Today -100: September 26, 1913: Of saloons, charming cities being charming, and parades

The Tennessee Legislature has more gunmen today, with Nashville cops sent by the mayor to protect Speaker Stanton from the prison guards sent by the governor to intimidate him over anti-alcohol legislation. However, Stanton orders the State House be searched top to bottom and any gunmen be expelled. Visitors were then excluded from the House chamber, except women and the press. “The explosion of a photographer’s flashlight created a small panic among the Representatives, several automatically reaching for their weapons.” The session is again abruptly adjourned due to “a sudden illness of the Speaker.”

Baltimore City Council passes an ordinance for residential racial segregation. People currently living on the “wrong” block will have to move. (The Maryland Supreme Court will strike this down next month).

A little civil war in Serbia, government v. Albanians, as is the custom.

Russia occupies Kobdo and Tchougoutchak in Western Mongolia.

Sir Edward Carson’s first act as self-proclaimed premier of Ulster is to take to his bed on doctor’s orders. There will be a parade of Ulster volunteers on Saturday, and the Unionists asked that a big football game be moved so as not to conflict with it.

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Today -100: September 25, 1913: Of saloons, provisional governments, and automatic pilots

The Tennessee Legislature is still calmly considering anti-saloon legislation while prison guards sit in the galleries pointing guns at legislators they don’t like. Speaker Stanton abruptly adjourns the session.

The Ulster Unionist Council sets up the machinery for implementing a provisional government to “tak[e] over the province in trust for the British nation” if and when Home Rule is established. The premier will be Sir Edward Carson, who still hasn’t been arrested for treason.

French aviator Albert Moreau demonstrates an automatic pilot, flying 30 minutes without touching the control levers.

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Today -100: September 24, 1913: A little was enough for me

Headline of the Day -100: “Not So Afraid of Germany.” In November, Britain will send a bunch of warships into the Mediterranean, in a change from its policy in recent years of keeping them nearby just in case Germany tries something.

A few days ago the Tennessee state senate passed bills banning the importation into the state of alcohol and defining the sale of any alcohol as a public nuisance, allowing courts to close saloons on the petition of ten taxpayers. The lower house of the Tennessee Legislature is now discussing the bills. Speaker Stanton complains that Gov. Ben Hooper has stationed armed guards in the House to force him to make rulings favorable to the bills. A state senator breaks down a door in the Capitol building behind which he finds seven guards (prison guards, probably) and a suitcase filled with revolvers.

Anthony Comstock, “in the role of a literary critic,” arrests a publisher and one of his employees who sold an allegedly immoral book, “Hagar Revelly” by Daniel Carson Goodman, which “deals with the problems of life as faced by two poverty-stricken girls in New York City.” You can sort of read it online, because it’s been “DoiizodbvCoogle” or “DolizodbvCoOglc” or “DolizodbyGoOgle”, which I think means Digitized Really Badly by Google. A quick skim suggests that Emile Zola didn’t have anything to worry about, but neither did it reveal what got Comstock so hot and bothered (Comstock admits that he didn’t read the whole book; “a little was enough for me”).

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Today -100: September 23, 1913: Of resentful hunchbacks and trains

Headline of the Day -100: “HUNCHBACK IS RESENTFUL.; Woman Strokes Him "for Luck" and He Throws Her In a Pond.”

Mexican rebels dynamite a passenger train, as was the custom, killing 50, 40 of whom were Federal soldiers.

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Today -100: September 22, 1913: Of assassins, bloody Sundays, slaves, and airborne tea

The man alleged to have assassinated Mexican President Madero during the coup is himself assassinated.

Another bloody Sunday in Dublin, with police attacking strikers and vice versa.

Several US colonial officials in the Philippines have been asserting that slavery is widespread, though Rep. William Jones (D-VA) denies it.

The first airship tea party takes place aboard the Zeppelin passenger ship Sachsen somewhere above Berlin. But no cigarettes afterwards.

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Today -100: September 21, 1913: Of impeachments, whimsical little bodies, general strikes, and mud

William Sulzer says he will not resign and will fight the impeachment to the end. Why, he would no sooner resign than commit hara-kiri. Or to put it another way, his feelers about whether resigning would stop the impeachment were rebuffed. “Mr. Sulzer thumped his interviewer on the chest and gave other evidences of being in a fighting mood,” writes a terrified NYT reporter.

The NYT returns in an editorial to the subject of Christabel Pankhurst’s recent writings, “a book so nasty that even the Pankhurst contingent of British suffragists is dismayed. Christabel has hitherto been looked upon as a whimsical little body, somewhat too fond of inciting riot, perhaps, but decent in speech and behavior.” But now she has “come to the conclusion that they can cause as great a rumpus by talking about things no decent woman used to discuss... as they ever did by smashing the hats of Cabinet Ministers.”

The annual conference of the German Social Democratic Party rejects the general strike as a political instrument, not even to achieve universal (male) suffrage in the state of Prussia (which has an insanely retrograde electoral structure).

Headline of the Day -100 (LAT): “Little Natalie Throws Mud.” In Kharkoff, Russia, the governor of the province was driving through a town when a little girl, aged 5, threw some mud at his car, and some of it... the horror... fell on his coat. Her parents were made to march 8 miles to the nearest police post, then back, where the entire village had been called to adopt a petition craving forgiveness. The police chief wanted the village to present it on their knees, but they refused. The governor came the next day, when the entire village was called out again; he looked ostentatiously in the other direction while they had to shout to get his attention. Eventually they were allowed to go home, but the mother was imprisoned for 15 days.

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Today -100: September 20, 1913: Votes for Women and Chastity for Men!

Max Blanck, one of the two owners of the Triangle Shirt Waist Company, 146 of whose employees burned alive 102½ years ago because the exits were locked, is charged with... wait for it... locking the exits of his new factory. His lawyer, the same high-priced shyster who got him off last time, will argue that the locks are necessary to prevent theft. The judge will fine Blanck $20 and apologize to him for having to do that.

The family of Princess Sophia of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, still claiming that she died of heart disease (at 25) rather than from blowing her brains out, hurriedly cremates her, the first female royal ever to be cremated.

The Mexican Congress shows some cojones, rejecting Huerta’s nomination for minister of public instruction for being too Catholic.

Woodrow Wilson broke with the tradition of sending black ambassadors to Haiti, and the NYT claims that Haiti actually prefers it that way because many of the “better class of Haitians” have French as well as black blood, and therefore have “French sensitiveness to slights, real or apparent.” It’s all in the blood, you know.

Speaking of things found in the blood, the NYT notes that there is a debate within the British Women’s Social and Political Union, without making it clear what the hell it’s talking about. Christabel Pankhurst has been publishing articles in The Suffragette which “state in the plainest language facts not usually found outside medical works.” Were 1913 readers able to intuit that the words the NYT is unable to bring itself to print are venereal disease? I don’t know. The LAT says Christabel has been talking about “certain phases of the social problem” and “has been calling spades by something even more distinctive than the plain word spades,” but the last two words of the article are “white slavery,” which gets near the topic.

In Miss Pankhurst’s “Great Scourge” articles (here’s a link to the American edition of the book form of these articles), she ascribes the spread of VD entirely to male promiscuity, and asserts that there is only one cure: “Votes for Women and Chastity for Men.” Indeed, she is now charging that the real reason men oppose women’s suffrage is “sexual vice.”

Mary Winthrop Turner is being sued by Arthur Bender for $5,000 for libeling his dog, Countess Toots. Ms Turner contends her dog, Champion, the Dollar Princess (I don’t know if that’s a name or a title), is a better dog.

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Today -100: September 19, 1913: Fundamentally incapable of efficient and decently just rule

What is it with deceased NYC Mayor Gaynor and ships? He was shot on board one ship in 1910, died on another one in 1913, and now his body is being returned on... the Lusitania.

Princess Sophia of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach commits suicide, shooting herself in the head after being refused permission to marry a commoner (and by commoner I mean Jew).

The NYT thinks the European Powers should make sure the Ottoman Empire doesn’t mistreat its Armenians. This can only be done, it says, by reducing the Empire’s power in the Armenian regions in favor of a governor nominated by the Powers, because “the Turks are fundamentally incapable of efficient and decently just rule... due to the inherent qualities of the race and to the religion by which for centuries they have been inspired.”

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Today -100: September 18, 1913: Of defamations, whale butts, and intractable tribesmen

The Anti-Defamation League is founded to fight characterizations of Jews on the stage, in textbooks, etc.

Headline of the Day -100: “Whale Butts a Steamer.” A whale runs into a ship in the middle of the Atlantic. It is NOT a reference to whales farting.

An Italian general and a bunch of other soldiers are killed by “a body of intractable Arab tribesmen” in Libya.

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Close bonds

The White House responds to Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s cancellation of her visit to the US.

The statement says that the invitation was “a reflection of the importance he places on... the close bonds between the American and Brazilian people.” Granted, one of these close bonds, the NSA’s reading of the Brazilian people’s emails, was one the Brazilian people were not aware of, but it was a very close bond nonetheless.

“As the President previously stated, he has directed a broad review of U.S. intelligence posture, but the process will take several months to complete.” Presumably this review is to determine if the allegations in the Snowden infodump were true, something which Obama claimed not to know when he met Rousseff at the G-20.

“the presidents have agreed to postpone President Rousseff’s State Visit to Washington”. That’s after Rousseff said she wasn’t coming. Obama graciously “agreed” to let her not come, as opposed to sending in Seal Team Six to rendition her to the White House State Dining Room.

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Today -100: September 17, 1913: Of dynamite miscreants, axe & pistol duels, rebellious loyalists, and impeachments

Someone sends a bomb through the mail to the owner of the L.A. Times, reactionary asshole Gen. Harrison Gray Otis. The package looked suspicious, so it wasn’t opened and the police safely detonated it. Gen. Otis blamed it on “certain dynamite miscreants”. He thinks it’s unionists, but the cops think it’s someone opposed to Otis’s support of the Mexican Huerta Junta.

Headline of the Day -100: “Two Die in Duel of Axe and Pistol.” H.F. Hendricks, a timber magnate, had the revolver, and pulled it on his old foe Mississippi State Senator Dr. H.F. Broyles. Broyles was working on a dam and threw the axe at Hendricks, slicing through his skull. Hendricks fired as he fell, hitting Broyles in the heart.

Irish Unionists claim to have an army of 100,000 prepared to resist Home Rule with violence.

The impeachment of NY Gov. Sulzer is underway, and the impeachment managers are claiming to have found another large campaign donation that Sulzer failed to report, but Hugh Reilly, a railroad contractor (in Cuba) (historical trivia: the first railroad line built in the Western Hemisphere was in Cuba), says it was actually a personal loan of $10,000 he made to Sulzer after he was nominated for governor, and that Sulzer owes him that plus $16,500 from earlier loans, which Sulzer has failed to pay back; Reilly says he’s “kissed the money goodbye.”

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Today -100: September 16, 1913: Of menacing defectives and ugly men

Headline of the Day -100: “15,000 Defectives Menace New York.” A Dr. M. G. Schlapp of the Post-Graduate Hospital, the “clearing-house for defectives,” says there is only enough room to institutionalize 6,000 mentally defective New Yorkers. He wants them all put away, because “almost every defective child is a potential criminal.”

More from 1913 science: anthropologists at the British Association meeting say that women don’t mind marrying ugly men, while men prefer to marry hot women. And by anthropologists, I mean male anthropologists. It all has to do with evolution. For example, all women used to have beards, but men didn’t like them, so they were bred out.

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Today -100: September 15, 1913: A sex problem that women alone can solve

The National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage issues a press release claiming that the National Association of Chiefs of Police says that women’s suffrage does not cure prostitution. They quote just one chief of police, that of Plainfield, NJ, who says that the consensus of the police chiefs is that “the social evil is a sex problem that women alone can solve.” Evidently women aren’t nice enough to prostitutes.

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Today -100: September 14, 1913: Of ultimata, vivisection, and big Tims

China gives in to Japan’s ultimatum. (Update from a later issue: not all of it, such as the demand that the governor of Kiang-Su province be fired).

An anti-vivisection movement has been developing in Britain (in the US, not so much). The Home Office releases a report saying all animals being cut open or experimented upon by Dr. Moreau and the other 598 licensed vivisectors (vivisectionists?) in the UK are “suitably lodged and well cared for,” so that’s okay then.

“Big Tim” Sullivan, NYC Tammany leader/organized-crime boss/former state legislator/US congresscritter (he wore many hats, straw ones if Google Images is anything to go by), dies at 51. He had escaped from his brother’s house, where he was confined due to syphilitic insanity, and was hit by a train. So thank you, NYT, for saying that for the last 13 days he “had been lying in the Morgue – in three Morgues, in fact” BEFORE explaining that that was because they moved his body around, not because different body parts were in different morgues. There are theories that he may have been murdered and his body placed on the train tracks. It took 13 days to identify the body because no one tried, despite its having good clothes and diamond & gold cufflinks with his initials, and despite his face being untouched, and despite the fact that the coroner was a friend of his. He was about to be buried in Potter’s Field when a passing cop recognized the corpse. In November 1912 he was elected again to Congress (he had served 1903-6 before resigning to spend more time with his graft) but never re-took his seat, given the, you know, tertiary syphilis. Since he was declared mentally incompetent, his congressional pay went to his conservators. I can think of a few members of congress...

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Today -100: September 13, 1913: Of martial law in where now?

Martial law is declared in New Lexington, Ohio. A former Catholic priest was scheduled to make an anti-Catholic speech at the Opera House. A mob of Catholics threw eggs at his followers. Hilarity ensued.

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Today -100: September 12, 1913: Of assassinations, votes for Northern Irish women, and cocaine

Remember how New York City Mayor William Jay Gaynor was shot in the throat three years ago as he was about to sail for Europe? Well, a few days ago he finally started on that belated vacation, and has now dropped dead in a deck chair onboard the ship as a result of the bullet fragment that was never removed.

Gaynor’s assassin died in prison a few months ago.

The Women’s Social and Political Union announces that it will hold Sir Edward Carson, leader of the Ulsterites who is now threatening to go to war, literally, with the British government over Home Rule, responsible for giving votes to women in Northern Ireland. Christabel Pankhurst writes in The Suffragette that Carson has appealed to women to share the risks and penalties of rebellion, and that every excuse he could give for denying women’s suffrage would be a negation of his own arguments against Home Rule.

Carson replies, and very promptly too, by including votes for women in his draft Ulster constitution.

Japan issues an ultimatum to China regarding the deaths of three Japanese citizens and the mistreatment of others: it wants an apology for insults to the Japanese flag, punishment of those responsible (including the commander of Chinese government forces in Nanking), and an indemnity.

The War on Drugs, 1913 version: a black drug dealer, convicted in New York of selling cocaine to children, is given the maximum: 1 year in prison and a $500 fine.

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Today -100: September 11, 1913: Of vaudeville, thaws, and souls

Woodrow Wilson sees his first vaudeville show. He liked it.

100 Japanese marines land in Nanking. Oh good, that always ends well.

The Canadian government throws escaped lunatic murderer Harry Thaw out of the country, suddenly and in defiance of the Quebec courts, which were to hear a habeas corpus appeal on Monday, and literally pushed over the border into Vermont. He is caught by authorities in New Hampshire.

Sir Oliver Lodge, a major inventor in the field of electromagnatism (radio telegraphy, that sort of thing), says science has nearly proven the existence of the human soul and its survival after death. Also telepathy.

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The United States military doesn’t do pinpricks

Obama addressed the nation on Syria.

UM, IRAN? “My fellow Americans, tonight I want to talk to you about Syria, why it matters and where we go from here.”

“But I have resisted calls for military action because we cannot resolve someone else’s civil war through force”. Now he tells us.

“Because these weapons can kill on a mass scale, with no distinction between soldier and infant, the civilized world has spent a century working to ban them.” Nothing disqualifies you from intervening in the affairs of a Third World country so quickly as using a phrase like “the civilized world.”

“On that terrible night, the world saw in gruesome detail the terrible nature of chemical weapons”. Then he mentioned gas attacks in World War I (noting that American GIs were exposed to it but neglecting to add that the United States also used chemical weapons in that war) and the Nazis’ use of it in the Holocaust (but not the execution of nearly 600 people in US gas chambers, most recently in 1999).

“When dictators commit atrocities, they depend upon the world to look the other way until those horrifying pictures fade from memory.” In democracies, we just wait until a new president says we need to look forward, not backward.

He did the slippery slope thing: if we don’t bomb Syria, Syria will keep using chemical weapons, then other tyrants will, then they’ll use them on our troops, then terrorist groups will get them, then George Zimmerman. Then they’ll be used against Israel, because everything is about Israel. Then everyone will acquire other prohibited WMDs and Iran will build nukes, and we’re back to Israel. Smoking gun in the shape of a mushroom cloud.

“After all, I’ve spent four and a half years working to end wars, not to start them.” It’s nice of Obama to remind us, as he’s starting another war, that he’s taken longer “working to end wars” than it took to fight entire world wars.

He reassures us that this won’t be “an open-ended action like Iraq or Afghanistan” or “a prolonged air campaign like Libya or Kosovo,” even though the authorization he sent to Congress included no such limitations. Funny, that.

“Let me make something clear: The United States military doesn’t do pinpricks.” Is the military’s inability to do anything that isn’t violently destructive on a large scale something to brag about?

“Even a limited strike will send a message to Assad that no other nation can deliver.” Er, why no other nation?

“I don’t think we should remove another dictator with force. We learned from Iraq that doing so makes us responsible for all that comes next.” Bombing without responsibility is so much more fun.

“It’s true that some of Assad’s opponents are extremists. But al-Qaida will only draw strength in a more chaotic Syria if people there see the world doing nothing to prevent innocent civilians from being gassed to death.” Can’t say I see the logic here.

“And so to my friends on the right, I ask you to reconcile your commitment to America’s military might with a failure to act when a cause is so plainly just.” So his argument is that if you have a large military, it’s just silly not to crush a few small countries from time? We really do have to switch the name of the DOD back to War Department.

“To my friends on the left, I ask you to reconcile your belief in freedom and dignity for all people with those images of children writhing in pain and going still on a cold hospital floor, for sometimes resolutions and statements of condemnation are simply not enough.” Bombing for freedom and dignity, what leftie couldn’t get behind that?

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Today -100: September 10, 1913: If you sit through the story about tariffs, there’s one about a zeppelin. No fair skipping.

The Democrats’ Tariff Bill passes the Senate 44-37, nearly along party lines. Many tariffs have been reduced or eliminated altogether (free items include sugar & raw wool, livestock, wheat, gunpowder, pig iron, art antiquities more than 50 years old and books in foreign languages)(but the tariff on modern paintings and statues goes up, because those are considered rich people’s luxuries, or something), an average reduction of 28%. Goods produced largely by child labor don’t get the reduction. There is also an income tax to make up for all that, which will have to be negotiated with the House.

A German marine zeppelin is destroyed by a hurricane and falls into the North Sea, killing 15, including the commander of the Marine Airship Division.

Everyone complained about Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan going off on paid lectures, but just half an hour after he left to give a lecture in Pennsylvania, his office blew up. Gas explosion. “It probably will be necessary to redecorate the room.”

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Today -100: September 9, 1913: Of yodelers and secretaries of state

British suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst is coming to the US for a speaking tour, but will immigration officials bar her as a dangerous criminal? The NYT thinks she’s “not likely to do much harm. If she attempts to lecture on white slavery she will probably be checked by the will of a people who have tolerated too much filth on the platform and have been brought to realize that no good has come of open discussions of such subjects. If she urges the American women to smash windows and assault officials her advice will not be heeded, and she will lose whatever influence she may possess.” The Times light-heartedly (I think) suggests a deal with Britain in which the US hands Mrs P over to them in exchange for Harry Thaw, the escaped murderer still fighting extradition from Canada.

Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan is off on his Chautaugua lecture tour, and says he has no objections to the circulars announcing that he will appear on the same bill with jugglers, magicians, yodelers and other vaudeville-type performers.

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