Today -100: February 13, 1914: Of suffrage splits, smashing the British Empire, and English mustaches

Christabel Pankhurst sends a letter to the press about the split with her sister Sylvia. She says that the Women’s Social and Political Union is not a propaganda organization but a fighting organization (that is, they’ve stopped caring about what the public thinks and their activities are now exclusively directed at pressuring the government), so it must have one policy, one program, and one command. “Only by fighting them [the government], not by appealing to them, can women maintain their self-respect,” she rewrites in today -100’s The Suffragette.

British suffragettes burn down a library, and Mexican rebels blow up a train.

A British Labour Party amendment to the King’s Speech asking the king to veto the South African government’s attempt to indemnify itself for having illegally deported strike leaders is rejected by Parliament. Colonial Secretary Lewis Harcourt defends the “autonomy” of British colonies; efforts like this to interfere with it would “smash the British Empire.”

The House of Lords votes for an amendment demanding a referendum on Irish Home Rule.

Blind Senator Thomas Gore (D-OK, Gore Vidal’s grandfather) is being sued for $50,000 by a Mrs. Minnie Bond, for an alleged attempted sexual assault on her when she lobbied him for a job for her husband (who was once married to her bigamously).

The commander of the Kaiser’s Guard Corps bans the toothbrush (or “English”) mustache: “the modern fashion of wearing the mustaches as a trifling tuft of hair under the nose is unsuitable for Prussian soldiers and irreconcilable with the true German character.”

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A promise to God is different from a promise to anyone else

Clarence Thomas says Americans are just too darned sensitive about race. Er, who was it who insisted that criticism of his sexual predation was a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks?”

That’s the bit that’ll get whatever attention this speech gets, but more important are his remarks about religion: “I quite frankly don’t know how you do these hard jobs without some faith. I don’t know. Other people can come to you and explain it to you. I have no idea. I don’t know how an oath becomes meaningful unless you have faith. Because at the end you say, ‘So help me God.’ And a promise to God is different from a promise to anyone else.”

So, 1) atheists are black boxes to him; he cannot even guess at their mysterious and unknowable motivations. 2) They cannot be trusted and probably shouldn’t be allowed to hold public office. Good to know. 3) Religion and government therefore are inextricably intertwined and cannot be separated.

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All of them are wonderful in their own ways

François Hollande visited the White House. A reporter asked Obama if France is our best European ally now. He says it’s like his daughters, he would never choose between them, “All of them are wonderful in their own ways.” Hollande said, “Hey, that’s just how I feel about my mistresses!”



RNC chair Reinhold Reince Priebus told MSNBC that if Hillary runs for president, they will absolutely be bringing up the Monica Lewinsky thing over and over: “I think everything’s on the table.”

Or in Monica’s case, under the table.

Obviously I would never have dared make such crude jokes while Shirley Temple was alive. I feel so free now.

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Today -100: February 12, 1914: Of unfused moose, primaries, hardies, and frozen tangoes

Headline of the Day -100: “Nebraska Moose Won’t Fuse.” Nebraska Progressives won’t merge with the Republican Party.

Pres. Wilson plans to introduce legislation to establish national presidential primaries for all the parties on the same day. States would still control election machinery and qualifications (to keep you-know-who from voting), and states and congressional seats would be the primary unit for counting votes. The latter provision is designed to screw up the Republicans’ attempt to reduce the power of the South in the party to something more proportionate to the actual number of Republican votes in the South (almost none).

The novelist Thomas Hardy (73) marries his secretary (and author of The Book of Baby Birds) Florence Dugdale (35).

Headline of the Day -100: “TANGOED IN HIS FREEZER.; Butcher, Locked In, Also Tried Jigs, His Yells Furnishing the Music.”

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Today -100: February 11, 1914: Of Chicago bribes, Belgian court dress, obliging weddings, Mexican bandits, Irish Home Rule, tricked London police, and impersonation and vilification

In the run-off to alderman elections in Chicago, the party machines are having to cope with the question of how to bribe the new female voters: candy instead of cigars, coffee wagons instead of booze.

A while back an (unnamed) Belgian woman “in Court circles” ordered a gown. Before it was finished, an episcopal letter was issued banning the wearing of dresses which are too, as they say in French, boobalicious. So the woman decided she couldn’t wear the dress and refused to pay her dressmaker, who sued. A judge ruled in the customer’s favor, but was reversed by the appeals court, which noted that the gown complied with the measurements of Belgian court dress regulations.

Headline of the Day -100: “To Wed to Oblige Kaiser.” German Foreign Minister Gottlieb von Jagow announces his engagement to the Countess Luitgarde Ernestine zu Salms-Laubach. For some reason it bothered the kaiser that his last two foreign ministers were bachelors.

Maximo Castillo, the Mexican bandit who suffocated the passengers on a train in the Cumbre Tunnel after holding it up a few days ago, is captured. Pancho Villa promises a public execution.

A new session of the British Parliament, which will focus on Irish Home Rule. The Tories say they will only agree if Ulster is excluded from the act, or there’s a referendum. If Ulster is not excluded, Austen Chamberlain says, civil war is certain. Prime Minister Asquith rejects the idea of holding another general election, saying that if the Liberals won, the Ulsterites would not lay down their arms, and if the Conservatives won, they’d have to deal with some very disappointed Irish people. But he’s still being wishy-washy over whether he might agree to Ulster exclusion or to Ulster being included in the Irish Parliament but with a referendum several years later to see how they were liking it.

The Swedish government resigns over King Gustaf’s refusal to stop mouthing off about political matters (especially military spending) without consulting his government ministers first.

Alfred Charles Sam (“Chief Sam”) has a scheme to bring negroes from the US to the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana). He’s off buying a steamship now. A white guy who transacts the company’s business says that the officers are all Gold Coasters whose names he could tell you, but you couldn’t pronounce them, much less remember them, so why bother? Passengers have to be stockholders in the company, and the company will sell them food on the ship and provisions in Africa and they’ll get 99-year leases. While not quite a Nigerian-prince-email scam, the 60 people who will get to Africa will not wind up at all pleased.

Headline of the Day -100: “Mrs. Pankhurst Tricks Police Again.” British police arrest Mrs. Pankhurst after a meeting and after a fight with her followers. Only it’s another woman in Mrs P’s clothes.

The Senate passes a law against “impersonation and vilification.” This is from the discovery that the Wall Street stock broker and lobbyist David “The Wolf” Lamar’s practice of impersonating members of Congress was not actually illegal. The bill would outlaw imitating any member of Congress or federal officer over the telephone.

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Today -100: February 10, 1914: The kindest possible spirit

Disappointing Headline of the Day -100: “Queen Louise Still Fast.” A beached ship, not a promiscuous royal.

Headline of the Day -100: “Bishop Absolves Jailers.” The bishop of London returns to Holloway Prison to check up on suffragette prisoners. While prison authorities don’t allow him to witness forcible feeding, he’s sure that “whether the orders are right or wrong, the officials are carrying them out in the kindest possible spirit.” So that’s okay then. Norah Dacre-Fox of the Women’s Social and Political Union suggests that the bishop come to Knightsbury Hall and be forcibly fed, “so that he could give voice to the faith that was in him in a practical manner.”

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Today -100: February 9, 1914: Of Balkan wars, divorces, and damns

Turkey is rumored to be considering restarting the Balkan Wars (good times, good times) in order to recover territory lost to Greece, and maybe Albania as well.

Arthur Conan Doyle argues for easier divorce.

Headline of the Day -100: “PASTOR SAID 'DAMN' TO DANCE OBJECTOR; Now Greenpoint's Reformed Episcopal Church Is to Lose the Rev. Charles Quinn.”

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Today -100: February 8, 1914: Of banditos, precious peas, cocaine fiends, and boobs

Mexican bandit – ah, fuck it, bandito – Maximo Castillo holds up a train, then allows it to enter a tunnel at the other end of which the bandits had set some stock cars on fire. 41 people on the train, including some Americans, suffocate to death. This may have been an act of revenge for the recent execution of 22 of Castillo’s banditos by the rebels.

Christabel Pankhurst confirms to the NYT that there has indeed been a break with her sister Sylvia over methods. She says Sylvia’s methods go too far and endanger human life (which is not true) while hers (well, not hers, she’s just sitting it out in Paris, but her followers’) only destroy property (arson being not at all dangerous to human life). Sylvia explains to the Daily Sketch that “It is not a split; it is an extension.” She notes that certain methods, like a no-rent strike, wouldn’t work except in the East End, while others, such as the burning of mail boxes, would be inappropriate where the people are poor. Nora Dacre Fox, who has day-to-day control of the WSPU in London, says that the cause of the split was Sylvia’s refusal to eschew men’s assistance and her use of mass methods that “tend to make it a class movement”.

The split makes the NYT has a sad: “We had come to look upon them as two precious peas in one pod.”

The Catholic Church tries to force the Abbé Jules Lemire, a deputy in the French National Assembly, to resign. He’s been a deputy for 20 years, but in recent years has moved away from the monarchist Right.

An article in the NYT Sunday Magazine suggests that one effect of the spread of prohibition in the South is to turn negroes into cocaine fiends, driving them to murder and insanity.

Marie Lloyd is allowed into the US.

NYT Sunday Book Review review of the Day -100: “BOOBS. As Seen by John Henry. By George V. Hobart. Illustrated by Edward Carey.”

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Today -100: February 7, 1914: Of splits, what Swedish peasants want, smuggling over the ice, Fords, poultry trusts, and kid auto races

The US Senate is discussing an amendment that some of the funds for “farm demonstration” should go to negro agricultural colleges. During the debate, James K. Vardaman (D-Miss.) regales the Senate with his views on race: negroes should be disenfranchised in every state, women in the South are living in state of siege with more dread than in the days when the wild man and wild beast roamed the frontier, etc.

Sylvia Pankhurst and her East London Federation of the Women’s Social and Political Union break away from the WSPU (actually, her mother Emmeline and sister Christabel expel her for her working-class and Labour Party sympathies and her preference for mass tactics over the WSPU’s individual acts of militancy, which mostly means arson at this point). There weren’t a lot of Pankhurst family get-togethers after this. The view that Sylvia was too much of a radical left-winger would later be shared (and expressed publicly) by Lenin.

Headline of the Day -100: “SWEDISH PEASANTS WANT BIGGER ARMY.”

Disappointing Headline of the Day -100: “SMUGGLING OVER THE ICE.; Canadian Merchants Ask Their Government to Stop It.” It seems goods are being smuggled using the ice bridge over the St. Lawrence River. I was wondering who would be smuggling ice over into Canada.

Reason Trigg (that’s a person’s name, Reason Trigg, really), stricken by conscience, confesses to having participated in a lynching 27 years ago in Monticello, Illinois. The grand jury releases him.

Turkey will allow women into universities.

The Progressive (Bull Moose) Party in Michigan asks Henry Ford to run for governor. He says no.

13 members of the Poultry Trust are sentenced to jail for 3 months for actions in restraint of trade, the first time anyone has actually gone to jail for this particular crime. The article reminds me that there was a Bathtub Trust, so the Poultry Trust was not quite the funniest trust, but thanks for playing the home game.

The release of the short “Kid Auto Races at Venice,” Charlie Chaplin’s first appearance as the Little Tramp.

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Today -100: February 6, 1914: Of Orestes, tolls, moral turpitude, and planes

Huh, so the revolution/putsch in Haiti will replace Pres. Michael Oreste with Oreste Zamor, probably so they don’t have to throw out all the stationery. Sen. Davilmar Theodore has also declared himself president, although it will take (spoiler alert) another coup later in the year to make this come true.

Pres. Wilson says he favors repeal of the toll exemption for American ships going through the Panama Canal.

“Boss” Murphy says he will be boss of Tammany for life. And he’s right.

British music hall star Marie Lloyd crosses from the US into Canada for a gig and on return is AGAIN barred for moral turpitude. And she’s not even moral turpituding any more: since her arrival with boyfriend Bernard Dillon last year, her husband died and she married Dillon.

Mexican rebels seize Mazatlan, their first port. Also, the rebels plan to take advantage of the lifting of the US arms embargo and buy some airplanes. Aerial warfare, just what was missing from this revolution.

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Today -100: February 5, 1914: Of coups, divorce, good relations, and trans-Atlantic flights

There’s a sudden coup in Peru, which rhymes. Pres. Guillermo Billinghurst (yes, really) is taken prisoner and the prime minister/minister of war is killed. Congress has been threatening to impeach Billinghurst and he’s been threatening to dissolve Congress, claiming it was elected illegally, which is about all I know about that.

Sen. Joseph Ransdell (D-Louisiana) proposes a constitutional amendment banning remarriage by divorced people.

German Foreign Minister Gottlieb von Jagow says that Anglo-German relations are “very good.” Phew. Or, as the Germans probably spell it, pfew.

A plane is being built which is supposedly capable of making the first trans-Atlantic flight. Its wing-span will be 80 feet and it will have a 200-horsepower engine. It will make the attempt in summer unless other events, you know, intervene.

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Today -100: February 4, 1914: Of immigration, parcels, women’s suffrage, and dreadnoughts in the air

The House, working on an immigration bill, rejects amendments excluding Asiatics (and Africans) by 203-54 after appeals by the Wilson administration that they not fuck up relations with Japan.

People are still getting the hang of the new parcel post system. A two-year-old was just posted by his grandmother in Oklahoma to his aunt in Kansas. To answer your next question: 18¢.

Pres. Wilson removes the ban on arms sales to Mexico (either side) imposed by Taft two years ago.

Pancho Villa says he will execute any Spaniards siding with Federal forces. Pancho Villa does not like Spaniards.

The lower house of the New Jersey Legislature passes a women’s suffrage bill 49-4.

At the national level, the Congressional Democratic caucus votes 123-57 that women’s suffrage is a matter for the states, not for a national constitutional amendment.

British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey admits that Britain was partly responsible for setting off the naval arms race by building the first dreadnought, but, he says, at the time the idea of dreadnoughts was in the air.

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Today -100: February 3, 1914: Him or it

The South African government is pushing through a bill to indemnify (i.e., retroactively make legal) its illegal act in deporting trade union leaders. The bill would also ban them from returning.

Carranza warns foreigners that they will be executed if they have aided Huerta. It is feared that “aid” will be interpreted to include merely paying the extraordinary taxes and forced loans levied by the Huerta Junta.

Self-exiled Gen. Felix Díaz sends an emissary, Francisco Guzman, to try to woo Pancho Villa’s support away from Carranza. Villa has Guzman shot. A simple no would have sufficed.

The Panama-Pacific Exposition planned for San Francisco in 1915 will feature an around-the-world airplane race. Unless other events, you know, intervene.

Woodrow Wilson meets a deputation of working-class women’s suffragists, and again refuses to come out for women’s suffrage.

Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, president of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association, refuses to declare to tax authorities the value of her personal property. The form she was sent asked her to declare any property owned by “him or it.” Since she is neither a him or an it, she says she must be exempt.

Norfolk, Virginia’s residential race segregation law is ruled unconstitutional “on a technicality.”

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Today -100: February 2, 1914: Of railroads and forcible feeding

Germany completes its East African Central Railroad. I’m sure that investment will really make Germany’s colonial presence in Tanganyika pay off for decades to come.

The Women’s Social and Political Union badgers the bishop of London into visiting Holloway Prison to determine whether suffragettes are being tortured (other prisoners can hear Rachel Peace screaming). He “investigates” and claims that she’s just being forcibly fed and is perfectly fine. The screams, he says, are protests rather than expressions of pain. The WSPU responds, as was the custom, by heckling him during services.

While Rachel Peace may have seemed perfectly “calm” to the archbishop (possibly because she was being drugged), she was driven insane by this forcible feeding and spent the rest of her life in and out of asylums.

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Today -100: February 1, 1914: The Delilah of Syndicalism has endeavoured to cut the locks of trades unionism, so that it becomes a mere piece of putty in the hands of the political authorities

Queen Mary of Britain has lifted her ban on women in the royal household belonging to any women’s suffrage society, as long as they don’t set stuff on fire or something.

Collectors of parliamentary mixed metaphors (and there certainly are collectors of parliamentary mixed metaphors) are exulting over this one, from future British prime minister and turncoat Ramsay MacDonald: “No sooner do [Syndicalists] get themselves into a hole than they put down a string so that we may pull them out of it. The Delilah of Syndicalism has endeavoured to cut the locks of trades unionism, so that it becomes a mere piece of putty in the hands of the political authorities.”

Headline of the Day -100: “Arrests in Plot to Oust Huerta.” Isn’t pretty much all of Mexico in a plot to oust Huerta at this point?

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Today -100: January 31, 1914: My alphabet has been the sight and trigger of a rifle

The British Labour Party’s annual conference again supports women’s suffrage, only 2 of the 600 delegates voting no.

Headline of the Day -100: “Villa To Adopt Civilized Warfare.” He will stop executing Federal prisoners unless they had been captured once before, released on a promise not to fight again, and broken that promise. Villa denies wanting to be president: “I never went to school a day in my life, and I am not educated enough for the post. My alphabet has been the sight and trigger of a rifle; my books have been the movements of the enemy.”

More military-civilian conflict in Germany’s most recently acquired provinces: at a concert for the Kaiser’s birthday in Metz, Lorraine, a lieutenant orders two locals to stop speaking French. They leave the concert hall but he follows them to a restaurant, where he is outraged to find that they (and two others) are persisting in not speaking German to each other. He calls in a major, who is outraged that they do not remove their caps in the presence of a royal Prussian major and knocks the cap off one of them, as is the custom with royal Prussian majors. The four Lorrainers are arrested and turned over to the police, who release them.

At the United Mine Workers convention, the Illinois secretary-treasurer accuses Samuel Gompers of having gotten “gloriously drunk” at the Seattle convention and having a “snoot-full” at the Atlanta convention. Miners are pissed that the AFL hasn’t given sufficient financial support to the striking Michigan copper miners.

The steamship Monroe goes down after being hit in the fog by the Nantucket in the Atlantic Ocean, 50 miles off Virginia. 41 die. Much is made of the heroism of the wireless operator, who stayed at his post signaling for help after giving his life preserver to a “hysterical woman.” His mother had had a premonition and begged him not to go to sea.

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Today -100: January 30, 1914: Of leaks, Confucianism, archbishops, sick animals, large families, and awed bears

After details of American negotiations with Japan over the racist alien land law in California leak, the Wilson administration suggests that newspapers should in future refrain from discussing the US’s foreign relations, especially since it might embarrass the US when foreign governments read in newspapers stories about America’s policies that contradict what the US government has told them. And this means you, Edward Snowden!

The Wilsonites say that they do not consider as unfriendly the actions of Japanese companies in selling arms to the Huerta regime in Mexico.

Chinese President and Aspiring Dictator Yuan reestablishes Confucianism. Yuan will set an example for his religion-deficient people by starting to worship at the Temples of Heaven & Confucius, just like the emperors did, but without wearing a crown, because that would be too obvious.

British suffragettes lay siege to Lambeth Palace, demanding to see the Archbishop of Canterbury on the subject of forcible feeding. Eventually he reluctantly agrees to see one of them, but will only say that he would definitely have a think about the subject of forcible feeding (which has been going on in British prisons since 1909, so you’d think he’d have an opinion by now).

Honestly, I liked the old Mad King of Bavaria better: King Ludwig tells aristocratic women that instead of patronizing charities for sick animals, they should take care of sick poor people: “Sick animals should be killed, but sick people cured.”

The League of Large Families in France proposes Mme. Amet, mother of 22 living children, for the Cross of the Legion of Honor.

Headline of the Day -100: “Girl Teachers Awe a Bear.”

Or is this the Headline of the Day -100?: “Kisses Baby and Is Killed.” (LA Times). A Baptist minister in Georgia leans over to kiss his child good-bye, the gun he always carries so his children don’t play with it falls out of his pocket and goes off.

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Today -100: January 29, 1914: Of wireless, marches on Washington, red lights, and once again Oklahoma is not OK

Wireless communication is established between Germany and the United States, without any relaying. The first message is from Kaiser Bill to Woodrow Wilson, and just says whassup.

Gen. Coxey announces a new “Coxey’s Army” march of the unemployed on Washington, on the 20th anniversary of the last one. He wants there to be government-owned banks in every town with 1,000 people.

Ah, European aristocratic mating habits: Prince Blücher von Wahlstatt is now his son’s brother-in-law; his son is now uncle of his own half-siblings and is indeed his own uncle. That is, the prince and his son, Count Lothar, both married sisters (albeit 18 years apart), Princess Louise Radziwill and Princess Wanda Radziwill. The son married the older sister, because of course he did. If Lothar and Louise have children, he will be their 1) father, 2) cousin, and 3) great-uncle.

Pres. Wilson won’t sign a bill abolishing the red light district of the District of Columbia until there is non-prostitute work available for any prostitutes who want it. Or they could just all move to Alexandria.

Rear Admiral Charles Vreeland tells the House Naval Committee in secret session that in event of war Japan could easily seize the Philippines, but not Hawaii, Alaska or the Panama Canal. “Members of the committee got the impression from Admiral Vreeland’s testimony that preparation for any trouble with Japan must be based upon the idea that Japan would strike without notice if she went to war with the United States.”

As a result of the military-civilian contretemps in Zabern, Alsace, the entire Alsace-Lorraine government resigns. Berlin will probably appoint a more hard-line governor-general.

The federal circuit court upholds Oklahoma’s Jim Crow law against a negro doctor who was told, when the train he was on crossed into the state, to leave the “white” car. He refused, there was a lively debate and he was arrested.

In other segregation news, it has been noticed that a bill working its way through Congress for agricultural education allows any state with more than one agricultural college to decide how to allocate the funds. In other words, Southern states will send all the money to white colleges.

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Today -100: January 28, 1914: Of canal governments, rubber warships, exiles, coups, lions, and lynchings

Woodrow Wilson creates, by executive order, a government for the Panama Canal Zone, and names the Canal’s chief engineer, Col. George Goethals, governor. A bit of a conflict with New York City, which has offered him the post of police commissioner.

The British Navy is experimenting with rubber-plated warships. That just sounds dirty.

South Africa will exile 10 of the leaders of the general strike. To England. Without a trial. On a ship with no wireless that will take months to arrive.

Haitian President Michael Oreste resigns in the face of a successful revolution, and seeks asylum on a German warship. Meanwhile, American and German troops land, in order to protect their nationals and their property.

I wonder who the first person was to die making a film? Possibly Fritz Schindler, who was trying to film lions in Kenya, although he probably meant to film the exteriors of lions rather than their interiors.

A negro accused of the murder of a Mrs. Lynch in Wendell, North Carolina, is, well, the hint’s in that name, isn’t it?

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Today -100: January 27, 1914: Of watchful waiting, anarchist MPs, and gypsy wars

Woodrow Wilson tells members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he will end the arms embargo against the Mexican rebels, but that his policy is still the alliterative “watchful waiting” thing.

Amilcare Cipriani is elected to the Italian Parliament for Milan. A famous anarchist, he fought for Garibaldi, and for the attempted Greek revolution in the 1860s, and for the Paris Commune, and has spent much of his life in Italian prisons or the French penal colony New Caledonia. Which also means he’s been stripped of his civil rights in Italy, so he can’t take his seat even if he were willing to swear allegiance to the king.

Headline of the Day -100 (Washington Post): “France Wars on the Gypsies.” France plans to expel foreign-born gypsies and require all gypsies to carry i.d. cards with a picture and fingerprints. This brings France into line with most other gypsy-hating European countries. Germany is the most unpleasant to Roma.

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