father was arrested).

Sir Melville Macnaghten, retired head of Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department, says he knows who Jack the Ripper was but he won’t tell. Also, that Jack committed suicide.

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Today -100: June 1, 1913: 6¢

Theodore Roosevelt wins his libel case after a week-long trial/circus. The newspaper proprietor he was suing went on the stand and apologized, saying he only believed that TR was a drunk because so many people said he was, but he hasn’t been able to find any proof of it and so is now convinced that TR isn’t a lush after all. Roosevelt then asked to be awarded only nominal damages, which in Michigan is 6¢.

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Today -100: May 31, 1913: The Balkan War is dead, long live the Balkan War

Philippe d’Orléans, pretender to the French throne, is sued for divorce by his wife, who is the cousin of the Austrian emperor. The cause of the break is believed to be her inability to produce an heir to the lost throne, or maybe his inability to repay all the money he borrowed from her. The Duke lives in England, and recently turned down a gig as king of Albania.

The First Balkan War is over. Everyone signs a preliminary peace treaty. Second Balkan War commences in 5...4...3...

I wrote that before seeing this next story: Bulgarian troops open fire on Greeks in the Salonika area.

One Frank Diamon first confesses, then recants, to several murders, including that of Thomas Francis Meagher, the former governor of the territory of Montana who fell off a steamboat into the Missouri River in 1867, and who rumors always said was pushed. I would have ignored this minor story, but it’s a good excuse to mention Meagher, a Young Ireland leader who was sentenced to transportation for life in Tasmania after the 1848 rising against British rule, then escaped to the US and 13 years later was a freaking governor!

Headline of the Day -100: “King Leaps From Train.” King Alfonso of Spain, in an attempt to save a little girl lying on or next to the train tracks. She died. “The King was profoundly impressed, and endeavored to console the mother, who was the woman in charge of the railway crossing, and gave her a present.”

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Today -100: May 30, 1913: Of redls

Col. Alfred Redl, who had been the director of Army intelligence for Austria and a double agent for Russia, which was using his homosexuality to blackmail him, commits suicide (that is, he’s given a loaded revolver – and an operating manual for it! – and told to do the right thing, as was the custom). Among the items he passed to Russia: the German and Austrian plans for how they’d fight a war with Russia. The authorities tried to keep all this secret, and succeeded for two weeks. You may know Redl from the István Szabó movie Colonel Redl with Klaus Maria Brandauer (good but no Mephisto) or the John Osborne play A Patriot for Me (I saw it with Alan Bates as Redl, and a Vienna nightclub scene in which I was a little slow to realize all the dancers were in drag).

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Today -100: May 29, 1913: Le Massacre du printemps

Wobblies storm a meeting of non-IWW strikers (English-speaking ones) in Paterson to prevent them setting a date for a return to work.

Headline of the Day -100: “Turtle Germs Fail Again.” A doctor thought he had a cure for tuberculosis.

Headline of the Day -100, Runner Up (LA Times): “To Pit Polish Against Trash.” About a plan offered by a member of the DAR who glories in the name Miss Elizabeth J. Virtue for erudite orators of the highest education and culture to combat the soapbox speeches by IWW speakers in Seattle.

Speaking of high culture, Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring), choreographed by Nijinsky, premieres in Paris. Some considered it primitive and offensive; some were horrified and scandalized by the fact that the dancers toed inward instead of outward and the dancing was angular and modern and violent rather than classical and graceful. And, as was the custom in Paris, they were a bit loud about it. Carl Van Vechten, the NYT’s music critic (who was sitting with Gertrude Stein, at least at the second performance) wrote: “Cat-calls and hisses succeeded the playing of the first few bars, and then ensued a battery of screams, countered by a foil of applause. We warred over art (some of us thought it was and some thought it wasn’t)... I remember Mlle. Piltz executing her strange dance of religious hysteria on a stage dimmed by the blazing light in the auditorium, seemingly to the accompaniment of the disjointed ravings of a mob of angry men and women.” Jean Cocteau would say that the audience played “the role that was written for it.” Le Figaro, whose critic called the ballet “a laborious and puerile barbarity,” suggested on its front page a couple of days later that a treaty be negotiated with Russia: “Nijinsky would have to agree not to stage any more ballets that aspire to a level of beauty inaccessible to our feeble minds... we would continue to assure him that he is the greatest dancer in the world, the most handsome of men, and we would prove this to him. We should then be at peace.”

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Today -100: May 28, 1913: Of Teddy and booze, bullingdons, and women’s suffrage

Theodore Roosevelt testifies in his libel lawsuit against The Iron Ore newspaper, which last year printed that “Roosevelt lies, and curses in a most disgusting way, he gets drunk too, and that not infrequently, and all of his intimates know about it.” TR testifies at length about the moderation of his drinking habits, seemingly reciting every drink he’s ever taken. Want to know how often he’s had mint juleps? Teddy knows. Want to know how much booze he brought along on his expedition to Africa? Teddy knows. And thanks to a million reporters, now we all do.

The Prince of Wales’s mother lets him retain his membership in the Bullingdon Club, the Oxford dining club known for drunkenness and destruction, in 1913 just as it was when David Cameron & Boris Johnson went through their initiation ceremonies (burning a £50 note in front of a tramp), but Queen Mary says he can’t join in the rowdy “Bullingdon blinds” – again.

Wisconsin Gov. Francis McGovern vetoes a bill for a women’s suffrage referendum, saying it’s too soon after the last one.

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Today -100: May 27, 1913: Of strikes, military service, and heading into the Second Balkan War, hurrah!

Major clashes between IWW-backed silk strikers and the police in Paterson, NJ. The strikers say one of theirs was shot, but the police say they only fired into the air – a lot.

Conscripted soldiers in France are not taking well the news that their hitch has been extended from two years to three. Some mutineers have already been sent to punishment squads in Africa, while the rest of the military is confined to barracks and their letters are being censored. Protest rallies are growing.

Serbia is demanding from Bulgaria a revision of the alliance treaty by which they joined forces against Turkey. It thinks it deserves a lot more land (when doesn’t Serbia think that?). Russia is mediating between them, and between Bulgaria & Romania, but everyone (Spoiler Alert: correctly) expects a war.

There has been much discussion in the letter pages of the NYT on the causes of baldness. Too frequent haircuts? Stiff hats? Germs? One weirdo even suggested it was hereditary. Another correspondent says religious convictions are proof against going bald (something about uric acid).

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Today -100: May 26, 1913: Of discrimination, islands, cunning plans, and royal garters

The Navy has investigated claims that it discriminates against black enlisted men, and finds that nothing could be further from the truth, so that’s okay then.

Turkey has evidently ceded Cyprus to Britain.

The Italian war of conquest in Libya isn’t quite as finished as I’d thought. A large defeat is inflicted on the Italians through a ruse. The Libyans allowed an Italian prisoner to escape after priming him with false information, which Gen. Ganbretti then used in deciding to divide his forces into three columns, thinking he was facing a much smaller opposition than was the case. Each of the columns was cut off and decimated.

Headline of the Day -100: “Royal Highnesses in Souvenir Riot.” At the royal wedding of the kaiser’s kid, there’s a scrum for her garter: “Almost the entire wedding company, numbering hundreds of bejeweled ladies and gentlemen, representing the cream of the German aristocracy, engaged in a free fight for the ribbons. A survivor describes the scene as a cross between a Bank Holiday frolic on Hampstead Heath and a football riot. Many ladies emerged with faces badly scratched by the pushing and shoving of Generals and gold-laced diplomats.”

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Today -100: May 25, 1913: A mighty coquetry, a flirtation planned on a gigantic scale

The NYT Sunday Magazine section interviews Mrs. Arthur Dodge, President of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage. She explains that while the British suffragists are at war with men, American suffragists are cajoling them, which “may be as dangerous as war; it tends to develop methods which may work as great destruction to society as a bomb can to a railway station or a Cabinet Minister’s residence. As a matter of fact, I cannot but believe the suffrage movement to be an attack in grim reality upon the structure of society.” The American suffrage movement is “a mighty coquetry, a flirtation planned on a gigantic scale. It is as perilous to morals as the English movement is to property.” She complains a lot about how these girls today dress. As an antidote to suffragism, she suggests supporting the Campfire Girls. She thinks women getting jobs will inevitably destroy “the sweetest attributes of motherhood” and result in children being raised in common. “No man has ever made a home. It has ever been women’s work. ... if it remains undone, what can ensue but something close related to a social reign of terror?” What indeed. She claims that women’s suffrage is associated with individualism, and later claims that it is associated with socialism.

There’s also a profile of Mary Bartelme, the head of Chicago’s Court for Delinquent Girls, who the Times says is the only woman judge in the US.

A coroner’s jury in Miami, Arizona ruled that José Perez, who was beaten to death by a mob, was killed by unknown persons. However a couple of days later two members of the jury are arrested for being part of that mob.

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Today -100: May 24, 1913: Of anti-trust laws, loans, and, let’s face it, “Cumberland” just sounds funny

The NYT is not happy that Congress attached a provision to the appropriations bill for the Justice Dept banning the (mis)use of the Sherman Anti-Trust Law to prosecute unions.

Mexican Constitutionalist leader Carranza warns European bankers against making that loan to the Huerta Junta, saying that if the Constitutionalists win, they can kiss their $100 million goodbye.

Princess Victoria Louise of Prussia, daughter of the German kaiser, is about to marry Prince Ernest August III of Cumberland, cousin of King George V, a marital alliance which will surely prevent any possibility of war between Great Britain and Germany, or at least between Prussia and Cumberland.

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