Today -100: November 5, 1913: Of the consequences of the intolerable conditions of a corrupt machine and leadership

William Sulzer, impeached and removed from the governorship of New York not three weeks ago, is elected to the state Assembly.

The NY general election is a disaster for Tammany Hall. Not only did Democrats lose seats, but many of the Democrats who were elected are independent or Progressive-backed (as are some of the Republicans) rather than cogs in the Tammany machine. Assemblymen who voted to impeach Sulzer are voted out everywhere in the state except the strongest Tammany strongholds in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The Republicans take control of the state Assembly. John Purroy Mitchell, the Fusion candidate (basically Republicans plus a few bits and bobs) for mayor of NYC wins easily. He says that Tammany candidate Edward McCall “reaped the whirlwind and suffered the consequences of the intolerable conditions of a corrupt machine and leadership.”

The loss of Democratic votes is confined to New York state. The Progressive/Bull Moose Party, however, is fading away everywhere in the nation (and nominal leader Theodore Roosevelt is out of the country on an extended trip to South America). For example, Everett Colby, running for governor of New Jersey with an endorsement from Teddy Roosevelt, gets only 38,693 votes.

James Fielder (D), acting governor of New Jersey since Woodrow Wilson resigned to become president, is elected in his own right.

The Socialist mayor of Schenectady, George Lunn, is defeated by an unholy alliance of the Republican, Democratic & Progressive parties (but the city elects the first socialist sheriff in the US, Louis Welsh).

David Walsh (D), is elected governor of Massachusetts, the first Catholic and the first Irishman to hold that office, defeating the incumbent, Eugene Foss. Not quite sure what happened there. Foss, who had only converted to the Democratic Party in 1909, was rejected by it for re-election earlier in 1913. He then tried to enter the Republican primary but failed to qualify, and finally ran as an independent. He came in a weak fourth, without carrying a single district.

China’s Pres. Yuan expels all 300+ Kuomintang members from Parliament for opposing his march to dictatorship.

Booker T. Washington suggests that for Thanksgiving, African-Americans count the blessings of being negroes in the South. Oh sure, there are “difficulties in the form of lynchings, mobs, &c.” but there’s always friction, why look at Mexico, in which there’s only one race (!). “But racial difficulties are growing fewer every year in the South, and a spirit of friendship and mutual recognition of the rights of each race is growing.” Blacks can buy land, and they understand how to grow and market cotton “almost by inheritance or instinct,” and they also understand mules by instinct.

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Today -100: November 4, 1913: Of ultimata, hobos, and getting used to the income tax

Woodrow Wilson sends a note to Mexican dictator Huerta telling him to resign at once, at once I say! And no leaving a puppet in the president’s office either.

Mexican Gen. Felix Díaz flees to Cuba.

On the NYT front page, subtly sandwiched between two Mexico stories, is this article: “500,000 SOLDIERS AVAILABLE FOR WAR; Ordnance Department Has Perfected Plans for Prompt Mobilization.”

To get the police to do their job in preventing voter intimidation, the acting mayor of New York orders every police captain rotated temporarily to a new precinct.

The AP reveals that Illinois Lt.-Gov. Barratt O’Hara is a hobo. The president of the National Hobo Union gave him a membership card after O’Hara revealed that he too was once down and out, but O’Hara will have to make one trip using only his own resources before being acknowledged as a real ‘bo, with all the rights and privileges that entails.

Federal officials assure everyone dealing with the new federal income tax “that they will like it when they get used to it.” And history has certainly proven them right, huh?

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Today -100: November 3, 1913: Of arms, meteorites, trams, and pitchforks

Gen. Carranza of the Mexican Constitutionalists asks the US to allow the rebels to import arms from the US.

Headline of the Day -100: “Nearly Hit By Meteorite.” In Malden, Massachusetts. Two high school students claim to have been sickened by the fumes.

Street car strike in Indianapolis. Strikebreakers shooting at the crowd kill one of their own. Four cops turn in their badges rather than protect scab-operated street cars. The sheriff will swear in 250 businessmen as special deputies tomorrow. (Update from tomorrow’s paper: this was evidently in the nature of a draft, like jury duty; the sheriff issued summonses. But only 50 people showed up, and the Democratic sheriff was accused of sending summons almost exclusively to Republicans to prevent them working in the election Tuesday.)

Sen. “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman (D-SC) complains in a letter to the Spartansburg Herald that Gov. Coleman Blease keeps stealing the best bits from his speeches. For example, “I am the originator of the phrase ‘To hell with the Constitution.’ I used it in Chicago.” Tillman also again declares himself in favor of lynching assailants of women (I’m not sure what the context is for that, or if it’s just something he tacks on whenever he writes to the press, which wouldn’t surprise me one bit).

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Today -100: November 2, 1913: Of amnesties and rotten eggs

Headline of the Day -100: “PORTUGAL FREES PRISONERS; Turns Loose 300 Illiterates, but Keeps the Intellectuals.” Royalists held up to three years without trial. 120 literate prisoners remain locked up. The authorities figure they must be the leaders.

Ousted NY Gov. William Sulzer holds a campaign rally in the heart of Tammany territory. Sulzer denounces Tammany Hall and Speaker of the Assembly Al Smith. The Tammany machine tries to disrupt Sulzer’s audience with: horse-drawn street cars, fire engines, a fife and drum corps, fireworks, and a fusillade of rotten eggs. A good time was had by all.

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Today -100: November 1, 1913: The moral law which the Suffragettes have defied is not the moral law accepted for themselves by men

Woodrow Wilson’s personal envoy, former Gov. John Lind, is still in Mexico, doing God knows what. But his wife just left for home. The steamship she was on was boarded by soldiers who arrested four deputies from a state legislature who opposed a tax Huerta ordered. Two other men the soldiers were looking for were hidden away – by Mrs. Lind in her cabin (she stayed on deck all night).

At the Kiev ritual murder trial, a Prof. Sikorski of Kiev University (a psych prof) testifies that Jews still ritually kill Christian boys all the time in the 20th century. All the time.

Speaking of racist murder trials of Jews, a Georgia Superior Court rejects Leo Frank’s motion for a new trial, which cited the prejudice of some of the jurors and loud intimidating demonstrations near the courtroom.

The New Statesman (UK) publishes a supplement on the women’s suffrage movement. Christabel Pankhurst’s article shows that she no longer considers militancy as merely a method for achieving women’s suffrage but as an end in itself, saying that militancy is “a means of breaking up the false relation of inferior to superior that has existed between men and women, and it is a means of correcting the great faults that have been produced in either sex by the subjection of women.” “The opposition to women’s militancy is founded upon prejudice, and upon nothing else. For the very same acts that militant women commit would, if they were committed by voteless men, be applauded. The moral law which the Suffragettes have defied is not the moral law accepted for themselves by men. It is slave morality that they have defied, a slave morality according to which active resistance to tyranny is the greatest crime that a subject class or a subject sex can commit.” Militancy is an education to men, showing that women are no longer appealing to them for the vote but “denying their title to withhold the vote.”

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Today -100: October 31, 1913: Of ritual murder, slimy pulitzers, and possums

The Kiev ritual murder trial continues, with a debate between doctors over “whether there were 13 or 14 wounds in the boy Yushinsky’s left temple, the number 13 having apparently a Cabalistic significance.” The court decides not to show the dead boy’s actual scalp to the jury. Further medical testimony “described the difference in the Russian and Jewish methods of slaughtering animals.”

Tammany candidate for NY mayor Edward McCall has been making a big deal about Fusionist candidate John Purroy Mitchell’s supposed connections to Ralph Pulitzer and his New York World, talking about Pulitzer much more than about his actual opponent. He says that if he ever meets “this slimy Pulitzer,” “if I ever get my hands on him, I’ll make him wish he never had been born.” That’s a former justice of the state Supreme Court speaking.

Headline of the Day -100: “President Gets a ’Possum.” A live one, one assumes. “‘I am an old slave time darkey,’ wrote ‘Joe’ Farrow of McFarlan, N.C., the sender. ‘I heard that some one sent you a sweet potato the other day. Here is an opossum to go with it.’” I wonder if anyone sends Obama opossums.

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Today -100: October 30, 1913: Of coal wars, ritual murder, and forcible resistance

Striking Colorado coal miners burn a mine office of the Southwestern Fuel Company (and the post office which shared the building, after looting the mail) in Aguilar. The Colo. National Guard gives mine guards and strikers 24 hours to surrender their arms, like that’s gonna happen.

Two doctors testify for Mendel Beilis in the Kiev ritual murder trial. One of them is a Dr. Pavlov, I think possibly the salivating-dogs Dr. Pavlov. It would help if the New York Times USED FUCKING FIRST NAMES, EVER.

Andrew Bonar Law, leader of the Tory Party, addresses a meeting alongside self-proclaimed One True Tsar of All the Ulsters Sir Edward Carson. Bonar Law says the Tories will support Ulster, even to the extent of forcible resistance to Home Rule.

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Today -100: October 29, 1913: Of defunct skyscrapers, coal wars, new navies, segregation, and mad kings

Standard Oil plans to tear down the Tower Building on Broadway, which when it was built in 1889 was the tallest building in lower New York (11 stories) and the first true skyscraper, built on a steel-skeleton frame. It’s not falling down or anything, it’s just too expensive to operate and its tax bill is too high. I’m not sure what replaced it, but there’s a rather ugly 37-story building which was finished in 1927 there now.

The governor of Colorado declares a state of insurrection and imposes martial law on the Ludlow-Berwind area, ordering the whole state militia into the area to disarm both sides in the coal war. They proceed to not disarm mine guards, who I might add have a machine gun. The strike is over a month old and the NYT says there have been 28 killed, and lots of property damage, dynamite being so readily at hand in the area. Today a mine guard is shot dead after he shot a striker in the leg. Some of the strikers are Greeks who fought in the Balkan Wars.

New Zealand decides to have a navy, just like Australia, and to stop subsidizing the British Navy, after Britain broke the deal to station two cruisers of a certain size in NZ waters, sending two smaller ones, amusingly named the Psyche and the Pyramus.

The LA Times has an article on segregation in federal government offices under Wilson, which it says is increasing but uneven. Black employees in the dead letter office of the Post Office Dept now sit “in one corner of a room screened off from the general public by lockers. It is explained that the lockers were so placed to improve the ventilation, but no explanation is made of the fact that only colored employees are working behind the screen.” Black employees in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing now have a “lunchroom, lavatory and toilet room all in one” but the Post Office Dept provides no lunchroom for black employees, “the argument being that as there are no separate negro restaurants in Washington, the government is not bound to provide one.”

Bavaria is finally going to dethrone Mad King Otto.

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Observation of the Day

Darrell Issa looks like he talks into his shoe. I don’t mean he looks like Maxwell Smart; I just mean he looks like he talks into his shoe.

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A lah-di-dah, airy-fairy view

British Prime Minister David Cameron issued a statement about The Guardian’s ongoing Edward Snowden leaks.

He called on The Guardian to “demonstrate some social responsibility,” by which he meant obey orders and shut the fuck up.

He warned against a “lah-di-dah, airy-fairy view” of the dangers of leaks, by which he meant failing to obey orders and shut the fuck up.

He said that up until now, “The approach we have taken is to try to talk to the press and explain how damaging some of these things can be,” by which he meant telling them to obey orders and shut the fuck up.

But, he says, they have “gone on and printed further material which is damaging,” by which he meant failed to obey orders and shut the fuck up, so he may have to resort to injunctions and D notices to get them to obey orders and shut the fuck up.

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State interest

The federal judge who blocked some of the Texas anti-abortion law doesn’t seem to have addressed the state’s claim that there is a state interest in “protecting fetal life” in cases where the mother wants to terminate it.

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Today -100: October 28, 1913: Of holidays, ritual murder, amnesty, home rule within home rule, Wackes, hairpins and krazy kats

Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan endorses Winston Churchill’s proposal of a “naval holiday,” as long as, you know, everyone else is also doing it.

The trial of Mendel Beilis continues in Kiev. Another day of “testimony,” mostly hearsay from Catholic and Orthodox priests about the Jewish practice of ritual murder. Days can go by without Beilis’s name even being mentioned, as the prosecutors put the entire Jewish race on trial.

Tammany candidate for NYC mayor (I’d say Democratic candidate, but Tammany is more realistic) Edward McCall demanded that John Hennessy (who worked for Sulzer as a graft investigator) put the charges he’s making against McCall (buying his seat on the state Supreme Court with money he got from a police inspector, acting as Boss Murphy’s messenger boy to former Gov. Sulzer, etc) in writing so he could sue him (the former justice has heard of libel laws but not slander laws, I guess). Hennessy does, and now McCall says he, er, won’t sue, and he doesn’t want anyone to mention “that creature”’s name in front of him again.

Woodrow Wilson gives a speech: “the United States will never again seek one additional foot of territory by conquest.” This is being taken to mean that the US will invade Mexico to “restore order,” but won’t stay there or, you know, annex anything.

First Mexican dictator Huerta tried to keep presidential rival Felix Díaz out of the country during the election, then he ordered him to leave Vera Cruz for Mexico City. Díaz rather sensibly resigned from the army rather than comply and has now asked for protection from the Americans and is safely lodged on a battleship.

Britain’s Liberal government has been suggesting flexibility on Ulster, but not exclusion from Home Rule. More like home rule within home rule, with Northern Ireland having control over its own education, police, etc.

In Saverne, Alsace (or Zabern, Elsaß if you prefer), one of two German-speaking provinces of France acquired by Germany in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, a Lt. Gunther Freiherr von Forstner tells one of his unruly soldiers to stop fighting other soldiers in the barracks but if he got into a scuffle with the locals – who Forstner refers to as “Wackes,” a derisive term for Alsatians – he could shoot them, in which case Forstner would pay 10 marks each. When this story gets out, it will not go over especially well.

Headline of the Day -100 (LA Times): “Hatpin is Fatal.” Mrs. Josephine Karmuenisk, wife of a saloon-keeper in South Chicago, stabs a hold-up man behind the ear.

The cartoon Krazy Kat premiers in Hearst’s New York Evening Journal.

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Today -100: October 27, 1913: What if they gave an election and no one voted?

Headline of the Day -100: “MEXICO VOTES; NOBODY ELECTED.” The constitution requires 1/3 of the voters to vote for the results to be valid and nowhere near that many participated in the farce. So Huerta will stay in power while he arranges another farce-election (farcection?). Huerta announces an increase in the size of the military from 90,000 to 150,000.

A 12-hour gun battle is waged between striking coal miners, deputy sheriffs and mine guards in Ludlow, Colorado. Gov. Elias Ammons calls in the National Guard. More will be heard from Ludlow.

After a suspiciously long delay, Tammany candidate for mayor of New York City Edward McCall and “Boss” Charles Murphy both deny that McCall paid Murphy for his seat on the state Supreme Court. McCall threatens to sue every newspaper that publishes the charges.

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Today -100: October 26, 1913: Of baby prohibitionists, nations stained by blood, and zeppelin trust

The Women’s Christian Temperance Union is holding a world congress (its first) in Brooklyn. Someone brought their 10-month-old baby and dedicated him to a life of total abstinence. I didn’t know you could do that. The congress passed a resolution asking the general convention of the Episcopal Church to replace its communion wine with grape juice.

Woodrow Wilson gives a speech in Mobile saying that every nation in the Western Hemisphere should not be “stained by blood or supported by anything but the consent of the governed,” adding, “Hey, did you get that I was subtly referring to Mexico there?”

Headline of the Day -100: “German Trust in Zeppelins Shaken.”

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Today -100: October 25, 1913: Of Catholic voting and miners

The Vatican’s lifting of the ban on Italians voting that’s been in place since the unification of Italy isn’t unconditional; they can only vote if the “right” sort of candidate is running in their district. The Vatican also bans Clerical candidates from forming a Catholic bloc in parliament for whose actions it might be held responsible.

As work continues to remove bodies from the Dawson, New Mexico mine explosion, the town’s mayor, acting on the request of Phelps, Dodge, deports United Mine Worker officials.

189 striking copper miners are arrested in Calumet, Mich. for violating an injunction against picketing.

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Today -100: October 24, 1913: Of vetoes, coal mines, withering militancy, and plague rats

Anthony Comstock, head of the NY Society for the Suppression of Vice and puritan wannabe, applies for warrants to arrest sellers of the British newspaper The Suffragette (one of the issues which discusses venereal disease and its relationship to women’s rights). Local suffragists head off possible prosecution by saying they’ll sell the remaining issues out west.

Woodrow Wilson issues his first veto, of a Congressional joint resolution to reinstate a West Point cadet who flunked out, and issues his first proclamation, designating Nov. 27 as Thanksgiving Day.

Tammany candidate for mayor of New York Edward McCall refuses to answer accusations that he paid Boss Murphy $35,000 for his nomination to the state Supreme Court.

Speakers of Esperanto protest the ritual murder trial in Kiev, because why not.

Another coal mine explosion, this one in Dawson, New Mexico. 261 dead, of whom 238 not yet recovered.

Huerta still claims not to be seeking election to the presidency, although he’s been trying to expel candidate Felix Díaz from the country (candidates for the presidency have to be on Mexican soil at the time of the election).

The Wilson administration blames Britain for Mexican dictator Huerta’s supposed new lease on life (the new British ambassador presented his credentials the day after the coup). Coincidentally, Britain is seeking a concession to build an oil pipeline in Mexico.

The Bishop of Winchester appeals to militant suffragists and the government for a “Truce of God” entailing the end of militancy, an amnesty and a suffrage bill or referendum. Even the non-militant leader Millicent Garrett Fawcett tells him where to stuff his Truce of God. Annie Kenney of the Women’s Social and Political Union replies in a letter the London Times didn’t print, saying that while the bishop claimed that if the vote was won by militant methods its benefits would be impaired, suffragettes “believe that if women get the vote by militancy, which means both fighting and self-sacrifice, it will bring with it a special blessing and a special power.”

In other pompous-British-male-lectures-suffragists news, Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George tells a deputation from the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies that militancy has “ruined” this Parliament as far as women’s suffrage is concerned, although he thinks the spirit of militancy is “withering.” In other words, he met with the non-militant suffragists and the only thing he talked about was militancy. Meanwhile, the withering militants set fire to the Bristol University Sports Pavilion. Bristol students will return the favor tomorrow against the furniture of the Bristol WSPU office.

Headline of the Day -100: “War on Plague Rats.” Seattle would like to point out that although it has many rats with bubonic plague, there has been no case among humans in six years.

Blind Senator Thomas Gore is being sued for (sexual) assault and slander.

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Today -100: October 23, 1913: Of land, Maderos, and lynchings

British Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George says that the Liberal government plans to establish a Ministry of Lands with the power to seize uncultivated land, regulate conditions and pay for farm laborers, and promote emigration from the towns to the land. Nothing will come of this, and it’s hard to believe Lloyd George thought anything would.

Two of the late Mexican President Madero’s brothers have been captured by the regime. We’ll see if they live longer than the last Madero brothers arrested by Huerta.

A negro is lynched in Monroe, Louisiana, for making an insulting remark to a white woman.

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Today -100: October 22, 1913: We know now the joy of battle, a joy men long kept from us

Headline of the Day -100: “Chihuahua in Danger.” The state, not the yappy dog, of course. By Pancho Villa. Villa is also ordering the cotton crop harvested for sale in the United States.

An indictment against Tom Watson, the Populist Party candidate for president in 1904, for sending improper material through the mails, is dismissed because the government was relying on extracts from an article in Watson’s magazine rather than the entire article. The judge says that under that tactic, the Bible could be prosecuted. The article “purport[ed] to embody questions asked by Catholic clergymen in the confessional,” in other words typical sensationalistic anti-Catholic propaganda of the period (since his Populist days, Watson had veered towards espousing many and various bigotries).

Emmeline Pankhurst speaks at Madison Square Garden. She defended using the US as a piggy bank for her wing of the British suffrage movement: “Why should I not come here. What helps women in England helps women all over the world. It is not necessary for women in the United States to be militant. Perhaps one reason is that we are doing the work for them. We are proud to do that work. We know now the joy of battle, a joy men long kept from us.”

Death of the Day -100: Gen. Samuel J. Crawford, Indian Fighter. The third governor of Kansas, he resigned in 1869 to go kill some Indians.

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Today -100: October 21, 1913: It will be Gaffney or war

Emmeline Pankhurst is allowed to enter the US after Pres. Wilson’s personal intervention.

Britain’s new Lord Chief Justice is Sir Rufus Isaacs, a Jew. The NYT declares anti-Semitism over in Britain. That’s nice.

The Progressive Party nominates ousted Gov. William Sulzer for next month’s election to the NY Assembly for the 6th district (which is in New York City). He has evidently been asked to run, in writing, by more than half the registered voters in the district. The Republican candidate will drop out and support him. Sulzer will also, immediately after election day, begin a lecture tour at $1,000 per lecture.

And Sulzer does, finally, have lots to say. He says that “Boss” Charles Murphy offered him money early in his term, and later threatened him when he wouldn’t appoint Murphy’s nominee as commissioner of highways (“It will be Gaffney or war,” Murphy allegedly told him). Every day, Murphy sent some emissary (Sulzer pointedly names Edward McCall, Tammany’s candidate for NY mayor) to make demands and threaten consequences.

Women from colored women’s clubs in Los Angeles complain to the Police Commission about the city’s color line. They say black people are charged 25¢ to 50¢ at some movie theaters where the regular price is 5¢ or 10¢ and are similarly over-charged at bars. The Police Commission said their only recourse was to file civil suits.

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Today -100: October 20, 1913: Of moral turpitude

Mexican rebels blow up a troop train, killing 46.

Woodrow Wilson is personally looking into whether Emmeline Pankhurst should be deported. In the meantime, hearings will examine the extent of the militant suffrage movement in Britain and whether Mrs P’s crimes were political, in which case she cannot be excluded unless moral turpitude is involved (suffragists have been pointing out that for decades Irish former political prisoners have been allowed into the US unimpeded). Mrs P supposedly says that if deported she’ll start hunger-striking and be dead within 24 hours. I say supposedly because the next day she denied having said any such thing but the NYT story had her alleged words in quotation marks. It is a puzzlement.

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